Time Travail (6 page)

You can’t keep it up indefinitely. Can you? I
had my future first ex-wife’s smiling face with me, the only one in
the wallet now, nothing hidden in the secret compartment
beneath.

What did the neighbors and the municipal
authorities say about that dangerous lot? Couldn’t small children
fall into that cellar-hole? It must have bothered me because that
night I dreamed I fell into it myself.

I went on falling and falling until I woke up
out of it.

I couldn’t ask Mr Morgenstern about it, of
course. Anyhow I didn’t see him, meet him, I mean, because I did
see him out of his living room window, stooped and whitened,
getting into his car and driving away. That was half an hour after
Mrs Morgenstern said it would be such a surprise for Morris and
went up to get him for me but came down only with Harvey. She said
her husband was napping.

Harvey’s hair was thinning. Deep lines ran
from the corners of his huge beak to the corners of a prematurely
embittered mouth. He didn’t seem all that pleased to see me either.
He even shook hands with me formally with an informal, “How are
you, there,” as though he didn’t recall my name. Then glanced at
his watch and said, “Sorry. I’ll be right back.”

He was gone for an hour.

“It’s his cellar-thing,” his mother said
three or four times apologetically. She entertained me, in the
hostess sense of the term, during that hour. She showed me articles
of his, dozens of them, published in impressively obscure
scientific reviews. They crawled with cabalistic signs and
formulas. Not even the titles were comprehensible.

She had only one theme but endless variations
and sub-variations on it: Harvey’s scholastic triumphs, Harvey’s
professional accomplishments, Harvey’s health. His health worried
her. She went into the symptoms. Harvey hadn’t been the same since
the fire. He’d had something like a nervous breakdown for a year.
More than a year, actually.

The loss of his lab must have been a real
blow, I thought.

When he came back we talked on and off with
the TV on fairly low and he glanced at his watch at regular
intervals and sometimes at the TV. Very early in our relationship
we’d gotten into the habit of the wisecrack as a vehicle of
communication. That was gone now as though we’d forgotten or
couldn’t summon up the necessary energy.

Maybe I wasn’t all that warm and spontaneous
myself. For the first few weeks I’d convinced myself that what had
happened was his fault, storing all those inflammable and explosive
chemicals in the cellar, even when an eye-witness described the
final pyrotechnics: red (that would be strontium salts), brilliant
white (magnesium), green (copper-sulfate), I forget what for deep
blue. That was at 2:00 am, after most of the house had gone, when
the flames got to his cellar, proof, supposedly, that it hadn’t
started there. But couldn’t it have started in one part of the
cellar, risen quickly, devoured the house and then returned to the
cellar and celebrated with the remaining chemicals?

Even if not so I blamed him for having
survived. It was only a month later that I learned the fire had
started in the kitchen where they’d found what it had rejected of
her.

Rachel couldn’t have foreseen fire after gas,
although the association on a vaster scale had been revealed to the
world that same year. It wasn’t the fault of either of us, omission
or commission. A few symbolic representatives of the vast guilty
party were soon to be hanged in Europe.

We didn’t care to talk about the old days so
we talked about the present. Objectively this was all to his
advantage, except for women. Of course he couldn’t compete with me
there. I showed him the photo of June in my wallet but he didn’t
seem interested. Otherwise his present was brilliant, according to
his mother, his future radiant. I suspected he knew, via his
mother, that I hadn’t finished my Ph.D. thesis yet and knew where I
was teaching.

I’ll admit he didn’t push his advantage. That
wasn’t his style. He wasn’t basically interested enough in others
to get satisfaction out of scoring on status. He possessed it so
completely that it didn’t matter to him. I was so far from it that
it gnawed day and night. So I blew my job into something big,
feeling self-distaste as I did it. Some of my pupils were juvenile
movie-actresses practically everybody had heard of. (I hardly ever
saw them in class. They automatically passed with, at worst, a B.)
I mentioned their names in passing in order to reflect a bit of
their glory.

He didn’t react. He probably had never heard
of them. He was the one who sounded the note of dissatisfaction.
About his ultra-secret government job. It was a waste of time. He
had no time for his really important work.

Of course his saying that widened the gap
between us. If he took the heights of his professional activity for
lowlands it deepened the hole I was in that much more.

He looked at his watch again. He hesitated as
if weighing the risk. Finally the temptation was too great. Maybe
he remembered the shack days.

“Let me show you something.”

He led me to the cellar-door and told me to
stay there a minute. He went down in the gloom. I heard a whirring
sound that started deep and rose and stabilized a couple of octaves
higher. Then it pierced up beyond 20,000 Hertz. You couldn’t hear
it any more but you knew it was there because of a pressure
somewhere in your skull.

He told me to come down. I shouldn’t turn the
lights on.

His lab was banished to a corner, isolated
from the rest of the cellar by two cinder-block walls. The door was
lined with asbestos. A sprinkler system ran all over the ceiling.
It was the condition his mother had imposed for a lab in the cellar
of the new house. He was working on convincing her to let him have
the whole cellar, he said. He was really cramped as I could see.
The lab was full of black cables crisscrossing overhead like a
giant spider-web. A long low box like a coffin occupied a whole
wall. It trembled. The supersonic waves were coming from it. On the
walls there was a scattering of weak red bulbs. Everything was
bathed in red. I must have looked as bloodily sinister as he
did.

The mouse was in a glass box with what looked
like a big camera lens at one end and a bank of dark-blue tubes at
the other. Above the glass box was what looked like a miniature TV
screen, a cluster of dials and two big clocks each with a
chronometer needle whirling.

Harvey sat down behind a console. It had once
been a school-desk. You could make out faint graffiti from that
earlier time: names and an ass-like heart pierced by an ambiguous
arrow. He placed his finger on a red button. He stared at me
solemnly and pronounced a movie cliché maybe because he never went
to the movies.

“I want you to promise something first. You
won’t talk about this to anybody.”

I promised the way they did in the movies. He
pressed the button.

The super-sonic waves swooped down to
sub-sonic with a deep groan from the coffin. All the red bulbs in
the cubicle were sucked dim and then dead. For a second we sat in
darkness. The mouse came back blue in the sudden intense light of
the tubes. The mouse quivered and died in color in the glass box
and in black and white on the TV screen. The red bulbs recovered.
Harvey looked quietly triumphant. “Well?”

I thought I understood now why he’d sworn me
to secrecy. That Government project. He was working on a death-ray.
I wasn’t really impressed. The blue bulbs were a few inches from
the mouse. What was the point of sticking an enemy soldier in a
glass case and bombarding him with rays at such close range if he
was a prisoner to begin with? And didn’t that violate the Geneva
Convention? Anyhow I was something of a pacifist.

“Chlorine worked faster the last time,” I
said.

“You mean you didn’t notice the
time-differential?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. He
got a fresh mouse and placed it in the glass box.

“Keep your eyes open on the mouse and the
screen this time. I’m running low on mice.”

Cross-eyed, I noticed this time.

There was maybe a fraction of a second
between the death of the blue mouse in the glass box and the death
of the black-and white mouse on the TV screen. Apparently I was
supposed to be impressed. I didn’t get the point.

The point was that the black-and-white image
wasn’t a slightly deferred replay of the blue mouse’s death. It was
what had happened one-third of a second before. He’d gone that far
back in time but no further. It was one aspect of what he called
the “retrotemporal stricture.” He was working on it. Had been
working on it for years. The other aspect was the “retrotemporal
duration stricture.” He switched the machine on again to illustrate
it.

I saw the dying black and white mouse again
but fainter and distorted. Five minutes more and there would be
nothing, he said. There were other strictures, the spatial
stricture, for example.

He went on and on. I didn’t get it. I still
had that idea of a deferred image. He stared at me, shook his head
and dropped the subject.

Another thing I didn’t understand. Why did it
have to be mice? Why did the mice have to die? I didn’t ask him. I
felt sorry for those mice and guilty about the mice I’d gassed long
ago in the shack.

I left the day after. Mrs Morgenstern was the
only one who said goodbye to me. Harvey was in the middle of
something important down in the cellar and couldn’t be disturbed.
He hadn’t even had lunch with us, it was that important. His father
either. I did meet his father, terribly aged, coming out of the
bathroom where I wanted to go before leaving. I started saying
goodbye to him without having had a chance to say hello after so
long.

He interrupted me and asked, nine years
after, why I hadn’t showed up that evening at the house as I’d
promised I would. It wasn’t really a question because before I
could come up with an answer he went into his bedroom and closed
the door.

Harvey’s mother drove me to the station. She
gave me a box with the rest of the strawberry shortcake. She wept a
little. She said I should return soon, she would bake another
strawberry shortcake for me. I promised I would return soon. I
returned thirty-odd years later. It didn’t look as if I would be
getting strawberry shortcake now.

Decades older, I went down the stairs again
into the same reddish gloom. The red bulbs were everywhere now.
Harvey’s lab occupied the whole cellar. He must have finally
succeeded in convincing his mother. Or maybe he’d had to wait until
she was dead to do it. He’d always been a dutiful son.

Two-thirds of the space was a huge disorderly
workshop. The other third was walled off. The wall was armored with
thick gray sheets of metal, lead probably. There was a padlocked
door, also plated. The machine or whatever must have been behind
that door. The giant spider had spun even more crisscrossing black
cables overhead. There was a console full of dials. Above the
console was a TV screen, much bigger than the old one.

But the first thing you noticed was the
junk-heap in the middle of the cellar. It touched the ceiling.
Seeing those coils of baling-wire, copper and iron and lead pipes,
boxes of rusty nails, screws and bolts, old electric motors, etc. I
thought at first that it was a miraculous survival of our shack
junk-heap which had occupied the same spot but ten feet above.

A nostalgic illusion. I now made out the
electronic aggiornamento: twenty or so busted television-sets and
computers. Next to the junk-heap there was an unmade cot. Alongside
it on the floor were sheets of paper covered with figures, a bottle
of mineral water, a dish with sliced salami and an opened bag of
potato chips.

His lab had expanded, monstrously.

He himself had shrunk. His face was in worse
shape than the house, collapsed and white beneath a Harpo Marx wig.
Had he just grabbed the first one available or was it a derisive
choice? The mass of golden curls sat aslant on a skull you guessed
was totally bald. Even the side-burns were gone. You couldn’t even
say he’d aged. He was beyond the aging process.

I’d apprehended that meeting after so many
years. Old acquaintances are pitiless mirrors. You read your own
negative progress in them. But not in this case. He was a
rejuvenating mirror. He acknowledged it.

“Jesus you look. Great,” he whispered. “You
bastard. How’d you pull. The graceful aging stunt?” His delivery
was painful, the sentences chopped up.

He switched off the red bulbs and now the
only light came from the dials on the console. It faintly lit his
face. His face was suspended bodiless in the dark like the mask of
a summoned spirit in a B movie occult session.

In the darkness he went through the motions
of catching up on the thirty-odd years. It was a little like a
questionnaire. You could tell he wasn’t really curious. He would
glance down at those dials every five seconds, waiting for the
really important thing to happen.

“Heard you got married, “ he said.

Said it as though the wedding had taken place
the week before instead of twenty-nine years and then again eleven
years ago.

“Two-time offender.”

“Kids?”

“Two. With the first woman.”

“What do they do?”

“Phil’s working in oil. Prospecting, I think
it is, somewhere in Canada. Maybe Alaska. We don’t see all that
much of each other.”

“Other kid?”

“Died some time ago.”

“What of?”

“That was quite some time ago. Talking about
families, I didn’t know you had a niece. She doesn’t have a
Morgenstern face. Or a Morgenstern build. How did you manage to be
an uncle and an only child at the same time?”