Time Travail (34 page)

After a while I revisited the shack in the
old days. There was the Ruhmkorff Coil, the deadly Russian snake
with spark-fangs and the Static Electricity Machine, the miniature
lightning-bolt between the brass balls, it could kill you. I
recaptured the pine-shelves with the whorled knots in them and the
jars and bottles. The dangerous ones had skull-and-cross-bones on
their labels. Mrs Morgenstern had insisted on that. There was
bichloride of mercury, I didn’t remember the formula for it. There
was arsenic disulfide, potassium cyanide, I didn’t remember the
formulas for them either. There in a blue cork-stoppered jar was
lead acetate. The skull grinned above the name. I still remembered
the formula: Pb (C
₂
H
₃
O
₂
)
₂
.

A few days later I told Harvey I wanted to
visit my mother. No alcohol, though, no drugs.

He tried to initiate me to the navigating
technique. It was elementary, he said. This gauge so, that one so,
the switch, then a simple conversion formula, and depending where
the red needle was you added this, the square-root of that, made
the final adjustments in consequence, pressed the red button and
there you were. Or were supposed to be.

He had to do it for me. He said that maybe
he’d simplify the already simple arithmetic part one day and put it
down in writing for me.

He showed me the four knobs on the helmet.
They were graduated from one to nine. Theoretically you could
choose a 1: 9999 time-ratio. But for the moment anything over
1: 200 risked being dangerous. I remembered that. One night
his eyes suddenly bulged and he yelled mutely. It was like me long
ago with the anti-Polack device. His hands clawed at the helmet. I
grabbed a dry rag and yanked it off. There was a red welt on his
forehead where the rim of the helmet had sat. He had to lie down.
It was no short-circuit, he said. The greater the time-ratio the
more you felt it. It was something that could be eliminated in
time.

He chose “a nice safe 1: 12” for me. I
made sure it was that. I didn’t want to be a guinea pig.

So on April 29 at 11:15 pm I raised the heavy
helmet and crowned myself. It was heavy and the springed metal
clamps were unpleasantly cold on my forehead. Blur and flicker.
Finally something like her swam up on the screen. I pressed the red
button.

Did I really voyage? Yearning predisposes you
to self-deception. I had the example of Harvey. It was true that
after a while the housing-unit disappeared and I lost consciousness
of the screen as though I’d gone through and behind it and into
that old living room. But that might have been because my face drew
closer and closer to the image of my mother and everything else
became peripheral.

No denying that my mother was there on (or
behind) the screen and Mrs Morgenstern too, in the positions he’d
said. But the experience didn’t correspond at all to his
description. There wasn’t any three-dimensional effect. It wasn’t
like a stereoscope at all. There wasn’t even color. The image was
sepia and flat. It flickered and had stains like a tintype from the
middle of the nineteenth century. It was the visual equivalent of
those old static-riddled voices we’d heard down in the cellar that
night. I could barely make out my eyeless mother’s lips. They were
probably moving, forming words but were those words what Harvey
said they were?

Stupidly I tried to reassure her, tell her
she shouldn’t worry about me. Of course it didn’t work. Couldn’t
possibly have worked. I could see her, imperfectly, but she
couldn’t see me, assuming I’d joined her. Anyhow, there was no
sound. That much was true too. The silence was absolute as in the
deepest of vaults. Or was it the silence of the cellar?

Then you had to endure random spatial
selection. Forced contemplation of a blank wall or a ceiling
molding didn’t procure joy as he said it did. It procured boredom
and depression. When the women came back, stained, fuzzy and
flickering, it was even worse.

Finally, time there wasn’t what he’d said it
was. That was the greatest of his swindles. Awakening out of it I
was at first thankful it hadn’t lasted weeks as supposedly it had
with him. He’d gotten that time-ratio business all wrong. Or else
it operated differently for me. I had the feeling I’d spent no more
than a quarter of an hour in that earlier living room. But when
outward focus came I saw that it was 2:17 am.

I’d spent over three hours of now-time to get
a quarter of an hour back there, assuming I’d been back there. That
gave a ratio of 1: 12 all right, but the wrong way. It wasn’t
all that different from my own private time-trips flat on my
back.

When I emerged from whatever it had been –
voyage back there or self-hypnosis – I blessed the dank cellar. I
wrenched off the helmet from my burning forehead and stammered it
all out to Harvey. He was lying blurred on his cot gnawing at a
slice of salami. His cot was the unavoidable way-station for a
little food and sleep between trips. He took a long time
answering.

Finally he said I hadn’t been in a state of
maximum receptivity. He said it in his new monocordal far-away
voice which resulted either from the trips or, more likely, from
the preparations for the trips. The cellar reeked of joints. In a
few minutes it would be his turn.

The brain had to be sleep-starved he said. He
himself conceded no more than two hours to the waste of sleep and
unselected dream images. Whereas I’d been squandering most of my
time on my bed, day and night, for the past week. He also blamed
salt and caffeine. I should experiment as he’d done. Never again, I
said. As if he hadn’t heard me he went on. He reminded me that
whiskey had had distinctly negative effects on him. I should try
the sweet California white wine, Lord’s Vineyards. Never again, I
repeated much louder. I should try a joint, more than one joint,
although he was running low on them, Hanna would have to do
something about that.

I rubbed my forehead where it burned and told
him I didn’t want any drugs, no drugs for me, ever. Also I didn’t
want to return to that sequence ever again. He should activate
something else, radically different. Couldn’t he perfect the
car-relay and drive out to the picnic-area in Bear Mountain Park
and place me in the time of early childhood with my parents and
Aunt Ruth, grilling steaks in the fall, those yellow and red trees?
Too far away in time and distance, said Harvey after a while. No,
it had to be in the living room. Another image, then, I said.
People not close to me. The visit of the Fuller Brush man or even
the reform rabbi, for example, I said although I knew I’d never
undergo supposed time-travel for strangers. He processed the
question and after a while said, hardly audible, that it had to be
the same scene for the sake of control. He himself went visiting
that scene all the time. The last visit, that afternoon, number
nineteen, had lasted a year, he said.

A year for his brain back there he meant.
Looking at him you could almost believe that the rest of him had
participated in the voyage too, had undergone the passage of that
subjective time. For months his face had been wrapping tighter and
tighter about his skull. Now it seemed to be letting go, drooping
down and away from the bones. It resulted in an overlap of faces,
both posthumous. All that time he thought he was winning back there
seemed to be borrowed from time here.

Of course there was a rational explanation.
It was the dying process, going on in all of us, but in his case
accelerated by what he had and by his refusal to have it treated.
Also all the things he was taking to trick his brain into believing
in the expansion of time and the recapture of a loved-one in
three-dimensional color.

After, I looked in the bathroom mirror. There
was a faint red mark on my forehead where the helmet had clamped
me. It faded in a few hours but the burning sensation went on for
days.

Over and over Hanna yelled at him to resume
the hospital treatment, to stop going down there in the cellar. He
probably didn’t even hear her. During his trips she’d stand for
hours in front of the new door he’d had installed to replace the
one she’d splintered. It was much stouter and secured by a
multitude of locks and bolts. It would be her shoulder-bones that
would splinter now if she tried to ram it open again. I know he’s
dead, she’d wail over and over when I went past. There was no way
to check. He’d shoved a sheet of plywood against the ventilator
we’d looked through that night under the elm.

We lost all contact with the world outside,
the contemporary one. It didn’t even intrude in the form of TV
images and voices. Hanna didn’t sit in front of that screen
anymore. She seemed to be spending all her time in front of the
locked and bolted cellar door or else at the kitchen-table with
beer. Harvey was traveling under the permanent-wave helmet. (He
didn’t even go outside to watch me burning things in the garden
although I did see him at a window inspecting the job.)

I did no traveling of any sort. Cured or in
the inactive phase of time-sickness, I wandered about the house
aimlessly in all the rooms including the dead room. From the window
I could see that the letterbox was beginning to overflow. It could
only have been junk mail. Who else would bother writing to the
three people in that house? Nobody answered the phone when it rang
as it did six or seven times. It could only have been wrong
numbers.

One evening all the lights in the house went
out, room by room. The sensors were disarmed. The fuses were gone.
The spares too. We groped about in the gloom with scary faces above
our candle-flame like apparitions, looking for fuses, she
pretending to. Jerry did it, she said. She’d seen me doing it.
Finally Harvey found the fuses where she’d hidden them. He knew how
her mind operated. He warned her never to do that again.

One day she barred the passage to the cellar.
Bulked in front of the door, great bare arms folded. Get out of my
way, he croaked over and over. Finally he told her if she didn’t
get out of the way she’d be out on her ass without a cent to her
name, she had ten seconds to move away from the door or move out of
the house.

She cursed him, wailed, let him have the door
and returned to the kitchen. Later, when I went in to grab a bite
she was still wailing. There must have been a dozen empty
beer-bottles on the Formica table.

Bust it, she said to me. Bust it. She meant
the machine. It was killing him. He was losing weight. Every day
she waylaid him and swept him up struggling in her arms. In a
single day he’d lost two pounds. She could tell, to the ounce, she
said. Bust it.

I couldn’t do that, I said, squashing a
passing roach. It wasn’t my property.

She urged me to put sugar in it. Nobody would
know. She even lurched over to the cupboard and got a bowl of sugar
which she plunked down on the table in front of me. She’d heard
that if you put sugar in the gas-tank of a car it would ruin the
engine and nobody could tell. She thought the recipe applied to any
machine.

“I’d do it myself, bust the goddam thing. For
him, the sonofabitch. But if I did where’d I go? You heard him. I
got nowhere to go. I’d starve on my ass in the street.”

“You won’t starve. You’ll have plenty of
money. You’ll be able to go anywhere.”

It was just to say something to console her.
Instead of being consoled she started yelling at me.

“I don’t wanna have plenty of money. I don’t
wanna be rich. Where’d I go without Harvey?”

She mumbled disjointed things about their
life together. I didn’t pay attention except when she said that
during all that time he’d never once been in her, couldn’t, never
had been able to with any woman.

One day I was poking about for a tool in a
dark corner of the cellar when I saw Hanna tip-toeing down the
stairs with a sledgehammer. I’d forgotten to lock the door. Harvey
was sleeping on the cot between trips. He was hardly with us now.
What followed was another of those decisive moments in your life,
as you realize only later, where you are defined not only to others
but also to yourself through spontaneous action. I found myself
spontaneously grappling with her, trying to pull down and away the
massive hammerhead poised above the console.

Harvey tottered over with a length of
two-by-four and slammed her over the head with it all his might. If
he’d had the might of his intention he’d have brained her. I caught
the sledgehammer just in time over the console as she jolted down
to her knees, blood streaming down her face. Then I grabbed his
wrists as he aimed another blow at her head, wrenched the wood free
and flung it into a corner.

I helped her to her feet and guided her to
the cot. The blood blinded her. Harvey ordered her out of the house
while I mopped up the blood on her face with a handkerchief.

I won’t go, I won’t go, she kept on moaning
and she didn’t. Harvey tried to scream at me for not having locked
the door. If he’d had any strength left he’d have tried to whack me
over the head too.

So she stayed. She went around for days with
her hair clotted up with black blood. It gave off a battlefield
stench and attracted bluebottle flies. When I urged her to wash her
hair and disinfect the wound and apply a bandage she refused and
said she wanted to shame me, wanted me to see what I’d done to her.
She claimed I’d been the one who’d slammed her over the head.
Harvey would never have done that.

Maybe not but she didn’t talk to him any more
for a long time. He noticed it only when he had to repeat for the
fifth time his order for her to go to the hospital and get more
marijuana for him.