***
Six
We waited and waited that night and got nothing. The next night we got a few shooting stars. Late-late-show interference, he said and made Hanna switch off the TV. Outside of that, framed darkness in darkness. Not even old darkness, he said bitterly. So I didn’t see myself drinking white wine like blood and trying to smile. I didn’t see the promised dead. He’d celebrated too soon. I felt a certain childish satisfaction. And relief. He wasn’t infallible after all.
I began to get bored with those long sessions down in the cellar. All I got out of them were rheumatic twinges in my right shoulder from the dankness. I asked Harvey why he didn’t automatically videotape whatever might turn up on the screen. That way we could stay upstairs in the nice warm living room, sitcomming and dodging roaches. He said the images couldn’t be videotaped as yet. Anyhow it was a secondary problem.
What had gone wrong? he wondered obsessively. His calculations were watertight. The living room had been the center of activity in the old days. It ought to be full of recuperable images. He tried to figure it out. Literally figure it out: pages and pages crawling with figures alongside his cot. He suspected that uncontrolled random navigation lay at the root of the problem. Could it be that the machine was ranging back too far, before the house, before the shack, maybe hundreds or thousands of years before the first white settlements? Pterodactyl time, maybe? Naturally nothing would register at that distance. All of the dynamos on earth couldn’t produce enough energy for that.
Harvey hardly emerged from the cellar at all now except for the weekly hospital treatment and he balked violently at that. Often he had to be forcibly extracted. It was true that he never looked and sounded as bad as when he came back from the hospital. The treatment took a lot out of him. It partially paralyzed his brain, he claimed, almost as though they knew what he was working on and wanted to sabotage it. He vomited and couldn’t work properly for two days after. So he tried to stay down in the cellar on the appointed day.
When he refused to respond to her barked calls from the head of the cellar staircase, Hanna overcame her fear of the machine. She came down, wheedling and menacing. He’d tell her to leave him alone, they couldn’t do anything for him, she should let him die. She’d yell that she wouldn’t let him die, you just try to die on me, you old bastard.
Once he said he’d written the instructions for his funeral in a lower left-hand drawer somewhere. Last wishes. Incineration was the main thing. No burial. Fire. Did she hear? Fire. Fuck you, she said. After, when she got the ashes, he whispered, (fuck you, she said) a little ceremony could be held. Only close friends: Jerry and her. White wine in the red goblets. Music could be played. Jerry could choose between the Mozart Requiem and “I’ll be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You.” Then his ashes should be slowly strewn in the toilet-bowl and the chain solemnly pulled. His ashes would wander a while in the sewer but eventually emerge into sunlight in the open sea with the rest of the shit. Then he wanted her to promise to get married. To marry his best and only pal: Jerry Weizman. She’d be an heiress then.
Those clashes with Hanna, another kind of treatment, put a little deceptive color in his face. At a certain point she grabbed him. He put up a struggle. It was no joke now. Had it been before? But what could he do against that brawn? I saw her sweep him up in her arms, no strain at all. He didn’t weigh much, that was true. He made squalling sounds in the place of words. It was strange hearing her trying to soothe him, like a cement mixer pouring out honey, calling him “sweetie” and “baby.” Hanna carried him to the Volvo like a baby.
And between treatments he scribbled, vomited, pondered and probed and found nothing at all. The screen remained opaque.
A whole month dragged by.
In mid-December I got a call from Beth Anderson. It had been a long time since I last heard her voice. She’d seldom occupied my thoughts except under the shower when I saw the greenish bruise on my left thigh from the impact of her flowerbed.
She inquired about my health in a shy formal voice, addressing me as “Professor Weizman.” She excused herself for bothering me again but she was having trouble with her television once more. Could I come over just a minute and have a look? I’d be happy to, I lied, but objected that I knew nothing at all about television except that it was bad. She said she felt sure I could do something. She’d seen me lugging in coils of cable, tubes, tools of all sorts and probably thought this was a sign of technical competence.
The Chevy on the driveway had a new windshield and windows. A few crumbs of safety glass glittered in the gravel.
She was waiting at the open door, shivering a little because of the cold, all done up with a silkish blue blouse for her eyes and golden shoes, a new hair-do, blonder, with the gray chemically muted. Her neat banality was repeated by her living room.
“Oh, nice, nice,” I said, looking around. It wasn’t a hundred percent spontaneous but I didn’t have to really force myself to say it after three months of Hanna’s kitchen and living room, Hanna herself and naturally Harvey. With that wig and wasted face, that big-pored gigantic beak, he was less than appetizing. Neither of them were fanatics about personal daintiness. They didn’t smell too good at close or middle range.
Beth Anderson of course (with that name) smelled good, some kind of wholesome middle-western scent. Her living room was faintly scented too: pinewoods from Air Wick. In comparison to where I’d been a minute before, here all was luxury and calm (this particular day). It was too much to expect volupté in the bargain.
Praise for her interior decoration triggered the ritual: “Let me show you around.” To one side of the picture window she had a miniature jungle of tropical plants in gay enameled pots. She gave me the names and the blooming times. She introduced her goldfish to me. He was called Oscar. “Jerry,” I said to him. He swam up to the edge of his universe and goggled. “He likes you!” she exclaimed joyfully. “He doesn’t do that to everybody.” She showed me a gilt rococo armchair with wormholes in the wood, faded red velvet and greenish brass upholstery tacks. “It’s a family heirloom, I don’t know how old. You’d better not sit on it, a big man like you.”
She ushered me through an arch into a nook done up in Mexican style. Terra-cotta sombreros decorated the pink walls. The pattern of the sofa cover echoed the big potted cactus with growths like spiked ping-pong paddles. Back in the living room I stopped in front of a small fireplace. To one side of it stood a wrought-iron holder containing shiny brass fire-utensils: a scoop, tongs and a poker. There was also a pair of brass-studded bellows.
She clicked a switch behind me. In their bed of aluminum-dust ashes, birch-like logs began to glow. Ruddy flame-lights started playing on the spotless bricks behind the logs. She stood alongside me and made no effort to move. When the flame-effect repeated its pattern for the third time I said: “Cozy.”
“You should see it in the dark. It lights up the whole room, nice and soft. Sometimes when I have the blues I sit in the dark and just stare at it. It’s very calming.”
It wasn’t really necessary here but automatically, as I did in any new house to situate the owner culturally, I glanced at the bookcase. She and her husband were radically separated on the shelves. It was like those two towels, His and Hers, you used to find in this sort of house. Hers on the top shelves: inspirational books, techniques of child-care and guaranteed peace of mind, patchwork, Pope John Paul II, cookbooks, gardening-books, best sellers. His on the bottom shelves with a shelf of glass animals between them: spiritism, astrology, numerology, parapsychology.
“I’ll bet you’re not bothered by insects here,” I said as she showed me another predictable room. Coming from where I did, this was supreme praise: “laudative understatement” in the jargon of rhetoric.
“Mosquitoes sometimes.”
“No, I mean bugs, you know, roaches.”
“Roaches! I don’t think anybody in this neighborhood has roaches. Except maybe … Do you have roaches over there? I
don’t mean you personally, of course.”
“Not more than a few hundred thousand.”
“How awful. Somehow I just can’t associate you with roaches.”
I thought it was a lovely thing to say about me, real laudative understatement. I pictured it engraved on my tombstone. I didn’t insist on fire.
She showed me the impeccable iris-scented bathrooms. “Now you know where they are,” she said. Sure enough, there was a Her towel in one of them. He must have taken the His with him. She didn’t overlook anything till the end of the tour. Not a closet or cupboard went unopened. I saw her dresses, her sheets and pillowcases, pink and blue with the stuffy fragrance of lavender.
She even showed me her bedroom. There was a big double bed with two pillows, for the sake of symmetry. The pastel-blue walls were covered with framed black-and-white photographs of her son from babyhood to adolescence. There were maybe thirty of them. She was on lots of them with him. When he was a baby and a little boy she’d been very pretty. His adolescence had vampired her.
“My husband took those pictures. He was a photographer. He’s a monk now.”
“A monk. Oh yes.”
“Well, a sort of monk. Not a Catholic or a Buddhist monk. He’s a Second-Degree Illuminated in The Golden Galaxy.”
With her hand on the doorknob she waited for me to pick that up. When I didn’t, she resumed the tour.
She stopped before another door and hesitated as she hadn’t before the others. It was covered with a life-size cutout of Uncle Sam with frosty blue eyes and an imperious forefinger and a hand-printed legend which made him warn: Keep out! This means YOU!! She pushed the door open timidly.
In a different mode the room was as conventional as the others I’d just visited. There were the universal posters of thuggish rock-stars, Marilyn Monroe goosed by the updraft and she and her skirt joyous about it, James Dean with his arms draped crucified on his rifle, Albert Einstein, the old teddy-bear demagogue, sticking his tongue out. A guitar on the wall. Drums in the corner. Her gauzy blue handkerchief removed invisible dust. She was like a museum curator, dusting but not touching.
Suddenly she asked me, “Have you finished reading his poems yet?”
I’d completely forgotten that blue box. The five-pound hammer had driven it out of my mind.
“His poems? Naturally I’ve read his poems.”
The forcefulness needed to make it sound like the truth she probably took for enthusiasm. Radiant, she asked me to tell her all about it in just a minute.
She closed the door softly on the memorial. Automatically I turned left for the last of the rooms at the end of the corridor. It was probably to stave off the moment of untruth. “No, that’s just an old guest-room,” she said. We turned our backs on that one unopened door and went down the stairs.
She steered me into a shining plastic dinette where she’d set the table with bamboo place mats. Few TV repairmen had ever been greeted like that. In cut-glass dishes there were Ritz crackers, peanuts, cheese-cubes and anchovy-stuffed olives impaled with toothpicks. There was a bottle of port and an unopened bottle of single-malt. She said she couldn’t remember the brand I drank and hoped I liked this one. She looked at me anxiously as I sipped it. I smacked my lips and raised my eyebrows appreciatively. It tasted like a cross between cough-medicine and a peat bog.
We talked for a while about brands of whisky and port and then about the cold spell and flu. Finally she leaned forward a little and said:
“So what did you think of them?”
I said that I found some of the poems quite remarkable.
She interrupted me with her face shining and said, yes, they were, weren’t they? particularly the one entitled Spring Morning in the BMT. Didn’t I think that was the best one?
Things were taking a dangerous turn so I said that I hadn’t had time to read very many of the poems what with Harvey’s health problems and that in any case I didn’t read poems that way, like the morning newspaper. I liked to savor them, I said. I would prefer to read them all before discussing a particular poem.
“Savor them. Oh what a day today. Nothing but good things. You’re so nice to say that.” Her voice broke a little on the word “nice”.
“Other good things?” I asked, to get her to talk about something else.
“They’re taking me on full time at Dave and Tom’s. They’re the florists I work for. It’s a great honor. I’m the only woman there. Full of gorgeous men.”
She giggled a second then breathed:
“You savored his poetry. I can’t tell you what it means to me to hear you say that. I mean I’m his mother and all, so of course I’m prejudiced in his favor, but an expert like you … Gee, I wish I could have attended one of your literature classes. Just sit in, I mean, I’m not bright enough to be a real student.”
I saw my nine o’clock classroom, Mondays and Fridays, a certain lovely attentive face. I surprised myself by saying: “I wish I could sit in on one of my classes myself.” I thought it was safely obscure to someone who’d just defined herself as not bright but she said immediately:
“You miss those classes, don’t you?”
“Oh miss …” I accompanied the disclaimer with slightly fending hands and a tolerant smile at that idea, her idea. She blinked as though aware she’d gone too far. Then her face became radiant again as she returned to the big thing.
“You actually savored Ricky’s poetry …”
Her chin trembled. I was afraid she was going to weep with joy and then of course with despair. That would have been terrible. I wondered how I could change the subject but she changed it herself by leaning down to pick up a pink paper-napkin that had fluttered to the floor. Maybe it was to hide her face.
As she straightened up one of the fine chains around her neck caught on the edge of the table and broke. “Damn! Excuse me.” I picked the pendant up for her. It was a silver five-pointed star soldered to a crescent-moon.
She said that it was an Indian good-luck charm. She didn’t really believe in it. She hadn’t had all that much luck until today. Maybe you had to be Indian. Maybe it was a sign, the fact that she broke the chain just when good news came. “I won’t wear it anymore. I have enough things around my neck.” She had a pretty neck for a woman of that degree of attrition.
She caught a quick breath and advanced her chest a fraction of an inch like a jeweler’s tray with objects for appraisal. Between her small breasts there was a gold crucifix and a zodiac sign and a massive blob of gilt plastic incrusted with bits of colored glass. It was out of place, cheap-looking, like the things you used to get from Omar the Mystic – a kid’s serial Harvey could have pulled in from the thirties that night – by sending in ten box-tops of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes plus twenty-nine cents. She touched it.
“My husband. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Lovely.”
“A little expensive, though.”
“Lovely gift,” I persisted.
“Oh it’s not a gift. I bought it from him. Two hundred dollars.”
It was another invitation to explore a weird relationship. I didn’t take it up. I went on quickly to the other objects. The crucifix wasn’t much of a conversation piece so I peered at the zodiac sign and said: “Ah, a zodiac sign.” “Sagittarius,” she said and asked me when I was born. “The month and day I mean, of course,” she added quickly. Had my face reacted to that question? I told her the month and day. “I wouldn’t have thought Capricorn,” she said, pouring more port in her glass, all the way up.
She didn’t drink in the lady-like way I’d imagined. Port was a sippy lady’s drink but she gulped it down like a man. She’d already put a dent in the bottle. So had I in mine. We had something in common after all.
By now she’d lost her shyness. She got up and put the broken chain on top of the spotless refrigerator. She returned to the table, a trifle unsteadily maybe, and said: “What were we talking about?”
“Your good luck.”
; She looked confused a second as though she had trouble associating Beth Anderson with good luck. It may have been the port.
“Your full-time job,” I prompted.
“Yes, that. Also you savored his poetry. Also he’s with a nice girl now. A nice girl can make all the difference. Maybe this time it’ll work. It’s not easy. You wouldn’t know. You saw once but you don’t know.”
I didn’t correct her. I felt it coming on and wished she wouldn’t. There must be something in my face that brings out life-stories. I never do it myself. I always attribute to others my own carefully masked indifference. Or is it squeamishness at the exposure of sores and stumps? Or maybe fear of expected reciprocity?
“And having to cope all by myself after Jack left. Jack was my husband. He still is.” She unconsciously moved her left hand forward a little as though to provide the corroboration of the diamond ring. “Just at about the time Ricky’s problem started Jack discovered the Golden Galaxy and became a Second-Degree Illuminated. Like I said before, a Second-Degree Illuminated’s a kind of monk. They shave their heads and have this thing about women, what do you call it?”
“Celibacy?”
“That’s it. So he couldn’t go on living here. He said I was too much of a something temptation. A carnal temptation. That was nice in a way but I had to cope all by myself. That was two years and three months ago. I don’t know where he is. He sends me lots of literature on the Golden Galaxy. It’s almost like getting letters from him. I took it awfully badly at first. Sometimes I still do. I try to understand. Like he says, it’s spiritual development and all that but sometimes I think it was cowardly to run off like that. What do you think?”
She took me for a universal repairman. I hadn’t contracted for personal as well as for TV problems. Only partly to console her, I said that we men tended to cowardice. That was as close as I would come to confession myself. Women were far stronger, I said. Look how women lived ten years longer. It was a reward, maybe.
“Maybe punishment,” she said and then apologized. It was very impolite and a bore to think out loud like that to someone, the same old thoughts. They went round and round like a merry-go-round only not merry.
She brightened determinedly. “Have another drink with me, Professor Weiz… Oh there I go again with ‘Professor.’ We never seem to get off the ground, you and me, just a few inches and then bang, down again.”
Did I scowl at that? After what had happened a month before in her tulip-bed I found the bang-on-the-ground metaphor tasteless.
“Like, for a while I called you Jerry and you called me Beth and bang I went back to Professor and you went back to calling me … nothing, actually. Even if you get angry at me, keep on calling me Beth, huh? Can I say something a little personal, Jerry? I really admire you for sticking it out with Mr Morgenstern with the roaches and the noise and that awful, awful woman and all. You’re a good person. I admire people who are true to friends through thick and thin. It’s rare, you can believe me. Hey, I forgot all about the TV. Wait till you see this. Take your glass.”
She took hers. We went into the living room. “Look,” she said, switching on the TV.
The image was perfect.
“Wait,” she said. “I’ve got the wrong channel. That’s what surprised me last night. Usually when I get interference it’s like a kind of herringbone pattern, blue and red and on all of the channels. Last night it was just on one channel, black and white and gosh it was … Wait, you’ll see.”
She selected the right channel and we waited.
Waited and waited while actresses simpered, actors viriled. I was spending my days as well as nights waiting for things that didn’t materialize on TV screens. A quarter of an hour went by. I began casting quick glances at my watch. She wondered what was wrong with what was wrong.
Now the scene shifted from a passionate embrace in a swimming pool to a room in a maternity hospital. The woman in the bed, passionately embraced seconds before, had just given birth. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a beauty parlor. She handed the impossibly mature baby to the good gray middle-aged husband who lacked only visible horns. Now you take him, Larry, she said with a knowing look to a brilliantly handsome young man with an elaborate coiffure.
Just as the baby was being passed to the third summit of the triangle a tiny figure emerged from the lower left-hand corner of the screen and started walking jerkily over the baby’s head. It was distorted, flickering and gray, a woman.
I remembered where I was sitting, over what burned-out foundations and looked away, at an aquarelle of a bouquet hanging above the TV. The ghost progressed, in persistence of vision, over poppies and daisies now. Beth Anderson uttered a little cry of triumph and turned to me and said that I looked as scared as she’d been the first time she saw it, not that, but something like that. Spooky, wasn’t it?
Now I recalled that the machine was in the cellar of the other house, pulling things out of that other living room, the harmless one. I forced myself to look back at the screen.
Harvey’s mother, dead fifteen years, was heading for the woman in the bed who took the baby back with a little smile and another knowing look.
I justified my whiteness (I felt white) by the surprise. I couldn’t look any more. She hadn’t been like that. It was as if she’d been recalled not integral from the past but from the grave and what time had done to her there. Leave her the way she’d been stored in my brain, forgotten but available and now summoned up: faded, that’s true, but life-size and human, not reduced to a thing jerking across a screen. Leave her in peace. I wanted to get out of Beth Anderson’s house. Out of the other one too.
I said I’d talk to Harvey about the interference. Maybe he had ideas.
On the threshold of Harvey’s living room I heard a faint whirring and saw the lens of one of the sensors tracking. The others must have been tracking too, a crossfire. I stepped back. Instead of going down to the cellar I took the phone-directories up to my room.
I did figuring. Not counting the money Harvey owed me in that mysterious account (I didn’t even know how much it amounted to), I had about $5,000. I wouldn’t get very far with that. I opened the yellow pages to “Employment Agencies” and found the three agencies that specialized in teaching positions. I sneaked down to the corridor where the phone was.
Even as I was dialing the first number I could hear in my mind the dialogue I was seconds away from. You imagine something to make sure it won’t happen that way. It’s a primitive vestige even in supposedly enlightened minds. Age? And to the confession, a polite Uh-huh or a soothing Yess or maybe an unenthusiastic I seee. Then: subject(s) taught? English? Frankly sir if it were math or science no problem at all. But English.
And that’s almost exactly the way the conversation ran. Maybe Harvey could pull things out of the past but I possessed second sight, in a way time-travel to the future to learn what he’d told me and I already knew: no future. So I didn’t bother dialing the other two numbers. I went down to the cellar, the long way around, avoiding the living room.
For a moment there I was afraid Harvey would kiss me when I told him what I’d seen. He did have ideas about the neighbor’s parasitic image. His first one was to send me back to Beth Anderson’s to get all the technical particulars: find out which make of TV, the exact model, the exact times of the phenomenon, the exact orientation of the antenna, the channel. Above all, the channel.
The information I brought back must have been decisive. Five days later he invited me down into the cellar with a triumphant look.
For nine hours we stared at the screen and saw old objects in maniac magnification and pieces of people, most of them dead and looking that way.
At about 3:00 am I got up and started upstairs. He went on looking.
“Momma!” I heard him croak again as I pulled myself out of the cellar.
I was too tired to go back after all the senseless things I’d seen for so many hours. More senseless than terrifying but
sometimes that too if you were able to believe it really was reactivation of time past and not a fraud.
***