Time's Arrow (2 page)

Watch. We're getting younger. We are. We're getting stronger. We're even getting
taller.
I don't quite recognize this world we're in. Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring. Far from it. This is a world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes. All the other people are getting younger too, but they don't seem to mind, any more than Tod minds. They don't find it counterintuitive, and faintly disgusting, as I do. Still, I'm powerless, and can do nothing about anything. I can't make myself an exception. The other people, do they have someone else inside them, passenger or parasite, like me? They're lucky. I bet they don't have the dream we have. The figure in the white coat and the black boots. In his wake, a blizzard of wind and sleet, like a storm of human souls.

Each day, when Tod and I are done with the
Gazette,
we take it back to the store. I have a good look at the dateline. And it goes like this. After October 2, you get October 1. After October 1, you get September 30. How do you figure
that? . . .
The mad are said to keep a film or stage set in their heads, which they order and art-decorate and move through. But Tod is sane, apparently, and his world is shared. It just seems to me that the film is running backward.

I'm not a complete innocent.

For instance, I find I am equipped with a fair amount of value-free information, or general knowledge, if you prefer.

E = mc
²
. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. It ain't slow. The universe is finite yet boundless. As for the planets, it's Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto—poor Pluto, subzero, subnormal, made of ice and rock, and so far away from the warmth and the shine. Life is no bowl of cherries. It's swings and roundabouts. You win some, you lose some. It evens out. It measures up. What goes around comes around. 1066, 1789, 1945. I have a superb vocabulary (monad, retractile, necropolis, palindrome, antidisestablishmentarianism) and a nonchalant command of all grammatical rules. The apostrophe in "Please Respect Owner's Rights" isn't where it ought to be. (Nor is the one in the placard on Route 6 that locates and praises "Rogers' Liquor Locker.") Apart from words denoting motion or process, which always have me reaching for my inverted commas ("give," "fall," "eat," "defecate"), the written language makes plain sense, unlike the spoken. Here's another joke: "She calls me up and says, 'Get over here. There's nobody home.' So I get over there, and guess what. There's nobody home." Mars is the Roman god of war. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection—with his own soul. If you ever close a deal with the devil, and he wants to take something from you in return—don't let him take your mirror. Not your mirror, which is your reflection, which is your double, which is your secret sharer. The devil has something to be said for him: he acts on his own initiative, and isn't just following orders.

No one could accuse Tod Friendly of being in love with his own reflection. On the contrary, he can't stand the sight of it. He grooms himself by touch: he favors an electric razor and does his own barbering with a brutal pair of kitchen scissors. God knows what he looks like. There are several mirrors in our house, as you would expect, but he never confronts or consults them. I get the occasional hint from a darkened store window; sometimes, also, a chance distortion in the burnish of a faucet, of a knife. It has to be said that my curiosity is heavily qualified by trepidation. His body is not all that promising: the epic blemishes on the back of the hands, the torso loosely robed in flesh smelling of poultry and peppermint, the feet. We come across some fine old Americans in the avenues of Wellport, keglike granddads and strapping sea dogs, who are "marvelous." Tod's not marvelous. Not yet. He's still pretty wrecked, all bent and askance and ashamed. And his face? Well, it happened, one night, between bad dreams. He had inched his way to the dark bathroom, and stood slumped over the sink, feeling lost, depersonalized, and trying to soothe or tether himself with the running water. Tod moaned, and straightened before the dark mirror, and reached for the switch. Easy does it, I thought. It
would
have to happen at the speed of light. Steady now. Here goes . . .

I expected to look like shit but this was ridiculous. Jesus. We really
do
look like shit. Like a cow pat, in fact. Wow. Is there anybody genuinely around in there? Yes: slowly it took on form—Tod's head. Flanked by the great guitars of the ears, his hair lay thin over the orange-peel scalp, in white worms. Greasy, too. This I'd reckoned on: each morning he bottles the gook it gives off, and, every couple of months or so, takes it to the pharmacy for like $3.45. Ditto with the sweet-smelling powder that is shrugged out by his obscurely culpable flesh. . . . The face itself: among its ruins and relics, which say nothing, there is a swirl of expressiveness around the eyes, severe, secretive, unforgivably droll, and full of fear. Tod switched off the light. He went back to bed and resumed his nightmare. His sheets have the white smell of fear. I am obliged to smell what he smells, the baby powder, the smell of his nails before the fire spits them out—to be caught in the dish and then agonizingly reapplied to his thrilled fingertips.

Is it just me, or is this a weird way to carry on? All life, for instance, all sustenance, all meaning (and a good deal of money) issue from a single household appliance: the toilet handle. At the end of the day, before my coffee, in I go. And there it is already: that humiliating
warm
smell. I lower my pants and make with the magic handle. Suddenly it's all there, complete with toilet paper, which you use and then deftly wind back on the roll. Later, you pull up your pants and wait for the pain to go away. The pain, perhaps, of the whole transaction, the whole dependency. No wonder we cry when we do it. Quick glance down at the clear water in the bowl. I don't know, but it seems to me like a hell of a way to live. Then the two cups of decaf before you hit the sack.

Eating is unattractive too. First I stack the clean plates in the dishwasher, which works okay, I guess, like all my other labor-saving devices, until some fat bastard shows up in his jumpsuit and traumatizes them with his tools. So far so good: then you select a soiled dish, collect some scraps from the garbage, and settle down for a short wait. Various items get gulped up into my mouth, and after skillful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon. That bit's quite therapeutic at least, unless you're having soup or something, which can be a real sentence. Next you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly, of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette, where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for my pains. Then you tool down the aisles, with trolley or basket, returning each can and packet to its rightful place.

Another thing that seriously disappoints me about this life I'm living through: the reading. I drag myself out of bed each night to start the day—and with what? Not with a book. Not even with the
Gazette.
No. Two or three hours with a yelping tabloid. I begin at the foot of the column and toil my way up the page to find each story unedifyingly summarized in inch-high type. MAN GIVES BIRTH TO DOG. Or STARLET RAPED BY PTERODACTYL. Greta Garbo, I read, has been reborn as a cat. All this stuff about
twins.
A Nordic superrace will shortly descend from the cosmic iceclouds; they will rule the earth for a thousand years. All this stuff about
Atlantis.
Appropriately, it is the garbage people who bring me my reading matter. I haul in the bags— which emanate, it would seem, from the monstrous jaws, the industrial violence, of the garbage truck. And so I sit here gurgling into my glass and soaking up all that moronic drek. I can't help it. I'm at Tod's mercy. What's going on— in the world, I mean? I wouldn't know about that either. Except when Tod's eye strays from the Kwik Crossword in the
Gazette.
Most of the time I'm staring fixedly at stuff like
Opposite of small (3)
or
Not dirty (5).
There is a bookcase in the living room. Beyond its dusty glass, the dusty spines, all standing to attention. But no. Instead, LOVE LIFE ON PLUTO. I AM ZSA ZSA GABOR SAYS MONKEY. SIAMESE QUINS!

There are certain pluses now, though, as the years lurch past. The Reagan Era, I think, is doing wonders for Tod's morale.

Physically I'm in great shape. My ankles and knees and spine and neck no longer hurt all the time—or not all at once, anyway. I get to places much quicker than I used to: places like the far end of the room. I'm there before you know it. My bearing is almost princely. I sold that stick of mine long ago.

Tod and I are feeling so terrific that we've joined a club and taken up tennis. Perhaps prematurely. Because—to begin with, at least—it made our back ache like a son of a bitch. Tennis is a pretty dumb game, I'm finding: the fuzzy ball jumps out of the net, or out of the chicken wire at the back of the court, and the four of us bat it around until it is pocketed—quite arbitrarily, it seems to me—by the server. Yet we leap and snort away, happily enough. We josh and kid: our trusses, our elbow supports.
Pap
say the rackets. Tod is popular; the guys appear to like him fine. I don't know what Tod makes of them, except that his glands tell me he could do without any special attention, or any attention at all.

Most of the time we sit around the clubroom playing cards. The clubroom is where I see the President, on the mounted TV. Yes, the old guys, the elderly parties with their freckles and fruit juices, they all get a big kick out of the President: his frowns, his bloopers, his world-class hair. Tod likes it in the clubroom, but there is a man here whom he hates and fears. The man's name is Art—another gorilla of a granddad, with a murderous backslap and a voice of millennial penetration and power. Even I was terrified the first time it happened, when Art rolled over to our table, gave Tod a kind of rabbit punch that almost broke his neck, and said, incredibly loudly,
"You eat them alive"

"Yes. What?" said Tod.

He leaned closer. "Others in here might buy that shit, Friendly, but I know what you're after."

"Oh, that's been much exaggerated."

"Still chasing them?" Art shouted, and rolled away again.

Every time we try to slip past Art's table, there'll be a pause, and then a thick whisper that beats its way right across the room: "Tod Friendly: had more ass than a toilet seat." Tod doesn't like that. He doesn't like that one bit.

Nevertheless, in the Superette, these days, it's true, the eyes of Tod Friendly linger on the bodies of the local frauleins as they tug their carts. The ankles, the join of the hips, the inlet of the clavicle, the hair. It turns out, too, that Tod has a black chest with photographs of women in it. Gay old broads in party dresses and tan pants suits. Ribboned letters, lockets, the knickknacks of love. Deeper down in the chest, where Tod doesn't often burrow, the women get appreciably younger and are to be seen in things like shorts and swim-wear. If this all means what I think it means, then I'm impatient. I really can't wait. I don't know how much sense it makes to say that I am tiring of Tod's company. We are in this together, absolutely. But it isn't good for him to be so alone.
His
isolation is complete. Because he doesn't know I'm here.

We're picking up new habits all the time. Bad habits, I'm assuming: solitary, anyway. Tod sins singly. . . . He has acquired a taste for alcohol and tobacco. He starts the day with these vices—the quiet glass of red wine, the thoughtful cigar—and isn't that meant to be especially bad? The other thing is this. Not very enthusiastically, and not at all sucessfully either, so far as I can ascertain, we have begun doing a sexual thing with ourself. That happens,
when
it happens, the minute we wake up. Then we stagger to our feet and pick our clothes off the floor, and sit and drool into our glass, puffing on a pensive perfecto, and staring at the tabloid and all its gruesome crap.

I can't tell—and I need to know—whether Tod is kind. Or how unkind. He takes toys from children, on the street. He does. The kid will be standing there, with flustered mother, with big dad. Tod'll come on up. The toy, the squeaky duck or whatever, will be offered to him by the smiling child. Tod takes it. And backs away, with what I believe is called a shit-eating grin. The child's face turns blank, or closes. Both toy and smile are gone: he takes both toy and smile. Then he heads for the store, to cash it in. For what? A couple of bucks. Can you believe this guy? He'll take candy from a baby, if there's fifty cents in it for him. Tod goes to church and everything. He trudges along there on a Sunday, in hat, tie, dark suit. The forgiving look you get from everybody on the way in—Tod seems to need it, the social reassurance. We sit in lines and worship a corpse. But it's clear what Tod's after. Christ, he's so shameless. He always takes a really big bill from the bowl.

It's all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation ... is easy, is quick. There's also a universe, apparently. But I cannot bear to see the stars, even though I know they're there all right, and I do see them, because Tod looks upward at night, as everybody does, and coos and points. The Plough. Sirius, the dog. The stars, to me, are like pins and needles, are like the routemap of a nightmare. Don't join the dots. . . . Of the stars, one alone can I contemplate without pain. And that's a planet. The planet they call the evening star, the morning star. Intense Venus.

There are love letters—I know it—in that black chest of Tod's. I tell myself to cultivate patience. Meanwhile, sometimes, I fold up and roughly seal and then dispatch letters I haven't written. Tod makes them, with fire. Over in the grate there. Later, we stroll out and pop them in our mailbox, which says T. T. FRIENDLY. They are letters to me, to us. For now, there's just this one correspondent. Some guy in New York. Always the same signature at the foot of the page. Always the same letter, come to that. It reads: "Dear Tod Friendly: I hope you are in good health. The weather here continues to be temperate! With best wishes. Yours sincerely ..." These letters arrive annually, around the turn of the year. It wasn't long before I started finding them both repetitive and bland. Tod feels differently. For nights on end, before the letters come, his physiology speaks of alerted fear, of ignoble relief.