Time Travail (25 page)

The sensors were working now, sniffing out
more prey in the cemetery of fragmentary faces and gestures. I
stood on the threshold and told her to go on in and have a
look.

She went in, fearfully. It was strange to see
her there, impeccable and banal in that dusty chaotic space. She
turned about uneasily, not trusting the lenses operating in her
back. One of them zoomed at her. She pulled back toward the
threshold and me.

I said there was no danger for her yet, a few
minutes’ exposure was harmless. But if I stood outside on the
threshold, I said, it was because I’d been exposed too long
already. The effect was cumulative like lead poisoning, saturnism,
they called it and I reminded her of Saturn, the Greek Chronos who
devoured his children. Nobody came into this room any more except
Harvey, it didn’t matter any more for him, I said.

It wasn’t a machine to cure his sickness, I
said. That had been another untruth. It was the machine that had
given him the sickness.

She stared at me and moved away a second
time, not from the sensors this time but from the threshold where I
was standing. Why did I go on like that? I said it wouldn’t stop
there. I said that with the sensors set up in her living room she
would be linked up day and night with the machine in the cellar
below. I crossed the threshold.

She stepped back a little again.

I tried to show her the hole behind each one
of the sensors with the cable snaking into them through motionless
heaps of roaches. Similar holes would be knocked in her living room
floor, I warned. Thick cables would run across her flowerbeds into
her house. I said that it wouldn’t stop there in her living room.
The cables and the sensors would seek better positioning, would go
up a flight and summon back a certain room somewhere, the
measurements hadn’t been taken yet.

I heard her (Beth) say what room? what are
you talking about? aren’t you well?

But her voice was distant and I saw it all
so clearly from the other threshold of that other long-ago
immeasurable room, a random selection of my brain: both of them
seated at her desk over some arduous problem, their heads
conspiratorial together and speaking some incomprehensible
conspiratorial language, her short hair neat and shiny, the
lamplight soft on the oval of the sweet-serious face girls had had
then and have lost since, I standing in the doorway commissioned by
Mrs Morgenstern to summon them down for dinner, hearing their
exclusive gibberish. (Out of this.) So I rehearse “It’s time to
eat” in her language and finally say: “
Es ist Zeit für uns zu
fressen
,” and they both
look up, Harvey annoyed. (Out of this.)

She predictably corrects me:
“
Essen, nicht
fressen
.” Of course I’d
known that. “Eat” for humans was “
essen
,” for animals, “
fressen
.” It was just to pull her out of the other, inhuman,
exclusive language into our own short-lived exclusive one even if
exchange was limited to a corrective echo of my own
words.

They go back to their problem and their other
language and I stand there in unbearable paralysis staring at the
curve of her neck and cheek as time goes by more and more
slowly.

Get out of it. Out or cross over the
threshold into that vanished room. From the threshold the scene
replays with no variation possible. Violate the course of things
and move across the threshold toward her and then be in it forever
in longed-for alteration of events. But then no return ever. Out of
it.

Out of it now, down in the cellar, by my own
efforts but not then, no non-assisted way out then. It was a deep
fall into another time-trap.

I was being shaken out of it. A worn woman in
a dirty room, arm stretched out, shaking my shoulder from a safe
distance, body tensed for flight, saying fearfully, what’s the
matter? What’s the matter with you? Now her hand left my shoulder
as she stepped away.

I was back, out of it. I returned to that
other, undesired, room, Harvey’s living room, the dead room with
the sensors and to the woman, the neighbor, tulips, Beth. Beth
Anderson. If she hadn’t shaken me out of it would I have emerged? I
wondered, thankful, resentful. Return is the worst of it.

“If you’re not well why don’t you see a
doctor?” she was saying. “I’ll call later when Mr Morgenstern
returns. I have to go back now.” She started for the door.

“Don’t do that, don’t go back,” I said too
urgently. “Give me just a few minutes.”

I excused myself and went into the bathroom
again. Again the washbasin with cold water. When I came back a few
minutes later it was a little better. She was still standing in the
middle of the room, not afraid of the sensors. She stared at me.
She didn’t say anything but kept staring at me. To make her say
something and stop staring I said:

“You can’t need the money that badly.”

She nodded violently. “Five thousand dollars,
right away, today.”

It started returning. I told her that five
million wouldn’t be enough, that she’d come down with it too, like
me. She didn’t want to be like me, did she? I was doing this for
her, I didn’t want anything to happen to her, she was a good
person. This was sincere, I said. It was compassion, she should
believe me. He’d offered me money if she’d say yes. Say no, you
don’t want them in your house. If you don’t say no I’ll break into
your house and smash them, I swear I will, and he’ll take the money
back and you’ll both have me thrown in jail. It’s a promise.

The promise was conveyed with passionate
sincerity. But why hadn’t I already smashed the sensors and behind
them the central machine itself?

Why didn’t I smash them then and there,
before her eyes?

Why don’t I remove the biting dunce cap and
smash them now instead of toying with the red button?

She started crying. Jail had been the wrong
word to use. The money was for a lawyer, I made out.

She didn’t have to tell me, I said as all
that disorder from another past came back suddenly with her words
and I went back to it, embraced it as painful diversion from that
even earlier past, the long-ago vanished room, also as a way of
drawing close to her in the mode of confession.

She didn’t have to tell me, I repeated. So
she didn’t go on telling me about it. She’d taken my phrase
literally, as recoil from confidence not as semi-confidence itself.
I’d meant that I knew all about it, the inevitable things that
happened in such a situation. The money part, even the jail part,
wasn’t the worst. She hadn’t been through the worst yet. And now I
was glad she’d misunderstood and hadn’t let me confide as I’d
wanted to, to prolong the diversion, maybe. How could I have told
her how it had ended for us with Keith?

So of course it wound up by my offering her
the money myself, all those precious days. I had a warm feeling as
though it was for her. Probably at that moment I thought it really
was. A loan, I said.

But how will I ever be able to pay you back?
she said with that exotic mid-western rectitude of hers.

It was funny in a way. Harvey was about to
offer her money to set up the machines and I was offering her money
to refuse. I knew he could have outbid me a hundred times over but
now it was too late. I’d short-circuited him from the start.

It was a predictable struggle to get her to
accept. She thanked me all the way from the depths. I said, shh,
it’s nothing, shh, don’t, she’d pay me back when she could. It was
the wrong remark, the wrong way around. How could I pay her back
for having saved me? We stood there together in the middle of the
dead room. I held her, consolingly at first, kissing her wet
cheeks, then her neck, then her lips, aware that she might be
submitting to it out of gratitude, a purchased familiarity then.
But if I was holding her so tightly now, tighter than she was me, I
think it was more from fear than desire, the need to feel a real
body against mine.

The sensors went on whirring, zooming,
tracking.

In a few hundred thousand years we might go
through it again one-dimensionally on a screen, not in the unity of
an embracing couple but dissected: a knee, a shoulder, an eye in
quick senseless succession.

One blowy overcast March morning I found
Harvey in the garden under his black umbrella despite the clouds,
in case of a surprise attack of sunshine. From time to time his arm
was yanked upward by a sudden gust and I thought he risked being
blown aloft, he was so flimsy now.

He didn’t pay attention to it. I thought he
was staring at Beth Anderson’s house until he started talking about
the birds darting about the feeding station she’d set up. It was an
aluminum pole thrust into the lawn with a little platform on top
and a spike to hold the block of suet or margarine. It was unusual
for him to take notice of outside things.

We looked at their incredible acrobatics for
a while. He started croaking things about them. He went on and on.
I found it confusing. Or maybe I wasn’t listening closely because
suddenly Beth Anderson appeared at her bedroom window in her
Saturday morning street-urchin disguise. She began wiping a pane
furiously. Her navel beneath the oversized knotted shirt was like
an unblinking eye. Harvey’s voice gave out. He started scribbling
it on the pad. Beth stopped wiping. All her eyes were fixed on me.
She made a timid gesture with her hand. I returned it even more
timidly, not to attract Harvey’s attention.

Later in my room I tried to piece together
what he’d written in his barely legible scrawl. When he wrote
things down I was contractually bound to read.

Stylistically fixed up it was something like
this: that of course there was objective time out there, invariable
for us at our tiny earthbound fraction of light-speed. But time as
perception was variable, wildly so. Those seconds that zipped by
like bullets for us were spacious for them. (He meant the birds,
the titmice). They could do meaningful things within their seconds
which weren’t ours. In a blink of our eyes they darted their beady
eyes in all directions, shot, suicidally it seemed, at the tangle
of branches and miraculously landed with precision on a twig. They
accomplished everything in acceleration it seemed to our eyes but
that was the relativity of time-sense. The slower time-sense was
ours. For them one of our minutes maybe had the subjective value of
a year. For a long-lived tortoise one of our minutes must have
seemed a second. To its slow mind maybe the tit was invisible.

Had I ever given this matter much thought? If
not, I would have to very soon.

That was the final sentence.

It sounded more like a threat than a
prediction. I balled the sheet up and threw it inaccurately at the
wastepaper basket. A week before I would have felt alarm. But the
shadowy forms below had vanished. There were no more time-traps. I
was firmly fixed in this time-stratum where Beth was.

From time to time, though, I couldn’t help
hoping it wasn’t just the inactive phase of the cycle.

***

Thirteen

I learned about Harvey Morgenstern’s alleged
breakthroughs in a funny way.

Just as the alarm clock on one side of the
bed announced the end of the tenderness session the phone on the
other side of the bed joined in. Fully clothed except for her
golden shoes, Beth Anderson broke away with a sigh. She clapped the
alarm still, got up into a sitting position and answered the phone,
all the while arranging her hair with her free hand.

“Oh. How do you do, Mr Morgenstern … Yes, as
a matter of fact he is. He’s in the kitchen. I’ll get him for …
What? … No I have definitely not changed my mind. I definitely do
not want to sell my home. Mr Morgenstern, you’re not going to hound
me about that again like you did last year … Something else? … What
kind of devices in my living room? … No, no, you must be out of
your mind, frankly, to think I’d accept that … You could offer me
all the money in the world, the answer is still no. Listen Mr
Morgenstern, I think my roast is burning. So hold on, I’ll get
Professor Weizman for you.”

By this time I’d put my shoes back on, the
only dressing necessary after our tenderness sessions. It was her
name for them. I reached over for the receiver. She kept it away
from me for the few more seconds necessary for me to plausibly
leave the kitchen and reach it.

Harvey whispered that he wanted me to come
over right away. He made what was supposed to be a joke about the
meat burning in her oven. He sounded in an ugly mood. It must have
been her refusal. He’d have to wait ten minutes, I said coldly in a
display of independence for Beth’s benefit.

I hung up hard and kissed her nose. She
reached up and cradled my head in her arms, rocked it like a sick
child. I broke loose and kissed her cheek. She sighed and said I
should hurry back.

Although I had no irrefutable proof at that
time I often thought that Beth Anderson might well prove to be a
passionate woman. Sometimes half an hour after a tenderness session
she’d take out a photo-album again and we’d go back upstairs. She’d
reset the alarm clock for the mandatory fourteen minutes and undo
the top three buttons of her blouse. Then we’d shed our shoes and
lie together and resume our caresses, largely intercepted by
cloth.

Once, as she opened the album during the
pause, I said that the jarring break was a little ridiculous,
waiting for it unpleasantly distracting. She was perfectly aware of
the ridiculous aspect of it and said so many times on that bed. She
explained in justification that she considered herself to be a
married woman in spite of everything. Despite temptations she’d
never been fully faithless to her husband, not even after what he’d
done. “Fully faithless” was another of her deliciously quaint
expressions. If there was no external limit set on tenderness she
was afraid she might lose control, she said flatteringly.