Memories of the Future (14 page)

He procures a can of charcoal lighter from the garage, unscrews the cap and performs the libation; then he steps back and tosses a lighted match onto the drenched briquettes. The sacred flame leaps up, engulfs them briefly, then diminishes. Presently they begin to redden, like Poe’s embers.

In Jack’s back yard, Jack’s seven sons are playing baseball. Jack himself, in his capacity as weekend cop, has left to moonlight in the police patrol car. Dad comes out onto the patio in shirtsleeves, carrying a can of Schlitz. He sits down on the glider and rests the can on his lap. In the kitchen, Mom and Nora ready the fryers for parboiling. The sun has reached zenith, and its harsh golden light covers every square inch of the back yard except the area usurped by the splotchy shadow of the Schwedler. The sky is cloudless and should be blue. It is not: It has taken on a dull metallic glare.

* * *

—In the county courthouse, my birthdate is officially recorded as July 10, 1932. I, who will not be born for two thousand years! The inadequacies of the Quadripartite extend into innumerable areas, but their prowess in physical and metaphysical prolepsis is unparalleled.

However, the falsification of my birthdate constitutes only the opening sentence in the spurious pamphlet re my pseudo-past so efficiently circulated by their agents. Fabrications pertaining to my fictive 1932–58 existence can be found galore in the schools I presumably attended and in the minds of the teachers and professors who presumably taught me. “Classmates” carry implanted recollections of me in their cortices; “old girlfriends” carry false phallic memories of me in their wombs. “Hometown neighbors” remember an only son of a childless couple who went up in one-hundred-octane flames. Each Christmas, I receive cards and/or presents from perfect strangers who claim to be my aunts and uncles and whom I pretend to accept as such. Filed away in some military archive is the service record of one Victor Lowery re a “Police Action” he never participated in. Buried somewhere among my papers is a startlingly realistic Honorable Discharge.

When the Sarn scientists developed time travel during the later years of the Regime, they did not dream of the use to which it would ultimately be put. Nor did the Sarn psychosurgeons, when they devised the Parnassian Link, dream that it might someday be altered into a Parnassian Block.

Such lack of foresight is tantamount to treason. For what more effective means could a dictatorship have of getting rid of a Solzhenitsynian genius than by imprisoning him in the past? And what more effective means could a dictatorship have of punishing an impugner of the state than by snuffing out the very flame that made the impugning possible?

Sometimes in my agony I cry out not only against the forces of evil that robbed me of my birthright but against the forces of good that made the robbery practicable—

* * *

Poe’s embers are in full bloom. Dad makes a round trip to the kitchen for a second can of Schlitz. Nora brings out the parboiled fryers, and Lowery places them on the grill with a long two-pronged fork. Mom sets the patio picnic table. The afternoon haze augments the sky’s dull metallic glare. Jack’s oldest son hits a home run.

The Schlitz fits naturally into Dad’s square bricklayer’s hand. Mom brings Lowery a bowl of Catalina Dressing with which to baste the fryers. She is wearing one of Nora’s calico aprons over the blue suit, and a warm motherly smile. Next door, Jack’s wife dumps half a bag of briquettes into Jack’s outdoor fireplace and drenches them with the same brand of charcoal lighter Lowery used. “After dinner,” Mom announces, “we’ll all go for a Nice Ride.”

Dad sips his Schlitz. Chicken fat and Catalina dressing sputter on poor Poe’s embers; little gouts of smoke arise. Mom takes the fork from Lowery’s hand. “Why don’t you go up on the patio and keep Dad company?”

Trapped, Lowery divests himself of hat and apron; on the glider, Dad and Schlitz make room for one more. In the kitchen, Nora puts water on to boil for corn on the cob. Dad reverts for a while to his prostatectomy, then reminisces about his bricklaying days. He steals an occasional glance at Lowery’s pale effeminate hands. Inevitably, son Tom returns to the center of the stage. “Last week his take-home pay was $666.75.”

Lowery does not comment.

“His withholding alone is more than most guys make.”

“It’s more than
I
make,” Lowery says.

“Maybe so. But you teachers ain’t exactly underpaid these days. And that library job you hold down summers don’t hurt none neither.”

The Schwedler is directly in Lowery’s line of vision. He stares at the arabesques of sky formed by the dark red fascicles. Their brassy glare hurts his eyes, and at length he lowers his gaze. The arabesques remain for a while upon his retinas, then gradually fade away.

It is time to eat. Dad procures another Schlitz to go with his meal. Nora, Mom, Lowery, and Dad sit down at the picnic table, Lowery at one end, Dad at the other. Dad heaps his plate with potato salad, crowding his fryer half onto the tablecloth. He keeps an extra ear of corn on hand throughout the meal. Lowery picks at his food. The roar of a power mower comes faintly from the next block as a late riser attacks his lawn. There is a barely perceptible tremor as Sunday shifts into second gear.

* * *

—There are times when I wish I could accept as facts the falsehoods so effectively circulated by my jailers, when I wish I could identify wholly with the simians on the shores of whose dark chrono-continent I have been cast up. But I cannot. It is one thing to ape an ape; quite another to be one. Thus I must walk alone, remembering as I go the green lands of Argo, the yellow seas of Tant, the cogent cities of the artificial archipelago the Guitridges built before the Sarn Regime collapsed: stoically bearing the contumelies heaped upon me when in deathless prose-poetry I dared expose the rotten timbers of the monstrous structure that rose from the ruins of the Regime. A giant striding among pygmies, extolling to their offspring the literary merits of other pygmies not fit to shine his shoes—

* * *

The Imperial, Dad at the wheel, backroads its way along the littoral. Through verdant arches made by sugar maples, past vineyards and houses and barns, Lowery sits beside Dad in the front seat; Mom and Nora share the back. Lowery suggested taking his Bonneville, but Dad would not hear of it. The Imperial has Air; the Bonneville does not. Dad believes in Air. Windows tightly closed, the Imperial breezes by rows of grapevines that seem to turn like the giant green spokes of a massive horizontal wheel. The grapes are—will be when autumn comes—Concords. This is Concord Country.

Dad does not drive far. The Imperial has a tapeworm, genus PVC, and the gasoline gauge drops visibly with each passing mile. Gasoline is dear these days. On second thought, Lowery is glad they didn’t take the Bonneville. The Bonneville has a tapeworm too.

Well, at least Sunday has not been wasted. It has been established that, come fall (barring an early freeze), there will be grapes galore. Mission accomplished, Dad pulls into a Tastee Freeze stand for the day’s
piece de resistance
. Mom has a sundae, Dad a double-dip, Nora a split, and Lowery a cigarette. Scene 7.

Dad says, “Vic, I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the car.”

“Why not?” Lowery asks. “It can’t catch fire. It’s made out of bricks, isn’t it? Like your brain.”

There is a terrible silence. Dad starts up the motor. “You’re lucky you’re Nora’s husband, or I’d—”

“
You’re
lucky I’m Nora’s husband—not I. Who else but a poor dumb school teacher would have taken her off your hands?”

“Vic!” Mom says.

Nora begins to cry.

Dad pulls back onto the highway, driving with one hand. Lowery stubs out his cigarette in the virgin ashtray. “I’ll bet when you went to school you carried bricks in your bookbag instead of books.”

The Ride is completed in utter silence. The coldness in the car has little to do with Air. Even Mom does not say goodbye to Lowery when Dad lets him and Nora out in front of the house. Lowery perks a pot of coffee in the kitchen, takes a cupful out onto the patio. Scene 8. The sky still retains its dull metallic glare. There is no hint as yet of night. Presently Nora joins him, but she does not speak. She will not speak to him for days. Last time he torpedoed Dad, she did not speak to him for a whole week.

At last the metallic glare begins to soften. For a while, the big bonfire of the sun burns redly beyond the Schwedler. There is a faint trembling of the fascicles as Sunday shifts into third and final gear.

Nora and Lowery go inside. She turns on the TV and they watch the Lawrence Welk Show. Scene 9. The ABC movie comes on an hour early. They have already seen it twice, but neither makes a move to change the channel. Once again, Alec Guinness suffers nobly for the cause of caste. Once again, aging Bill Holden leads Jack Hawkins’s commandos through the bush. Once again, the Bridge is blown to Kingdom Come.

“Dullness! Dullness!” the medical officer cries, striding down the slope . . .

* * *

The news comes on. They watch it, then go to bed. Lowery lies immobile in the darkness till Nora’s rhythmic breathing assures him she is asleep. . . . Then, soundlessly, he pulls the chrono-cell’s only chair over to the wall beneath the cell window and climbs up on the seat. By standing on tiptoe and stretching himself to maximum height, he can grip the windowsill with his fingertips. He pulls himself upward with practiced ease, props one elbow on the sill, then the other. Slowly, he inches himself up and through the stasis field, emerging at the base of a wooded hill. Then he pulls his real body through after him. The field’s inbuilt dimension-correlator keeps it from emerging inside out.

After it settles into place around him, he starts up the hill. It is night, but the darkness is alleviated by starlight, and he makes his way without difficulty along the familiar trail that leads upward through the conifers to the chalet. Once inside the chalet, he puts through a call to a psychosurgeon he used to know and who is still loyal to the Sarn Regime, which has gone underground. Can the psychosurgeon come at once and remove Lowery’s Parnassian Block? The psychosurgeon not only can, he will be glad to be of service to a loyal compatriot like Lowery. He will arrive in a matter of minutes.

Lowery paces the floor, smoking cigarettes. He keeps the lights down low and the blinds drawn because there are Quadripartite agents in the area. At last the psychosurgeon’s aircraft drops down into the clearing in front of the chalet. Lowery runs outside to meet him, and the two old friends walk arm in arm back to the chalet. The psychosurgeon is well up in years, but is unsurpassed in his profession. He directs Lowery to lie down on the divan. Lowery complies. The psychosurgeon opens his little black bag and withdraws a rectangular chrome-plated box. After plugging it into a nearby baseboard outlet, he holds it exactly eleven inches above Lowery’s forehead and clicks it on. Three pencil-thin blue rays leap from the box’s bottom and converge in the middle of Lowery’s forehead. “This won’t take long,” the psychosurgeon says reassuringly, bending over his patient to make sure the rays have converged in just the right spot. “We’ll have it burned out of there in a jiffy.”

The psychosurgeon’s breath smells strongly of Franco American spaghetti. It is a dead giveaway: Only Quadripartite loyalists eat Franco American spaghetti. Lowery shoves the box aside and leaps to his feet. “I know what you’re up to!” he cries. “The Quadripartite
want
the Block removed! They sent you!”

“In point of fact, they do and did,” the psychosurgeon says calmly. A fly emerges from his left nostril, crawls diagonally across his hairless upper lip and halts at the corner of his mouth. “They feel that in depriving you of your flame they went too far, and now they wish to rectify their mistake. If you’ll kindly resume your former position on the divan, I’ll—”

“No!” Lowery shouts. “I don’t trust you! I’m going back to the past!”

Instantly, the room swarms with Quadripartite agents.

Somehow, Lowery eludes their clawing fingers and gets through the door. He runs down the hill, expertly evading the grasping hands that reach out at him from behind every tree he passes. At the base of the hill, he homes in on the chrono-window and crawls back through the stasis field and into his cell. He pulls his body through after him, shaking it free from a Quadripartite agent who has gripped it by the heels. It flows smoothly around him in the darkness, sinks pleasantly into the inner-spring mattress. Frantically he feels for the Parnassian Block. It is still intact, still in place. He sighs. Lowery sleeps.