Time Travail (43 page)

Hanna explains that she’s come for the big TV
set in her room. She’s brought along her brother to help her. JW
has to get up and meet him. He’s standing before the front door,
smoking, a tiny bald Latin-type with a wispy moustache and a bright
blue suit. He smiles brilliantly and goes back to the beat-up Volvo
for something. She got the Volvo too.

Hanna discovers three bottles of Budweiser in
the refrigerator. Legally they’re probably hers too. Sitting down
she looks around and crinkles up her pug nose and comments on the
dirt and mess in the kitchen. In the brief pause between her second
and third bottles JW feels obliged to allude to the problem of the
check. He reminds her of that day Harvey gave him an $84,000.30
check.

As soon as JW mentions Harvey’s name she
bursts into tears. She brings out: “He was the great love of my
life.” JW briefly tries to console her and returns to the check.
When he explains that he’s lost it she stops blowing her nose and
stares at him. He expects her to howl and shriek with laughter.
Instead, she repeats: “The great love of my life,” and starts
sobbing again.

He gives it up. She and the tiny Latin type
cart the TV set away. JW returns to the sofa but can’t bring back
bubble-gum Gettysburg. So he travels somewhere else in early
childhood.

He spends a great deal of his time on the
sofa traveling wherever he wants to. Sometimes also where he
doesn’t want to. He voyages a lot too down in the cellar,
machine-assisted, but mainly to flooring-cracks, doorknobs and
carpet fringes, in what Harvey called the random mode. Those things
are authentic all right but JW would prefer people, even eyeless
and fuzzy. The only recognizable human being he can visit is on the
first experimental time-cassette: Miss Forster with her
broken-toothed smile.

The amateurish way he operates it, he can’t
impose on the machine his own preference for people over things.
The machine has no preference one way or the other. People were a
tiny fraction of what the living room contained and they came and
went. Things were faithful to that space and stayed put. So the law
of probability gives JW faithful things over a period of forty
years. Not a single image of his mother talking to Mrs Morgenstern
with her worried lips shaping his name. Not even Harvey vertical
and young or decades later horizontal in gradual death.

JW feels lonely down in the cellar even
though he often has the yellowish dog there. He’d settle for
anybody on the screen, the Negro maid, the Fuller Brush man, even
the reform rabbi. But he doesn’t know how to navigate to them. Why
hadn’t Harvey left him instructions? he often thinks bitterly. He
promised to. What was the point of letting him have the machine if
there are no instructions?

One night JW finally tries to view the first
of the two time-sequences from the burned-down house. The label
bears a practically illegible scrawl: “Rebecca, living room, late
May 1943, X 40.” At the end the poor bastard couldn’t even get her
name right. X 40 means that, helmeted, you get a time-ratio of 40
seconds of there-time for every second of here-time.

When JW, unhelmeted of course, inserts it and
presses the red button, his heart chaotic, all that swims up on the
screen from the burned-down living room is a big horizontal
luminous blotch that he guesses is the sofa because there are
vertical luminous blurs on it that are probably seated people. JW
thinks of their home-built Newton reflecting telescope with
Andromeda still a luminous blur at X 200. Andromeda, coming, is
over two million light years away. These luminous blurs, less than
fifty sun-circling years gone, are much further than that.

He constantly wonders why Miss Forster and
the humping dogs on the first experimental time-cassettes are
relatively clear while the image on this perfected one is a
hopeless blur. Is some special sequencing necessary? JW remembers
how Harvey complained about blur that night and sent him over to
his house in search of a red notebook for the solution. But wasn’t
that a trick to get him out of the virtual house?

Or had Harvey’s final voyage – the one that
had monopolized his brain for decades and maybe even motivated the
time-machine in the first place – had that final voyage been just
to this blur before blackness? After all that fuss and bother?

The second time-cassette is labeled,
“Rebecca’s bedroom, late June 1945.” That imprecise date
encompasses her (Rachel, not Rebecca) and also fire. The time-ratio
is a suicidal X 8000. JW laboriously calculates: at that ratio a
minute here was worth about five and a half days there assuming
Harvey wasn’t electrocuted instantly. If he held out an hour it was
almost a year but maybe in fire.

Even safely bareheaded it takes JW months to
dare press the red button. When he does, the screen fills with
total luminous blur. Sometimes JW wonders again if that wasn’t what
Harvey had visited for five and a half days or a year. Sometimes
though he believes that correct sequencing can pull her out of
blur. But what sequencing? All those dials and figures and symbols
and needles and red zones, all those knobs and buttons and
switches.

At some time the idea occurs to him that
maybe the promised navigational instructions lie waiting for him
behind the lead-armored door where the master machine is. The idea
grows and grows like a brain-tumor after he finds the lock
combination scrawled on a scrap of paper beneath the console. Was
it a memory aid for Harvey? Or was JW meant to find it? He doesn’t
dare enter. He’s scared of irradiation, he tells himself, although
that’s not a logical fear if the machine is switched off.

Finally one day (or night), he amplifies his
courage and pushes open the heavy lead door. Banks of mercury tubes
overhead stutter into crude blinding light. To illuminate what? The
narrow windowless vault is practically empty. Just there in the
left-hand corner a repetition of the outside set-up: a miniature TV
screen and a black box the size of a dog-kennel with a miniature
lead-plated door. There’s another, much smaller, combination lock
on it. The same combination? He doesn’t want to try. If you open
that door and crawl inside won’t you find yourself in another,
smaller, glaring vault with another, smaller, door and so on and so
on, a doll’s nest of successive miniaturizations? And you
successively miniaturized with each passage till no bigger than the
doll zombies that jerked eyeless across the screen, yourself one of
them? JW’s jagged or stoned of course.

There’s also the shelf in the glaring vault
and on it two notebooks. He saw only one notebook on the shelf that
time he surprised Harvey coming out of the dark space and warning
him of the consequences of poking around there.

JW pokes around. He opens the top notebook
and suffers consequences even if not the announced ones. There he
is, JW, black on white. Very black. It’s a distorted résumé of his
life. He refuses to recognize himself (referred to as “J”) in those
distortions any more than long ago in that jubilant trick-mirror of
the 42nd St Laugh Movie, pinheaded and macrophallic at seventeen.
Harvey got lots of the bare brute facts right, the dates and names
accurate too. But all those details and interpretations, pages and
pages of them, are basically lousy gossip, lies, nearly all of them
lies. So many of them lies. It’s like reading a malevolent obituary
on yourself. The biography’s clearly based on loose malevolent
talk. Who were his informants? He thinks of the names on the sheet
of paper in the JW file in the filing cabinet in the tiny payment
room. Not a single kind or forgiving word?

The last twenty or so pages in the notebook
confirm that the distortions of his image, most of them anyhow,
come from the gross aberrations in the reflecting surface. JW sees
himself cast in the role of potentate over girl after girl. Harvey
remembered some of their names from nearly half a century back, a
prodigious feat of memory, better even than JW with his innocent
stamps. It’s a defective playback of the stories of times with
those girls that Harvey had paid to hear, but stripped of the
original elegance and tenderness, details of ugly exploits in the
crudest of language that JW could never have used.

In the sweat and heat of action sometimes the
potentate becomes “I” instead of “J”. Or is that a confusion of the
two similarly shaped letters?

Those girls are minor partners, warming-up
exercises for the major partnership in school toilets, empty
classrooms, library stacks, the bedroom. The German lesson Harvey
had commanded her to give JW in her bedroom turns out to have been
another kind of lesson. “How did it go?” he’d asked JW. “How was
he?” he’d asked her. Their truthful answer hadn’t satisfied him. Is
that the way he saw her, doing things like that, allowing things
like that to be done to her?

There are three pages on it. JW breaks off at
the first symptoms of guilty response to it.

There are the movies too, the off-screen
scenarios of the three movies they’d gone to together on his order.
How could Harvey have convinced himself that he knew what (as they
sat supposedly side by side in darkness with the gilt stars in the
blue dome overhead) JW’s hand had been doing? JW almost protests
aloud in the glaring empty vault: there’d been an old man between
them the first time, a whole row of occupied seats the second time,
and the third time, yes, his hand, but on her dry inert hand for a
few seconds.

At the top of the third page from the end
he reads: “
On
June 28, 1945 he came to the house when everybody was away. Momma
shouldn’t have asked him to.
” What follows is a monotonous replay of the German lesson
in that room except for bloodshed at the end and the last sentence:
“
Then he set
fire to the house
.”

JW closes that notebook and after a while opens the
other. It’s what he’s been looking for. He leaves the vault and the
cellar with the two notebooks. He takes the crazy one into the
bathroom and methodically starts ripping out the pages, crumpling
them up and flushing them away, three at a time. When the final
white balls go whirling down he feels weepy but it’s not as bad as
he thought it would be. He goes upstairs to bed.

The next day he sits down at the kitchen
table with paper and pencil and plunges into the promised
navigational simplifications of the second notebook. His mind is
inhabitually clear of agents of amplification. The notebook’s full
of simplifications all right, like the repeated painstaking
identification of the red button: “third from left, top row”
although that button is the only one that’s red. Things are
underlined heavily for JW’s benefit, sometimes in red ink with
marginal posthumous wisecracks like: “I think a six-year-old could
grasp this simple operation. So assuming you have one to consult,
let’s go on to the next step.”

There are steps after steps after steps,
criss-crossing flights of steps leading to blank impenetrable walls
or breaking off on void. In this void JW often hears, echoing,
Harvey’s judgment: “You haven’t got the mathematical basis.”

For weeks he ponders and sweats over the
simplified navigational formulas. It’s like being back in Mr
Weintraub’s class except he can’t cheat by looking at Harvey
Morgenstern’s paper because this is Harvey Morgenstern’s paper
already.

He goes to the public library and takes out
all the books on math he can find. He understands nothing and goes
to a bookshop specializing in elementary and high school textbooks.
He practically buys the bookseller out. No false pride. Nothing’s
too simple for him. He wants to make sure his foundations are
sound. So the first books JW tackles are for seven-year-olds. He
blitzes through them. Harvey spoke of JW’s inferiority to
six-year-olds in the field. It’s a minor triumph. It’s also a
satisfaction to think that he could have easily graduated primary
school with an A in arithmetic. B+ for sure.

But high school algebra proves to be the
familiar blank impenetrable wall of forty years before. He can read
three foreign languages and in the days when he still had music in
him could whistle the
lento assai
of the Beethoven opus 131 from beginning to end but he’s a
slobbering idiot before those symbols. He feels the old bitter
frustration rising in him.

It isn’t a total waste of time though. If JW
still can’t navigate he understands enough to improve the quality
of the images. The flooring-cracks and doorknobs in the second
Morgenstern living room are much clearer now. The blurs of the
living room of the first Morgenstern house on the time-cassette
have condensed unmistakably into three people sitting on a sofa.
You can’t tell who they are, not even whether man or woman, but
it’s progress.

On the image of the second cassette, labeled
as her bedroom in late June 1945, he thinks he can make out a
horizontal luminous blur on the right-hand side of the screen. On
the left-hand side a vertical luminous blob. It floats toward the
horizontal blob and after a while merges with it. JW plays the
sequence hundreds of times but extracts no more than that. He
begins wondering if reasonably sharp focus isn’t obtainable only
through time-travel with the helmet. But he doesn’t dare entrust
his head to that murderous device.

He decides to experiment. The idea is to set
the knobs at a very low time-ratio and quickly touch the springed
metal forehead clamps. When he starts adjusting those knobs he
discovers that they turn freely without the resistance of engaged
elements inside. The knobs apparently communicate with nothing.
They’re like the knobs on a toy imitation of some complex adult
apparatus.

He plugs the helmet in and touches the
forehead clamps like something white hot. All he gets is the
faintest of tingles. The tingle remains a tingle even at X 200,
even at X 9000. But index fingers are one thing, temples and
forehead another.