Three
Not much else but at least the hill that gave its name to the town was still there. Also on top of it the Methodist church and its huddle of illegible stones. From there you had a good view of Harvey’s neighborhood and what had happened to it. It used to be a scattering of old-fashioned frame houses standing at their ease on big lots full of clutter and billowing wash. There’d been empty lots everywhere, fields almost, where you could catch grasshoppers in the tall grass and butterflies off the golden-rod in fall despite all the empty bottles and oilcans. In summer the overall impression you got was of shabby green space.
I hadn’t seen it for thirty years. We’d moved to Brooklyn shortly after the fire. There was no connection. My father had found work there. My mother went on visiting the Morgensterns but I’d never returned to Forest Hill except once, nine years after the fire, and that had turned out to be a bad mistake.
I had trouble picturing the way Forest Hill had been. Bulldozing years had reshaped the town into a chaotic geometry of housing developments and a big shiny shopping center. There was no more shantytown on the other side of the tracks. As a matter of fact there were no more tracks. I wasn’t assailed by waves of nostalgia for the butterflies on the golden-rod and what went with it. I’d foolishly decided to walk to Harvey’s house the long way round because of the nice September afternoon. By the time I got to the top of the hill for the view, lugging the flight bag, my brand-new English shoes were killing me.
So I didn’t have metaphysical thoughts. You can say, as Harvey was going to say endlessly, that the past is as real as the present, but not with new English shoes on your feet it isn’t. Acuity of suffering is the vast superiority of the present over the past.
I got lost in the grids of new streets named after national heroes and lined with adolescent trees garroted to stakes. I judged it to be a housing development for the $30,000-$40,000 salary-bracket. Finally I asked a pot-bellied bald man standing in the middle of the sidewalk setting his watch with an outthrust lower lip. His eyes shot up at me from the dial.
“Three Wilson Road? And how I know where it is. Everybody here knows where the Morgenstern place is. You a friend of his?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say a friend.”
I played it carefully because of his tone of voice. It was no lie either, no shameful disavowal as to the hard-fisted Polack kid long ago in the time of the tracks.
“Turn left there. Keep heading for the big pylon. You can see that crazy pylon of his ten miles away. With the noise either you can’t miss it. He’s got the police in his pocket. Morgenstern. Watch out for the woman.”
I was halfway down the street when he yelled:
“Hey, tell him I still get TV interference and it better stop. Tell him Lawson told you to tell him. You can bet he knows who I am. It better stop.”
The pylon was a good guide all right. So was the noise after a while. It sounded like a giant defective organ playing a duo in the deepest registers with a revved-up racing-car. It wasn’t a suburban sound.
I hardly recognized the house when I got there. It had been practically new the last and only time I’d seen it, thirty years before, a big white frame house. Harvey’s father was in the lumber business. He’d started building it before what happened to the old house. Otherwise it would have been brick.
It stood exactly where our science shack had stood. I summoned up the shack dimly and also dimly the house (the second one) as it had been, two successive time-strata.
Now the house as it was in this time-stratum emerged out of a sea of weeds, once a big lawn and flower garden. It stood in partial gloom that sunny September afternoon.
The “memory-tree” as Mrs Morgenstern had called it, some kind of elm, had been planted too close to the house and now shaded half of it. It was lopsided from the amputation of house-side branches. A tall ladder shrouded in bindweed to the top rung leaned against it. A rusty saw lay in nettles nearby. She said they’d planted the tree the fall following the fire. That made it almost forty years old now.
The house had aged very badly. The paint was peeling like a skin-disease. There were rusty dribbles down the wall beneath the gutters. They must have been clogged with leaves from that tree. Most of the faded shutters were closed and some were cockeyed. The few windowpanes you could see were grimy.
Normally neighborliness is an obligatory suburban virtue. If there’s a separation between lots it’s something symbolic, apologetic almost, like knee-high shrubs. There was nothing symbolic about what separated Harvey’s house from his neighbors. Strands of barbed wire topped the high hurricane fence. The effect was unintentionally softened by the white bellflowers of bindweed that had twined almost up to the barbed wire. They half-covered the warnings: “Keep out!” “Private Property!”
That was the back of the house. I limped to the front. The noise worsened. The front-gate was just more hurricane-fence but framed and on hinges with another warning sign. It looked like the entrance to a military base. The gate was shut. There was a big brass padlock. Through the meshes of the fence I saw the vestiges of Mrs Morgenstern’s big flower garden. Everything was weeds now except for a minimum patch of lawn next to the front door.
A gigantic woman of about forty was mowing it. She was wearing jeans and an overflowing unstrapped bra. She had beefy red sweating shoulders and a mean face. She was doing a sloppy zig-zaggy job. On a plastic table stood five uncapped beer bottles.
A thin washed-out blonde crouched behind the hurricane fence on the lot where the old Morgenstern house had once stood. Behind her was a big two-story house with a sheet-iron Disney deer and a white bench on an impeccable lawn. I tried to visualize the old burned-down house, the Morgenstern’s first house. The blonde’s house, built on its blackened foundations, kept it under.
The blonde was gripping the meshes with one hand like a prisoner. In the other hand she was holding a bag of tulip-bulbs. Veins stood out in her neck as she tried to compete against the racket. The giant beefy woman in the bra couldn’t help seeing her but pretended she wasn’t there. She was giving me the same treatment even though I was crying too, for her to let me in. At least I wasn’t crying tears as the blonde was doing. The woman reached the end of the lawn. She wrenched the mower about and turned her back to me and to the blonde. She started a new swathe.
The big brass padlock wasn’t snapped shut. I pushed the gate open and limped into the high grass, avoiding molehills and empty beer-bottles. I stood in front of her, in the path of the roaring machine, smiling politely.
She kept on coming. Maybe she would have stopped at the last moment but I wasn’t taking any chances. I jumped aside like a matador in a suit of light and administrated the estoque by bending down, spry for my age, and switching the mower off. There was partial relief to my eardrums. But the deep organ sounds coming from the house kept up and now the woman pitched in.
“Are you crazy or something?”
It was a surprisingly lightweight voice for the bulk and vehemence that produced it. It was the voice I’d heard on the phone the day before.
“Who the hell are you? Who let you in? What did you stop the mower for?” Now she passionately addressed invisible witnesses, a trick of hers I was to get to know. “Is he crazy or something?”
I almost told her I hadn’t felt like buying new hand-stitched Churches and maybe a foot-prosthesis. I played the cold dignity gambit instead. “Mr Morgenstern is expecting me. My name is Professor Weizman.”
She wasn’t impressed. She made me show her my driver’s license and had the gall to say suspiciously that she didn’t see “Professor” in front of my name. Then she turned around and went into the house.
“You were very brave,” said the faded blonde through the meshes. “I thought she was going to mutilate you. She’s crazy.” She wiped her eyes with a lacy blue handkerchief. She had great vulnerable wet blue eyes. A strand of blonde-gray hair was plastered to her forehead. She was anywhere between thirty-five and fifty.
; “I shouldn’t cry like that,” she said. “I shouldn’t give her that satisfaction. But I’m just not accustomed to abuse. And I can’t bear the noise. I think all this noise is deliberate. He tells her to do it. He knows about my nerves. I shouldn’t tell people about it. He’s trying to drive me away.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“He’s been trying to buy my house for years now. I used to get an offer every week practically. It’s crazy. If he wants to live in a nice house why doesn’t he fix up the one he’s got? Look at those shutters. And, gosh, the garden. What wouldn’t I do with that garden? They say it’s a pig-sty inside.” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh I’m sorry! You’re a friend of his, maybe?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
So for the second time that day I denied him. Would there be a third time? Did they have cocks (roosters) in these suburbs? She moistened her lips with a shy pink tip of the tongue.
“Sir, do you mind if I ask? I couldn’t help hearing. What are you a Professor of?”
I told her that I professed English Literature. Predictably, she looked impressed. She said she loved literature and started asking me which poets I particularly recommended when the woman came back and growled:
“He’s still down in the cellar. He’s always down in the cellar. Says he can’t come up. He never comes up. Says you should come on down.”
She went back to the mower and yanked the starter-cord. The blonde started to protest. She turned up the machine full blast and shoved it past me. My legs were bombarded with bits of twigs and beer-caps.
The vestibule was crammed with heavy coils of wire, pipes, sacks of cement, salvaged switch-panels, gauges and electronic components. The chaos went on in the living room but wasn’t as visible because of the half-closed shutters and the dirty panes that strangled the little light the tree let through. The wallpaper had big blisters. The ceiling was cracked. Newspapers and magazines were scattered over the carpet. It was worn and stained. On a table were more newspapers and a dish with Rice Krispies stuck to the sides and a spoon. A woman’s blouse had been flung across a lumpish armchair in front of a giant new TV.
I advanced in the gloom of the corridor toward the sound which, that close, was less a sound than violent vibrations in your bones.
It stopped suddenly. The cellar door was open.
“Harvey?”
“Jerry? That you, Jerry?” His voice was a hoarse whisper but stronger than on the phone. “Just in time, pal. Don’t turn. The light on. Come on down. You don’t want to miss this. Show you something. In six-and-a-half minutes. Something you won’t forget.”
As Harvey called me down into that reddish gloom I remembered how he’d done it thirty-odd years before in a younger less pathological voice. But I didn’t make the full connection, didn’t imagine that what he wanted to show me now, after all that time, could be the same thing as then.
I was twenty-eight and teaching in a fraudulent private school for juvenile actors in Los Angeles when my aunt on my mother’s side died. When I thought of goodness I thought of Aunt Ruth and at the time was still young enough to wonder how the world, so radically lessened, could go on. I couldn’t help going to Forest Hill for the funeral.
Sure enough, Harvey’s mother was there. I hadn’t seen her for years. When our eyes met, the diffused guilt I always feel at funerals (as though survival were an act of callousness on my part) focused sharply. But she gathered me in her arms. She was a woman of easy but authentic tears.
Her mind was a memorious cemetery. She wept quietly for Aunt Ruth, for my mother. Also for Rachel of course but with an expression of mixed grief, bewilderment and hurt. Hurt for what Rachel had done, naturally. But maybe also hurt for what I’d been obliged to say I hadn’t done. Wasn’t that the real cause of my sharply focused guilt?
I couldn’t avoid recalling her weeping outburst over the phone a week after the fire when she made me confirm that no, I hadn’t come over that evening to see Rachel as she (Mrs Morgenstern) had begged me to do during their absence. I forget the excuse I invented. I couldn’t think straight. Oh Jerry, you promised. We’d never have left her by herself. I thought you liked her so much. Etc. Etc.
But now, nine years later, she insisted I come back home for dinner. She said: “You and Harvey were such great friends. Harvey would be so sorry to have missed you. You haven’t seen each other for ages. Morris’ll be so happy too.”
She was another one of those women who always get situations and relationships wrong but in the generous direction.
She must have guessed what I was thinking (Aunt Ruth used to bake custard for him) because she said Harvey couldn’t take an afternoon off for whatever reason. He was working for the Government. She darted quick glances right and left and lowered her voice to a whisper: on a top-secret scientific project, she couldn’t tell me what it was about. From her tone, I guessed that “I can’t tell you” wasn’t a confession of ignorance but meant that she was in on the secret but bound to silence like her son.
“Besides, you remember how Harvey is about funerals. He didn’t even go to poor Rachel’s.”
Here the tears and the look of bewilderment and hurt came again, but also uneasiness. She must have remembered that I hadn’t gone to her funeral either. Did that remind her of the other confessed omission?
“How is the new house?” I asked to take the pressure off both of us.
“Oh, it’s not so new anymore. Time passes so fast.”
That was true. Already at twenty-eight time was accelerating for me.
Thinking of Harvey and his father I tried to resist her invitation. She lured me with strawberry shortcake as though I were still twelve. If I finally accepted I told myself it was more for the pleasure she would get baking it for me than for the pleasure I would get eating it. Nice middle-aged women disarmed me even then. My mother had been her best friend.
Wasn’t there something else? By accepting wasn’t I confirming absolution? I saw it in those theological terms even though I knew that she saw that long-ago thing as a fault of omission rather than some unforgivable sin of commission. Even then I was known to be a person of omissions, not commissions.
Anyhow, my return flight was the next day. I’d save money on a hotel and restaurant.
The lot next to their not-so-new new house was the first thing you noticed. Nine years after the fire there was still that vestigial cellar with the blackened walls. (The blonde’s house was in the future.) There was something shamelessly public about it. It wasn’t like discreetly keeping up a room in memory. It was true none of the rooms had survived to be kept up.
Why did Mr Morgenstern keep up that eyesore and what other sore? He’d been crazy about her. I remember thinking: whatever you believe at the start and maybe even a year or two (or three) after, new involvements end by getting the better of grief. Not selling the lot must have represented a big financial sacrifice as well.
You can’t keep it up indefinitely. Can you? I had my future first ex-wife’s smiling face with me, the only one in the wallet now, nothing hidden in the secret compartment beneath.
What did the neighbors and the municipal authorities say about that dangerous lot? Couldn’t small children fall into that cellar-hole? It must have bothered me because that night I dreamed I fell into it myself.
I went on falling and falling until I woke up out of it.
I couldn’t ask Mr Morgenstern about it, of course. Anyhow I didn’t see him, meet him, I mean, because I did see him out of his living room window, stooped and whitened, getting into his car and driving away. That was half an hour after Mrs Morgenstern said it would be such a surprise for Morris and went up to get him for me but came down only with Harvey. She said her husband was napping.
Harvey’s hair was thinning. Deep lines ran from the corners of his huge beak to the corners of a prematurely embittered mouth. He didn’t seem all that pleased to see me either. He even shook hands with me formally with an info
rmal, “How are you, there,” as though he didn’t recall my name. Then glanced at his watch and said, “Sorry. I’ll be right back.”
He was gone for an hour.
“It’s his cellar-thing,” his mother said three or four times apologetically. She entertained me, in the hostess sense of the term, during that hour. She showed me articles of his, dozens of them, published in impressively obscure scientific reviews. They crawled with cabalistic signs and formulas. Not even the titles were comprehensible.
She had only one theme but endless variations and sub-variations on it: Harvey’s scholastic triumphs, Harvey’s professional accomplishments, Harvey’s health. His health worried her. She went into the symptoms. Harvey hadn’t been the same since the fire. He’d had something like a nervous breakdown for a year. More than a year, actually.
The loss of his lab must have been a real blow, I thought.
When he came back we talked on and off with the TV on fairly low and he glanced at his watch at regular intervals and sometimes at the TV. Very early in our relationship we’d gotten into the habit of the wisecrack as a vehicle of communication. That was gone now as though we’d forgotten or couldn’t summon up the necessary energy.
Maybe I wasn’t all that warm and spontaneous myself. For the first few weeks I’d convinced myself that what had happened was his fault, storing all those inflammable and explosive chemicals in the cellar, even when an eye-witness described the final pyrotechnics: red (that would be strontium salts), brilliant white (magnesium), green (copper-sulfate), I forget what for deep blue. That was at 2:00 am, after most of the house had gone, when the flames got to his cellar, proof, supposedly, that it hadn’t started there. But couldn’t it have started in one part of the cellar, risen quickly, devoured the house and then returned to the cellar and celebrated with the remaining chemicals?
Even if not so I blamed him for having survived. It was only a month later that I learned the fire had started in the kitchen where they’d found what it had rejected of her.
Rachel couldn’t have foreseen fire after gas, although the association on a vaster scale had been revealed to the world that same year. It wasn’t the fault of either of us, omission or commission. A few symbolic representatives of the vast guilty party were soon to be hanged in Europe.
We didn’t care to talk about the old days so we talked about the present. Objectively this was all to his advantage, except for women. Of course he couldn’t compete with me there. I showed him the photo of June in my wallet but he didn’t seem interested. Otherwise his present was brilliant, according to his mother, his future radiant. I suspected he knew, via his mother, that I hadn’t finished my Ph.D. thesis yet and knew where I was teaching.
I’ll admit he didn’t push his advantage. That wasn’t his style. He wasn’t basically interested enough in others to get satisfaction out of scoring on status. He possessed it so completely that it didn’t matter to him. I was so far from it that it gnawed day and night. So I blew my job into something big, feeling self-distaste as I did it. Some of my pupils were juvenile movie-actresses practically everybody had heard of. (I hardly ever saw them in class. They automatically passed with, at worst, a B.) I mentioned their names in passing in order to reflect a bit of their glory.
He didn’t react. He probably had never heard of them. He was the one who sounded the note of dissatisfaction. About his ultra-secret government job. It was a waste of time. He had no time for his really important work.
Of course his saying that widened the gap between us. If he took the heights of his professional activity for lowlands it deepened the hole I was in that much more.
He looked at his watch again. He hesitated as if weighing the risk. Finally the temptation was too great. Maybe he remembered the shack days.
“Let me show you something.”
He led me to the cellar-door and told me to stay there a minute. He went down in the gloom. I heard a whirring sound that started deep and rose and stabilized a couple of octaves higher. Then it pierced up beyond 20,000 Hertz. You couldn’t hear it any more but you knew it was there because of a pressure somewhere in your skull.
He told me to come down. I shouldn’t turn the lights on.
His lab was banished to a corner, isolated from the rest of the cellar by two cinder-block walls. The door was lined with asbestos. A sprinkler system ran all over the ceiling. It was the condition his mother had imposed for a lab in the cellar of the new house. He was working on convincing her to let him have the whole cellar, he said. He was really cramped as I could see. The lab was full of black cables crisscrossing overhead like a giant spider-web. A long low box like a coffin occupied a whole wall. It trembled. The supersonic waves were coming from it. On the walls there was a scattering of weak red bulbs. Everything was bathed in red. I must have looked as bloodily sinister as he did.
The mouse was in a glass box with what looked like a big camera lens at one end and a bank of dark-blue tubes at the other. Above the glass box was what looked like a miniature TV screen, a cluster of dials and two big clocks each with a chronometer needle whirling.
Harvey sat down behind a console. It had once been a school-desk. You could make out faint graffiti from that earlier time: names and an ass-like heart pierced by an ambiguous arrow. He placed his finger on a red button. He stared at me solemnly and pronounced a movie cliché maybe because he never went to the movies.
“I want you to promise something first. You won’t talk about this to anybody.”
I promised the way they did in the movies. He pressed the button.
The super-sonic waves swooped down to sub-sonic with a deep groan from the coffin. All the red bulbs in the cubicle were sucked dim and then dead. For a second we sat in darkness. The mouse came back blue in the sudden intense light of the tubes. The mouse quivered and died in color in the glass box and in black and white on the TV screen. The red bulbs recovered. Harvey looked quietly triumphant. “Well?”
I thought I understood now why he’d sworn me to secrecy. That Government project. He was working on a death-ray. I wasn’t really impressed. The blue bulbs were a few inches from the mouse. What was the point of sticking an enemy soldier in a glass case and bombarding him with rays at such close range if he was a prisoner to begin with? And didn’t that violate the Geneva Convention? Anyhow I was something of a pacifist.
“Chlorine worked faster the last time,” I said.
“You mean you didn’t notice the time-differential?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. He got a fresh mouse and placed it in the glass box.
“Keep your eyes open on the mouse and the screen this time. I’m running low on mice.”
Cross-eyed, I noticed this time.
There was maybe a fraction of a second between the death of the blue mouse in the glass box and the death of the black-and white mouse on the TV screen. Apparently I was supposed to be impressed. I didn’t get the point.
The point was that the black-and-white image wasn’t a slightly deferred replay of the blue mouse’s death. It was what had happened one-third of a second before. He’d gone that far back in time but no further. It was one aspect of what he called the “retrotemporal stricture.” He was working on it. Had been working on it for years. The other aspect was the “retrotemporal duration stricture.” He switched the machine on again to illustrate it.
I saw the dying black and white mouse again but fainter and distorted. Five minutes more and there would be nothing, he said. There were other strictures, the spatial stricture, for example.
He went on and on. I didn’t get it. I still had that idea of a deferred image. He stared at me, shook his head and dropped the subject.
Another thing I didn’t understand. Why did it have to be mice? Why did the mice have to die? I didn’t ask him. I felt sorry for those mice and guilty about the mice I’d gassed long ago in the shack.
I left the day after. Mrs Morgenstern was the only one who said goodbye to me. H
arvey was in the middle of something important down in the cellar and couldn’t be disturbed. He hadn’t even had lunch with us, it was that important. His father either. I did meet his father, terribly aged, coming out of the bathroom where I wanted to go before leaving. I started saying goodbye to him without having had a chance to say hello after so long.
He interrupted me and asked, nine years after, why I hadn’t showed up that evening at the house as I’d promised I would. It wasn’t really a question because before I could come up with an answer he went into his bedroom and closed the door.
Harvey’s mother drove me to the station. She gave me a box with the rest of the strawberry shortcake. She wept a little. She said I should return soon, she would bake another strawberry shortcake for me. I promised I would return soon. I returned thirty-odd years later. It didn’t look as if I would be getting strawberry shortcake now.
Decades older, I went down the stairs again into the same reddish gloom. The red bulbs were everywhere now. Harvey’s lab occupied the whole cellar. He must have finally succeeded in convincing his mother. Or maybe he’d had to wait until she was dead to do it. He’d always been a dutiful son.
Two-thirds of the space was a huge disorderly workshop. The other third was walled off. The wall was armored with thick gray sheets of metal, lead probably. There was a padlocked door, also plated. The machine or whatever must have been behind that door. The giant spider had spun even more crisscrossing black cables overhead. There was a console full of dials. Above the console was a TV screen, much bigger than the old one.
But the first thing you noticed was the junk-heap in the middle of the cellar. It touched the ceiling. Seeing those coils of baling-wire, copper and iron and lead pipes, boxes of rusty nails, screws and bolts, old electric motors, etc. I thought at first that it was a miraculous survival of our shack junk-heap which had occupied the same spot but ten feet above.
A nostalgic illusion. I now made out the electronic aggiornamento: twenty or so busted television-sets and computers. Next to the junk-heap there was an unmade cot. Alongside it on the floor were sheets of paper covered with figures, a bottle of mineral water, a dish with sliced salami and an opened bag of potato chips.
His lab had expanded, monstrously.
He himself had shrunk. His face was in worse shape than the house, collapsed and white beneath a Harpo Marx wig. Had he just grabbed the first one available or was it a derisive choice? The mass of golden curls sat aslant on a skull you guessed was totally bald. Even the side-burns were gone. You couldn’t even say he’d aged. He was beyond the aging process.
I’d apprehended that meeting after so many years. Old acquaintances are pitiless mirrors. You read your own negative progress in them. But not in this case. He was a rejuvenating mirror. He acknowledged it.
“Jesus you look. Great,” he whispered. “You bastard. How’d you pull. The graceful aging stunt?” His delivery was painful, the sentences chopped up.
He switched off the red bulbs and now the only light came from the dials on the console. It faintly lit his face. His face was suspended bodiless in the dark like the mask of a summoned spirit in a B movie occult session.
In the darkness he went through the motions of catching up on the thirty-odd years. It was a little like a questionnaire. You could tell he wasn’t really curious. He would glance down at those dials every five seconds, waiting for the really important thing to happen.
“Heard you got married, “ he said.
Said it as though the wedding had taken place the week before instead of twenty-nine years and then again eleven years ago.
“Two-time offender.”
“Kids?”
“Two. With the first woman.”
“What do they do?”
“Phil’s working in oil. Prospecting, I think it is, somewhere in Canada. Maybe Alaska. We don’t see all that much of each other.”
“Other kid?”
“Died some time ago.”
“What of?”
“That was quite some time ago. Talking about families, I didn’t know you had a niece. She doesn’t have a Morgenstern face. Or a Morgenstern build. How did you manage to be an uncle and an only child at the same time?”
“Hanna. Doesn’t like the neighbors. To talk. So I’m uncle. Think she’s ashamed. Age-difference. Not exactly May and December affair, though. I’m December all right. Thirty-first of December. Five to midnight. But she’s closer to August. Than to May. Don’t know why it still bothers her. We don’t do it. Anymore. I don’t, anyhow. She probably does. Right and left. Pretty good at it. As I remember. Feel free. If you still can. She does the housework. And the cooking. Drives me. To the hospital. For the treatment. Lugs the equipment. See the shoulders on her? Tits to match. Also she keeps people. Away.”
“She’s pretty good at that too. She doesn’t seem to be all that great at housekeeping, though.”
“I’m not obsessive. About tidiness. Other things to do.”
He grabbed my shoulder.
“Look. It’s coming. Look hard. This you won’t forget.”
I stared at the screen. It stayed dark in the darkness. Then there were a few preliminary diagonal light-streaks like shooting stars. I waited for the thing to begin.
“You’re lucky,” he croaked. “It’s never been. This good before.”
“Oh yes,” I said. I ventured: “Atomic particles?”
“What?”
“Mesons? Dixons?”
“What are you. Talking about?”
“Those streaks, like shooting-stars. Gluons, maybe?”
“Interference. Their goddam TVs in the middle. Of the goddam afternoon. The housewives here. When they aren’t getting screwed. On the sly. Spend the whole afternoon looking at. Beverly Hills serials. That was interference you saw.”
“What was it interfering with?”
“With ten years ago. Or twenty. Can’t tell. Can’t pinpoint yet. Working on it. Right now what you’re looking at. On that screen. Is at least ten years ago.”
The trouble was I couldn’t see anything on the screen now that the interference had stopped. As a matter of fact I couldn’t even see the screen. I vaguely made out the housing unit but the screen itself was as dark as the darkness that surrounded us. I told him this.
He said in his mutilated delivery that it wasn’t the same darkness. The darkness we were in was contemporary darkness but the darkness on the screen was the darkness of the cellar years ago. He’d learned to tell the difference. The dials confirmed it anyhow.
First of all I had to understand that he had tremendously increased the temporal range of the machine. He had gone far beyond the fraction of a second’s recuperation of the dying mouse I’d witnessed long ago. Of course he’d prefer something more spectacular than old darkness but that had to do with the spatial stricture. The machine captured only events in a radius of a few yards. Very little had been going on in this part of the cellar except darkness. His old lab had been in a corner and walled off. Maybe once a week his father used to come down to check the heating unit. The machine had never captured that moment so far.
Navigation was a big problem. Recent events were really hard to pinpoint. About two months ago for two seconds on the screen he saw himself looking at the same screen. He was wearing the wig (had I noticed he was wearing a wig?) so that meant it was less than a year ago. The treatment had started a year ago, the necessity for a wig two months later. It had been a beautiful clear image.
But the really exciting exception to old darkness wasn’t that. Last week, he said, he’d seen me on the bike pedaling for the Static Electricity Machine. Did I remember the Static Electricity Machine? It was pure luck, a quirk almost. The machine (this one here) was situated exactly on the site of the shack, but deeper of course. Vertical differential was normally a barrier to reception. For example he’d never been able to recuperate Momma up on the ground floor. But I had come through, he said, more or less. The image was so bad he hadn’t been
able to make out my face. The further back you went the dimmer the image got, got very, very dim, flickering and distorted.
But it could only have been me. I was the one who always pedaled. That’s what had given him the idea of contacting me.
From the top of the stairs the woman banged twice on the door. It sounded as if her fist would splinter through. She yelled that the mail had come. She needed him. There was a letter from the bank.
That made me think of the $1,000 check he’d sent me. Again I wondered if there was anything behind it. By now I was certain he was crazy. It’s a well-known fact that cellars all over the country are full of nuts slaving over utopian contraptions like perpetual-motion machines and water-fueled engines. These were less wacky than a time machine. But he had even more reason than the rest of us to be crazy, to want to reverse the flow of time.
He pressed a button and the red lights came back on. We slowly climbed up out of the cellar. As we left a mechanism whirred and the red lights went out and the cellar was black beneath us.