Time Travail

Time Travail

Howard Waldman

In memory of Eric Anderson

Time Travail

One

But then at the threshold of entry (after all
this time), forefinger rigid on the red dispatching button,
suddenly the intruder, that old bum with the funny gizmo on his
head, sabotaging the voyage back. How did he get past the
triple-bolted cellar door? Hasn’t he already pulled the trick at
the same critical moment, materializing like a ghost with that
metal thing on his head, making you think: “What the hell is he up
to? Is he insane?”

Think that now. Maybe yell it to drive him
away. But he stays. Becomes even more familiar. Distance starts
collapsing. That’s the next stage of lucidity.

Forced to recognize the old bum with the
funny gizmo on his head as Jerry Weizman, late Associate Professor
of English, largely freshman, stranded high and dry, he too, in
this trivial time-space intersection. Already able to recite the
space-locus accurately (
USA, Long Island, NY, Forest Hill, 8 President
Wilson Street, Harvey Morgenstern’s cellar
) but still have trouble with the time-locus.
Clock says 3:46. Night or day? And what day? What month even?
Remember leaving hot high sun coming down here, so summer, but
can’t recall the year yet. It’ll come back any second, the way the
bum’s coming back strong, threatening merger.

Merger’s happening now in great pain. He (I)
is (am) seated at the console in the red gloom of the cellar,
entangled, practically strangled, in the coils of Harvey’s machine,
coiffed with a wired metal helmet. Now ridiculous He and spectator
I merge totally into suffering Me staring at Me reflected in the
dead screen.

To combat the pain of lucidity there’s
always
Lord’s
Vineyards.
The
blasphemous $8.99 bottle of California sauterne stands half-empty
on the console.

Now it’s three-quarters empty. There are
others, completely empty, under the console. It’s got powerful
anti-lucidity virtues but is hell on my stomach. Ever since my
purveyor started peddling intergalactic religion to me instead of
contractual tetrahydrocannabinol, I’ve had to depend heavily on the
sauterne for what Harvey called the amplifier effect, indispensable
for the voyage.

I start sneezing now. Coming down with the
flu. Pressing the red button on the console might bring relief
either through annihilation or the happening of long-desired
things, first on the screen before me and then in my head beneath
the wired metal helmet. But the only thing happening on the dark
screen for the moment is my own white-stubbled bummish face, the
contemporary one. I once saw it marvelously young and handsome
there during a voyage back. In the red gloom manufactured by
Harvey’s twenty bulbs the present reflection is dim, a mercy. The
past two months have finally dumped my true age on me and maybe
more.

I’m getting on. “Getting on” is what old Miss
Forster in PS 89 way back in the 30s – I saw her again a while ago
but much fainter – called a “phrasal verb”, an ambiguous one
because “getting on”, among other things, also means “making
progress”, in my case to one grim thing only, let’s face it. I got
on a long time ago and soon will be getting off. Maybe any second
now if I press the red button and Harvey’s calculations prove wrong
for me as I think they did for him when he pressed it.

All in all, taking the good with the bad,
it’s been a pretty lousy trip. I’m more scared than consoled at the
idea that one day another Harvey Morgenstern, as yet unborn, may
resurrect me on a screen the way the original Harvey Morgenstern
imperfectly did his early contemporaries, among them Miss Forster
with her broken front tooth and also Rachel Rosen the night of her
death.

I’ve just sneezed again. It’s bitterly dank
down here in his cellar, a foretaste of eternity as I imagine it.
Where’s my handkerchief? I can hear rats stirring about in the open
bag of potato chips near the cot. The rim of the metal cap bites
into my forehead painfully. It can do worse things than that, I
know.

Maybe as a stalling tactic, not to commit
myself one way or the other with the red button, I start playing
games with my ghostly reflection on the screen, try to imagine
situations more orthodox than the real one to explain the presence
of that biting thing on my head.

Despite all the transformations it still
looks very much like what it once was: an old-fashioned woman’s
permanent-wave helmet. But it’s no beauty parlor down here. Now the
thing seems to be a big inverted funnel I’m wearing. But isn’t that
how madmen are represented in I can’t remember what country? In
great fear of that definition I now see the thing as the cap
occupants of the New York State electric chair used to get crowned
with. This invention is even worse, for I’m convinced the
ex-permanent-wave helmet is capable of a fatal hair singe, a
permanent wave goodbye.

Anyhow, no matter what Harvey said at the
end, what crime did I ever commit? I’m a man of omissions, not
commissions. I try to invalidate the image of retribution by
recalling that the condemned have arm and leg straps to make them
stay put in their final chair. There are none on mine. I haven’t
even got that excuse for being where I am.

Come to think of it, the thing on my head
looks more like a futuristic dunce cap than anything else.

So say an innocent dunce in a lucid
moment.

If I’d had the sense not to stoop for his
check that day I’d be 2000 miles from this place in my nice warm
bed. Having nightmares probably but ones I could wake up out of.
Accepting that check was just one of a long series of mistakes that
started practically with birth. I’m tempted to go back in my own
private built-in time machine – a million times more efficient than
his – to the day when I got fatally involved and pass in review the
subsequent mistakes. I know there’s danger in going back like that.
You can get sucked down in memory and suffocate. But this time I’ll
view myself from way above, practice safe detachment, lucid
dissociation. I’ll look down at JW blundering away and match his
grimaces with grins, try to double up with laughter when he doubles
up with pain. Maybe I’ll finally learn from those mistakes of mine,
extract precious survival lessons for the future.

What future? Isn’t this just another stalling
tactic? Putting off the choice I’ll finally have to make: either
take my chances with the machine or remove the thing from my head
and leave this house for good and take my chances with what’s left
for me of forward-moving time outside?

Now my nose is starting to run. A salty taste
like the sea or tears.

Where the hell is my handkerchief?

That sunny September day began at nine, like
all my other days since retirement, with vacuum cleaning. I cleaned
my vacuum again with great thoroughness, both rooms. I’m maybe a
little compulsive about cleanliness (in those days I was anyhow)
although I wouldn’t say anally regressive about it. That was my
second ex-wife’s diagnosis. Mary attributed it to rigid
Judeo-Christian toilet training. Whatever, I can’t stand having to
contemplate disorder, (couldn’t in those days, anyhow). It was too
much like a metaphor for intimate things. As usual I spent long
minutes over my audio system with the Swiss
electro-static-nullifying feather-brush. There aren’t a hundred
systems of that quality in the world. We’re both sensitive to
dust.

After, I went down for possible mail, the
second major event of the day, one I never missed out on. With the
sudden end to my teaching activities I’d learned to restructure my
days with small things. I’d been retired three months before,
transitively, the way certain people are suicided. Times were tough
in education. People had to go. I had published, but not enough
(not even for a third-rate state university). Both parties involved
pretended to believe that official reason. They carefully skirted
the real reason, like skirting sidewalk dog excrement. But hadn’t
the thing been practically by mutual consent? Enough of that.

So I perished. Professionally, of course.
What survived was going through motions in a furnished two-room
flat I owed rent on.

Getting the mail was one of the motions.
Since my “retirement” I’d learned to fill my waking hours with
activities, physical and mental. I’d learned not to relax, not to
become indifferent. It appears that cerebral decline creeps up on
you in the flattering disguise of “above it all” indifference. What
you take for Olympian serenity the world rightly chalks up to
softening of the brain.

This concern with cerebral decline started in
the middle of one night soon after I was scrapped. A person I’d
long ago succeeded in not thinking of came back more or less. Her
face was indistinct and I couldn’t remember her name. Couldn’t.
When her name came back shortly before dawn I got up and wrote it a
number of times, Rachel, Rachel, on scraps of paper in order not to
forget the next time. Wasn’t that cheating? I saw myself in the
mirror doing it and, through tears, found myself comically
pathetic.

Even she might have smiled at the sight if
she hadn’t been dead for nearly half a century (we can go back and
see them imperfectly but they can’t ever see us). I tried to
imagine her face but couldn’t. I think it was then that I started
trying to combat cerebral decline.

The trouble is, one of the symptoms of
cerebral decline is concern with cerebral decline. I’d come to
recognize it, for example, in the little warm feeling I experienced
when learning that so-and-so had whipped up a masterpiece at an
advanced age. Haydn at seventy imitating God with his
Creation
and on the whole doing a better
job of it. Michelangelo at the same age pulling off the Saint
Peter’s Basilica. Verdi still green at eighty with
Falstaff
.
Picasso pushing ninety but engraving that sex-exercise series,
maybe no dim memory. Now I’m on to another kind of bitter decline.
But I did have the models of V. Hugo and L. N. Tolstoy,
indefatigable white-bearded impregnators of
servant-girls

Of course I wasn’t in their league but I
did have my own disciplines. Senility can be combated to a certain
extent by physical and intellectual discipline. From ten to eleven,
after the mail, I kept on my toes with Hungarian on tape
(
Assimil
).
Hungarian is said, rightly I think, to be the most challenging of
European languages. Another example of intellectual calisthenics
was the way I forced myself to grapple with music I’d never been
able to penetrate in my younger days, even though penetration was
even less my strong point now. Mainly Gregorian chants and medieval
masses for the dead. Mood music for meditations on the passage of
time, love and money.

Not just mentally, also corporally I tried
to keep trim. This was easier. I watched what I ate, if not what I
drank. The year before, in the university pool, a woman colleague
(Marianne Richards of the French Department) had said: “Why, Jerry,
you have the body of a forty-year-old, myumm!” I had the vanity to
feel offended at the limits of her comparison but realized she
meant well and so returned the compliment, gallantly lowering the
age comparison and concluding with, “myumm, myumm,
my
u
mm!” This was
excessive and imprudent. It started that way.

But I was on the subject of physical fitness.
I had a chinning-bar permanently wedged in the bathroom doorframe.
I learned to duck, most of the time, on the way to the toilet at
night. Rain or shine I jogged an hour, not in the direction of the
University campus. I didn’t go out of my way to avoid my former
colleagues but didn’t exactly hammer at their doors. Any more than
they did at mine, with one persistent exception.

I wasn’t bitter about it. I understood that I
still gave off that tremendous distancing aura of people stricken
by some incurable illness (leprosy, say) or inconsolable loss. Some
of the colleagues I did bump into commiserated till I felt like
telling them not to take it so hard. Others said I was lucky to
have retired seven years in advance. Most carefully avoided the
subject as they hadn’t been able to avoid me in the street. I
smiled steadily for them all.

One day in the supermarket Harry Richards of
the English Department playfully clashed his shopping-cart into
mine. I had to ask how Marianne was doing although I knew in
detail. Harry said I wasn’t looking so hot and that statistically
half the nervous breakdowns occurred in the first year of
retirement. He warned against solitude and advised me to find a
lady-friend. One my own age for a change, he added, but not
nastily. He’s a nice guy basically and I wasn’t happy to see
him.