

Time Travail

Howard Waldman

In memory of Eric Anderson

Time Travail

One

But then at the threshold of entry (after all this time), forefinger rigid on the red dispatching button, suddenly the intruder, that old bum with the funny gizmo on his head, sabotaging the voyage back. How did he get past the triple-bolted cellar door? Hasn't he already pulled the trick at the same critical moment, materializing like a ghost with that metal thing on his head, making you think: "What the hell is he up to? Is he insane?"

Think that now. Maybe yell it to drive him away. But he stays. Becomes even more familiar. Distance starts collapsing. That's the next stage of lucidity.

Forced to recognize the old bum with the funny gizmo on his head as Jerry Weizman, late Associate Professor of English, largely freshman, stranded high and dry, he too, in this trivial time-space intersection. Already able to recite the space-locus accurately (USA, Long Island, NY, Forest Hill, 8 President Wilson Street, Harvey Morgenstern's cellar) but still have trouble with the time-locus. Clock says 3:46. Night or day? And what day? What month even? Remember leaving hot high sun coming down here, so summer, but can't recall the year yet. It'll come back any second, the way the bum's coming back strong, threatening merger.

Merger's happening now in great pain. He (I) is (am) seated at the console in the red gloom of the cellar, entangled, practically strangled, in the coils of Harvey's machine, coiffed with a wired metal helmet. Now ridiculous He and spectator I merge totally into suffering Me staring at Me reflected in the dead screen.

To combat the pain of lucidity there's always Lord's Vineyards. The blasphemous $8.99 bottle of California sauterne stands half-empty on the console.

Now it's three-quarters empty. There are others, completely empty, under the console. It's got powerful anti-lucidity virtues but is hell on my stomach. Ever since my purveyor started peddling intergalactic religion to me instead of contractual tetrahydrocannabinol, I've had to depend heavily on the sauterne for what Harvey called the amplifier effect, indispensable for the voyage.

I start sneezing now. Coming down with the flu. Pressing the red button on the console might bring relief either through annihilation or the happening of long-desired things, first on the screen before me and then in my head beneath the wired metal helmet. But the only thing happening on the dark screen for the moment is my own white-stubbled bummish face, the contemporary one. I once saw it marvelously young and handsome there during a voyage back. In the red gloom manufactured by Harvey's twenty bulbs the present reflection is dim, a mercy. The past two months have finally dumped my true age on me and maybe more.

I'm getting on. "Getting on" is what old Miss Forster in PS 89 way back in the 30s – I saw her again a while ago but much fainter – called a "phrasal verb", an ambiguous one because "getting on", among other things, also means "making progress", in my case to one grim thing only, let's face it. I got on a long time ago and soon will be getting off. Maybe any second now if I press the red button and Harvey's calculations prove wrong for me as I think they did for him when he pressed it.

All in all, taking the good with the bad, it's been a pretty lousy trip. I'm more scared than consoled at the idea that one day another Harvey Morgenstern, as yet unborn, may resurrect me on a screen the way the original Harvey Morgenstern imperfectly did his early contemporaries, among them Miss Forster with her broken front tooth and also Rachel Rosen the night of her death.

I've just sneezed again. It's bitterly dank down here in his cellar, a foretaste of eternity as I imagine it. Where's my handkerchief? I can hear rats stirring about in the open bag of potato chips near the cot. The rim of the metal cap bites into my forehead painfully. It can do worse things than that, I know.

Maybe as a stalling tactic, not to commit myself one way or the other with the red button, I start playing games with my ghostly reflection on the screen, try to imagine situations more orthodox than the real one to explain the presence of that biting thing on my head.

Despite all the transformations it still looks very much like what it once was: an old-fashioned woman's permanent-wave helmet. But it's no beauty parlor down here. Now the thing seems to be a big inverted funnel I'm wearing. But isn't that how madmen are represented in I can't remember what country? In great fear of that definition I now see the thing as the cap occupants of the New York State electric chair used to get crowned with. This invention is even worse, for I'm convinced the ex-permanent-wave helmet is capable of a fatal hair singe, a permanent wave goodbye.

Anyhow, no matter what Harvey said at the end, what crime did I ever commit? I'm a man of omissions, not commissions. I try to invalidate the image of retribution by recalling that the condemned have arm and leg straps to make them stay put in their final chair. There are none on mine. I haven't even got that excuse for being where I am.

Come to think of it, the thing on my head looks more like a futuristic dunce cap than anything else.

So say an innocent dunce in a lucid moment.

If I'd had the sense not to stoop for his check that day I'd be 2000 miles from this place in my nice warm bed. Having nightmares probably but ones I could wake up out of. Accepting that check was just one of a long series of mistakes that started practically with birth. I'm tempted to go back in my own private built-in time machine – a million times more efficient than his – to the day when I got fatally involved and pass in review the subsequent mistakes. I know there's danger in going back like that. You can get sucked down in memory and suffocate. But this time I'll view myself from way above, practice safe detachment, lucid dissociation. I'll look down at JW blundering away and match his grimaces with grins, try to double up with laughter when he doubles up with pain. Maybe I'll finally learn from those mistakes of mine, extract precious survival lessons for the future.

What future? Isn't this just another stalling tactic? Putting off the choice I'll finally have to make: either take my chances with the machine or remove the thing from my head and leave this house for good and take my chances with what's left for me of forward-moving time outside?

Now my nose is starting to run. A salty taste like the sea or tears.

Where the hell is my handkerchief?

That sunny September day began at nine, like all my other days since retirement, with vacuum cleaning. I cleaned my vacuum again with great thoroughness, both rooms. I'm maybe a little compulsive about cleanliness (in those days I was anyhow) although I wouldn't say anally regressive about it. That was my second ex-wife's diagnosis. Mary attributed it to rigid Judeo-Christian toilet training. Whatever, I can't stand having to contemplate disorder, (couldn't in those days, anyhow). It was too much like a metaphor for intimate things. As usual I spent long minutes over my audio system with the Swiss electro-static-nullifying feather-brush. There aren't a hundred systems of that quality in the world. We're both sensitive to dust.

After, I went down for possible mail, the second major event of the day, one I never missed out on. With the sudden end to my teaching activities I'd learned to restructure my days with small things. I'd been retired three months before, transitively, the way certain people are suicided. Times were tough in education. People had to go. I had published, but not enough (not even for a third-rate state university). Both parties involved pretended to believe that official reason. They carefully skirted the real reason, like skirting sidewalk dog excrement. But hadn't the thing been practically by mutual consent? Enough of that.

So I perished. Professionally, of course. What survived was going through motions in a furnished two-room flat I owed rent on.

Getting the mail was one of the motions. Since my "retirement" I'd learned to fill my waking hours with activities, physical and mental. I'd learned not to relax, not to become indifferent. It appears that cerebral decline creeps up on you in the flattering disguise of "above it all" indifference. What you take for Olympian serenity the world rightly chalks up to softening of the brain.

This concern with cerebral decline started in the middle of one night soon after I was scrapped. A person I'd long ago succeeded in not thinking of came back more or less. Her face was indistinct and I couldn't remember her name. Couldn't. When her name came back shortly before dawn I got up and wrote it a number of times, Rachel, Rachel, on scraps of paper in order not to forget the next time. Wasn't that cheating? I saw myself in the mirror doing it and, through tears, found myself comically pathetic.

Even she might have smiled at the sight if she hadn't been dead for nearly half a century (we can go back and see them imperfectly but they can't ever see us). I tried to imagine her face but couldn't. I think it was then that I started trying to combat cerebral decline.

The trouble is, one of the symptoms of cerebral decline is concern with cerebral decline. I'd come to recognize it, for example, in the little warm feeling I experienced when learning that so-and-so had whipped up a masterpiece at an advanced age. Haydn at seventy imitating God with his Creation and on the whole doing a better job of it. Michelangelo at the same age pulling off the Saint Peter's Basilica. Verdi still green at eighty with Falstaff. Picasso pushing ninety but engraving that sex-exercise series, maybe no dim memory. Now I'm on to another kind of bitter decline. But I did have the models of V. Hugo and L. N. Tolstoy, indefatigable white-bearded impregnators of servant-girls

Of course I wasn't in their league but I did have my own disciplines. Senility can be combated to a certain extent by physical and intellectual discipline. From ten to eleven, after the mail, I kept on my toes with Hungarian on tape (Assimil). Hungarian is said, rightly I think, to be the most challenging of European languages. Another example of intellectual calisthenics was the way I forced myself to grapple with music I'd never been able to penetrate in my younger days, even though penetration was even less my strong point now. Mainly Gregorian chants and medieval masses for the dead. Mood music for meditations on the passage of time, love and money.

Not just mentally, also corporally I tried to keep trim. This was easier. I watched what I ate, if not what I drank. The year before, in the university pool, a woman colleague (Marianne Richards of the French Department) had said: "Why, Jerry, you have the body of a forty-year-old, myumm!" I had the vanity to feel offended at the limits of her comparison but realized she meant well and so returned the compliment, gallantly lowering the age comparison and concluding with, "myumm, myumm, myumm!" This was excessive and imprudent. It started that way.

But I was on the subject of physical fitness. I had a chinning-bar permanently wedged in the bathroom doorframe. I learned to duck, most of the time, on the way to the toilet at night. Rain or shine I jogged an hour, not in the direction of the University campus. I didn't go out of my way to avoid my former colleagues but didn't exactly hammer at their doors. Any more than they did at mine, with one persistent exception.

I wasn't bitter about it. I understood that I still gave off that tremendous distancing aura of people stricken by some incurable illness (leprosy, say) or inconsolable loss. Some of the colleagues I did bump into commiserated till I felt like telling them not to take it so hard. Others said I was lucky to have retired seven years in advance. Most carefully avoided the subject as they hadn't been able to avoid me in the street. I smiled steadily for them all.

One day in the supermarket Harry Richards of the English Department playfully clashed his shopping-cart into mine. I had to ask how Marianne was doing although I knew in detail. Harry said I wasn't looking so hot and that statistically half the nervous breakdowns occurred in the first year of retirement. He warned against solitude and advised me to find a lady-friend. One my own age for a change, he added, but not nastily. He's a nice guy basically and I wasn't happy to see him.

But I'm wandering. This is probably symptomatic. At least I'm lucid about my growing befuddlement. I began by saying that after my short-term victory over dust I went down for the mail. I came back with a double handful, a real harvest. Reading the mail, all of it, while breakfasting and electric shaving had become a ritual. If somebody asked me: "What is the major symptom of advancing age?" I would say: "Instead of dumping it all unread into the garbage-pail, the pre-senescent open and meditate over every piece of junk-mail."

That morning I got a color-catalog of Taiwanese watches. They are enviably shock-resistant with non-volatile memories, show the time in five capitals I'll never visit now, calculate solar and lunar eclipses till the useless year 2025, beep Vivaldi's Four Seasons to wake you, even in winter, with spring or summer. They are proof against deep descents and provide automatic countdown. That morning there was also a gardening handout featuring a sale on tulip-bulbs. Just pop them into the earth in fall and up they pop as flowers in spring. There was also an advertisement for old-age incapacity insurance. At each turning point in your life you get on a mailing list or off one. I didn't get advertisements for X-rated videocassettes any more.

The next letter, from Mary, my second ex-wife, was as impersonal as the others. She got to the point with a minimum of verbiage. I owed her three months' alimony, it seemed. Deadline: next Friday. If the matter had to be placed in the hands of the law it would cost me much more. I sincerely believe that if the roles had been reversed, I she and she me, I'd have recalled moments of tenderness and wouldn't have let grievances completely stifle compassion. After all she got the house, didn't she? And damn close to getting my audio system as well.

After meditation over the timepieces I dumped all the communications into the garbage-pail. I was trying to cope with Lesson Ten when the landlady knocked on the door. She was holding a letter. She listened to the intensely alien sounds behind me.

"Oh Professor Weizman: Hungarian! Do you know Hungarian too? My father was Hungarian." I tried to pretend I was glad to see her. I'd been avoiding her of late.

"Mrs Philips," I stammered, "any day now I'll take care of the three months' rent I owe you."

She sounded almost offended at that. "Three months? It's just two months' rent."

Of course. Two months was for the rent, three months for the alimony arrears. More mental confusion.

"There's no hurry, Professor," she comforted.

All of Mrs Philips was in that answer. No deadline with her. I suspected she knew of my axing. Sometimes I found myself fantasizing about a twilight third marriage with a woman like Mrs Philips, with Mrs Philips herself, to tell the truth. She was youngish and of boundless goodness and patience: this is what I badly needed. A good cook too, judging by what I sniffed at mealtimes going past her door up to nuked pizza. It would have been an elegant end to rent-arrears as well.

One thing was sure. If it didn't work out she would never hound me for impossible alimony. As for the age-gap – she couldn't be much over forty – couldn't cultural prestige bridge that? Moreover, I am (or was) astonishingly well preserved and can (or could) generate vestigial charm in case of necessity. She had a plain but kind face and a pleasant body. Probably too demanding, that body. Besides, she no longer had her Hungarian maiden name. Her husband was taciturn and muscular.

"Don't you worry about the rent," she said. "I just wanted to give you this letter. You must have dropped it. I found it on the staircase."

The envelope was addressed in a crabbed hand to "Assistant Professor J. Weizman." The belittling precision of "assistant" was unusual. It's true I'd been an Assistant Professor for a long long time till I finally made it to Associate Professor, but in the days when I got meaningful mail, correspondents nearly always conceded full professorship to me on the envelope. I didn't like being demoted retroactively even if I was nothing at all now.

I pulled the letter out and a check fluttered to the floor. Kneeling to it I made out as in a dream one thousand dollars to the order of myself (still defined as an assistant) and signed, in the same crabbed hand, Harvey Morgenstern. The name transported me back, unwillingly, thirty years and more. So he too had survived. But not in a furnished room stooping for a check, you could bet.

Reading him or listening to him you'd never guess Harvey Morgenstern was a genius, one of the mid-century pioneers of advanced cybernetics. He'd also calculated intercontinental ballistic missile trajectories onto populous targets and, as it later turned out, succeeded at enormous effort in inscribing a few faint scratches on the mile-thick time-barrier. He didn't verbalize gracefully had always been the problem. Now he had others.

Hi Jerry,

Not kicking all that much but am still alive. Long time no see – in the flesh, that is. (What does that mean: "in the flesh"?) Still knocking the broads flat on their backs right and left? But hey, you're getting on. Can you still get it up? It's all a memory for me and I'm beginning to lose that too. But I think it can be beaten. Memory problems I mean. I don't want to say anything more about it in case this letter gets into the wrong hands. I think you can guess what it is. Remember the blue mouse? Rounding off, 209,880,000 times better than that. If you remember the blue mouse figure it out yourself.

Now the thing is I need help, the way you used to help me in the old days. Remember the old days way back when we screwed around with the induction coil and the X-ray machine and gassed mice and shocked the shit out of the Polacks? I have bad memory problems because of the treatment (I'll tell you about that when I see you) but I do remember the Polacks. This is a good day for memory. And boy do I remember you sweating away on the Static Electricity Machine bike although to be honest I had help with that particular memory. Don't make me say more.

Anyhow this is my proposition. I want you to come out here to Forest Hill. You must have plenty of time on your hands now (how did he learn about that?) and maybe the money would come in handy. I can offer you five hundred bucks a week as my collaborator. You'd come and live here with me rent-free – separate rooms, of course, I know you're not that way. Free meals too. You should just taste Hanna's cooking. We could talk over old times. The check is to prove this is no gag and to cover your moving expenses. Why not try it out for a month? Whichever way you decide, yes or no, you'll be two thousand dollars to the good. I'm quite ill and can't handle all of the work myself.

I'm really ill, Jerry. I haven't got all that much time. It's something very big. Now what I want you to do is this: I want you to give me a buzz and say you're coming right away because I haven't got all that much time to wait around. But if what I'm working on works out I'll have all the time in the world. So will you. I ain't forgettin' my old pal. (Pal?)

See you soon, OK?

Harvey Morgenstern

In a postscript he gave me his phone number and asked me to bring all the old photos of Forest Hill in the old days. Above all, photos of Rachel. He'd asked for photos of Rachel maybe thirty years ago and I'd never answered. Did I remember who Rachel Rosen was?

One thing was sure. Memory loss wasn't the worst that had happened to his mind. All my life I've attracted the mentally unbalanced. I like to think it's the attraction of the dissimilar, something like positive and negative magnetic poles. I'm scared of them, the way they look into your eyes and assume a secret congruence. Normally I pull back fast. But there was a check in this case and more to come. Didn't the proposition at least deserve careful reflection? I gave it a second's worth and grabbed for the phone.

As the other phone thousands of miles eastward buzzed away in my ear the four monomaniac walls about me with their reiterated large purple flowers fell away. I felt buoyant, ten years younger, as though I'd conquered time. It was a premonitory feeling although of course I didn't know it then. If I had I'd have hung up. I allowed myself to realize how sick I was of all those attempts to fill the vacuum with push-ups, chinning, jogging and junk-mail, sick of half-thawed pizza, sick of banging my forehead against the chinning-bar at midnight, sick of plainchants and contrapuntal prayers for the dead. I felt sorry I wouldn't see Christine (Mrs Philips) any more. But it would never have worked out. I thought of all those Long Island beaches. I hadn't seen the sea for years.

The phone buzzed on and on until finally I got a woman's voice. It was shrill and querulous. Right off the bat she wanted to know what I wanted. It was dislike at first hark. I said that I wished to speak to Mr Harvey Morgenstern. She actually snapped: "Who are you?" I requested her to kindly inform Mr Morgenstern that my name was Professor J. Weizman. I had received a letter from him that morning asking me to contact him.

"Oh Jesus, the letter. Listen, Mr I-didn't-catch-your-name, if it's the letter I think it is, he sent out twenny of them. I know, I had to mail them. Even had to pay for the goddam stamps. Those letters weren't serious."

"Mine must have been. There was a check in it," I said, a childish fall from dignity. I wanted to hold on to my sudden wealth with the promise of more to come and an end to vacuum. For the second time (and not the last time as it turned out), I wondered if Harvey wasn't a mental case. Maybe there'd been checks in the other nineteen letters too, phony, like mine.

"A check? How big a check?"

Her alarm was encouraging. I actually told her the amount. Maybe Harvey wasn't the only mental case.

"A thousand dollars?! What did you do with it?"

"What one generally does with checks. Mr Morgenstern, please."

"You mean you deposited it? That wasn't honest. He's a very sick man. I try to protect him from people like you, not that I get any thanks for it. Look, I know what my uncle wrote you about, that thing down in the cellar. Jesus, the electricity bills we run up and what for? You'd be wasting your time coming out here, Mister."

His niece must have read the letter. Niece? Harvey had no niece.

She broke off and started talking to someone. Then that characteristic deadness of a hand over the receiver. Finally I got another voice, between a whisper and a croak, barely audible and totally unfamiliar. Am I confusing this with a later thing? I seem to remember that hearing that voice for the very first time my mind compared it to a flickering distorted image.

"Hi pal. Glad you. Phoned. Can you. Make it out here. Today?" He said something else but I didn't get it because his voice started going. It went out.

"Hold on." It was the woman again. I held on for minutes.

"You still there? Listen, my uncle can't talk. I tole you. He wrote something. He wants me to read it. Here goes."

She chanted it slowly like someone little accustomed to the written word.

"Sorry Jerry voice troubles don't let Hanna scare you off. She... Hey, you can't make me read this..."

Hand-over-the-receiver deadness again. Then she was back with a weepy voice:

"He says sorry Jerry voice troubles don't let Hanna scare you off he says he says she's not a bad girl just men-menopause problems that's not true you sonofabitch. He says don't worry she knows what side her AT&T shares are bu-buttered on how can he say that?" She started sniffing then finished reading. "When can you come? Expecting you today. That's what my uncle wrote. He wants an answer now."

I told her to tell him I was glad to hear from him but I would have to think over his proposition. I would ring back that evening at the latest. I hung up fast. The purple flowers welcomed me back.

I tried to return to the Hungarian lesson. I could still hear that hoarse whispered claim to friendship in my ear as though from some cavern 2000 miles deep and the sullen voice of the woman forced to insult herself to a stranger. I switched off the recorded voice. The inside ones went on. I changed into my jogging things. For some reason I slipped Harvey's letter into the jacket-pocket. Outside in the fresh air the voices faded.

I turned left at the end of the street instead of right as usual, I didn't know why, and started jogging down Ambrose Avenue. The letter rustled in my pocket. Without realizing it I began taking great strides, practically leaping, like a superannuated ballet-dancer. I bounced, puffing, into view of my bank between a record-shop and a fancy shoe-store. It was as though my foolish feet had commanded me. I suddenly found myself depositing Harvey's check and withdrawing practically all my savings: seven hundred dollars. I told myself that if I deposited the check it was either to pay good long-suffering Mrs Philips or else to make a minimum gesture to my second ex-wife. I would carefully choose the beneficiary.

But my jubilant feet directed me to shops just yards from the bank and I bought ten-year-old single-malt, English shoes and numerous CDs of penetrable music. I had just about enough left for the plane-fare to New York.

As Harvey had pointed out in his letter I could always try it out for a month. At the worst I'd have two thousand dollars. I'd be able to settle my debts with both my ex-wife and my landlady, simultaneously. It seemed more elegant that way than settling with just one, immediately, to the detriment of the other.

I left early the next day. I forgot that Marianne dropped in at four after her last class.

As I boarded the plane I remembered that I'd have to reset my watch. For a moment I couldn't recall whether it was a later or an earlier time zone.

***

Two

Weizman and Morgenstern. It sounds more like a stockbroker partnership than one of those great old-time friendships like Castor and Pollux. Or were those two twins? Anyhow, for seven or so years back in the Forest Hill, Long Island, of the late 1930s and early 40s Harvey Morgenstern and I formed a bizarre inseparable couple. We were as different as night and day. I don't know who was day and who was night.

Outwardly we contrasted in a way that sometimes made people laugh. They couldn't suspect our one odd convergence: a heart-murmur that kept us both out of the war. He was small, swarthy, beak-nosed, with fleshy lips constantly tensed in what could be taken for a half-smile or a faint sneer. Somebody once said he looked like a caricature of a racial polluter in the Völkischer Beobachter. I was big and blond and blue-eyed, another caricature.

Often, as a joke, I think, Harvey used to salute me with an outstretched right arm and bark out, "Heil Hitler!" I would return the salute, say "Jawohl," soundlessly click my sneakered heels and pretend to find it funny.

It wasn't my fault if I took after my mother. She'd come over from Poland in the early twenties and still spoke English with a faint but unmistakable Yiddish intonation which made up for her blonde hair and blue eyes. Also she was a passionate Zionist. I felt vague shame at the ethnic betrayal of my pale eyes and hair. It was worsened by a profile people called Greek. I had nothing to offset them like accent or faith.

When people – new teachers, for instance – learned my last name they often looked surprised as if there were a mistake somewhere. Some would even say, "Your name's Weizman?" or worse: "You're Weizman?" I used Yiddish expressions all the time to compensate. Harvey compensated in the other direction by using vulgar goy expressions.

The contrast between us wasn't just physical. There was the intellectual imbalance. This was vast. I was the first to acknowledge it. A very late bloomer that way, I knew I was no genius. Everybody knew he was one. He didn't try to conceal the fact. His intellectual swagger may have been compensation for his physical inferiorities. They aggravated at the critical age. By thirteen my mind was up to the hilt into girls, my body burning to follow and not much later it did. He was a late-bloomer that way. He was able to develop a little anti-climactic face and body hair only at fifteen. It was publicized by spectacular and persistent acne. He went to the hospital regularly for mysterious treatments. My mother spoke vaguely of "glandular troubles". She always referred to him as "Poor Harvey" and gazed at me with loving admiration.

Maybe his brain monopolized all of his body's resources. I sometimes wondered if the people who laughed at the sight of us together didn't see us as I once did in the jubilant trick mirror of the 42nd Street Laugh Movie: me pin-headed and macro-phallic with those elephantine haunches, Harvey like H. G. Wells' Martian invaders, macrocephalic above a thread of a body.

That didn't prevent him from using foul pseudo-knowledgeable language and prying for intimate details about the new girlfriends whose photos I carried about in my wallet. He'd stare down at them and with his new unsure tweeting woofing voice use vulgar terms to describe them. He offered me money for accounts of times with those girls.

Gentlemen don't tell, I'd say and then pocket the money and tell, inventively and in elegant language but a little ill at ease. Verbally I was something of a puritan. I soon lost the money back to him at five hundred rummy. It wasn't just for the money that I did it. It was my one area of acknowledged superiority.

Sometimes I'd try to inject a little tenderness into the accounts. He wasn't paying for tenderness.

"Cut the crap. Did you get into her?"

I didn't like that kind of language. I was longing for a great romantic love experience. I had other photos in a secret compartment of my wallet just beneath the semi-public ones. Even then, I had this weakness for impossible love-objects. There was Judy Garland in the Land of Oz with twin cascades of hair tumbling down past her wonder-lit face. One day I learned she was born Francis Gumm in Grand Rapids. She disappeared beneath a succession of women I judged more exotic. I took Katherine Hepburn for a foreigner with those cheekbones and that passionate sinuous mouth. Also Claudette Colbert and Olivia de Havilland because of their names. Finally Wendy Hiller crowned the other photos. I saw Major Barbara twenty-one times, four times in a single day till I was turned out of the movie-house. Wendy bore an astonishing resemblance to June Keller, my first ex-wife.

One day, coming back from the toilet in the middle of a disastrous card-session, I found Harvey ferreting in my wallet. He'd discovered my impossible stratified loves. It was as though he were ferreting in my brain.

"Titless wonders," was his blanket verdict on them all. But what did he know about the subject? He'd look at girls slyly and quickly away when they looked back. To my knowledge he never came closer to a girl than with those quick sly glances or listening, absorbed, to my paid stories of hot involvement. Once in the street, though, his mother collapsed and I remember how he cried, "Momma! Momma!" and helped her up, her face filled with pain from the sprained ankle and joy at his outcry.

That was the only emotional response to another human being I ever witnessed in him. But maybe he kept it hidden as I did the photo of Wendy.

So I made allowances for his compensation, the way he tended to shove his top-heavy intellectual weight about. When he did it a little too contemptuously I'd do a Lenny on him. I'd seen Of Mice and Men six times. I'd go slack-jawed, glassy-eyed, dangly-armed and say very loudly: "Aw, talk United States, George. I like rabbits, George." When I did it in a crowded street he'd walk much faster muttering: "Cut it out, you moron," but I'd lope after him bellowing: "I like to pet rabbits and girls, George. But then they don't move no more. How come they don't move no more, George, huh?"

The bond between us was science. We were into science back in the days when pre-teenagers could duplicate most of the great scientific breakthroughs with stuff swiped from hardware stores or picked up from junk-heaps. Even a feeble-minded kid could build an operating radio-set with a crystal of lead-ore (it comes back now: galena, PbS) and a wire (a "cat's-whisker" it was called). Everything was easier in those days. There were no computers or TV sets to demoralize us, to say nothing of prodigious things like Mark I Particle Detectors.

I remember the Static Electricity Machine he rigged up. Great disks of varnished glass revolved in counter movement. Wires led to big jars lined inside and outside with tin foil. "Leyden-jars," they were called. The machine was powered by my feet via a stationary bike. My scalp would start crawling as the charge built up. Finally there came a crackle and a miniature bolt of lightning between the brass balls.

With the discharge I would slump panting over the handlebars. It could kill you, he said and it nearly did me, indirectly, each time I manufactured the bolt. I didn't feel like Zeus. Already at that age he was playing around with death and I was assisting him in a subaltern capacity.

For an easier source of high-potential electricity, we built a Ruhmkorff Coil. The name and the rattlesnake sound of the circuit-breaking vibrator made me think of some dangerous Russian serpent coiled ready to spring with electric-spark fangs. It took four months to construct with miles of fine copper wire intricately wound about a core of iron rods. Hooked up to four big dry cells, this induction coil spat out a two-inch spark and an acrid smell of ozone. We also built motors, condensers and finally a big DC dynamo.

With that dynamo and my leg-muscles we produced hydrogen and chlorine through electrolysis of brine. The bubbles of hydrogen that rose from one of the carbon electrodes made satisfying popping sounds in contact with a lighted match. With the chlorine that bubbled up from the other electrode we killed white mice. It was his idea. But I lent myself to it and possibly enjoyed the mouse's reaction to the yellow-green gas. He himself didn't enjoy it. He was too busy measuring the exact dose that proved lethal.

Electrolysis got us on to chemistry. There was enough land about our shack for violent experiments involving gun cotton (easy: cotton dipped in a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acid) and thermit incendiary-bombs of the sort the Luftwaffe would soon be distributing all over London: ferrous oxide I think and aluminum powder. Even the fuse was spectacular: a ribbon of magnesium producing an intense blue-white star hissing down to the bomb.

You couldn't find magnesium or aluminum powder or delicate specialized glassware in garbage cans. The chemicals and some of our equipment had to come from stores. I operated mainly in winter when I could wear my billowing raglan overcoat. It was fitted out inside with hooks for the bulkier hookable items. In the deep pockets there were quantities of handkerchiefs to serve as clink-muffling buffers between beakers, test-tubes, coils, etc.

The place was out in Long Island City. There's prescription three times over but I won't give the name. Harvey supplied diversion by purchasing trifles.

Once I got caught. Harvey calmly paid for his five test tubes and left without giving me a glance. I had to give them my name. I remember my intense shame. Jewish boys didn't steal. My mother didn't say this but it was all over her stricken face for days. It was much worse than the belting I got from my father. He cited my friend Harvey as an example of proper conduct.

Much later when the old relationship between us was dead, this one aspect survived. He'd ring me up and dictate the titles of expensive specialized books that I procured for him in the same way from university bookstores. He was one of my customers. Like the others he paid half price for the books.

But most of our equipment was salvaged, not swiped. Dangerously situated on the other side of the tracks was the most gigantic junk-heap I've ever seen in my life. They don't make junk-heaps like that any more. I can see all those desirable objects now: ancient electric motors with their precious intact armatures, big-bellied jugs with bubbles frozen in the thick warped green glass, battered five-gallon cans, old roller-skates, mines of ball bearings.

I've got to get out of it. But wait, just this: there, very clearly, as though produced by the screen, I can see the broken Singer sewing machine with the floral pattern of the cast-iron foot-pedal and there, the quaint refrigerator of the 30's crowned by the honey-comb cooler, lying next to those two rusty bicycle-frames.

I've got to stop, get out of it. Details can overwhelm you. It can be dangerous.

Anyhow, Harvey would step carefully in the chaos, inspect, step back to safety and tell me what to worry and pry and wrench free. I came with a crowbar and an assortment of screwdrivers, hammers, chisels and hacksaws. I became expert at it. To transport the stuff we'd built a big wooden wagon with old bicycle-wheels. We had our own junk-heap on Mr Morgenstern's lot, next to our shack.

Harvey's father owned a big lot close to his old house. He always hoped the real-estate market would improve but it wasn't desirable property because of the nearby railroad tracks. Already Harvey's father was tempted with the idea of building a bigger and better house for his family on it, which is what he finally did in circumstances I won't be able to avoid recalling. In the meantime he let us build a shack on it for our experiments. Harvey drew up the plans and I did the sawing and nailing.

The trouble was, the big junk-heap was located in enemy territory on the other side of the tracks, a shantytown inhabited by Poles and Irish and Litvaks. From our shack you could see them in their anti-Semitic patched jackets and woollen stocking caps with battered pails picking up chunks of coal that fell out of the freight cars. Nowadays that expression "live on the other side of the tracks" doesn't mean anything. It did then. Chaplin, great comic embittered man, caught it all in certain of his short silent films.

The other side of the tracks everything was lopsided and violent. There were slapped-together wooden houses with sagging porches, ash-heaps, barrels of tadpole-infested stagnant rainwater. I can see gray tattered wash flapping from lines over poverty-stricken vegetables like cabbage and carrots. Also yellowish dogs scouring among turds and broken bottles.

I could go on forever. Not I but the things. They could go on forever. They want to take control. I have to stop and select. The only way you can master it all is through selection and when selection goes (as it's been doing, alarmingly, more and more often these last weeks) then you're in real trouble.

What I have to select for what I'm doing now are the packs of dirty, ragged, wiry, hard-fisted, stinking, expertly spitting kids, thirsting for Jewish blood that they were quick to sniff out in the junk-heap.

Once they burst in on us knocking apart a brass bed. Harvey fled. He was awful at all sports but he could run fast. It must have been atavistic. They caught me and pushed me around, but not too hard. I expected them to beat me bloody.

"Tell your clipcock pal we'll beat the shit out of him next time."

They implicitly placed me outside the circumcised.

"He ain't no pal of mine," I said in great fear, purposefully imitating their grammar as my hair and eyes involuntarily imitated theirs and their grandfathers', those drunken joyous participants in the pogroms my mother used to tell me about, sparing me no details.

Harvey was afraid of them but didn't hate them the way I did. He would dismiss them, echoing his father, as "human garbage". I can still hear their favorite expression: "clip-cocked Christ-killers": a throatful of phonetic ugliness, like a choking with hatred, like preliminaries to spitting.

Again I should stop because what you get going back this way is not just the objects and people with the original sharpness of vision but also the sharpness – sometimes like a knife-blade – of the original emotion they aroused.

One last thing about them. Periodically they sallied forth across the tracks and ravaged our shack and also used it as a mass latrine and left excremental misspelled anti-Semitic slogans on the walls.

Finally they were bested by Jewish cunning. Even Hitler acknowledged this characteristic. His side had nobility and courage but was a little short on brains. Harvey hooked up wires from the Ruhmkorff coil to the brass doorknob. Twisting the knob made the interrupter vibrate. It was set for five seconds. Longer would have killed you. I know because one day I forgot and tried to open the door. The amperage was low but it delivered about 40,000 volts. As I jigged about Harvey observed me with interest until the five seconds were up and I was free although still jerking like a spastic.

One of them must have gotten the same treatment. They didn't try to break in any more. Instead, they would stand at a safe distance and heave rocks like Neanderthals at that shack of enlightenment. Eventually we gave up the shack and fitted up the cellar of Harvey's house as a serious lab. By this time Harvey's father was beginning to take seriously the things his son's teachers were saying about him.

We didn't limit ourselves to electricity and chemistry. We'd sneak out after eleven when there was less parasitic light in the sky from the town and scrutinize stars and planets with a homemade Newton reflecting telescope made out of a big cardboard shipping-tube. Harvey ground the four-inch mirror. We split double stars and saw the four known moons of Jupiter.

The rings of Saturn were a marvel.

Venus was a big disappointment even at that age: lovely at a distance but just a blank disk close up. I was forewarned.

Mars wasn't much either: a rusty blur. We couldn't see the canals or the polar caps. Andromeda was another disappointment. Even at X 200 it resolved into nothing more spectacular than a faint smear of light.

I remember what Harvey said as, teeth chattering in the January cold (the seeing was best in winter), we took turns peering at that nearest galaxy to ours. We were looking at time past, he said, back at the galaxy as it had been 2.2 million years ago. He said that there were billions of stars in that galaxy, some probably suns to planets, and you could imagine a super-evolved race equipped with telescopes able to view the earth. Right now they would see the earth as it was before the appearance of man. In 2.2 million years they would see the two of us as we had been, now, talking about them.

It sometimes happened that I guided Harvey to new fields of study in unorthodox ways. The starting-point was the preposterously bogus ads I came across in SF pulp-mags (Amazing and Astounding Stories) and answered. Not the miracle cures for piles, eczema and impotence or correspondence courses for would-be detectives but the promised exercise of marvelous powers. Even after prolonged contact with Harvey's brilliant rational mind I remained a sucker for the marvelous.

There was the "magic X-ray tube." The incompetent illustration showed a cloth-capped young man gazing through it at his hand. The bones of his hand were visible. Another cloth-capped young man – maybe the same one – was shown peering through it at a young woman. There was a crude (artistically speaking) hint of a petticoat beneath her long dress. You could guess the apparatus penetrated to more essential things that couldn't be shown in the magazine-ad. At only thirteen my mind was already turned that way.

The magic X-ray tube set me back $2.50. It turned out to be a tube with a feather pasted to a celluloid disk inside. When you looked through it the feather vaguely broke up the object. My hand and girls were broken up but remained opaque.

Harvey whooped and jeered. He tried to explain the principles of X-rays to me but he must have been dissatisfied with his explanation because he started studying the phenomenon. He decided that we would construct a Roentgen apparatus.

The tube was expensive. To get the money I mowed lawns till I was dizzy and swiped coins from newsstands. Finally it was set up, the Coolidge tube and the screen coated with zinc sulfate (ZnSO4). "OK, here we go," he said, not moving. He expected me to stick an experimental hand in the ray. I had the rare sense to refuse.

So he did it himself. He saw his own bones on the screen. I was scared to. Even then I was afraid of revelation. Harvey wanted to go further. It was his basic and fatal characteristic. He wanted to see his own skull. He did. After, he suffered fits of dizziness, vomited and an ugly red rash appeared and spread on his right temple.

A couple of months later I came across an ad for hypnotism in the SF pulp. Again the same old theme. The crude drawing showed a strong-chinned man with rays streaming from his eyes fixing a girl meant by the artist to be pretty and subjugated. I sent the $1.75. Again I got stung. The seven-page booklet was full of anecdotes. The last three paragraphs dealt in general terms with operational techniques: magnetic passes, masterful gazes, soothing invitations to slumber.

I tried it on Harvey, both of us seated facing each other.

"You're feeling sleepy, sleeepee sleeepeee..."

I said that over and over again and woke up frightened in my chair I didn't know how much later. Harvey was still in his chair but now reading a popularization of the theory of relativity and taking notes. He wasn't paying any attention to me. I hammed it up. I got up goggle-eyed with my arms stuck out like a sleepwalker and barged into him. He ended up believing that it had all been an act. But it hadn't been and I was scared.

None of this involvement with applied science helped me at school. I was disastrously bad at math. Physics was a closed book to me. Even in chemistry I got no more than C+ because of the arithmetic involved in the reaction formulas. I longed for a scientific career but basically I didn't have a scientific bent of mind. I couldn't get beneath the surface of phenomena.

With me it was superficial aesthetic pleasure: those light-blue crackling sparks, the swaying pearl-necklaces of hydrogen bubbles arising from an electrode, the pulsing green glow of white phosphorus. I remember the bulb Harvey hooked up to the induction coil and the transfiguration of dull daylight minerals into glowing violet jewels. I wanted to see them that way over and over.

He humored me but what interested him was what underlay fluorescence: excited electrons, wavelength and amplitude, photons, Planck's constant. I never tired of the rings of Saturn, a self-sufficient midnight spectacle. Harvey didn't bother looking any more. He was beyond or rather beneath spectacle: into orbital mathematics, gravitation and centrifugal force, ultimate reality.

Harvey was a straight-A+ student except for English where he couldn't do better than a shameful B+. Even though he shone in grammar (he was great at anything structured) his compositions had no imagination and Shakespeare and George Eliot bored him. In math and sciences he was a genius.

For a while we were in the same math class. He witnessed my unending humiliation but the spin-off benefit for me was that I sat next to him and he would sometimes let me copy during tests. It depended on his mood.

Harvey's presence disrupted the class even though he never opened his mouth. He fascinated the teacher, an old German refugee stiff as a Prussian officer. It sometimes happened that Mr Weintraub deliberately stumped us with an impossibly advanced problem and invited Harvey to the board.

"No," he would say, "no," as Harvey began the calculation in what must have been an unorthodox way and at some point the "noes" would stop and then a dubious "yeess" would begin and then become a dogmatic excited "yes!"

At the end of a few weeks Harvey disappeared from our class, a blow because now I had to confront tests on my own. He was promoted in fast motion to junior and then senior science and math classes and soon left the students there far behind. He could have graduated from high school at fifteen but they reined him back and he got his diploma only at sixteen. He went to CCNY with the other prodigies.

By this time we'd begun to drift apart. The bond of science had loosened.

We didn't move in the same circuit, he once said when I delivered his order of technical books at half price.

I remember one of the last of our astronomical sessions. There was a winter sky above us snapping with stars. We were studying Jupiter with the Newton and at about midnight Rachel joined us. I invited her to view one of Jupiter's mythological love-partners, Io or maybe it was Europa. Harvey stood apart watching me adjusting the ocular for her. I wanted to tell her, confidentially, that I was going to show her the heavens.

"Jetzt ich zeige dich der Sternen," I say in my awful German.

"Jetzt zeig' ich dir die Sterne," she corrects automatically. She breathes O when she looks. I credit myself with indirect authorship of that little spontaneous cry, so unlike her. She doesn't retreat from the clandestine growing proximity of my body to hers because she's millions of miles away in outer space.

That must have been the winter of 1943, Harvey's second year in college. I was still desperately trying to graduate high school. It was in the summer of the year before that Rachel Rosen had come over to live with the Morgensterns. The families were vaguely related on his father's side.

She was from Vienna originally and in 1938 she and her parents got out in time and took up residence in France, then she was sent to Lisbon in 1940 in time and then later to the States. Her parents were caught in France and eventually went up in smoke. They must have got last-minute consolation at the thought that their beloved daughter had been spared the same fate. It goes to show you.

She was nineteen at the end but looked younger. She had a cat called Mitzi, a photograph of her parents, a mathematics textbook her father had written and two dolls which she placed against her pillow.

I'll stop there. I won't let myself get caught this time as I almost did a while ago with the junk-heap and the Polacks. I have to go faster. You can't linger. I've learned that time past is like quicksand. If you run fast over it you're safe. But if you linger it starts eating you, foot, ankle and calf. You get sucked under. It fills your mouth and then your lungs. Then you're quicksand yourself and if somebody thinks of you in the special way Harvey and I did, much later, about our dead then I guess you suck them down too the way you were sucked down. It's something like vampires or zombies.

***

Three

Not much else but at least the hill that gave its name to the town was still there. Also on top of it the Methodist church and its huddle of illegible stones. From there you had a good view of Harvey's neighborhood and what had happened to it. It used to be a scattering of old-fashioned frame houses standing at their ease on big lots full of clutter and billowing wash. There'd been empty lots everywhere, fields almost, where you could catch grasshoppers in the tall grass and butterflies off the golden-rod in fall despite all the empty bottles and oilcans. In summer the overall impression you got was of shabby green space.

I hadn't seen it for thirty years. We'd moved to Brooklyn shortly after the fire. There was no connection. My father had found work there. My mother went on visiting the Morgensterns but I'd never returned to Forest Hill except once, nine years after the fire, and that had turned out to be a bad mistake.

I had trouble picturing the way Forest Hill had been. Bulldozing years had reshaped the town into a chaotic geometry of housing developments and a big shiny shopping center. There was no more shantytown on the other side of the tracks. As a matter of fact there were no more tracks. I wasn't assailed by waves of nostalgia for the butterflies on the golden-rod and what went with it. I'd foolishly decided to walk to Harvey's house the long way round because of the nice September afternoon. By the time I got to the top of the hill for the view, lugging the flight bag, my brand-new English shoes were killing me.

So I didn't have metaphysical thoughts. You can say, as Harvey was going to say endlessly, that the past is as real as the present, but not with new English shoes on your feet it isn't. Acuity of suffering is the vast superiority of the present over the past.

I got lost in the grids of new streets named after national heroes and lined with adolescent trees garroted to stakes. I judged it to be a housing development for the $30,000-$40,000 salary-bracket. Finally I asked a pot-bellied bald man standing in the middle of the sidewalk setting his watch with an outthrust lower lip. His eyes shot up at me from the dial.

"Three Wilson Road? And how I know where it is. Everybody here knows where the Morgenstern place is. You a friend of his?"

"I wouldn't exactly say a friend."

I played it carefully because of his tone of voice. It was no lie either, no shameful disavowal as to the hard-fisted Polack kid long ago in the time of the tracks.

"Turn left there. Keep heading for the big pylon. You can see that crazy pylon of his ten miles away. With the noise either you can't miss it. He's got the police in his pocket. Morgenstern. Watch out for the woman."

I was halfway down the street when he yelled:

"Hey, tell him I still get TV interference and it better stop. Tell him Lawson told you to tell him. You can bet he knows who I am. It better stop."

The pylon was a good guide all right. So was the noise after a while. It sounded like a giant defective organ playing a duo in the deepest registers with a revved-up racing-car. It wasn't a suburban sound.

I hardly recognized the house when I got there. It had been practically new the last and only time I'd seen it, thirty years before, a big white frame house. Harvey's father was in the lumber business. He'd started building it before what happened to the old house. Otherwise it would have been brick.

It stood exactly where our science shack had stood. I summoned up the shack dimly and also dimly the house (the second one) as it had been, two successive time-strata.

Now the house as it was in this time-stratum emerged out of a sea of weeds, once a big lawn and flower garden. It stood in partial gloom that sunny September afternoon.

The "memory-tree" as Mrs Morgenstern had called it, some kind of elm, had been planted too close to the house and now shaded half of it. It was lopsided from the amputation of house-side branches. A tall ladder shrouded in bindweed to the top rung leaned against it. A rusty saw lay in nettles nearby. She said they'd planted the tree the fall following the fire. That made it almost forty years old now.

The house had aged very badly. The paint was peeling like a skin-disease. There were rusty dribbles down the wall beneath the gutters. They must have been clogged with leaves from that tree. Most of the faded shutters were closed and some were cockeyed. The few windowpanes you could see were grimy.

Normally neighborliness is an obligatory suburban virtue. If there's a separation between lots it's something symbolic, apologetic almost, like knee-high shrubs. There was nothing symbolic about what separated Harvey's house from his neighbors. Strands of barbed wire topped the high hurricane fence. The effect was unintentionally softened by the white bellflowers of bindweed that had twined almost up to the barbed wire. They half-covered the warnings: "Keep out!" "Private Property!"

That was the back of the house. I limped to the front. The noise worsened. The front-gate was just more hurricane-fence but framed and on hinges with another warning sign. It looked like the entrance to a military base. The gate was shut. There was a big brass padlock. Through the meshes of the fence I saw the vestiges of Mrs Morgenstern's big flower garden. Everything was weeds now except for a minimum patch of lawn next to the front door.

A gigantic woman of about forty was mowing it. She was wearing jeans and an overflowing unstrapped bra. She had beefy red sweating shoulders and a mean face. She was doing a sloppy zig-zaggy job. On a plastic table stood five uncapped beer bottles.

A thin washed-out blonde crouched behind the hurricane fence on the lot where the old Morgenstern house had once stood. Behind her was a big two-story house with a sheet-iron Disney deer and a white bench on an impeccable lawn. I tried to visualize the old burned-down house, the Morgenstern's first house. The blonde's house, built on its blackened foundations, kept it under.

The blonde was gripping the meshes with one hand like a prisoner. In the other hand she was holding a bag of tulip-bulbs. Veins stood out in her neck as she tried to compete against the racket. The giant beefy woman in the bra couldn't help seeing her but pretended she wasn't there. She was giving me the same treatment even though I was crying too, for her to let me in. At least I wasn't crying tears as the blonde was doing. The woman reached the end of the lawn. She wrenched the mower about and turned her back to me and to the blonde. She started a new swathe.

The big brass padlock wasn't snapped shut. I pushed the gate open and limped into the high grass, avoiding molehills and empty beer-bottles. I stood in front of her, in the path of the roaring machine, smiling politely.

She kept on coming. Maybe she would have stopped at the last moment but I wasn't taking any chances. I jumped aside like a matador in a suit of light and administrated the estoque by bending down, spry for my age, and switching the mower off. There was partial relief to my eardrums. But the deep organ sounds coming from the house kept up and now the woman pitched in.

"Are you crazy or something?"

It was a surprisingly lightweight voice for the bulk and vehemence that produced it. It was the voice I'd heard on the phone the day before.

"Who the hell are you? Who let you in? What did you stop the mower for?" Now she passionately addressed invisible witnesses, a trick of hers I was to get to know. "Is he crazy or something?"

I almost told her I hadn't felt like buying new hand-stitched Churches and maybe a foot-prosthesis. I played the cold dignity gambit instead. "Mr Morgenstern is expecting me. My name is Professor Weizman."

She wasn't impressed. She made me show her my driver's license and had the gall to say suspiciously that she didn't see "Professor" in front of my name. Then she turned around and went into the house.

"You were very brave," said the faded blonde through the meshes. "I thought she was going to mutilate you. She's crazy." She wiped her eyes with a lacy blue handkerchief. She had great vulnerable wet blue eyes. A strand of blonde-gray hair was plastered to her forehead. She was anywhere between thirty-five and fifty.

"I shouldn't cry like that," she said. "I shouldn't give her that satisfaction. But I'm just not accustomed to abuse. And I can't bear the noise. I think all this noise is deliberate. He tells her to do it. He knows about my nerves. I shouldn't tell people about it. He's trying to drive me away."

"Why would he want to do that?"

"He's been trying to buy my house for years now. I used to get an offer every week practically. It's crazy. If he wants to live in a nice house why doesn't he fix up the one he's got? Look at those shutters. And, gosh, the garden. What wouldn't I do with that garden? They say it's a pig-sty inside." She clapped her hand to her mouth. "Oh I'm sorry! You're a friend of his, maybe?"

"Not exactly," I said.

So for the second time that day I denied him. Would there be a third time? Did they have cocks (roosters) in these suburbs? She moistened her lips with a shy pink tip of the tongue.

"Sir, do you mind if I ask? I couldn't help hearing. What are you a Professor of?"

I told her that I professed English Literature. Predictably, she looked impressed. She said she loved literature and started asking me which poets I particularly recommended when the woman came back and growled:

"He's still down in the cellar. He's always down in the cellar. Says he can't come up. He never comes up. Says you should come on down."

She went back to the mower and yanked the starter-cord. The blonde started to protest. She turned up the machine full blast and shoved it past me. My legs were bombarded with bits of twigs and beer-caps.

The vestibule was crammed with heavy coils of wire, pipes, sacks of cement, salvaged switch-panels, gauges and electronic components. The chaos went on in the living room but wasn't as visible because of the half-closed shutters and the dirty panes that strangled the little light the tree let through. The wallpaper had big blisters. The ceiling was cracked. Newspapers and magazines were scattered over the carpet. It was worn and stained. On a table were more newspapers and a dish with Rice Krispies stuck to the sides and a spoon. A woman's blouse had been flung across a lumpish armchair in front of a giant new TV.

I advanced in the gloom of the corridor toward the sound which, that close, was less a sound than violent vibrations in your bones.

It stopped suddenly. The cellar door was open.

"Harvey?"

"Jerry? That you, Jerry?" His voice was a hoarse whisper but stronger than on the phone. "Just in time, pal. Don't turn. The light on. Come on down. You don't want to miss this. Show you something. In six-and-a-half minutes. Something you won't forget."

As Harvey called me down into that reddish gloom I remembered how he'd done it thirty-odd years before in a younger less pathological voice. But I didn't make the full connection, didn't imagine that what he wanted to show me now, after all that time, could be the same thing as then.

I was twenty-eight and teaching in a fraudulent private school for juvenile actors in Los Angeles when my aunt on my mother's side died. When I thought of goodness I thought of Aunt Ruth and at the time was still young enough to wonder how the world, so radically lessened, could go on. I couldn't help going to Forest Hill for the funeral.

Sure enough, Harvey's mother was there. I hadn't seen her for years. When our eyes met, the diffused guilt I always feel at funerals (as though survival were an act of callousness on my part) focused sharply. But she gathered me in her arms. She was a woman of easy but authentic tears.

Her mind was a memorious cemetery. She wept quietly for Aunt Ruth, for my mother. Also for Rachel of course but with an expression of mixed grief, bewilderment and hurt. Hurt for what Rachel had done, naturally. But maybe also hurt for what I'd been obliged to say I hadn't done. Wasn't that the real cause of my sharply focused guilt?

I couldn't avoid recalling her weeping outburst over the phone a week after the fire when she made me confirm that no, I hadn't come over that evening to see Rachel as she (Mrs Morgenstern) had begged me to do during their absence. I forget the excuse I invented. I couldn't think straight. Oh Jerry, you promised. We'd never have left her by herself. I thought you liked her so much. Etc. Etc.

But now, nine years later, she insisted I come back home for dinner. She said: "You and Harvey were such great friends. Harvey would be so sorry to have missed you. You haven't seen each other for ages. Morris'll be so happy too."

She was another one of those women who always get situations and relationships wrong but in the generous direction.

She must have guessed what I was thinking (Aunt Ruth used to bake custard for him) because she said Harvey couldn't take an afternoon off for whatever reason. He was working for the Government. She darted quick glances right and left and lowered her voice to a whisper: on a top-secret scientific project, she couldn't tell me what it was about. From her tone, I guessed that "I can't tell you" wasn't a confession of ignorance but meant that she was in on the secret but bound to silence like her son.

"Besides, you remember how Harvey is about funerals. He didn't even go to poor Rachel's."

Here the tears and the look of bewilderment and hurt came again, but also uneasiness. She must have remembered that I hadn't gone to her funeral either. Did that remind her of the other confessed omission?

"How is the new house?" I asked to take the pressure off both of us.

"Oh, it's not so new anymore. Time passes so fast."

That was true. Already at twenty-eight time was accelerating for me.

Thinking of Harvey and his father I tried to resist her invitation. She lured me with strawberry shortcake as though I were still twelve. If I finally accepted I told myself it was more for the pleasure she would get baking it for me than for the pleasure I would get eating it. Nice middle-aged women disarmed me even then. My mother had been her best friend.

Wasn't there something else? By accepting wasn't I confirming absolution? I saw it in those theological terms even though I knew that she saw that long-ago thing as a fault of omission rather than some unforgivable sin of commission. Even then I was known to be a person of omissions, not commissions.

Anyhow, my return flight was the next day. I'd save money on a hotel and restaurant.

The lot next to their not-so-new new house was the first thing you noticed. Nine years after the fire there was still that vestigial cellar with the blackened walls. (The blonde's house was in the future.) There was something shamelessly public about it. It wasn't like discreetly keeping up a room in memory. It was true none of the rooms had survived to be kept up.

Why did Mr Morgenstern keep up that eyesore and what other sore? He'd been crazy about her. I remember thinking: whatever you believe at the start and maybe even a year or two (or three) after, new involvements end by getting the better of grief. Not selling the lot must have represented a big financial sacrifice as well.

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?"

"Hanna. Doesn't like the neighbors. To talk. So I'm uncle. Think she's ashamed. Age-difference. Not exactly May and December affair, though. I'm December all right. Thirty-first of December. Five to midnight. But she's closer to August. Than to May. Don't know why it still bothers her. We don't do it. Anymore. I don't, anyhow. She probably does. Right and left. Pretty good at it. As I remember. Feel free. If you still can. She does the housework. And the cooking. Drives me. To the hospital. For the treatment. Lugs the equipment. See the shoulders on her? Tits to match. Also she keeps people. Away."

"She's pretty good at that too. She doesn't seem to be all that great at housekeeping, though."

"I'm not obsessive. About tidiness. Other things to do."

He grabbed my shoulder.

"Look. It's coming. Look hard. This you won't forget."

I stared at the screen. It stayed dark in the darkness. Then there were a few preliminary diagonal light-streaks like shooting stars. I waited for the thing to begin.

"You're lucky," he croaked. "It's never been. This good before."

"Oh yes," I said. I ventured: "Atomic particles?"

"What?"

"Mesons? Dixons?"

"What are you. Talking about?"

"Those streaks, like shooting-stars. Gluons, maybe?"

"Interference. Their goddam TVs in the middle. Of the goddam afternoon. The housewives here. When they aren't getting screwed. On the sly. Spend the whole afternoon looking at. Beverly Hills serials. That was interference you saw."

"What was it interfering with?"

"With ten years ago. Or twenty. Can't tell. Can't pinpoint yet. Working on it. Right now what you're looking at. On that screen. Is at least ten years ago."

The trouble was I couldn't see anything on the screen now that the interference had stopped. As a matter of fact I couldn't even see the screen. I vaguely made out the housing unit but the screen itself was as dark as the darkness that surrounded us. I told him this.

He said in his mutilated delivery that it wasn't the same darkness. The darkness we were in was contemporary darkness but the darkness on the screen was the darkness of the cellar years ago. He'd learned to tell the difference. The dials confirmed it anyhow.

First of all I had to understand that he had tremendously increased the temporal range of the machine. He had gone far beyond the fraction of a second's recuperation of the dying mouse I'd witnessed long ago. Of course he'd prefer something more spectacular than old darkness but that had to do with the spatial stricture. The machine captured only events in a radius of a few yards. Very little had been going on in this part of the cellar except darkness. His old lab had been in a corner and walled off. Maybe once a week his father used to come down to check the heating unit. The machine had never captured that moment so far.

Navigation was a big problem. Recent events were really hard to pinpoint. About two months ago for two seconds on the screen he saw himself looking at the same screen. He was wearing the wig (had I noticed he was wearing a wig?) so that meant it was less than a year ago. The treatment had started a year ago, the necessity for a wig two months later. It had been a beautiful clear image.

But the really exciting exception to old darkness wasn't that. Last week, he said, he'd seen me on the bike pedaling for the Static Electricity Machine. Did I remember the Static Electricity Machine? It was pure luck, a quirk almost. The machine (this one here) was situated exactly on the site of the shack, but deeper of course. Vertical differential was normally a barrier to reception. For example he'd never been able to recuperate Momma up on the ground floor. But I had come through, he said, more or less. The image was so bad he hadn't been able to make out my face. The further back you went the dimmer the image got, got very, very dim, flickering and distorted.

But it could only have been me. I was the one who always pedaled. That's what had given him the idea of contacting me.

From the top of the stairs the woman banged twice on the door. It sounded as if her fist would splinter through. She yelled that the mail had come. She needed him. There was a letter from the bank.

That made me think of the $1,000 check he'd sent me. Again I wondered if there was anything behind it. By now I was certain he was crazy. It's a well-known fact that cellars all over the country are full of nuts slaving over utopian contraptions like perpetual-motion machines and water-fueled engines. These were less wacky than a time machine. But he had even more reason than the rest of us to be crazy, to want to reverse the flow of time.

He pressed a button and the red lights came back on. We slowly climbed up out of the cellar. As we left a mechanism whirred and the red lights went out and the cellar was black beneath us.

***

Four

When we came into the living room the gigantic woman was making room on the table, shoving the newspapers to one side. She had her blouse on but hadn't bothered buttoning it. The TV was roaring with canned laughter at a sit-com. I was about to ask where the phone was when Harvey croaked that I should sit down. I could hardly make him out. I went over and switched the sound off the sit-com. I got a murderous look from her. It must have reminded her of what I'd done to the lawn mower. I pushed a rumpled stocking off a chair and sat down. She opened a loose-leaf notebook and stared down at it and then at the bank-statement.

"It's like I said. We lost more than five thousand on Bell South last month. I told you we should've gotten rid of it. How many times did I tell you that?" To the invisible witnesses: "How many times did I tell him that?"

"Hanna. Takes care of the investments," Harvey said to me, ignoring her. "Consultative voice. Normal. Gets it all. When I croak. Don't mean the way I'm croaking now. Mean the big croak. That puts an end. To this kind of croaking. Gets it if she's a good girl. And behaves properly. To our guest."

She looked at me murderously again. Harvey asked me if I wanted to see what Hanna got if she behaved.

He showed me the monthly statement, black on white from NationsBank. A little over $300,000 in US Government bonds. About $400,000 in a Prime Money Market account. Practically $500,000 in blue chips: AT&T, Bell South, Exxon, IBM, etc. A stab of envy. I wondered where it came from. His parents had been of modest means.

He was a millionaire in a pigsty. I felt relief for that $1,000 check of his but still wanted to get to the phone.

She went on with the position of the securities one by one. He didn't answer. He sat motionless. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be asleep or dead. I got up and went outside into the mowed part of the garden. The heat and sunshine and the smell of the cut grass were pleasant.

The blonde was still there but on her knees now, planting tulip-bulbs in the long flowerbed that ran the length of the hurricane-fence. We chatted through it about flowers and authors as she made holes. Her hand-tool made a hole in a single movement. Pop went the tulip-bulb into the hole and was given a deft burial. Then she repeated the operation. With her head bent down to the flowerbed her face had color and when she smiled she lost about ten years. With certain movements her modestly unbuttoned blouse fell away from her body and at that angle you could see small sharp-pointed breasts. Her bent-forward position gave them deceptive youth and firmness. Kneeling like that in the flowerbed was the best position for her.

Just to say something I said she wasn't like some women, afraid of getting their hands dirty. Overreacting to the remark, she said she could garden all her life and after life too. If heaven was the Garden of Eden she wouldn't ask for wings or a harp but a spade and a rake. If that's where she was going, she said.

She paused. Her mind must have been making opposite associations because then she spoke about how she'd once transplanted a climbing rose to the fence, her side. She thought she could on her side. Just as it was about to bloom, yellow-pink flowers with "heavenly fragrance," Sutter's Gold it was called, that terrible woman clipped it at the base saying she had no right to plant anything against their fence. And apparently that was true. She hadn't been able to sleep a wink that night, she said. It was silly weeping over a rose-plant.

When she got up, clapping the dirt off her hands, the color drained out of her face. Time and gravity took charge of her breasts. She asked more questions about poets. Keats and Shelley led to her son who used to write such beautiful poems. That was before a certain problem. Since the problem he didn't write any more. If somebody who knew – an expert, not just his mother – could tell him how good his poems were maybe he'd want to go back to writing and that would help with the problem. She got confused with her explanations and what she didn't want to explain. Finally her tongue moistened her lips nervously and she said:

"Maybe you wouldn't mind just glancing at some of his poems, Professor? I could show them to you tomorrow afternoon."

Springing the outrageous request on such short acquaintanceship she caught me off balance. Instead of summoning up a mysterious wounded expression and answering as I always did in such circumstances, "I can't, simply can't, please don't ask me why," I felt safe enough to reply that I'd have loved to read his poems but was leaving the next day, first thing in the morning. I invented an excuse for returning to the house before she had the idea of showing me the poems on the spot.

I found his phone in the corridor. It was an early flight but not early enough for me.

I returned to the living room. They were still at it there. She was assessing General Electric. "What time do you folks eat around here?" I asked in a pause. It was nearly seven. I'd had an early sandwich for lunch. "The refrigerator's in the kitchen," she said and returned to GE. Harvey added that mealtimes were very flexible. I didn't have to worry about formality here. You ate when you were hungry. The refrigerator was always full of food. Himself, he ate down in the cellar.

I went into the grubby kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes. I opened the refrigerator. The cold didn't keep down the moldy smell. There were unidentifiable bits of meat dried to greenish leather, layers of thawed pizzas, soup-plates heaped high with noodles. Just breathing through the nostrils and looking at what the refrigerator held solved the hunger problem on a short-time basis. Then I practically bolted out of the kitchen. I'd finally noticed the roaches on the floor, the walls, on top of the refrigerator. They were holding a national convention on the dirty dishes in the sink. I'd rather face a Bengal tiger than a cockroach.

Later Harvey took me up to his old bedroom. It was mine now, he said. He slept down in the cellar on a cot. He looked at his watch and went down to his machine. I'd forgotten to tell him I wouldn't be staying. I'd leave him a note.

The bedroom looked as if it hadn't been lived in for years. There was dust everywhere and a big spider on the floor. At least it was dead, probably from asphyxiation. I tried to open the window. It was stuck. Struggling with it I saw the picture window in the neighboring living room and the blonde sprinkling something into a goldfish bowl. She was talking, either to someone I couldn't see or to the goldfish. I gave up on the window and examined the bedding very carefully before I committed myself. The sheets were clammy but uninhabited.

A banging noise woke me up. In the darkness I didn't know where or when I was and turned around to Mary and embraced emptiness. I caught up on time and remembered Mary wasn't associated with bed anymore but with alimony, retroactive bed-toll. Someone was banging feebly on the door then pushed it open and stepped inside. Light blinded me.

I struggled to a seated position. Harvey was panting from the flights of stairs. His voice was terrible. He told me to hurry down into the cellar, never mind about dressing. It was a breakthrough, I made out. I remembered what I'd seen or rather hadn't seen on the screen.

"Let me sleep," I mumbled. "Go back to bed." I retreated beneath the sheet head and all. He brought out:

"Who has time? To sleep? It's got me. By the balls. By the throat."

He nagged at me, we were wasting time, I had to get up and go down to the cellar. When I didn't answer he finally said that was what I was there for, to help him. It was part of the contract, he said. I sat up at this and told him I had signed no contract. I'd come here on a trial basis and, sorry, I'd decided not to buy. I was leaving first thing tomorrow morning.

I peered at my watch. It was already first thing in the morning. There was a little light in the sky, what you could see of the sky through the dirty panes and the branches of that badly planted elm.

I wasn't tired any more. I got out of bed and started dressing. I decided to skip the morning toilet. I would walk back to the terminal.

"You can't. Go. You can't. Leave me."

"I've got this thing about roaches," I said, buttoning my shirt.

"For Christ's sake. Roaches. Hanna'll pick up. Roach-powder tomorrow."

"They'll come back. They like dirt. I don't. And I don't like frozen pizza. I can't stand disorder either, it's too biographical. And I don't like Hanna. She murders climbing roses." I tied my shoelaces.

His voice went suddenly in the middle of his pleading. He took out a spiral notebook and a pencil. He always carried them about. He started scribbling and showed me:

You'd better hurry if you want to hear this.

Hear? I thought it was see. I shook my head and stuffed the pajamas into the flight bag. He scribbled:

Listen, I said $500 a week in the letter. Let's make it $700.

"It's not the money, Harvey." His pencil whispered.

One thousand dollars then. That's double.

I stepped into my trousers, zipped up and fastened the belt. After a while he handed me another sheet of paper:

Listen. Stay with me a little and you'll inherit. Twenty-five percent. That's $290,000, less the federal and state cut: say $200,000, all yours. No joke. Soon. Only don't talk to Hanna about it. Stay.

I asked him how I could possibly help him. I knew nothing about whatever it was he was working on. He had Hanna. She had bigger muscles than I did.

He scribbled away.

Hanna doesn't give a shit about my work. She doesn't believe in it. You do. Or you will when you come down into the cellar. She's too young to recognize the voices.

"What voices?" I asked. He wrote:

The voices I'm pulling in, for God's sake, I've been telling you. The voices I want you to hear down in the cellar.

So to humor him I followed him into the cellar. I had the flight bag for a quick get-away.

We went down the cellar steps into reddish light and a fierce crackling like a bonfire. It was the red bulbs and a steady blast of static from a loudspeaker with maybe a voice going on beneath the static.

He sat down at the console and made me sit opposite him. He reached and pulled me over the console so that my face was inches from his mouth. He could produce the faintest of whispers. That along with the movements of his lips allowed me to surmise:

"The shadow."

"The shadow?"

With his wasted face and what his breath communicated I mentally completed: "In the shadow of the valley of death." But his lips and that faint whisper cooperated to put together something bizarre and familiar: "The tree of crime bears bitter fruit." And now his face became sardonic and he must have intended laughter. It came out as a succession of feeble wheezes.

He bent over the console, interrogated dials, stabbed buttons and coaxed knobs: the rigmarole of what he called "sequencing." I smiled tolerantly and was prepared to go when things began to emerge beneath the sea of static: snatches of corny swing, an impersonal news broadcaster voice: "...ench Premier Daladier and British Prime Minister Chamberlain in a dramatic last-minute..." and I knew what and when that was.

Now it was more brassy swing and suddenly the other thing came back in my mind. The shadow. Not the shadow but The Shadow, pitiless upholder of justice, terror of law-breakers, 6:30 pm Wednesdays, was it? And what station? Wasn't it WOR? And with The Shadow came my once best friend Charley Schulz, out of mind for half a century, in a summer lot playing The Shadow and me the Italian gangster and Charley laughing sardonically and reciting the business about the tree and the fruit.

He or it – was it Harvey or his machine behind the lead-armored wall? – was ranging over wavelength and time. The time-leap was now from late 1938 to late l941 or maybe early 1942, from Munich to the distorted but unmistakable song: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, so immediate post-Pearl Harbor. But wasn't it all – Tommy Dorsey, Munich, the serial, the bellicose song – a contemporary broadcast indulging in nostalgia, a safe return to the past via a montage of old radio programs?

This is how disbelief broke down, at 6:47 am. Broke down for no good reason. What emerged could still have been an element of a montage. Maybe I wanted to believe.

There was more violent static and beneath it, hardly audible, a jaunty heavy-beat song with debris floating up on the surface of the static: "spot" "lot" "much". Disbelief broke down as, like paleontologists with fragments of bones, we recreated it, two old men in a cellar, at least one of them with tears in his eyes, adding their own quaver (his a pathological whisper) to the old voices:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot

Twelve (ten) full ounces

That's a lot

Twice as much for a nickel too

Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you

"Remember?" he croaked. Croaking myself from emotion I said of course I remembered. Why those tears? We got up and did a kind of dance all the while chanting it, yes, Harvey too. It acted like some potent incantation bringing back his voice a little, this tiny victory over time stymieing the crab for a little while. I stumbled over the flight bag and kicked it out of the way. Why did I do that? And why those tears at a soda-pop jingle as at the Credo of the Bach B Minor?

"Twelve full ounces," I corrected. His memory was really bad. He shook his head and held up both hands with all the fingers spread apart. We sang it over and over even after the jingle had made way for a moving commercial (house-moving but moving too in the other sense): the comically threatening cavernous voice: "Don't make a move! – without calling Lincoln!!"

Exhausted we finally collapsed on his cot and let the waves of varying lengths, the voices and the years cover us. The reception improved.

We heard (reheard) the vibrant potent male voice inquiring, ostensibly about Manichevitz Wine, "Do you like it?" and the whispered woman's voice: "I love it," and marveled at what they'd been able to smuggle into commercials in those up-tight years.

We heard a voice saying "thirty-nine" repeatedly and getting studio-laughter for it, then sour fiddle-music and knew it was Jack Benny, (born Benjamin Kubelsky 1894-1974) lying about his age, for a decade holding on to his late thirties, minting the slow tragedy into golden laughs as a poor consolation and I pulled out of oblivion Sunday evenings listening and laughing with my mother and father and recovered a Sunday dinner down to the dessert: red apple-sauce with heavy cream. My nostrils were filled with the pungency of the cinnamon and cloves in it.

We pulled in the acid nasal voice of Fred Allen (born John Florence Sullivan 1894-1956) and the singsong Russian-Yiddish voice of the woman, what was her name? Neither of us could recall her name but I recalled the exact pattern of the carpet I used to lie on belly-down, listening to her and the others.

We heard the organ prelude to a soap opera called "Young Widow Brown," the commercial and the first minute of the episode. Her son had just come down with polio. The doctor, with a resonant actor's voice, expressed hope for him and clear interest in the mother. I pictured them as I'd seen them, my mother's friends, devastated by afternoon boredom, housewives beyond adultery, listening, staring sightless at their shabby living room walls. I felt like weeping again despite the poor materials my country afforded for nostalgia.

Now Teddy the Poet murmuring verse in the most outrageously faggish of voices to camp twirls of his organ (the musical instrument). It chuckled slyly in glissandos at his coy jests. Those same housewives marooned in the slow afternoons used to eat him alive.

We stayed there the rest of the morning. At each voice he exclaimed, "I remember!" and asked, "Remember?" and when I hesitated it became a command: "Remember!" Once he said that it all came back, just that little bit was enough and everything else came back.

It was true. Those familiar distorted voices recreated lost worlds. It was like the old experiment in the shack. The water stood clear in the glass. You added the tiniest of crystals. Suddenly the clear water revealed what it had been holding in invisible supersaturated solution and you had a glassful of crystals like diamonds, millions of them. I couldn't (and mustn't) begin to enumerate all the scenes, experiences, objects and people, dead now but alive again for a moment in my mind, all the days and years that crystallized out at the prompting of those tinny voices.

The familiar forgotten voice which came in at about 11:00 am interrupted a blubbering confession. "We do not use such language on the air," said the cold, precise contemptuous voice and that was Mr Anthony and his Court of Human Relations.

What was the language the other had used? I wondered now as I had so often in the past. In the late thirties terms forbidden in print were aired all over the Eastern Seaboard. The celebrated Anthony voice summed up the scandalized horror attributed to 53,000,000 potential listeners and allowed him to get away with it. His reaction was so contemptuous of the blubbering turd that one couldn't help feeling sorry for the offender. External censorship would have fallen far short of what that intergalactically frigid voice had expressed. How could the censor be censored? As for the offender, he would never appear again, dispatched with Mr Anthony's implacable: "Leave this woman. Return to your lawful spouse and your five children, etc." And the poor shit would blubber: "Thank you Mr Anthony." But there had been no forgiveness.

And now the floodgates of memory opened wide, a vast flood of corn-syrup threatening to engulf me and I saw them all, snatched back from the jaws of death, see them all, the (adult) members of the family gathered about the picturesque dome-shaped scrolled radio with the yellowed celluloid tuning screen.

My mother is eagerly bent forward toward the radio. "What did he say, what did he say, Victor?" My father, one eye on me sitting in a far armchair to which I have been banished, pretending to read, straining my ears, is whispering the thing to my mother.

I can hear my mother's scandalized joyous throat-sound. It's more real than these cellar walls, than the sound of the rats.

I have to get out of it.

The last thing we heard before it suddenly faded was Red Barber's soft gentlemanlike southern voice covering a lost game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Two balls two strikes on Dolph Camilli, .284, the Dodger's first baseman and sole slugger. He struck out.

Harvey, sitting next to me on the cot, touched my shoulder. He tried to say something to me. Was he crying? Could he cry? His voice was a croak. The healing effect of the Pepsi-Cola potion had worn off. Again he had to write. I couldn't talk myself although what was choking me was nothing malignant, I foolishly thought at the time.

Red Barber went on, suddenly in another inning, with a neat double-play, then a line-drive to center-field and Pete Reiser's leaping catch, back against the wall. Harvey scrawled away feverishly in big hurried characters, forward-slanting as though pursued. He ripped out page after page from the spiral notebook and thrust them at me with one hand while with the other he went on scrawling on the new sheet. His wig was askew. Half of his naked skull gleamed red as though he'd been scalped.

He wrote in a semi-burlesque style, maybe to keep the emotion under control, that if he were superstitious he'd think it was the hand of God. My image pedaling away in the shack had appeared to him one night like the Virgin at Fatima. He made a feeble obscene joke about my long-standing non-virginity. Then a week later I had come again, this time in the flesh and lo voices came out of the past and in the same night as the voices he'd understood in a flash why I had been pulled in on the bike despite the vertical spatial differential.

What the machine had done as a quirk it could be made to do at will. It had been frustrating, I had no idea, being limited to the cellar. He was condemned to viewing old darkness while life was going on on the floor above. Momma was up there baking for him, moving about, cleaning and waxing. (Reading this I imagined her ghostly form, in a red bandanna and wielding a dust-rag, superimposed on the contemporary mess, the cracks, the dirt, the stains, the roaches.)

But now he knew the way to give the machine vertical and maybe later horizontal freedom. Some of the images to recapture were upstairs in this house, but most of them were in the other house, the blonde's house, standing where the old house had stood. Wouldn't I like to see the other people who had lived in the old house? There had been his mother and father, younger, his uncle, his grandparents. There had been himself and myself, younger.

Wouldn't I like to see Rachel Rosen?

No, I said out loud as though he'd spoken not scrawled that crazy invitation. I forced my mind into emptiness and listened on for a while to the game with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirates evened up as Hank Greenberg connected and sent the ball into the center-field grandstands. Then there was a burst of static and Red Barber's voice faded. The static slowly faded too. Now the only sound was a painful snore coming alongside me on the cot where Harvey was sleeping.

When I pulled myself up out of the silent cellar it was almost two in the afternoon. I went past Hanna slouched in the armchair looking at TV. She was chewing a candy bar and drinking beer. I climbed the stairs to the bedroom, leaving behind me the vulgar contemporary TV voices. I pulled the curtains and collapsed on the bed.

Baseball was the thing that flashed on (or the thing that I allowed to flash on) in my built-in display monitor. It was all there, saved on my hard-drive. I marveled at the capacity of my hard-drive to restitute all that early junk. Actually it may have been a sign of debility, of the daily loss of gigabytes, as in A Space Odyssey where the hero removes memory-unit after memory-unit and the poor murderous super-computer HAL is finally reduced to babbling early things like "Mary had a little lamb."

The uniformed figures started coming back. His contraption was a primitive time machine of sorts, apparently. But the images they induced in my mind were a million times superior to the poor distorted ones his screen displayed, if I could believe his description of myself pedaling away for the Static Electricity Machine in a flickering blur. On my back, staring up at the mottled ceiling I was able to summon up weak-chinned Peewee Reese, shortstop, swarthy Harry Lavaghetto on third, of course slugger Dolph Camilli on first. Wasn't somebody chunky called Hodges on second base? Hadn't I got the Brooklyn infield in the early 1940s?

For hours I safely resurrected baseball. I couldn't fall asleep. Maybe my hard-drive was softening but I extracted lots of things from it tucked away for decades but saved and available like the line-up of the unbeatable St Louis Cardinals with their sluggers-row, the pansy Philadelphia Athletics, hitless wonders, guided by ancient Connie Mack, a gentlemen so a loser, into eighth place, year after year.

I even started salvaging a day in Ebbet's Field, good seats behind the catcher. Even a stain of mustard from the hotdog (HeissHund I say as a joke) on my scorecard which records St Louis' two homeruns in the third inning. Brooklyn going into the last inning has a string of goose eggs. Now I explain the fine points to her even though she doesn't know the basic rules of baseball. I see her politely intense look as I explain a double play. She must be bored, but like so much else, doesn't allow it to show.

I want to say I'll teach her baseball. "Ich werde dich Baseball lernen," I say in my atrocious German, learned practically for her sake. She thanks me politely, corrects the verb and adds, "Dear." Of course it's not the inconceivable English word. It's the indirect personal object dir instead of dich. But that intimate form of "you" is almost as good as "dear" even though it's no more than a corrective echo of my verbal intimacy with her in her unwanted language.

The crowd rises to its feet yelling. She rises with us. She's obediently trying to enjoy herself. Harvey ordered her to accept my invitation to Ebbet's Field. "Have a good time," he said to her and went back to his equations. She's doing her best. She's a docile girl and does what Harvey tells her to do.

***

Five

I flew back and wound up the little there was to be wound up. I paid Mrs Philips for the two months. She was sad to see me go but happy I'd found a much better teaching position. That's what I told her. I'd have had to cook up a different version for my ex-colleagues. They wouldn't have swallowed that. But I didn't intend notifying my ex-colleagues. I liked clean breaks.

I transferred my few personal belongings into the car. Mainly books, the hi-fi, the CDs and clothing, also the telescopic chinning-bar. I did it with a certain melancholy. It seemed to me that a man my age ought to have accumulated more than what could fit into a compact Ford. Shaking off the melancholy, I tested the tight squeeze of the hi-fi components. Each had been carefully wrapped in a blanket like a fragile baby. You couldn't find components of that quality on the market nowadays. They were my most precious possession. There was something melancholy in that thought too.

Just as I was going to get in the car and make a clean break Marianne came into sight.

"Leaving already?" she asked in a casual tone of voice.

There are situations where you can disguise an intended clean break as a round-the-corner errand, picking up a pack of cigarettes, for instance. Tens of thousands of men disappear that way every year. That's how the garden-crazy blonde's husband had vanished, according to Harvey. But you didn't pick up cigarettes at the wheel of a car crammed with all your worldly possessions.

Marianne acted very casually about the situation but I'd learned to discount that apparent nonchalance. When she was deeply discontented – not an uncommon condition – she never had outbursts but inbursts, far worse. Her accent was a little more apparent than usual. That was a symptom too.

"I dropped over to recover the book I loaned to you a few months ago," she said. "I was going to ask for it on Friday but you weren't there. I waited for an hour. I urgently need it."

"Oh God, Marianne, I completely forgot Friday!" She always came over at four on Friday afternoons and left at six or seven, more often seven than six. She'd been doing it for months and months. I hoped I looked aghast. "Something big came up at the last moment, a kind of emergency. Had to leave for New York on the spot. I'd have phoned to tell you not to come except we agreed I shouldn't ever phone."

"I thought you said you had forgotten because of that big thing. Be consistent at least. I know all about that big thing. I passed by this morning. You were out. Your landlady told me about your so-called new job. I thought she was going to cry, poor woman, to see you go. I need the book. Gilbert Durand, _Les structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire_."

It was somewhere in one of the cardboard boxes underneath the CDs, the valises and the hi-fi. I told her this and said I would mail it to her first thing on arriving. She insisted on having it immediately and expected me to empty the contents of the car on the sidewalk, exposing the hi-fi components to shock, all for a book she'd never read and had no intention of reading. I hadn't read it myself. Had anybody?

The conversation broadened. Soon we reached the point where I was saying that a woman of her age and charm and looks could do better than an old wreck like me, and it ended by my saying that it had been marvelous of course, but a terrible strain. Harry was a colleague, if not exactly a friend at least a very close acquaintance. That was the last thing to have said in such circumstances.

Expressionless, she said that hadn't bothered me for the past year. Old wreck? _Vieux salaud, oui_.

I knew what "vieux" meant, was less sure about "salaud" but could guess. Dirty water? Certainly nothing favorable. It was a bad sign when Marianne lapsed into French. I had learned that. She added that everybody knew the real reason for my so-called retirement.

I got into the car rapidly. As I pulled away I said: "I'll send it to you first thing, also a letter to explain things a little more in detail." It was no way to say adieu. I gave her a little wave and regretted it. Seen from her point of view, standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, things sort of snatched out from under her, it must have seemed nastily breezy. I hadn't meant it that way.

I felt terrible about it for half an hour. I would have felt even worse and for longer if the whole scene hadn't seemed a little unreal like everything else since I'd emerged from Harvey's cellar the day before. Her voice had seemed distant and distorted. So had Mrs Philips'. In my head I still heard the cellar voices. They seemed far more real. So did all the scenes they'd summoned up, more real than the buildings and crowds at the moment they appeared framed in the windshield of my car. Then they rushed by and dwindled in the mirror. They vanished into the permanence of the past.

I soon discovered that there were lots of strings attached to the job. Practically every week I tripped over new ones radiating out. After a while I began picturing those strings as a spider-web and it's easy to guess where and what I was in relation to it in my picture.

In the letter he'd promised me $500 a week, then in the night of the old voices $700 and finally $1,000. What I actually collected, in humiliating circumstances, was a measly $350. He assured me "the balance" (he didn't specify if the balance was $650 or $350 or just $150) would be regularly deposited in a special account in my name and in exactly a year's time I would get all the money.

It was only later that I began to wonder if getting the contents of that account wasn't contingent on my sticking it out with him in that decaying house for a year. Or at least till the predictable end which, in all sincerity, I can say I didn't wish for.

At the beginning I did very little at Harvey's to justify even the little money I was drawing. I found it hard to cope even with the elementary business of getting settled. I spent a good part of the first week flat on my back on the bed staring up at the dirty cracked ceiling. It was a screen for the images the radio voices had resurrected.

It was strange allowing myself to go back like that. I'd learned long ago to resist that indulgence. Indulgence in the sense of giving way to desire. In a religious sense indulgence also means remission of punishment. No punishment was involved in visiting the past. Not yet it wasn't. There was no loss of control, no feeling that you couldn't emerge from past things if you wanted to. I didn't really want to, as long as the things were early and harmless. The present was a cracked ceiling with nothing much better in the other rooms and in the streets outside.

It was a kind of pleasant paralysis. Then one day the memories stopped coming. I felt loss. That should have been the alarming part only I didn't realize it at the time. That suddenly blank ceiling was like the screen in long-ago Saturday popcorn matinees when the film broke in the projector. Except that now in my solitary movie-house I couldn't join in with the rest of them and jeer and whistle the images back.

So I was able to get up and throw myself into the present. I created islets of comparative cleanliness in the house. I scrubbed my bedroom and painted it. I managed to unjam the window. Like a teenager in his first room away from home I even scotched up Van Gogh beach scenes and seascapes. They provided better views than the window did. I sprinkled roach-powder in strategic spots. I screwed the chinning-bar in the bathroom doorframe and had the petty satisfaction one morning of seeing Hanna with a bruised forehead. It was worth the abuse I got.

It took me a whole day just to set up my hi-fi system and find the best positioning for the speakers. I spent as little time as possible in the house when Harvey didn't need me. I took my meals in town. Twice a week he gave me long lists of components and I would drive out to an electronics place in Long Island City in his old Volvo station wagon with Hanna brooding in the back seat. She was there for the muscle-work of loading and unloading. She didn't say a word to me. She wasn't talking to me and Harvey couldn't, most of the time.

He spent all his time in the cellar working over electronic devices he called "sensors." Under construction they looked, not surprisingly, like a cross between the inside of a TV set and a computer. Supposedly they would give his machine mobility and allow it to pull in more than ancient darkness and voices. I nodded gravely. I told myself I didn't believe for an instant that it was possible to summon up old images despite his exploit with the old radio-voices. Somehow I made a distinction between capturing images from the past and capturing old disincarnated voices. Didn't my own machine do that to Caruso and Chaliapine? My reasoning wasn't scientific.

The only constructive work I did in the cellar was a little soldering. He couldn't stand the acrid fumes. Mostly I deconstructed. I dismantled junked computers and TV sets and stocked the components in a vast stretch of labeled pigeonholes. There were hundreds of them. It looked like a giant honeycomb with metal larvae in the cells.

Clearing out the cellar mess was also part of my duties. Once a week I drove the Volvo to an industrial wasteland and watched Hanna hurl the bulky unburnable stuff onto a junk heap. Twice a week, rain or shine, Havey made me incinerate the inflammable stuff in the back yard near the pylon, probably to spite the neighbors. It made a lot of smoke. I was careful to choose times when the wind didn't blow it the blonde's way. Harvey always watched me as I kneeled before the heap of cardboard and wood scraps with a box of kitchen matches. "Good job," he would croak when it caught. It was the only praise I ever got from him.

Finally, I talked, vaguely, about the old days. Was expected to anyhow but not vaguely. It turned out to be an essential part of the job. I was his paid memory-booster. His memory was riddled with blanks, he said. He blamed the hospital people for it with their ray and chemical treatment. He made it sound as though they were plotting against his brain instead of trying to cure him. He explained that he'd be exploring those old days with the machine eventually and badly needed guidance. He spoke about sightings, agonic lines, spatio-temporal bearings, I don't know what else.

When I said I didn't understand he explained that my memories would simplify the task of navigation once the machine became fully operational. He had to know roughly when and where and who.

I answered his questions, more or less, as long as they were limited to the shack days. When he tried to go beyond them I found ways out. I said I couldn't work and talk at the same time. I was putting the components in the wrong pigeonholes. He told me to stop pigeonholing and to go on talking. So then I had to say, "I don't remember," over and over again to those questions about particular people from that time, the way they looked. I didn't like talking about the dead. "Symptom of age," I'd say about my faulty memory. So we'd work on in silence.

Once, after a half-hour's silence, he said: "Not even her eyes? The color?"

"Age," I said and we went on working in silence.

I was involved in other ways with his memory problems. Once a week I had to join him in a hunt for his earlier mother. He had a silver-framed photo of her but in her last years. She was shrunken and white-haired on it. He'd had a younger photo of her, dark-haired and smiling, he said, but it had disappeared mysteriously a few years before. Now he couldn't remember what she'd looked like then. He suspected Hanna had ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet. She'd been insanely jealous, he said. Still was. She'd thought it was the photo of an old girl friend of his. That was typical of her. The dumb bitch even thought he was getting into the neighbor, the blonde. In the days when that had mattered he'd preferred his women more substantially titted and assed, he said. I had trouble imagining Harvey at any age in close involvement with a woman configured that way. Or any way.

So once a week I had to poke about in the dusty chaos of closets with him. After, I had to take a long shower to get rid of the dust and grime. We never found it. I had to tell him I didn't remember the color of her eyes either. It was true this time.

Another thing about the job that I didn't appreciate was the crazy payment ceremony. Instead of receiving a check in a discreet envelope, I had to pick up – literally pick up – my "retainer" (I preferred this term to "salary" with its associations of subordination) on Fridays at 5:00 pm in a tiny room where Hanna kept track of the performance of Harvey's investments. There was a wall-safe and a big filing cabinet. She hulked there at a battered desk over ledgers with steel-rimmed glasses astride her red pug nose, her lipless mouth downcurled. She looked strangely efficient in her official capacity. Harvey was always present, silently looking on. It lent solemnity to the occasion.

They had an idiotic joke. Was it a joke? Fifty of the three hundred and fifty dollars were paid in petty coins: dimes, nickels and even pennies. Yes, pennies, one hundred of them. They weren't even neatly stacked but sprawled in disorder over the desk. It took minutes to pick up and count all those coins while they both looked on. When I expressed my surprise Harvey croaked something about loose change accumulated over the years. But those coins looked brand-new.

The following Friday Hanna happened to open a drawer for a pen and I saw unbroken rolls of coins fresh from the bank. They went to the trouble of procuring those rolls, breaking them and scattering the small change on the table just to see me rooting for it. That's the way I interpreted the ritual. They arranged something similar with the bills. These were all new singles and fives heaped up in disorder. It took me a good five minutes to sort them out and count them while they looked on. Then I signed her ledger. Sometimes I forgot the ballpoint pen wasn't mine, pocketed it and she asked for it back, rudely.

One Friday I revolted. I laboriously collected the small denominations, the dimes and the nickels but told her to keep the change, meaning the hundred pennies. The pennies disappeared after that, replaced by nickels I think it was.

For conversation I had the neighbor on the other side of the hurricane fence. That is, before she soured on me. It was a glorious mellow October, like two-hundred-dollar single-malt. When I wasn't on duty I fixed up a spot with a deck chair in the high grass near the fence. I'd unclasp the black briefcase that had once contained lecture-notes. I'd remove the bottle, a glass and sometimes a book, for justification. Soaking up sunshine and scotch, I would meditate or try to read. My only expenditure of energy was to move the deck chair when the criss-crossed shadow of the pylon encroached on me. It was like a giant sundial.

I pretended to feel guilty at this ease. Harvey said I was doing just the right thing. A very important part of my work was being accomplished on my back in the deck-chair bullshitting with the blonde. I would understand why pretty soon, he added.

The first time I encountered her again she was back on her knees planting forget-me-nots between twigs that marked the spots where the tulips were buried. Her blouse was buttoned all the way up. Yet it was such a warm day.

She gave a little cry of surprise when she saw me. I invented a reason for my sudden departure and return: business to settle, I said vaguely. She said she was happy I was back. I thought of her son's poems hanging over my head. She didn't speak about them immediately.

"I suppose you'll be leaving any day now for good. I thought university classes had started already."

"I'm not teaching this year."

"Oh, a sabbatical leave, I've heard of that."

"More a permanent leave, actually. I've retired."

"At your age?" she said with wondering eyes. Sweet woman.

I said it was a kind of pre-pre-retirement and to change the subject I remarked that each time I saw her she was gardening.

"O gardening!" she exclaimed, holding the clump of forget-me-nots against her meager bosom. It looked like spinach. Her eyes were closed and her face ecstatic. I thought it was overdone, a little ridiculous. She didn't have the build of an Earth Goddess. Or maybe she was trying to isolate that kneeling moment in the sun from everything else before and behind and pretending she'd succeeded.

She opened her eyes. The pink tip of her tongue appeared and moistened her lips a little. "Uh, Professor..."

"Jerry," I said. I knew what was coming and felt like running.

"Jerry. I'm Beth. Beth Anderson. What I wanted to say, Jerry, about those poems I spoke to you about the other day, my son's poems, you do want to read them, don't you? You said you did."

"Naturally," I said weakly. "Love to read his poems."

I have a pathological reaction to unsolicited literary efforts when I suspect there's too much emotion invested in them. It dates back to my student days in NYU and involvement with a Russian language instructor, an intense Bulgarian woman in her mid-thirties with short black hacked hair. She talked, ceaselessly and obscurely, in a low monotonous murmur. Hours on end she subjected me to a rolling barrage of her poems printed in green ink. They were in English but as unintelligible as if they'd been in Bulgarian. She was one of the first of those uncataloged visitors from far, far outer space that were to periodically graze my orbit with disturbing effect. She never let up with the poems except in bed where her inspiration was spectacular and her discourse intelligible, of astonishing crudity.

Outside of bed it was an ordeal. I had to maintain a tense mask of interest and emit murmurs of appreciation at regular intervals. My face muscles ached hours after. She was so easy to wound, super-sensitive to any relaxation of my mask. Her opaque black eyes would flick up from the green lines. "You don't like it!" she would accuse, face whitening. Once when I hazarded the most timid of criticisms involving intelligibility she broke down and cried for an hour.

The strain was terrific. I feared infection. The day some of the green lines seemed to be making sense I determined to opt out. But I was afraid rupture would send her into a mental tailspin. That's what finally happened to her anyhow although I thought I'd maintained my intense appreciative mask to the end. Maybe I hadn't and what happened was partly my fault.

She once sent me a letter from the place, a very subdued one in black ink with sensible remarks about the weather and the food and the visiting hours. They must have shocked all the poetry out of her. I suppose I should have visited or at least answered her. Whatever happened to her? I can't remember her name even though my palms still recall her body. She'd be well into her seventies now.

Then twenty years later, ghastly replay with Marty Stein. I won't think of Marty Stein.

Beth Anderson produced surface scruples.

"I don't want to impose on you. I'm making a selection of the best poems, the ones I like best, anyhow. I hope you'll agree. I'll let you have them as soon as I finish."

But then the next day she saw me unloading the electronic material from the Volvo with Hanna and now knew that I was involved with the mysterious machine that woke her up in the middle of the night and sabotaged her TV programs. The next afternoon when I strolled over to the deck chair with my scholarly briefcase she was on her knees again in the flowerbed on the other side of the hurricane fence.

She looked up from her plants, gave me a brief pained smile and said, "Hello, Professor," and went back to the plants for a few seconds. Then she got up, clapped her hands clean and said, "Well, that's that," and went into her house.

At least I was saved from the poetry ordeal. But Harvey noticed the coolness or else Hanna had been spying on us and had told him about it. When I was in the garden I often caught her peering down at me through a dirty pane. Harvey wasn't happy about the coolness. He seemed to take it very seriously. He returned to the matter a number of times, vocally and in writing. In writing it had a legal look, as though I'd committed a breach of contract. Finally I said I'd see what I could do about it.

The next afternoon she was digging when I came. Her back was turned to my deck chair. She hadn't heard me and went on digging. Or maybe she had heard me but went on digging anyhow. I watched her unhurried efficient movements. She levered up a slab just right for her strength. A twist of the wrist and the slab slipped reversed exactly up against the ruins of the last one. Quick jabs disintegrated the slab into crumbs. Then the operation over and over again, unhurried but quick. The freshly dug area was perfectly neat. She wouldn't need to rake it.

When she turned around I expected the ecstatic face of the forget-me-nots. Her face was wet with tears.

Seeing me she wiped her eyes with her bare forearm. She was wearing green garden-gloves.

"Migraine," she said and I wondered if migraine could make you weep. "I didn't get a wink of sleep last night with that machine of his. Doesn't the noise bother you? I guess not."

I said that yes, it did, terribly, I suffered from insomnia and headaches myself. But despite migraine I tried to remember the condition he was in, I said. He was an old, old friend, a childhood friend. He looked much older than he actually was, I added quickly. He'd convinced me to stay with him for a few weeks. I didn't know how much longer he'd got. It wasn't a picnic for me either. He wanted me to help him with the... thing. So sometimes – not very often – I give him a hand with his work.

She was leaning with clasped hands on the spade, lips slightly parted, looking at me with a touching expression of trust as I went on.

I tried to convince her that people were unjust about a little midnight noise. If people only knew what he was working on, they'd be more tolerant, I said. I stood there in silence, staring at her solemnly, visibly weighing whether I should divulge the secret or not.

She seemed to have forgotten her pain or grief or whatever it was.

"Oh, I always try to be tolerant," she said. "Just what is it he's working on? If I may ask. I don't mean to be curious. It's just that I want to be tolerant."

"It's pathetic actually," I said. "He's working on a machine to cure what he's got." I told her what he had.

"The poor man!" she exclaimed with great pitying blue eyes still wet with the tears she'd forgotten. "Like my sister Martha." She felt guilty for her past cruelty. I felt a little guilty because of her guilt. She was the kind of nice silly woman who'd believe anything you told her. It's a type. Aunt Ruth and Mrs Morgenstern had been like that. She said I was a good person to have come. She could well imagine it wasn't a picnic for me.

So we made up. It was Jerry and Beth again.

She asked me about the poems, was it still all right? And when I said of course, she said, "wait" and started trotting, then running, back to the house. She hurried back, out of breath, holding something mercilessly big. But there was the hurricane fence between us so I left Harvey's place and went over to her neat friendly low gate, white-painted wood, where she was waiting for me with a blue cardboard box closed by a golden clasp and bearing on the side in ornate print: Poems by Richard L. Anderson. (Age: 15-17). There were pounds and pounds of them.

She asked me to come in, have a look at her roses, a cup of coffee if I liked. I thanked her but said I'd better go and see how Harvey was doing. I didn't like to leave him alone too long. She looked guilty again.

Sometimes when the neighbor wasn't there Harvey worked his way over to my deck chair, blinking at the light, pushing aside the rank grass with his free hand. He walked about under a black umbrella for protection against the mellow fall sunshine. Because of the treatment at the hospital, sunshine was bad for him, it appeared. Hanna would bring him a chair and soda pop and make sure he was holding the umbrella against the sun.

The day Beth Anderson gave me the poems he came again. I was relaxing in the deck chair with the whisky. There was a blob of shadow on me, too sudden to be the sundial pylon. I looked up into his ravaged face beneath the juvenile blond curls. He noticed the unopened blue box in my lap and said, "Good work. Let me brief you on her," as though she were a military problem.

He told me (for the second time) that her husband had deserted her two years ago. "No problem there," he said obscurely. She lived all alone except when her son came for money, four or five times a year and stayed a few days each time. We had to map out the future strategy with her even if the immediate problem was to test the sensors in our own living room. Then I'd have to convince her to let us set up the sensors in her living room.

Before I could come up with a wisecrack to disarm my disquiet he went on.

Her junky son was a real problem though.

It was a word I didn't like. The problem was that, then. I knew there were easier ones. Harvey explained the focus of the problem.

"Smashes things when he. Runs out of dope. Suppose he smashed the sensors? Unless he has an overdose. Before we set them up."

He sounded hopeful. I'd said nothing. He couldn't know. But it wasn't a thing to say to anyone. I changed the subject and started talking about his "time machine." He didn't like the term. So far he'd discouraged all talk about his apparatus. With his vocal-cord problems it was easy for him to leave unwelcome questions unanswered. He avoided even the general subject of time-travel. He was pathologically suspicious, even of me, I sometimes thought. I tried again.

Was that all it could do? Just give you poor flickering images without sound or color and capture old radio programs? I'd thought a time machine could transport you back and forth. I recalled H. G. Wells' novel, no theoretical difficulties: a kind of nickel-plated bicycle with strategic crystals and the time-traveler zipped forward and back at will along the "time-continuum," from dinosaurs to the death of the planet, saving a nubile girl on the way.

He said that chronoportation – what I called "time-travel" – was an impossibility, at least for objects of anything but minimal mass. A microbe maybe but not a man. And even this exception wasn't sure.

Then you couldn't go back in the past? He replied, "Mentally it might be possible." Did he mean memory? I asked. You didn't need a machine for that. No, not memory, he said, scowling. Something else. He clammed up. "You wouldn't understand. You haven't got the mathematical basis," he said.

I felt the old inferiority. To prove I knew a little of what was involved I trotted out the scraps I'd picked up from Wells and the gaudy-covered SF pulp magazines of the 40s. I said that in a sense whatever we see is the past and cited the example of the galaxy Andromeda. To see the two of us chatting here in this ex-garden right now, inhabitants of Andromeda would have to wait a million years.

"Two point two million," he corrected. "Andromeda is roughly. Two point two million. Light years away."

With the correction I remembered that he was the one who had told me the Andromeda business in the first place, long, long ago. To cover my confusion I gulped down the whisky in my glass and poured out more. At an advanced age I was parroting what he had said at the age of thirteen and was getting it wrong.

Forgetting he'd just told me that chronoportation was impossible I asked him about travel to the future rather than to the past. Did we really want to go back and live that sinister mess, collective and personal, all over again, without the power to change the course of things? Did we really want even to witness it? The history of mankind had its ups and downs. Couldn't he, Harvey, pinpoint one of the heights in the future, something pastoral but hygienic, and whisk us there, to a golden green time where people got on together, where they could heal what was ailing us in soul and body, no alimony, no time erosions, where you lived hale to the age of Methuselah or beyond? Or forever, why not forever? Something like a walking-over-God's-heaven time, gonna meet my mother there, ain't gonna study war no more, except it would be on earth. Couldn't that be done?

He shook his head. He said the future was purely conceptual. It had no reality. "That's your pulp-magazines again. The future doesn't exist."

I didn't put up much of a struggle. He didn't have to knock himself out to convince me. For decades I'd been believing in no future and now I had scientific confirmation.

A week later in the middle of the night a smashing of glass and cries woke me up. I thought it came from downstairs. I shoved my bare feet into my shoes, grabbed my bathrobe and struggled into it while pounding down the stairs into the living room. Hanna was still in front of the TV watching a low-cut girl in a crypt full of coffins. "What is it?" I yelled above the loud scary music. "What's what?" she said, not taking her eyes off the screen. I imagined that with the TV screams she hadn't heard the real ones. "That, for Christ's sake!" I repeated as another cry came: "Ohhh..."

"Oh that. That's the junky again. The Anderson kid. Nobody pays attention to that any more."

There were more cries, clearer now. It wasn't "Ohhh" but a long denial: 'Nooo..." I ran out of the house holding the front of my pajama-bottoms bunched up. The waistband elastic had lost its tight embrace. The gate was locked. I had to pound up the stairs again and get the key and pound down again. Hanna didn't even look at me. I slammed the front door shut on the end of the trailing bathrobe belt and lost it.

None of the other neighboring houses had budged out of their cowardly darkness. The only light came from the Anderson living-room picture window. It was still intact. It illuminated them both on the driveway. Her son was tall and thin, blond like his mother. He was wearing high-heeled cowboy boots, ragged blue jeans and a sweatshirt. With an abstracted expression he was smashing holes in the windshield of her old Chevrolet with a hammer that must have weighed five pounds. The door-windows were already gone. The glass-crumbs glittered on the driveway gravel like diamonds.

She was sitting hunched and swaying in the middle of the driveway, head lowered, knees drawn up. She was in her nightgown with a lumber jacket thrown over her shoulders. Puffing badly I edged up to her.

"Have you called the police? Do you want me to call the police?"

She didn't respond. She went on swaying. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her expression was intense, almost ecstatic. It was crazy, given the circumstances.

Now he lost interest in the car. All of the glass was gone by now. He moved unsteadily toward her. I retreated. He stood over her with the hammer dangling by his side and asked over and over if she was going to give him the money. She didn't respond to him either, went on swaying with shut eyes. I think he kicked her or tried to and almost flopped on his face. I just stood there looking on in my bathrobe and defective pajamas. For some reason he started for the long strip of garden where she'd planted the tulips.

Without raising a finger I'd watched him demolishing the car and threatening his mother. Now I was moving forward with the spade I found leaning against the house, yelling at him, heading him off from the flowerbed. Keith hadn't been that way. He'd never done violence to us or to things, only, finally, to himself.

Beth Anderson's son stopped in his tracks and stared at me in stupor. He raised the hammer. I thought he was going to hurl it at my head. He moved forward. I backed off, jabbing at him with the spade, not touching him at all, just to keep him away from me. I needed both hands for the job and in the wind my beltless bathrobe yawned wide and the pajama-bottoms with the tired elastic began slipping.

I was badly frightened. I could imagine my forehead shattering like the windshield. I heard Beth Anderson crying out, "No! No!" and heard the fast crunch of the gravel. She'd snapped out of it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her running to my rescue and then I was slammed breathless and found myself flying. The ground came up and hit me and I sprawled full-length belly-down in the flowerbed, the wind knocked out of me, my pajama-bottoms around my ankles.

She'd done it.

To me.

Done it deliberately, to me, shoved me all her might. I had the taste and grit of cold muddy earth in my mouth. Muddy because that evening she'd watered her forget-me-nots, oh I would not forget. Maybe he was hovering over me, the hammer uplifted. But I was stunned and couldn't move. Maybe what really paralyzed me was outrage.

"Ricky, are you all right, Ricky?" she was gasping when I was able to get up, adjust my pajama-bottoms and run. I'd just cleared her open gate when I heard a long wail: "Oh my God, Jerry, Professor, Professor Weizman!" I ran faster.

Hanna was still looking at the horror picture when I staggered back in. She grinned a malicious slovenly grin when she saw me. I stammered out of earthen lips that she'd done it, she'd attacked me, the two of them ganging up on me. I must have been mentally unsettled to have unburdened myself to her. Hanna stared at me and her cheeks started puffing. She burst out laughing. The laughter built up in volume like Harvey's machine. I'd never heard such howls, such shrieks of laughter.

"Shut your face, you fat bitch," I yelled out of my immense humiliation. It was language I'd never used to a woman at whatever provocation and some of these had been great. I thumped upstairs, tracking additional dirt behind me on Hanna's runner.

She must have immediately reported the event to Harvey down in his cellar. He came up, panting, just as I emerged from the shower. He made a playful sub-navel grab and congratulated me pointedly on my physical shape. He thought it would be a good idea if I gave her a ring and offered to drive her to work tomorrow morning. She worked part-time at a florists'. In her own car she wouldn't be able to.

"Buy me a chauffeur's cap," I said. "I was trying to protect her, her car at least, no, her tulips it was I was trying to protect, not even up yet, when he comes after me with a hammer to brain me and she attacks me. Me she attacks. Oh yes, I'll drive her to work. And back too. Call me James."

"Women," he croaked idiotically in consolation. Why "women"? What did that explain? It was the first time a woman had ever done such a thing to me, knocked me down and me in a posture of succor. Metaphorically, plenty of times, but never in the flesh.

At nine-thirty next morning the phone rang. Hanna said it was for me. Harvey was standing by expectantly as if he knew who was calling. Later I wondered if she hadn't already phoned while I was sleeping. Harvey switched on the speaker. It came out non-stop with just quick gasps for breath:

"Oh, Professor Weizman, you are all right, aren't you? I can't tell you how ashamed I am for last night. I didn't recognize you. I was trying the Golden Galaxy technique, trying to blank out everything, and all of a sudden I was back and I saw somebody in a bathrobe in my tulip bed with a spade trying to kill my defenseless Ricky was what I thought. He wouldn't hurt a fly, not even in self-defense. I know you were doing it for me. I know that now and I thank you, I thank you. But I didn't know that then. I didn't recognize you until after that awful, awful thing I did. Oh Professor Weizman, I'm so ashamed, I thought of you all night long. I beg of you to forgive me."

She had these quaint lacy expressions like, "If I may" and "I beg of you", but a powerful shove for such a dainty woman.

I said: nothing to forgive, it was all my fault, interfering in a family quarrel. I had got what I deserved. Actually it was quite funny, I said (thinking of the collapsing pajama-bottoms) if you regarded the incident from another angle, as I would probably be trying to do in a week or two.

"Oh sir, it's not funny, oh it's anything but funny, not funny, not funny at all."

She started crying. I got it in both ears, in the receiver and over the speaker. Harvey jabbed me in the ribs and mimed an expression of infinite pity.

So I, treacherously laid low in earth like a tulip-bulb at 2:30 am, found myself a few hours later turning the other mud-stained cheek, comforting my attacker, perfunctorily, OK, but comforting her. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not basically a weak person, as my first wife used to say, with increasing frequency in the final years.

That wasn't the end to it.

"Flowers for you, Perfessor," said Hanna, a few hours later, with her slovenly grin, shoving a bouquet of red roses at me. It wasn't her offering even though her attitude toward me had improved greatly following the night's excitement when I'd twice descended from my professorial heights, first by coming back a mud statue and second by calling her a bitch.

They were rigid long-stemmed scentless roses, like frigid countesses. They must have come from her florist-shop. With, I guessed, a 40% discount for employees. A nasty rancorous thought. There was a card with Mrs Beth Anderson embossed in lower middle-class gothic script and a single sentence in violet ink:

To Professor Weizman with the humblest and sincerest of apologies.

Later Harvey came up for air and saw the flowers.

"She sends you flowers? That's good. That's very good."

Some time after we looked out of the window and saw her standing by the hurricane fence, busy in her strip of flowerbed despite the drizzle. She was wearing a gleaming yellow raincoat and fisherman's hat. Aren't you going to thank her? he wanted to know, meaning for the roses. He kept pestering me.

What could I do, with the woman pulling and Harvey pushing? It was still drizzling and the deck chair was dripping but leaving the house I instinctively grabbed the bottle and the book as though going out in the rain wasn't for her. I apprehended more tears but she came up to the fence, looking terrible but self-composed, and spoke of the weather. I spoke of New York winters. She spoke of a book she was reading. The rain started coming down harder. I sneezed twice. She said I was catching cold in the rain. I agreed and ran back to the house with the book and the bottle. I hadn't mentioned her roses. She hadn't mentioned her son.

Then steady cold rain set in so I had the best of reasons for not going out into the garden except to burn the rubbish, with Harvey looking on. Anyhow I had plenty to do inside.

Harvey had just about finished with the sensors. I varnished them, three coats, careful to avoid the big zoom lens. Now there were the unavoidable preliminaries to setting them up in the living room. He didn't want any of the local people to do the job. He saw spies everywhere. So he had me ring up a man twenty miles away. I was in charge of the negotiations too. Harvey was too dumb for that in the vocal sense and Hanna in the other sense. Anyhow she didn't know what was involved. When she learned, said Harvey, she'd have a shit-hemorrhage.

I remember the slow incredulous look on the big Irishman's face when I explained what we wanted. Out of some half-assed sense of professional pride he said, "I can't do that." As though I were asking him to contract-kill a nun instead of just knocking four good-size holes in the living room floor. I invented a reason: a new kind of central heating system. It turned out the man was an expert on central heating systems. "Mister, you don't run pipes up in four holes." For what Harvey intended you did. He'd explained that the tubes had to be separate, couldn't be run together in a single hole because of the induction fields. I couldn't tell the man this.

Finally he did the job, grim-faced. He didn't even say good-bye when he finished.

Hanna went wild. The filthy mess everywhere, mummified meat in the refrigerator, armies of cockroaches, where was the problem? But not this. She had a thing about the machine in the cellar. She must have regarded it as a rival. Also I think she was scared of it. As things turned out she had good reason to be.

So far at least it had been kept down in the cellar where she seldom went. But now it was metastasizing in the living room. From the cellar four flexible tubes with the girth of an adult boa constrictor emerged in each corner and snaked, each one, into a big oblong black box with a protruding lens. When the apparatus in the cellar operated, the housing of the lens was disquietingly mobile. With a whirring sound the Cyclops eye would slowly move vertically and horizontally. Sometimes it would slowly zoom out, like a robot's erection. You'd have sworn it was tracking you instead of long-dead people whose space you were occupying. Remembering this didn't make the whirring sound less disquieting.

That was later. For the moment each eye was staring blind and immobile in its corner.

The day we tested it out Harvey edicted a celebration. Strangely: before, not after. He was so sure of himself. He'd never heard of hubris ("overweening God-defiant pride," I'd defined the concept to my students). Suddenly after months and months he noticed the mess. He made Hanna clean up the living room, a very little bit. She banged all the furniture viciously with the vacuum cleaner. The dust-bag must have been full or the dirt encrusted because the machine's passage made no impression on the carpet. She did get rid of the dish with Rice Krispies glued to the sides, actually took it into the kitchen. I'd seen it there on the table the first day I came. Now there was a wreath of dried milk as a memorial.

He had her bring out a bottle of sweet white wine (Lord's Vineyards: the grower's name was Philip Lord) and three red cut-glass goblets. I vaguely remembered the goblets from thirty years back. They were dusty and chipped now. The white wine looked like coagulated blood in them. As I was sipping the sickening stuff he told me to smile. "Maybe you'll be seeing yourself. As you were now. In half an hour." The thought made me feel self-conscious in my movements. I smiled slightly. I wanted to be worthy of resurrection.

Then we went down into the dim red light of the cellar.

"Here we go," he whispered solemnly and the sound built up unbearably. "Look!" he commanded and pressed buttons.

Tensely I stared and stared at the dark screen in the darkness.

Time went by.

Nothing came.

Nothing at all.

Hubris.

I began to relax.

***

Six

We waited and waited that night and got nothing. The next night we got a few shooting stars. Late-late-show interference, he said and made Hanna switch off the TV. Outside of that, framed darkness in darkness. Not even old darkness, he said bitterly. So I didn't see myself drinking white wine like blood and trying to smile. I didn't see the promised dead. He'd celebrated too soon. I felt a certain childish satisfaction. And relief. He wasn't infallible after all.

I began to get bored with those long sessions down in the cellar. All I got out of them were rheumatic twinges in my right shoulder from the dankness. I asked Harvey why he didn't automatically videotape whatever might turn up on the screen. That way we could stay upstairs in the nice warm living room, sitcomming and dodging roaches. He said the images couldn't be videotaped as yet. Anyhow it was a secondary problem.

What had gone wrong? he wondered obsessively. His calculations were watertight. The living room had been the center of activity in the old days. It ought to be full of recuperable images. He tried to figure it out. Literally figure it out: pages and pages crawling with figures alongside his cot. He suspected that uncontrolled random navigation lay at the root of the problem. Could it be that the machine was ranging back too far, before the house, before the shack, maybe hundreds or thousands of years before the first white settlements? Pterodactyl time, maybe? Naturally nothing would register at that distance. All of the dynamos on earth couldn't produce enough energy for that.

Harvey hardly emerged from the cellar at all now except for the weekly hospital treatment and he balked violently at that. Often he had to be forcibly extracted. It was true that he never looked and sounded as bad as when he came back from the hospital. The treatment took a lot out of him. It partially paralyzed his brain, he claimed, almost as though they knew what he was working on and wanted to sabotage it. He vomited and couldn't work properly for two days after. So he tried to stay down in the cellar on the appointed day.

When he refused to respond to her barked calls from the head of the cellar staircase, Hanna overcame her fear of the machine. She came down, wheedling and menacing. He'd tell her to leave him alone, they couldn't do anything for him, she should let him die. She'd yell that she wouldn't let him die, you just try to die on me, you old bastard.

Once he said he'd written the instructions for his funeral in a lower left-hand drawer somewhere. Last wishes. Incineration was the main thing. No burial. Fire. Did she hear? Fire. Fuck you, she said. After, when she got the ashes, he whispered, (fuck you, she said) a little ceremony could be held. Only close friends: Jerry and her. White wine in the red goblets. Music could be played. Jerry could choose between the Mozart Requiem and "I'll be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You." Then his ashes should be slowly strewn in the toilet-bowl and the chain solemnly pulled. His ashes would wander a while in the sewer but eventually emerge into sunlight in the open sea with the rest of the shit. Then he wanted her to promise to get married. To marry his best and only pal: Jerry Weizman. She'd be an heiress then.

Those clashes with Hanna, another kind of treatment, put a little deceptive color in his face. At a certain point she grabbed him. He put up a struggle. It was no joke now. Had it been before? But what could he do against that brawn? I saw her sweep him up in her arms, no strain at all. He didn't weigh much, that was true. He made squalling sounds in the place of words. It was strange hearing her trying to soothe him, like a cement mixer pouring out honey, calling him "sweetie" and "baby." Hanna carried him to the Volvo like a baby.

And between treatments he scribbled, vomited, pondered and probed and found nothing at all. The screen remained opaque.

A whole month dragged by.

In mid-December I got a call from Beth Anderson. It had been a long time since I last heard her voice. She'd seldom occupied my thoughts except under the shower when I saw the greenish bruise on my left thigh from the impact of her flowerbed.

She inquired about my health in a shy formal voice, addressing me as "Professor Weizman." She excused herself for bothering me again but she was having trouble with her television once more. Could I come over just a minute and have a look? I'd be happy to, I lied, but objected that I knew nothing at all about television except that it was bad. She said she felt sure I could do something. She'd seen me lugging in coils of cable, tubes, tools of all sorts and probably thought this was a sign of technical competence.

The Chevy on the driveway had a new windshield and windows. A few crumbs of safety glass glittered in the gravel.

She was waiting at the open door, shivering a little because of the cold, all done up with a silkish blue blouse for her eyes and golden shoes, a new hair-do, blonder, with the gray chemically muted. Her neat banality was repeated by her living room.

"Oh, nice, nice," I said, looking around. It wasn't a hundred percent spontaneous but I didn't have to really force myself to say it after three months of Hanna's kitchen and living room, Hanna herself and naturally Harvey. With that wig and wasted face, that big-pored gigantic beak, he was less than appetizing. Neither of them were fanatics about personal daintiness. They didn't smell too good at close or middle range.

Beth Anderson of course (with that name) smelled good, some kind of wholesome middle-western scent. Her living room was faintly scented too: pinewoods from Air Wick. In comparison to where I'd been a minute before, here all was luxury and calm (this particular day). It was too much to expect volupté in the bargain.

Praise for her interior decoration triggered the ritual: "Let me show you around." To one side of the picture window she had a miniature jungle of tropical plants in gay enameled pots. She gave me the names and the blooming times. She introduced her goldfish to me. He was called Oscar. "Jerry," I said to him. He swam up to the edge of his universe and goggled. "He likes you!" she exclaimed joyfully. "He doesn't do that to everybody." She showed me a gilt rococo armchair with wormholes in the wood, faded red velvet and greenish brass upholstery tacks. "It's a family heirloom, I don't know how old. You'd better not sit on it, a big man like you."

She ushered me through an arch into a nook done up in Mexican style. Terra-cotta sombreros decorated the pink walls. The pattern of the sofa cover echoed the big potted cactus with growths like spiked ping-pong paddles. Back in the living room I stopped in front of a small fireplace. To one side of it stood a wrought-iron holder containing shiny brass fire-utensils: a scoop, tongs and a poker. There was also a pair of brass-studded bellows.

She clicked a switch behind me. In their bed of aluminum-dust ashes, birch-like logs began to glow. Ruddy flame-lights started playing on the spotless bricks behind the logs. She stood alongside me and made no effort to move. When the flame-effect repeated its pattern for the third time I said: "Cozy."

"You should see it in the dark. It lights up the whole room, nice and soft. Sometimes when I have the blues I sit in the dark and just stare at it. It's very calming."

It wasn't really necessary here but automatically, as I did in any new house to situate the owner culturally, I glanced at the bookcase. She and her husband were radically separated on the shelves. It was like those two towels, His and Hers, you used to find in this sort of house. Hers on the top shelves: inspirational books, techniques of child-care and guaranteed peace of mind, patchwork, Pope John Paul II, cookbooks, gardening-books, best sellers. His on the bottom shelves with a shelf of glass animals between them: spiritism, astrology, numerology, parapsychology.

"I'll bet you're not bothered by insects here," I said as she showed me another predictable room. Coming from where I did, this was supreme praise: "laudative understatement" in the jargon of rhetoric.

"Mosquitoes sometimes."

"No, I mean bugs, you know, roaches."

"Roaches! I don't think anybody in this neighborhood has roaches. Except maybe... Do you have roaches over there? I don't mean you personally, of course."

"Not more than a few hundred thousand."

"How awful. Somehow I just can't associate you with roaches."

I thought it was a lovely thing to say about me, real laudative understatement. I pictured it engraved on my tombstone. I didn't insist on fire.

She showed me the impeccable iris-scented bathrooms. "Now you know where they are," she said. Sure enough, there was a Her towel in one of them. He must have taken the His with him. She didn't overlook anything till the end of the tour. Not a closet or cupboard went unopened. I saw her dresses, her sheets and pillowcases, pink and blue with the stuffy fragrance of lavender.

She even showed me her bedroom. There was a big double bed with two pillows, for the sake of symmetry. The pastel-blue walls were covered with framed black-and-white photographs of her son from babyhood to adolescence. There were maybe thirty of them. She was on lots of them with him. When he was a baby and a little boy she'd been very pretty. His adolescence had vampired her.

"My husband took those pictures. He was a photographer. He's a monk now."

"A monk. Oh yes."

"Well, a sort of monk. Not a Catholic or a Buddhist monk. He's a Second-Degree Illuminated in The Golden Galaxy."

With her hand on the doorknob she waited for me to pick that up. When I didn't, she resumed the tour.
She stopped before another door and hesitated as she hadn't before the others. It was covered with a life-size cutout of Uncle Sam with frosty blue eyes and an imperious forefinger and a hand-printed legend which made him warn: Keep out! This means YOU!! She pushed the door open timidly.

In a different mode the room was as conventional as the others I'd just visited. There were the universal posters of thuggish rock-stars, Marilyn Monroe goosed by the updraft and she and her skirt joyous about it, James Dean with his arms draped crucified on his rifle, Albert Einstein, the old teddy-bear demagogue, sticking his tongue out. A guitar on the wall. Drums in the corner. Her gauzy blue handkerchief removed invisible dust. She was like a museum curator, dusting but not touching.

Suddenly she asked me, "Have you finished reading his poems yet?"

I'd completely forgotten that blue box. The five-pound hammer had driven it out of my mind.

"His poems? Naturally I've read his poems."

The forcefulness needed to make it sound like the truth she probably took for enthusiasm. Radiant, she asked me to tell her all about it in just a minute.

She closed the door softly on the memorial. Automatically I turned left for the last of the rooms at the end of the corridor. It was probably to stave off the moment of untruth. "No, that's just an old guest-room," she said. We turned our backs on that one unopened door and went down the stairs.

She steered me into a shining plastic dinette where she'd set the table with bamboo place mats. Few TV repairmen had ever been greeted like that. In cut-glass dishes there were Ritz crackers, peanuts, cheese-cubes and anchovy-stuffed olives impaled with toothpicks. There was a bottle of port and an unopened bottle of single-malt. She said she couldn't remember the brand I drank and hoped I liked this one. She looked at me anxiously as I sipped it. I smacked my lips and raised my eyebrows appreciatively. It tasted like a cross between cough-medicine and a peat bog.

We talked for a while about brands of whisky and port and then about the cold spell and flu. Finally she leaned forward a little and said:

"So what did you think of them?"

I said that I found some of the poems quite remarkable.

She interrupted me with her face shining and said, yes, they were, weren't they? particularly the one entitled Spring Morning in the BMT. Didn't I think that was the best one?

Things were taking a dangerous turn so I said that I hadn't had time to read very many of the poems what with Harvey's health problems and that in any case I didn't read poems that way, like the morning newspaper. I liked to savor them, I said. I would prefer to read them all before discussing a particular poem.

"Savor them. Oh what a day today. Nothing but good things. You're so nice to say that." Her voice broke a little on the word "nice".

"Other good things?" I asked, to get her to talk about something else.

"They're taking me on full time at Dave and Tom's. They're the florists I work for. It's a great honor. I'm the only woman there. Full of gorgeous men."

She giggled a second then breathed:

"You savored his poetry. I can't tell you what it means to me to hear you say that. I mean I'm his mother and all, so of course I'm prejudiced in his favor, but an expert like you... Gee, I wish I could have attended one of your literature classes. Just sit in, I mean, I'm not bright enough to be a real student."

I saw my nine o'clock classroom, Mondays and Fridays, a certain lovely attentive face. I surprised myself by saying: "I wish I could sit in on one of my classes myself." I thought it was safely obscure to someone who'd just defined herself as not bright but she said immediately:

"You miss those classes, don't you?"

"Oh miss..." I accompanied the disclaimer with slightly fending hands and a tolerant smile at that idea, her idea. She blinked as though aware she'd gone too far. Then her face became radiant again as she returned to the big thing.

"You actually savored Ricky's poetry..."

Her chin trembled. I was afraid she was going to weep with joy and then of course with despair. That would have been terrible. I wondered how I could change the subject but she changed it herself by leaning down to pick up a pink paper-napkin that had fluttered to the floor. Maybe it was to hide her face.

As she straightened up one of the fine chains around her neck caught on the edge of the table and broke. "Damn! Excuse me." I picked the pendant up for her. It was a silver five-pointed star soldered to a crescent-moon.

She said that it was an Indian good-luck charm. She didn't really believe in it. She hadn't had all that much luck until today. Maybe you had to be Indian. Maybe it was a sign, the fact that she broke the chain just when good news came. "I won't wear it anymore. I have enough things around my neck." She had a pretty neck for a woman of that degree of attrition.

She caught a quick breath and advanced her chest a fraction of an inch like a jeweler's tray with objects for appraisal. Between her small breasts there was a gold crucifix and a zodiac sign and a massive blob of gilt plastic incrusted with bits of colored glass. It was out of place, cheap-looking, like the things you used to get from Omar the Mystic – a kid's serial Harvey could have pulled in from the thirties that night – by sending in ten box-tops of Kellogg's Corn Flakes plus twenty-nine cents. She touched it.

"My husband. Pretty, isn't it?"

"Lovely."

"A little expensive, though."

"Lovely gift," I persisted.

"Oh it's not a gift. I bought it from him. Two hundred dollars."

It was another invitation to explore a weird relationship. I didn't take it up. I went on quickly to the other objects. The crucifix wasn't much of a conversation piece so I peered at the zodiac sign and said: "Ah, a zodiac sign." "Sagittarius," she said and asked me when I was born. "The month and day I mean, of course," she added quickly. Had my face reacted to that question? I told her the month and day. "I wouldn't have thought Capricorn," she said, pouring more port in her glass, all the way up.

She didn't drink in the lady-like way I'd imagined. Port was a sippy lady's drink but she gulped it down like a man. She'd already put a dent in the bottle. So had I in mine. We had something in common after all.

By now she'd lost her shyness. She got up and put the broken chain on top of the spotless refrigerator. She returned to the table, a trifle unsteadily maybe, and said: "What were we talking about?"

"Your good luck."

She looked confused a second as though she had trouble associating Beth Anderson with good luck. It may have been the port.

"Your full-time job," I prompted.

"Yes, that. Also you savored his poetry. Also he's with a nice girl now. A nice girl can make all the difference. Maybe this time it'll work. It's not easy. You wouldn't know. You saw once but you don't know."

I didn't correct her. I felt it coming on and wished she wouldn't. There must be something in my face that brings out life-stories. I never do it myself. I always attribute to others my own carefully masked indifference. Or is it squeamishness at the exposure of sores and stumps? Or maybe fear of expected reciprocity?

"And having to cope all by myself after Jack left. Jack was my husband. He still is." She unconsciously moved her left hand forward a little as though to provide the corroboration of the diamond ring. "Just at about the time Ricky's problem started Jack discovered the Golden Galaxy and became a Second-Degree Illuminated. Like I said before, a Second-Degree Illuminated's a kind of monk. They shave their heads and have this thing about women, what do you call it?"

"Celibacy?"

"That's it. So he couldn't go on living here. He said I was too much of a something temptation. A carnal temptation. That was nice in a way but I had to cope all by myself. That was two years and three months ago. I don't know where he is. He sends me lots of literature on the Golden Galaxy. It's almost like getting letters from him. I took it awfully badly at first. Sometimes I still do. I try to understand. Like he says, it's spiritual development and all that but sometimes I think it was cowardly to run off like that. What do you think?"

She took me for a universal repairman. I hadn't contracted for personal as well as for TV problems. Only partly to console her, I said that we men tended to cowardice. That was as close as I would come to confession myself. Women were far stronger, I said. Look how women lived ten years longer. It was a reward, maybe.

"Maybe punishment," she said and then apologized. It was very impolite and a bore to think out loud like that to someone, the same old thoughts. They went round and round like a merry-go-round only not merry.

She brightened determinedly. "Have another drink with me, Professor Weiz... Oh there I go again with 'Professor.' We never seem to get off the ground, you and me, just a few inches and then bang, down again."

Did I scowl at that? After what had happened a month before in her tulip-bed I found the bang-on-the-ground metaphor tasteless.

"Like, for a while I called you Jerry and you called me Beth and bang I went back to Professor and you went back to calling me... nothing, actually. Even if you get angry at me, keep on calling me Beth, huh? Can I say something a little personal, Jerry? I really admire you for sticking it out with Mr Morgenstern with the roaches and the noise and that awful, awful woman and all. You're a good person. I admire people who are true to friends through thick and thin. It's rare, you can believe me. Hey, I forgot all about the TV. Wait till you see this. Take your glass."

She took hers. We went into the living room. "Look," she said, switching on the TV.

The image was perfect.

"Wait," she said. "I've got the wrong channel. That's what surprised me last night. Usually when I get interference it's like a kind of herringbone pattern, blue and red and on all of the channels. Last night it was just on one channel, black and white and gosh it was... Wait, you'll see."

She selected the right channel and we waited.

Waited and waited while actresses simpered, actors viriled. I was spending my days as well as nights waiting for things that didn't materialize on TV screens. A quarter of an hour went by. I began casting quick glances at my watch. She wondered what was wrong with what was wrong.

Now the scene shifted from a passionate embrace in a swimming pool to a room in a maternity hospital. The woman in the bed, passionately embraced seconds before, had just given birth. She looked as if she'd stepped out of a beauty parlor. She handed the impossibly mature baby to the good gray middle-aged husband who lacked only visible horns. Now you take him, Larry, she said with a knowing look to a brilliantly handsome young man with an elaborate coiffure.

Just as the baby was being passed to the third summit of the triangle a tiny figure emerged from the lower left-hand corner of the screen and started walking jerkily over the baby's head. It was distorted, flickering and gray, a woman.

I remembered where I was sitting, over what burned-out foundations and looked away, at an aquarelle of a bouquet hanging above the TV. The ghost progressed, in persistence of vision, over poppies and daisies now. Beth Anderson uttered a little cry of triumph and turned to me and said that I looked as scared as she'd been the first time she saw it, not that, but something like that. Spooky, wasn't it?

Now I recalled that the machine was in the cellar of the other house, pulling things out of that other living room, the harmless one. I forced myself to look back at the screen.

Harvey's mother, dead fifteen years, was heading for the woman in the bed who took the baby back with a little smile and another knowing look.

I justified my whiteness (I felt white) by the surprise. I couldn't look any more. She hadn't been like that. It was as if she'd been recalled not integral from the past but from the grave and what time had done to her there. Leave her the way she'd been stored in my brain, forgotten but available and now summoned up: faded, that's true, but life-size and human, not reduced to a thing jerking across a screen. Leave her in peace. I wanted to get out of Beth Anderson's house. Out of the other one too.

I said I'd talk to Harvey about the interference. Maybe he had ideas.

On the threshold of Harvey's living room I heard a faint whirring and saw the lens of one of the sensors tracking. The others must have been tracking too, a crossfire. I stepped back. Instead of going down to the cellar I took the phone-directories up to my room.

I did figuring. Not counting the money Harvey owed me in that mysterious account (I didn't even know how much it amounted to), I had about $5,000. I wouldn't get very far with that. I opened the yellow pages to "Employment Agencies" and found the three agencies that specialized in teaching positions. I sneaked down to the corridor where the phone was.

Even as I was dialing the first number I could hear in my mind the dialogue I was seconds away from. You imagine something to make sure it won't happen that way. It's a primitive vestige even in supposedly enlightened minds. Age? And to the confession, a polite Uh-huh or a soothing Yess or maybe an unenthusiastic I seee. Then: subject(s) taught? English? Frankly sir if it were math or science no problem at all. But English.

And that's almost exactly the way the conversation ran. Maybe Harvey could pull things out of the past but I possessed second sight, in a way time-travel to the future to learn what he'd told me and I already knew: no future. So I didn't bother dialing the other two numbers. I went down to the cellar, the long way around, avoiding the living room.

For a moment there I was afraid Harvey would kiss me when I told him what I'd seen. He did have ideas about the neighbor's parasitic image. His first one was to send me back to Beth Anderson's to get all the technical particulars: find out which make of TV, the exact model, the exact times of the phenomenon, the exact orientation of the antenna, the channel. Above all, the channel.

The information I brought back must have been decisive. Five days later he invited me down into the cellar with a triumphant look.

For nine hours we stared at the screen and saw old objects in maniac magnification and pieces of people, most of them dead and looking that way.

At about 3:00 am I got up and started upstairs. He went on looking.

"Momma!" I heard him croak again as I pulled myself out of the cellar.

I was too tired to go back after all the senseless things I'd seen for so many hours. More senseless than terrifying but sometimes that too if you were able to believe it really was reactivation of time past and not a fraud.

***

Seven

You thought of a small child or a moron let loose in that long-ago room with an old defective 8-millimeter movie-camera running sporadically at the wrong speed with the wrong lens and focus. Sometimes in the course of that night and also much later I thought they actually were old film sequences he was trying to palm off as stuff his machine was pulling out of the thin air of time. Convincing another of the authenticity of the images allowed him to convince himself, I reasoned. Madness works that way, I'd read somewhere.

In those moments I extended my disbelief to the radio voices of the earlier night too. I downgraded them to old recordings. But then I'd remember the horror of random temporal selection. Could he have faked that? I suppose he could have. I'd let myself swing back into belief anyhow.

What bothered me sometimes was the rapidity with which my disbelief crumbled. It was as though I wanted to believe in the invisible persistence of time past as badly as he did. Didn't that make it something like shared insanity? At this thought I'd swing back fearfully into disbelief.

In the dominant periods of belief, you were tempted to attribute malevolence to the machine behind the lead-plated wall. Childish anthropomorphizing. Simply, its mode of operation was alien to our perception of spatial and temporal reality. When it didn't zoom into senseless close-ups it saw the living room fish-eyed at an angle of 180 degrees. Everything was shrunken and suffered distortion, radically at the edges.

And once your eyes compensated for all those bent lines and crazy perspectives and you were about to try to recognize tiny lost people, the image started fading. Fading away from already faded into nothing at all. Depending upon how far back the machine had gone the image lasted between one and forty seconds. After a while you learned to judge the duration pretty accurately from the start by the quality of the image. The more flickering and feeble it was, the older it was and that much more short-lived, stillborn almost. Could he have faked that?

Another troubling thing about the machine's performance was what Harvey called "random spatial selectivity." The human eye/brain couple privileges the human in a landscape. It knows how to subordinate the non-essential. Harvey's machine subordinated nothing. Anything occupying space was treated as a legitimate subject.

I remember that first revelation of the machine's pitiful capabilities. It turned out at the end of the sequence that Harvey's mother had been there in the living room all the while, seated in a flowered armchair probably looking at a (TV) screen herself.

What the machine gave in quick succession was, I remember, the speckled pattern of the carpet renovated by the return to the pre-Hanna years, the fold of a curtain, a dragon's head on a Chinese vase, a big oval mirror pivoted to a wooden stand, ceiling-cornices, the fluted leg of a chair (I must stop) an electrical outlet, certain keys of a piano I mustn't enumerate, the cross of window-panes, a dish of fruit on the table: three mottled bananas, four apples, two oranges, a bunch of grapes, how many grapes?

I could say but have to stop. What did I want to say before those objects almost overpowered me? I think I wanted to say that Harvey's machine detailed the living (once living) and the inanimate with impartiality. We got Harvey's mother, and badly fragmented at that, only in the last second before the sequence faded. She was fragmented because Harvey's machine decomposed things and people (in a sense things alone since people were things to it) in accordance to some strange logic.

It didn't recognize the human face as a unit. It didn't even recognize the mouth as a unit. You'd get the lower lip, the chin, the neck, part of the chest. That's the fragment we got of Harvey's mother in the sequence I dangerously described. It was just as well we didn't get the eyes.

Sometimes the dictatorship of objects was worse than that. You could be involved for hours with senseless things before you got a fragment of a face, lost again after a second or so. And you could be reasonably sure it was lost for good unless you had a life span of a few hundred thousand years. That's another aspect of the machine's mode of operation. I'll try to return to it if I remember and if I don't get bogged down in things as I almost did there again for the fourth time, I think: first the junk-heap, then the Polack shantytown, then Rachel at Ebbet's Field, now this.

They are time-traps and they open up under your feet when you least expect them to.

The thing is to react immediately, flounder out of it at once, not let yourself get sucked under.

Sometimes movement in the living room would distract the machine from its minute investigation of trivialities. It would zoom in on the movement and then step back and track it. It wasn't the intrinsic importance of the person as a person or the importance of what he was doing that motivated the machine's choice as I assumed at first. Movement in that room was generally human but a sudden billowing of a summer curtain would polarize the machine's attention in the same way.

Once we saw the Morgensterns tiny and distorted, fish-visioned, seated at the dinner table. Somebody unknown to me tossed an orange across the wavy table to Harvey. The lenses zoomed in on that orange, pitted like a Martian moon, held it in suspension, time frozen, for two seconds and then zoomed in on a fragment of the anonymous arm that had thrown it.

In addition to random spatial selection there was random temporal selection. It could be terrifying.

One sequence I would like to forget started with what must have been a Christmas dinner in fish-eye view with maybe fifteen people gathered at the Morgenstern table. Before we could pick out the participants, we got the usual zooming inspections of the clawed feet of the sofa, the frame of the oval mirror and its carved rosebuds, a curtain-tassel and other trivia. Then came a series of close-ups on the Christmas tree. Five seconds for tinsel. Then a macro close-up of a glass ball in which we could see the dinner table in even worse distortion than usual. It wasn't like an arty film playing around with mirrored views of the essential. The people about the table just happened to be there reflected in the convex surface. The machine went from glass ball to glass ball with maniac devotion.

Once Mrs Morgenstern with the jet-black hair of her mid-forties was tracked in jerky movement, bearing a platter with a turkey. Then the machine returned to its glass-ball monomania. We were surprised at the length of the sequence. It wasn't the habitual maximum of forty seconds but three full minutes.

Once again, movement interrupted the glass ball investigation and the machine focused on Mrs Morgenstern bearing in a platter of fruit.

She had shrunk. Her hair was pure white.

I have to believe that the machine had plunged vertically, diachronically, detailing a long succession of Christmas trees, spanning a quarter of a century in those three minutes. Harvey deduced that later.

At the moment his suddenly white-haired mother appeared on the screen he was incapable of analysis. The image wrenched from him another "Momma!" This one came unusually loud and cavernous, as from his bowels, bypassing his stricken vocal cords.

What swam up on the screen that night couldn't have been trickery. It had to be authentic, time past dredged up moldering in distortion and fragmentation. He couldn't have contrived that suffering on himself: not just the telescoping of time but the way the supposedly resurrected people looked: that paper whiteness of their faces, those circles of blackness in the place of eyes, the wild jerking way they moved. They looked dead.

***

Eight

When I came up from the cellar with burning eyes and collapsed on the bed that night (the night of December 22: the living room windows in the neighborhood had been showing radiant tinseled trees for a week), I discovered they'd come up with me. They went on jerking about eyeless. It was no good closing my eyes on them as I'd tried to do below in the cellar until Harvey, misunderstanding, told me to wake up and go on viewing.

They were on the inner screen now. My brain wouldn't take orders to display other things. Involvement with the things of the room didn't work either. The animated dead surcharged the walls, the ceiling, the furniture. I tried to convince myself it was image retention. I remembered the phenomenon as a kid after a day of fishing or berry picking. But what persisted now wasn't a bobber or magnified blackberries.

At one point my brain suddenly went beyond passive replay. It started processing the images. Improved them into color and focus. Straightened out the bent perspectives. Interrelated those macro-shots. Now I saw every detail of a living room that meant nothing to me and that I'd visited for two days thirty years before.

I saw Mrs Morgenstern too in her great kindness, her hazel eyes freed from the blobs of blackness, the gray streaks in her dark hair, the mole on her left cheek. I heard her voice urging another slice of strawberry shortcake on me. It was as though it had all happened minutes before. It lasted about five seconds.

Five seconds of joy. Why joy? For her sake, the reversal of process, seeing her the way she'd really been? Or selfishly for my sake? For the way I'd been, seeing it all thirty years before? Then it collapsed. I lost the room and the cake and the real her and my earlier self. I was back again to those distorted perspectives and the jerking once-people with stark eyeless faces.

They were like silent-film actors with crude charcoal and chalk makeup, I thought, now in bed, trying to reduce them to make-believe. I thought of early Weimar expressionist films, Nosferatu the Vampire and the lunatics of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari seen in the Museum of Modern Art in the forties with a bare-armed silk-bloused girl whose face and name I tried to recall. I escaped them that way until suddenly the museum lines deformed and the girl jerked towards me eyeless and I recognized her and woke up.

The next morning they were gone. But I had to go down to them the next night for even longer.

It started up again when I returned to my room. There was the joy of resurrection and rejuvenation again. But the price was too high for five seconds.

I practiced self-medication. For a while they paled at Handel. If I stared hard enough at the Van Gogh posters, almost projected myself into the seascape and the boat stranded on the beach, sometimes they let up inside for a while.

The fourth day an ophthalmologist tortured the back of my eyes with white-blue dazzle in search of what caused the colored patterns I'd complained of. He found nothing. Maybe the problem was further upstream, I suggested in great fear. He didn't see the necessity for a brain scan and advised against abuse of TV and computer screens. I got him to commit his advice to paper and showed it to Harvey who reluctantly reduced what he called "viewing" – I called it "ghouling" – to six hours a day. He needed my vision as a control, supposedly.

So the wee-hour vault chore went on. I closed my eyes when I could and busied my mind with salary-figures. I wondered if the clean break with Forest Hill couldn't be managed in three months' time.

Only Harvey stepped across the threshold of the living room now. He had it all to himself. Had them all to himself. Hanna couldn't stand the sudden whirring and crossfire of the four lenses. Not that she knew what the sensors were there for. Harvey didn't confide in her any more than he did in the kitchen-table. She must have sensed something uncanny about them anyhow. She had the TV installed up in her bedroom where it used to wake me with its nearby booming at 10:00 am.

But I knew what the sensors were there for if she didn't. I left the living room (I began thinking of it as the dead room) to its earlier inhabitants, the co-dwellers. I'd seen them there on his screen. So they were there in the dead room and forever. They were impotent but invincible. The earth could explode but they'd go on occupying that space, forever.

Not just that space. Soon I sensed them contaminating the other rooms of the house. I tried to combat the idea that in whatever room I went I shouldered invisible multitudes, that there wasn't a square inch of unoccupied space, that with every step I was increasing their number, depositing hundreds of moments of myself behind me as on a stroboscopic photo. It was suffocating. When you thought of it, as you couldn't help doing more and more often, you wished you could dwell on the ceiling like a fly. But then you realized that the ceiling itself must be virtually black with untold generations of flies. Illogically (hadn't they been unbearably peopled too?) I longed for empty beaches sloping into the immensity of the sea. Again the Van Gogh posters helped a little.

By this time (the second week of ghouling) an incident occurred that I interpreted as a possible explanation for what was happening to me. The incident was connected with Harvey's pathological secrecy. He'd said over and over that I should never go down in the cellar when he wasn't there. He hid his calculations from me, flatteringly, as though I could make sense of the symbols and figures.

That day I went down the stairs and surprised him coming out of the lead-plated room where the master machine was. He'd switched the light off inside. All I could dimly see behind him in the upright rectangle of blackness was the end of a shelf and on it a notebook.

He caught my curious gaze. Snapping the big brass combination lock shut and scrambling the code, he said:

"I wouldn't advise poking around. Inside here. Unless you want to get. What I got. That's why there's lead. On the wall and the door. I found out about the machine. Too late. Like Curie. Unlucky Pierre."

I wondered at first if it wasn't an invention of his to scare me away from what lay behind that gray door. Then I wondered if it mightn't be true.

Maybe I'd been exposed to radiation myself despite the lead armor. I imagined the time-rays seeping past the lead-molecules. It was a frightening thought. Less so, though, than incipient insanity. Unless the two explanations weren't mutually exclusive.

There was a fundamental question I evaded then. At the first symptoms of the sickness and assuming the machine down in the cellar was the source of it why didn't I pack up and flee, never mind all the money he owed me? Flee the dust and disorder, outer and inner, the croaking voice, the roaches, those shadows waylaying you at every turn of the corridors?

Maybe it was because for the moment those symptoms were limited to the space of the house. As soon as I stepped outside into the suburban banality of manicured lawns and backyard barbecues the symptoms weakened. I felt almost normal a mile from the house, jogging. I tried to reason that it couldn't be in my blood or brain. Infection and craziness you transport with you wherever you go.

That was the superficial reason I stayed on. I think I know the deep reason now.

But most of the time I was inside the house. I started developing strange ideas. One day Hanna tripped over my pail of warm sudsy water in the corridor outside the dead room. She upset it but stubbed her toe, a consolation. She hopped furiously on one foot holding the other. She swore at me. I swore back because of the mess. I told her that it was her job anyhow not mine. I was on my hands and knees with the scrubbing-brush.

I told her I couldn't stand the filth anymore but it wasn't that. I'd got the idea that the dust and cobwebs were a favorable milieu for them like dankness for toadstools. It didn't change things but I felt better while I was doing it until I imagined Mrs Morgenstern eyeless in her red bandanna alongside me scrubbing away too.

Powerfully imagined her and the others in those rooms and passages. But no more than that, I tried to reassure myself. I didn't actually see them off the screen, in the contemporary living room. I hadn't reached Harvey's stage yet. When he wasn't down in the cellar you were sure to find him in that whirring room Hanna and I steered clear of. It was as though he wanted to inhabit the same space as his mother. You could understand his fixation on the past. There wasn't much for him in the present or in the future which he said didn't exist.

I guess there was nothing for him in sanity either. I'd stand on the threshold I didn't dare cross and watch Harvey in that room. I noted how he made skirting movements in the middle of carpeted emptiness and realized that he was avoiding the long-vanished piano. Or he would bump into furniture that was occupying former emptiness. Sometimes he'd talk to the ghosts. In his mind they must have replied because once I heard him wheezing with laughter.

Finally Hanna would venture to the threshold of that room, not scared, like me, of the ghosts she didn't suspect, but scared of the ceaseless glass eyes. She'd see what he was doing and say: "Harv! Cut it out. You come on out back here." Repeated it over and over. Usually if she nagged him long enough he'd painfully come out of it.

Once he put up as fierce a struggle as down in the cellar. It was time for his hospital treatment. He ignored her and went on with his half-smiling dialogue. Finally she glanced in fear at the sensors and entered the dead room heroically. She grabbed him by the arm. He looked away from his interlocutor, squinted at her for a second and then returned to the interlocutor with a word maybe of apology for the dim interruption. He tried to recover his arm gripped in her ham.

"You touch me. You bitch and. Jerry gets half of. Schering Plough."

"Stick all of Schering Plough up your ass." She dragged him toward the sad, sane side of the threshold.

"I don't want any of it," I said in a loud intractable voice to overrule my secret reaction to his words. He'd recalled the promise of the eventual 25% of all of the shares and the bonds and the money-market fund, a promise he'd made in the middle of the night of the old voices. Ever since, without really believing in it, I hadn't been able to avoid thinking of that $200,000 after taxes, shamefully each time (because of what it necessarily involved), but quite often.

Maybe that was why I put up with as much as I did. Everything except, finally, the ghouling sessions when one day he said that he was hoping to bring back my mother, a frequent visitor to that living room.

I told him I didn't want him ever to do that. He shouldn't ever disturb my mother. I told him I wasn't going down in the cellar any more, never again. I'd decided not to ghoul anymore.

My term for it offended him. That sidetracked the issue. I reminded him what they looked like. He yelled at me faintly. How could they look dead when in fact they were alive? I should have my eyes examined. I didn't tell him I already had. Apparently we didn't see the same things on the screen. Maybe rectification of the deformed images was instantaneous and permanent with him, not just five seconds. Didn't that mean instantaneous and persistent joy? He conceded a certain distortion and flicker but claimed you could see their eyes.

I stuck by my refusal. Finally we compromised. I would be released from viewing but had to take my memory-boosting duties seriously. I should do it in writing.

Two weeks after the first mutilated images swam up on his screen Harvey handed me questionnaires on people I'd known in the old burned-down house. He expected me to recall scenes involving them and to situate them roughly in time and space. "Navigational assistance" he called it again.

There were a couple of blank pages to be filled out on classmates, on his grandparents, on my mother. There were about twenty blank pages to be filled out on his own mother. Just a page for his father. He'd never liked his father.

There were four questions on Rachel Rosen. First, he wanted a detailed physical description if I still refused to let him have a photo of her. Second, a detailed account of our various encounters, in particular the first and last encounters, with the exact time and date and place. Third, a detailed description of her room with the estimated location of the room with regard to the later Anderson house. The fourth question encompassed the three others. I was to describe in detail anything else I remembered concerning the subject.

All that paper allotted to Rachel Rosen – there must have been five hundred sheets in all – seemed to dictate an in-depth treatment. Those blank sheets were like histological sections of the memory-blasted parts of his brain. I was supposed to inscribe things on them. I felt like scribbling after each question, "I can't remember." But those three words would have created a terrific imbalance with the five hundred starved expectant sheets. He'd be sure to take it for deliberate withholding. Wouldn't that mean midnight descent to the cellar and resumption of ghouling? Resumption of exposure to infection? I sat at my desk and stared down at the piles. Finally I reached for the first sheet.

I spent most of the next five days in my room. No time for jogging, the chinning-bar or music. Sometimes things came back in the middle of the night. I'd get up and commit them to paper. It was less for the sake of his brain than for mine. I didn't want the slightest snared memory to slip away again. I saw them as timid creatures emerging out of a dark forest. They gave me great pleasure. Sometimes it peaked to joy. And I was being paid for it. Only the need for food drove me out of that room.

And when I sneaked down into the kitchen for one of Hanna's cold specials I made another discovery. I was hardly bothered at all by the former dwellers of the space I passed through. As for the jerking dead, they'd totally vanished. I determined never to set foot in the cellar again. It was the source of the infection.

Harvey came up quite often and talked to me through the door. I'd locked it. I didn't want to be disturbed, I told him. How is it coming? he'd ask. Coming along fine, I'd reply. You remember lots of things? he'd ask. I always replied: more and more. Can I have it now? he always asked. It sounded like a plea for an urgently needed blood transfusion. Don't disturb me, I'd reply. You're driving it away. It was true. At that he'd leave very quietly.

Finally on the sixth day he came in. I'd forgotten to lock the door. I was propped up in bed, scribbling away. It must have been noon. There was no point getting up early. I remembered just as well in bed. I'd dragged the desk over to the bedside. He looked down at the big pile alongside me. He took a sheet, stared at it, then took another sheet and finally the whole pile. He leafed through it faster and faster.

"What the hell? Stamps?"

"It started out with Fatty Berkowitz then it got onto the stamps. You remember, Saturday afternoons, the trading sessions? If you don't remember, read this and it'll all come back."

"Who gives a shit? About stamps? Or about Allan Berkowitz?"

"Henry Berkowitz was one of the people you wanted to know about."

Two pages were enough, for Christ's sake, he said. Who needed more than two pages on him? I'd done a hundred. And not even on Fatty Berkowitz. On stamps. He looked at the Rachel Rosen pile and of course saw that it had diminished. He wanted what I'd done on her, he said.

But I hadn't done anything on her yet. He hadn't spoken of priority so I'd concentrated on one of the classmates, fat freckled stammering Henry Berkowitz and the three fabulous stamp-albums he used to lug over to Harvey's on Saturday afternoons a million years ago. They were trading-sessions. I'd recalled my cigar-box and inside the gummed hinges and their sweet fishy taste, the tongs, the rectangular magnifying glass. I'd recalled Scott's fat red catalog. It illustrated and priced impossible longed-for things. There were those rare inversions and tête-bêches (in all innocence), the fabulous 1856 British Guyana One-Cent Magenta valued at $50,000 then, the 1840 Penny Black with young Victoria in strange left-facing profile as if unwilling to view her future black dowager dumpiness. I saw my album with the map of the world and the intact British and French empires in pink and violet.

Guard down, I can recall all those things in detail. Can wander about peacefully visiting them like museum displays. No chance of a trap springing for the time of the stamps and the other things associated with it like twilighting stick-ball, rainy day Monopoly, Red Rover Red Rover let Jerry come over, candles in papier-mâché pumpkins, etc. No chance of being caught back there.

Anyhow, I was a subsidized memorialist now. I'd written tirelessly. It wasn't all dry enumeration. It had narrational interest, comic episodes even. I'd reminded him of the stamps we used to swipe from Henry, how we'd also conned the fat heavy-tongued kid with stamps given ancient-looking fade in a Chlorax bath, clean-shaven monarchs bearded with indelible ink, figures modified to promote them out of the usual Scott 2-cent valuation. Harvey took care of the technical side and I delivered the glib sell. Henry's incredible gullibility at all that remained comedy until one morning in bed at about eleven, almost half a century after the event, the idea occurred to me that Henry had known but had no friends and was prepared to pay that price for those Saturday afternoons.

Hind-wit spoiled that cruel innocence. I got rid of Henry Berkowitz. I banished him and all other real persons from memory and concentrated on the stamps in my album.

My pen could hardly keep up with them. The pleasure came from the things remembered of course but also from the exploit of being able to remember them. Had I got rid of cruelty entirely? It was meant for Harvey's eyes too, after all. Wasn't it something like a boastful display of memory, an Olympic pole-vaulter exercising before a paraplegic? I went on and on from Albania to Zanzibar.

Of course the two pages he'd allotted to Fatty Berkowitz were insufficient for that. I borrowed blank pages from the other piles, mainly from Rachel Rosen's. Part of the pleasure came from the way I was able to get back into my ten-year-old mind, taking at face value the lightweight lithographed world, that colorful paper conspiracy of silence against the real world like the two-rouble Moscow subway in the place of gulags or ten-penny cuddly kiwis instead of slaughtered Maoris, etc.

But then I ventured too far out of that time of innocence. I couldn't help remembering the day the real world erupted into my lithographed one and destroyed its fictions. Coming back from school I found my mother waiting for me in front of the apartment-house entrance. Because of her face I thought something had happened to my father. He had a heart condition. She said I was a practically a man now (a Mensch) and could understand. I was twelve. Poppa still hadn't found work. We desperately needed money. She'd sold my stamp-collection. I consoled her.

Poor Momma. How the bastard cheated her. It was worth three times that sixty-five dollars. When I learned where my album was I stuck the cigar-box with the gummed hinges, the tongs and the rectangular magnifying glass on the shelf of a closet, way back, behind other things. I was a Mensch. I stopped thinking about stamps, blanked it all out. Instinctively, till now, I'd avoided returning to that past joy because of the association with final disaster. It was a characteristic mental operation.

Harvey didn't even bother reading a single page of the precious things I'd recaptured. He finally came out and said that what he wanted was Rachel. To make up for all the paper I'd taken from her to record the stamps, he brought up a whole ream. Now there were nearly a thousand blank sheets available for Rachel Rosen.

Alone in the room, I took a sheet and disposed of his third question on her. I told him that I had no ideas about the location of her room with regard to the later Anderson house. I wasn't a surveyor. He was the one who'd seen the Anderson house being constructed on that lot. Couldn't he remember?

As for the description of her room, I'd been there, very briefly, twice, once with his mother and the other time with him. All I remembered was that her desk was always covered with math books. Also that there were two dolls propped up against the pillow of her bed. They had black button-eyes. Her unfriendly cat had been on the bed too. The cat's name was "Mitzi" or "Mitsi." When her tail coiled and she stared at you with those unblinking yellow eyes it was a dangerous sign. I once got scratched trying to pet her.

That's all I remembered about her room. I said that if more came back I'd give it to him. I reminded him that she'd lived with his family for two years. Her room had been on the same floor as his. Why did he need me? He must remember more things about her room than the dolls and the cat. His memory couldn't be that bad.

I got the paper back almost immediately, a fast correction job. The margins were crowded with comments in red ink defining our topsy-turvy roles: he the teacher, I the student. The only thing missing was a mark. It wouldn't have been a pass. How come I remembered the dolls' eyes and the cat's and not hers? It couldn't be true that I'd been in her room just twice. His memory wasn't that bad.

He repeated vocally what he'd written, over and over till his voice went out. I foresaw daily hassles with the bit-by-bit approach. I told him that criticism disturbed the flow of memory. He'd have to wait a while till I'd accumulated a hundred pages or so, then criticize all he liked.

What could he say to that? Because of his silence I relented a little. I said that from time to time I'd let him have things. But no more harassing.

I was still working on it, I said as the days went by. I tried to stay out of the room as long as possible, go jogging in any weather three times a day, once in a blinding snowstorm. He didn't like jogging on company time. It did no good telling him I was multi-tracked mentally and could remember just as easily moving on my feet as seated at a desk. I was sentenced to the room. I listened to music behind the locked door clandestinely with earphones and tried to go on recalling stamps.

A week went by.

Almost finished? he began asking. I'm a slow rememberer, I said. I almost added: as slow remembering as picking up nickels and dimes. He shouldn't be too impatient, shouldn't nag me. Nagging disturbed the delicate balance of memory.

He didn't dare say anything after that. But sometimes I caught him staring intensely at my skull as though it harbored millions of images his machine could never get at. I remembered I'd promised him things from time to time.

#1

The first time I saw her was on a snapshot. The organization in charge of the refugees must have sent it while she was still over there. I saw it by accident. You were taking something else out of your wallet, money to pay for the books, probably. (Do you remember the books I procured for you for years till the day I got caught and then you had to pay for them full price?) Anyhow the snapshot fell on the floor and I picked it up. You've been holding out on me, I said. You didn't have girls in your wallet or on your mind like me. That's how I learned about her, that she was coming over to live a while with you. Why did you make such a secret of it?

She was nothing special. She was there with her parents standing in snow in front of pine-trees. She must have been thirteen. The photo was a little blurred but she didn't look like a promising beauty. I think I told you so. You like them young I said. I think I said I preferred the mother. I disclaim all responsibility for things I said or did then. At that age I was the crown prince of schmucks. I think it was some time in 1943, ancient history. I don't mean the photo, but when I saw the photo. The photo too, of course, even more ancient history, since they were all together on it and looked reasonably happy. You have to in front of a camera. What's the point of all this?

(He dwarfed them. They were on each side of him, their arms linked in his. He had his hands in his pockets. His wife was smiling at the camera. So was he, but reserved, self-sufficient, as a concession to the occasion you felt. He had horn-rimmed glasses and a moustache like Thomas Mann or Stephan Zweig. The girl was looking up at her towering father. You could see the long black shadow of the photographer across the snow like a giant finger pointing at her. The branches of the pines were covered with snow. There was a crow on one of the branches. The amateurish blur of the photo reminded you even then, that first time, of the photos of obscure families doomed into making the third page of a tabloid.)

#2

This is for the first question, a description or a photo you say. I never had a photo of her. I remember now that she had brown eyes. Also short dark hair. She was slim with a quiet, serious face. She was no raving beauty although better than on that snow photo. Four years older it must have been. How come you can't remember yourself? You saw her every day for two years a thousand times more often than I did. Your memory can't be that bad.

(There'd been a second photo, a reduced studio portrait. Delivering a book-order to Harvey a couple of weeks after the first photo I find it on the living room table. Mrs Morgenstern has gone to get Harvey for me. He's down in the cellar. Her oval face emerges out of artistic blur and darkness into the narrow zone of focus. The lighting of her features is cleverly done. The illumination seems to come from within. Her sensitive lips are on the verge of a smile. Her great dark eyes elude mine, barely. I stand there trying to capture that mysterious gaze. It can't be done since she's looking past the lens. I try anyhow for minutes. When I hear Harvey coming I slip the photo into my pocket. When I get home I cut off the margins and place it over Wendy Hiller in the secret compartment beneath the semi-public girl friends. It's funny how you can operate on two levels like that. A little over two years later it's necessary to reduce her to shreds and flush her away. That was the only photo of her I'd ever possessed.)

One night in January – so another year between me and all that – I heard the staircase creaking laboriously. There were shuffling steps up the corridor, then his harsh panting in front of my door. The alarm-clock dial showed 2:32 am green in the darkness. Now he was trying the doorknob. The door was locked. He practically whispered it, either because he couldn't manage anything but a whisper or else because he knew I was awake and so a whisper would do.

"I have her. Down in the cellar. Your mother."

***

Nine

A minute went by. The only sound was the ticking of the alarm clock. Then I heard his footsteps moving away from the door and then the diminishing creaks of the staircase. The ticking of the clock finally covered the sound.

After a while I slipped my bathrobe on and went downstairs. You could hear the sensors working away in the dark dead room. All I felt was emptiness there. I stood on the threshold of the cellar for a while. Then went down carefully, step by step. I kept to the wall side of the stairs as though those extra inches could make a difference to the rays. The junk-heap hulked in the red gloom. He was crouched forward in his chair, hiding the screen. I moved to one side to see it, standing as far away from the lead-plated door as possible, my back against the cinder-block wall.

For an hour I saw a succession of flickering close-ups of drapes, the oval mirror, furniture detail, windowpanes, the chandelier, the grinning skeleton teeth of the piano, hundreds of other objects. Once his father scuttled eyeless across the room.

Of course she was gone. Had vanished even before he'd undertaken the painful journey up two flights to tell me about it. Why had he bothered? She'd died in December 1952. That entitled her to about eight seconds' electronic existence. What he'd seen would never come back.

He'd told me about that. In the mode of random selectivity the probability of an identical return to a particular spatial-temporal intersection was practically nil. It was part of the more general problem of temporal navigation. I went on looking anyhow.

At the end I asked him what she'd been doing, what she'd looked like. I had to repeat the question twice, louder each time. Finally, without turning around he said she'd been seated in the striped armchair chatting with his mother in the flowered one. He'd been able to read my name on her lips.

After a while I went upstairs. My eyes started to burn, a symptom. I'd got a good dose of rays. I stopped in the corridor. It still felt empty, one-dimensional in the lonely stratum of the present. I felt empty too. It was like a broken appointment. I tried to imagine her there but couldn't. I'd never seen her in that living room. After the move to Brooklyn she'd visited the Morgensterns twice a month for years but without me.

What came back was another living room with my mother and Mrs Morgenstern. I saw (see) Rachel coming down. My mother says something to her in Yiddish and embraces and kisses her. Rachel smiles shyly with that slight shrinking of hers when offering herself for embrace, always a dangerously consoling one with my mother. I see her staring seriously over my mother's shoulder at Harvey as he comes in, abstracted, not noticing any of us.

But that had been in the old living room, not this one. I went back to bed.

When I woke up at ten o'clock in the morning Hanna's TV wasn't booming as usual. There were no sounds anywhere in the house. The only thing I heard was the rain lashing against the panes. My eyes were still burning. I tried to imagine my mother seated in a striped armchair I'd never seen. All I could come up with was the image of her embracing Rachel, the wrong time and the wrong living room.

I was alone in the house. Hanna must have muscled Harvey off to the hospital again. Their rays, the therapeutic ones, would burn away more of his memory-units, placing that much more burden on me. I didn't turn the light on in the corridor. It was like solitary midnight there. I opened the door of the dead room and stood at the threshold.

In the gray light from the weepy windows I could see the lenses working away in the four corners. They were busy with their vision of what I couldn't see even though I'd been down in the cellar for a good hour that night. Maybe I'd stood too far away from the lead-plated wall. I went inside and stood in the middle of the room for a while. The sofa bore the imprint of Harvey's body. I felt tired and stretched out on it.

On the low table next to the sofa there was a dish with half a salami-sandwich and a roach on it, pencils, a ruler, a draftsman's compass, a directional compass and a pile of papers. I tried to chase the roach away. It didn't budge. I touched it and it fell over on its back.

It was strange. The living room used to swarm with roaches. This was the first one I'd seen since the sensors had been set up. Maybe they had the sense to steer clear of them. I looked at the papers.

At first glance they looked like cubist drawings. Examined, they resolved into confused house-plans. The confusion came from the overlap of a second, dotted, house-plan on the first one. It was like a photo of a bombed-out city with one roofless building disastrously involved with another one. No two diagrams were identical. The angle and degree of overlap differed. So did the layout and size of the rooms in the two houses. There was a red circle on the dotted diagram. On each paper the red circle covered a different part of what I understood was Beth Anderson's house.

I understood that he was trying to situate Rachel's bedroom on it, the past on the present. No version was definitive. There were question marks on all of them. Some had been crumpled and then smoothed out.

When I woke up I was still holding one of the diagrams. A sensor lens zoomed in on my sudden movement as I placed the diagram back on top of the pile.

I went upstairs and started changing into my jogging clothes. The rain dashed harder against the panes. Beth Anderson's house was ghostly behind the undulating curtain of rain. There was movement behind a first-floor window. I thought of a pretext and went over to the bookshelf where my books had replaced his and chose something easy. I changed back and went over to her house.

She took a long time opening the door. She was holding a window-wiper in one red rubber-gloved hand with the other cupped beneath it to catch a dirty drop. "Why Jerry, you're drenched, come on in. But promise not to look at me."

She looked like an aging street-urchin in a man's shirt four sizes too big and knotted over her bare abdomen. She was wearing low tattered jeans. She had a cap on her head at an angle and a smudge on her cheek. I'd never seen her that spontaneous sweating way. For some reason she made me think of Huck Finn and afterwards I sometimes called her that.

A vacuum cleaner was lying in the middle of the living room. I apologized. I hadn't realized it was Saturday morning. It had been a sudden idea. She'd once said how she wished she could have sat in on one of my classes. The class could come to her, I said, showing her the book. Some other day, of course, I added. She blinked. I realized too late that she was wondering: if poems why not her son's poems? I'd have to get around to that blue box.

She recovered and said, "Oh, Robert Frost! I... I'd be delighted, honored. Don't go. I've practically finished with the house cleaning. I'll be down in a few seconds." She almost ran upstairs. A shower started up.

I stood in the middle of that other living room. I didn't move or make a sound. I remembered how once in a wood I'd stood like that, absolutely motionless and silent waiting for some small shy animal to come for my camera. I stood like that (in the wood) for an hour. It hadn't come. After a while (in her living room) I began wandering around, examining the goldfish goggling magnified in his bowl, the potted plants, the imitation Scandinavian furniture, the reproductions of harmonious bouquets and landscapes on the pastel walls. There was nothing beneath it. It was all safe surface, I thought.

A minute later I came across an imitation 18th century jewel-box with a porcelain lid showing a shepherdess and a swain simpering against pink clouds. I opened it and found a tube of Valium inside.

When she came down a half hour later she was all dressed up and coiffed in her usual banal perfection. Scent had replaced the faintly acrid smell of her sweating body. She'd been more attractive dressed down for house cleaning. We did a few Frost poems. She said she'd adored Wall Mending and would love to do more. That's how our classroom sessions started. I felt better after and told myself again that her house was a good place to retreat to when it became impossible to breathe in the other house.

#3

The first time I met her was by accident. You hadn't even told me she'd arrived. Why all that secrecy? I happened to drop by with books I thought would interest you. You hadn't come back from your CCNY classes yet. I didn't know your schedule. Your mother was there. She had hazel eyes and a mole on her right cheek. She told me about her, how her father was a famous mathematician. I should never talk to her about him or about her mother. She'd brought one of her father's books with her but couldn't understand it and was always asking you to help her with it. I was surprised at that. I hadn't seen her as a scientific type like you. Your mother went upstairs and coaxed her out of her room. I could hear them. I stayed in the living room. She came down with a book and that cat. She was shy and didn't talk very much although her English was good. You came back. She started asking you questions about equations, don't ask me about those questions, it's a language I've never understood. After a while I went back home with the books. They hadn't interested you. I'd come over for nothing.

(I stand there in the middle of that other living room waiting for them to come down. In those days I'm on the friendliest of terms with mirrors and am prepared to see myself reflected in glory in her face: the tweed jacket with the bully-boy padded shoulders of the time, the buttoned-down collar with the laboriously double-knotted necessarily blue Sulka silk tie, keenly creased cream flannel cuffed trousers, correctly breaking over black shoes coaxed to soft shine. The book money is for clothes mainly.

My smile, rehearsed a hundred times, is winning. Her smile is shy and brief. Later Mrs Morgenstern mentions extensive dental work as well as the obvious other things to explain the limits of it. I get the prologue to smile plus great brown eyes for a second. Then the cat gets her mouth and gaze as she kisses its round head.

We are introduced. She has to leave the cat. I initiate the handshake, a European gesture, I know. It's for the contact. The table is next to her but she doesn't relinquish the book and pencil to free her right hand. She shifts them to the other hand awkwardly. Also full of awkward grace, the slight recoil of her slim body in compensation for the surrender of her hand briefly and passively in mine. Out of this. She reclaims her hand quickly. Mrs Morgenstern says that Harvey will be back any minute now. She's wrong. I know his schedule. She praises me inaccurately to Rachel and leaves us together in the living room. She has shopping to do.

Rachel is involved silently with the cat again. I'm involved with her plain mysterious averted face. The girls I go out with never avert their faces. They give you everything in minutes and it's nothing. Rachel keeps what she has and what she is. I'd seen that immediately on the second photo she doesn't suspect I have in my wallet.

For the next fifteen minutes I present her with an image of myself fashioned to correspond to the image of her I'd fashioned on the basis of two photographs, one blurred. I parade Central European names and titles I've memorized.

She sits stiffly in her chair as though undergoing an oral examination. Oh yes, Grillparzer, Kafka, yes, she murmurs as I go on not just for the sake of my image but because that way I take her away from the cat, monopolize her docile eyes. And of course Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, I say, identifying him as the librettist of Der Rosenkavalier. Richard Strauss, she says positively, identifying the composer of the opera. That gets us (gets me) onto arduous modern Central European music I've listened to a few seconds on WQXR. It turns out she's vaguely heard of Schönberg, not at all of Alban Berg. I pretend to have conquered both of those unscalable bergs.

To break the silence I fall back on easier and authentic things. I ask who she prefers, Schumann or Schubert? I think they are both very great, she says respectfully in her low voice. I have the strong impression that she doesn't care for music any more than she does for literature. I'm left with that carefully constructed and conveyed image of myself, corresponding to nothing.

I ask about her plans and extract from her that she's going to attend Monroe High which I'm still struggling to graduate from because of geometry. If you like, I could help you with Shakespeare, I say casually, in poor command of my heart. You're going to have to study Shakespeare. You could help me with German. She's politely evasive.

Now I try to construct a new more effective identity. I invite her to a baseball game at Ebbet's Field. I say that for the naturalization test of course you have to know all the presidents of the United States chronologically but also they ask questions about the national game and they turn you down if you can't explain "double-play" or "steal home".

She looks very serious at that last term and her lips repeat it soundlessly. To make her laugh, the necessary first stage for contact, I pantomime the stealing of home there in the living room and nearly break a vase. Why do I clown? Does she define me as a clown? Does she define me as anything at all? She's gone back to kissing the stupidly indifferent cat.

Now for the first time her face awakens, the inner light of the photo in my wallet, as she looks up beyond me at the doorway where Harvey is standing. Sharp, he says, taking me in. I've brought you books, I say. Dressed to kill, he says. Dressed to kill, he repeats, much louder, staring at her, wanting response to that. He'll do that constantly with her: use slang expressions she can't possibly know. Her English is very good but of the British variety. He'll stare and stare at her for response until she has to confess her ignorance. This is the first time before me.

Dressed to kill? she confesses her ignorance now. Kill the girls he says with heavy patience. Jerry's a girl-killer. If you're a girl you'd better be careful. Her lips silently form the insanity in bewilderment split by a fractional second of a quick polite smile, and her plain lovely face returns to bewilderment. Then smiles a little, nods, clearly hasn't understood. I imagine he'll be explicit with her later. But I've already defined myself with Arnold Schönberg as an intellectual. Or as a clown with the theft of home.

May I show you this, Harvey? she says and abandons the cat and shows him a formula she'd worked out and says more to him in thirty seconds than she had with me in thirty minutes. I can't understand a word she's saying. He looks bored. He glances at me seated in the armchair and at the books on the table. He interrupts her. "Jerry's my book-procurer. But he's procured the wrong titles." I know that. I pretend I don't.

When I leave I say: "Auf Wiedersehen, Rachel." She says: "Goodbye.")

The new year started jerking by monotonously like an escapement-wheel. Rain-bound, I spent the days upstairs dredging up memories, paid-for written ones, also unwritten ones, paid for too, differently. I started going down to the cellar again from time to time but taking precautions. I was careful not to stay there for more than an hour at a time. I positioned myself as far away as possible from the lead-plated wall, up against the cinder-block wall. For comfort in peril I straddled a chair, crouched forward. A good part of my body was shielded by the back of the chair and half of my face by my crossed arms.

The fifth or sixth night my mother came again, supposedly. It had been very short, he said, a few seconds. She'd been in the same position, in the same striped armchair facing his mother in the flowered one. But it might have been years before the first capture or years after, he couldn't tell. They'd always been in that position when my mother visited, saying basically the same things year in year out, he said. Anyhow I'd missed her. I must have been dozing. That week I did see fragments of his mother several times, more Christmas dinners, a cat, his father, Harvey himself in his early thirties judging by the duration of the image.

One night I brought the old Morgensterns up with me to my room once more and endured them for the sake of those five seconds of total restitution. The next morning I sensed the co-dwellers in the rooms and corridors again. But I didn't feel my mother there. I felt the cat and Harvey's father but not her.

Even when the physical symptoms began to set in I told myself it was just for a while. I'd had to do a lot of reading on the subject once and should have remembered that "just for a while" is what a drug-novice in the honeymoon stage of addiction tells himself and even sets dates for pulling out. I'd set deliverance-date, the clean break from the house, for the beginning of April. I underscored the day of fools in my pocket-diary. I decorated the space with exclamation marks and the sum I'd have saved by then: $10,000. And then there would be the money in the special account if he kept his word. That would amount to either $15,600 or $8,400 or $3,600. It depended on what my weekly salary was. I still hadn't been able to find out.

I made constant efforts not to think of another, prodigious, sum of money which couldn't be dated. I've always had an unsatisfactory relation to money. I recorded my outlays for each day. Certain golden days the expenditure was zero. To economize on restaurants I'd taken to bolting down what Hanna left moldering in the refrigerator. I had no idea where I would be going. I thought vaguely of a Florida beach, far from the parts where childishly clad seniors herd themselves.

But April was four thousand dollars away. Sometimes I had to get out of the house. The co-dwellers were invisible but suffocating. I felt occasional nausea and attributed it to intestinal flu picked up jogging in a snowstorm. For relief (I told myself) I went over to the other house twice a week for what Beth Anderson called our "talking sessions." We'd created a miniature classroom situation in her living room. It had developed out of that unannounced Saturday morning visit of mine with Frost. Every week I gave her something to work on and we'd discuss it over drinks. She always dressed up for the occasion. I supplied the liquor. It was my major expenditure. For a slight woman she could put it away.

For the sake of variety the sessions sometimes included music as well as literary appreciation. Between chapters I exposed her to classical music, one movement at a time. I'd glanced at her collection of records and tried to bridge the gap with easy spectacular things like the Mahler First in Solti's 1964 version. It lost out tremendously on her little stereo outfit. "You should hear it on my machine," I said after the final movement. "Blasts the roof off the house with absolutely no distortion." At the expression on her face I added: "Never after 10:00 pm, of course." I explained to her in some detail the unique technical features of my audio system.

But mainly it was literature. I gave her short accessible things: after Frost, Winesburg, Ohio. As a joke I said I'd chosen that book because the author's name was the same as hers. She wasn't really an Anderson, of course. Her maiden name was hard to pronounce. She insisted on writing it out for me. It bristled with Z's and Y's. She was proud of her pope. Her father had come from there. Oh yes, I said, my mother too. We were practically landsleute I said. She didn't understand the Yiddish word for fellow-countrymen. Or was it German? She thought it was Polish. Do you know Polish too? she asked.

I'd had worse students. At least she wasn't brand-new. She brought her experience to the texts. Sometimes though this raised difficulties. Purely pedagogic difficulties, I thought at first. She tended to read her own problems in the stories. The warning signal was: "How true that is..." A musing silence. Then: "It's like once..." And then we were out of turn-of-the-century Winesburg and into end-of-the-century Forest Hill and her husband and her son.

Sometimes the confidences were a little embarrassing. Once a scene of extramarital involvement in the book brought up: "But she's married!" With her mid-western nasalization the word came out: "Mary-ed," which made me think of my second ex-wife. I had been Mary-ed once too. "I never understood how a married woman could possibly do a thing like that. I was always faithful to Jack." Then, as though I doubted or had designs, almost defiantly: "And I always will be faithful to him, no matter what. I know we'll be together again one day."

As the literary sessions went on, the anecdotes on her married life multiplied and seemed less and less to be digressions from the text. B. Anderson's stories ended by blending in perfectly with S. Anderson's. By the time – necessarily very long – we finished Winesburg, Ohio she and her husband had somehow become characters in that book of grotesques. It turned out he wasn't a professional photographer at all. He didn't seem to have been a professional in any field except evasion and fraud. In eighteen years of marriage he'd briefly run through scores of fragmentary occupations: car-washer, encyclopedia salesman, waiter, embalmer, diamond-pusher over the phone, clerk, I can't remember what else.

For her it wasn't instability but a spiritual quest. He was trying to find himself. She recounted her exploitation with indulgent nostalgic tenderness. It was outrageous, the way she wasn't outraged about it.

For instance: how when he'd started talking about moving out she'd advanced him out of her mother's inheritance enough money to buy a slum flat on 9th Avenue in Manhattan for meditation a couple of days a week. That way she had him the rest of the week was the idea but soon he stopped returning to Forest Hill. She couldn't stand the idea of his living in a dirty slum. He was so hopeless with things that she'd had to come over (with take-away Chinese food) and clean up the flat and paint it for him while he lay on a sofa. To protect him against drippings while she was doing the ceiling she'd had to put a sheet over him.

"Meditating?" I asked.

"Why yes, he was," she said. "Of course he was meditating. I did my best not to disturb him."

Then he disappeared. When she came back from her summer holiday with her ill sister in Phoenix the flat had been sold and he had disappeared. A spiritual crisis, she supposed. She'd been worried sick.

"Did he ever give you back the money you advanced for the flat?"

She blinked. She was visibly offended at the implied blame of the man she loved. So I stopped asking questions about him even when she told me the story of the junk-jewelry she wore. The Golden Galaxy supposedly crafted them. They radiated spiritual force. He mailed them to her at irregular intervals. She sent the money to him at post-office addresses that changed quite often. Once she went to the Akron, Ohio address he'd given and stood in front of the post office all day for three days but didn't see him even though the money was waiting for him. She wept a little telling the story.

"Did he get the money in the end?" I asked.

She blinked and didn't answer. Couldn't she see that, like her son, her husband was a villainous exploitive shit? She wasn't too bad at analyzing fictional stories but F minus when it came to analyzing her own. I felt a certain pity but mainly annoyance at the way she let herself be devoured. It was also getting to be a bore. When alone with a woman in a room I wasn't accustomed to another man barging in as he did all the time.

Finally one evening she broke off in the middle of a story-inspired confidence. Maybe my comments on Jack had been becoming too critical or else she'd observed that I wasn't paying attention. I often had absences in that room and maybe my gaze had wandered a little. She apologized. "I must bore you. I'm always talking about myself. Not like you. You never do that. You're a real mystery man." And waited, expectantly. "Oh me," I replied disparagingly and laughed and tried to steer her back to the story. She blinked and obeyed. I got to know that rapid blinking. It was a sign of something wrong: something I'd said or hadn't said. Finally she stopped her personal digressions.

Still, she couldn't stay confined to the printed page. "I admire her," she exclaimed about a character one evening. "Do you mind if I ask you? Who are the ten personalities you most admire?" And without giving me a chance to say "Mozart, ten times," recited her list. Her pope, J. F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were well positioned. Then she returned to the fiction for a second and repeated, "I really admire her. She's so, oh, human. What are the qualities you admire most in a human being?"

Once again, before I could sidestep her question, she gave me her list. "Sincerity" came first. "Compassion" was a close second. I forget the others. I think they were more of the inborn heart-virtues. They'd betrayed her. She should have prized cerebral virtues like lucidity. When she asked me about my own top ten I said that in principle I agreed with her choice. She looked vaguely dissatisfied at my answer.

The paper characters were suffering friends for her. She prescribed remedies for their loneliness and despair. I'd listen to her for a while then try to return to what the author had written. I thought I did it gently and jokingly but she'd blink in confusion or hurt so I finally relaxed and allowed her to play her games. She just wasn't able to take fiction as fiction. She said she felt like shaking the Winesburg characters to make them get out of themselves and live.

"A good shaking and good advice, and, oh, lots of love, of course," she said as though she had the infallible recipe for others. She delivered lectures to them on the best way to solve their problems and asked me what I would say to so-and-so.

I felt like telling her that her approach was a heresy in terms of literary analysis. But I ended by playing her game. I had no one else to talk to that winter. The thought occurs to me now that maybe she hadn't either. So I gave sound theoretical advice.

Sometimes I was even tempted to give her sound advice for herself, say in a detached voice so it wouldn't seem intrusive that maybe she ought to try to cut down on the tranquilizers. You found them everywhere in that impeccably ordered house, practically in every room, as though recourse had to be instantaneous, the trip to the nearest pink-lit cabinet-chest impossibly long.

Certain evenings we did no more than three pages in as many hours. She couldn't stay cooped up in fiction. She had her own fictions. The stories were launching pads for wild tangents to vaster things: other worlds and invisible presences. A one-line description of a starry sky and she was off there herself, into the possibility of other inhabited planets and visits from them: all those unexplained UFOs. Her husband was back with us.

Clouds, birds, aircraft, alcohol and hallucinations, I said, refuting him. I reminded her of the distances involved, so immense that they congealed into a time barrier. She nodded almost eagerly, like an attentive student when I expressed my negative certitudes. "Oh I agree, I agree," but she ended by saying, more to herself than to me: "But there must be something."

The death of a character in a story was a starting-point for conjectures about afterlife. When she asked me what I thought, I arrayed the scientific reasons that militated against that consolation (or horror). Again she nodded in apparent agreement but came out with a terminal: "But don't you think there must be something?" Once she ventured a timid reproach. "Gosh, you're not a very encouraging person." I told her I was irrationally disturbed by the irrational.

My remark didn't discourage her. Over the weeks I had to parry extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, "attested-to" apparitions, out-of-body experiences, telepathy, clairvoyance, the whole pathetic catalogue of yearning and abdicated intelligence. She'd apparently visited her husband's part of the bookcase. Each time she carefully listened to my counter arguments which systematically demolished her husband's witless utopias and nodded in unconvinced agreement.

Sometimes I got a little impatient with her digressions until I remembered that after all this wasn't a real classroom, she wasn't a real student and when you got down to it I wasn't a real teacher.

So to make up for my impatience I sometimes played along, even initiated childish games myself when I'd drunk enough. Once I asked her what country she'd like to live in if she had the choice. It's one way of measuring people, but did she have to be measured? She said: right where she was, the good old USA, but otherwise Switzerland because of the mountains, the cowbells and the cleanliness. And you? I said Italy because of the cities and the dirt. She said, of course Italy too. I guessed it was for gondoliers and her pope again. He popped up everywhere.

Another time in all innocence I proposed: "What would you do if you had a couple of hundred thousand dollars?" At first I was prepared for things like Alpine travel, horticultural splurges, a gold-plated Ouija board. Then I realized that she didn't go in for gifts to herself. She'd give the whole sum to her husband in exchange for a truckload of mystical machine-manufactured junk jewelry.

Her face remained perfectly immobile for long seconds as in deep reflection and then disintegrated. Money couldn't buy what she wanted, she managed to bring out and then apologized very briefly and definitively. She reached over and refilled my glass with whisky as though I were the one who needed fortifying.

I said I understood that. What I really wanted couldn't be bought with any amount of money either. She didn't take it up. She changed the subject like shutting a door.

What annoyed me a little about the incident was her quick apology, as though she regarded her loss of control as some sort of violation of the rules of an imposed game, a transgression of an implicit agreement between us to remain on the safe surface of things. Somehow I must have conveyed the impression that confidences were distasteful to me. I thought I concealed it more expertly. Or maybe she imagined there was an implicit obligation for reciprocity in confidences.

The incident was exceptional. It wasn't hard to make her laugh at classroom-style quips. I still got pleasure out of making women laugh, particularly if they closed their eyes and threw their heads back doing it as this one did. It's like a kind of surrender on their part. I could make most of the women I'd known laugh at will at the beginning of our relationship if not at the end.

Once she said I was funny for such a sad man. She said I reminded her of her grandfather. He'd been like that, funny and sad. I wasn't pleased at the generation aspect of the comparison. For maybe the past fifteen years half of the younger women I found myself involved with stressed my resemblance to their dead fathers. It was a role that had to be accepted as the price for access. Apparently, as a grandfather figure, I had entered a new and terminal phase in my relationship with younger women, even with a woman like Beth Anderson, basically non-desirable except maybe a little, very briefly, when offering her throat in laughter or seen kneeling in a flower-bed in hot weather from the right angle.

***

Ten

One evening without warning she looked up from the assigned story (which had nothing to do with what she was going to say) and announced:

"What we see is a Veil of Appearance, Impure Illusion concealing the True Splendor behind and beneath. But one Nearing Day the Veil will be rent and the True Splendor revealed. That Day is near."

It had to be a quote. It wasn't her usual oral style. The intruder again. Our duo was a trio. With a jingle of his bracelets her sweeping gesture took in her living room and I guess everything beyond.

"Do you really think this is all there is, Jerry? There's nothing behind or beneath, like they say?"

I was disturbed at her asking a question like that. It wasn't the role I'd assigned her. Knowing the poor unspiritual stuff that lay beneath, I tried to hang on to the illusory surface she'd downgraded. I told her that it wouldn't be nice at all to have her lovely living room disappear. I didn't want that to happen, I said.

Her face shone. It wasn't unpleasant to make her face shine like that. It was in my power, godlike, to rejuvenate her. She asked me what I particularly liked about her living room. She was 100% back in illusory surface. To exercise more power of rejuvenation I was tempted to say "You." It was a dangerous temptation, involving abuse of power. So I said: "Everything in the living room." She returned to The Golden Galaxy.

"That wasn't me. I was quoting. My husband sends me their literature every week. I wish he'd write. It's way, way out stuff. Too far out for me. Wonderfully poetic but I have real trouble with some of it. For example..."

She let me have it in detail. Apparently she read the literature Jack sent as carefully as if they'd been letters. She could quote whole paragraphs. I closed my eyes and sank deeper in the armchair with the whisky as she began reciting in fatiguing capital letters – she already tended to italicize syllables – about the two Realms, the totally Evil and Illusory Realm of Appearances ruled over by the evil Fallen God Glauk and the shimmering Realm of the Golden Galaxy, our true Spiritual Home. What maintained the Unreal Realm about us was Despair, Disbelief, Spiritual Sloth. When the balance tipped in favor of Belief and Love, the Veil of Appearance would be rent. How could balance-tipping be achieved? Through the process of InGathering.

Beth Anderson stopped. She waited for me to ask about InGathering. Maybe she was testing me to see if I was asleep. I opened my eyes and asked: "What's InGathering?"

I learned that InGathering was seeking the mass presence of Unbelievers and, by intense spiritual concentration in their unknowing midst, winning them over to Illumination. No whitewashed cell or wilderness for the Golden Galaxy believers. Their church was the multiplied human soul in crowds, wherever the crowd might be, gathered for whatever reason, however trivial: subway, football games, political meetings, discos, etc.

One day – and it was not far – the necessary number of believers would be reached, one billion, three hundred thousand four hundred and twenty three and the InGathering would attain critical mass. At any moment it could happen, mental concentration overcoming dead lethargy.

Apparent reality would then disappear and the usurped reality of the Golden Galaxy would appear in blinding splendor.

I imagined them under broadbrimmed black hats, bearded to the fanatical eyes, trying to win over the shadowy crowds of co-dwellers to Illumination.

"You're sure about that figure?" I asked. "One billion three hundred thousand four hundred?"

"And twenty-three. Positive. That's what they say anyhow." She reached for her glass and took a long swallow.

I certainly didn't want to offend her. However, I couldn't help observing that it was the most prodigious bullshit I'd ever heard. She blinked and replied that it was a little weird maybe but she wouldn't call it... what I'd just said. I had to admit, she said, that it was full of imagination, like a wonderful poem.

I admitted nothing of the sort. I told her that any C student in Comparative Religion could have concocted the tenets of that cult. It was warmed-over Gnosticism.

Gnosticism? she inquired.

Some other evening, I said and pretexted fatigue. The subject of the Veil of Reality was a bore. I'd been behind it and knew the diminished things that were there. Comparative Religion was a little dim in my mind, anyhow. As soon as I got back to the other house I consulted Harvey's 1930 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and took notes. It was a little like preparing a class. While I was doing it I forgot about the co-dwellers.

The following evening I gave her a guided tour of metaphysical dualism: Zoroastrianism, Manicheasm, the Albigenses, the buggering Bogomils, etc. etc. She didn't yield. She said that if so many people believed it over the ages even if the name for it changed then it couldn't be a hundred percent... what I'd said it was.

But she also said: "Gosh, Jerry, is there anything you don't know?" Which was satisfying to hear even though I'd cheated in a way with those warmed-over encyclopedia articles.

She didn't neglect her son during our literary sessions. She began to allude more and more frequently to his poems. She seized any pretext. It was tiresome being nagged in this house as well as in the other, in one to produce unwelcome writing, in the other to read it. I couldn't be hurried with those poems if I wanted to do justice to them, I said. She brightened at that. Oh yes, I know, you need time to savor them, she said. She promised not to hurry me. She let up after that. I'd really have to get around to doing the painful job one day. Whatever the minor annoyances involved, her house was a relief from the other house and my duties there.

#4

I didn't see much of her even after she started attending Monroe High. Between classes she was always in the library, never had time to go out, not even for an ice-cream soda. I don't think she had any friends. I hardly ever saw her except for half-hour German lessons once a week in an empty classroom after three. It wasn't easy convincing her to do that. She wasn't stubborn or anything but hard to reach. She never volunteered anything herself. I submitted written stuff in German which she corrected. She also corrected my oral mistakes. She was a very nice and gentle girl but it was a little like working with an intelligent grammar-book. And those lessons were just for a while. The summer holidays rolled around. I spent August as a counselor in a camp in Vermont. I hardly ever saw her at all after those lessons.

(I see her very often at school. She seldom sees me. I know her schedule by heart. Between classes she's sure to be in the school library. I don't want to disturb her in her work. She emerges bewildered when you do that. From the stacks I can see how the reference books and papers and pens are laid out neatly on the desk before her like a perfectly done assignment in itself. She isn't naturally a brilliant student and tries to compensate by grinding work. One of my girl friends angered me by calling her that: "a grind." Once I saw her staring down at a corrected math paper, a disaster judging by her strained white face. I expected a C. It was a B+. She often wears a long-sleeved white blouse with a little-girl collar beneath a gray jumper. Once she reaches for the dictionary and I see a big white scar on her wrist over a lovely tracing of blue veins. She has very white skin. Maybe a week later I see her make the same movement and see the scar again. It was the same movement but with the other hand.

Once she suddenly looks up from her notebook straight at me, pen poised, for long seconds. Her lips are parted. From where I'm standing in the stacks I smile and raise my hand in greeting but go unrecognized or unseen. She's looking for something but it's inside. Now she finds it and goes back to the notebook. I can hear the dry scratch of her pen point.

Once I witness a similar scene through the wired glass insert of a classroom door. It doesn't change things all that much. When we're together it's as though there's glass between us, she polite and attentive for my benefit but behind it. Behind this real glass I see her up front, divided between her notes and her teacher, casting quick dutiful glances at Mr Walton with his big Adam's-apple above his bow-tie, her pen pausing when he pauses. He clowns a little. The class relaxes, laughing. Her pen stops, poised over the notebook, patiently waiting. Then he turns to the blackboard and her pen goes back to work.

She gives me reluctant German lessons after school once a week in an empty classroom. I've minored in German to understand the lyrics of Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf lieder. German declensions prove unlyrical. I've declined from A to C. My enthusiasms are always short-lived. Now I'm remotivated, a thousand times more.

The lessons last exactly half an hour, not a minute less, not a minute more. I have cunning pathetic strategies. For example, during a preposition-drill I choose the phrase, "I think of you too much." I say: "Ich denke zu viel um dich." I know the preposition "um" is wrong. It's to trick her into saying the correct form, "Ich denke zu viel an dich," to hear her, any way, even tricked into it, say that to me: "I think of you too much."

Once I touch her bare arm without warning. It jerks back involuntarily as though burned. You can tell she's distressed at the possible offense her reflex may have caused. Her distress and my offense are so strong that I put my arm around her shoulders in consolation (and revenge?). Seeing it coming, she's prepared. There's no reflex this time, just a stiffness with a slight smile. It's like embracing a statue. She waits in polite distress for it to end.

When you give her little things as I do whenever I can, she exclaims "O" which expresses thanks and appreciation and maybe alarm. Conversation isn't spontaneous with her. When I say something, she listens with polite intensity and then comments on it, really tries, but it's a minimum contribution and she withdraws into silence until I jog her on to new contributions.

One day, doing that, I recall a beloved early toy which strangely I remember best from the time of defect. You wound it up, forcing towards the end against the abnormal resistance of the spring, pressed the button and the stamped-tin baby bear jerked forward, silently clashing cymbals. Then stopped. If you pushed it you got a few feeble forward-moving jerks, a weak try at a cymbal clash, then it stopped again. Every time the spring was harder and harder to wind. One day there was a faint metallic scream from inside and quick crazy soundless cymbal clashes and a wild acceleration of movement and the stamped-tin baby bear banged into the wall blindly over and over. Then a snapping sound and it fell over into final immobility. I kept it for years anyhow.

She's always in a hurry, no time for a Coke after the lesson. She has no way of preventing me from walking her to the bus stop. Sometimes she tells me she's in a hurry because of a math lesson with Harvey. He helps her with her father's book when he has time. She's very grateful. She confides a tiny bit in Mrs Morgenstern. Mainly they talk about Harvey, I guess.

She wants to follow in her father's footsteps, at least become a scientist although her father believed that women couldn't because of the form of their brains. She'd asked Mrs Morgenstern anxiously if she thought it was true. She's trying to decipher his textbook, keeps at it all the time. That was why Harvey helped her a little when he had time.

"He is a genie," she says to me one day while waiting for the bus. She seldom makes English mistakes. "He's a genius," I correct, glad at the reversal of roles and the brief domination it involved. "Oh yes!" she replies, taking correction for enthusiastic affirmation. Her brown eyes are great with respect. Harvey is the one subject she's spontaneous with me about, allowing a little give and take between us. I have to praise him to keep the connection intact. I tell her about the shack-days, about his scholastic triumphs.

"Auf Wiedersehen, Rachel," I always say as her bus swings in. "Goodbye," she always says.)

I got my paper back the next day. Marginal red ink reminded me that there had been a German lesson in her room one year in July. That was true. It had been his suggestion. Correcting my memory like that was another reversal of roles. So what was the point of my new task?

(The day after the summer vacation has begun I come over with another book order. They're seated side by side at the living room table over a notebook and her father's book. He looks bored. Her head is bent over the notebook. Her short hair is shiny and neatly parted. She's working something out and doesn't look up. I've landed a job as a counselor in a camp in Vermont and won't be seeing her for a long time, thirty-five days.

When she finishes the problem she looks up and sees me and smiles politely. I say I'm going to miss those German lessons. Harvey suggests she give me the lessons here, upstairs. Why not right now? Maybe it's to get rid of her.

When we come down an hour later from her room he's still there, plunged in his own work. "How was he?" he asks her, not looking up. "Very good, Harvey," she says generously. When she's gone he asks me: "How did it go?" "OK." "Like?" "Declensions." "Yeah?" he says and waits, expectantly, it seems to me. "Masculine," I say and recite: "Der, Des, Dem, Den." "Go on," he says. I don't know if it's the "go on" of disbelief or "go on" meaning "continue." I continue: "Feminine: Die, Der Der Die. Do you want the neuter too?")

On the Friday of the second week of my regular pedagogic visits to the other house I overheard Harvey wheezing to Hanna:

"Goddam it. You do. What I tell you. To do. Clean it up. Buy good stuff. Don't forget the tablecloth." It proved to be in my honor, a little celebration in the kitchen just before the humiliation of the payment ceremony. The dirt and the roaches were still there. But she'd covered the Formica table with a linen tablecloth. It was yellowed and deeply creased from having been folded away in a closet for maybe thirty years. It smelled that way. Even doubled up it was too big for the table and dragged down onto the filthy floor. There was a jar of sticky salmon-eggs, a box of Ritz crackers with the top ripped off, a big bottle of Cointreau and three turdish chocolate éclairs.

The celebration was for my "breakthrough" with Beth Anderson. He knew our relationship had taken a new turn. That was because he deputized Hanna to keep him informed about my movements. Whenever I went over to Beth's she was sure to be watching at a window.

The day before the kitchen feast I happened to look out of Beth's picture window. I saw Hanna behind the attic window with binoculars trained on the two of us. I drew the drapes, telling Beth it was cozier that way.

Harvey misinterpreted that completely. When I told him we engaged in tutorials behind those drawn drapes his lips withdrew from his yellowed teeth in a spectral grin.

As I forced myself to sample the sickening stuff on the table he said it was probably a little too early in our relationship for me to sound her out about the placement of the sensors in her house.

Much too early, I said.

A little too early, he repeated and then returned to that matter of the location of Rachel's room. It was worth $500 to him if I could manage to get hold of the blueprint of Beth Anderson's house. Now that I was a regular visitor it shouldn't be a problem. I replied that a house blueprint wasn't something you borrowed like a cup of flour. Or was his idea for me to steal it? He didn't answer that one but came up with a substitute tactic. I should draw a plan of the house to scale from memory. Hadn't I said she'd shown me everything? He made a try at a leer.

So I became a reluctant unpaid draftsman for him. He wasn't satisfied with my job. He was sure I'd screwed up the measurements. He produced a steel ribbon tape measure and told me to measure every one of her rooms and the corridors too. I said that you couldn't do a sneaky crazy thing like that in a house you'd been invited to. He couldn't tell me that was part of our contract. Maybe not, he said, but it was still worth $500 to him to get the exact measurements of that house.

He left the tape measure on my desk. I wondered how it could possibly efface the question marks on his sheets and position the red circle of the immeasurable room on a measured one.

I didn't so much as touch his cold-blooded coiled instrument. It didn't budge from my desk. I couldn't accept the image of myself kneeling down to figures in his service. That's how it had all begun, with the check on the floor of a furnished room. Still, I couldn't help translating dollars into days. I'd figured out that every fifty dollars meant a day closer to clean break with that house.

One evening Beth Anderson returned from the kitchen too soon and caught me in the middle of my compromise, stalking along her pastel living room wall, counting under my breath. One of my long paces was a yard, give or take an inch. She looked at me queerly.

All things considered I handled the situation pretty well. I went on pacing off, unfazed, excusing myself for the exercise: lumbar rheumatism, a sudden attack. At the onset of pain, long stiff-legged strides were prescribed. She looked relieved at that, maybe even happy I'd finally confided intimate things. While I strode on, she told me all about her own back troubles.

By the end of her symptoms I'd lost count of the paces. I handed the tape measure back to Harvey that very day and told him it was impossible.

A few days later he came up to my room and handed me a compact camera with a 28-70 millimeter focal zoom. He expected me to photograph every room in her house. It was worth $1,000 to him. That meant twenty days to me. But I said he must think I was crazy to think I'd do something like that. I handed it back. He didn't insist but left the camera on my desk.

By that time I was going down to the machine regularly. Those descents were like appointments with someone who never showed up. My eyes burned constantly and I was nauseous pretty often. But maybe the nausea had nothing to do with that although one night I was half way down the cellar stairs when I heard Hanna's voice behind me. "You better quit going down there all the time. That's how it started with him. You better not go down there anymore. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Some days I felt the co-dwellers very strongly, some days not at all. It seemed to be cyclic. Once I thought I was on the verge of sensing my mother in the dead room although I'd never seen her on his screen. The feeling lasted a second and then vanished. I stood there in the middle of the room like a defective fifth sensor for maybe half an hour until I felt too tired to remain standing.

I lay down on the sofa and looked at the overlapping houses on the table. He'd done more of them. Again the gone house with the red-circled room haunted the existent house at different angles and degrees of overlap. There was something new now: a sheet with a big "J" above a long list of numbers. I still recall the first ones: J. #1: 12-23 6.5 h. I gave up trying to make sense of it.

At subconscious levels my brain must have gone on processing it, fitting this and that together. The completed pattern woke me in the middle of an unrelated dream. J. # 1 12-23 6.5 h.: Jerry, Viewing Number One, December 23, six and a half hours. Six and a half hours before the screen.

His careful bookkeeping accounted for all my visits down there and the duration of exposure to the rays.

Bolt upright in bed in the darkness of four-something in the morning I thought I understood, in that moment of insight or paranoia, why he'd labored up the stairs that night with the news that my mother had swum up on the screen for a few flickering seconds.

What else if not to lure me back down there? And when I resumed ghouling night after night and saw nothing and might well give it up again, there had been that further invention of a second capture of her in the striped armchair coinciding neatly with a moment of dozing on my part.

Did he want to radiate me into his image? I saw myself shrunken with a Groucho Marx wig and painted upper lip wisecracking to invisible co-dwellers.

When I woke up to a room filled with rational daylight I remembered that Harvey himself had warned against the effects of the rays. I came up with a sensible explanation of the sheet. He'd spoken of the need for a control of his vision. I was the control. It was simply a control sheet.

I was bringing up in the toilet for the third time that day and must have been noisy about it with nothing on my stomach because she stopped in front of the door.

"I told you not to go down there. Didn't I tell him not to go down there? You're gonna get what he got. I'm gonna have two sick men on my hands."

But couldn't it have been intestinal flu? People were coming down with it right and left.

(I don't see how I'll be able to survive those thirty-five days without her. Four days later I meet a jolly green-eyed freckled redhead called Josie who's a counselor at the girl's camp on the other side of the lake. I talk romantically about swimming over at night to see her but actually go the long safe way round through the woods skirting the lake. She lives in Queens so there's the promise of relative duration. Her photo's on the top of the public part of my wallet by the end of the week. It would be topmost on the private part except that I've begun judging that distinction between public and clandestine as childish. I don't look at them any more even if I haven't gotten rid of them. Her breasts too are freckled. Sometimes I think of Rachel and realize that I haven't done that for a good hour. Then hours. Everything ends up diluted that way.

In September I come over to Harvey's with books. It's no pretext now. Rachel's in the living room by herself, carpet-sweeping. She produces her predictable shy smile and "O". Why does she always wear the same unbecoming dresses? I shake hands with her. That contact confirms my recovery. I sit down at my ease opposite her, waiting for Harvey. I don't go on talking and talking, as I used to do with her in what I look upon as the humiliating old days the month before. I let her silences go on and on. Sometimes I look at my watch. When she starts in on Harvey I even yawn. Not to her face of course. Behind my hand. It's an ostentatious gesture anyhow. I could have stifled that yawn.

When she asks me about my summer camp I show her Josie's black-and-white photo with a certain residual rancor. Rachel finds her "very pretty." Did I want her to say or betray something else? I feel almost tempted to say impossible things about Josie, the sort of thing Harvey used to pay to hear. Instead, I say something about Josie's green eyes and the association with jealousy. Rachel doesn't understand "green-eyed monster."

She comes out with her usual exotic "Please?" I suddenly find it irritating. I tell her "please" in that context isn't colloquial at all, isn't correct English and that she does it all the time, particularly with Harvey who purposefully says things he knows she can't possibly understand just for the satisfaction of hearing her say "please" as though begging for something. The correct expression is "Excuse me?" said in a self-possessed non-begging way. I don't remember if I said all that but I thought it for sure.

I get up and put the books on the table and say, in English this time: "Goodbye." As I reach the door, she says with tremendous intimacy: "Jerry, why do you steal books?" So she knows that and for the first time shows interest in me. I don't bother explaining or denying. I say "goodbye" again, as if I haven't heard, and leave.)

One night in late January at about a quarter to midnight a muffled banging woke me up. The wind was howling and buffeting the house. It was practically a hurricane. You could hear things toppling, ash-can lids noisily driven across the street. I wished it would blow all the houses into the sea. The muffled banging came again, from outside. I looked out of the window.

A branch of the elm tree planted too close to the house was knocking against the side of the house, just above my window. It was like a long black arm. It would have to be lopped off. The tree had an unbalanced shape from all of those house-side branches that had already been sawn off. The job had been botched. From having watched professionals I knew that a branch had to be removed flush with the trunk in order not to leave an ugly dead snag. It had to be undercut first so that it would break off cleanly and not wrench off part of the trunk itself. Then the wound had to be tarred. In the rips of the trunk and the jagged snags I recognized Hanna's signature. Tomorrow I'd ask Harvey to get her to deal with that branch too.

With the howling and banging I couldn't sleep. I had to leave the house. I dressed and went outside, staggering against the force of the wind. I saw Beth Anderson in front of her house, blown about by the wind, trying to chase her ash-can cover. The wind was driving it like a noisy wobbly hoop down the street. I intercepted it for her. She said that she couldn't sleep either and invited me in for a drink. While she went into the kitchen I stood again in the middle of her living room without moving. Bringing in the tray she said behind me: "What's the matter, Jerry? Why don't you sit down?"

We had more than one drink and spoke of insomnia remedies, mostly things to be taken in from outside and not things to be suppressed inside. I told her of an old method in my younger days, a recurrent fantasy. I gave it to her for whatever it was worth. She listened to me, her glass immobile halfway to her lips. It wasn't worth that much attention.

I'd been to Florida with my parents when I was about seven. In the mid-forties, I added for the sake of rejuvenation in her eyes. It had actually been a decade earlier. I hadn't forgotten the beach, I said. It represented something like paradise to me for a long time, I didn't know why. The fantasy to combat sleeplessness was that I was a solitary and indefatigable runner, breasting state-line after state-line like 200-yard finish-tapes except this was a 1500-mile run, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, the cotton-pickers of Georgia applauding me, then the Everglades, racing over the backs of slumbering alligators, and finally I reached the vast white empty beach, unless I'd already fallen asleep.

"There were empty beaches in Florida then?"

"Perfectly empty and white. It was early morning. I ran into the sea, a great big green wave. Let's go to Florida."

"Excuse me?"

"Let's go to Florida."

"You and me?"

She smiled. She took it for one of our games.

"When do you want us to go?"

"Now."

"Yes, January's a good time for Florida."

"No, now. Right away. Time to pack, say a quarter of an hour and we'll be out of the house, out of the houses, and in Florida in a couple of hours. Someone told me they have round-the-clock flights to Florida. We'd be there before dawn."

She smiled again and sipped her port. She was enjoying her end of the game. The wind buffeted the picture window.

"But I have my job here."

"You'll find work in Florida. Don't they have florists there? Or do flowers grow everywhere, free for the picking? You'll find something else to do. I'll dye my hair and find a teaching job. Anyhow with what I've been earning at Harvey's I've saved up nearly eight thousand dollars."

I was half hoping she would say that my hair wasn't all that gray (which was true). Instead she frowned a little and blinked twice. I think she was on the point of saying something else but remembered that the game wasn't over yet. The rules had to be abided by. She mechanically objected, trying to smile a little again:

"But I'm a married woman."

I was tempted to say that she was only technically a married woman and add that after two years and more of unilateral rupture there must be something like automatic annulment. She should learn to break free of the past. Instead, I said:

"You could say I'm your grandfather."

"Nobody'd believe that."

"Your father, then."

She must have thought that was a credible relationship for she went on to something else, but still frowning a little.

"There are no empty beaches in Florida anymore. It's all built up. Why, you'd have to go back fifty years to find an empty beach in Florida."

So we were back to my feared starting-point. I didn't know what to say. She didn't say anything either. She was frowning again and rubbing the rim of her glass with her finger trying to coax music from it.

"I didn't know you were working for Mr Morgenstern," she said finally.

It was a confession that had slipped out. It was the alcohol. I took another drink. Was it fair of her to take something from a game and use it outside the game? I realized that my status in her eyes had suffered a damaging blow, that the persona I'd constructed mainly through omission but also through misrepresentation had now collapsed. I'd explained my presence in that other house as an act of altruism, appealing to her from those flattering heights for comprehension of poor Harvey, setting an example of self-sacrifice. Now it turned out I was a salaried employee rather than a "good person." I realized the misrepresentation could be repaired only through further confession, voluntary this time. Instead, I tried to return to what she'd defined, from the beginning, as the game:

"So no empty beach, no Florida for you?"

"No," she said absently, still looking down into her glass.

"Let's go to a desert, then."

Reluctantly, without looking up, she played.

"Death Valley?"

"Too many whitened bones there. Pioneers lying in wait. Even the Sahara was inhabited once. The Gobi desert, maybe? It was always uninhabited. Except way back by dinosaurs, a hundred million years ago. That's out of range. Not all the dynamos on earth. Who's afraid of dinosaurs anyhow?"

She frowned and said:

"I don't understand what you're doing in that awful house, a person like you. Why don't you go back?"

I had an instant of fright when she said that and almost replied that I'd been going back too often and was losing my grip because of it, couldn't she see that? It was stupid, the alcohol and the track I'd been on. Then I realized she was talking in terms of space. In the confessional mode to make amends I said:

"Back to what? The last two years I was living in a furnished room. That sounds seedy. Furnished rooms I should have said. The plural changes things considerably. I never did get used to the purple flowers on the wallpaper, though. My wife got the house. You didn't know I was married, did you?"

"Of course I did. You can see where the ring was."

I looked down at my finger and didn't see any telltale mark of former mutual possession. Women are supernaturally keen-eyed about such things. After the failure of soap and then glycerin (she'd fed me too well all those years and I'd put on weight) I'd nearly amputated that finger with a hacksaw.

She wanted to know if men did that often when they broke up with a woman, take off the wedding ring?

I said that I didn't know. In this particular case it was the man who had been broken up with, I said ungrammatically.

The wind buffeted the picture window again. Ash-can covers rattled again.

"Well," she said after a while, yawning and stretching. "Time for bed." She got up and started for the front door. Before, I'd always been the one to initiate endings. It was a shift in the balance of power. I joined her at the door. I didn't want to go back to bed. I didn't want to go back to the house.

I tried again, already on the wrong side of her door.

"Then you don't want to go to Florida with me?"

"Not really," she said and wished me a good night.

I smiled at her standing in the narrow gap, stifling a yawn.

"Just a joke. While waiting for InGathering, what would we have talked about during those long semi-tropical evenings?"

When I passed through her gate, I turned my back on the two houses and walked in that opposite direction. It was hard going against the wind which was trying to shove me back. The wind was even wilder now. The trees were hysterical about it. There were flights of paper, like night birds, skittering cans, a flailing of twigs. Once a ripped-off branch nearly struck me. I thought of the other branch. It would be banging against the house non-stop.

After a while I turned back. I didn't have to struggle anymore. Now the wind was shoving me in that direction.

I returned to the other house and went to bed. I counted the irregular banging of the branch for hours. I was up to eighty-something when I finally fell asleep.

***

Eleven

Our relationship started falling to pieces like The House of Usher I'd analyzed for her the week before. Fissure, crack, gap and down into the dark tarn.

She'd suddenly become very sensitive to my joking remarks on the cult. I'd taken the initiative on the subject now. I may have been a little aggressive about it as though to reconquer the territory I'd lost to her that stormy night. She took my remarks as ironic criticism of her husband and tried to talk about other things. She was careful now not to leave the cult leaflets hanging around.

But one evening in the kitchen, getting ice cubes, I came across one on the kitchen table. I took it back to the living room. She saw me ostentatiously reading the outrageous thing but said nothing. The leaflet was full of celebrated faces, among others, Ramses II ("The Mightiest of the fabulous Egyptian Pharaohs"), Benjamin Franklin ("The Founding Father and Eminent Inventor") and Ludwig von Beethoven ("The Celebrated Composer of The Moonlight Sonata"). They'd all been members of The Golden Galaxy. I asked her what she thought of those extravagant claims. She said, why not?

I said I'd thought nothing was known about Ramses II's associative life, but maybe so. I said that I had doubts about Benjamin Franklin. Where'd he find the time? Pretty busy man, it seemed to me, coping with stoves and lightning-bolts and diplomacy. Did a lot of tomcatting too in his spare time. Maybe so, though. But Beethoven, absolutely out.

To my surprise, she counterattacked. Could I prove that Beethoven hadn't been a member of The Golden Galaxy? And when of course I said I couldn't prove that any more than I could prove he'd not been having a steamy affair with the reigning Hapsburg Emperor, she looked as though she'd won the argument.

It irked a little. A few minutes later, during the music break, I noticed something new on her finger. I took her hand and scrutinized the massive brass ring consisting of three intertwined serpents with red-stoned eyes. I asked if it was another present from her husband. She reluctantly said it was. I asked how much she'd had to pay for it. She withdrew her hand and dropped it out of sight on her lap.

She didn't remember. Approximately? She didn't remember even approximately. I persisted.

"Two hundred dollars? Two hundred dollars is what you said he charged you for that thing around your neck."

"It's not a 'thing'. It's a unique piece of hand-crafted jewelry."

"Ah."

"I don't know what you're implying by 'ah.'"

"That he picks up those things for maybe five dollars and sells them to you for forty times the price. It's exploitation. Can't you see that? I'm trying to help you. By all rights you're the one who ought to be getting money. Isn't there something like alimony for desertion?"

"They're not worth five dollars! And it's not desertion. It has something to do with a phase of spiritual development. You have to step back from certain kinds of involvement for a while, take stock and then you return to them on a higher level."

"Is that what he told you?"

"I believe him. I believe him. I have a very bad headache. I'd prefer not talking about this private matter any more."

She went back to the Brahms Opus 111 quintet with exaggerated attention, staring past me at the wall. When it was over she said:

"I wouldn't try to price your ring if it was still on your finger."

Right from the start there'd been problems with the camera. My first opportunity had occurred one Saturday afternoon when she went into the kitchen for more pretzels. It almost ended then and there. I whipped the camera out of my pocket, backed up against a wall and wide-angled as much of the living room as I could.

The flash was unexpectedly indiscreet. She came out of the kitchen instantly. I barely had time to shove the camera back in my pocket.

"What was that? A short-circuit?" She sniffed. "Didn't that come from here?"

I told her it had come from outside, like a flash of lightning. She went over to the window and examined the sky which was largely blue. She frowned then shrugged. After all, she said, there was that expression, "like a bolt out of the blue", so it sometimes happened. But this was the first time in her experience.

In each of the rooms I operated in I stood in a corner to take in as much as possible, the lens briefly zooming in and out in search of the correct focus. For some reason I was bothered by the phenomenon of parallax, the discrepancy between what I saw through the viewfinder and what the lens saw. I didn't share its vision. Things lay beyond the margins of the viewfinder. I don't know why it bothered me.

By the end of the second week I'd managed by hook or crook to photograph all of the rooms of her house with the exception of the unvisited room at the end of the corridor and the second-floor bathroom. I urgently wanted to finish the job not just for the money (the days) involved but also to end the strain. There was a certain harmless duplicity to the operation.

One afternoon in the middle of another Poe story, Ligeia, I excused myself. "There's a bathroom on this floor," she reminded me as I headed for the stairs. I continued as if I hadn't heard her.

I tried the door of the room at the end of the corridor but it was locked. I went into the bathroom. The cramped quarters posed a technical problem even at the widest focal. I backed up in various spots and ended by knocking over a hair-dryer poised on the washbasin. It clattered to the floor, making a hell of a racket. Finally the only spot that allowed a general view of the bathroom was the shower. I slipped my shoes off. The porcelain unit underfoot proved to be wet.

The flash went off and I got a good part of the bathroom including the door which was now open with Beth Anderson framed in blinded stupefaction. Was it the clatter of the hair-dryer or had she been suspicious already?

I was caught off base. Usually I can come up with expert instant rectification of reality, a form of creativity in a way, I used to think. "Sculpting the sad gray clay of facts into ideal beauty," I used to say. Time had taken its toll. The best I could manage, standing with graying hair soggy-footed in her shower, was: "Trying out a new camera." She nodded briefly and groped down the staircase in silence.

She hardly opened her mouth that evening and abridged the session saying she had a bad headache. Maybe she really did. She had the hunted look she must have had when Hanna decapitated Sutter's Gold. I could imagine her sleepless that night, pitching and tossing away, trying to digest other things: that alleged flash of lightning in a largely blue sky, my pacing off her living room to remedy a supposed back complaint, the revelation of a cash-nexus between me and Harvey Morgenstern.

And that was the moment Harvey chose to start harassing me to convince her to let us set up the sensors in her house.

By this time he was tired of his time-exploration of the dead room. He showed me a long list of the people he'd encountered on the screen. His body-count included his mother and father and himself in varying stations toward decay, four cousins, two uncles, eighteen family friends, the Negro maid he claimed to have caught stealing twenty years after the act, a reform rabbi, a cat and a Fuller Brush man. And my mother, twice. He hadn't been able to locate her a third time, he said. New catches were becoming less and less frequent.

He wanted other dead rooms. He kept after me vocally and in writing. There would be money in it for her and for me, plenty of money. It shouldn't be hard for me to convince her now. He made broad vulgar allusions to imagined intimacies. You've got her wrapped around your finger. He didn't say "finger." He'd gotten things all wrong.

The idea of time-exploring that space, brought out into the open like that, disturbed me deeply. It couldn't be done, I said flatly. She'd never agree, no matter how much money he offered her. Who could stand the company of those multiplied Cyclops eyes whirring and tracking? Her nerves were already fragile.

Moreover, I continued, she prided herself on her interior decoration scheme. Her living room was all scatter rugs and delicate glass vases and blond imitation Scandinavian furniture. Time-sensors would be jarringly out of place in her pastel corners. She was a superstitious woman as well. She'd believed, all evidence to the contrary, in Indian good-luck charms, in zodiacal signs, and maybe in the efficacy of the cross. She wouldn't take to necromancy.

"Necromancy. That's summoning. The dead. We're not summoning. The dead. We're bringing back. The living."

He added that in any case she wasn't to be told what the sensors really did. I should never do that. He was confident I could cook up a plausible explanation unless I'd radically changed from my younger days.

When one day he demanded (a practical ultimatum) that I submit the proposal to her that very evening I tried to come up with an alternative strategy. If he could manage with a single sensor instead of the present four then conceivably it could be smuggled into a gift, a sizable decorative object, something bulky, maybe a statue with the sensor within, a 19th century Negro groom thing, for example, with the lens masquerading as one of the goggling eyes.

Impossible, he said: there had to be four of them. Anyhow the lens whirred and visibly moved about. Goddam it, Jerry, leave the technical side to me. He'd have shouted if he'd been able to. Invent a reason, he commanded.

He overestimated my powers of invention, I said, thinking of the recent bathroom fiasco. That, like so many other things, had been eroded by time. Why not tell her the truth about what the sensors really did? She might be flattered to participate in an historic time-experiment.

I suggested this because I was certain at first that she would refuse. I suspected she'd be deeply alarmed to learn that diachronically, in vertical cross-section, her living room was as crowded as the IRT 42nd St station at 6:00 pm. Then, too late, at the very moment I submitted the idea I wondered if after all she mightn't accept the presence of the sensors in her living room in the hope of recuperating her son normal and her husband loving, if only in the form of shadows.

Fortunately, Harvey rejected the idea, as explosively as he could. I hadn't been opening my mouth to her, had I? I didn't like his tone and choice of words and felt like telling him so. I said, of course not, I hadn't spoken a word about them to her.

Just to say something, I asked him how much money he was prepared to pay for the sensors to be set up in her house. He told me the sum.

The sum for her.

The sum for me.

A talking-session was scheduled – as he knew – the very day I learned what it was worth to him to get those sensors into the space Beth Anderson's house intruded on.

I was apprehensive about it (the tutorial) but she opened the door all dressed up for class as usual and smiling. She'd digested the flash-shot in the shower-unit. She was even a little apologetic about the headache that had abridged the last session. She was that way, I was discovering: quick to flare up, quick to feel guilt about it.

As usual, we drank and chatted before getting down to business. I steered clear of The Golden Galaxy.

I didn't position her for it. She positioned herself. It began by her complaining about the noise that night which had been particularly bad.

"I know I ought to be tolerant and all, but it's crazy at that time of night, he must be insane!"

Immediately I said that, well, maybe not insane but certainly more than a little peculiar. Sometimes he reminded me of my grandmother on my father's side. In the last years, I said, she used to throw dollar-bills out of the window. I wasn't positioning her for it, not consciously I wasn't, even though money was central to the perfectly authentic anecdote.

"Don't tell me he does that!"

"Manner of speaking," I said evasively, retreating from it now. "No, he's not completely normal, poor Harvey."

"Poor me you mean. Oh I realized he wasn't normal a long time ago. Hounding me day and night for me to sell my house. I had to leave the phone off the hook to get some sleep. I even threatened to call the police though they say he's got the police in his pocket."

It wasn't thought out. It was like a fencer's arm autonomously exploiting a split-second opening:

"He's still got a thing about your house. Only this time he doesn't talk about a purchase. He talks about a rental. All the time."

It was like my feet that morning five months before, autonomously heading me to the bank with his check. Money had been central to that too. She laughed.

"He wants to rent my house now? With that awful woman too? Where am I supposed to live?"

"As far as I can understand, people wouldn't be involved in the rental. You'd go on living here. It's for a device. He wants to rent a spot in your house for a device."

"A device? What kind of a device? Is it a big device?"

"Size is a relative concept. They're knee-highish, say." I didn't add: knee-highish to an elephant.

"They? I thought you said there was just one device."

"In a sense there is. It's the same device but multiplied four times. A little like quadraphonic speakers. As a matter of fact they look a little like speakers. Make less noise though. Forget about it."

"Noise? They make noise too? He must be out of his mind."

"Pretty far out. And it'd be so easy to take advantage of him in that condition. It's pathetic, actually. It's like that grandmother of mine. He says he's willing to give you $20,000 if you keep them in your house for a while."

She echoed the sum in astonishment, reflected and then asked suspiciously what was so special about her house.

I told her it wasn't the house, he didn't care about the house. It was the ground the house was standing on apparently.

"Buried treasure?"

"Nothing like that. Nothing commercially exploitable like oil or gold either. Telluric waves. Whatever that is. Your house occupies a nodal point, it seems."

She reflected again for longer. "Could they be covered up with a cloth? Not that I'm tempted."

"Maybe if you made holes for the lenses."

"Lenses?"

I explained that it was for the telluric waves. She stepped back from the whole thing at that. She didn't see how lenses fitted in with invisible waves. I didn't myself. She could be pretty sharp sometimes. She also said she didn't understand the business about telluric waves in the first place. Hadn't I told her he was working on a machine to cure himself of his illness?

When I replied that he had more than one string to his bow, that he took himself for some kind of universal genius like Leonardo da Vinci, that he worked simultaneously on different things, she blinked and said nothing. The silence lengthened. Didn't she find my answers too glib?

"Forget it, it's all craziness," I said and pushed the bottle out of the way and unclasped my black briefcase to get to safe things.

Everything went radically wrong then.

It was sheer carelessness on my part. I'd been late for the talking session and had grabbed the black briefcase without looking inside. I did notice that it was unusually heavy for something as lightweight as Steinbeck but supposed it was a bottle. When I took everything out of the briefcase the blue box containing her son's poems was revealed. I remembered having stuck it there the day before while cleaning to get it out of the way.

Her face switched on.

I said, "Still working on them," shoved it back in the briefcase and took out Of Mice and Men.

Her face switched off.

Half an hour later I excused myself and went to the bathroom, the ground floor one this time. The last time I'd visited a bathroom in her house things had gone very badly.

It was much worse this time.

The first thing I saw when I returned was her rigid back and then the blue box before her, opened for the first time since it had been in my possession. The poems, like a royal mummy, were protected by a sealed kraft envelope further protected by criss-crosses of scotch-tape. Her face was as rigid as her back. I said, "Ah." I couldn't think of anything else to say.

"You didn't read them at all. You didn't savor a single one."

I recalled the pitiless priority she gave to sincerity. I was absolutely sincere now when I explained that those poems had seemed to mean so much to her, that I hadn't wanted to wound her with the truth, that it was something I had trouble lying about. Call it a private code. Or a phobia. I'd had certain bad experiences I'd rather not talk about.

I couldn't talk about the Bulgarian woman. Could I talk about the repetition of the experience twenty years later with my closest pal, gentle Marty Stein in the hospital, leaden-faced and terminal? He'd alluded to a secret activity. I thought it was clandestine women. It turned out to be clandestine poetry for the past two years since he'd learned how ill he was. Would I mind reading them and telling him the truth? Oh, it wasn't the truth he wanted, not about his sojourn in the hospital and not about his poems either, bits of survival for him. Who wants the truth about anything?

So I didn't tell him the truth about his poems. I couldn't condemn him to total void. For hours every day for three weeks I recited those poems at his bed-side and had to invent quiet sincere-sounding things like: "It's beyond analysis, Marty, like, I don't know, certain chamber music, that Mozart viola and violin duo, you know the one: dum-dum-dee-da-da."

Day after day. He went out with that. I wept for my best friend out of grief and guilt for relief. My dead suffocate me. It was nothing to talk about to a practical stranger even in justification.

"It's something I simply can't lie about, it takes too much out of me," I repeated.

"But you did lie about it saying you'd savored them." She was very close to tears. "And how could you know they're bad? How can you possibly know that? You haven't even read them."

I was being hounded. What right did she have ferreting in my briefcase? I took the folder and started attacking the criss-cross of scotch-tape, saying: "I wanted to spare you and myself." She started to say something. I cut her off. "Please say nothing until I've finished," I said imperiously.

I had the pile between my clenched fists and plunged a little theatrically into the first of the things. It was like a high drum-rolled circus dive into a tub of water. I was aware of the uncompromising set of my features, my knotted brows and tight lips (didn't it age me?) and I felt the balance between us shifting back. She was gazing at me with the old timidity. She sat down at a safe distance on the sofa, on the very edge, like a job-applicant.

The atmosphere was electric with her anxiety as sheet after sheet went into their appropriate pile. Time went by. Once she started to say something again. I cut it off instantly with a curt palm-forward gesture without looking up from the sheet. Once she approached the table and softly placed a glass on it. I frowned at the soft clink of the bottle's neck against the glass, the gurgle. Dying for it I pushed it away. Nothing must be allowed to disturb the painful totality of my attention was what I wanted to convey. I couldn't help hamming it up. I remembered again the quality she prized most.

Back on her sofa, she now had a magazine open on her lap and turned the pages but I felt her eyes on me. Sometimes she would get up and tiptoe about the place, straightening out this and that. Once the phone rang and she sprang for it and whispered (to a certain Johnny) that she'd take the call on the bedroom phone.

Later in a pause as I was reaching for another poem and still wondering who Johnny could be, she whispered: "Do you want to eat something?" By then the whole afternoon had gone by. I shook my head briefly. Soon she had to turn the lights on.

"OK," I finally said, took a deep breath, slowly expelled it and leaned back.

I let another minute go by, visibly concentrating on correct formulation.

"Get this straight. He's no Keats."

That was to place my remarks under the sign of forthrightness, pitiless frankness, so she wouldn't question the veracity of what I'd saved up for her out of compassion, number two on her list of virtues.

It was a mistake. She wouldn't even concede that he was no Keats. She said that he was only fifteen when he wrote some of those poems.

It was a bad start. She didn't yield an inch when it came to that son of hers.

I didn't answer. In the silence she stared down at her pale blue carpet. Don't look like that.

"I've sorted them into three piles as you can see."

She didn't look up. I went on with the forthright strategy.

"The first pile consists of the bad poems. It's the biggest of the three piles as you can see. The second pile, a sizable one, consists of poor poems."

Now she looked up at me. I'd aged her by ten years. As though I'd condemned him to overdose. Stop looking like that, you good person.

Her premises were all wrong, I felt like telling her. She'd blown up this idea in her head that acknowledging merit for his poems would somehow get him off drugs. When you're in that situation – not the addict but the family – you grab for the most waterlogged of straws. Genius and addiction weren't incompatible. Hadn't she ever heard of Coleridge, Baudelaire, Modigliani? Coleridge, maybe.

"So much for the first two piles. There's the third pile. The third pile is very small, maybe twenty poems. They have talent. Some are surprisingly good. In particular the one called Spring Morning in the BMT."

I expected her face to light up at my gift, the painful invention. I expected her to exclaim something like: Oh Jerry you're not saying that just to comfort me, are you?

Instead, she went through the rejected poems, picking and quibbling, dissenting and hassling at the presence of this poem and that poem. I pointed out that in the Kimberly mines there were five tons of gravel for every diamond. She didn't at all appreciate the word gravel. It was just a metaphor, I said. She recited the poems with great expression to convince me of my error.

Hours went by. But you're the expert, she kept on saying. She didn't act as if she thought I was one. When she placed the poems back in the folder she undid my categories of bad, mediocre and promising, shuffled them all together.

She saw me to the door in silence and grudgingly wished me a good night. The thing that had stuck with her, stuck in her throat, I felt, wasn't so much my criticism of the majority of the poems as it was the original invention. A lie, she'd called it plainly.

Original sin, I supposed, for someone with her hierarchy of values.

She begged off from the next bi-weekly talking sessions because of another one of her headaches. Then the second one she canceled because of "company," she said. Apparently I wasn't company.

That evening from my room I saw her brightly lit picture window and behind the gauzy curtain, as in artistic soft-focus, a man she'd invited over for drinks. The table was set for two. I couldn't see how old he was. I made out the low glass-topped table with two bottles and between them cut-glass dishes probably containing anchovy-stuffed olives and toothpicked cheese-cubes. Did he drink single malt too? Did he have pedagogical talents? Or did his talents lie in another direction?

I saw her leaning forward in the eager posture of communication and the other in receptive immobility, then talking and gesturing himself. I almost had the illusion that I was looking at myself earlier with her.

Then Harvey called me down into the cellar for carpentry work on the new housing-units for the second-generation sensors. He intended reducing their size in the interest of mobility, he'd said mysteriously.

When I returned to my room two hours later the drapes of the picture window across the way had been drawn. There was soft light behind them. After a while the front door opened and she stood in a tasteless gold lamé décolleté she'd never worn for me, smiling and chatting with a young man of astonishing beauty, far too young to be her husband. Besides, he had a fine carnal head of hair.

I assumed the old schedule would resume the following Tuesday evening. I went over and pressed her melodious chimes into action and waited. That suburban music used to materialize her, smiling, almost instantaneously. When she finally opened the door she stared at me blankly for a second. She wasn't even dressed up in my honor.

She nodded acknowledgement, hesitated and finally let me in. The low glass-topped table where we worked and drank was bare of book and bottles. She'd forgotten, she said, following my gaze. She went and got the bottle of scotch and a glass and an unopened box of pretzels.

"I'm trying to cut down on my intake," was how she explained the solitary bottle. She made unconvincing attempts at conversation. Her face was set in tragic lines. Wasn't that overreaction to the flash-shot under the shower and the business with the poems? Or was it something else?

"Is everything all right?" I asked, breaking another silence.

"Everything is fine," she replied.

Then she noticed the book in my hand. I'd been careful to leave the black briefcase in the other house.

"I haven't read your chapters. I've been too busy this week."

"No tragedy."

"You look as if it was. Didn't it ever happen that your students didn't hand in their papers on time?"

"That happened. But it was an economically defined situation then. Papers or no papers I got my salary at the end of the week. What we do is extracurricular, for pleasure, yours, I had hoped."

"I can't concentrate anymore. Not with the problems I have. Never mind that. Anyhow I think I'm too old and stupid for that kind of thing. It was very kind of you and I did appreciate it."

She didn't sound as if she had. I didn't insist. That was the end of the talking sessions. I finished my drink and left a quarter of an hour after I came, pretexting work for Harvey and adding that I too was trying to cut down on my intake. We were perfectly synchronized at least in that respect, I said. She made no effort to keep me there a little longer. Her door closed on me. Then it opened again.

"Oh, I forgot. You can tell Mr Morgenstern that I'm not at all interested in his proposition. I don't want any of your prying machines in my house, not for all the money in the world."

The door closed before I could protest that the prying machines weren't mine.

Back in my room I told myself that the end of our relationship wasn't really important. I concentrated on her physical and intellectual insufficiencies as one pathetically does in such situations. But I couldn't help picking about again for other reasons for her changed attitude. Maybe it wasn't just the camera and poem fiascoes. She'd spoken of worries. Her job? Her health? That son of hers? If so she clearly didn't regard me as worthy of being confided in. "Everything is fine," she'd said and then when it had slipped out that everything wasn't fine: "Never mind."

I didn't like confidences, that was true, and apparently hadn't concealed the fact well enough. But to be undisguisedly excluded from them that way was almost insulting, an uncharitable pointing to an insufficiency that wasn't physical or intellectual, something worse from her point of view I suppose.

***

Twelve

There was no way of hiding the collapse of our relationship from Harvey. Hanna, always on the lookout, relayed the information. When I confirmed it and told him that Beth Anderson had turned down his rental proposition in the bargain, he took it very badly. I wasn't living up to the contract. I wasn't helping him down in the cellar. My memories of Rachel were useless as eventual navigational assistance. Now I couldn't even get into the Anderson house anymore. How could I do this to him?

On February 14, Saint Valentine's Day as it happened, the sickness came back again. It had never been so bad. Maybe it had nothing at all to do with the end of the visits to Beth Anderson's place. By now I understood that the sickness (I called it time-travail) manifested itself cyclically. There may have been an unrelated coincidence between the swing round to the active phase of the cycle and deprivation of the banal one-dimensional living room and the woman in it.

Whatever, the co-dwellers came back again, on the very border of materialization I sometimes thought: younger Harveys, his mother in various stages of progress to nothing, friends, the cat slinking past my legs many times, relatives, the reform rabbi, but not my mother. My mother wasn't in that virtual throng.

I tried to picture her there, very hard, but what came up, as conventional memory, was my mother embracing Rachel again, this time with annihilating compassion (it was after the news from the liberated shambles of Europe, so in the summer of 1945) but when I tried to materialize her (my mother), transplant her to the dirt and disorder of the dead room, nothing came.

I forced myself to jog. The first time I'd done no more than five blocks when I started gasping for breath. There was a diffused pain in my chest. I remembered in alarm my juvenile heart-murmur. I had to go back to the co-dwellers.

I tried it again the next day. I jogged on and on, taking unknown streets. When my chest was stabbed with pain I don't know how many hours later, I collapsed on a bench. I gasped down air like a beached fish. A nice middle-aged woman asked me if I was sick. When I found out where I was I realized I'd been heading toward the seaside. That close it was all built up. I took a bus back.

After that I didn't even try to leave the house. Things got worse there. What finally rescued me was the contractual obligation to go to New York and do research for Harvey.

Suddenly he'd stopped harassing me about the house next door. He was on to something new. On the surface it was new. He was going to resurrect a strategic part of old Forest Hill, he said. What he wanted me to do was to recall the exact sites of the old shops. In particular, the A&P, the beauty parlor, the hardware store, Schultz's butcher-shop, and the movie-house.

Of course I couldn't do it, not after so many years. The new shopping center had been erected on the bulldozed old order. The Chase National, radically renovated, was still standing as a landmark but it didn't help. When I said that I had memory problems myself and couldn't do the job unaided he told me to go to the 42nd St Library and try to dig up old photos of Forest Hill. I was pretty sure that wasn't the place to look but didn't say so. I was glad to be forced out of the house. On my own I'd never have managed it.

Just before I left he said: "Also I want you to do other research. On tits. Maybe there are things about them. You don't already know." He explained what he meant.

Just climbing past the stone lions with my black briefcase in view of research (even on the futile things he'd commissioned) made me feel much better. In the studious hush I felt meaningful for the first time since retirement as I positioned my index cards and pens on the desk.

I started in on the tits, titmice, chickadees, genus Paries, family Paridae, order Passeriformes. I didn't know what he was looking for. It turned out that the tit was the best-studied bird in the world. It had an agitated sex-life. There was plenty on them in the library, lots of photos.

I handed him my notes on the bird and said that I hadn't found any photos of old Forest Hill. He wasn't happy about that and also said I hadn't given him anything on Rachel for a week now. I said I'd take care of that. As for the photos I'd try the local newspaper and City Hall.

#5

Once I was over at your place when your father came back from the road with presents for Rachel. That day I took Rachel to the movies, for the first time I think. There were two other times later. She'd have preferred going with you I think but you didn't like movies and had work and you told her to go with me instead. I don't remember the year or the month but it was a hot day. Everybody was sweating except Rachel. The picture starred Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. I don't remember the title.

(A long hoot announces his coming. No one moves in the living room. "Your father, Harvey," says Mrs Morgenstern over her crossword. Harvey goes on reading. Rachel puts her book aside and waits, a little stiffly. A car door slams. The front door bangs shut.

Now he's in the living room, filling it, a squat ungrammatical blare of a man looking ill-shaven five minutes after a shave. His fat wet lips are perpetually wrapped around a cigar. He smells of cigars, after-shave lotion and sawdust. He reminds you of a parody of Edward G. Robinson in a gangster role.

" _Wheeew!" he deflates loudly, conveying exhaustion from a week on the road. Rachel instantly stands up. I do too, more slowly. He goes over to his wife. They peck. "Good, Morris?" "So-so." "Pickled tongue and mashed potatoes," she says. He grunts with satisfaction and raises his hand to Harvey. "Einstein," he says. Harvey looks up, nods, returns to his book. Mr Morgenstern glances at the two books on the table I've procured for Harvey. Then he shakes my hand silently with intent to impress. Like many small men he puts all his force in it. I know he doesn't like me._

Now that he's disposed of us he turns to Rachel. He's crazy about her. He tells everybody that, including her. He calls her "Rachie" and makes her call him "Uncle Morris" even though the blood relationship is more diluted than that. She submits to his bear hug. Now he holds her at arm length and praises her beauty, an exaggeration. She stares down at the carpet and blushes into beauty now. He makes her show him her school marks. She stares down at the carpet again. It looks like more modesty but I know it's shame. She's just a strong B student. He gazes at her marks as at jewels.

" _Jesus, we got two geniuses in the family now. One of them beautiful too. Don't get a swelled head, Harvey, I don't mean you."_

Now he goes through his routine. Harvey's told me about it. I witness it for the first time. He freezes, mouth open, smites his forehead with the heel of his hand and leaves the room. He comes back a second later with a fancy bouquet and a gift-wrapped box for her. She rewards him with another blush and a little O! for the flowers and soon another little O! for the chocolates. Then she gets a vase and transforms the flowers into a collective offering on the living room table. She does the same thing with the chocolates. Mr Morgenstern looks vaguely dissatisfied. I feel sorry for him and want to tell her to be kind to him and accept his presents for herself.

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.

The sensors were working now, sniffing out more prey in the cemetery of fragmentary faces and gestures. I stood on the threshold and told her to go on in and have a look.

She went in, fearfully. It was strange to see her there, impeccable and banal in that dusty chaotic space. She turned about uneasily, not trusting the lenses operating in her back. One of them zoomed at her. She pulled back toward the threshold and me.

I said there was no danger for her yet, a few minutes' exposure was harmless. But if I stood outside on the threshold, I said, it was because I'd been exposed too long already. The effect was cumulative like lead poisoning, saturnism, they called it and I reminded her of Saturn, the Greek Chronos who devoured his children. Nobody came into this room any more except Harvey, it didn't matter any more for him, I said.

It wasn't a machine to cure his sickness, I said. That had been another untruth. It was the machine that had given him the sickness.

She stared at me and moved away a second time, not from the sensors this time but from the threshold where I was standing. Why did I go on like that? I said it wouldn't stop there. I said that with the sensors set up in her living room she would be linked up day and night with the machine in the cellar below. I crossed the threshold.

She stepped back a little again.

I tried to show her the hole behind each one of the sensors with the cable snaking into them through motionless heaps of roaches. Similar holes would be knocked in her living room floor, I warned. Thick cables would run across her flowerbeds into her house. I said that it wouldn't stop there in her living room. The cables and the sensors would seek better positioning, would go up a flight and summon back a certain room somewhere, the measurements hadn't been taken yet.

I heard her (Beth) say what room? what are you talking about? aren't you well?

But her voice was distant and I saw it all so clearly from the other threshold of that other long-ago immeasurable room, a random selection of my brain: both of them seated at her desk over some arduous problem, their heads conspiratorial together and speaking some incomprehensible conspiratorial language, her short hair neat and shiny, the lamplight soft on the oval of the sweet-serious face girls had had then and have lost since, I standing in the doorway commissioned by Mrs Morgenstern to summon them down for dinner, hearing their exclusive gibberish. (Out of this.) So I rehearse "It's time to eat" in her language and finally say: "Es ist Zeit für uns zu fressen," and they both look up, Harvey annoyed. (Out of this.)

She predictably corrects me: "Essen, nicht fressen." Of course I'd known that. "Eat" for humans was "essen," for animals, "fressen." It was just to pull her out of the other, inhuman, exclusive language into our own short-lived exclusive one even if exchange was limited to a corrective echo of my own words.

They go back to their problem and their other language and I stand there in unbearable paralysis staring at the curve of her neck and cheek as time goes by more and more slowly.

Get out of it. Out or cross over the threshold into that vanished room. From the threshold the scene replays with no variation possible. Violate the course of things and move across the threshold toward her and then be in it forever in longed-for alteration of events. But then no return ever. Out of it.

Out of it now, down in the cellar, by my own efforts but not then, no non-assisted way out then. It was a deep fall into another time-trap.

I was being shaken out of it. A worn woman in a dirty room, arm stretched out, shaking my shoulder from a safe distance, body tensed for flight, saying fearfully, what's the matter? What's the matter with you? Now her hand left my shoulder as she stepped away.

I was back, out of it. I returned to that other, undesired, room, Harvey's living room, the dead room with the sensors and to the woman, the neighbor, tulips, Beth. Beth Anderson. If she hadn't shaken me out of it would I have emerged? I wondered, thankful, resentful. Return is the worst of it.

"If you're not well why don't you see a doctor?" she was saying. "I'll call later when Mr Morgenstern returns. I have to go back now." She started for the door.

"Don't do that, don't go back," I said too urgently. "Give me just a few minutes."

I excused myself and went into the bathroom again. Again the washbasin with cold water. When I came back a few minutes later it was a little better. She was still standing in the middle of the room, not afraid of the sensors. She stared at me. She didn't say anything but kept staring at me. To make her say something and stop staring I said:

"You can't need the money that badly."

She nodded violently. "Five thousand dollars, right away, today."

It started returning. I told her that five million wouldn't be enough, that she'd come down with it too, like me. She didn't want to be like me, did she? I was doing this for her, I didn't want anything to happen to her, she was a good person. This was sincere, I said. It was compassion, she should believe me. He'd offered me money if she'd say yes. Say no, you don't want them in your house. If you don't say no I'll break into your house and smash them, I swear I will, and he'll take the money back and you'll both have me thrown in jail. It's a promise.

The promise was conveyed with passionate sincerity. But why hadn't I already smashed the sensors and behind them the central machine itself?

Why didn't I smash them then and there, before her eyes?

Why don't I remove the biting dunce cap and smash them now instead of toying with the red button?

She started crying. Jail had been the wrong word to use. The money was for a lawyer, I made out.

She didn't have to tell me, I said as all that disorder from another past came back suddenly with her words and I went back to it, embraced it as painful diversion from that even earlier past, the long-ago vanished room, also as a way of drawing close to her in the mode of confession.

She didn't have to tell me, I repeated. So she didn't go on telling me about it. She'd taken my phrase literally, as recoil from confidence not as semi-confidence itself. I'd meant that I knew all about it, the inevitable things that happened in such a situation. The money part, even the jail part, wasn't the worst. She hadn't been through the worst yet. And now I was glad she'd misunderstood and hadn't let me confide as I'd wanted to, to prolong the diversion, maybe. How could I have told her how it had ended for us with Keith?

So of course it wound up by my offering her the money myself, all those precious days. I had a warm feeling as though it was for her. Probably at that moment I thought it really was. A loan, I said.

But how will I ever be able to pay you back? she said with that exotic mid-western rectitude of hers.

It was funny in a way. Harvey was about to offer her money to set up the machines and I was offering her money to refuse. I knew he could have outbid me a hundred times over but now it was too late. I'd short-circuited him from the start.

It was a predictable struggle to get her to accept. She thanked me all the way from the depths. I said, shh, it's nothing, shh, don't, she'd pay me back when she could. It was the wrong remark, the wrong way around. How could I pay her back for having saved me? We stood there together in the middle of the dead room. I held her, consolingly at first, kissing her wet cheeks, then her neck, then her lips, aware that she might be submitting to it out of gratitude, a purchased familiarity then. But if I was holding her so tightly now, tighter than she was me, I think it was more from fear than desire, the need to feel a real body against mine.

The sensors went on whirring, zooming, tracking.

In a few hundred thousand years we might go through it again one-dimensionally on a screen, not in the unity of an embracing couple but dissected: a knee, a shoulder, an eye in quick senseless succession.

One blowy overcast March morning I found Harvey in the garden under his black umbrella despite the clouds, in case of a surprise attack of sunshine. From time to time his arm was yanked upward by a sudden gust and I thought he risked being blown aloft, he was so flimsy now.

He didn't pay attention to it. I thought he was staring at Beth Anderson's house until he started talking about the birds darting about the feeding station she'd set up. It was an aluminum pole thrust into the lawn with a little platform on top and a spike to hold the block of suet or margarine. It was unusual for him to take notice of outside things.

We looked at their incredible acrobatics for a while. He started croaking things about them. He went on and on. I found it confusing. Or maybe I wasn't listening closely because suddenly Beth Anderson appeared at her bedroom window in her Saturday morning street-urchin disguise. She began wiping a pane furiously. Her navel beneath the oversized knotted shirt was like an unblinking eye. Harvey's voice gave out. He started scribbling it on the pad. Beth stopped wiping. All her eyes were fixed on me. She made a timid gesture with her hand. I returned it even more timidly, not to attract Harvey's attention.

Later in my room I tried to piece together what he'd written in his barely legible scrawl. When he wrote things down I was contractually bound to read.

Stylistically fixed up it was something like this: that of course there was objective time out there, invariable for us at our tiny earthbound fraction of light-speed. But time as perception was variable, wildly so. Those seconds that zipped by like bullets for us were spacious for them. (He meant the birds, the titmice). They could do meaningful things within their seconds which weren't ours. In a blink of our eyes they darted their beady eyes in all directions, shot, suicidally it seemed, at the tangle of branches and miraculously landed with precision on a twig. They accomplished everything in acceleration it seemed to our eyes but that was the relativity of time-sense. The slower time-sense was ours. For them one of our minutes maybe had the subjective value of a year. For a long-lived tortoise one of our minutes must have seemed a second. To its slow mind maybe the tit was invisible.

Had I ever given this matter much thought? If not, I would have to very soon.

That was the final sentence.

It sounded more like a threat than a prediction. I balled the sheet up and threw it inaccurately at the wastepaper basket. A week before I would have felt alarm. But the shadowy forms below had vanished. There were no more time-traps. I was firmly fixed in this time-stratum where Beth was.

From time to time, though, I couldn't help hoping it wasn't just the inactive phase of the cycle.

***

Thirteen

I learned about Harvey Morgenstern's alleged breakthroughs in a funny way.

Just as the alarm clock on one side of the bed announced the end of the tenderness session the phone on the other side of the bed joined in. Fully clothed except for her golden shoes, Beth Anderson broke away with a sigh. She clapped the alarm still, got up into a sitting position and answered the phone, all the while arranging her hair with her free hand.

"Oh. How do you do, Mr Morgenstern... Yes, as a matter of fact he is. He's in the kitchen. I'll get him for... What?... No I have definitely not changed my mind. I definitely do not want to sell my home. Mr Morgenstern, you're not going to hound me about that again like you did last year... Something else?... What kind of devices in my living room?... No, no, you must be out of your mind, frankly, to think I'd accept that... You could offer me all the money in the world, the answer is still no. Listen Mr Morgenstern, I think my roast is burning. So hold on, I'll get Professor Weizman for you."

By this time I'd put my shoes back on, the only dressing necessary after our tenderness sessions. It was her name for them. I reached over for the receiver. She kept it away from me for the few more seconds necessary for me to plausibly leave the kitchen and reach it.

Harvey whispered that he wanted me to come over right away. He made what was supposed to be a joke about the meat burning in her oven. He sounded in an ugly mood. It must have been her refusal. He'd have to wait ten minutes, I said coldly in a display of independence for Beth's benefit.

I hung up hard and kissed her nose. She reached up and cradled my head in her arms, rocked it like a sick child. I broke loose and kissed her cheek. She sighed and said I should hurry back.

Although I had no irrefutable proof at that time I often thought that Beth Anderson might well prove to be a passionate woman. Sometimes half an hour after a tenderness session she'd take out a photo-album again and we'd go back upstairs. She'd reset the alarm clock for the mandatory fourteen minutes and undo the top three buttons of her blouse. Then we'd shed our shoes and lie together and resume our caresses, largely intercepted by cloth.

Once, as she opened the album during the pause, I said that the jarring break was a little ridiculous, waiting for it unpleasantly distracting. She was perfectly aware of the ridiculous aspect of it and said so many times on that bed. She explained in justification that she considered herself to be a married woman in spite of everything. Despite temptations she'd never been fully faithless to her husband, not even after what he'd done. "Fully faithless" was another of her deliciously quaint expressions. If there was no external limit set on tenderness she was afraid she might lose control, she said flatteringly.

But why fourteen minutes, Beth? I would protest, half-laughing. Why not fifteen? Just like that, she replied, half-laughing herself.

Even though there was that locked guestroom at the end of the corridor she always chose the cama de matrimonio as the site for tenderness. I had a hang-up about other men's camas de matrimonio but that wasn't one of her hang-ups as long as the action on it was circumscribed. I suspected it was timid revenge on her husband.

In any case, still a little sensitive to overlapping temporal levels, I was uncomfortably aware of his presence on the bed. The other member of her family was very often with us there too, not just thirty times on the pastel blue walls. Between kisses she would ask me, over and over, to repeat the good things I'd told her about the poems in the third pile. I wished we could have been alone on that bed a little.

Regulated physical tenderness had started as an overflow of pure joy. She'd already told me what the trouble was with her son that had required all that money, what he'd been caught with and how much and what that could mean.

The day following our dead room embrace she took off two days and went to Nebraska where it had happened. She returned a little less worried. That evening she rang me up joyously. She'd just got a fax. Everything was going to be all right. I should come over and celebrate with her.

She didn't limit her intake that day. She hunted around a little unsteadily for the fax in the living room and then said she must have left it upstairs, come on up. She found it in her bedroom, showed it to me and initiated the tiptoed embrace of thankfulness and joy. We were standing in the middle of another room embracing as a few days before except that in this room there were no time-sensors but a bed. Between showing me the fax and utilization of the bed no more than thirty seconds elapsed.

Sometimes I couldn't help feeling it was a little like an initial installment plan payment.

The limitations she imposed on the expression of tenderness took me back to adolescence on sofas with good girls. But even with good girls ultimate buttons could be slyly undone. Certain garments could be sweet-talked off on the pretext of preserving them from wrinkles. Beth defended her ultimate buttons and said the wrinkles she feared weren't those. I didn't insist as much as I would have in my younger days, a sure sign of waning vigor. So I went about in a state of faint but constant excitation. It wasn't unpleasant, a kind of rejuvenation. Or if not, embers beneath the ashes at least. That faint loin-fire was her great present, maintained by a future of imagined possession and by her refusal to let me realize it.

I thought I was on the dangerous verge once. I'd been able to coax her into her Saturday morning Huck Finn outfit, the tattered low-riding jeans and the big man's shirt over bareness and knotted between breastbone and navel. I quoted Robert Herrick and invited her to mess up her hair which she finally did, like submitting to any sacrifice to humor me. I prescribed the angle of the cap. She stood there in the middle of the bedroom surrounded by the photographs of her son, frowning, not answering my invitation to join me on the bed. Then suddenly she left the room and my rejuvenated heart beat hard at the imminence of total disclosure and possession. After a while I heard the querulous whine of the vacuum cleaner below. My present and future were still intact.

I followed her around, even gave her a hand with the windows.

The excitement involved in our exchange of tenderness was more verbal than tactile. One of the unspoken rules of our new game was that intimate things could only be whispered into the other's ear – hers small, pink, exquisitely sculptured and unaging like her nose.

We confessed our jealousies. Who was that young man a few weeks ago she'd had dinner with and maybe more than dinner with? Oh, Johnny, from the florists', a baby, twenty-three, had lost his friend, needed consoling.

What kind of consoling? I whispered. Had he been allowed to go this far? Oh no, not that, my sweetheart, she whispered ambiguously. Hadn't been allowed to go as far as my hand was trying to go, did she mean? Or protesting that it shouldn't go so far?

She removed it and kissed it and whispered something monstrous. She was certain I was having an affair with Hanna. I said I felt insulted. She whispered, I know men can't resist big breasts. I said it depended on who was standing behind the big breasts. In this specific case I had no trouble resisting.

She once whispered that her love had been from the very start when suddenly I'd appeared that day like a kind of knight, mature but athletic, and had defied that female dragon and switched off her lawnmower. She wanted to know when I had started becoming interested in her. I replied, right from the start too but there had been that time when she'd been on her knees planting tulip-bulbs bra-less and I couldn't help seeing her pretty little breasts, like exquisite pink-tipped tulip-bulbs themselves, I whispered. Only considerably larger, I added with exaggeration.

Her breath came fast at that. My excitement (and hers too?) came more from this evocation than from my hand's immediate exploration of the presumed area of her draped bosom. I wondered if this past-orientation even in sexual matters wasn't another of the perverse effects of time-travail.

Sometimes she whispered pretty wild things in response to those muffled caresses. Once she confessed she'd had fantasies about me from the very first day, perfectly innocent fantasies and then less so and then not at all innocent.

She told me all about it and said she would do it again that night and gave me the exact time and said how beautiful it would be if I did it too at the same time, each of us in our own bedroom intensely thinking of the other, my sweetheart.

Towards the end it all ebbs back from the primitive area of intervention into the museum of the brain and the best you can hope for is a woman saying things like that.

Despite the boldness of some of her confessions in the relative heat of action she didn't like any allusion to our activities on that bed once we left it. I wasn't even supposed to take the initiative to go up to it with her. She always initiated the tenderness sessions herself, wordlessly. Typically, I'd be close-reading a passage for her benefit. I'd test her comprehension with a question and get no answer. She'd be staring at me. The sudden melting not-listening expression of her face was pedagogically annoying but otherwise flattering.

"Wait," she'd whisper and unlock a certain closet and take out a photo-album. That was the signal and the pretext for the climb upstairs, as if the photos could only be close-read on a bed. There must have been a hundred of those albums, largely devoted to her son doing unexceptional things at various stages of growth. She conducted an enforced tour of his development in the alarmed pauses between embraces. It was the price to pay.

One evening she brought up two albums. When the alarm clock went off she disengaged herself, sat up in bed and opened the first of the albums and quickly shut it, saying she'd taken the wrong one. She refused to let me see those wrong (so Ricky-less) photos. She placed the album back on the floor alongside the bed and groped for a bottle and a glass. "Gosh, I forgot your whisky, Jerry. I'll be right back. Be good."

She was gone ten minutes, long enough for me to leaf through that wrong album.

It was full of nude torso studies of her fifteen or so years back. Except for the last one, they were chaste enough to have graced late nineteenth century walls. Mushy with soft-focus, sometimes with cute vignette effects, the studies showed her from a variety of angles, mostly with her arms crossed over her chest. Her pretty face had an invariable expression. Those parted lips and eyes fixed on things beyond the margin meant to convey dreamy spirituality.

The final photo was in sharp focus and showed all of her entirely nude. Her arms were lifted and her head thrown back as she brushed her long hair. She had the same expression of dreamy spirituality as though unaware that below a spot selectively lit up her abundant honey-colored fleece. That center of interest was further emphasized by her awkward posture. Her husband must have ordered her to arch her torso back to give priority to it. It was a touchingly amateurish job on both sides of the camera.

I went on looking at her until I heard her fifteen years later singing out from the staircase: "Gangway for Glenfiddich." She said it long seconds before she entered, giving me time to close the album and place it back on the floor. When we embraced I felt I had to pay indirect tribute to what I'd probably been meant to see.

"Oh please no, not that, Jerry, my darling," she said over and over.

The alarm went off in time. She gathered up the albums, I took the glasses and bottles and we went downstairs to resume literary analysis.

Harvey was waiting. I kissed her cheek again and said I'd be back as quickly as possible. As I turned away from her I knew her face had switched to that clandestine expression of deep concern. I could almost feel it in my back.

I took the short way down to the cellar, through the dead room I'd begun again to think of as the living room. I didn't pay attention to the sensors or avoid the departed piano. None of that bothered me anymore ever since my loins had started glowing with urgency for a targeted future. At least that was the connection I made.

I stopped midway down the cellar stairs. No closer. Harvey looked up from an old TV he was gutting for parts and stared at me grimly beneath his Harpo Marx wig.

He wanted to know what Beth Anderson had been doing here in the house a few weeks ago.

I played it wisely. For him to have launched such an accusation he must have had proof. Neighbors might conceivably have seen her coming over that Monday morning. But Harvey wasn't on speaking terms with any of the neighbors. Had he found a lost earring of hers in the dead room? That happened only in books and movies.

Anyhow, I said yes, she'd been here. I'd been trying again to convince her to let the sensors be installed in her living room. It was his idea, after all. I'd even told her how much he was willing to rent the space in each corner for. She'd wanted to see them first. So I'd invited her over.

"Did you say. What they were for?"

"I spoke in the vaguest of terms of telluric-wave research. Some day you'll have to tell me what telluric waves are."

"And that's all. You did?"

"Absolutely all."

"You didn't maybe. Turn on the machine?"

I looked scandalized at the very suggestion.

"Losing my memory. But that I remember. Still the same. Old Jerry. Still the same. Pathological liar."

Before I could retort he switched on the screen.

What could I say then to the infallible bastard at the spectacle of Beth and myself locked in embrace in the dead room? There was maybe one chance out of six trillion of that particular image coming up and it had. I didn't realize at the moment that it illustrated not my habitual bad luck but a number of Harvey's breakthroughs.

In my discomfiture at least I was able to get satisfaction from the sight of Beth kissing me with closed eyes, something I hadn't been in a position to notice at the time. Supposedly, insincere women kiss staring into space over their partner's shoulder. The image was clear, unflickering and unfragmented.

I justified myself by saying I'd had to turn on the machine so she could see the sensors in action before she made up her mind. It was elementary honesty to show her the sensors operating here as they would be operating in her living room. She hadn't liked what she'd seen. Her answer was still no and it sounded very definitive.

Harvey didn't say anything more about the matter. But I knew he would brood over it. It would germinate and root in his mind, grow immense and black and bear bitter fruit, like the Shadow's tree. And I knew who would have to taste that astringency.

To change the subject I congratulated him on the unusually good quality of the image.

That was just one of the things. He gave me minimal grudging information about his breakthroughs. I gathered that the image I was looking at (looking in particular at my right hand slipping down an inch from her waist to the birth of her left buttock) was taped. But devising a way to videotape the images from the past was a relatively minor accomplishment.

Vastly more important was the progress in temporal navigation. The machine was no longer a drunken rudderless skiff on the waves of the past. It was still far from being perfectly obedient to the helmsman's will, not yet able to sail for a stipulated hour or even day, but roughly reliable to the week. The extended maritime metaphor is mine. Harvey expressed it more aridly. The images he was interested in weren't literary.

Next, he'd partially overcome the problem of temporal random selection. He'd bridled the machine's tendency to break out of the imposed time-corral. If it had mattered now I would have been thankful for an end to that particular horror. But this was my last semi-descent into the cellar.

Also, he'd made progress disciplining the machine into staying put on the main center of interest, restraining those exuberant zooms on what for us was trivia. There was still room for improvement in this respect, he admitted.

Obediently, as if to illustrate his words, the screen filled with a close-up of my hand well below the small of her back now, in semi-possession of the left buttock. I felt desire at the spectacle, more than at the time as an actor, I think.

Now another close-up: her hand on my shoulder and then a super-macro shot of her diamond ring. It was like a comically moralizing montage in an old silent film. The machine all but supplied the curlicued subtitle: "Another Man's Wife."

Also, he said, he'd succeeded in greatly extending the duration of the image without the need for a corresponding energy-input. He was still working on a device to store the image. Not the dead videotaped image. The real image. There were snags.

But most of the preconditions now existed for what he had in mind, he said.

Whatever he had in mind didn't alarm me. Didn't interest me. I'd shaken it all off. The jerking dead hadn't come back since the first tenderness sessions. Past time-strata didn't erupt in the corridors either. How had it been possible to do without a woman's love for so long? Hadn't that been the deep cause of all my troubles?

Each time Hanna and Harvey came back from the hospital the Volvo was loaded with junk, mainly discarded machines. Harvey bent the salvaged items to his esoteric uses with Third World ingenuity. It explained why his set-up had that amateurish look. The very instruments of the attempted linkage with the past already belonged to that past. He pointed at something and I said it looked like one of those beauty-parlor helmets you used to see women reading mags under while having a permanent wave. He said that was exactly what it had been but wouldn't stay that way much longer. I knew he wanted me to ask about that so he could refuse to answer. But I wasn't interested. All I said was that it also looked like the funny metal helmet they stick on your head when they shock you out of existence in the electric chair. Then I went back to the other house, my new center of gravity despite the little chasm there.

That chasm wasn't at all impassible. We skirted it coming toward each other, smiling and pretending it wasn't there, pretending that insane scene in the other house had never happened. This was hard to do because the climax of that scene had been the embrace that had quickly developed into our present position on her bed. I knew she longed to explore the chasm. I understood it by her intense concerned glances at me when she thought I wasn't looking, also by the constant therapeutic head-cradling act.

Sometimes I was irritated at being treated like a borderline case. Then I'd realize that maybe I really was a borderline case or worse. I saw the borderline as the threshold of the dead room. I'd crossed it too often. So if you pursued the metaphor logically didn't that make of me a beyond-the-borderline case?

Finally she asked the question that had been gnawing at her. The moment and position were propitious. She breathed a deep sigh and nuzzled in a touching ersatz of that lovely post-coital tenderness of the fully gratified woman she couldn't possibly have been, given the limits she imposed on our relationship. """Je-rr-y. Je-rr-y, hon-ey." A nose-kiss. Then: "What do those machines really do, Je-rr-y? Don't you want to tell me, my dar-ling?" How could I? How could I tell her they were one-eyed scouts for a half-assed time machine? Just pronouncing the term "time machine" would have catalogued me definitively as a lunatic or a liar or both in her mind. So I nuzzled back and said he'd told me they were telluric-wave detectors, but maybe they weren't. Like her, I said, I was surprised that lenses were necessary for detecting invisible waves.

Yes, dangerous. Very dangerous.

She went on exploring my unsettled mental state the following day in the same circumstances. After the sigh and nuzzle she asked me about that camera in the bathroom shower. She asked the question in a tone of deep soothing readiness to understand the wildest things I might say.

How could I give her the real reason: that I'd been accessory to an attempt to install in her living room machines I'd defined as deadly? I was ashamed to confess it, I whispered. She coaxed and coaxed. She'd slap me, I said. Never, never, my darling.

It was a kind of projective fetishism, I said finally. I'd had no photo of her. So I took shots of her shower to look at it and imagine her there gleaming, soaping her breasts. Forgive me, I begged. It sounded unexpectedly pathological once it came out. Her breathing quickened, she bit my arm and asked me to say it again which I did with a bolder variation. She gathered my head in.

Finally she did it once too often. I recovered my head with a certain irritation and brought the thing out into the open. "You think I'm crazy, don't you?" She protested, unconvincingly, at that term. Certainly not crazy, but maybe on the verge. She relativized the state. She said it happened to everybody sooner or later. She'd often been on that verge herself and even a little beyond the verge once or twice.

She gave me her most recent experience, just last Saturday. She'd gone to New York to see a friend (a woman-friend) and on the subway all of a sudden she'd been possessed by the notion that half of the passengers in the car were members of the Golden Galaxy concentrating mentally on the other, unconverted, half. Sometimes they staged InGatherings in the subway.

But Jack wasn't in the car. All the passengers looked bored, unspiritual. At each station she got off that car and ran to the next one. She forgot the real reason she was in the subway. She overshot her station and got out of the final car all the way out in the Bronx. All the passengers – overwhelmingly ethnic toward the end – looked unspiritual. Jack wasn't in any of those cars.

"And then I almost got on another line. I was about to take another line, all the lines, IRT, BMT, all over, Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn and go on looking. But then I said, "Whoa, Beth, whoa. You could spend your whole life on the subway looking and you'd never find him."

She wept a little alongside me. Her "whoa" had sounded like "woe."

She blew her nose and returned to my case. She said it was a miracle I hadn't had a nervous breakdown months before, living in that horrible house, the dirt, the noise, the roaches. "I was simply horrified at what I saw," she said. Of course she meant me to understand: horrified at the disorder of that house. But maybe too she meant horrified at another kind of disorder she'd seen there.

Horrified maybe but relieved in a way, I guessed. All the things that had deeply troubled her about my behavior now appeared in another, clinical, light. Morally it was an improvement. The poem-box unopened for months and lied about, my stealthy doings in her house, the muttering pacing of her living room, my wet-stockinged stance in her shower with a camera, etc – all that now had a reassuring pathological explanation.

She was the kind of woman who stepped back only an instant from pathology in a loved one and then surged forward to nurse it. So she nursed me. It was a reversal of our former relationship. I had been pretty much in command before. Now she took charge of me, still another woman taking charge of me. I felt once again the great familiar relief at encouraged irresponsibility.

Plumbing the murky depths of my mind wasn't her only curative approach. She took active measures to reduce the infection. I was to avoid the other house as much as possible, she decreed. She programmed my activities during her absence. She kept me busy weeding her tulip strip, picking up seeds and fertilizer at the garden center, shopping in the supermarket. My mouth watered at the sight of that first shopping-list and the prospect of a home-cooked meal after two years of restaurant fare, radiated pizza and Hanna's frigid noodles.

But it never got beyond the Ritz cracker and skewered cheese-cube stage. She never invited me to stay for dinner. As for sleeping in her bed, even relatively chastely, that was out of the question. If she wanted to preserve me from infection why didn't she invite me to move in with her?

There were other even more peculiar things about her behavior. One day I found a big brass bolt installed on the inside of her front door. When I came in she locked the door and shot the bolt. Before we went into a room she was careful to draw the drapes or angle the Venetian blinds opaque.

Why did she do that? I whispered in my turn, nuzzling her. We used to have our classroom sessions without a locked and bolted door, I reminded her. She hadn't bothered drawing drapes either in the other rooms we happened to be in. Our relationship hadn't been the same then, she whispered. We hadn't been deep dear friends then as we were now.

Finally I thought I understood what it was all about. She'd once said she was sure her husband would come back one day. She didn't want us to be surprised in inextricable postures of (relative) intimacy. She could always leap up fully clothed from the cama de matrimonio at a moment's notice. How could she possibly get rid of a second table setting at a moment's notice?

As the days went by the oddities multiplied. Our (slow) progress in intimacy upstairs was accompanied by the progress of fearful precautions downstairs. She trained me to vanish at a moment's notice. That was at about the time she sometimes consented to removing her blouse in her bedroom.

Suddenly in the midst of anything, television, drinks, embraces, above all embraces, her body would stiffen, her eyes would go fixed and distant and she'd tell me to vanish. It was like one of those old-time school fire drills. In twenty seconds I was to disappear upstairs leaving no trace of my presence below. From the staircase I'd see her inventorying the living room. She'd pat the imprint of my behind on the sofa out of existence, grab the bottle of whisky and my glass and hustle them into the kitchen. Then she'd face the front door, immobile, expectant.

I had a painful insight one evening. All those theatrics made the return of her husband imminent in her mind. She'd often said that a woman could love two men simultaneously. But not on the same level of intensity, apparently. Her parasitic monk was younger, true, but no great shakes culturally and intellectually, I was sure. I didn't see him endowed with wit and charm either. I tried to minimize her senseless preference for the man who'd ditched her as another of her deficiencies in taste, like the electric fireplace, her gothic-lettered visiting cards, her "best-of" CDs.

Still, after that insight I couldn't help feeling a little wounded at being reduced to an instrument to make her fantasies a bit less pathetic and impossible.

But after, when the alarm was over and we were together on the bed, I took her head in my arms and rocked it and kissed it repeatedly.

***

Fourteen

After a long respite Harvey returned to his archeological fixation. I'd thought he'd forgotten about unearthing the sites of Forest Hill shops forty years before. I reactivated the research. This time I went to the local paper and on the pretext that I was writing a history of the town was able to dig up photographs of the Forest Hill of the war years. I pondered over them and tried to regenerate the old beneath the new.

It began to monopolize my brain. I suffered something like a relapse.

I did a little fieldwork. But most of the archeological research was pursued mentally in bed, my own and Beth's. I couldn't get rid of it even there. It was becoming obsessive, trying to peel off the contemporary occupation layer to reveal the underlying deposit of artifacts. She took my distraction for sulking because of the limitations on intimacy she still imposed. Lately I'd been getting urgent. I felt I owed it to her and to my own virile image to be urgent. Not here, my sweetheart, she would say. Where then? Not here, she would repeat, probably referring to this life. I suggested the living room sofa or even the cactus-patterned sofa in the Mexican nook. She found that sordid. I suggested the museum room guarded by Uncle Sam. There was a bed there. She reacted to that as though I'd proposed a church altar with her pope in attendance.

Then I mentioned that unvisited room at the end of the corridor that she'd referred to as "the guest-room." No, she said. Why not? Not there, she said. After a while she added: "It's full of junk anyway."

We'd progressed in intimacy by then. It was largely visual. Although I was generally able to sweet-whisper her out of her bra she would gracefully pull out of attempted torso caresses with a kiss and ask me to recite her son's poems again, I did it so wonderfully. I must have recited the BMT thing twenty times.

She'd lie alongside me, head thrown back, cupping her breasts out of modesty or shame and listen with intensely closed eyes. Then of course I had him on those photo-albums as well. When the alarm went off I had to sit alongside her on the edge of the bed and pretend interest. With that merciless feminine memory for long-ago trivia involving loved-ones, she recalled the events surrounding this snapshot and that one. He looks mad here because I wouldn't buy him a third ice-cream cone, chocolate and pistachio. Here, that was the day he nearly fell in the river, I thought I'd die.

She went on and on and I would end by stroking her downy neck-vertebras with my fingertips and follow them down to the small of her back and the stubborn barrier of her belt. She had a lovely back. Like her small intricate ears and brief nose it hadn't aged. If I kept it up she was sure to stop and look up and say, bewildered, "Aren't you interested, Jerry?" And I would stop the sinuous exploration and say, miming candid surprise at her question, "Yes, of course I am. Pistachio and strawberry, you said. What river was that he fell into?"

But during the period of archeological research I paid less attention to her vertebras. She hinted gently at a slackening of tenderness on my part. Occasionally she'd clasp her hands behind her neck and concede brief access to her rejuvenated breasts. She often asked me if I had something on my mind. I invariably answered yes but she protected it too well. At that she would breathe deeply, squeeze my hand hard and intensify kisses and caresses and became less and less real while I went on displacing shops and buildings in my head. It was a bad symptom.

It was a bad symptom that reality for me on that bed alongside the half-naked woman was long-ago things some of which I'll enumerate now but not compulsively and without peril this time I think since I'm on my guard, aware, as I wasn't enough then, of the trap.

So, marking my distance from them, holding on to here and now (which is a dark and dank cellar with the pattering of rats and the bite of the time-helmet on my forehead) I recall recalling the primitive grocery-store in the days before the moving black belt and bar-codes, the clear music of the old-time cash-register, recall embracing the big 100% biodegradable Kraft paper-bag with the saw-toothed top tickling my nose and placed the grocery-store on the site of the present video-shop.

I recall recalling the scarred bloodstained butcher's chopping block, concave over the years from the cleaver, the hooked carcasses of sane bovines, and that had to be the brand-new bank. Next door (so the computer-store now) the great pants-press lowered with a hiss of billowing steam and a smell of mildew. Much more pleasant was the fragrance of fresh-cut pine-boards from the lumber-store which was haunting the present travel agency. I saw Cohen's candy-store and outside the soda-drink chest with the built-in bottle-opener and the pattern of bottle-caps on the sidewalk, Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up, Canada Dry, lots of others I could enumerate but won't. The furniture-store surely. There's the taciturn Italian shoe-repairman in his heavy leather apron bent over an archaic machine with leather belts making slapping sounds. Choice Nuts and Dried Fruit now?

I see the barbershop pole, the giant red-and-white revolving peppermint-stick, an antiquity even then. She went there instead of to the fancy beauty parlor with the women in their ranked electric chairs. She had a practical boyish cut that emphasized her white neck. I knew when she went and sometimes in the mirror she saw me looking through the window and stared solemnly at me, frowning a little and then smiling a little and then frowned and looked away. Harvey was waiting his turn reading a paper along with the other men.

Out of it. I don't know where to place it. I didn't know where to place the barbershop I would tell Harvey if he asked.

When I submitted my tentative location of the old places I thought my job was over. No, there was another piece of research even more unreasonable than the first. He expected me to come up with everybody's shopping-habits in those days: the stores, the days, the time. He didn't individualize "everybody." I understood: himself, myself, my mother and father, his mother and father, maybe his grandparents. He should have known for his own people and himself but he didn't. It was his memory again, he said and added that if it kept on worsening he'd stop the chemical and ray treatment.

There were no libraries or local papers to consult for the ancient shopping habits of obscure people. Most of the individuals involved were beyond consultation. I was supposed to make a deep cerebral plunge and come up with the precious time-barnacled information. Was the big shopping day Friday afternoon or Saturday morning?

So now I knew what he was after, always the same thing. I should have understood far earlier what with the relay he'd constructed and the reduced second-generation sensors. He'd been preparing this alternate strategy for months now to bypass Beth Anderson's inaccessible house. I wasn't really alarmed at first. Rooms were a concentrate of past people in private attitudes. How could the machine help picking them up? But on sidewalks outside shops they would be safely public and diluted among the thousands of other passersby.

Anyhow I finally came up with what I thought had been the old schedule for my mother and his. They'd shopped together. His father's I didn't know, he'd been on the road most of the time. For the days we both went there it was easy, mainly Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. I handed him the paper. He glanced at it for a second. He stared at me.

"You got. Everybody down?"

"Everybody I can remember."

"Where's...?" He broke off and seemed to be searching for a name.

"Where's Rachel?" he said finally and I recalled that night the year before when she came back and I couldn't remember her name either. Couldn't.

"Why Rachel?" I asked as if I didn't know why.

"Didn't she go. Shopping too? Get her hair fixed? Dresses dry-cleaned? Malted milks? Movie? Dentist?"

"I forgot about her."

"You forgot about Rachel?"

"I don't remember when she went into town."

"Try to remember."

So I said I'd try to remember.

One of the ways I tried not to remember was by keeping my mind sharply focused on housework when Beth was away. But I found I couldn't do jobs like vacuum cleaning in the old vehement way. They'd become mechanical chores that didn't require exclusive mental focus. Focus shifted to old things. It was an unhealthy situation.

One morning as the whine of the vacuum cleaner died away into developing silence I decided to launch into some challenging big-scale project. I wandered all over her silent house.

Couldn't the upstairs corridor stand repainting? In the storeroom I found everything for the preliminary job of washing: sponges, rags, pails, even neatly tied stacks of newspapers, some yellowed and a decade old. I avoided looking at them as I spread them out on the floor. The stepladder proved to be too short for comfort. I hunted around but couldn't find a bigger one. Then I thought of the locked room at the end of the corridor. She'd called it a junk-room.

I finally found a big bunch of keys on top of the refrigerator. The next-to-the-last one on the ring opened the door with difficulty.

The room was dim and unbearably stuffy. It was empty except for a cot in the corner. I pulled up the Venetian blinds in a cloud of dust. I nearly ruptured myself trying to open the window. Defeated, I sat down on the cot and thought of the bedroom in the other house, how it had been dusty and suffocating like this room that first night (the night of the old voices) and how I hadn't been able to force the window up there either. That gave me the idea of doing to this room what I'd done to the other. I gave up the idea of painting the corridor.

It took three days of clandestine work to transform the junkless junk room. An hour before Beth's return I'd lock the door, air out the corridor and take a shower with her perfumed soap.

On the third day as I was doing the second coat on the ceiling I glanced at the window and surprised Hanna dimly staring at me from her bedroom window in the other house. She'd made two clean circles in the dirty panes for her eyes.

When she left, probably to inform Harvey, those two circles went on staring at me. I let the blinds down.

The evening of the surprise I held Beth by the waist and guided her down the corridor past her bedroom, past the bathroom. Where are we going? Not there, Jerry, it's locked. I tell you it's locked. I lost the key. I know it's locked, she protested.

I opened the door and practically had to force her inside with me. She seemed to be on the verge of tears. I understood then that something had happened in that room. I was sure it had involved her son. With my experience I could imagine what it was. I tried to convince her that she shouldn't live in the past all the time. I told her that whatever had happened here was the past. The only reality of this room, I said, was the two of us seated on this cot, me kissing her cheek. I soothed her into sitting on the edge, stiff, upright. Look! I commanded. I got up and pulled the blinds up, like pulling a sheet off a statue, to reveal the room in new sunny glory and saw Harvey across the way standing dimly at the bedroom window, staring at me, past me, through two clean circles in the dirty panes, half a foot under Hanna's. He looked as though the revelation had been for him.

I slanted the slats till he vanished. The evening sunshine tigered everything in the room now. Look, I said: a brand-new room. I said I'd junk the old cot and buy another one. I did it the next day. Even so she refused to stay in the room more than a minute. But during the next fire drill she told me to go upstairs and lock myself in that room till the all clear. So it served a useful purpose after all.

By this time Harvey had finished the work on the second-generation sensors (with a slew of bits and scraps I had to burn three days running in the garden). They had mobility now, he said. The word "mobility" was an overstatement. It depended on who was active behind them. Each was double the size and weight of a car storage battery. But we had Hanna's brawn to grunt and fart them in and out of the Volvo.

His real achievement was a powerful relay that filled a third of the station wagon. It was more or less effective within a radius of half a mile of the machine in the cellar. I was cheered when he said we would be operating at the extreme limit of the relay's pick-up zone and added that nothing could be done about that.

The four new sensors were connected to the relay in the car by cables that Harvey instructed me to paint pavement-gray in the interest of inconspicuousness. But it struck me as useless cosmetics with four outlandish machines marking out the area of time-search on the sidewalk in front of busy shops. Finally Harvey realized that body snatching would have to be done at lonely hours. Not even mid-morning would do. He chose six in the morning.

Of course earlier wouldn't have posed technical problems. In midnight blackness the sensors could capture old sunlight. But operating in the dead hours of the morning might seem suspicious to the police who cruised about the neighborhood regularly since a recent spate of burglaries and two rapes.

So operating time was to be six in the morning: the beginning of honest daylight and nobody around to ask questions.

On the eve of the chosen day he impressed on Hanna and me the importance of going to bed early in order to rise and shine at five. The beat-up hearse-like Volvo was packed with the relay, the four sensors, a junked and reconverted portable TV that would enable Harvey to monitor the images from the back-seat and videotape them, the video device itself, the prototype of a time-storage unit, a portable control-panel extemporized from a salvaged length of pine-board, spare cables and tubes, a tool-chest. There were even three chocolate-bars for early-morning hunger.

But the Volvo didn't budge next morning. Hanna had been secretly late-late viewing in her room and at 5:00 am couldn't be moved, no more than Boulder Dam. By the time she emerged, snarling, it was already seven-thirty and the outing had to be postponed.

The next scheduled day it was Harvey himself who overslept and Hanna strangled with laughter from the top of the cellar stairs. Even that didn't rouse him. She wanted me to go down and wake him up to enjoy her triumph immediately but I told her to let him go on sleeping. It would do him good, I added, eating my cake and having it too.

The third day they were both ready on time and hammered on my door. I didn't answer. Harvey came in. I was sick, I said and turned toward the wall. He harassed me. I'm sick, I said. Leave me (I felt like saying "us") alone. He went on and on. Finally I turned around and sat up in bed.

For the first time I made a fundamental criticism of what he was doing. I didn't trust myself to speak about what was really troubling me. I kept the criticism on a dispassionate theoretical level. All of the people he was trying to resurrect were nobodies to the world at large, I said. I pretended to be revolted at the wasted financial and cultural possibilities of the machine. Why didn't he record past presidential turpitudes and sell the images to the TV networks? There was a fortune in that. Or he could summon up great men, we could see W. A. Mozart in conversation with J. Haydn or if not that, doing anything, playing billiards even.

He glanced at his watch impatiently but maybe because he could never resist theoretical speculation he accepted that hypothesis. Very seriously he said that what I'd suggested was within the realm of possibility. If he worked on it there was no theoretical barrier to extending the range of the machine to two hundred years in the past, it was a question of more tubes, more power. You'd need lots more power for that though, a small city's power plant. And of course the machine would have to be the size of a cathedral and rebuilt on the site of that Vienna house or wherever it had been. But all that would take time and time was what he didn't have.

He went back to harassing me and finally said:

"Don't you want to see...?"

Once again his face went blank with the effort to recall the name.

"Don't you want to see Rachel?"

He'd already written the question, the night of the old voices but had never uttered it. I didn't want to see any of them anymore, I said, diluting her in the others. I said I'd already seen his mother and didn't want to see my mother and father that way. I had my own images of everybody, a hundred times more real and flattering than his poor gray caricatures. I called them up when I liked, not often (and that was my fault), but when I did they were more faithful, a million times more, to what those people had really been than his images were.

He echoed me weakly but angrily.

Images? You never understood what it was all about after all this time. You didn't understand the blue mice, I tried to explain it to you then.

His voice started going, reduced to a hoarse whisper hard to follow.

They aren't images. They're alive. The way they were back then. No, not the way. Not were. They are. Are alive and it's not just a question of looking, it's a question...

At this point his voice went entirely and I had only his lips to go by. What it was a question of doing was a guess on my part. A question of enjoying them? It corresponded to the lip-movements. But did it make sense? It wasn't a question of looking at them, it was a question of enjoying looking at them? The promised opposition of clauses wasn't present in the presumed utterance.

Suddenly the remembered lip-movements gave:

Joining.

It wasn't a question of looking at them, it was a question of joining them. There was formal rhetorical sense in that, but insanity of meaning.

I don't want to see them that way anymore, I said. I won't stay here another day. To hell with all the money you owe me. And he shouldn't think that if I left him I didn't have a place to go. I had a landing-point now, real, not virtual. I said that I was sick of his dirty cracks about Beth Anderson. If he had to talk about her it should be with respect.

He was instantly conciliatory. He thrust his mouth against my ear. Just harmless little jokes, he whispered, not understanding that my final outburst had been to cover up the other thing. He returned to that other thing. If I wasn't interested of course I didn't have to. He'd thought I did want to see her.

I turned again to the wall and said that no I didn't want to see her. It all came out and with it the beginning of tears, like water astonishingly from a desert. I didn't want to see Rachel or my mother or father (dishonest with myself too, I now realize, I again diluted her in the others) or anybody whose death I'd painfully become reconciled to, whom time had eliminated from the broad daylight thoroughfares of my mind.

He was still hovering over me, lips an inch from my ear. He whispered, OK, of course I didn't have to look if I didn't want to. All I had to do were the things that enabled him, Harvey, to look. He said that I was surprisingly emotional for a man my age. He said I should get up now, there was still time.

I refused to budge from my bed. They'd each had their turn. It was mine now. Except they'd overslept. I was sick.

You don't sound very sick to me, he said. I didn't turn from the wall or answer him. He left.

I got up at what I thought was a safe ten and took a walk through the weeds. Through the meshes of the fence I saw that some of Beth's tulips were coming up. Harvey approached under his black umbrella. You don't look very sick to me, he said. I said, no, I was feeling a little better. Good, he said triumphantly and got Hanna and told us that we'd start recording right now, the hour didn't matter, we wouldn't put it off another time. He was anxious to try out the storage-unit.

It was eleven in the morning when Hanna parked the car, as instructed, in front of the old beauty parlor lurking somewhere beneath a supermarket. She muscled the sensors onto the pavement. They marked off an oblong of about three hundred square feet. I was relieved at Harvey's bad choice but couldn't help feeling sorry for him. His memory was really going. Didn't he remember that boy's cut of hers that set off the whiteness of her neck? Didn't he remember it wasn't the beauty parlor she went to but the barbershop once a month along with him? He'd always had his hair cut there at the same time she did. They'd done so many things together.

At first I did my job conscientiously. Basically I had to monitor and safeguard the sensors. The needle had to remain within the narrow black zone. When it deviated leftwards into the red I pressed the right-hand button, when rightwards the left-hand one. At the same time I had to keep an eye on the passersby. I ran around geometrically, shooing little kids away from the sensors, protecting them from teenage roller-skaters, apologizing to people who'd tripped over the cables that ran into the Volvo. Painting them sidewalk-gray hadn't been a good idea. Once I even headed off a tapping blind man at the very last moment.

Small throngs agglutinated about me. When the onlookers made guesses ("Are you surveying?") I could always get by with a non-committal, "Something like that." But when they expected me to supply the explanation I would mutter something incomprehensible or fantastic, things like "pavement tensile resistance measurements." Some of their guesses (like "laser soundings of sewer-pipes") were better than that and I used them.

Finally I lost patience and said over and over that it was a time machine. They grinned feebly and went on watching.

Pretty soon I didn't hear or see them anymore. I was sensing almost to the point of vision the multitude of the dead advancing toward me down the sidewalk. They were massing on the verge of materialization, in broad daylight. It was a new stage in the downward spiral of the cyclic sickness. Now distance from the house didn't count. Blue sky and the crowds of the living weren't antidotes anymore.

The thought didn't come to me that the decay and gloom of Harvey's house were just B spook-movie properties, that the machine was indifferent to atmosphere. It ground out the time specters wherever they might be and continued to emit those dangerous rays. My brain was just as vulnerable here in the outdoor dead room created by the four sensors as in the indoor one. Tending them at unprecedented close range I'd absorbed a massive dose of the time rays. I turned to the double-parked Volvo. Maybe they were coming through on Harvey's screen. Maybe he was capturing them and that somehow activated them for me.

I worked for a brutal end to it. I started practicing passive sabotage. I stopped chasing the little kids away from the sensors. I prayed they would tamper with them, break them, that shoppers would stumble over them, smash the lenses. I even looked up into the sky in the hope passersby would imitate me and barge destructively into a sensor.

Sharp beeps summoned me to the Volvo. Hanna took over surveying the sensors.

What the hell was the matter with me? Harvey wanted know. What was I looking up at the clouds for? A kid had nearly smashed a sensor. His sullen pouchy face under the golden curls told me that it wasn't working as he had hoped.

I got in the car and viewed what he'd taped. The relay wasn't doing a good job at this distance from the master-machine in the cellar. The screen showed mainly blurred feet, regiments of blurred feet. Who said they were even ancient feet? Maybe they were no more than half an hour old. Once a dog showed up clearly, motionless. A second dog came and sniffed and humped the first dog. A recent or an authentically ancient hump? Who could tell? The operation in man and beast was timeless.

Then I saw that he had pulled in really old things on his screen, too old to be dangerous. Male ghosts in straw-hats and female ghosts with feathered felt hats and ankle-long skirts jerked by. The machine was back to random temporal selection.

Suddenly Miss Forster filled the entire screen ghostly, smiling for some reason. She was much younger than when I'd had her as my teacher at eight in PS 89 and she was badly blurred but it could be no one else with that slight hunch and broken front tooth. She blurred further into mist and the mist vanished. The screen remained empty.

Finally it must have come back to him, the site of her long-ago haircut, because he asked me where the barbershop was. He couldn't find it anywhere on my map. I told him I wasn't sure but thought it might be somewhere in the space occupied by the Ford showcase.

He had Hanna move the sensors fifty yards further in front of the showcase. She swore. Sweat was pouring down her face. She had to double-park in front of Ford. I was still in the car.

An image swam up gray and warped. His relay wasn't doing a great job. The barbershop was a blur. Figures went past it. No customers went in or out of the blur. Then the lenses slowly focused and in fear I almost expected to see myself looking eyeless through the lettered window at her eyeless in the mirror.

But the blur slowly resolved not into the barbershop but a funeral-parlor.

For a while we sat there in silence. Then Harvey had Hanna move the sensors in front of the brand-new bank where the butcher's had been. I got out of the car and resumed my monitoring duties in deep fear.

It all came to an end this way.

A police-car sneaked up. There were two of them inside and they stayed there for a while, scrutinizing. I could feel their stares in my back. They pulled me back into the present, brutally. It was a relief to have to cope with reasonable fear. I've always been scared of cops. In my younger days I'd had legitimate reasons.

Finally the older bulkier cop extracted himself and plodded over to one of the sensors. He stared at it from all angles. Then he moved over to the second one and repeated the operation. Then the third one. Finally he came over to mine.

"Good morning, Officer," I said cheerfully.

He didn't answer. He squatted and scrutinized the fourth sensor. The funny thing was, his hand never left the immediate vicinity of his holster. It wasn't really funny.

I think he was maybe the dumbest cop I'd ever encountered. He had to practically trip over it before he noticed the gray sidewalk-color cable snaking out of the sensor. He hadn't seen the three others. He stared at it, followed it and found himself before the back door of the Volvo. I could imagine that he saw Hanna snoring away on one part of the back seat, Harvey on the other, absorbed in contemplating on the screen whatever the sensors were pulling in from Schulz's butcher shop forty years before.

The cop turned about and marched up to me again. His hand, making no bones about it, was on the revolver butt. It made me nervous.

"What the hell's this all about?"

"Seismic detectors, Officer," I said promptly.

"Yeah?"

"Four, as you can see. For the echo effect."

He stared at me for what must have been a minute.

"A what kind of detector?"

"An earthquake detector. Tremors, actually."

He stared at me bleakly then returned to the police-car and started talking to the other cop. Their eyes never left me. Finally the younger, thinner cop got out of the car and came up to me. He stared down at the sensor at my feet.

"This is supposed to be a seismograph? And the other three too? All four of them?"

"Absolutely, Officer."

"To detect tremors."

"What else?"

"Quake-detectors. Good thing for you they're not lie detectors. Come on, what are you trying to hand me? New York's not in the volcanic zone. Not in the subduction zone either. No mid-plate quakes here. Solid bedrock. Everybody knows that. What are you trying to pull?"

He looked faintly Jewish. What was he doing on the police force?

"Look, Officer, I'm doing this for a friend. He has a thing about earthquakes. He once got caught in one. I know it's not a subduction zone here and you know it's not but he's a very nervous man."

"How come you're doing it here? You got a permit to operate on a public sidewalk?"

"It's like, I don't know, bird-watching. Some things have to be done out of doors. That's where earthquakes happen. I didn't know you needed a permit."

"In front of a bank it has to be done?"

Sure enough. It was getting dangerous now. I'd been seeing Schultz's butcher-shop there, his great nazi fist with the cleaver cleaving muscle and bone. I'd forgotten that in the present occupation layer it was a bank. The bank people must have phoned.

"That your friend in the old station-wagon?"

I nodded. The cop made me accompany him to the car. He tugged up his blue trousers a little, flexed his knees slightly and peered inside.

"Oh for Christ's sake. I should have guessed. Who else? We meet again, Mr Morgenstern. We got two more complaints yesterday. Something's going to have to be done. Aren't a dozen fines enough? Anyhow you're getting a ticket for double-parking. OK, I want you to clear the sidewalk of all that junk and fast."

The two cops stood there as Hanna and I grappled with the evicted sensors, still and blind now, just dead weight. When we finished I found myself nervously saying, "Goodbye, Officers," and also, "Thank you" to each of them. They didn't answer. They stood there, a great blue intensely real presence and behind them what they guarded, equally intense and real: the bank, the supermarket, the video-shop, the Ford showcase.

That's how the attempted resurrection of Old Forest Hill and certain of its deceased inhabitants came to an end. Not even the time-storage unit had worked properly it turned out later. All it had retained was the humping dogs and ten seconds of Miss Forster's marred smile.

Harvey spent the rest of the day on his back on the sofa in the dead room staring at the apparent emptiness. He didn't eat or say a word.

That evening I went over to Beth's. She had the same intense reality as the two cops. I practically forced her out of the bedroom, away from the ticking alarm clock, the cama de matrimonio haunted by her husband and her son staring down at us. I overcame her resistance at the threshold of the brand-new room with the brand-new cot.

She consented to total nudity, not enough. At first there was the sharpness of shielding elbows and knees. Finally she went limp. It proved contagious. Her head was turned away from me on the pillow. Her eyes remained wide open and staring far away, as on that sharp-focussed nude photograph her husband had taken fifteen years before. I saw her with her arms raised, brushing her hair, sharp-nippled, the spotlight firing her honey-colored fleece. Suddenly enabled, I worked unassisted to solitary climax, telling her over and over again how much I loved her.

After, she wept quietly but persistently. I had to tell her to stop and to please never do that again. She went on. I turned away from her on the cot. I was voided of that faint fire. I'd returned the present she'd given me. I was paralyzed by sudden black depression. I felt like crying myself, at my age. Did I? After a while I felt her hand timidly on my cheek. She turned toward me and took my head in her bare arms and pressed it against her chest. She began silently rocking my head, consoling me for what I'd done to her.

***

Fifteen

The next day I helped Hanna unload the machines from the Volvo. Harvey was still lying motionless on the sofa in the dead room. We asked him if he wanted the new sensors set up as the old ones had been before. He didn't answer. We set up the old ones, like toys for a sick child.

An hour later she went up to the threshold and told him it was time for the hospital. She had to repeat it three or four times. Finally he whispered that it was time but that there would be no more treatments. I was expecting the usual dramatics but long before it reached that stage he got up and followed her to the Volvo, obedient and indifferent.

When they came back, much earlier than usual, she cursed Harvey and the doctors between sobs. He'd refused the treatment. She was enraged at the doctors for not overpowering him and forcing him to submit to it. It came out that she'd been an attendant in a psychiatric hospital and there they did overpower patients for treatment. Was that where they'd met? She begged me to convince him to keep up the treatment. They said he might not last more than a few months if he didn't. I did what she asked, what else could I do?

We got no response. He didn't go down even once to the cellar and the machine. He inhabited the dead room now, slept on the sofa, ate there when he did eat. When he spoke it wasn't to us.

Then it was Friday again. Five o'clock went by uneventfully. Just as it had the Friday before. At half-past five I stopped at the threshold of the dead room. I asked Harvey how he was feeling and reminded him that I hadn't been paid for the last two weeks. He was still lying on the sofa. He stared in my direction but didn't seem to see or hear me. The next time I went past the door there was a scrawled message on the threshold. "You took the blueprint. I want it back."

I asked him: what blueprint? and spoke about the salary again. He didn't answer. When I went past again there was another message on the threshold: "Go down in the cellar. See if you can find it there." I said I'd see about that later maybe but first I wanted to be paid for the past two weeks. Actually, I had no intention of going down in the cellar ever again or crossing over into the dead room.

An hour later Hanna told me to come with her to the tiny payment room. He'd given the green light but he didn't attend the ceremony. I'd forgotten the two plastic bags, one for the bills, the other, much sturdier, for the coins. So I had to stuff the bills in one pocket and deposit three pounds of coins in the other.

I walked towards the cellar-door lopsided. It was a compromise. I went halfway down the stairs. No further. It was cold and dank even there. I peered about for a blueprint down in the red gloom below. Blackprint actually. In that light, blue would show up black. I didn't see anything. I was about to turn back when I started sneezing. I couldn't stop. I pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket and maybe a pound of silver with it. The coins cascaded down the steps and rolled about on the cement floor below. I hesitated a second and then went after them very fast. No more than twenty seconds, I said, and held my breath between sneezes as though I were going down into poisonous gas. I kneeled and ran, sneezed, kneeled and ran, sneezed, grabbing them up.

I saw three quarters and a half-dollar lying near the lead-plated door and then saw the unfolded blueprint, half of it sticking out beneath the door.

I crouched low as against enemy fire and raised my arm to protect my forehead. Still holding my breath, I dashed for it. On the way back I snatched at the half-dollar with my free hand. I missed it, but not the rough cement. I lunged up the stairs out of range and then out of the cellar.

I pushed dirty dishes to one side and spread out the ruin on the kitchen table. The paper was limp and ragged. The folds were rifts bridged by yellowed Scotch tape. Even in the conventional light of the kitchen it wasn't really blue, just the memory of blue like the milky blue of blind eyes. You could hardly make out the rooms under the blotches. The legend was absolutely illegible. It seemed to have been exposed to decades of sun and rain. I knew immediately it couldn't possibly be the blueprint of the Anderson house.

Then of what other house? How could it possibly be that? How could he have come up with it forty years after the fire? Where could he have found it? Everything had gone up in the house.

A sheet of paper was clipped to the other side of the blueprint.

The colliding houses again but in new overlap.

The repainted guest room I'd revealed to him that day was encircled in red.

There was no question mark on this version of overlap, the definitive one, then.

But how could he know the space of the guest room had once been (still was) occupied by Rachel's bedroom? How could he read sense into an illegible blueprint? I told myself it was like the sense he made of the jerking posthumous figures on the screen, claiming to have seen them as they'd been when alive, with eyes.

But wasn't there more to it than self-delusion? Wasn't he trying to involve me in his crazy vision? Because of course he'd sent me down to the cellar for that dangerously positioned blueprint knowing I'd look at it and see the definitive localization of his obsession. He must have imagined it was mine too. Projection was a characteristic of sick minds, I knew. The blueprint was somehow a lure. I had trouble formulating the thing clearly.

I saw the lab below full of black cables crisscrossing like a giant spider-web. I went back to the beginning with questions I should have asked myself then. He'd lured me here with that check. How had he known I'd retired practically penniless? Been retired. Did he know about that too? Who'd told him that?

I recalled an incident a few weeks before. My pocket address-book was missing. I suspected Hanna. Breathing through the mouth I went into her chaotic room. I didn't find it. On the table I saw the key to the filing cabinet where she kept my signed salary receipts. Maybe there were other things concerning me there. For instance information about the mysterious salary account. So I went to the tiny room and opened the filing cabinet and looked in the file marked JW. I found nothing on the mysterious salary account.

But I did find a sheet of paper with the names and addresses and phone-numbers of lots of people I'd known, some from way back. None had been friends, some not even friendly, at least not at the end. I didn't know what to think about that.

There were other troubling things, like the promise of a salary absurdly disproportionate to the work I did for him. Anybody could have dismantled junked TV sets and computers for him, even dim-witted Hanna. Not everybody could have been his memory-booster, that was true. But did he really need me for that? Was his memory really as bad as he claimed? He'd recalled the blue-mice episode and the details of what he'd said to me then, thirty years before. He'd accurately recalled distant shack episodes.

For some reason he wanted to keep me here. To make sure I didn't leave he'd placed a percentage of the promised salary into an account I'd never seen and which might well be pure invention. Like the promised legacy.

I saw myself as the victim of obscure manipulations. It went on and on in my mind until I thought of Harvey sniffing spies everywhere and accusing the hospital people of sabotaging his memory. I saw myself in the dead room, imitating him, avoiding non-existent furniture, addressing non-existent people. I remembered Hanna predicting his end for me and later coming after me as she did with Harvey, the way she must have done to the inmates of her hospital, maybe Harvey too then.

So I pulled back from parallel paranoia. I folded the blueprint up and went to the dead room where he was still lying motionless on the sofa. His eyes were closed. As I placed the blueprint on the threshold I noticed tiny red whorls on the milky blind blue. I'd scraped my fingertips raw on the cement floor trying to recover the coins. I went over to Beth's house and the room in the red circle.

"You look awful," was the first thing she said from the threshold when she got back hours later and stared at me lying on the cot in the newly painted room. "You've been in that house again. Don't say you haven't. I can tell." I confessed I had. Doing what in that house? she wanted to know. I'd already told her I had no more work there. Listening to music. Couldn't you do that here? Bring your records over here. I know, you don't think my hi-fi's good enough. It doesn't make that much difference, does it? I want you to keep out of that house, Jerry. You keep clear of that house.

She called it the "honored-guest room" now instead of the junk-room. She was a little less afraid to step inside. I think she'd ended by half-believing what I'd told her that day, that it was a new room now, that the past was the past. She fixed it up for me. She cannibalized other rooms for a carpet, a lamp, an armchair and a bookcase for my books which I brought over from the other house. She got rid of the Venetian blinds and put up curtains. The room was constantly filled with very slightly shopworn flowers she brought back from work.

The consecration occurred when I bore up to that room with infinite care my components as she'd reluctantly suggested I do. Wherever my hi-fi and CDs and old vinyls were was home, I told her.

Of course it's home, she said. Only, whenever she wasn't there I was to keep the room locked up, also play the music very low and never answer the phone or open the front door if somebody rang. A few hours later I also learned that the room was open to me only for daytime and evening uses and that those uses didn't include what she'd passively done once (been half-forced to do) on the cot.

She was surprised I was always lying on my back there when she came back from work. She pulled me out of it by her presence, not knowing she did that. Sometimes I was relieved. Sometimes not. She wondered if I was ill. I said no, just a little tired from jogging. Actually I hadn't left the room all day long. I couldn't speak to her about it. I can't think of it now. I mustn't.

There were safeguards. Sometimes they worked. I'd superimpose the burned-down house onto this bigger one. I'd try to persuade myself that the room where I was lying couldn't possibly correspond spatially with the other room, that it occupied old never-built space and I almost saw the room (this one, Beth's) traversed by the transient inhabitants of that space, birds from earlier time-levels, lightning-quick tits, thousands of them. All those birds in the small space was suffocating.

There was another safeguard, a trick which sometimes worked when it got too real. I'd get rid of her in memory the way I had (thought I had) in reality decades before, kneeling on white tiles before a toilet and shredding the only photo I had of her and watching the fragments whirling down and away in that vulgar vortex.

The third and least ineffective of the safeguards was imagining Beth and me on a big empty beach.

Once I thought that Harvey had switched the machine on. Somehow it reanimated the dead here. I went over to the other house to make him stop. I found him lying on the dead room sofa with the sensors immobile. Not those lenses but his eyes were slowly moving about the space of the room.

Back on the new cot in the newly painted room in his own rigid position I thought of the old Ruhmkorff, buzzing away like a rattlesnake, the expanding and collapsing magnetic field of the primary coil inducing high-tension current in the captive secondary coil, those mile-long windings of fine copper wire. For a few minutes I imagined that his brain was generating that time-field, inducing those old memories in mine. Some of his memories couldn't be so different to start with.

One afternoon the safeguards didn't work. I couldn't imagine us (Beth and me) on an empty beach.

The thousands of birds didn't visit the room to stave off the other things in the room.

Again I kneeled on the white tiles as before a porcelain idol and reduced her to shreds, not her, but the blank back of the photo I'd been careful to hold face down in order not to hurt her a second time. Still, a fragment of her mouth turned up at the last whirling moment, also an eye, a bit of her white neck. There was that temptation to plunge my hand into it and salvage something of her, resisted then, the temptation, but not resisted forty years later in imagination and so I did plunge my hand after her and then arm and shoulder and then all of me sucked down into the vortex as it's trying to happen now.

Keep out of it now as I hadn't then, that day in the newly painted room. It was much worse (or better?) than the previous time-trips. Better, much better. For as long as it lasted. How long did it last? I'd lain down on the bed of the one room at two in the afternoon and had remained in the other room I could have sworn no more than ten minutes when I heard her (Beth) say hey, what's the matter? and saw her back from work standing in the doorway with daffodils, almost spectral, flowers and woman, a visitation from a less essential temporal plane.

After the immense pain of rupture and then a return to sense I realized a whole precious afternoon of my diminishing stock of afternoons had passed elsewhere, nowhere finally.

Badly frightened I reached out for the antidote, the reality of her (Beth) then and there. She protested, then submitted, again with her face averted, eyes open. I resorted to the same inspiration as the first time. At the end she wept again although I'd told her never to do that.

I said over and over again that I loved her. What we should do was go away together. If not Florida as I'd suggested that night (but she'd thought it was a game) at least for the weekend. Long Island was all beach. She couldn't do that, she said. I said I wouldn't stay here. I'd go to the beach by myself. I might not come back, ever.

Immediately she agreed to come with me. I felt much better. It was as though the poison was already working its way out of my system.

Beth was the antidote. Sometimes I had the lucidity to wonder what I really wanted. Was it the antidote or the poison? The poison was treacherously sweet like something way back in the past. It started up again, the time-tangent, as I remembered the taste of a certain dangerous lead-compound we'd used in experiments: sweet and fatal. I got lost again in shack memories. Which lead-compound? Lead carbonate? Minium? Maybe an hour went by searching. The thing had to be pursued till the victory of recuperation. Finally victory came. Of course: lead acetate, and almost frighteningly total victory as the formula came intact out of the wreckage of years: Pb (C2H3O2)2. Why had I started thinking of lead? Then I was back to the fatal disease of saturnism and that gave me Saturn again and the Greek for it. But wasn't it lead, in thick plates, that was supposed to protect us from the rays of the time machine?

We were to leave for the seaside as soon as she got back from work. I kept out of the room that day but felt the disorder still intact, lurking beneath the frantic surface of household activities and imagined some radical cure from the time sickness just from jogging barefoot in sunshine on flat shining sands, swapping old stale breath for deep lungfuls of antiseptic ocean air. I'd chosen a place way out in Long Island where I'd never been and supposed that no one I'd known had ever been. The beaches were practically empty at that gusty time of year, I knew, except for maybe the odd kite-flyer or surf-caster.

The radio spoke of possible rain for the weekend, so after we'd registered at a motel and had a disappointing seafood dinner we started in the direction of the sea and finally broke free of the labyrinth of sand-strewn streets with empty summer houses and reached the beach. By then it was night with the moon trying to survive among fast inky clouds.

For about three minutes we could see the breakers crashing white, the light of a ship at sea, our shadowed footsteps in the wet sand behind us, washed-up crates, tires, bottles, rusty drums, a bloated dog, originally a fox-terrier maybe.

Then the moon went. It started to drizzle. We couldn't see anything, just hear the crashing of the breakers and the lap and hiss of the surf at our feet. I was afraid of stepping on the dog. We went back to the motel soaked. Just before she got in bed she said she was sick. At first I didn't understand.

We spent the next morning in the motel room looking out of the window. I talked about summer beaches somewhere else as the cold steady rain came down past billboards. I tried to convince her to spend two weeks with me at the seaside in June. She said she usually spent her vacation at her sister's in Phoenix. Martha wasn't well. Finally I got tired of the billboards and trying to convince her. I lay down on the bed. The ceiling was a blank screen, not like the ceiling in the honored-guest room.

She remained at the window looking out. She started stealing glances at me.

"Are you all right, Jerry?"

"Fine."

"Not mad at me?"

"Why should I be mad at you?"

The billboards grew brighter and brighter. Suddenly the sun came out.

"Let's go back," she said.

"Yes, it wasn't a good idea. It's too early in the year. You pack up and I'll check out."

"I didn't mean that. I'd never have said that and spoiled your fun. I meant go back to the beach now that the sun's out. I'd love to walk along the beach in the sun. I could maybe try to jog with you even." Her change of mood sounded forced.

"Jog with all that stuff washed up on the sand? Didn't you see that dog?"

"Dogs don't scare me. I like dogs. Maybe we could find a nice piece of driftwood and you could make a lamp. I'd love to have a real driftwood lamp. What do you say? I'll do the varnish-job. It'd be nice to have projects together."

I didn't move from the bed. I kept staring up at the blank ceiling. Maybe it was the distance from the overlapped room. Or the presence all night long of Beth. Or maybe something definitive. The cure had worked after all, just walking in the dark alongside the sea had done it. The antiseptic sea air had driven it out of my mind for good.

The pang at that thought told me it was still with me. Fear and relief now.

Beth turned away from the window and sat down on the bed. She looked down at me.

"You talked about nothing else for days and now that you're here and the sun's out you just lie there moping on the bed."

I said I wasn't moping. Not feeling all that great, was all. The dinner last night hadn't agreed with me. I hadn't slept a wink, I said.

She felt my forehead, said maybe so, a little, and prepared two glasses of Alka-Seltzer. I asked her if she felt sick herself. She felt fine. Her glass was just to keep me company. She said she'd have thought the sea air would have done me good. But if I didn't want to I didn't want to. Where did I want to go then? How about another beach if I didn't like this one?

I said I felt like going back to Forest Hill. She put up a short struggle. If you really want to, she finally said. If you're not feeling well maybe we'd better. She started packing the bag. Misbehavior behind her now, she couldn't help humming. Often, when there were no cars abreast, she leaned her head against my shoulder.

Late that evening I found myself in exactly the same position, on my back staring up at the ceiling in the honored guestroom. Beth was unpacking in her bedroom. This ceiling gave the same results as the motel ceiling. The sea air had been powerfully antiseptic. After a while she came in and lay alongside me. I told her I wanted to stay the whole night here. She said we'd spent the whole night together in the motel. I hadn't meant together here in this room with her but couldn't say that. I didn't like the idea of sleeping in the other house, I said. She agreed reluctantly, reminded me that she was sick and came in to join me a quarter of an hour after I'd gone to bed. I couldn't tell her not to share the room with me.

She was the antidote, all right, not the sea air, I realized in the darkness.

In the middle of the night she sat up in bed abruptly.

Somebody was trying to get in, she whispered. I turned over on the other side. The cot was relieved of her weight. I heard her voice from the other end of the room, a panicked whisper. It was Rick with a friend, I should get up, get dressed, not make any noise. She shook me hard and told me to lock the door here. She'd fix them up on the sofa and the cot downstairs. When they fell asleep I could leave. I knew I knew I knew you shouldn't have stayed, she kept on saying in a frightened whisper.

I didn't answer. She shook me harder. She ended by yanking the sheet and blanket off me and practically pushed me out of bed.

She slipped into a blue kimono with big white butterflies and went downstairs. She stayed there for a long time. As I dressed I could hear their voices, mainly hers, pleading. At last she came back and said they'd be asleep pretty soon and then I'd be able to go. We waited, each seated on a side of the bed back to back.

Finally we left the room. She scouted the living room. She gave a conspiratorial "psst!" and I sneaked down the stairs as in vaudeville with a shoe in each hand. When I reached the front door she let me put them back on. She'd switched off the outside lights and all I could see of her was the white oval of her face and the white wings of the kimono butterflies

Half-asleep, I started stumbling toward her gate. She pulled me behind a forsythia bush. Her breath was coming fast.

"Jerry, what if he asks for the key and he sees everything? What'll I say? What'll I do, Jerry? I can tell him I had the room fixed up for him, sure, but how about that stereo outfit of yours? What'll I say when he sees that? Listen, I know what. They'll be fast asleep till noon. An earthquake couldn't wake them. I know how they operate. Are you listening, Jerry? What I want you to do first thing tomorrow is take your hi-fi back. I'll give you a hand. Say seven or eight. Promise? Do you promise?"

I promised and started down the path.

"My God, the books!" she whispered hoarsely. She pulled me behind the forsythia again. "Suppose he gets up in the middle of the night and sees the books?" She was almost crying. "Wait!" She tiptoed back to the house.

I must have fallen asleep on my feet. I woke to the nearing crunch of gravel and her painful panting. She was hidden to the nostrils by the swaying pile of books in her arms. She unloaded them on me. "I just took the worst ones, the ones in foreign languages. You'll have to get rid of all the others tomorrow morning. He'd know I wouldn't read books like that."

The books started spilling over onto the gravel as I tried to negotiate the path for the third time. "Stop making so much noise," she groaned, picking them up and reloading me. I reached her gate.

She caught up with me and pulled me behind the sheet-iron Disney deer.

"Oh Jerry, everything's going to be fine, you shouldn't worry. Promise you'll come over for drinks tomorrow evening. I'll introduce you as the next-door neighbor. Talk to him about his poems. Only be careful not to say anything about the so-called bad ones, the ones you think are bad. Try to encourage him to go back to poetry. You'll get along marvelously, I'm sure, he's very sensitive and intelligent and gentle, don't worry. So promise. And for God's sake don't forget about the hi-fi tomorrow morning, seven sharp."

I promised and stumbled past her unannounced visitors' beat-up unwashed cars. One of them was parked halfway on the sidewalk.

I struggled with Harvey's paranoiac padlock, then went past the dark bulk of the memory-tree. At that moment Harvey's machine erupted into deafening groans. It was almost three in the morning. Hanna's window lit up instantly. You could see her progress down to the cellar as window after window lit up. She was yelling his name. Now windows in the neighboring houses lit up. I let myself into the dead room. I sniffed. It couldn't be what I was sure it was. I turned the light on.

The sofa was empty. The time-sensors were working away. I put the pile of books on the carpet.

In the corridor leading to the cellar-door I blundered into Hanna. She was barefoot and had her old overcoat on over nothing. It was buttoned wrongly with great loopholes of intimacies. Her hair was wild and she glared at me. Where the hell had I been? She grappled with the door. It was locked from the inside. O God, he was dead.

If so those were farewell notes tacked on the door. They were encircled in red like my room.

Not to be disturbed under any pretext. If I don't come up by April 14 at 4:00 pm come down and get me.

All of the other sheets said the same thing except one that said:

Where the hell is Jerry?

She assaulted the door with both fists and cried out his name. Why didn't he answer? She started whimpering that he was dead to punish her.

Before I could ask her what had happened she bolted out of the corridor. I followed her to the back of the house. Almost hidden by a dead splintered branch of the elm-tree was a cellar-ventilator with slits. She squatted in front of it and squeezed an eye against one of the slits. What's he got on his head? Oh Jesus, his eyes, he's dead. Oh Jesus, those eyes. She howled unbearably.

Shh, the neighbors, I said stupidly. The neighbors couldn't help being wide-awake by now. She stood up and ran back to the house.

I kneeled down and looked through the slit. He was the way she described him. Those eyes.

What had killed him?

I remained there on my knees for a while. A thud and an agonized grunt came from inside. I came back just in time to see Hanna taking a running start and ramming the cellar-door with her shoulder. There was a splintering wrenching sound. The door burst open, hanging lopsided on a hinge. She overshot the landing and cartwheeled down the stairs in a chaos of thumps and limbs. She lay still at the bottom for a few seconds.

I started down. Before I could help her she picked herself up bleeding and moaning. She hobbled over to Harvey where he was sitting, stiff already, at the console. His eyes were turned completely inward. They were white like a statue's. He was wearing the permanent-wave helmet on his naked skull. His Harpo Marx wig was lying on the cement floor. There were sheets of paper, a pencil and his opened spiral notebook on the console. On the page was a scrawled sentence.

Trip ten: 11:21 am April 12.

The same smell as in the dead room. There was also the bottle of white wine and the chipped red goblet for celebrations, half-filled. There was nothing to celebrate, for him. He wasn't breathing.

Hanna threw herself on her knees and covered his thighs with kisses, moved her face up into shameful territory. She moaned. How could she do that before a witness? I thought with envy and dismay. Now she gave him a bleeding bear hug of love.

The helmet slipped off his skull and crashed to the floor. He sat there a rigid statue with his bumpy naked skull reddish in the miserly light of the bulbs. There was an ugly red welt on his forehead. I expected him to slump over to the floor.

He blinked.

I blinked back, violently.

The whiteness turned into bloodshot eyes, back to things outside. He blinked hard again, squinted as though blinded by the cellar-gloom and peered about. Now his eyes tried to focus on us. A minute passed. His face slowly filled with tragic outrage as he continued staring at us. His lips moved soundlessly. Finally he whispered:

"To return. From that. To this. To you two."

There was silence. Then he asked:

"Time?"

"Three twenty-two," I said.

"Morning or. Afternoon?"

"Morning."

"What date?"

"The thirteenth."

"What month?"

"April."

Hanna was sobbing. Her lank hair wilded over him. Harvey pushed her away feebly. He reached for the pencil and the spiral notebook. His hand was trembling badly. He told her to stop it, to go back to bed. He tried to write. His great nose almost touched the paper. He couldn't focus here. Hanna painfully started pulling herself up the stairs. She was still sobbing. Yawning, I started stumbling up after her.

"Not you. I need you. I can't write."

He held out the spiral notebook and pencil impatiently. I returned and took them. I drew up a chair and sat down. He started in.

Stifling my yawns I tried to take down his account of what was, supposedly, the first voyage of exploration of the past in the history of mankind.

***

Sixteen

Did I get it right? Communication with him, even two-way, had never been easy. Now one-way, and the wrong way at that, it was practically impossible. There were his usual emission difficulties, aggravated by a monologue that lasted hours with no possible recourse to the written word on his part. He lost his voice on and off for minutes and I had nothing but lip-movements to go by.

The contents of his account didn't make things easier. They were notes to himself. A good deal of his hoarse whispering had to do with incomprehensible technical matters. I soon gave up trying to record them. I often nodded off during those arid stretches. He'd ball up sheets of paper and throw them in my face saying he didn't pay me to sleep.

What I did understand I didn't believe (except in brief moments of weakness) or didn't want to believe. Disbelief weakened my attention. Lots of things probably got past me.

He began with an analysis of the preliminaries to voyage, the preconditions concerning machine and mind. As soon as he started in on the machine my pencil gave up. It went back to work when he began discussing mental preparatives.

On the brink of sleep was the most favorable state. At least twenty hours of sleep-deprivation was indicated. As expected, the trips had steadily improved since ray treatment and chemotherapy had come to an end. The total blockage they'd induced soon wore off. Salt and aspirin proved fatal to trip-receptivity. Cough syrup favorable. Codeine? Strong liquor disastrous, with the notable exception of gin (alkaloid of juniper-berry? Investigate). Sweet California white wine effective in sharpening perception. Note to me: any more bottles in house? If not, find brand (Lord's Vineyards) and buy two dozen more bottles. But real receptivity breakthrough came from hospital marijuana.

At this point I almost laughed at the crazy idea of a hospital peddling joints. Later I learned from Hanna that hospitals did issue doses of marijuana to patients suffering from what he had in that stage. He'd smoked three joints in the fifty-three minutes preceding the trip, he said. Here Harvey paused and added a note that he instructed me to underline twice. Hanna should contact the hospital immediately and get more marijuana. Find precise concentration of THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient of cannabis sativa. He'd used up half of the monthly ration in preparation for the trip.

Now the trip itself.

Subject pinpointed and activated: Mrs Morgenstern and Mrs Weizman in conversation.

Approximate date: mid-July 1952. Error-latitude of twenty days, ten days either way.

July 1952. She'd died five months later.

All the old pain came back again. It worsened at the confused thought that somehow he'd revived her and that she'd die again. There may also have been longing to see her myself. It was one of the instants of belief, the contagion of craziness.

I immediately understood this and broke free of the pain and longing. I rejected his imminent account and its foreseen terrors as mental derangement aggravated by drugs and alcohol. He'd spent weeks on the sofa of the dead room. I'd been away for only two days. How could he possibly have attempted ten trips in that brief time? Or tested all that alcohol, whiskey, rum, vodka, gin, etc? Inevitably it would have ended in a titanic binge, fatal in his condition.

It was all another manifestation of his mental state. I knew I should feel sorry for him but I couldn't forgive him for involving my mother in his ravings.

He went on, now analyzing the quality of the image. (Why didn't he say something about my mother?) This had had been excellent. The one difference with normal perception was a slight accentuation of the three-dimensional effect, similar to what an old-fashioned stereoscope gave you. Expected but oppressive for the first few minutes was an absolute silence unmatchable in here-time. There was little chance this audio deficiency would ever be remedied. Here Harvey went into more technical considerations and I was awakened by the first of the paper-balls.

The two women had been seated there in the living room chatting in that absolute silence. After a while he'd been able to do a little lip-reading. For his mother it was easy. He saw his name on her lips constantly and although he couldn't make out exactly what she was saying about him the facial expressions he remembered so well guided him. So he knew when she was talking about his scholastic and professional achievements, about his hush-hush Government project, about his health. He could almost resurrect it all verbatim from memory. He saw her dabbing at her eyes and that could only be Rachel.

It had been harder to read Mrs Weizman's lips with the exception of that one phrase about her son.

What phrase? I couldn't help asking, pencil poised, in a quick return to semi-belief. He ignored my question.

A major disappointment was the partial failure of image-stabilization, something he'd only gradually realized. The temporal sequence accessible to visit proved to be only a few minutes long and not the hour he'd activated on the screen and which included the arrival of women friends with cakes and an ensuing bridge-game. He'd never witnessed it in then-time. There was only that preliminary chat.

If the trip lasted as long as it had (measured in here-time: four hours and two minutes) it was because the scene was repeated over and over, something not too easy to detect when the subject was two middle-aged women chatting statically in armchairs. It was only slowly that he realized they were saying the same things over and over to a degree that surpassed remembered reality at least for Mrs Weizman.

She couldn't have said as often as she had, "I'm so worried about Jerry." He'd had great leisure in that month of subjective there-time to read their lips and see Mrs Weizman say it perhaps a hundred times.

Worried about what? I almost blurted it out, although I could guess her reasons. I badly wanted to reassure her, tell her it had ended with just a suspended sentence a day before her death, that I'd given up the book-business, had been watching my step ever since, didn't so much as jay-walk any more, had finally, years later, landed a university job and had lived far longer than she had and was in reasonably good health, physically speaking.

Compensating for the limitation on objective duration was the radical modification of time-perception, a confirmation of conjecture and the justification of forty years of research. Then-time relived proved to be closer to titmouse-time than to human time. Just what the ratio of difference between objective now-time and subjective then-time was couldn't be determined. Subjective time was by definition not measurable. He judged the ratio to have been somewhere in a margin of 1: 25-50. Meaning that one second of our objective now-time expanded to approximately half a minute or a whole minute. On emergence, that idiotic brutal emergence, (why had I let Hanna do that?) he'd had the impression of having spent weeks, perhaps a month in the living room.

Time slowdown more than offset random spatial selection. The visitor wasn't in control of the images. They didn't obey his will. The person you wanted to see and approach was there of course because you'd selected that scene with her there. But once you were transported ("projected" would be a more accurate term) everything had equal value, things and people. You would contemplate a curtain-fold for a day of subjective then-time before the two women returned, still chatting. But that curtain-fold, or carpet pattern or table-edge or whatever gave you the same indescribable feeling as the view of the people.

Here Harvey broke off and his eyes closed. I could imagine them white and brain-directed again beneath the lids. Maybe a minute went by. I was on the brink of dozing off myself. But he wasn't sleeping. He was searching for the word. Finally he opened his eyes and pronounced a word I'd never heard on his lips. "Joy," he said. Not even a whole day's contemplation of a flowerpot was a deprivation. The joy was just a little muted. You knew she was there behind you in that room. You knew Momma was there in the flowered armchair chatting with Mrs Weizman in the striped armchair. The joy couldn't be described. Deep and lasting as it couldn't be here. When had he last felt such joy? Maybe never before in his life. And she was there to be revisited whenever he liked. And maybe the subjective time-ratio could be indefinitely extended. Couldn't a second of "here-time" be expanded to an hour of "there-time"?

He invited me, mathematical wizard, to figure it out, how long if the trip lasted twenty-four hours of objective here-time? He leaned forward stiffly and stared into my eyes. How long? Quick! And quickly I said, "A couple of days short of five years." Strangely I had no trouble doing that. It came out as on a calculator-screen at the touch of a finger.

Later, in bed, I laboriously went through the calculations and reached 43,000 hours. Divided by 24 that gave you 1791 days: four years, 331 days, nearly five years as I'd said spontaneously.

He went on and on. It went past me. I did get what turned out to be the final observation. Control of the trip-experience was of course necessary. There might well be personal variables. How much of the experience derived from subjectivity? Would another mind have experienced the same time-differential, the feeling of joy? There would have to be another time-traveler.

He stopped.

There was silence in the cellar where we were seated facing each other. I finished scribbling what he'd said and stared down at it. The silence went on. I imagined he'd fallen asleep again. I looked up into his blood-shot eyes staring into mine.

After a while I looked down at the pad again, underlined certain things, distributed punctuation marks and then I fell asleep for I don't know how long. What awakened me was the slap of the pad and clatter of the pencil on the cement floor. They'd slipped off my lap. Harvey was asleep. I bent down to pick up the pad and pencil.

Near his feet I saw joint-butts and a second bottle of Lord's Vineyards. It was empty. I also noticed that the tinkered permanent-wave helmet was unplugged. Of course it might have happened when Hanna bear-hugged him and the helmet fell off his skull. But that wasn't likely.

It had been a good trip, all right. Stewed and stoned the way he was he could have visited the moons of Jupiter and dictated all the details to me. He probably would have said he saw my mother sitting there in an icy crater, worrying about me. Or even the girl I'd shown those moons to. I remembered their names: Io and Europa. What was the girl's name again? I was very tired. I went to bed.

***

Seventeen

How could I sleep? The living room was just beneath my bed, Harvey's bed, actually. Demented and tetrahydrocanniboled in the bargain, he'd pipe-dreamed that trip back through the time-barrier with the swap of dreary now-minutes for joyous then-hours. But he hadn't invented the scene. The sensors must have exhumed it. I knew my mother was (had been, I tried to correct) down below chatting with Mrs Morgenstern and in the summer of that final year for her she was certain to be expressing worry about me.

And of course the two women would be talking about Rachel (I had her name back) and be remembering this scene and that scene involving her and I could imagine some of those scenes myself and another the two women couldn't possibly be in a position to speak about.

I tried the third safeguard, time-travel too but counter time-travel, to the future he claimed didn't exist, the summer vacation I'd talked to Beth about. We were both on a clean white empty beach. Now running into a big green wave. Over and over.

The old antidote against insomnia worked against the other thing as well.

I slept chaotically through the whole day. What awoke me, at 6:10 pm, was foreboding, quasi time-travel to the immediate future. You read about such instances of prescience. Mothers who suddenly drop their bridge-hand and rush into the nursery and there, sure enough, is the baby toddling, for the first time, but towards an open window.

Bolt upright in bed, I looked about the room for the danger, even sniffed for smoke. Then got up and went over to the window.

There it was (mistakenly I thought that's what the foreboding was about) down below. Ricky and his friend were staggering toward their cars, each bearing one of my giant teak-cased speakers. In their yawning trunks I could see, like a dismembered baby, the tuner, the amp, the pre-amp, shoved any which way, and box after box of CDs and vinyls.

Beth was standing there on the sidewalk motionless except for her hands strangling a sweater. She had her befuddled tranquilized face. Why wasn't she stopping them? Why hadn't she stopped them?

I recovered from paralysis, leaned out and started yelling.

They didn't stop. Paid no attention to me. Didn't even accelerate the pace of the operation. Ricky held the loudspeaker like a crate of oranges. Now he roughly threw it onto the rear seat. It bounced about perilously. His friend, a chunky Hispano type, did the same thing in his car with the other speaker. I appealed to the whole neighborhood and the police in a radius of a mile for assistance. Kept it up while struggling into my pants and shoes.

"Stop it! You stop that, you! You shut up!"

Beth had finally intervened. Radius of a mile too, easily. I was the only one she could be yelling at to shut up. Who else? The two others hadn't said a word. Devoted themselves wholly to the task. I yelled again. She yelled back.

"That's the hi-fi I bought for my son and I can prove it. You stop that, you!"

Now like honest workmen at the end of a job they clapped their hands free of imagined dust (I'd warred on the slightest speck on my components), slammed the rear-doors shut, bang, bang, and got into their cars.

What did I do then? Was it possible?

I'll need Lord's assistance for this. Let me grope for the flask and guide it through the tangle of wires to my lips. That sweet blandness in my mouth turns to fire in my gut. Ulcers? Worse? The price to pay. Pay again. Again. Now: what did I do then? Was it possible? Distance. View him from way above, practice safe detachment, lucid dissociation. Look down at him blundering away. Match his grimaces with grins. Try to double up with laughter when he doubles up with pain. What does he do next? Is it possible?

Rushes downstairs, still buttoning up his shirt, almost tripping over the unlaced shoes and bursts out of the gate in time to see the two cars picking up speed. Sprints after them, eyes glued to the dwindling license plate of her son's car. Halts in the middle of the street, panting. Mumbles the numbers, frisks himself for a pen not to forget, returns to where she's standing, strangling her sweater again, maybe crying a little. "A pen, quick," he commands. She has no pen, she replies in a tiny bewildered voice. A pencil, anything. No pencil, either.

Now what's he doing? Running through her open gate, looking around for a stick on that impeccable lawn of hers. Finally takes off a shoe, yes, his shoe, hops over and with the toe of the shoe starts inscribing the plate-number deep in the soil of her long tulip-bed.

When she finally understands what it's all about she rushes over and starts stomping all over the figures, shouting jumbled numbers to efface the real plate numbers from his mind as her feet are doing to the soil-inscription, crushing tulips in the process, also jostling him as, one-footed, he tries to protect those inscriptions. Her head barely comes up to his shoulder but he warns her, very loudly: "Don't you knock me down again." By a sinister coincidence he's in the same spot as the night she shoved him into forget-me-nots and mud.

"You leave my flowers alone," she pants out, going on crushing more of them.

He's never seen a relationship disintegrate so fast. A sudden revelation of their true center of gravity, not each other. He tries to gain command over himself. Holds his hand up and says or shouts: "Stop. Let's stop this. Let's reason. Let's be reasonable." Puts his dirty left shoe back on.

She stops immediately. Can afford to, he thinks bitterly. She's trampled the numbers out of the flowerbed, jostled them out of his mind. She looks about bewildered, blinking. As if she's emerging from a dream. Kneels and administers first aid to the tulips.

There's no problem to get excited about, he says very loudly to her back. It's very simple. He wants his hi-fi back and in good condition and right away. Also the records. She should contact Ricky immediately. She goes on nursing the tulips. He has to repeat it, much louder.

Finally she gets up and says he has no right to make such wild accusations, yelling for the police like that. It's all his fault anyway. He promised to come over at seven that morning and take it away. She phoned and phoned and phoned and never got an answer. Anyhow it wasn't Ricky, it was that awful friend of his. She doesn't know where Ricky lives. He moves about. But it wasn't Ricky. It was the other, that awful José. No, she doesn't know where José lives either, doesn't even know his family name.

Yes, of course, he says: José, not Ricky. Ricky had just been giving him a friendly hand. Why the goddam hell hadn't she done something? Stopped them? Phoned him? Let the air out of their tires?

He projects these questions with great force and emotion and realizes he's already in the impotent stage of recriminations. He pictures the two cars far away by now, his delicate components bumping together dangerously. He feels weak and jostled by his heart. Has to sit down on her white-lacquered bench near the sheet-iron Disney deer. Closes his eyes and tries to calm the inner uproar.

After a while something touches his foot softly. Beth is kneeling in front of him and trying to clean his left shoe with her sweater.

"Oh your shoe, Jerry, I'll buy you another one, brand-new."

He stares, thinking she's talking about his left shoe. Then realizes she means a hi-fi system. It officializes the loss, he feels. It's gone forever, a part of himself, like his heart or liver. How can he ever get up from the bench without heart or liver?

Following the initial shock comes grief and outrage. After, he won't be able to remember how much he poured forth or kept burning within like molten lava. He'll imagine his lamentations were Old Testamental, testifying to triumph over the apostasy of his blond (slightly graying) hair, blue eyes and somewhat sagging Greek profile. He'll recall that June, his first wife, Christian like the second one, used to refer to his "Job bit." He'll suppose that he must have mourned Eastern-wise his handcrafted Kos 321 amplifier, his gold-wired Poly-Astroc speakers. And the records, his rare vinyl pressings with three diamond-point needles dedicated exclusively to them in rotation, his Busches, his Budapests, his Schnabels and Scherchens and the CDs: 1,854 of them in the card-catalogue Ricky probably hadn't bothered stealing, four-fifths of all the recorded Bach cantatas, all of the Mozart and Haydn quartets, four different versions of the Beethoven quartets, Busch, Berg, Italiano, Vegh.

Vegh, oye Vegh.

She repeats that she'll buy him an even better hi-fi system. He says that the best available isn't half as good. It's practically a funeral eulogy. You can't find those components on the market anymore, he says. It's like poking about in a junk-shop to replace a stolen Rembrandt. Why the goddam hell hadn't she phoned him when they started in?

She'd been afraid of violence. That night you almost killed him with the spade, she says and then with no logical transition says he called her a whore, his own mother, when he saw the room, but she did it for him, that money had been for him. I never wanted you to bring it into my house. Last night I told you to take it back. Why didn't you do that? Why did you insist on staying? Why did you take advantage of me?

With that profound intellectual dishonesty inscribed from conception in female genes, she's reversed the situation. He's at fault for what happened.

Flare of anger: says that her son is costing him a fortune. First five thousand dollars and now his hi-fi and records. They were – had been – his universe. He actually uses that expression. His personal universe is going to be swapped for a few adulterated fixes, he says. She has to get it back. Better she than the police.

How can he say such a thing? such a horrible thing? she whispers. I didn't know you, I didn't know you.

It's like an echo of other distant feminine voices except they'd known him much longer before realizing they hadn't really.

It goes on and on, down and down, like a fall off a cliff, at first grabbing at tree-roots, grass tufts, granite outcroppings to check the fall and then giving up grabbing at things, not able to or not wanting to. They were in fatal free-fall.

Now she's accusing him of having taken advantage of her that day with his money. He's tempted to say that if it had been for that he could have gotten better value for his money. Maybe he actually says something like that. It ends with her saying that she'll pay him back for everything, his machine, his records, his five thousand dollars. You'll get your pound of flesh, she says.

She shouldn't have said that, he thinks. It was predictable that with all the crooked "z"s and noosed "y"s in her maiden name (he thinks) she'd say it one day. It's a thing she shouldn't have said. But why does he have a feeling of relief on hearing her say that definitive thing?

He replies, calmly he thinks, that he knows she knows where Ricky lives, has his phone-number. She should contact him as quickly as possible, tell him to bring the hi-fi and the records back and no questions will be asked. If not, the police will be notified.

You just try that, she says in a low menacing voice, her face suddenly aged and ugly (as he sees it). She says he can call in the FBI if he likes. She's the owner of the house. No one's broken in. Except you, right now.

At that he retorts that she's the owner of the house all right but he's the owner of the hi-fi as the police will be told if it's not back by tomorrow evening.

What hi-fi? she says. Get out of here.

Doubly dispossessed, he turns around and leaves that house.

Back on the bed I tried for a while to believe it was one of the nightmares of the day I'd slept through. How could it have imploded like that, so fast? We'd each blundered into the other's elaborately mined sanctuary. Reserved zones usually turn out to be mutually antagonistic. Music, indissociable from the machine that vehicled it, was revealed to be mine, her son hers.

Put like that it makes me seem essentially deficient, I know, prizing teak and transistors over flesh and blood. Somewhere along the line she'd made that point. I tried to retort to myself as I hadn't to her that it wasn't machine versus flesh and blood, anyone but a monster knew what choice to make in such an abstract opposition, but my machine (key to the nearest I'd ever come to paradise) versus her flesh and blood, violent and grubbing, thieving, exploitive and insulting. That changed the fundamentals of the problem altogether.

I did have to admit though that I'd never seen a woman so uncompromisingly dedicated to another human being who treated her like shit. Maybe Hanna. I couldn't help feeling a certain grudging admiration and envy, not quite sure about the nature of the envy. To be the object of such dedication? To be capable of it myself?

I thought of the foreboding that had awakened me an hour before. It had been foreboding of loss all right, but more than the loss of my hi-fi system, deeper even than the loss of what I felt was my ultimate woman. Beth Anderson now enlarged into a whole dimension of time. Losing her I'd lost my future.

I sought comfort. That future wouldn't have been an empty white beach (did such beaches exist any more?) and an instant in a green wave as I'd imagined. My future would have been the daily reality of chintz, iron lawn-deer, tooth-picked olives, imposed conditions for tenderness with tears at the end as after violation, all the rest, including her crazy husband and her son. Wasn't that the deep reason for what I'd said and done, to avoid a future defined in those terms?

After a while I revisited the shack in the old days. There was the Ruhmkorff Coil, the deadly Russian snake with spark-fangs and the Static Electricity Machine, the miniature lightning-bolt between the brass balls, it could kill you. I recaptured the pine-shelves with the whorled knots in them and the jars and bottles. The dangerous ones had skull-and-cross-bones on their labels. Mrs Morgenstern had insisted on that. There was bichloride of mercury, I didn't remember the formula for it. There was arsenic disulfide, potassium cyanide, I didn't remember the formulas for them either. There in a blue cork-stoppered jar was lead acetate. The skull grinned above the name. I still remembered the formula: Pb (C2H3O2)2.

A few days later I told Harvey I wanted to visit my mother. No alcohol, though, no drugs.

He tried to initiate me to the navigating technique. It was elementary, he said. This gauge so, that one so, the switch, then a simple conversion formula, and depending where the red needle was you added this, the square-root of that, made the final adjustments in consequence, pressed the red button and there you were. Or were supposed to be.

He had to do it for me. He said that maybe he'd simplify the already simple arithmetic part one day and put it down in writing for me.

He showed me the four knobs on the helmet. They were graduated from one to nine. Theoretically you could choose a 1: 9999 time-ratio. But for the moment anything over 1: 200 risked being dangerous. I remembered that. One night his eyes suddenly bulged and he yelled mutely. It was like me long ago with the anti-Polack device. His hands clawed at the helmet. I grabbed a dry rag and yanked it off. There was a red welt on his forehead where the rim of the helmet had sat. He had to lie down. It was no short-circuit, he said. The greater the time-ratio the more you felt it. It was something that could be eliminated in time.

He chose "a nice safe 1: 12" for me. I made sure it was that. I didn't want to be a guinea pig.

So on April 29 at 11:15 pm I raised the heavy helmet and crowned myself. It was heavy and the springed metal clamps were unpleasantly cold on my forehead. Blur and flicker. Finally something like her swam up on the screen. I pressed the red button.

Did I really voyage? Yearning predisposes you to self-deception. I had the example of Harvey. It was true that after a while the housing-unit disappeared and I lost consciousness of the screen as though I'd gone through and behind it and into that old living room. But that might have been because my face drew closer and closer to the image of my mother and everything else became peripheral.

No denying that my mother was there on (or behind) the screen and Mrs Morgenstern too, in the positions he'd said. But the experience didn't correspond at all to his description. There wasn't any three-dimensional effect. It wasn't like a stereoscope at all. There wasn't even color. The image was sepia and flat. It flickered and had stains like a tintype from the middle of the nineteenth century. It was the visual equivalent of those old static-riddled voices we'd heard down in the cellar that night. I could barely make out my eyeless mother's lips. They were probably moving, forming words but were those words what Harvey said they were?

Stupidly I tried to reassure her, tell her she shouldn't worry about me. Of course it didn't work. Couldn't possibly have worked. I could see her, imperfectly, but she couldn't see me, assuming I'd joined her. Anyhow, there was no sound. That much was true too. The silence was absolute as in the deepest of vaults. Or was it the silence of the cellar?

Then you had to endure random spatial selection. Forced contemplation of a blank wall or a ceiling molding didn't procure joy as he said it did. It procured boredom and depression. When the women came back, stained, fuzzy and flickering, it was even worse.

Finally, time there wasn't what he'd said it was. That was the greatest of his swindles. Awakening out of it I was at first thankful it hadn't lasted weeks as supposedly it had with him. He'd gotten that time-ratio business all wrong. Or else it operated differently for me. I had the feeling I'd spent no more than a quarter of an hour in that earlier living room. But when outward focus came I saw that it was 2:17 am.

I'd spent over three hours of now-time to get a quarter of an hour back there, assuming I'd been back there. That gave a ratio of 1: 12 all right, but the wrong way. It wasn't all that different from my own private time-trips flat on my back.

When I emerged from whatever it had been – voyage back there or self-hypnosis – I blessed the dank cellar. I wrenched off the helmet from my burning forehead and stammered it all out to Harvey. He was lying blurred on his cot gnawing at a slice of salami. His cot was the unavoidable way-station for a little food and sleep between trips. He took a long time answering.

Finally he said I hadn't been in a state of maximum receptivity. He said it in his new monocordal far-away voice which resulted either from the trips or, more likely, from the preparations for the trips. The cellar reeked of joints. In a few minutes it would be his turn.

The brain had to be sleep-starved he said. He himself conceded no more than two hours to the waste of sleep and unselected dream images. Whereas I'd been squandering most of my time on my bed, day and night, for the past week. He also blamed salt and caffeine. I should experiment as he'd done. Never again, I said. As if he hadn't heard me he went on. He reminded me that whiskey had had distinctly negative effects on him. I should try the sweet California white wine, Lord's Vineyards. Never again, I repeated much louder. I should try a joint, more than one joint, although he was running low on them, Hanna would have to do something about that.

I rubbed my forehead where it burned and told him I didn't want any drugs, no drugs for me, ever. Also I didn't want to return to that sequence ever again. He should activate something else, radically different. Couldn't he perfect the car-relay and drive out to the picnic-area in Bear Mountain Park and place me in the time of early childhood with my parents and Aunt Ruth, grilling steaks in the fall, those yellow and red trees? Too far away in time and distance, said Harvey after a while. No, it had to be in the living room. Another image, then, I said. People not close to me. The visit of the Fuller Brush man or even the reform rabbi, for example, I said although I knew I'd never undergo supposed time-travel for strangers. He processed the question and after a while said, hardly audible, that it had to be the same scene for the sake of control. He himself went visiting that scene all the time. The last visit, that afternoon, number nineteen, had lasted a year, he said.

A year for his brain back there he meant. Looking at him you could almost believe that the rest of him had participated in the voyage too, had undergone the passage of that subjective time. For months his face had been wrapping tighter and tighter about his skull. Now it seemed to be letting go, drooping down and away from the bones. It resulted in an overlap of faces, both posthumous. All that time he thought he was winning back there seemed to be borrowed from time here.

Of course there was a rational explanation. It was the dying process, going on in all of us, but in his case accelerated by what he had and by his refusal to have it treated. Also all the things he was taking to trick his brain into believing in the expansion of time and the recapture of a loved-one in three-dimensional color.

After, I looked in the bathroom mirror. There was a faint red mark on my forehead where the helmet had clamped me. It faded in a few hours but the burning sensation went on for days.

Over and over Hanna yelled at him to resume the hospital treatment, to stop going down there in the cellar. He probably didn't even hear her. During his trips she'd stand for hours in front of the new door he'd had installed to replace the one she'd splintered. It was much stouter and secured by a multitude of locks and bolts. It would be her shoulder-bones that would splinter now if she tried to ram it open again. I know he's dead, she'd wail over and over when I went past. There was no way to check. He'd shoved a sheet of plywood against the ventilator we'd looked through that night under the elm.

We lost all contact with the world outside, the contemporary one. It didn't even intrude in the form of TV images and voices. Hanna didn't sit in front of that screen anymore. She seemed to be spending all her time in front of the locked and bolted cellar door or else at the kitchen-table with beer. Harvey was traveling under the permanent-wave helmet. (He didn't even go outside to watch me burning things in the garden although I did see him at a window inspecting the job.)

I did no traveling of any sort. Cured or in the inactive phase of time-sickness, I wandered about the house aimlessly in all the rooms including the dead room. From the window I could see that the letterbox was beginning to overflow. It could only have been junk mail. Who else would bother writing to the three people in that house? Nobody answered the phone when it rang as it did six or seven times. It could only have been wrong numbers.

One evening all the lights in the house went out, room by room. The sensors were disarmed. The fuses were gone. The spares too. We groped about in the gloom with scary faces above our candle-flame like apparitions, looking for fuses, she pretending to. Jerry did it, she said. She'd seen me doing it. Finally Harvey found the fuses where she'd hidden them. He knew how her mind operated. He warned her never to do that again.

One day she barred the passage to the cellar. Bulked in front of the door, great bare arms folded. Get out of my way, he croaked over and over. Finally he told her if she didn't get out of the way she'd be out on her ass without a cent to her name, she had ten seconds to move away from the door or move out of the house.

She cursed him, wailed, let him have the door and returned to the kitchen. Later, when I went in to grab a bite she was still wailing. There must have been a dozen empty beer-bottles on the Formica table.

Bust it, she said to me. Bust it. She meant the machine. It was killing him. He was losing weight. Every day she waylaid him and swept him up struggling in her arms. In a single day he'd lost two pounds. She could tell, to the ounce, she said. Bust it.

I couldn't do that, I said, squashing a passing roach. It wasn't my property.

She urged me to put sugar in it. Nobody would know. She even lurched over to the cupboard and got a bowl of sugar which she plunked down on the table in front of me. She'd heard that if you put sugar in the gas-tank of a car it would ruin the engine and nobody could tell. She thought the recipe applied to any machine.

"I'd do it myself, bust the goddam thing. For him, the sonofabitch. But if I did where'd I go? You heard him. I got nowhere to go. I'd starve on my ass in the street."

"You won't starve. You'll have plenty of money. You'll be able to go anywhere."

It was just to say something to console her. Instead of being consoled she started yelling at me.

"I don't wanna have plenty of money. I don't wanna be rich. Where'd I go without Harvey?"

She mumbled disjointed things about their life together. I didn't pay attention except when she said that during all that time he'd never once been in her, couldn't, never had been able to with any woman.

One day I was poking about for a tool in a dark corner of the cellar when I saw Hanna tip-toeing down the stairs with a sledgehammer. I'd forgotten to lock the door. Harvey was sleeping on the cot between trips. He was hardly with us now. What followed was another of those decisive moments in your life, as you realize only later, where you are defined not only to others but also to yourself through spontaneous action. I found myself spontaneously grappling with her, trying to pull down and away the massive hammerhead poised above the console.

Harvey tottered over with a length of two-by-four and slammed her over the head with it all his might. If he'd had the might of his intention he'd have brained her. I caught the sledgehammer just in time over the console as she jolted down to her knees, blood streaming down her face. Then I grabbed his wrists as he aimed another blow at her head, wrenched the wood free and flung it into a corner.

I helped her to her feet and guided her to the cot. The blood blinded her. Harvey ordered her out of the house while I mopped up the blood on her face with a handkerchief.

I won't go, I won't go, she kept on moaning and she didn't. Harvey tried to scream at me for not having locked the door. If he'd had any strength left he'd have tried to whack me over the head too.

So she stayed. She went around for days with her hair clotted up with black blood. It gave off a battlefield stench and attracted bluebottle flies. When I urged her to wash her hair and disinfect the wound and apply a bandage she refused and said she wanted to shame me, wanted me to see what I'd done to her. She claimed I'd been the one who'd slammed her over the head. Harvey would never have done that.

Maybe not but she didn't talk to him any more for a long time. He noticed it only when he had to repeat for the fifth time his order for her to go to the hospital and get more marijuana for him.

Up yours, she finally said. Not just to get even with him. She'd learned to associate the reek of the drug there with the machine and his sinking condition. So he deputized me to look into it, to see his doctor at the hospital.

I agreed if only to fill the present. That's all I had now. Ever since that machine-assisted trip I was cured of my own time-travels. I was delivered of the past. There were no more time-traps. I was in full possession of the present and didn't know what to do with it. It was empty. I was like a man who'd constructed his existence about a grave malady and suddenly finds himself cured with no alternative existence conceivable.

Sometimes I wondered if my homemade images of the past hadn't been devalued by that machine-assisted trip back to mid-July 1952.

By now I was inclined to think it had really been a trip of sorts. The beloved dead stored in my mind were clear and in color but somehow (despite all the things I'd told Harvey about the superiority of the images in my head to the images on his screen) lacking something essential. The two women I'd seen were splotched and blurred and flickering but they were authentic. This feeling had been building up steadily in the days that followed the trip. And now, slowly, I explored the idea that for some reason the distortion wasn't in Mrs Morgenstern and my mother chatting away in the striped and flowered armchairs. They were there integral and I had been there too, part of me anyhow, but there had been some kind of shifting dirty veil between us, much closer to me than to them. Sometimes I could almost believe that the distorting veil was a defect or inadequacy of my perception.

So to occupy the present I went outside, for the first time in weeks, not counting my contractual garden fires. The daylight glared painfully. Going past I was careful not to look at the other house with the tulips and the iron deer. As soon as I was a mile or so from the two houses I began feeling much better.

There was irony in what Harvey's doctor told me when I asked for more marijuana for him. He said that marijuana had no curative virtues so far as the disease was concerned. Simply, it attenuated the nausea of the ray and chemotherapy treatment. But since Mr Morgenstern refused that treatment there was no need for marijuana any more. He'd refused the treatment, I knew, because it blocked time-travel. But for successful time-travel marijuana was apparently indispensable. It was some sort of vicious circle.

I told the doctor that maybe he'd developed a taste for joints independent of their therapeutic value. If it helped stave up his morale why shouldn't he be issued more? He shrugged and said that didn't concern the hospital. If what I said about his morale was true, marijuana wasn't all that difficult to find was it? I shouldn't quote him.

When I explained why I'd come back empty-handed Harvey repeated the doctor's words. Marijuana shouldn't be that hard to find. Half the population of the United States smoked it. The other half must peddle it. Tomorrow I was to pick up five hundred dollars' worth.

Easy to say, "Go out and pick up five hundred dollars' worth of marijuana," but where do you go? who do you ask? You can't sidle up to unknown people and proposition them. You have to be sidled up to and propositioned.

So I walked about Spanish Harlem, aimless and yet expectative, hoping to be propositioned and dreading it. Hadn't I read about come-on dealers who at the moment of transaction flash their badge and snap cuffs on you? If it had been a dozen joints, OK, but he wanted me to buy enough for months. How many years could you get for that?

I strolled past immobile figures in shabby doorways and when I felt magic X-ray tube stares at the virile bulge the five-hundred-dollar roll made in my pocket, walked faster. But I wasn't mugged or propositioned. You felt they were nocturnal activities. The dealers and muggers must have been snoring the profitless daylight hours away. I'd be damned if I'd venture into that neighborhood at night.

I tried shabby bars with crude green and orange neons. In one bar I drank beer next to a smoking young couple. Wasn't it that? "Good stuff," I said expertly. I got a clammed-up narrow-eyed response. In another bar I surprised myself humming La Cucaracha over more beer. It wasn't meant to be a signal. Ideas and feelings prompt music in me spontaneously. Minor triumphs come out as imperial Handel. Grief is usually orchestrated by slow Purcell. At one stocktaking period of my life it bothered me, this expression of feeling in other men's definitive formulations, a kind of emotional prosthesis.

Anyhow the girl behind the bar looked at me as I hummed away. She was a cute little Hispano trick with a mop of frizzy black hair and a big crimson mouth over a lovely weak chin. "You wan somethin else?" It was no crime to sing the words of an old Mexican song. "Ya no tengo que fumar," I sang low but distinctly. She pointed to a shelf with cigarettes. I shook my head. "All we got," she said. Her boy friend came over and asked me belligerently what I wanted. "Nada," I replied like a character in a Hemingway story, paid and left.

The second day was like the first. At day's end I found myself on a Washington Square bench for nostalgia's sake, selectively watching students swaying past.

The man on the other end of my bench must have been deep in his eighties, but natty and spry, insistently at peace with the universe, smiling benignly at the pigeons and perambulated babies, then at me, then at the sky, then at me. He gave off eau de cologne. It must have taken him half the day to get dressed for his daily show on the bench where he scored with his expensive UK shoes, flannel trousers, monogrammed blazer, polka-dotted blue scarf to hide age at his throat, pink silk shirt, cuffs half-hiding the wormy veins of his hands.

Seeing that, I thought that to be tolerable extreme old age must be assumed utterly as Rembrandt's aged did or like a Hindu fakir with metaphysical bony nakedness beneath the white tangle of hair and beard. Actually I couldn't imagine myself ever assuming it any way or it ever being tolerable. But I couldn't imagine griming it either as he did. Maybe the solution is not to get that far.

Now Natty Spry was peering at me. I peered back. A familiar younger face haunted the present wreckage. He recognized me first.

"Why goodness gracious, I know you. Oh you've aged greatly but you've still got those eyes. You were such a handsome boy. A C- student as I remember but strikingly handsome. Your eyes haven't changed one bit. Old turquoise. Chinese grave-jade. My heart used to beat. How disruptive you were for the girls in my class and for me. Cruel. Your name is Whiteman, Gerald."

That fussily precise voice. I knew who he was now. Mr Venezelous, my English instructor at NYU almost forty years ago, Greek in every sense of the word. That C- was faulty memory or characteristic waspishness. I'd been his best student. He'd kept on inviting me up to his place just off Washington Square for a drink. I accepted, once. It turned out there were other things involved with the drink, not just salmon-eggs and Greek olives.

"Whiteman, Gerald," he repeated triumphantly. "Is that true or is that not true?"

"Weizman, Jerry," I corrected.

I was impressed anyhow, despite that C- slip. Would my axons and cerebella peduncles be performing like that in undesired twenty-five years' time?

"Yes," he said triumphantly as though I'd confirmed not corrected. "You've aged beautifully, Gerald. It's an art, as you can see." He smiled modestly on perfect teeth and started musing audibly.

"Gerald Whiteman the womanizer. Gerald the masher. The heart-smasher. The juvenile Don Juan. How well I recall you." It was another impressive performance. He was as good as Roget's Thesaurus. Now he forgot me completely. "Hello, baby!" Was he talking to the passing mother or to her child? "Marvelous day," he congratulated the sky, then returned to me. "Despite those eyes one of my worst students as I remember. And I remember pretty damn well. A straight-F student. Gerald and the Three Fs. O that lovely pink cloud up there." I followed his gaze. The sky was uniformly leaden. "O the birds, flocks of birds!" A solitary pigeon flew overhead. A dachshund waddled over and sniffed his beautifully stitched black shoes. "Meeow," he greeted. "O the terrible great puma. Don't devour me."

Would I be like that in a few years? If you absolutely couldn't avoid getting that far maybe it was the best way to be after all.

He took out a gold-plated case, extracted a thin cigarette and lit up with a gold-plated Ronson.

Could it be? Could. Was. The unmistakable reek, creator of pink cloud, puma, the dead chatting three-dimensional in elongated time.

He smiled with delight when I opened up to him about my quest and told me about grades and qualities, about charas, bhang, takrouri, sweet dawamesk, the divine gandjah. Above all, in what bar and at what times and what the purveyor looked like. He even told me the color of his eyes.

I came back with only a fraction of what Harvey had wanted. I was taking no chances being nabbed with five hundred dollars' worth of the stuff. As it was, with the little I had stashed under the right front-seat, I drove back to Forest Hill very slowly, very carefully, sweating profusely.

Refueled, Harvey returned to the cellar and the helmet and explored the chemically enhanced past. I lay on my back on the bed and explored the unimproved present, my only temporal dimension now. It's a hard one to be stranded in when it consists exclusively of somebody else's four walls, drawn curtains and a blank ceiling. My passport had expired to all other places and times.

One long night there was another storm. The wind howled and buffeted the house. I tried to imagine it wrenched loose and sailing seawards. Ash-can covers started on their noisy trip down the street. Was she chasing hers? The tree outside threshed about like posthumous Schubert. The dull thumping started up again. It kept banging against the house like a fist against a locked door. I counted and counted but this time it didn't put me to sleep. I'd have to remember to get Hanna to climb up that ladder and saw the branch off.

I'd said never again and also not that way but I ended up returning there Harvey's way. Maybe the distortion had been in me. It was to better her, if the thing could be done, rid her of splotch and flicker, restore her eyes, bring her into three dimensions and color, to see her lips better. See her the way Harvey had. Maybe she was saying other things. It was to see her again, any way and to experience joy doing it.

Once again I muffed the techniques of time-navigation and Harvey had to do it for me. It irritated him. Once again he said he'd try to simplify the entry procedures and write it down for me. I sat down coiffed at the console before the screen, at time-ratio 1:20, feeling muddled and queasy from the preparatives to voyage. I imagined in shame Keith seeing his father that way.

This time the image opened up. I entered. I wasn't outside looking in but inside with her. There was her face in random selection interrupted by the billowing curtain and a fly on a windowpane. Where is the promised color and dimension? The room is still blotch and blur and flicker and silence like the grave. All I'm getting is the feeling, stronger, of authenticity (that she is there and me with her a very little bit). Now closer, great imperfect close-ups of her face. But there's nothing of the promised joy. She's still eyeless. I see the illness that will painfully kill her soon, it's a certitude, a kind of time-travel forward. Now the billowing drapes, gray sunflowers, over and over. Now the fly crawling up the windowpane. Bigger and bigger. Now her lips also macro, crevassed. I try to read the meaning of those moving lips. This is the fourth time after the gray sunflowers and the fly and I think what she is saying is: "My Jerry's never been the same either." She's starting to fade, the billowing gray flowers too, the gigantic black and hairy fly too and now emergence with hopeless grief.

Emergence from that first enhanced voyage a year ago with grieved awareness of the joint-butts and the empty bottle at my feet and the possible self-swindle of it all. Also emergence from it a year later, now, without nausea but with the original grief. It was a time-trap again. I got sucked down into there and then.
What did I do then a year ago in the same position as now?

What I could do now.

Took off the helmet and groped upstairs. Blundered out into the meaningless real world, the garden. I was blinded by the high sun.

I'd started the trip at eleven in the evening.

It was noon the next day.

That fifteen-minute trip had lasted thirteen hours and nine minutes of here-time, real-time. The ratio had expanded, wildly. Way more than 1:20. And in the wrong direction. Tit-time for him there, maybe. It had been plated tortoise-time for me. My forehead burned violently.

I was retching up nothing painfully into the tangle of new and dead grass under the elm when I heard her voice, more detached than anxious. "Are you sick too?" I couldn't answer. "Everybody's down with it at Dave and Tom's. It's Singapore flu. Or Taiwanese. I have things to settle your stomach with in the house, if you like. Oh God, was I sick. I thought I'd die."

She was in exactly the same position as the first time I'd seen her on the other side of the fence, clutching the meshes with one hand but not holding a bag of tulip-bulbs with the other this time. They'd already been planted. They were up like red and yellow flames behind her. Some were already drooping. "But I can't give it to you through the fence. Come on over just a minute. I'm not afraid of catching it from you. I already had it."

She guided me across her disordered living room up the dusty staircase. She talked about sickness and medicine without pause and when we reached the landing steered me toward the guestroom but I resisted going that way. There's something I wanted to show you there she said but I resisted. She took me into her bedroom and told me to lie down. From the bathroom I heard water filling a glass and the clink of a spoon and her voice going on about sickness. I fell asleep and when I woke up she was sitting on the edge of the bed holding the glass and staring down at me.

She said she'd phoned over and over during those two weeks but had never got an answer. She hadn't dared knock on the front door. So she'd written a long letter and put it in his mailbox. She soon realized that nobody picked up the mail anymore. I should read it. There were things in it she couldn't say. And in a little while I should go into the guestroom. From her bedroom she'd seen a little of me in my bedroom through the gap of the drawn curtains, just my feet on the bed, almost whenever she looked. He must be sick too to be in bed all the time like that, she'd thought and hoped it was the same thing that was wrong with her. Once she'd seen me at the window. I looked terrible. I still did, even worse, much worse. What was that ugly red welt on my forehead?

She put her hand on my forehead. I reached up and held on tight to her and spoke my first words since my return from where I'd been. I said I didn't want to go back to the other house or stay in this one. We should leave together for somewhere far away.

She simplified us. The drapes were drawn but all the lights in the room were on us. I'm shameless, she exulted, strenuous in the middle of the thirty wall spectators, atoning for past passivity, silence and final tears. I did this, I did that, saying crudely what she'd just done for my passive pleasure (the doing and saying) and now I'm going to do this, she said and did.

Had I liked that? she whispered at the end.

I'd loved it, I whispered back as in the old radio wine-commercial.

I saw the picturesque dome-shaped scrolled radio with the yellowed celluloid tuning screen and my mother leaning toward it.

Quickly I spoke to her of the seaside in June. She said yes.

***

Eighteen

Shopping about for her birthday present in the neighborhood I found myself before her florists'. The name Dave and Tom's was spelled out in entwined roses and lilies. It was almost the size of a supermarket. Through the plate-glass I could see her next to potted ferns and a palm-tree, wearing a uniform like a waitress. She was joking with the very handsome young man, her guest that evening, the baby she'd consoled. Like the other men he wore a green shirt with a red monogram, D & T. I drew a little closer. It was just to see her, I wasn't going to go in and bother her. I'd tried phoning every morning and afternoon but she said I shouldn't, they didn't like it except in emergency cases. I told her truthfully it was an emergency when she wasn't there. She took it for lover's hyperbole. Then I had this idea. I went in.

She looked flustered when she saw me. I called her "Miss" as though I didn't know her and explained: a big bouquet, it had to have fragrance, so none of their roses. I nodded at whatever she chose. It's for Hanna's birthday, I explained in a low voice. From Mr Morgenstern? she asked in an even lower voice. No, from me, I said. I said that Hanna was sensitive to such gestures. "With Love from Jerry," I wrote on the fancy card.

She took the flowers to the operating-table and worked over them in silence. Asparagus ferns, the cellophane, the silver ribbons, the love-card and finally the expensive gold seal. It cost over forty dollars.

She handed me the rustling bouquet, still frowning a little. I handed it back grandly. "For you." She reddened then looked around fearfully and said she couldn't take it here, she couldn't gos home with it. She wasn't supposed to waste time making a bouquet for herself. So I had to take the bouquet myself and carry it about ceremoniously in all the shops I visited for her real present, her birthday present.

It bothered me almost as much as it did her that in a few weeks she wouldn't be thirty-nine any more. For a man my age, being loved by a woman still technically in her thirties was far more ego boosting than being loved by a woman in her forties even though just a few days separated the two states. Anyhow, birthday gift hunting was my main activity when she wasn't there. Maybe the reason I took so long deciding on the right present was that buying it would have put an end to shopping and in its place what would time have been filled with?

There were other activities, of course, as there had to be, mainly furious weeding and housework again. I hardly ever listened to music. I resisted temptation and avoided the honored guestroom. I had to pretend to her that I spent hours there listening to the expensive pitiful hi-fi system she'd bought me on credit along with the boxed Beethoven symphonies (Karajan, his last unsatisfactory integral, not the great 1950 one, but how could she know?).

When I was tired I sat at the living room table staring down at the road map and at the holiday leaflet with the empty white beach. I'd finally come up with one for us in southern Maine. I had doubts about that beach. The shadows of the dune-grass were very long in the sand-ripples. The photo had been taken with the sun low in very late evening or maybe even in winter. In winter even Jones' Beach would be empty, not counting washed-up dogs.

One evening I found her in a state of stupor with the stiff face and rambling mumble that abuse of tranquilizers gives. I got out of her that a friend had finally disclosed what everybody else had known for ages: that her husband was living with a girl half his age, had been from the beginning. He's a dirty hypocrite. Goes on shaving his head. But how about celibacy? How about that? How about carnal temptation? And all the money she'd sent him for the literature and the jewelry. She said she'd denounce him to the leadership of The Golden Galaxy. I was sorry for her but glad for us.

To calm her I suggested it might be a spiritual relationship. "Spiritual, shit. They don't m-meditate. I know Jack. They f-fuck. All night long. She's twenty-five."

It was a shock to hear her say that. I'd never heard her use words like that except for my private delight recently. It cheapened that use.

Now she started crying like a little girl. It aged her badly. Her mouth was square with grief. She tried to bring forth words. "All my life," I made out. She said it over and over. "All your life what, Beth?" I had to ask as she repeated it for the fifth time.

It came out bit by bit like a hard delivery. Exploited, all my life. Ever since I was a little girl I've been exploited. When I got married I thought it'd be different. But they exploit me. Jack and even Ricky. Came out in a rush: "O Jerry you won't exploit me too will you?" I said of course not and that I was going to give her a wonderful birthday present. I kissed her and stroked her wet face till her mouth came out of squareness. A wonderful present, I soothed.

After an hour or so she said she felt better and thanked me for the present I was going to give her and asked me to show her that leaflet on the beach in southern Maine. It was the first time she'd ever done that. She asked if there was driftwood on it.

One day on my knees, warring on incipient weeds, I saw Harvey through the fence. He was urinating in the rank garden just out of the shadow of the elm-tree. He didn't travel anymore. Hadn't stuck that thing on his head for days now, Hanna had told me jubilantly. Didn't it work any more? He stood pissing in the present, blinking at Beth's house and at the birds quick in her bright yellow forsythias. He was standing disarmed in the dangerous sunshine of late April. Hanna had gone shopping.

I went over into the other house for the first time in a week and got his umbrella for him. I opened it and placed it in his hand. Urine had dribbled down one leg of his shapeless pants.

As usual I tried to convince him that he should resume the treatment. Fifty thousand dollars? he asked. Would she still say no to that? They were the first words I'd heard from him in days. He was back to that. He wanted another room, another person. Quickly I replied that when I'd mentioned his leasing the corners of her living room I'd spoken of a sum bigger than that and she'd refused, flatly.

It must have been the word "leasing" that gave me the tremendous idea. Thought it was tremendous at the time. I took his bony wrist and rectified the angle of his umbrella so that he was in safe shadow and said that it wasn't a question of money any more. He'd antagonized her from the start. A gesture on his part might be more effective in the long run. Predictably he asked, what gesture?

This huge once-garden of his where you half expected a tiger to slink out of the man-high weeds, wouldn't it look better full of flowers like the other side of the fence? My idea was that he should lease a strip of land to her for a nominal fee. What I had in mind was a Hong-Kong style lease, at least the lifetime of a rosebush, but didn't say so yet. Maybe later she'd reciprocate, tit for tat, lease for lease, I said.

He gave in so easily that I felt a little guilty and asked him over and over if he really wanted to do it, even backed slightly out of my own proposal until he came after me with harassment. The delicate part was when I said that of course the fence would have to be pulled back, say twenty feet. He didn't react even to that.

I must have had misgivings. That very day I dropped broad hints about my prodigious love-present. Partly it was to cheer her up and take her mind off Jack. I'd picked up garden-center catalogs, another precious new activity, and asked her what she would plant if suddenly she had extra land. The "suddenly" must have given me away. She got it out of me finally. What did he want in return? I whispered it in her ear, adding that he wouldn't get it, all for me. But it was no joke for her.

She must have realized my disappointment because she sat me down like a child, all but holding my hands, and told me that I couldn't do such a thing, the land wasn't mine to give, you couldn't dispose of other people's property like that. Her rectitude had the allure of the exotic for me.

A couple of times in the week that followed I surprised her sadly staring through the fence at Harvey's weeds. But maybe she wasn't thinking of the garden, not even seeing it.

Three days before we were to leave I finally told Harvey about it. He was lying shrunken and doll-like on his cot. The long mark of the helmet clamp stood out very red on his papery forehead. You can't do that, he whispered without moving, without opening his eyes. He needed me for the final work on the storage unit.

Try and stop me, I said and by the way I said it (I thought) he didn't dare insist. He simply said I wouldn't be paid for those two weeks, I'd better think it over. He played it wisely, not too much indignation, not too much indifference. In compensation I agreed to help him on the storage unit all day and all night if he liked until we left.

It was his last device. He didn't have the strength to finish it. He remained on the cot most of the time, working through me. I hammered, soldered connections, screwed with a screwdriver, for two days.

The accumulator was a black cubic-foot box. A temporal sequence recorded by the sensors could be stored in it, supposedly. Like a conventional storage battery its life was limited. In time (he didn't know how much time) the images disintegrated. He said he hoped he would have time to devise something permanent.

He was bitter that everything came too late. If he'd developed the storage unit and perfected the range of the relay and everything else a few years ago the mechanisms could have been fitted into a truck. He could have traveled all over the country in search of privileged moments. Imagine the charged accumulators hooked up in series with those moments available at the touch of a finger and enlarged at a time ratio of 1:1000, the here-time trip lasting a year. Fifteen lifetimes of straight joy. You'd have to come up sometime for food wouldn't you? I objected.

He spoke of people in deep coma fed by tubes, voyagers in blackness though. The idea sounded nightmarish. In his defective time travels, I knew, you were deprived of all senses except sight and guilt. Retrotemporal flowers were scentless, there was no music there and entry into a wave or a woman could only be cerebral. That beach in southern Maine in the immediate but still non-existent future seemed more real and much more desirable than his resurrected mutilated past.

Finally late in the evening of the second day I tightened the last screw on the lid of the storage unit. "Another day another dollar," I said and started leaving. He beckoned me back to the cot. He whispered:

"Why didn't you come? To the house?"

"Last week, you mean? Too much to do over at Beth's."

"Not this house."

"Beth's house?"

"The other house."

"Which other house?"

"The house before her's. Before this one. Why didn't you come? You told my mother. You would."

I'd been prepared for it from the moment he'd begun asking those questions down in the cellar about the old days and then that questionnaire on her, one thousand blank sheets inviting me to talk about it. I said I accepted a certain very indirect responsibility for what happened that night forty years ago even though I thought it would have happened anyhow some other night if not that night: she'd already tried, remember her wrists and did he really think she'd fainted on the edge of the subway platform that day? It's what I'd said to his mother a few days later, I told him. She'd accepted the explanation. At least she had nine years later. She'd even invited me over for dinner when we met at the funeral.

"You didn't go to her. Funeral."

"Aunt Ruth's funeral. You weren't there. She used to bake custard for you. You weren't at the other funeral either. Your mother told me that."

"Why did you say. You'd come? Why didn't you come? I don't mean to. Her funeral."

"I was with a girl, I seem to remember."

"What girl?"

"A girl. Who remembers a girl that long ago? That was a million years ago. It's late. We're leaving tomorrow, first thing in the morning. See you in two weeks."

But it was Beth who left first thing in the morning, by herself. That evening, she told me, her brother-in-law had rung up. Her sister Martha had been hospitalized. So the destination wasn't Maine for two anymore but Phoenix, Arizona for one. I wanted to go with her anyhow but she said it wasn't possible. She said she'd phone me every day.

As she packed her things I said, "You can't leave me here," as to heartless desertion and she took that too for lover's hyperbole. She promised to phone faithfully every evening. She also said that if it turned out that Martha wasn't too bad she'd try to come back as soon as possible. She cried. I tried to tell her that maybe it wasn't as serious as she thought.

Before she left she gave me instructions concerning her houseplants and goldfish. A small sprinkle from this yellow can for Oscar, once a day. Two waterings a day for the potted hydrangeas, one for the others. I said, no problem. She looked at me for a second and then wrote it down, lots of words underlined three times. I felt a little offended at her lack of confidence, handed the instructions back and said she could trust me, I wouldn't forget. She gave me the keys to her house.

After having made all that fuss about those two weeks I didn't rush over and tell Harvey it was all off. I'd have to eventually of course, if only to get paid for the canceled vacation, but didn't feel like doing it that evening. Early next morning I drove her to the airport. It was no social affair she was going to but she had a new hairdo and a new low-cut dress, also lipstick and bluish eyelids. She was hard to recognize. She refused to let me see her off. She said it would give her the blues. When I asked for her sister's phone number she said she'd ring me every day. If anyone else phoned I should say I was the neighbor watering her plants. I should say I didn't know when she'd be back.

After I dropped her off I drove to New York to kill time. I shopped around for her birthday gift, leisurely, as though it were a lifetime activity without deadline and fed squirrels in Central Park. I didn't want to go back to Forest Hill and sleep alone in that house. I didn't want to sleep in the other house either. But I couldn't sleep on a park bench.

I came back at half-past ten in the evening and parked my car a long way from the house. I sneaked in shadow to the door like a burglar. When I tried to unlock the door I found it was already unlocked. I had the crazy joyous idea that Beth's sister had rallied and that somehow she'd returned and that we'd be going to that beach after all. She was in bed waiting for me, reading. The thought was protection as I advanced into the dark living room.

I could see the faint glow of light from her bedroom, reflected by the ceiling above the stairs. I called her name as I went up. The light wasn't coming from the bedroom but from the guestroom. I groped into the dark bedroom and approached the bed and got it all at once: that smell, those powerful naked arms and that sleepy voice, "Harvey, honey, come on."

I broke loose and ran into the guestroom. I saw him vague on the other side of the gauzy curtains. He was leaning out of the open window. He had a compass and a folding yellow yardstick in one hand and seemed to be measuring the night with it. The big faded blueprint was unfolded on the windowsill. It rustled in sudden wind like dead leaves. The curtains billowed and the door slammed shut behind me.

"Get out," he said, not turning around, in the voice he used for Hanna.

"Like hell."

He turned around slowly and peered at me.

"You're on vacation," he said definitively, dismissing my image as something unreal. He turned back to his measurements. I must have looked like a ghost to him as he did to me through the gauzy curtain.

"You didn't waste time," I said. "Get out."

He scribbled on the blueprint. After a while: "This isn't. Your house."

"The owner entrusted me with the key. So out."

He went on measuring with his back to me. After a while:

"I'll pay."

"Out. Hanna too."

"Fifty thousand dollars."

"She said no. I told you that."

"Fifty thousand dollars. For you."

"You don't dispose of other peoples' property like that. Don't make me throw you out."

He turned around, stared at me and passed unsteadily through the veil of the curtain. He leaned against the wall a few inches to the left of the window. Now he slowly let himself down until he was in a sitting position, gaunt knees drawn up. He still had the yellow yardstick in one hand, the compass in the other. The curtains billowed white against the black rectangle of the night. The blueprint on the sill went on rustling. His eyes were closed but he talked, at great expense.

"It's not property of hers. I want. She won't know. About it. How can she. Know about it? What I want she doesn't know. She has. It's not even hers. Three days only. The house'll. Be just as. It was. Everything as it was. Except your bank-account."

"Not that again. You already owe me $14,220 back-salary."

"Math wizard," he whispered. "You'd get. That too. The back pay. Right away. I won't be needing you. Anymore after this. You'll get the fifty thousand. Plus the back pay. And listen. All the salary to come. To October. How much is that? The salary to come." He was like a teacher mercilessly quizzing a dull pupil.

"Nineteen thousand two hundred and seventy dollars."

"Rounding off. You left out. Thirty-five cents. You'll get that too. Every penny. Like on Friday. Plus the fifty thousand. How much. Is that?"

I wasn't going to answer. Anyhow he'd already forgotten the back-salary. With the back-salary plus the salary to October plus the fifty thousand it totaled up to $84,000.30. You didn't have to be a math wizard to figure that out.

Not just all that money, he said. As a bonus he'd let me visit her once she was in the box. It wouldn't be the first time. This time a social visit in the living room with himself and his mother.

Stop, he warned as I moved toward him. He struggled to his feet. This was the old space, he said, nineteen inches, all along the wall, the space of the other house, his space to stand in and nobody could make him leave. I took another step toward him. He retreated diagonally toward the window and said no, don't come any closer, I was trespassing on his space. This isn't your house, he said. Nothing here is. The space here belongs to me. Where I'm standing, nineteen inches into this room. If you trespass again. You bastard I'll kill you. Have Hanna kill you. Don't come any closer.

But if I was stepping forward now it wasn't to intimidate him into leaving the house but to grab him because he was retreating into what was supposedly the continuation of his space but it was the blackness beyond the open window he was backing into, partly shrouded by the curtain. Watch out for the window, I yelled and then grabbed his wrists hard. He was trying to yell himself: Hanna, Hanna, Hanna. It was the first time I'd ever heard him call her in a voice of imploration. How could she possibly hear his hoarse whisper at that distance?

But then I smelled her and my neck was locked in the crook of her arm and I let go of his wrists.

"Tried to kill me, Hanna. Push me out of the window. And trespass. Don't strangle him. Yet. Promise you won't. Trespass. And she'll let you. Go. Promise?"

"Lunatic." I brought it up distorted past the vise of her arm. Her arm tightened.

"Promise?"

"Maniac." Tightened more, but she knew better than anyone else they were true, the definitions she was trying to choke off.

If I didn't promise, she'd snap my neck-vertebras like a rat, he wheezed jubilantly.

"I... promise," I wheezed as her arm tightened even more. My voice was like his now, a wheeze.

"Promise what?" His voice sounded more bewildered than menacing.

He'd forgotten. I'd forgotten too. Old men.

"I... promise anything... you like."

Promise I'd never trespass again, he said triumphantly as though it had suddenly come back to him why we were fighting.

I promised I'd never trespass on his space again. Hanna let me go. But I knew I wasn't free. They'd sequester me here, tie me to a chair for four days, while the sensor lenses worked away and he stored her up exclusively.

At that moment the phone rang.

Before Hanna could head me off I lunged for it and implored: Beth, Beth, as though calling for help, as Harvey had done with Hanna a minute before. I held up my hand in warning for Hanna not to move toward me and stepped back with the phone and Beth's alarmed voice in it: what was the matter? what had happened?

"You, Beth, your voice, I'm so happy to hear your voice, Beth, you have no idea."

Why was I yelling? her distant voice wanted to know. Why had I yelled 'Beth! Beth!' without knowing who it was? How could I be sure who it was? Suppose it had been someone else? She'd told me not to do that. A neighbor wouldn't have done that. Remember, I was the neighbor who watered her plants. Had I done that? The plants? Was I sure everything was all right?

I switched the speaker on so that they could hear her answer to the question I was going to ask her. I said I'd watered her plants, the hydrangeas twice, and fed Oscar from the yellow box, and that everything was all right except that, coming back an hour ago, I'd seen the police investigating a house in the neighborhood that had been broken into and I'd thought: what would I do if it happened here and I saw a burglar or two burglars in the house, what would I do, Beth?

You'd run out and call the police, naturally. What a funny question. You sound funny. Was everything really all right?

I switched the speaker off and assured her that everything was fine. How about her? When she said everything was okay, not sounding that way though, I said that if everything was okay then she should fly back tomorrow and we'd leave for Maine right away.

She said that no, everything wasn't okay, everything was terrible actually. She couldn't leave Martha. She was calling from the hospital and would have to hang up now. Somebody else wanted to phone.

I asked her to give me her home number.

Her distant voice said that she was at the hospital most of the time. She was scared of getting calls when she was at Martha's. It might be the hospital. She'd call me every day like she'd promised.

But suppose somebody called here for something urgent? Or an emergency came up? Like burglars breaking in. Or suppose I had a heart attack. She'd want to know that, wouldn't she?

I was hiding something, her voice said. Was something wrong with my heart?

I assured her that everything was under control here including my heart except when I thought of her. That was as far as I dared go with love talk with those two in the room glowering at me. From her end, though, she could have been a little more loving, it seemed to me. It must have been the hospital atmosphere.

I kept at it until finally she agreed to give me her sister's home number. She said that it had to be for a real emergency. I burrowed in my pocket for a scrap of paper and came up only with a dollar-bill. I scribbled the number in the soiled margin and whispered that I loved her.

She said she loved me too. I shouldn't invite that Hanna over.

A click and buzz in my ear.

Cunning, I didn't hang up immediately. I stared with horrified eyes at the dark window behind them. When they both looked that way I dodged and ran past Hanna then down the stairs and out of the house. In the moonlight I ran to the back of the house and the window.

Harvey stood above me, framed, staring moonward. He was still looking for whatever I'd pretended to have seen in the night. I called out that if they weren't out of the house in five minutes I'd phone the cops. Beth Anderson, who was the owner of the house, every square inch of it, said I should do that, they'd heard. I had to repeat it much louder before he looked away from the moon and down at me. Then I ran out into the street.

From the safe end of the street I saw them leaving the house. Harvey was leaning on her. He was holding the compass, the blueprint and the yardstick.

I returned and locked the front and back doors. I wedged chairs under the knobs. I had the feeling that I was barricading myself in rather than barricading intruders out. I went upstairs and without looking inside I closed the guestroom door. I changed the sheets of the cama de matrimonia in Beth's bedroom. To get rid of the last of Hanna I opened the window wide. Like the guestroom window it gave on the west. It too was in the nineteen-inch zone and me with it. For a moment there I believed him, didn't have time to reason that he had no landmarks to be able to determine the exact degree of coincidence between the old house and the new, certainly not to the inch.

I pulled back fast and went downstairs. I took the half-empty bottle of whisky and a glass and sat in the big armchair in front of the TV. I didn't dare turn it on. They could come that way too, I knew, like insects on the screen. I was invested everywhere. When most of the whisky was gone I tried to sleep on the living room sofa, dressed except for my shoes, as for a solitary tenderness session.

Lying there on her sofa I couldn't help thinking that Harvey must also be lying, collapsed, on his sofa in the dead room. He'd be imagining his strategically positioned machines in the space of this house with their time-prying lenses, pumping in old scenes for reactivating. The scenes ended by coming to me that way, imagining what he was imagining.

I tried to keep a bit of my mind lucid. By now I knew the price of complete surrender, the reverse-ratio of time involved in pathological dedication to memory, machine-assisted or not, cheated out of my impoverished stock of future. Time-travail was like hard-drug addiction. The dose increased endlessly in the desire for something more authentic, maybe blotched and flickering, untouchable and dumb at first but at the end couldn't your blown mind supply those missing elements too as Harvey's had with color and dimension and joy and the jackpot time-ratio, lifetimes there, time practically conquered? At the end imagine joyous recognition on their part, response to touch and words and you babbled insanities and explored the night with a yardstick and a compass, ready to sequestrate maybe even to murder to return integrally to all that?

Finally I struggled out of it at half-past three in the morning. Wasn't this an emergency? I searched for the dollar-bill with the number Beth had given me. I must have left it in the guestroom. I labored upstairs and forced that door open against the pressure of the wind. The doorknob trembled in my hand as I stood on the threshold watching the curtains pouring into the room like smoke or concentrate of moonlight. The room was stark with moonlight and opaque shadow. I went in.

The door slammed shut behind me. At a safe distance from the window I saw through the fence the shadow of the elm in Harvey's rank garden, branches and twigs alive in the blowing high dead weeds. The wind launched inky clouds against the full moon. The sky reminded me of the time on the beach with the dead dog.

As I picked up the dollar-bill from the floor where the wind had blown it I saw a watch lying just beneath the window. He must have lost it when I'd grabbed his wrists hard to prevent him from toppling out of the window. I hesitated and then went over there. I bent down to pick it up and felt dizzy as though I were going to pitch forward and down into a black chasm, the forbidden space the maniac had invented, a trap, I was able to think (a saving crazy thought), baited by his Taiwanese watch with its merciless non-volatile memory, constructed as I wasn't for deep descents.

I got out of the room, clutching the dollar-bill, and escaped downstairs. I sat down in front of the phone in the living room and looked at my watch. It was almost four in the morning. I also saw the date and realized with a sinking feeling that it was finally Beth's birthday. I looked at the other watch, Harvey's, almost expecting an earlier time, an ancient date, but got confirmation of now-time. Almost four, her birthday, and I had no gift, not even one to announce. She'd told me not to ring her anyhow. I went back to the whisky.

After a while I felt there wasn't enough light in the room. I got up and fiddled with the wall-switches. By accident I turned on the electric fireplace. I remembered what she'd said about it. Sometimes when she had the blues she sat in the dark and stared at it. It was very calming. I switched off the other lights. The room rocked with flames. I extinguished them instantaneously. I switched the lights back on and stared at the soiled margin of the dollar-bill.

I got a hotel desk. I thought it was a wrong number and checked. It was the right number. I asked for Mrs Beth Anderson. Her room phone rang and rang. Finally I got her blurred voice. I said, Beth, Beth, like the last time.

After a while she mumbled: "You woke me up. Why are you phoning? What's the emergency?"

"It's your birthday. I almost forgot. Happy birthday, Beth."

But I still had no gift.

Silence. She had trouble focussing mentally, because of the barbiturates, probably. She mumbled again: "That's no emergency. Not for you. Why wake me up to remind me of that? Why are you phoning me at... at ten past midnight, Jerry?"

Panic at that. I'd just seen the time and knew it was ten past four, even by his watch. Was I getting her voice from four hours in the past? Was she there too? The infection was spreading. Then I said:

"I forgot about the time-zone. What are you doing in a hotel, Beth? I thought you were staying at your sister's."

Another long silence. Had she fallen asleep? "Beth?"

"Long story. Too tired. It's... four in the morning where you are. Why are you phoning me at four in the morning, Jerry?"

I'd told her. But her question was like a challenge. It had to be more than words of congratulation, more than the vague promise of a gift to justify breaking into her sleep at midnight with something she didn't want to hear anyhow. It had to be something tremendous, better even than Harvey's garden which she'd rejected.

Suddenly the answer came like a sunburst, triumphant, something she couldn't possibly reject. How can you reject the rising sun?

"It's about your present, Beth. I couldn't wait to tell you. A tremendous present, Beth."

"You're yelling again. Aren't you feeling well, Jerry? God, I feel so awful too."

"Not well at all, Beth. Till I had this great idea. It'll make you feel like yelling too. First tell me when you'll be back."

"I don't know. Maybe in a week. Maybe more."

That long? I thought. It wasn't possible to stay in this house another day, no more than in the other house. Did she remember, I said, how once I'd asked her as a game what she'd do with $200,000? I'd forgotten what she'd said but whatever, it wasn't the right answer. What she should have said and I should have said too was a house near the sea for both of us. Not for a two-week vacation, paying rent to strangers, but ours, for as long as we lived. You didn't need $200,000, half that amount was enough and I had it, I said. Practically: almost one hundred thousand, with maybe more later.

Which was her birthday present: a house far away from here and just for the two of us, near an empty beach, there must be a few left. I tried to create it all for her distant ear, that lovely pink seashell. An acre or two of land for all the flowers and vegetables she liked, why not a small farm for self-sufficiency while we were at it? Couldn't she just picture it? Great skies and surf. Pink seashells. Driftwood fires on the beach. Driftwood for lamps too, maybe open a driftwood-lamp shop, I'd do the wiring-job and she'd do the varnishing. We'd lie down each evening, our minds busy with tomorrow's projects in common.

I went on and on. It was an act of creation. He'd said the future didn't exist but he was wrong for once. It had color, dimension, sound, smell, everything. I was creating and fortifying it with every word. What I held in focus now was integral reality. Facing in that right direction I could practically feel the sand trickling out through my funneled hands, smell washed-up seaweed in the sun, hear wheeling gulls. You weren't in blur and silence as when you faced in the wrong direction. Embracing was possible and reciprocated.

It was so real that at one point I thought: I'm there on that beach in reality and this, standing in this room at 4:00 am talking about it far from her in this nightmare of a room is another time-trap I'm going to have to struggle up out of. But then I told myself that on that beach – those firm shining sands – there'd be an end to time-traps.

A sunburst inside. The night was behind me. She must be feeling the same. I wanted her to participate in the creation, authenticating it by give and take, collaboration, making it a shared vision, it was for the two of us, inconceivable otherwise.

"Beth, that's your present. What do say, Beth?"

I waited for participation but nothing came. She wasn't saying anything.

I said her name again. Again, louder. Yelling again?

She came back, saying that she'd dozed off, she'd had a long day and that I should go to bed now.

I tried to generate the lyricism for a repeat performance but was too tired. I'd had a long day too, a long night. It would be better as a total surprise anyhow.

I said I loved her. Did she love me?

She said, yes of course she loved me and hung up.

***

Nineteen

The next afternoon I was vacuum cleaning the honored guestroom, sunny and harmless now, singing along with Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, imperfectly reproduced on my new hi-fi, when I got a call. The woman thought she had the wrong number when she heard my voice. She wanted to speak to Beth Anderson. I identified myself as the next-door-neighbor. I was watering Mrs Anderson's plants. I'd promised to do that once a day for as long as she was away. Away? Did I know where? And for how long? I said I'd understood it was an emergency. Her sister had been hospitalized.

"Oh, you got it wrong, thank God. To my knowledge I'm the only sister Beth has and I haven't been hospitalized. Not this year, touch wood. That happened last year. She's supposed to come over next week like she does every summer. I just wanted her to confirm. As soon as she comes back could you tell her Martha phoned? Thank you."

There had to be a clue somewhere in the house. I ploughed through her things, from top to bottom, riffled all the drawers and shelves in the house, riffled her books and chucked them on the floor, burrowed into the blue and pink sheets in the closet, left everything in turmoil.

I finally found the answer in the imitation 18th century jewel-box with the shepherdess and the swain. The tube of Valium was gone. I unfolded the crazy leaflet and read the scribbled flight number with take-off time and the destination and also the hotel reservation.

I phoned the hotel every half-hour for five hours. Just as well she didn't answer. I needed arguments to preserve my future defined in the terms I'd defined it the night before. I couldn't give up that forward-looking vision, so couldn't give her up. Strangled bellows of rage, little sounds of hurt and grief and prostrated silence were no arguments. Something had to be salvaged from this.

I took a sheet of paper and started listing the points to be made, trying not to let a deadly insight focus. Why this act of treachery? I scrawled. Act of sabotage. Like smashing rudder of ship. Crippled ship could stay afloat in fair weather but weather was cyclic too. When it blew foul, ship would sink. I would sink, go down and down. Black abyss. Help. Help. Return and rock my head instead of this betrayal. Betraying me that crazy way: revelation of our basic incompatibility. Oh no, Beth, not incompatibility, cross that out. But betrayal, yes. Had flagrantly violated tacit contract that exists between all couples.

Suppose she asked about the terms of our contract? I put the pencil down and pondered. That my craziness took precedence over hers, that I was fundamentally the nursed, not the nurse? No, no. But it was true I'd been dependent on her to pull me out of the quagmire of time past. Help. Help.

Help? The deadly insight focused now. She too was caught in those same slow sands to the quivering nostrils, in her own selfish past with no reference to mine. We were sinking together, side by side but light-years apart, unable to help each other. But anyhow: help, help.

It began to take shape, sheet after sheet, structured with roman numerals, capital letters, small-case letters, numbers. Scribbling away I almost forgot my woe in the semi-creative act of accurately outlining it on paper. My despair and rage were finally laid out like a classical French garden. I reached for the phone. I'd have to be careful not to monopolize things, not to read the seven sheets like a lecture, punctuated by, "You're listening?" "You're not dozing off this time?" I dialed and dialed.

Finally at about 3:30 am, my time zone, she answered. I glanced at the first sheet, rejected the violent introduction, chose the quiet one. I said quietly:

"How come you're in that hotel, Beth? I know it's a long story and it's late but I'd like to hear it anyhow."

She didn't know where she was and who I was, barely who she was. I identified myself and repeated the question, a little less quietly. A long pause.

"Oh, that. No reason to wake me up for that. Terrible story. Don't even like to think of it, much less talk about it. All right, if you insist. I can't stay at Martha's because of Larry. My brother-in-law. Knew each other before he met Martha. Used to be in love with me. Not love really, something awfully... carnal, animal almost. Didn't like the idea of staying in the house alone with him. Then I thought, okay, with Martha in the hospital, my own sister, for heaven's sake, no danger. But he started in as soon as we got back from the hospital. Brutal. Can't tell you what he asked me to do."

Even my arm was aghast at that. It sank. At thigh-level her voice continued, tiny. I hung up. She rang back. "We were cut off," she said. She went back slandering her brother-in-law. "So that's why I'm in a hotel," she concluded. I glanced at the script: II A, the three alternatives: a, b, c. I chose c, again something quiet.

"A wise move. But why pick a hotel in LA? Don't you find commuting five hundred miles every day to the hospital in Phoenix a little wearing?"

I departed from quiet irony, yelling: "Your goddam values. How can you lie like that? I can't stand crazy women who lie, who betray trust, who practice deliberate sabotage on loved ones. Where's sincerity in that? Where the hell is compassion? Never mind me. Forget about me. How about your sister, though? She rang up and told me she was in perfect health this year. What a thing to wish on your own flesh and blood. Your murderous fantasies. And poor Larry. Those sex fantasies of yours. All in the head. And me, for Christ's sake, how about me? Look, stop this bullshit. I saw the leaflet in that phony 18th century jewel box of yours where you put the Valium. So I know there's a monster one-week meeting of the Golden Galaxy lunatics tomorrow in LA and I can guess you hope your ex-husband'll be there and there'll be a big reconciliation and you'll drop me and he'll drop the twenty-year-old girl for you. For God's sake you're forty, going on fifty. Sixty isn't that far off, believe me. He'll never come back, get out of the past."

Of course tears and sobs at that. I pictured her mouth square with grief.

"Come back," I commanded. "I want you here by tomorrow evening."

"I... I can't do that. Not yet. This is the last time, Jerry, I swear it is. I'll be back as soon as I'm able to. I won't go to Martha's this year, she's fine, thank God. You're right, you're so right about that, Jerry. How could I have said such awful things about my own sister? Like wishing it on her. I love Martha so much. Larry almost tried to kiss me once, that's true, but he never... I was possessed that day. It happened all of a sudden when I saw that leaflet, like that time in the subway. I never told you this, but I spent that whole day taking line after line, IRT BMT Bronx and Manhattan and Queens looking in the cars, getting off and on, on and off, looking for him until way into the night and dangerous. And knowing it was crazy all the time I was doing it but going on doing it anyhow. And it happened lots of times, once in the middle of a Wall Street crowd, two months ago. But this is the last time, Jerry, I swear it is. This time I'll get it out of my system."

"When will you be back?"

"I don't know. As soon as I'm able to."

"You don't know when you'll be back. But I know when I'll be gone. Don't be alarmed. Stop crying. I won't betray the trust you placed in me. I'll go on watering your hydrangeas twice a day and feeding your goldfish till June sixth. That's in a week. You'd better be back by June sixth if you care more for your plants and your fish than you do for your sister and me. I'm not staying in Forest Hill any more. How did I ever get involved with you grotesques anyhow? I have a better place to go to. I saw us both there but I can do it on my own, don't think I can't."

A lie. A lie.

Suddenly I broke off in total departure from script and joined her. Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, from both ends of the wire 3000 miles apart. Oh Beth. I can't do it without you. I don't want to be alone again, Beth. O Jerry, Jerry, my darling, forgive me.

It went on for some time. Finally she promised she'd be back in a week, never, never again, out of her system this time, and we'd leave for the seaside together as planned. It was badly damaged but I'd salvaged something of the dream.

After I hung up I realized she'd still been thinking of Maine. She'd been dozing when I'd talked about the permanent house for the two of us. I almost rang back but knew I wouldn't be able to summon the lyrical impulse for the sales pitch. It was better this way. The surprise would be total for her when we got into the car and started heading south instead of north.

Who wants to remember what followed? What lesson can be drawn from that? For what future?

I fell asleep in the armchair. Sunshine pouring through the window woke me up. I spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon clearing up the enraged mess I'd made the day before. I examined all the rooms critically. The house was exactly as she'd entrusted it to me two days before. Impeccable. I fed Oscar, watered the plants. Then I went over to Harvey's.

But who wants to remember that? Who wants to remember what followed?

O Lord for Thee I yearn.

Through the jungle tangle of wires I reach out for Thee.

The spirit hath fled the temple, an empty shell labeled $8.99.

But the hosts of Lord are numberless. Let me reach for reinforcements beneath the console to combat the pain of lucidity. Ah, thy pale blood fills my mouth, thrice, activates ulcers or worse.

More. More.

Perhaps now, at the price of this terrible bowel pain, better though than the other, I'll be armed to review what followed.

Behold him tiny down there, jigging about. Some of it must be good for laughs.

***

Twenty

He prays the neighbors can't see Hanna squatting in the high grass playing out the cables a foot or so through the four holes clipped out at the base of the hurricane fence. In the wind the grass billows over her. Gigantic filthy mermaid.

If interested, the neighbors can see him an hour later in the twilight sauntering toward the neat Beth side of that fence, bending down as for sea-shells on a green-sanded beach, gathering the four balls of stout twine attached to the ends of the cables. Then (but this they can't possibly see) letting the twine out as he saunters past the open window and casually tossing the four balls inside.

Elaborate precautions. He wants no witnesses.

Now inside, nearly invisible, crouched beneath the sill, her exotic plants out of harm's way, he pulls the cables in hand over hand. Suppressing concern about auricular flutter, he can imagine he's hauling in early morning nightlines heavy with eels. They slither across the lawn in convergence toward the living room window. Inevitably they run through the strip of tulips and do a certain amount of collateral damage. But most of the flowers are shattered by now anyhow.

Soon the cables are lying lifeless beneath the window.

The tricky part now. The green paint-job on the cables is fine camouflage for the lawn but not for the white wall. Takes another drink for encouragement. Then picks up the four strands of twine and puts back and heels into it, tottering back with gasps toward the opposite wall. Not good for his heart. All four of the cables pour into the house.

He goes on retreating, trips over the Christmas-wrapped monitor and gets a vicious jab in the small of the spine from one of the Christmas-wrapped sensors. (Christmas is way in the past or way in the future depending which way you look but they had to be disguised and it was the only wrapping-paper he found, in one of Harvey's closets, decades old. Yellowed Santas waved over and over from their sleighs. What did the neighbors think of Christmas in late May if they witnessed those four heart-straining trips from one house to the other?)

With that blow to his spinal column the palpitations start up again. He has to return to the sofa. He should never have agreed to help Hanna with those big first-generation sensors three hours ago. A heart attack on the threshold of entry into real life would be too cruel.

Four times he'd transported them, knee-flexed, tottering behind Hanna like a winded sweat-blinded pallbearer. With the fourth sensor set up in its corner, completing the now operational quartet, his heart had started acting up in irregular bursts. He'd had to lie down on the sofa for a half-hour. He'd been deeply alarmed even after it subsided.

At the second alert following the blow in the spine three hours later, he longs to stay on the sofa indefinitely. But there are those four cables green against the white wall. He forces himself to get up. He goes over to the window. He flings the blanket over the cables. A blanket hanging out of a living room window is a little strange but less strange than what it's hiding. As he slowly pulls the cables further into Beth's living room he wipes each one perfectly clean and dry even though her carpet is protected by thicknesses of newspaper. "Wipe your feet," he says to them comically, trying to forget his heart. Soon each one lies coiled at the foot of its sensor. He returns to the sofa.

The phone starts ringing again for the fifth time that evening. With such persistence it can only be Beth. He'd let it ring on and on the first four times. Just wasn't up to standing there in the middle of her radically altered interior decoration scheme and talking about other things.

But now with the heart alert he badly wants to hear her concerned loving voice, wants her assurance that it's probably nothing at all serious. Maybe it's also a strategy to alarm her into early return. So he gets up like fine glassware and answers the phone in the prudent way she insisted on.

There's no immediate reply, just hard breathing. Finally Ricky's spaced-out voice:

"I want Beth. Who are you? I want my mother." JW gives him the plant-watering routine. He takes a long time digesting the news that his mother is away for a week. He asks JW what he's doing in their house. JW repeats the reason and throws in the goldfish stint for good measure. Ricky hangs up on him.

He goes outside and inspects the window job. The blanket does look odd. And you can make out the shape of the cables underneath. Finally the neighbors don't matter all that much, but what about the police? Sometimes you saw them cruising around at night, their patrol cars hurling glaring full moons on the houses. That worries JW. But it will be only one night, that night. He made it clear to Harvey.

Six hours earlier he'd found Harvey on the cot curled up on Hanna's lap, clutching his stomach and staring at the wall. Hanna was rocking him. You seldom saw her down in the cellar except for emergencies.

She glares at JW and whispers: "Look what you did to him, you bastard." JW has the means of relieving his pain if it's just that. Solemnly he announces that he's willing. Deep in his pain, Harvey doesn't react. JW touches his arm and bends over and repeats in his ear, louder, that he's willing to let the sensors be installed in the living room of the other house. For a strictly limited time, on the terms already agreed upon.

Still no reaction. After half a year of harassment this indifference alarms JW. Hanna comes to his rescue. She strokes Harvey's caved-in cheek.

"Harv honey, didn't you hear? You can have it. He says it's okay, we can stick the things in the bitch's house." He goes on staring at his pain. She bends down closer to his face.

"Honey, you can have it. You can have it, he says. You talked all the time about it and now you got it you don't care. Don't do this to me, Harv. Does it hurt real bad, sweetie? Lemme get the pills."

She removes her bulk from under his head, gentles it on the pillow. She comes back with a glass of water, eases him slowly up to a sitting position. The curly golden wig is shoved forward over his eyes. All you can see of his face is the gigantic beak and the embittered mouth.

She puts the glass down on the floor, carefully rearranges the wig, fluffs it. Then says, "Say ahh," places the pill on his tongue and lifts the glass to his lips and swallows herself so he'll do it in imitation.

He slowly comes back. Stares at JW.

"When?"

"Tonight."

"How long?"

"Just tonight."

"A week."

"No."

"Five days."

"Just tonight."

JW says it in a tone that should tell Harvey he's wasting time and breath. He doesn't have much left. It's something deeper than his impaired vocal cords now. He has difficulty summoning up breath to make them vibrate into half-intelligible sound. His face is loose and waxen over the skull.

He tries to plead for time without breath. Holds up four bony fingers.

JW shakes his head.

"Whole house, then," Harvey brings out.

"Just the living room."

"Four days. Everywhere."

"What I said."

"Give you more money. For two days. And everywhere."

JW feels stirrings of anger at the way Harvey's maneuvering him into the role of a sadistic time-monopolist, as though by a single word ("four" then "three" and now even "two") JW could prolong his life indefinitely. JW doesn't let pity get the upper hand. He shakes his head. He isn't indefinitely purchasable.

"Eighty-four thousand dollars was what you offered last night. That's enough for me."

"Eighty-four thousand dollars?" Hanna echoes the sum in the same incredulous shocked way she did over the phone long ago when JW told her the amount of the check Harvey had enclosed in the letter. After all, that money would have been hers soon. Most of it anyhow.

Harvey stares down at the floor. "Get. The checkbook," he commands Hanna.

Negotiations nearly break down then and there. JW insists on cash. It's Friday evening, Harvey reminds him in writing. He wouldn't be able to transfer that much cash from the money market account till Tuesday at the earliest. He wants to start in that very evening, he doesn't have time to wait around. He offers JW an IOU as well, witnessed by Hanna. JW is suspicious.

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.

Is this the moment and place that he takes off the blue denim jacket?

He starts climbing up. His heart isn't equal to the task, not with moldering rungs below that break under his weight, that slip out of his grasp above and the dangerous buckle as he rises through dead bindweed toward the open red window like a lover or a fireman, not a fireman though, forty years too late for that, and the one-way lover hadn't needed a ladder, the key is under the mat as Mrs Morgenstern said it would be and he gets it and inserts it and lets himself in, steals across the living room to the stairs and up the stairs to that room at the end of the corridor and at that point, taking him out of it, cars brake violently in front of the house, voices, the slamming of the car doors.

The blue principle of reality to his rescue a second time. Any moment now the police will break inside. This time, however dumb, they're sure to see the four cables immediately. They'll follow the cables up the stairs, down the corridor, through the door and break into what's going on inside the helmet.

JW's foot gropes for missing rungs to descend from his compromising posture. With the shift of his weight the ladder at that acute angle buckles away from the house, teeters unsupported for a second and then clatters violently back against the wall, almost wrenching him loose.

The voices are close now, girls' voices too. He opens his eyes and over his shoulder looks down at them in the moonlight looking up at him: Ricky, his chunky Hispano pal, two other rocker types, four busty girls with violet lips and nails, black in the moonlight.

The girls start making savage lynch-mob noises. Now they're all milling at the foot of the ladder. They start shaking it violently. No question of making the universal gesture of surrender, hands in the air. His white-knuckled hands can only strangle the wood for survival.

He tries to explain that he's Mrs Anderson's neighbor, but can only cry it spasmodically to the wall because he's hugging the bucking frame and anyhow they can't hear him with the noise they're making.

With the window open can't Harvey hear the noise? Or is he encapsulated forty years back, already in the other room where there can be no noise, not even of weeping? That's a fleeting thought, skimming over the slow sands, so no time-trap because JW is at grips with an intensely real present. He should be grateful for the imminence of cardiac arrest or a smashed spinal column.

"Come on down, you mother," one of them yells.

Unable to turn around, JW cries to the wall, choppily: "Please stop. Shaking. The ladder. I have a. Bad heart. Condition. Let me. Get down. And explain."

A rocker starts up the ladder. JW tries to clamber up higher, away from that murderous face. The other lunges up, grabs at his foot. All he gets is JW's empty shoe. Off balance, he topples off the ladder with the shoe in his hand down onto the others. Taking advantage of the confusion below and the end of the shaking, JW starts letting himself down, crying, "Neighbor! Neighbor!" Ricky pushes the others back. JW collapses on the grass, clutching his chest.

When he opens his eyes Ricky's spaced-out white face, inches away, is staring down at him. At a higher level a circle of hostile spaced-out faces look down at him. A foot above his face a hand is holding his shoe.

JW gasps again, "Neighbor!" Gasps it over and over. After a while his heart allows him to elaborate the concept. Does it the wrong way. Doesn't say plausibly: had heard noise from the house, seen suspicious red light, had climbed up the ladder to have a look. Conditioned reflex by now for him to state function after identity.

So he says: "I'm the neighbor. I water Mrs Anderson's plants."

The girls jeer. Before he can rectify their image of him climbing up a ladder at 2:00 am with a watering can, one of the rockers shouts, "Never mind the old bastard. The front door, for crissakes!"

They rush that way. The old bastard too, yanked to his feet by the chunky Hispano type who helped steal his precious audio system and who is now twisting his arm painfully behind his back. The gang fills the doorway and begins pushing with their shoulders. The door bursts open with a sound of irreparable breakage inside and they crowd into the red gloom of the living room crunching underfoot the debris of the gilt rococo chair. The second, illicit, passage of the cables has swept protecting newspapers away and the broad swathe of carpet is full of dirt. Also her cherry-wood side-table is overturned and her flowered vase smashed. The cables pour up the staircase and beyond.

The chunky Hispano releases his hold and JW collapses on the sofa. He sees them as from a great distance massed at the foot of the staircase, daunted by Hanna midway up the flight. Amazon defending a Thracian mountain pass. Her mean pig eyes glare through wilding hair. She viciously jabs Beth Anderson's decorative poker down at them. Nobody dares take her on.

O brave hophead hoplites, lynching a drunk heart-sick old man with his back turned and his defenseless hands clutching unsteady wood for survival, no hesitation then: pitch him into myocardial infarction or quadriplegia. Do something now, for Christ's sake. Baffle her back like a lion with the four legs of a chair, a kitchen chair, not one of these elegant ones here. Rush her, overpower her, follow the four black and now green guides down the corridor and into the room, rip wires, unplug him, evict the time-voyeurger.

Stalemate. The two sides don't move, just eye each other. Then JW hears someone say, "The ladder." Ricky disappears through the front door. Time goes by. Anxious for diversion, JW thinks: the side-table can be righted, the mass-produced vase replaced, the carpet vacuum-cleaned. But the heirloom?

Sudden dramatic turn of events. Stalemate broken. Harvey and Ricky appear at the head of the stairs. Isn't that a wreath of dead bindweed in Ricky's hair? Truce. Ricky is supporting Harvey, like a pal. Alliance now?

Ricky makes a sign to his friends not to move. Hanna backs up the stairs, still gripping the poker and keeping her eyes on the gang. She nearly trips over one of the cables. Harvey talks to her. She doesn't look happy at what he says. She goes down the stairs to the door. Going out with the poker still in her hand her foot crunches a big fragment of the heirloom.

In a few minutes she's back with an envelope. All three of them disappear down the corridor. The gang relaxes. They start smoking various things. JW hasn't got the energy to get up and hand saucers around. Anyhow he senses that the fire-hazard worry is another diversion. From what? His heart? Or is that a diversion too?

Soon Ricky appears. Looks satisfied. Going down the stairs with the envelope in his hand he says, "Bingo!" Squeezes past Hanna. She still has the poker in her hand. Slam it bent double over his head, ram it up his venal rectum. She tosses the poker onto the carpet below.

Ricky directs his friends to drag the furniture into a barrier (be gentle with it, gentle, gentle, implores JW in thought) and now the living room is separated in two, on one side the gang, on the other side the cables and JW on his sofa. Peaceful partition of conquered territory.

JW retreats as far away from it all as possible. He and his bottle go into the Mexican nook with the big cactus and the terra-cotta sombreros. He takes a swig and lies down on the cactus-patterned sofa. He closes his eyes. He hears his heart, the persistent rustle of newspapers, the tinkle of glasses, raucous bursts of laughter, now loud rock music and above all that – how is it possible? – hears the buzzing and whirring of the four lenses upstairs. A party's under way. He ought to get up and survey things. Tired. In a second he'll do that, just a few seconds. So tired.

The ladder bucks wildly but he can't hold on with the key in one hand the watering can in the other, can't reach that inflamed open window with rungs breaking under him. He tries to tell the yelling lynch mob below that it's not real fire but the electric fireplace, fictional fire that can't burn, he'll put it out anyhow. He tries to rise to the window. Ultimate rungs break. He pitches down into the lynch mob and their knives and spades and saws. They have familiar faces from way back but pitiless. Surviving them he's on a beach looking for something precious lost in the sands. It must be found before night. It's a deadline. The sky fills with darkness.

Maybe it's another dream that he opens his eyes onto a face suspended white above him, staring down. What he should say to the bloodless face is: "Get out, all of you. Your mother left me with the key to the house. I'm responsible for what happens here. It's delegated authority. So you and your gang get the hell out of here." Or he should say: "Stop those machines up there. It's not worth the money in that envelope, we're all being radiated into incurable sickness. I delegate delegated authority for you to go back upstairs and shut the machines off and chase him out of this house or whatever house it is."

Instead JW finds himself saying: "You stole my hi-fi. I want it back." What he should urgently say now is: "Drive me to the hospital. I'm not well. I think I'm dying." Instead, he says, "And the records too. All of them."

Could the other have said outside a dream what he says in his curious high-pitched fragile voice? "I know you. You're the old bastard who screwed my mother before I made her kick you out of our house. Get out of here."

Whichever world he's in JW is deeply shocked at that and replies: "You don't know me at all but I know you, everything, inside and out."

And proves it with testifying forefinger pointed up at the white wincing face by reciting everything he knows about him, from earliest childhood, his favorite ice cream flavors, the names of his early friends, sledding in Forest Park with his mother, precocious masturbation, once ran a fever of 105 and his mother lit candles for him in the church, his favorite toys, comic-books, movies, how he nearly drowned in a river, and his mother nearly died at that, the length of his appendicitis scar, recites three of his worst poems, tells how his mother rolled on the floor when she saw the dead girl in the room, how he'd vampired her out of a decade in a year, how he smashed his mother's car and kicked her, kicked his loving mother, exploited her, drained her of money and beauty.

Where else than in a dream could the other have protested in a high weepy voice: Get out of my head. I never kicked my mother. I love my mother. I love Beth. Get out of my head. You're in the Golden Galaxy too. You're a Supreme in the Golden Galaxy.

He wants to talk about the Golden Galaxy but JW is back on the deadlined beach searching hard in the growing darkness. You can dream in a dream. From the seaward side of a dune he hears a scream, ohhh! and his name.

JW opens his eyes on painful daylight. Doesn't know where he is but when he hears the scream again (not "ohhh!" but denial: "nohhh") sits bolt upright, blinking. Silence now. He staggers out of the Mexican nook.

Beth Anderson is sitting among the fragments of the rococo armchair near the open living room door. Still gripping the straps of her flight bag, she's swaying to and fro. Her deathly white face is ecstatic with The Golden Galaxy technique to deny the painful reality of unpotted (but faithfully watered) hydrangeas, the smashed goldfish bowl with Oscar stiff in the shards, the butts and burned spoons and shooters on the carpet, the slumped and curled up bodies of the kids out for the count, the overturned table, the furniture-barricade, the broken vase, the dirt, the cables, the four black cables pouring up the staircase.

Her lips move soundlessly. Is it a prayer for belief and maybe the lucky cosmic number, bingo, one billion and something and this veil of chaos will vanish? JW feels like joining her in prayer.

At this point a thud comes from upstairs and then a raw animal bellow. She tries to ignore it but when the inhuman bellow comes again her eyes open on JW where he stands with his missing shoe, gripping the empty bottle of Glenfiddich.

Her wet blue eyes widen and widen. Then she squeezes them shut again and tries to struggle back into denial.

But Hanna thumps down the stairs with an earthquaking face, bearing Harvey, and she has to open her eyes again as Hanna jolts past her toward the door with Harvey's bald head lolling over the crook of her arm, his mouth open, eyes white, a great red welt on his forehead.

Beth starts screaming again. She screams: Police! Police!

The kids who slumbered like rocks through the first screams and the bellows resurrect at the word "police", grab their clothes and stuff and vanish in super-accelerated fast motion.

Beth and JW are alone in the shambles. They're both looking around. She's looking around for something in the room. He's looking around for something to say. He doesn't know what to say. Anyhow words are no good at this moment. What is she looking around for?

JW thinks of something better than words. He gropes for his inside breast pocket theoretically located at heart level. That gesture, desperate now, must resemble his earlier heart-clutching gestures last night.

He discovers he's not wearing the blue denim jacket. So there can't be an inside breast pocket and so no wallet and so no $84,000.30 check that he wants to give her to remove that expression from her face.

If he doesn't find what he's looking for, she does. She bends down and picks up the decorative poker Hanna tossed away. Less in fear of the poker than of her eyes JW backs up through the door, turns, and, loping like Lenny, leaves that house forever.

***

Twenty One

So here he is after all that, back at starting point, the dried-blood gloom of Harvey Morgenstern's cellar. Seated with a runny nose at the console, he stares at the screen as he's been doing for so long, but this time viewing nothing better than his own face under that recycled permanent-wave helmet. Like a madman in some country, or a criminal in his own, or a universal dunce. All three at the same time?

His face twitches at him. He twitches back. He realizes he's just about reached the tether-end of recall and stall. Any moment now he'll have to go. But where? Via the staircase, up and out and forward? Via the red dispatching button, down and in and back (but maybe black)?

Theoretically, recall and stall could go on a little longer. Between flight from Beth Anderson's shambled living room and his present underground position there'd be lots of things to chronicle if the chronicler were in better shape to do the job. Those things are a scramble in his mind except sometimes a little better during spells of lucidity. Which means much worse in another way. Luckily, the spells are less and less frequent. This one, he feels sure, is the last he'll suffer and he's on the verge of snapping out of it. He knows the symptoms by now. Lucidity goes as suddenly as it comes.

But even lucid, chronology's shot to hell. Everything's random selection. And the scenes he does manage to salvage are blurred like Harvey's early images. They're too close up in time. It's like presbyopia, a sight defect that worsens with age: far things sharp but can't focus on near things. JW can see things fifty years back very clearly, the engraving whorls on a 50-centime French stamp or the double-toothed grin of a pumpkin with a candle inside, but not the things that followed eviction from the other house.

It's a symptom of the worsening time sickness, he often thinks. Or maybe the side-effects of amplification.

Logically, one of the first things must be the visit to the hospital. Lying there unconscious, white as the walls, radiating wires and tubes and surrounded by dials, Harvey doesn't look much different here than down in the cellar. Is he still voyaging? The visitor can see the red welt on his forehead, fainter now. He asks about it. He expects the doctor to confirm electrocution. The doctor doesn't understand what he's talking about. Harvey is suffering from heart collapse, he says, not unusual in the terminal stage.

He dies that night. Harvey betrayed him but JW feels sorry. He doesn't go to the burning ceremony though. Did Hanna get the ashes along with everything else? Each time he flushes the toilet JW thinks of Harvey and his last wish. Although it wasn't his idea, JW's ashamed of the thought, almost to the point of constipation.

JW still feels sorry even when he finds out (months later that must be) that Hanna inherited everything, even the Schering Plough shares Harvey had practically promised him with no protest on her part. She'd even said Harvey could stick them up his ass. But JW doesn't get a single Schering Plough share, not even that way. He doesn't cry over it. Sometimes he laughs and laughs at the idea of harboring a ploughshare that way.

The will doesn't matter much to him by then, not even when it turns out that there's no mysterious account in his name with back pay. So he gets nothing. Practically nothing. A clause stipulates that the "experimental devices" in the cellar are his and that he can continue living in the house until his death when full property of the house will revert to Hanna or her estate.

That was nice of Harvey. Unless it was posthumous revenge, JW occasionally thinks during bad moments with the machine.

He can't recall if this is before or after the hospital visit but he remembers getting up before dawn and sneaking over to her house. She must have got someone to clear out that room. All of Harvey's stuff is there piled up alongside the ash-can near the street lamp. The salvaged tinkered objects have accomplished their mortal cycle from garbage back to garbage, ashes to ashes. There are the four cables, mutilated now. She must have hacked them off at the holes in the fence where they trespassed on her property. There's the portable switchboard, the relay, the portable monitor, the time-cassettes, the permanent wave helmet that killed him (he's convinced of this no matter what the doctor said or will say). There's even a cardboard box full of red bulbs. Also his fedora.

JW steps over her friendly symbolic white wood fence. Her Chevy isn't there and the windows of the house are in white mourning with drawn curtains and drapes. He guesses she's gone to her sister's for real now. Still, he looks up nervously at her bedroom window when the driveway gravel crunches underfoot. He leaves her keys under the mat and goes behind the house.

It's dark but he can make out the ladder, still propped up under the opaque window. That's a good sign. Maybe nobody's been here since the lynching episode. But as the sky lightens slowly he sees that there's no blue denim jacket anywhere. Couldn't the wallet have slipped out of the breast pocket? He looks and looks. He finds his damp left shoe under a lilac bush.

He starts lugging all of Harvey's stuff into the house, to punish his heart he tells himself. At the end he's dizzy and sweating but his heart goes on beating and beating. It doesn't miss a beat. Panting, he goes to the back of the house. He searches methodically in the high weeds, particularly in front of the cellar ventilation opening where the four cables are still pouring out uselessly, and around the lopsided elm, and also the spot where he pitched forward onto the empty beer bottles. All he finds are more beer bottles and beer caps.

For weeks he turns Hanna's house upside down from cellar to attic, the closets again, the bathrooms, Hanna's room, his bedroom, even the ripe garbage pail, explored with wet stinking hands. Who could have taken it? Ricky and his gang? If so, where can he locate them? Hanna? She's the prime suspect. The others couldn't cash the check. All Hanna had to do was rip it up and be $84,000.30 richer. But he doesn't know where to locate her either. When he returned from the hospital he'd found her closet and drawers yawning and empty. All she'd left were moldering pizzas in the refrigerator and intimate black hairs near the shower drain. Anyhow, would she have listened to his pleas?

He tries to phone Beth. The phone rings on and on as he expected it would. Her windows are still in white mourning. One drizzly pre-dawn day he sneaks over to her house for the second time. He feels deep guilt as he recovers the key under the mat. He tries to insert it and discovers the lock has been changed. He experiences relief from the guilt, but then deep depression. He goes back to bed fully dressed.

He writes her a long letter of justification. He says that, appearances to the contrary, he was as much a victim as she was. Until things got crazily out of control he'd faithfully followed her instructions regarding the plants and the goldfish. He is as emotionally annihilated by the events as she must be and in addition very nearly suffered a heart attack.

He says that he loves her deeply and explains about the house near the beach for the two of them, which was why he'd let Harvey install those machines. It was for her birthday. He has trouble making the beach sound real even to himself.

In a long PS he says that he left his blue denim jacket somewhere in her house. Probably in the Mexican nook but maybe in one of the bathrooms. If not there then in the living room or the kitchen. He adds that she'll find a wallet in the inside breast pocket and what he wants her to do is this: take out all the money (over $3,000) and keep it as compensation for the damage to her living room although that damage, as explained above, wasn't really his fault. She could, if it's not too much trouble, drop the wallet in Harvey's mailbox in case she doesn't want to see him immediately after what happened.

He drops the letter in her mailbox. It's full of junk mail. She's still away in Phoenix. Or is it LA?

He never gets a reply to that letter. Not even something hopeful like the letter returned unopened. That's communication of sorts. Maybe when she got back she did get rid of the unopened letter but in her garbage pail along with the other junk mail.

He sends her two other letters, much later likely. In the first he probably repeats himself a little about responsibility for the events but accepting more of it and also about his deep love even though by this time that's become a little unreal too, like the beach. Traveling and voyaging a lot, he's become pretty indifferent to other things. He tells her that she doesn't have to bother returning the $5,000 he lent her for the lawyer.

In the third letter, written months later in a bad moment after the dog fiasco he encloses a $5,000 check. When he goes outside for the first time in weeks to drop the letter in her mailbox he discovers that her nameplate has disappeared. The drapes and curtains have disappeared from the windows too. The house stares vacantly like a dead man.

So he keeps the letter with the check. It had been a sincere gesture. His bank account is back to a little over $10,000. He has no old age dependency insurance. It's true he doesn't have to worry about rent, won't have to for the rest of his life.

One rainy dark-blue evening there's a sudden yellowish dog pissing against the elm. How did it get in? Under or over the fence? An underdog, unmistakably, with those dog-eared ears and mournful yellowish eyes. It wags its clotted tail at the sight of JW as though grateful for not being kicked but retreats when he tries to pet it. JW fills a dish with scraps of meat and noodles left over from his last meal and intended for his next. The dog sniffs it once and turns away. "Beggars can't be choosers," he reminds the animal and goes back inside.

The next day the plate's empty. After a few more shared meals the dog allows JW to pet it. Soon it agrees to come inside. It lies alongside the sofa for a while without disturbing the trips except when sometimes it has senseless fits of happiness and its tail thumps on the floor. JW gets into the habit of leaving the front door ajar for the dog's comings and goings.

One day, he can't remember when, Ricky comes over with the audio outfit in his car. He's visibly in bad need. He claims he forced José to give it back. For his pains he wants $2,000 for it, then $1,000, and so on down to $500. Absolutely last price: $300. He'd have gone down to the price of a fix but JW gives him $100 even though music means nothing to him now.

JW doesn't even bother mentioning the wallet. What for? Anyhow, he's finally realized that if Ricky or one of the gang had found the wallet they'd have already held him up for the check. It's Hanna for sure.

Ricky wants to talk about his mother. She refuses to see him. He says that he loves her and never kicked her. He weeps. JW's not really interested in that subject either. The thought doesn't even occur to him to ask where she's living now. He finds it hard to talk about anything. He's anxious to get back to the cellar. The last person he's talked to more than five seconds was the owner of the wine and liquor store who'd run out of Lord's Vineyards. That was maybe two weeks ago.

Ricky wants to talk about The Golden Galaxy. JW doesn't. What suddenly JW wants to talk about is joints. The machine doesn't perform well at all, maybe because the images aren't amplified enough on the receiving end, he thinks. He's in no condition to get the stuff on his own. The price Ricky asks is a rip-off but JW doesn't feel like haggling.

So Ricky regularly supplies him with what he, JW, had once procured for Harvey thanks to Mr Venezelous. Ricky comes about once a month with the stuff in a scholarly briefcase that contrasts with his tattered faded jeans, his dirty long hair and scuffed high-heeled mother-kickers. He wants to talk to JW but each time JW gives him the money fast in the vestibule and practically has to push him out.

That goes on for quite some time. Then Ricky disappears, for months it must have been, because JW has to depend exclusively on the California sauterne for the amplifier effect, his stomach remembers that constantly.

Every so often he pampers himself with a joint on the sofa. But he's careful not to touch what he's hoarded up for the big voyage if one day he dares.

One afternoon the bellowed name of Jesus destroys a trading session with Charlie Schultz. JW was on the sofa reconstructing the illustration of Gettysburg, number 67 or 76 of the bubble-gum cards, the Great Battles series, perfect smoke wreaths about cannon muzzles, raised sabers, joyous crimson splotches on gray and blue uniforms.

It's travel. Travel's upstairs on the sofa and unlimited. Voyages are down in the cellar, strictly limited and less pleasant but more authentic.

Weeping on the threshold of the living room in dramatic black, Hanna seems to fill the whole house. She has the key to the house (technically hers) in her hand. He'd ignored the doorbell as he always did, the doorbell and the telephone bell.

"Jesus, I thought it was Harv for a second there, first that smell then you on the sofa," she says and totters to the striped armchair. It twangs under her weight, emits dust and stuffing. She wipes her eyes and asks about it, also about the flowered one facing it, and the tarnished oval mirror framed by gilt rosebuds.

JW takes a final lip-searing drag and reluctantly says that he found them up in the attic. His voice sounds unfamiliar. He doesn't use it much except to himself a little and then practically a whisper, he's so close. He concedes the information that he nearly smashed the mirror negotiating it down the steep stairs. It's too long to say but he thinks: that would have been seven years of bad luck, so an assurance of relative longevity. Was that the bad luck involved? Someone had once made that wise point. Who?

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.

One evening, totally amplified, JW finds himself luring the yellowish dog with a frozen lambchop to the plugged-in helmet set at X 200. He's in bad need of an extra pair of hands to crown the whining yelping struggling dog. It breaks loose and bolts up the cellar stairs in three howling leaps. Sitting on the floor JW reflects that anyhow the size of the helmet would have required a much bigger dog to test it on. Also all that rough hair would have insulated the animal. A Mexican hairless? Far too small. And where can you find a stray Mexican hairless this far north? Now JW imagines the yellowish dog helmeted at the console and joining the humping dog sequence at X 9999. JW starts laughing and laughing at the thought of canine pornography.

When he pulls himself together and out of the cellar with the thawing lambchop the dog is gone. He never comes back. JW misses him but consoles himself by reflecting that he won't have to leave the front door ajar anymore. It's winter by then and there are drafts. He leaves it ajar anyhow for quite a long time. When he finally closes it he feels deeply depressed and writes his last letter to Beth Anderson, thinking she still occupies that house.

One evening in some month or other at 10:23 the doorbell wakes him up. He gets out of bed and negotiates the stairs down to the door although normally he never answers the doorbell. It's no time of day – night, actually – to be visiting people, he grumbles as he opens the door. When she sees him clearly she gives a little cry and says, "Mr Morgenstern, what have you done with Professor Weizman?" It's a bad joke and he starts closing the door on her. "Please take this and give it to him," she says, thrusting her usual bouquet of shopworn flowers at him. "Say it's from me. Why doesn't he phone?"

When the door shuts on her JW is angered to see that the flowers are worse than shopworn: fit for the garbage-pail. He throws them on the floor and goes back to bed. In the morning he doesn't see the flowers where he thought he threw them. He looks all over, even in the garbage pail. It sticks its tongue out at him with a mottled banana-peel. He'll have to get around to emptying the pail. He pokes about in it but doesn't find the flowers. By then he doesn't expect to.

He's forgotten her phone number and has to look it up. A woman's voice tells him Mrs Anderson moved five months ago, she doesn't know where. The vacant stare of the house comes back to him now. But that couldn't be five months ago, could it? He can't find her new address in the phone book. Finally he realizes the phone book's ten years old. Maybe she's moved to Phoenix or LA. She could be anywhere. Ricky knows where she lives but Ricky hasn't come for months. He wishes he'd come. The California sauterne's wrecking his stomach.

The next time JW goes shopping (which is about once a month) he passes in front of Dave and Tom's but doesn't see her through the plate glass window. A month or so later on the way to the supermarket again, he goes inside. She isn't there. It's too much bother asking about her but he feels he has to justify his presence so he buys the cheapest bouquet they have – something like daisies but with a colored heart – and when he gets back with all the groceries he sticks the flowers on the little round table near the door and forgets about them. One day he sees them there, fit for the garbage pail, which is where he puts them.

One night JW dreams he's time-traveling down in the cellar and has Rebecca almost in focus when there's a terrific banging somewhere upstairs. He thinks it's the elm in a storm. But now it comes in triple tattoos, too fast to be the branch. He dreams he leaves the cellar and opens the front door. It's the woman next door, the one with the tulips. Her fist is raised for another tattoo or to strike him. She stares at him in theatrical horror. "What's happened to you? You've got roaches on you." It doesn't bother him anymore. They could inscribe whatever they liked on his stone. But it was meant as an insult.

He pushes her away from the door as hard as he can and insults her back. He locks the door, double-bolts it. He dreams he can hear her crying from the other side of his safely bolted door, ringing and hammering again. To escape it he goes upstairs to bed and has dreams within that dream. They're even worse, involving his dead son.

Violent stomach pain wakes him up. He needs solid food. He remembers there's no food in the house. He'll have to confront the glare of the sky and go shopping. When he tries to open the door he finds it locked and double-bolted, something he never does, anyhow doesn't remember doing.

One day the doorbell rings with unusual persistence. JW's on his sofa. It finally stops. It always does sooner or later. Immediately after, though, there's a sharp rapping on the window. The intruder, distorted by the dirty panes into something like a bad time-image, makes urgent obscure gestures and vanishes. The doorbell resumes.

JW gets up, opens, stares and finally recognizes the transformed visitor and backdrop. JW remembers that the last time he opened the door on him ragged and sullen it was cold and white outside. It's hot and green now and there he stands, a forward time-traveler from the corny fifties with a button-down collar, quiet tie, a suit (who wears suits now?) with sharply creased trousers breaking perfectly on shiny shoes, a short haircut, a persistently ecstatic smile. That smile is the thing that disguises him most of all. JW almost smiles ecstatically himself.

"It's about time," he says in an excited rusty voice and guides Ricky through the mess to the flowered armchair. He tells him to wait. He goes upstairs and brings back the money. The other counts it carefully, inscribes the amount in a neat black address-book, places the money in a buff envelope and the envelope on his lap. He reinforces his smile and takes out of the briefcase a jewel-case with stars on the lid, a funny disguise for the stuff.

He opens it, revealing three rings on violet plush. One of the rings is formed by entwined snakes with red eyes. All three rings look familiar. "Please choose, Professor Weizman. Two hundred dollars more and you can have two, twice the spiritual force."

JW lunges forward and snatches the money back. "I want the stuff," he mumbles, perhaps imploringly. Ricky goes on smiling. He puts the jewel case back in the briefcase and pulls out a sheaf of leaflets. "No charge, of course." He withdraws his shiny shoe quickly from the path of a survivor roach and launches into mystical gibberish. JW's heard it all before. He stares at his briefcase and mutters: "Cut the shit. Give me the stuff."

All the new Ricky has are the rings and more leaflets. He speaks of rebirth, cites himself as an example of it, urges it upon JW. JW orders him out of the house. Before he goes (smiling even more intensely) he leaves his mother's address and phone-number. "She would like so much to hear from you, Professor Weizman. We all would. I'll be back."

Each time he comes, constantly now it seems, it's the same story. In his corny 1950 uniform, with his intense mad smile, he holds aloft his briefcase to lure JW into widening the crack of the front door into wide welcome. "Wonderful things for you Professor Weizman!" JW always widens the crack on the off chance that the briefcase contains the uncosmic veil-of-reality-lifting stuff he's craving to fuel his voyages with. He ended by offering double the usual rip-off price, then triple.

He sullenly convoys his impeccable visitor through the minefield of disorder and dirt to the dead room. Where of course the nut pulls out his mystical shit. He's incorruptible. He talks about his mother's spiritual progress. "We're guiding her." JW guesses that "we" is Ricky and his father. He feels faintly sorry for her but sorrier for himself, constantly tricked that way.

Ricky has new conversion tactics. He's given up frontal assault in favor of flank harassment. Each time he comes he speaks about a great InGathering ("perhaps the very last") scheduled soon at Coney Island. Does Corny Island still exist? "We would very much like you to come," Ricky says. He urges JW to fight free of Glauk and his Veil of Irreality even while JW feebly pushes him out of the house. "Thank you, thank you," he says as the door slams shut on him.

JW had completely forgotten Coney Island. He returns to the sofa and only half-succeeds in riding the Ferris Wheel with his parents. He tries hard to imagine the crowds on Coney Island beach way back. He can't go beyond abstract knowledge of their swarming existence. He tries and tries. Something's wrong.

Failure to repossess new fragments of the past contaminates the old ones. Things start going wrong with the trips. Memories once possessed elude him. He can't picture the stamps or the bubblegum cards. His mother's face near the hump-backed radio refuses to materialize. He can't hear her scandalized joyous throat-sound. The ceiling screen overhead gives him nothing but its network of cracks. He finds himself evicted into the trivial and meaningless present. He wanders about the house aimlessly, sleeps enormously but poorly. He clings to the hope that it's cyclic and that after this blankness he'll be able to travel again.

One day he returns to the first experimental time-cassettes after a long absence and discovers that Miss Forster has grown dim. So have the dogs in bucking expressionless union. In the other living room Rachel – whichever one of the three presumed persons on the presumed sofa she may be – is fading for good. She's never emerged out of blur, but as blur she's fading too. JW recalls that Harvey had spoken of this impermanence of the time-cassettes. But soon he realizes that the other images directly pumped out of the dead room upstairs are going too. Everything is going.

One night, appalled by the accelerating decomposition of doorknobs and his teacher's smile, he opens the box with the small hoard set aside for the helmeted voyage he's kept putting off. He does it for courage as well as for amplification. He coifs the helmet at X 200 for her bedroom with that fading vertical blur merging with the fading horizontal blur.

On the very threshold of entry, forefinger rigid on the red dispatching button, he's caught by lucidity and doesn't dare. It's not the first time. He removes the helmet, consumes more of the hoard, lurches upstairs and tries again to crack Harvey's navigational simplifications. Suddenly everything makes sense to his luminous mind. He almost breaks his neck storming down the cellar steps.

He's like a cross-handed virtuoso over the electronic keyboard. He produces not useless music but precious things in marvelous clarity: the cat, the salesman, the rabbi, the maid, even something new, Harvey in his early thirties. Harvey seems to be staring solemnly at him. He slowly smiles as in encouragement.

Finally JW gets his mother and Mrs Morgenstern in their time-renovated armchairs but as never before: in sharp focus, color and dimension. He's not a victim of random selection anymore. He can concentrate on his mother's face and even stop the image on her hazel eyes.

Joyful at having at last seen her eyes, he solicits the first of the two time-cassettes from the burned down house before fire. With no need for the perilous helmet, he sees Rachel emerging from blur. She was (had been) the middle figure on the sofa. She's wearing a blue blouse with a little-girl collar and a blue ribbon in her hair and is looking at television. Once she looks his way and, unbearably lovely, smiles. He stops her image on that smile. He can almost believe she sees him. It must be Harvey entering the room. He falls asleep over that image. When he awakes, the time-cassette has unwound to the end and the screen's blank.

He closes his eyes. Loved-ones and precious things come back that way too. He sees, with unprecedented authenticity, Momma and Poppa leaning toward the big square radio, listening to the poor shit blubbering out his sins. Mr Anthony's voice, warm and consoling, tells him to return to the source of forgiveness. Thank you, thank you, Mr Anthony.

Things completely forgotten come back. He remembers the contents of the second stamp album his mother had offered him for Christmas a year after the sale of the first one: the Penny Black with backward-gazing young Victoria on it, the US 1847 Five-Cent Franklin, the US 1876 Commemorative. The bubblegum Great Battle cards come back too with marvelous detail and color: Stalingrad, The Liberation of Paris, The Battle of the Bulge.

Now a skilled sequencing summons Keith to the screen. It's a wonderfully clear image in three-dimensional color. He's nicely dressed and looks great. JW tells him so. He doesn't greet his father or smile but he keeps on staring at him, there can be no doubt about that. Which proves Harvey was wrong, he thinks jubilantly, when he said that if we can see them they can't ever see us. Because Keith sees JW all right, keeps staring at him, disapprovingly. JW feels ashamed of his wrinkled stained clothes and unshaven face, the empty bottles and joint-butts. He feels like telling Keith he shouldn't judge his father too harshly the way his father had once judged him. Still, JW feels so glad to see his son looking that great even if it's humiliating to be seen by him the way he (JW) is.

Then he senses something wrong. It focuses painfully. Keith's never been in this house, it's not possible, he was never within the catchment-area of the machine. He starts fading. JW says, don't go, but he goes.

That pulls him out of it into total emptiness. The other acquisitions have gone too. He can't picture his mother's face, can't remember the sound of her scandalized joyous throat sound. Now he recalls that in that last vision of her the radio was square and Mr Anthony's voice consoling. But that radio had been humpbacked. And Mr Anthony never offered absolution. Inauthentic a second time, his mother in the striped armchair. Her eyes were (had been) blue, not hazel. He remembers too that there'd never been a second stamp album after the first one. He'd never possessed those precious longed-for issues like the 1847 Five-Cent Franklin and the 1876 Commemorative. JW remembers that the bubble-gum cards with Charlie Schulz had been years before Stalingrad, The Liberation of Paris and The Battle of the Bulge. Also that television had been commercialized after the war. How could Rachel have been looking at television during the war?

He revolts at that inauthenticity, sacrifices the rest of the hoard, crowns himself with the helmet set at X 9999 and inserts the second of the two time-cassettes from the burned down house hours from fire. Forefinger on the red dispatching button he takes a mental running start and supplies the prelude to what he longs and fears to see.

The handsome Greek-profiled youth struggles again down the street to the Morgenstern house, as promised, with flapping flannel trousers, maintaining his golden hair against the gale, practically a hurricane, assailed by skittering cans, ash-can covers, wrenched-off branches from the roaring trees. He reaches the front door.

The aging observer stops the mental image and so time, leaving the other immobile, kneeling before the doormat as in long prayer. The observer hesitates and then allows the other to remove the key, open up and go through the dark living room. Rachel is sitting in the sofa alongside Mr Morgenstern. It's contamination from an earlier memory. He reestablishes the empty living room and allows the other to go up the stairs, allows him to go down the dark corridor to her door, to knock and knock, to call her name. As he pushes open the door, on the threshold now, he splices memory and return to the authentic thing by pressing the red dispatching button.

He survives it. The vertical blur on the screen condenses into the handsome youth recalled a second before on the threshold. Now beyond the threshold after all this time, the door closed behind him, he gazes at the horizontal blur already condensed into Rachel in pajamas, propped up against pillows, her cat alongside her, a button-eyed doll on each side of her head. On the side-table there are stacks of paper, pencils, a pencil sharpener, a bottle of cough syrup and the photograph with her parents standing in the snow and smiling for the lens, she between them, looking up at her towering father. Sheets of paper with equations cover her lap in disorder. A crow's wing of dangling hair half conceals her chalky face as she stares down at the book. She doesn't look up.

Now the peripheral cellar fades, also the housing-unit of the screen and transfer occurs in color and dimension. He is totally in that room as the golden-haired youth approaches her. The cat's eyes observe him cold and yellow. Going toward her he wills stoppage of forward process. Time obediently halts. He allows it to resume.

When the young man touches her shoulder in timid consolation, she looks up from the book with immense eyes and he gets a torrent of words, more than she's ever said to him in two years, but in German. It's no correcting echo of his own laboriously constructed phrases. He can't understand a word. It goes on and on.

He places his arm about her shoulder and sits down on the edge of the bed, comforting her. Now he takes her in his arms like something made of spun glass. He tries to stop process for the promised five years in this pure joy. He gets maybe five seconds.

Process resumes, unbearably. Looking, he endures it as she endures it. If one or the other, let it be electrocution, not the 1: 9999 time-ratio, not five years of this. Random selection rescues him for a while. In great close-up the cat, fled to a corner, stares at him with cold yellow eyes. On the carpet now, the cracked face of the button-eyed doll. On the bedside table the upset bottle with cough syrup oozing out over the papers. Other sheets of paper scattered on the carpet with incomprehensible equations, hundreds of them, an unending confusion of symbols.

Now he returns to her, is returned to her. What if the five-year stasis should be this: limp and weeping where he's carried her to the chair? On the carpet the laundry bag. He begs and then commands her to stop weeping. Aware that it's half past eleven he panics at the sound of an approaching car.

He guides her back to the bed with the fresh sheet. He notices that her pajama top was buttoned up the wrong way in his haste but there's no time to correct that. Quickly he says love, love, love, for the hundredth time (but he's visibly panicked at her rigid mask staring up at the ceiling) and promises again to phone her next morning. He flees with the laundry bag.

Flames arise sluggish yellow, entwined with black smoke. Sparks shoot out, drift a little against the stars and go out. The fire, fueled by old newspapers, is for him in a distant lot. In the smoldering heart of it he sees the carbonized weave of the sheet. The discolored washrag, still wet, resists. The wind shifts and blows the acrid black smoke into his face. He coughs violently and starts vomiting.

In the red gloom of the cellar he goes on vomiting. It has the sour taste of wine. When he finishes and is able to breathe he sees that the helmet's unplugged. He'd forgotten to plug the helmet in.

On the screen the badly faded vertical blur starts drifting toward the horizontal blur, also badly faded. He switches it off. He pulls the helmet off and expels everything from his mind except the necessity of leaving the cellar. Remembering recent cold and snow he struggles into his heavy overcoat.

He wipes his mouth with the sleeve and stumbles up out of the cellar and out of the house into the hot blue glare of the vast concave screen overhead. It has tremendous blinding reality. He squints beyond the high green weeds and the hurricane fence at the other house. A dark-haired young woman is standing motionless at a window. On the lawn a red tricycle is half hidden by motionless rows of pink red, yellow tulips. Everything's tremendously present. He tries to keep it all focused there. He sustains it for a few seconds. Then the dark-haired young woman raises her hand to her cheek, initiating process.

The tulips move a little in the breeze. He thinks: they've come up very fast. He remembers the expert way the woman (not this one at the window) buried the bulbs a while ago but has trouble remembering her name. Then he realizes it was an earlier cycle. He's already seen them pointing up, the violet-edged shoots, the stem bearing the sheathed flower and the slow revelation of bloom, pink, red, yellow like now, but another now because he'd seen them past this stage, yawning wider and wider each day, then the fall of the petals totally baring the pistils.

He goes back into the house, mind in controlled blankness, a kind of delicate suspension. Sweating heavily, he removes the winter overcoat in the living room and goes on undressing.

He leaves his clothing in a little pile and goes up naked into the bathroom. He brushes his teeth and then takes a hot shower, soaping himself over and over. He tries to shave. The light over the dirty mirror is dead. The razor's dull. It leaves a pattern of white beard sprinklings and blood in the washbasin. He twists the faucet and the powerful cascade whirls it away. He carefully dresses with wrinkled but clean things.

He soon soils them cleaning the house: vacuum cleaner, mop, pail, scrub-brush, old shirts ripped into rags. He concentrates on the job and maintains blankness and suspension. At the end he has to take another shower and even shaves again with more blood but much fewer bits of white beard in the washbasin this time. He takes it for rejuvenation.

The phone goes on ringing for a long time. Finally she answers in a sleepy alarmed voice. He doesn't know what to say, doesn't understand why he dialed the number her son had left. He almost hangs up. She goes on saying: who is this? Is this Jack? Is that you Jack? That gives him a cue. He identifies himself in a casual tone of voice. After a long silence she says, "Wait."

He waits a few minutes. She comes back and asks in a less sleepy voice: why are you phoning at this time of night? It's not unfriendly but you couldn't say friendly either. He says he wouldn't mind seeing her. Another long silence. Maybe, she says. One of these days. No, now, he says. He would like to see her now, she should come over right now or he'll come over to her place right away. He's drowning.

She says after a while: it's nearly three o'clock. In the morning, she adds heavily as though she's not sure he knows day from night. Yes he does, he wants to assure her, she told him that. She's got to keep it up.

The last thing she says is that she can't talk at three in the morning. If he promises to behave like a human being this time and fix himself up maybe she'll drop in tomorrow, but she's not promising anything. If she does come it'll be at about 3:30 pm of course. Just for a few minutes. She has a date. So maybe. But it's no promise. She hangs up.

How had he ever behaved if not like a human being? Hadn't he always been a suffering human being, like everyone else, causing suffering and suffering for it? JW hangs up and goes to bed in hope of total and permanent reorientation the next day. But then his mind starts losing blankness and suspension. He imagines himself going down the cellar steps. He tries to capture her face to be able to concentrate on it the way he concentrated on the housecleaning. Finally he thinks he gets it.

After a while he realizes that those parted lips and far-focused eyes are from the wrong album fifteen years before. It's unreal like the Penny Black, Keith on the screen, Mr Anthony's forgiving voice. Total and permanent reorientation seems to depend on capturing her later, real, face.

It finally comes back. He falls asleep.

When JW opens on her the next day at the promised time, he finds her face so radically deviated from that recent memory of it that he almost says: "God." It's like a betrayal. Simultaneously the middle-aged stranger widens her eyes at his face and practically says: "God." Doesn't actually say it but it's all over her deviated face, no effort to politely conceal it as he had. Irritated but trying to smile, he says that yes he's changed a little, but then so has she. She blinks at that.

They stand like statues, each on the other side of the threshold. She crinkles her (suddenly familiar and unaged) nose in distaste. It can't be at his immediate self, not with the third shower and clean clothes. He realizes now what must be keeping her on the outdoor side of the threshold. He aired out the house, all the rooms, but it's persistent. Now she's staring past his legs, at the heap of yellow powder in the vestibule, he feels sure. Irritated at that too, he remembers the dream where she'd said he had roaches on him. But he shouldn't hold against her things said in a dream.

He remembers his manners and opens the door wide, standing to one side for her to come in. "Watch your step," he says, the roaches still on his mind. He points at the yellowish mound of powder. "Mounting a big campaign. They'll be annihilated in no time." She still doesn't move from her side of the threshold. She says: "That's old-fashioned, isn't it? I thought they had disposable traps now. I wouldn't know though, I never had roaches." He tries to keep the conversation alive. He says: "Actually they're not so bad. Poor press agent. Give a roach a bad name. Like anything else." She searches. "Maybe so," she concedes. He says, "Careful: I'm not saying I'm crazy about them." "No," she says.

They stand there. "Come on in," he says a little impatiently. She doesn't move. She says, "Couldn't we sit outside? It's such a beautiful day."

He has to get two chairs. He kicks beer bottles aside, stamps down a patch of tall weeds and they sit down. The sunshine pains his eyes so he sits with his back to it. She sits facing it, unflattered, with her back to her former house. He feels drained. He knocked himself out cleaning up the house. All for nothing. If he had known she'd refuse to come in he'd have mowed the grass instead. At that thought he longs for the fresh new green smell and sees her nostalgically with her real face that first time, weeping from frustration at Hanna's lawn mower. He remembers himself rescuing her like a kind of knight, mature but athletic.

She breaks the silence by saying that you age in two years' time at her age. He realizes that all along she's been processing his opening remark about how she'd changed. Two years? he says. They haven't seen each other in two years? That's not possible. She says: not counting that time she came and rang and rang and he'd opened up with a thing on his head and pushed her away. Let's not talk about that. I did that? She confirms it. Insults too. Bitch. I said that? She says: let's not talk about it. JW excuses himself if it's true and says that he hadn't been well then. Oh, it's true all right, she says. Let's not talk about it. You said you wanted to see me. Well here I am. Yes, says JW. He thinks for a while and adds: great to see you.

After a while she asks: did it have to be in the middle of the night? He thinks it over and says: I didn't realize it was the middle of the night. That's why I phoned you, I guess. She doesn't look as if she understands what he means. She says:

"I couldn't believe it was actually you. I'd practically forgotten you. I washed my face to wake up. I wasn't sure it wasn't a dream. I once dreamed you phoned like that. That was a long time ago."

"I had a dream about you too. I think it was a dream. Did you bring me flowers once?"

"I used to. Not just once."

"This was late at night. Very shopworn flowers."

"I never offered you or anyone else shopworn flowers in all my life. I was the one who should have gotten flowers. Fresh ones, fresh-cut roses for everything. I never got flowers in all my life. So I didn't get any kind of flowers from you. Or anything else. I know what I got from you. Let's not talk about that."

JW tries to tell her that he wrote three times to apologize and to explain.

"I never got a letter. Maybe you dreamed that too. And you never answered the phone. Anyhow I don't want apologies or flowers. I don't want to talk about that, ever."

Silence. Bees buzz in the weeds surrounding them. A plane goes by.

"Of course not," JW mumbles.

"Ever."

Longer silence. The sound of the plane starts fading away.

"I can understand that." JW mumbles it again.

"Ever, ever, ever, ever."

JW says nothing. The bees go on and on.

"Who wants to talk about the most terrible nervous breakdown in all my life? Martha nursed me for three months. I lost my job, of course. I've had three jobs since then. The last one was in the invoice department of an automobile part concern. I had to sell the house and move into a tiny two-room apartment. I just don't want to talk about it. I'm trying to positivize. I tell myself it's essentially unreal."

She shuts her eyes on him and dedicates her face to exclusive dialogue with the sun. Her face is sweating. After a while her blind hand undoes the two top buttons of her blouse. JW feels totally excluded. He wants to offer reparation, some great present. What present? He can't think of anything. Eyes still closed, she undoes a third button.

In the continuing silence JW briefly wonders if he shouldn't invite her, in this heat, to go on with the buttons and discard her upper garments and sunbathe with her hands clasped behind her neck as in the old days. The tall weeds shield them from view. But he doesn't ask. Like himself she's taken great strides toward desiccation. He realizes he's basically indifferent to breasts now as to music and money. It sounds like a process of spiritual purification, a divestiture of secondary things. What's the primary thing though? The silence goes on. He dozes off.

When he wakes up her chair's empty. The sun has shifted westward. JW feels sorry he didn't ask her to partially disrobe for him. It might have boosted her morale to be able to turn down that request with indignation. In his concern for her morale he discovers, despite the betrayal of her face, a certain residual tenderness for her. He thought he'd lost that too. The sunshine hurts his eyes.

He goes inside and finds her sitting deep in the striped armchair with closed eyes and parted lips. They have trouble synchronizing their periods of consciousness. But is she really asleep? Isn't it the cult stunt, hoping he'll vanish? Or pretence at sleep to be able to account for the hour she's been in the house all by herself? Doing what? He thinks of Hanna stealing down the cellar steps with the sledgehammer. Did he lock the door?

She opens her eyes. She doesn't retreat back behind the lids at the sight of him. She looks around. He's aware now of what a lousy housecleaning job he's done: dust everywhere. "I thought you left," he says. "Not without saying goodbye. I didn't want to wake you up. I wasn't feeling too well. Too much sun maybe. I'll be going in a minute."

She looks at the hi-fi components piled on the table. "I told Ricky to bring it back. I said I wouldn't speak to him unless he did that. That was a year ago. You haven't even set it up." A year ago? He explains that he doesn't listen to music any more. She takes that almost like another insult. "You have to listen to music. You were always talking about music and your audio system."

Suddenly he has an idea so wonderful that he stammers saying it. "I don't need it anymore. It's just gathering dust. Listen, it's yours. It's a present. You can have it. Right now. The CDs too. Everything. Go get your car and we'll load it." She says she doesn't want it. He insists. She refuses passionately.

They start quarreling over it. He remembers Harvey's strip of garden and the house on the beach. He thinks: she never wants any of my presents. "Never got anything from you," she said. Whose fault? Refusing this is a refusal of him, humiliation, desertion, a sentencing to permanent disorientation. She'll get this present whether she wants it or not.

He embraces one of the dusty speakers, staggers with impeded vision out of the house to the gate and out onto the sidewalk. She's parked her car a long way off. Every few seconds he has to crane his neck to get his nose over the top of the speaker for a quick glance at possible obstacles. Tricycling kid. Ash-can to the left, street-lamp to the right, stop zigzagging.

Now his visitor, barring the way. "Put that down, you're killing yourself. I told you I don't want it." He pants out: "You reject all my presents, everything I offer you. It's not true nobody ever offered you flowers. I did. You prepared them for me but I paid for them, forty dollars, and they were for you." "They were for Hanna's birthday." They argue over that.

He ends by panting out, "This goddam audio system belongs to you now. I'm going to give you five thousand dollars, too. Money doesn't mean anything to me anymore either." "I don't want five thousand dollars." "Ten thousand then. It's all I have. How much more do you want?"

She gets into the car and drives away, leaving him in pain in the middle of the sidewalk embracing his teak speaker. He's strained his heart badly. He eases the speaker down on the sidewalk, upends it and sits down on it, panting. Waiting for the chest pain to let up he watches her beat-up Chevy turn the corner and disappear. The tricycled three-year-old contemplates him huge-eyed. His mother snatches him out of danger. A well-dressed business type skirts him like dog shit, looking intensely ahead.

After a while he hears a car pulling up alongside him. The door slams. "Stop this craziness, Jerry. I think you do it on purpose to scare me off. Stop it. Get up and give me a hand with it." Well, that was all he wanted in the first place. She's yielded, so he helps her load the car with that heavy fraction of her present. She drives them back, gets out and opens the barbed-wired gate with the warning signs mitigated by bindweed bells and drives in. Instead of asking him to get the other speaker and the components she orders him to help her unload. He doesn't move. She starts struggling with the speaker on the back seat, cries out in exasperation: "You stop this craziness!" She commands him to give her a hand.

When they place the speaker back in a corner next to the sensor she commands him to place the second speaker in the other corner, then to set it up. "I don't listen to it anymore," he says, collapsing in the striped armchair. "Tell me how to set it up." He gives her the instructions. She goes over to the cases with the CDs. "OK, what's your favorite?" "No favorite." "Beethoven? Bach? "I think you'll find Bach is nice as I remember." "Bach... Bach... O.K., what Bach?" "You'll find the B Minor is nice, I think." "B Minor what?" "The Mass, naturally." "Haven't you got something more cheerful?" "It's extremely cheerful, I seem to remember." She starts it.

When she turns around to him his hands are hermetically pressing his ears. He makes out her lips forming "What are you doing?" and hears his voice imprisoned deep within him: "It's yours, I don't want any of it." She leaves the room. He frees his ears and beneath trumpets hears her car starting and then driving away. He waits a while. When she doesn't return he gets up and turns off the Kyrie Eleison. The sudden silence is deafening.

He goes to the cellar door. It's all right. He locked it. Coming back into the living room something tickles his neck. He jerks violently. He thinks it's a roach. It's just his long hair. One of these days he'll have to have his hair cut. He decides to go out for a walk. He has to buy eight electric light bulbs, razor blades, furniture-polish and salt anyhow. The sunshine's much weaker now. It doesn't hurt his eyes.

When he returns, he puts the salt in the cupboard, the razor blades in the medicine chest and replaces the burned-out bulb above the mirror. He replaces the burned-out bulbs in the other rooms. He goes back to housecleaning. Dusting and polishing the furniture, his mind is a perfect blank again. He can't find the Swiss electrostatic-nullifying feather-brush. He sacrifices four handkerchiefs and a woolen scarf for the job.

After he finishes, he switches the machine back on. With the vacuum cleaner he has to raise the volume. When he finishes with what can be done to the living room he removes the Scherchen B Minor, puts on the superior Harnoncourt 1969 version and sinks into the flowered armchair. After it's over he looks at his watch. One thirty-six. He adds, "A.M." out loud. He removes the CDs, places them in their jackets, puts them back in alphabetical order and goes to bed.

For the second night in succession, sleepless, he tries to capture her real face two years before and concentrate on it to the exclusion of anything else. But all he can get is the new altered one. It's not as effective but it doesn't shock him so much now. She salvaged her eyes, ears and nose after all and probably other things as well. His fingers recall her vertebras.

At 3:00 am he's ready to apologize for his behavior and tell her that he's decided to keep the audio system and use it too. She'd been so passionate about it that it seems to him to be the greatest of presents for her, replacing Harvey's garden and the house on the beach. Then he thinks of another present so tremendous for him that he weeps at it. He goes downstairs and picks up the phone. At the last moment he remembers the time (of night) and hangs up. He's hesitating between his bed and the cellar door when the phone rings.

In a fast breathless voice he can hardly understand she says she can't sleep and apologizes for waking him, apologizes for her behavior that afternoon, denounces herself in detail, finds no mitigating circumstances. They'd behaved like strangers, talking about roaches of all things. She'd gone back to old things best left unsaid. It was grave spiritual backsliding on her part, getting mired down in the ephemeral. Could she come again tomorrow? She'd been so... ungracious. Of course, of course, she'd accept his marvelous present, his hi-fi.

When he opens on her he finds her transformed for the second time, even further from what he still takes to be her real face. She has wet-looking pink lipstick, blue lids, gold dust at the base of her throat. Chemical blondness has got the upper hand over the gray and the surviving natural blondness. She's covered with rings and bracelets and pendants. They generate some kind of field-force of illuminated certitude in her face. The scoop neck of her gay embroidered peasant blouse reveals collarbones urgent against tired skin. Her eyes and ears and nose remain faithful though.

He praises her appearance this time. Had my hair fixed up she says. See you had a haircut too. Not nearly as gray either. Why shouldn't we? He invites her in again. She still wants to sit in the garden. He speaks of something very important he wants to show her. She steps inside the living room like a blind and deaf woman and sits down on the very edge of the striped armchair. She starts chatting, with great poise, about the weather and then about her son.

It's incredible but she hasn't noticed the new things in the room. There's The Four Seasons, for her of course, mercifully low but perfectly audible, the third cleaning job, the new carpet, the painstaking gilding job on the wooden roses of the oval mirror, what's piled up against a wall, above all what's on the table. It's true she's sitting with her back to it. She's still talking about her son ("He's saved, thank God. He's out of drugs. He's changed so completely that sometimes I think he's somebody else.")

When she stops for breath he makes an inviting gesture toward the table with the new linen tablecloth, the bamboo place-mats, her favorite port, cut-glass dishes with radishes, toothpicked cheese-cubes, black and green olives, celery, also the gigantic bouquet, also the neat stack of papers, the two pens and the fat worn Treasury of Great Poems edited by Untermeyer. "Oh, thank you." She chooses a branch of celery, rapidly inspects it and nibbles symbolically. He starts filling the new cut-crystal wineglass.

"Oh not for me, thank you." She explains that she doesn't drink any more. She doesn't need it any more. Pills either. When he has to point at the flowers, she says, "Oh lovely, just lovely." Trying to control his irritation, he says, "Goes well with Vivaldi, don't you think? That's The Four Seasons. Spring. You know, flowers." "Oh yes, I love Vivaldi." "I remembered that. We heard it once in the supermarket. That's why I bought you the CD." She returns to her son.

In another of her gasps for breath he points to what's piled up against the wall: the five-gallon cans of paint, the rollers and paint brushes, trays, sponges, pails, the pile of soft new rags, etc.

"Oh yes," she says. "You won't be able to rent the house without fixing it up."

"Rent? Did you actually imagine I was going to make you pay rent to live here?"

Her face goes blank at that. Then she laughs incredulously.

"Oh gosh, Jerry, I haven't come to move in with you. Of all ideas. I've come to convince you to move out, of course. You have to leave this horrible place. Otherwise I'll never see you again, Jerry, ever, I swear I won't."

"Move out? Where? With you?"

"You know I'm married. You'll find something, a two-room flat like mine. We could see each other very often."

He sits there in deep silence. Finally he says sullenly that he'd already lived in a two-room flat with big purple flowers everywhere for two years. The landlady was nice though. Suddenly nostalgic, he tries to recall Mrs Philip's face. He can't.

He stares at the $265 worth of painting stuff and tries to convince her of the terrific advantages to moving in here with him in a completely renovated house. The savings on rent for her. Space. He points at Untermeyer. They could have talking-sessions every day. Now he remembers her big thing. He points at the brand-new spade and rake, expensive Swedish steel, leaning against the wall. They'll turn the jungle into a Garden of Eden, he says. Roses and lilies everywhere. She must miss her garden. She says, oh, she still gardens, small-scale, raises miniature plants in big corked bottles with cute tiny tools. It's an art, a real challenge.

He's depressed at the way everything's shrunk for her. Then he has an inspiration. She'll have to see. He goes over and pries open the lid of one of the pails of paint with the screwdriver. She asks in an alarmed voice what he's doing.

"Just a sample," he says, dipping the widest brush in the white paint and starting in on the wall, flip-fluck, flip-fluck.

"Just the first coat but it'll give you an idea. You won't recognize the place. Listen, we could begin right now, both of us. You could take that blouse off and put on one of my shirts. There must be a cap somewhere, Huck."

"Stop that," she says over and over.

He explains: "I don't want to impose my own tastes on you. We can tint it any color you like. Blue. Pink, even. Anything you like, Beth." Flip-fluck. Flip-fluck.

"I'm leaving if you don't stop immediately," she says.

He stops immediately. It looks lousy anyhow. He'd forgotten to stir the paint. And of course the walls have to be washed rinsed and prepared. The soiled white crisscrosses look a little like a cryptic Chinese ideogram. Otherwise crazy.

"You've got paint all over you." She looks around for something to remove the stains and sees a pile of papers on a chair. When she sees what they are (each time he comes Ricky plants them all over the living room) she forgets his stains, sits down in front of him, gazes up at him and says:

"I'm trying so hard to believe. We have to believe. That's your problem too, Jerry, you have to believe. If you did we'd be together again, one great family and you part of it too. We'd be spiritually wedded, Jerry. Wouldn't you like that?" She reaches out and touches his hand.

JW finds himself kneeling before her, gripping her bare arms, his face in her lap, almost in shameful territory, and stammering muffled and desperately, "Yes, I want to marry you."

She displaces his head a little, strokes it and says, "A spiritual marriage, of course."

"Oh, any kind of marriage, Beth. Beggars can't be choosers. As long as it's with you."

"Come on, Jerry. Let's get out of this place. Right away. I have to see my dentist anyhow. Where do you want to go after the dentist? Any place special?"

"I'd like to go to the beach with you."

Her unaged blue eyes widen. "That's uncanny. And you say you don't believe in thought transmission. A beach was just what I was going to suggest but for tomorrow. Have you ever been to Coney Island?"

Why Coney Island? he asks suspiciously. Why not? she asks. I've never been there. He says: I was thinking of a real beach, not so crowded. Oh but we could do that too, the next day. After Coney Island (unless something happens, she says mysteriously) we'll drive back to my flat. There's a sofa in the living room. Then (unless something happens) they'll go to any beach he likes. "It'll be a beach weekend. Wouldn't you like that?" He doesn't answer.

"So you'll come with me tomorrow to Coney Island?" Her haggard painted face is alight, loses a year or so with it. He doesn't deprive her of that, doesn't say no even if he doesn't say yes. "Oh, my sweetheart, you're coming!" So he has to say yes.

She gets up and brings back her bag and sits down again. Very solemnly she whispers: "Stand up, Jerry." She remains seated, rummaging in the bag on her lap. A lock of new pure blonde hair swings before her eyes. She comes up with a little jewel-box like the one she kept the Valium in except there's no simpering shepherdess and swain on the lid. There's a multitude of stars on it. She chooses something, stands up and tosses the bright lock out of her eyes. The movement reveals she's salvaged a little of her throat too. "Now give me the finger of your left hand, Jerry. Not the pinky, for heaven's sake. I don't want to bet with you. Your ring-finger, of course."

She slips a ring loosely on his ring finger. It looks like a gold ring but hasn't got the weight of gold. It's set with a great big red stone, a fortune if it had been a ruby or even semi-precious. "It doesn't fit. You're so thin. You used to be so big. I'll fatten you up though. Wait, I've got another one." She rummages again and comes up with an identical ring: underweight imposter gold again, set, this one, with a great big green stone. "It's a perfect fit, Jerry. You promise you'll never remove it? Whatever happens?"

She chooses another ring from the case and hands it to him. "Now you slip this one on my finger." Most of her fingers are occupied by similar-looking rings. She points at her ring finger. There's her diamond wedding ring and above that a copy of the first ring she tried out on him. He slips the green one above the red one. It produces a traffic-light effect. "My sweetheart, we're spiritually wedded now."

JW puts his hand in his pocket for a handkerchief for his eyes and nose. "You don't have to pay for the rings now," she says. He doesn't dare pull the handkerchief out. He's not sure of the next move, now that they're wedded. For old time's sake he touches her left breast. She lets him do that but says something about celibacy. "Anyhow, we're too old for that," she adds, but without pulling her breast back. They stand in that posture for a while like statuary. Finally JW withdraws his hand, takes out the handkerchief and wipes his eyes and blows his nose.

She takes him in charge, totally. What a relief that is. She maps out their immediate future. After he packs urgent things he'll accompany her to the dentist's and wait maybe an hour. Then this evening a restaurant and then he can sleep on her living room sofa. Then tomorrow Coney Island. Then if there's a next day they'll drive out to any other beach he liked. Why not that beach they'd already gone to that cold rainy March weekend two years ago? Then on Monday job-hunting for her and apartment-hunting for him. Okay, my darling? He nods. Everything goes very fast then. She unearths two valises and a flight bag and supervises packing.

On the threshold of the house he tells her the telluric wave machine has to be shut off, definitively. It may take a few hours. She should go by herself to the dentist's. When she comes back they'll leave as planned. She agrees reluctantly and drives off.

I go down the cellar steps for the last time, I know, either way. I turn on the red lamps, like a muted fire. I go over to the console and sit down. The cassette is still there with its fading contents. In real travel it must be different. My hands are autonomous. They crown me with the helmet, set at 1: 9999. It's plugged in now. The image swims up: the vertical blur motionless and then moving slowly toward the horizontal blur.

On the threshold of entry for I don't know how long my finger is rigid on the red button. Twenty years gazing at her from the threshold of her room or clasping her, time halted. But what if old time, programmed, can't be halted and we have to endure what followed for twenty years? Or faulty navigation and then fire for twenty years?

It's bitterly dank down here. Quench my thirst O Lord. More. Aren't those rats stirring about? The rim of the metal cap bites into my forehead. More. In the faint reflection of the screen I look like an old madman condemned to death. Isn't it unconstitutional, cruel and unusual punishment, to condemn an old man to the electric chair? No, now the thing on my head looks more like a dunce cap than anything else. I should have torn up his check that day. I'd be 2000 miles from this place in my nice warm bed right now. Probably having nightmares, that's true, but at least ones I could wake up out of. I can't help going back in my own private built-in time machine (far more efficient than his) to the day I got fatally involved. That was how long ago? I can't remember. What did I want to remember? I can't remember.

Somebody's poking around upstairs. The woman's back. The neighbor across the way. My memory's going too, fading like the girl, what's her name? She's calling my name now (the woman), so she knows me better than I know her. The button feels smooth beneath my index finger. I can hear the woman calling my name louder. She must be just on the other side of the locked door. What's her name? Now she's turning the cellar doorknob. Opening the door. How is it I forgot to triple-bolt it? "Jerry?" she says a couple of times. That's my name. Now silence. Maybe she's gone, whoever she is.

"Jerry, come on up out of there," she's just said.

Suddenly a name comes back to me.

Beth. Beth Something.

Somehow, I can't remember how, she has to do with tulips.

"Jerry, come on up out of there," she's just said again.

Beth Anderson.

Yes, I remember now. If I don't push the button (What for? Something desirable but fearful, is all I know) we'll be leaving this house and be going to the seaside as I always wanted.

That's tomorrow.

Suddenly I see them as they'll be tomorrow: massed on the beach prone and gleaming, waving, shouting, wrestling, burrowing, raising structures of sand, flying kites, leaping to volley-balls. I can smell tomorrow's suntan lotion, hot-dogs and waffles, something of the sea way beyond. Now I see tomorrow's Ferris Wheel and the Loop-the-Loop and the shrieking roller coaster, the crowded boardwalk, hot-dogs with chili and mustard, ice-cream cones, popcorn, the mica-flashes of trillions of grains of sand of nowness.

But wait: those one-piece bathing suits, those concealed belly buttons, those rubber bathing caps, that cotton-candy cloud and lemon lollipop sun in the momma-eyed sky: this is Coney Island in the 1930's so not now and to come, so a fraud, the terrible late discovery.

Who can save us?

O I see them now in solemn procession across those sands: bearded to the eyes under their broadbrimmed black hats and now turning unanimous toward the multitude of time-trapped unbelievers. One of us suddenly falls to his knees in the firm sand, stricken with enlightenment, and isn't it possible? After all that time at last the ultimate conversion, number one billion, three hundred thousand four hundred and twenty three? He-I the Elect, freed from his doomed moment of triviality? And yes with the burning focus of his yearning and belief, critical mass attained, all in-gathered, the balance-tipping, the end of now and then and to come: the beach, the sea, the sky, that painted theatrical veil lifting, and time vanquished for all time and we're together again, all of us, the dead and the living, all with pardoning smiles.

The End

