Time Travail (40 page)

Harvey orders Hanna to help him up the stairs
to the salary-room. She bears him in her arms there. He has her
open the wall-safe. All they have in cash is $5000. He offers JW
$3000 as a bonus for accepting a check and an IOU. That’s JW’s one
compromise. Reluctantly he accepts the check and the IOU along with
the $3000 in cash.

He doesn’t have much time to wait around
either.

At 9:00 pm Hanna stomps into Beth Anderson’s
living room practically bearing Harvey who is disguised and reeking
of mothballs and clutching the folded blueprint, the navigational
compass and the yellow yardstick. She’s also bearing the tinkered
permanent-wave helmet and a supermarket plastic bag with five
bottles of that terrible California white wine that jimmied doors
of faulty perception. Does he intend drinking five bottles for
super amplification? Is it going to be a party? A wake?

Harvey has come dressed as for a fancy-dress
party or a wake, as though you could really wake them. All JW had
insisted on was clean-soled shoes and clean pants and shirt as
protection for Beth’s living room. He comes disguised as a
caricature of his earlier self in the 1940’s, shrunken away from
those obsolete padded shoulders and flopping elephant cuffs that
had lain embalmed forty years in an obscure closet. He even has a
tie, broad and short like a gaudy Roman sword. Crowning
anachronism: he’s abandoned the wig for a fedora. Who wears fedoras
in this age?

JW can’t help saying: “Dressed to kill.” It
almost comes out: “Dressed to resurrect.” Transitive or
intransitive use? For a second JW sees him tiny and shrunken in
those expendable clothes, laid out in a first-generation
time-sensor coffin. He’d told him to come over reasonably clean,
not tricked out for a corny posthumous social visit. All that’s
lacking is a bouquet. Lilies, necessarily. Flowers make JW think of
Beth.

Harvey insists on undoing the Santa Claus
wrappings of the machines himself. Starting in, he looks like a
wizened child on Christmas day. Only the tinsel garlanded tree is
missing. He manages to disengage one sensor. The Scotch tape on the
second proves too much for him. Hanna and JW finish the job.

He looks on, stretched out on the sofa now.
JW has protected it with more newspapers. He makes him remove those
corny two-toned shoes as well. Harvey gives them faint orders.
Hanna does the final shifting. The correct positioning of the
sensors isn’t where they’d placed them, one in each corner as in
the dead room. Here the real and the virtual living rooms don’t
coincide.

Harvey directs Hanna to place two of the
sensors in the middle of the room. The third winds up in the closet
where Beth keeps her photo-albums. The fourth goes in the kitchen,
in the place of the refrigerator which JW lets Hanna push out of
the way unaided. He’s strained his heart enough for one day. He
just slips more newspapers under the sensors.

After she lugs the Formica breakfast table
into the living room JW orders her back to her stool. When her
muscles aren’t needed JW makes her sit out of harm’s way on a
kitchen stool in a corner of the living room far from delicate
things. He’s put additional sheets of newspapers under the stool
too because of her feet. She wanted to sit like a queen in Beth’s
prized rococo armchair. JW vetoed that idea instantly. The
worm-riddled gilt-and-velvet heirloom wouldn’t have borne up a
second under her two hundred odd pounds.

JW makes a rustle of dead leaves on the
yellowing newspapers underfoot as he moves about assembling the
equipment. He places the monitor on the Formica table, also the
control panel, the video and the time storage units, the cassettes.
Then cables all the components into an operating whole. Harvey
makes him change the lighting. Sullen red bulbs replace source
after source of gentle sane light. Finally the living room is
filled with red gloom, like what Beth’s electric fireplace
manufactured, except static.

As soon as he smells the acrid illegal reek
JW runs rustling into the kitchen for a saucer, places it on the
floor alongside the sofa and warns Harvey against ashes and embers.
He’ll air out the living room after it’s all over and they’re gone.
Harvey wants wine. JW gives him a glass and warns him against
spilling it.

Now Harvey asks for another pill. Hanna
refuses. He’s already exceeded the prescribed dosage. JW learns
it’s morphine. He didn’t know you could administer morphine orally.
Hanna has to give it to him, the vial as well. He whispers
something in her ear. She nods.

They help Harvey to the table. JW holds the
glass of wine for him and watches the joint trembling between his
fingers. Harvey sits down and stares dissatisfied at the control
panel. Something’s wrong or missing. He tells them to get the
relay. It weighs a ton.

JW thinks of his heart and tries to put up an
argument. What does he need the relay for when the sensors are
cabled to the machine in his cellar? Harvey repeats his order.

As they lug the relay unit up the cellar
stairs the machine behind the lead-plated wall starts up. The
bone-trembling bass rises to a shriek. At the sudden noise (or at
the thought that the sensors are now at work in the other house)
JW’s heart acts up. The relay nearly slips out of his sweating
grasp. It’s too great a strain on his heart. He insists on halts
every five yards. They’ve reached Beth’s neat white gate when Hanna
lets her end down on the sidewalk without warning.

“Forgot something,” she says and
disappears.

He squats alongside the relay, puffing badly.
That close to the street lamp, isn’t he visible from the
neighboring houses? But most of the houses are dark except for here
and there a square of bluish shifting light from late TV.

When Hanna comes back they lug the relay into
Beth’s living room. The two visible sensors are tracking and
zooming invisible presences.

JW stretches out on the sofa. A checkup
tomorrow. Monitoring his heart, he stares dully at Harvey at the
table. He’s kept his fedora on. He looks like the mummy of an old
Jew about to perpetrate electronic abomination. Golem. Ignoring the
two of them and the relay, he manipulates the switches and buttons
of the control panel. Hanna announces a bursting bladder and goes
to the bathroom.

Harvey’s finger is on the red button now. He
turns his head toward JW and explains in whispered fragments that
navigation for the replay of tonight’s tapes will be automatic,
like the earlier experimental ones with that teacher and the dogs.
JW will have no trouble launching the voyage if he, Harvey, decides
to let him voyage to what he’s going to bring back this night from
the old house (the third, virtual, house).

JW whispers back that he has no intention of
ever voyaging again. Not his way. He’d be gone in a few days
anyhow.

Harvey presses the button with effort and
leans forward toward the screen. His back monopolizes it. Time goes
by. JW looks at his watch. Ten to midnight. More time goes by. Then
Harvey says:

“Me. June 1940. Bad focus though.”

A while later he says:

“You. April 1942. Dressed to kill. But fuzzy
too. What’s the matter?”

A while later:

“Hello, Momma. December 1944. Same thing.
Fuzzy. Why?”

A long while later he whispers:

“Have her. Almost sure. May 1943. Still not
clear. Sure now. She’s wearing. That. Blue blouse. Remember?”

At that detail JW tells himself it’s
invention. Even for Harvey the unvisited images on the screen have
always been monochromatic. Unless his memory, suddenly jogged by
her image, is supplying the blue.

JW gets up and approaches the monitor. Harvey
switches it off.

“Not clear enough. Can’t voyage. In that. The
red. Notebook. I know. What’s wrong. But can’t remember. The
sequencing.”

The red notebook, he repeats. The correct
sequencing is in the red notebook. But where is the red notebook?
Can’t remember. Not in the cellar. In the living room? In one of
the closets? Maybe in the attic? JW should go over and look in
those places. Even if it takes an hour or two. It’s vital.

JW pours himself a drink and goes back to the
other house. He takes the bottle with him.

He tries the living room first. It looks
strangely empty now without the sensors. Even gone, though, they
reveal things beneath surface. They’ve left four squares of
flooring in the dust. The four heaps of desiccated roaches are
visible too.

He stands there and can’t get beneath that dusty
surface, can’t even imagine the flowered and striped armchairs and
their occupants. JW thoroughly explores what’s available for
exploration in the room but doesn’t come up with the red notebook
that supposedly will materialize her out of haze.

He doesn’t find it in any of the closets
either. Spends a foolish sweating hour pulling and poking, coughing
from the dust he raises in those confined spaces.

Is it then that he takes off his blue denim
jacket?

Finally he goes up to the attic. He’s never
been there before. Has Harvey? Under the naked bulb dangling from a
rough-hewn beam and cauled with spider webs, the floor is thick
with dust. The dust is undisturbed by footprints or has slowly
gotten the best of old ones. He steps inside anyhow. There’s
movement ahead.

In a big oval mirror framed by gilt wooden
rosebuds he sees himself advancing tarnished and gravely distorted
toward himself. Next to the mirror are two ripped armchairs, one
faintly striped, the other faintly flowered.

He goes down to the cellar even though Harvey
said the red notebook wasn’t there. His memory’s bad.

The door is locked. They left it open two
hours before when they transported the relay up the stairs. He
recalls now that Hanna went back to the house, probably for that.
Maybe the red notebook is lying on the cot, despite what he said.
His memory’s very bad. He can’t have remembered the color of a
blouse forty years before.

JW goes to the back of the house, past the
dark tree with the ladder and kneels before the rectangular opening
where they removed the ventilation grill for the passage of the
cables. They glint black in the moonlight. He’s kneeling as he did
months before when he saw Harvey voyaging white-eyed. But now it’s
pitch-dark inside. He’ll have to get the cellar key from her.

He starts for the other house when he hears a
sound from the mutilated elm. The ladder’s trembling. It’s as if
someone light and invisible were climbing up. A faint slither comes
from the tall dead grass a few feet away. The grass is swaying in
forward progress. A snake? In that miniature suburban jungle? The
ladder goes on trembling.

When empty beer bottles start clinking he
understands everything, sees Hanna at the top of the stairs in
Beth’s house digging her heels in and powering the four cables up
the staircase, soon into the room at the end of the corridor. He
gets confirmation when he runs back to the cellar opening. All four
cables are in movement, like snakes. They jostle the ladder in
their progress toward the honored guestroom.

In fear and outrage, JW places his
Glenfiddich
on the ground. Maybe it’s then
that he struggles out of his blue denim jacket. He pounces on the
nearest slithering cable, digs his heels in and yanks with all his
might. Murderously pictures Hanna yanked forward, toppling over,
tumble and bang, bang, bang, step-edge after step-edge chastising
her teeth and vertebras.

But now a terrible pain clamps his chest, my
heart, O my heart, and at the same time the cable wound about his
forearm yanks forward murderously, pitching him face forward into
the grass and violent painless impact against empty beer bottles,
painless because of the greater pain in his chest. He lies there
motionless except for his heart. The cables, unimpeded, slither
forward again.

JW lies there a long time.

He gets up slowly and mops the blood from
the wound on his temple. He listens inwardly. The cables are lying
still and silent in the grass now. They’ve reached destination. He
picks up his
Glenfiddich
and
drinks from the bottle deeply as he’s doing now from
Lord’s
Vineyards
down in the
cellar much later.

Of course Beth’s front door is locked. When he
unlocks it and pushes, something resists. A chair jammed under the
knob as he himself had done the night before, he guesses. (They’d
both of them, Harvey and JW, forgotten Beth’s new bolt.)

He goes slowly to the back of the house and
looks up at the open window of the honored guestroom. The room is
lit dull red. The theatre of operations has shifted. He imagines
Harvey at last seated there commanding the sensors, helmeted like a
triumphant general.

Clobbered by fatigue, JW has to lean against
the house he was supposed to keep. He has a sudden desire to
escape, to get into his car and drive the rest of the night
southward into dawn. After a while he returns to the front of the
house. Why hadn’t he thought of the window immediately? Pathetic.
They’d locked and barricaded the door but they couldn’t do that to
the window, not with the passage of the four cables. He goes to it,
reaches over the cables and pulls the drape aside.

Hanna bulks there with a poker. “You got the
notebook? You can’t come in less you got the red notebook.” She
grins malevolently.

Crazy and pathetic, thinks JW, stepping back
from her. Poker and lock and chair or whatever, don’t they realize
he can sabotage those cables at any point from one house to the
other, knife, spade, saw? He goes back to the other house, not for
any of those definitive instruments, but for the ladder leaning
against the dark tree. Crazy and pathetic. He grapples with the
ladder, tears it away from the embrace of dead bindweed. Bent
double with it balanced on his backbone like a seesaw, he bears it
away and sets it up beneath that open red window.