Time Travail (24 page)

He starts talking about the war which is
going well seen from Forest Hill and says that if pressing a button
could do it he’d exterminate the Germans, all of them, men, women
and children. He means it as another present for Rachel. Mrs
Morgenstern has trouble getting him off the subject.

Breaking the silence, as Mr Morgenstern
removes his shoes from his aching feet, Rachel timidly asks Harvey
if he’ll help her with her father’s book. “You haven’t got the
mathematical base,” he says. “You should go out a little, Rachel,”
says Mrs Morgenstern. “All work and no play.” “Go to the movies
with Jerry,” says Harvey, an order, not a suggestion. Mrs
Morgenstern seconds that motion. Mr Morgenstern looks frustrated.
“If Rachie wants to go to the movies why don’t she go with Harvey?”
“Morris, you know Harvey never goes to the movies.”

They kick it around for a while. Rachel sits
there waiting for it to be decided who she’s going to the movies
with. I win by default. I’m afraid they can hear my heart at the
prospect of us side by side way back in the empty and dark
cathedral with the gilt stars in the blue dome overhead, maybe her
hand not rejecting communication with mine if I dare.

The house is packed. But up front there are
three empty seats. I’m just behind her, never so close, as we
struggle past shifting and jack-knifing knees towards those empty
seats in competition with a small old man from the other aisle. My
nostrils are keened for the natural perfume of her body (it’s a hot
day) but she doesn’t sweat and I don’t get communication that way
either. Not even her hair, an inch from my nose, departs from that
neutrality.

She sits down in the first of the empty seats
and the little old man collapses triumphantly in the seat next to
hers. I ask him to let me have that seat. He’s hard of hearing and
I have to repeat my request much louder. He points at the
mountainous man sitting in front of the third empty seat. I ask him
to take Rachel’s seat. She’d take his and I’d cope with the
mountainous man. I wouldn’t be paying much attention to Hepburn and
Tracy anyhow. He refuses testily. “Shhs” arise all around me like
escaping steam.

So the testy old man remains between us. Why
did she sit down in that first seat? I weave my head back and forth
to catch glimpses of her. A woman behind me tells me to please stop
moving my head. I stare sullenly at Hepburn.

In the monk-cell auditorium of the Museum of
Modern Art – how much later is this? – there aren’t even two empty
seats together. So from opposite sides we watch hairless cadaveric
Nosferatu and his plaguish rats devastating the town.

The third and last time we are back in the
dark cathedral with the gilt stars in the blue vault for a comedy,
at Mrs Morgenstern’s urging and finally Harvey’s command. By now
she hardly leaves her room. This time we’re seated side by side.
But this is after Josie. Her photo is still topmost. Sometimes I
look at Rachel’s profile pallid in the shifting light from the
screen. She stares solemnly at the clowning, smiling dutifully when
the audience laughs.

But then
The Loony Toons
comes on. They are supporting the war
effort. Regimented swastikaed ducks duckstep past a glowering
fore-locked duck and quack: “
Venn der Fuehrer says vee ist der Master Race vee Heil
(bronx-cheer) Heil (bronx-cheer) right in der Fuehrer’s
face.
” I
haven’t reckoned with the Loony Toons.

Haven’t reckoned with the newsreel either. A city is
on fire. The flames play on her face. Cautiously I place my hand
over hers on the armrest. It doesn’t withdraw or respond. Of course
I couldn’t hope for response but that inertia frightens me and I
want her to snatch her hand away as she’d done before. This is
toward the end. I place my arm about her shoulder and stroke her
bare arm. Of course no head against my shoulder but also no
stiffening or contraction, like the last time, no disengagement. I
kiss her cheek. Nothing. She goes on looking at the flames as at an
arduous equation.

After each return from the
movies Harvey asks me how it had been. I find the formulation
strange but each time I tell him about the film. First Hepburn and
Tracy, then Murnau’s
Nosferatuu the Vampire
. He doesn’t listen. The third time I don’t talk
about the film.

“
She’s not well,” I say.

But the Morgensterns know that already.)

One very bad day I decided to scrub the
co-dwellers away again, deprive them of their nourishing medium of
dirt and disorder as I’d once done in the corridor (it was filthy
and populated again by now). But this time I’d do it in the dead
room where the sensors manufactured them.

I marched in armed with a pail of soapy
water, a brush, rags, a vacuum cleaner, a mop over my shoulder like
a rifle. Before I started shifting the furniture to get at the
carpet I put my weapons down and wandered about the room trying to
visualize the old order. I couldn’t. I went over to one of the
sensors. Its lens was still. For some reason I knelt down and
approached my eye to that round unblinking eye, trying to look
inside, getting only my own inverted image, distorted into
caricature.

With a sudden whirring the lens reached out
like the ophthalmologist’s instrument that had explored the back of
my eye painfully. I pulled back saying, don’t scan my brain
upstream. I think it was as a joke. The room filled with a whirring
sound. The three other sensors had joined in.

I got up off my knees and wandered about the
room trying again. The piano had been (was) there in that
deceptively empty space. Without thinking I avoided it, also the
great table from the past. The flowered armchair might have been
there, near the window. And Mrs Morgenstern in it, and if so then
the striped armchair was opposite and my mother in it. “Hello,
Momma,” I felt like saying, almost did, maybe really did, I don’t
know, because I heard Hanna say: “Jesus. Jesus.”

She was there in the doorway staring at me
wide-eyed. She was in her mangy fur-coat, ready to go out. I
remembered it was hospital day. Somehow I knew she’d been there for
long minutes, spying on me again, had seen me kneeling and talking
to the machine, knew this even before she said:

“Jesus. You’re crazy too, like Harvey. I told
you not to go down there. Didn’t I tell him that?”

I grabbed the heavy pail and heaved it at
her. I got slopped and blinded in the process. The pail missed her
by an inch and banged against the corridor wall. But she got
drenched too. She spluttered and swore. Then she crossed the
threshold.

She started coming toward me as she had so
many times with Harvey. I imagined her overpowering me (suddenly
shrunken and frail), sweeping me into her enormous arms and
carrying me to the Volvo and the hospital, not his hospital,
another kind of hospital.

I grabbed the mop and used it like a
bayoneted rifle. My eyes were on fire from the soap. She kept
coming. I retreated, jabbing away with the mop as I’d done with the
spade at Beth Anderson’s son in her garden at two in the morning
months before. Cornered, I slipped behind one of the sensors. An
unpleasant crunch underfoot barely registered.

Hanna stopped dead in her tracks. I thought
it was one of my vicious jabs until I saw the lens zooming out at
her, synchronized with my movement.

She turned and bolted out of the room. I
heard her running down the corridor heavily, yelling like a
madwoman, “He’s crazy, he’s crazy too, I got two crazy men on my
hands.” You could hear that shrill voice of hers all over the house
repeating it to the eyeless co-dwellers jerking past her.

When I was able to I started moving out from
behind the sensor. I felt the same unpleasant crunch underfoot and
saw hundreds of dead roaches on the floor behind the machine. I
understood now why that filthy room had been practically free of
roaches ever since the sensors had been installed. For some reason
they found the attraction of the sensors greater than that of
rotten food. It had been fatal to them. Now they had joined the
co-dwellers.

I had to lie down on the sofa. The
overlapping houses were still on the low table. I became aware of
the silence in the room. The sensors had stopped operating. A few
minutes later I heard heavy footsteps and strangled sounds in the
corridor. Hanna went past the open door bearing Harvey like
something sacrificial. He was flailing his arms weakly and
squalling. The front door slammed shut. The Volvo started up and
pulled away. I was alone in the house.

After a while the phone in the corridor broke
the silence. The phone almost never rang in that house. When it did
they let it ring on and on until it gave up. Another wrong number
Hanna once said. Quickly I got up and left the dead room. I nearly
tripped over the pail in the corridor in my hurry to establish a
connection, even a wrong one, with the outside world. As I pressed
the receiver against my ear and identified myself the thought came
that maybe the sensors had contaminated the telephone line too and
that I would get a dead voice.

I got a hurried hello from Beth Anderson. I
pictured her all dressed up at her phone in her impeccable living
room from which I was banished. I controlled my voice and said I
was glad to hear from her. She asked if she could please speak to
Mr Morgenstern, it was urgent. I told her he was out. I wanted to
hold on to her voice. I tried to slip back into the old
relationship. Was her TV acting up again? I asked. I might be able
to handle it myself. I was Mr Morgenstern’s left-handed right-hand
man. Maybe my voice hadn’t been up to handling humorous content.
She didn’t laugh. She said:

“You told me he’d give me a good deal of
money if I let him set up those things in my living room. How much
money did you say again?”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

Twenty thousand dollars for her. Twenty
thousand dollars for me.

Liberation happened suddenly like that. She’d
changed her mind. She was ready to accept Harvey’s proposal. I
didn’t have to be a mathematical wizard like him to make the
calculation. I’d dispose of more than the magic sum I’d encircled
on the page of the first day of April in my agenda-book. I was
hours removed from an end to the haunted rooms. I saw myself
speeding southwards toward some distant hot empty beach, all this
craziness behind me.

She confirmed that she was willing to accept
the proposition, provided she got the money right away. I could
have said that I’d tell Harvey as soon as he got back. Instead, I
said that she should come over right away and have a look at the
machines before she decided. Why did I say that? I told myself
quickly that it was an excuse to see her again, immediately. I told
myself that it was to construct another image of myself in her
eyes, to prove my possession of prized virtues like sincerity. I
said that Harvey and Hanna had left. She should come over. There
was only myself in the house. Another lie.

Oh my God, was the first thing she said when
she stepped inside. Each room and passage wrenched another little
My God out of her. I explained that I often tried to clean up a
little but that it was a hopeless job. She didn’t answer.

From the threshold of the dead room I showed
her the four sensors. They were standing idle in their corners. She
didn’t say anything, but I thought I knew what she was
thinking.

“I told you they were knee-high but you can
see that’s not a hundred percent true,” I said.

I wanted to be irreproachably sincere. For
her to see the chest-high sensors in obsessive action and to
appreciate what was behind them I took her down to the cellar. I
had a sense of transgression. Going down there alone in the absence
of Harvey would already have been bad enough.

As expected, the red lights produced their
chilling effect. There was also the mountainous junk heap with its
bloody glints. I sat down at the console, hesitated a moment and
then switched on the machine as I’d seen him do so often. She
clapped her ears against the rumble and whine and looked scared.
Now I could take her upstairs to see the sensors in action. She was
staring at the screen. It was flickering. Why hadn’t he switched it
off?

Out of the flickering chaos my mother
materialized dimly in the striped armchair.

Where are your eyes, Momma? Look away. At
Beth Anderson. Staring at the screen. But not reacting. Couldn’t
she see it? See her? She (Beth Anderson) didn’t say anything. She’d
seen nothing. How come she didn’t see that?

My mother faded away.

Relief. Grief.

Now another ghost, soundlessly banging away
on the piano. I waited for her to comment. She said nothing. I
switched off the monitor and took her upstairs, took both of them
upstairs. I led her into the kitchen (“My God, my God”) and said I
would be back in a few minutes.

I went into the bathroom Harvey and Hanna
used. I locked the door behind me. My mother persisted. She
surcharged the stained washbasin with the uncapped toothpaste tube
and the hairbrush full of long hair. She surcharged the shower with
crinkly pubic hairs near the drain, the bra and stockings and blue
jeans on the tubular shower-curtain support.

I sat down on the closed toilet-seat and
waited for her five-second resurrection with eyes. She didn’t
resurrect. I could hear Beth calling my name. I filled the
washbasin with cold water and plunged my face in it. She was
calling my name over and over in alarm. I unlocked the door and
joined her in the corridor. My mother was gone.

She said I didn’t look well, was I sick? I
spoke of nausea and migraine, hoped she wouldn’t catch it. I needed
fresh air. I spent too much time in this house. Would she come with
me to the beach one day? She didn’t answer. She looked at her
watch. I led her back to the dead room.