Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “But dare we use stuff like this? It looks to me like a dynamite.”

  “It’s our duty to use it,” she said, and with youthful eagerness she added, “This man is a menace to the country.”

  When the minister arrived in the studio and they shook hands, Timothy was so nervous he could barely keep his voice steady. The politician saw his nervousness and immediately tried to increase it.

  “He was a huge man, even bigger than he looked in his photographs, and he had narrow eyes in a bullet head. He had a hump on the back of his neck that made him look like a bison whose head was too small for it. He burned his eyes into mine like a pair of laser beams and when he turned on his smile that was the worst thing of all about him.”

  Timothy’s military bearing, of which he himself was generally unconscious, must have made a slow impression on the minister; Timothy recorded later that after this initial opening the man became more cautious, though this did not prevent him from trying to take charge of the show and use it as a springboard for himself. There were no hooks in the first three questions Timothy asked and Timothy realized that the minister was taking him for granted.

  “Suddenly I understood the essential vulgarity of power. In the presence of it, the average man can’t help desiring its approval, as though some of that power might splash over onto himself. This thought drove my nervousness away and made me feel cold; Esther told me later that I sat up so straight and stiff that it was almost as though I were wearing a uniform. I decided the time had come to move in on him.”

  The instant the minister stopped talking, Timothy took a piece of paper from his pocket and laid it on the table before him. Looking up, his shoulders as erect as a guardsman’s, he spoke politely as though he were genuinely puzzled and hoped that a matter obscure to him might be cleared up.

  “Mr. Minister, I have here two sets of figures concerning that installation your department is building at Corway. The first one” – he stated the facts slowly and with a studious frown – “gives a cost figure of $13,550,000. Now this second one” – another careful pause and a wrinkling of the forehead – “gives a figure of exactly $20,000,000.” Glancing up with no particular expression, he asked, “Would you care to comment on the discrepancy between these two figures?”

  The politician reared back with his mouth open and his eyes on fire.

  “Just what are you trying to insinuate by that question?”

  Timothy smiled gently. “Sir, I appear to have been correct in believing that these figures would be familiar to you?”

  The minister’s voice mounted close to a shout. “Where did you get those figures? I demand that you tell me that.”

  Timothy smiled sadly and made one of the biggest gambles of his life.

  “Isn’t there something in the Bible about being sure your sin will find you out?”

  The man’s face almost disintegrated, then came together like granite. Timothy wrote that he could actually smell his fear. He wrote also that the man was such a natural authoritarian that when he was opposed by anyone he despised his anger made him stupid.

  “Mr. Wellfleet, I didn’t come here to have allegations – to be insulted – to –” he stopped, hunting for words, and Timothy knew that he had him.

  “Mr. Minister,” – the same calm voice – “is it true or false that the first figure was the lowest tender submitted to your department before the work began, but that it was the second tender that your department ultimately accepted? Is my belief also correct that the first tender was submitted by a proved company, while the second was –”

  The minister’s color changed, but not the bully in him. “Who do you think you are, the Auditor General?”

  Timothy, though stiff with fear, managed to shrug laconically. “Well, naturally, if the Auditor General is in possession of both these figures – if he is in possession of them – due note will be taken in his next annual report.”

  The minister had a large vein in the left side of his forehead, just as I have one in mine. Timothy saw it quiver to the rise in this blood pressure, make a little jump, and turn puce.

  “Are you aware of the implications in this line of questioning?” he said.

  “Of course I am. I’m nobody, of course. I’m just an ordinary citizen. The real question is – are you aware of the implications here?”

  “You – you little –” Timothy could almost see the man’s tonsils, “you’re the one who’s going to be investigated, not me. You’re on a government network. You won’t be on it again if you think you can talk like this to a responsible public servant.”

  “If I have committed a criminal libel,” Timothy said steadily, “you understand that the courts are at your disposal. But you know I’ve done nothing that concerns a court. I’ve merely asked you a straight question.”

  While the politician’s mouth was still open, Timothy faced the cameras and said quietly, “And now we will pause for this message.”

  While they were off the screen for the commercial the minister glared at Timothy and growled. Timothy looked back at him with a mocking smile and that blew it. The minister leaped from his chair and grabbed Timothy by the shoulders. While he was still shaking him, the cameras came on again and caught the minister cold. Timothy rose to the opportunity of a lifetime.

  “Mr. Minister, I must beg you to control yourself. You are being watched by hundreds of thousands of people. Thank you for joining us, but now we must continue with our next guest for the evening.”

  The minister stumbled when he walked out of the lights.

  The following day Timothy’s program made headlines all over the country. In the question period in Parliament the Opposition went after the government like a school of piranhas. The guilty minister had absented himself, may even have been ordered to stay away, and it was the Prime Minister himself who rose to receive the questions. The night before, Timothy had been scared white by his own audacity, but now he learned just what a partner he had in Esther. She had learned in the capital something known only to a few insiders, that the man Timothy had exposed had been intriguing for months to oust the Prime Minister and take his place. So it was with a serious expression but an inward satisfaction that the Prime Minister refused any comment beyond the routine one that the allegations would be fully investigated. He meant exactly what he said. They were indeed investigated and the man was driven out of public life. Timothy had also discovered something else that went to his head: that he had a rare talent for getting under the skins of powerful men and knocking them off balance. As he later reflected, “It takes one paranoiac to catch another.”

  So it happened that Timothy Wellfleet, hitherto a young man who had considered himself a failure in everything he had attempted, found himself famous overnight. He was praised in the press as a courageous, intelligent, and honest journalist who had braved government arrogance in order to find out the truth. He even caught the attention of the cartoonists and one of them drew him in a metropolitan daily over the caption “Our Ralph Nader?” No praise could have meant more to Timothy than this and he later admitted that it went to his head.

  “Then for the first time I tasted power and the taste was sweet. I said to Esther, ‘Now we know the way we have to go. De l’audace, darling! Et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace!’”

  Esther reminded him that the author of this line left his head in the basket of the Paris guillotine, but she laughed when she said it. Explosive with relief they left the studio and began kissing in the back of the taxi taking them to Esther’s apartment. This was the first night when Esther and Timothy became lovers, and he has recorded it previously.

  NINE

  Now, two years later, Timothy knew that if ever he again repeated Danton’s famous line there would be no laughter in Esther’s reply to it. Something total had happened. She would possibly love him; she would never allow him to be her lover again.

  Reading his scattered notes and fragmented paragraphs two normal lifetimes later, cert
ain that both Timothy and Esther have been dead for many years, I remember my mother’s eyes when she said she had read somewhere that the saddest thing is that we must grow old and can never grow young. If only we could grow young instead of old, how many misunderstandings and miseries might be avoided? There were so many unnecessary destructions of happiness. This curious, marvellous woman, my mother. Emotionally she was a perfect harmony. Intellectually she was an explosion of contradictions. But what else are all intellectuals but bundles of explosive contradictions? And she was never an intellectual.

  Anyway, Timothy knew now that the dream that began with Esther was over, but he would not admit – and perhaps he was right – that he was the one who had killed it. If she had rejected only his ideas it would not have mattered, but she had rejected his yearning for a brilliant mind with a body he could love with passion, as he had done. So now his old sense of the raw deal returned to him with a crash. He felt her physical rejection like a physical pain, and in a flood of anger and fatigue he muttered to himself, “All right, Esther, if that’s how you want it, there are more fish in the sea than you.”

  He made his way to the make-up room but when he reclined in one of the studio’s second-hand barber chairs in front of a powderflecked mirror that had not been polished in weeks, he admitted to himself that Esther had at least been right about one thing.

  “I was not merely tired. I was exhausted into a kind of ecstasy. When I closed my eyes to relax I had the feeling that the chair had taken off and I was flying in the dark. ‘More sleep in God’s forgotten name, more sleep you fool.’”

  Then he was terrified that if he did learn to relax he would be destroyed. For as he saw it, he was not reporting the news as the others did. He was not hiding behind the usual rampart of facts and handouts. He was reporting what made the news, and if even under the rules as he played the game he never called a politician a liar to his face, he was compelling them to reveal themselves as the liars nearly all of them were, and if people wanted to call him irresponsible, all they had to do was turn the switch. As he put it himself: “The world was not my stage. I was the stage for the world.

  “And this meant that I had to suck into myself all I could hold of what the world had become and hand it back so distilled and acid that in spite of themselves the armchair-sitters would have to see, hear, taste, and smell it. And how could anyone do that unless he opened his lungs and veins to the full, intoxicating brew of poisons, to all the dreads, lusts, ambitions, greeds, and inner terrors churning like microbes in the belly of the technological loneliness? How could anyone reflect Now unless he himself was manic-depressive, schizoid-paranoid, unsure, cocksure, uptight, downloose, dancing on banana skins balanced on tightropes, listening to a dozen different voices contradicting each other on the same subject in the same instant of time, knowing absolutely that except for the kooks, the cruels, and the godfathers legitimate and illegitimate, at the bottom of the universal fantasy there was only a single question that mattered – ‘What is to become of me?’ For I knew it – God damn you, God, I knew that unless that question was answered, and answered soon, this marvellous circus they told us had evolved out of You was going to blow up with a bang that would compete in its tiny way with that famous Big Bang the scientists (at least for the time being) were telling us marked Your first birthday.”

  The make-up room had been empty when he entered it and through his mind flashed the thought that the nicest people he knew were these kindly, matter-of-fact girls who powdered and primped the stars for the shows. Like a patient in a hospital bed suddenly aware that a nurse has entered the room, Timothy opened his eyes. This make-up girl was new and she was black. Evidently Esther had hired her while he was away to replace fat Gloria, who had bulged with Coca-Cola, French fries, and snacks before she became pregnant and grew so enormous he had asked her whether she intended to have her baby on the set.

  To this new girl he said, “Use plenty of powder, please. I carry a heavy beard because I’m a hairy man, but at this hour in the day I rely on you to save my jaw from looking like Nixon’s.”

  He closed his eyes and wondered if it would be a good idea to grow a real beard. Two years ago he and his cameraman had visited a university called Berkeley and found all the students wearing beards like bumper stickers – Lenin beards, Marx beards, Mao beards, Trotsky beards, even a few with Moses and Lincoln beards. He himself had settled for bushy sideburns and a solid mass of hair settling firmly on the top of his collar.

  The girl’s hands were working smoothly over his face and forehead and they felt delicious. He went into a partial doze in which Esther seemed to be talking with General Sprott. Old Eli down there in the maximum-security playing it cool. Old Eli waiting sharp and shrewd to press the button. Old Esther searching the corners of the earth with a lantern looking for a few dust pockets of righteousness.

  He opened his eyes and this time he really saw the girl who was working on him. Small features, a full but disciplined mouth, impassive eyes, glossy black skin, and a neat little waist. How dull would the city be without these people bringing up all their vitality from the Caribbean. That racist professor, he was probably advising Immigration to keep them out. He asked the girl her name and she answered in a soft Jamaican accent.

  “Miranda, Mistah Wellfleet.”

  “Call me Timmie, Miranda. We’re all on first names here. Where did Esther discover you?”

  “Through the Student Placement Bureau, sir.”

  “So you’re a student? Don’t call me sir, for God’s sake. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s a disaster to be called ‘sir’ by a pretty girl?”

  She did not answer and he closed his eyes.

  “What kind of a time are you having in the university, Miranda?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Do you encounter any prejudice there?”

  “No.”

  “There must be some.”

  “I don’t look for it.”

  “Some of your people ran into a lot more than prejudice a little while ago. They ran into half the city police force. Anyway, we’re having a professor on the show tonight. I’ve just remembered his name. Dehmel. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve audited some of his lectures.”

  “Like him?”

  “I didn’t audit his lectures because I liked him.”

  Timothy opened his eyes and said sharply, “Now that’s a very interesting remark. Tell me more.”

  “I went there because my friend takes his course and he teaches people things they don’t know.”

  He grunted and closed his eyes.

  While Miranda was brushing and shaping his thick hair, his mind slumped into the state of a person half asleep and half awake “with the ideas charging through it like a pack of dogs chasing a bitch in heat.” He should have let Esther take the show tonight. It was sure to be a dud and if Esther took it he’d lose nothing. That damned poetess, she’d conned him, but good. The separatist would sing his old song and the professor would probably utter the word “problem” in every third sentence. He was acutely aware of Miranda’s presence close by, of her hands touching his skin, and it was an effort to keep his own hands off her. Why not? How could anyone be a part of Now unless he had made love to a black girl? He felt her strong little fingers kneading the nape of his neck and opened his eyes again.

  “I suppose things have been pretty hard for you, Miranda?”

  “No sir, not particularly.”

  “You’re very brave.”

  She said nothing. Her face was an impassive mask and he closed his eyes again and was frustrated. “I simply had to have this girl with all that prehistoric history in those wonderful little loins of hers, all that body-lore they’re supposed to have. I smelled from the cracks in this decaying building the fossilized sweat of those hundreds of thousands of woman-hours spent by the overworked and underpaid females who had labored here from 1924 until 1961 (smell of an abandoned barracoon?) until finally they had made the own
er rich enough to sell his business, throw them all out of work, retire, and buy in Miami the house that he called a home.”

  When Miranda finished he stood up, scrutinized himself in the mirror, and did not like what he saw. He picked up his guitar, sat on a bench with the instrument on his knees, and began strumming it into a tune. He looked studiously at the strings, but glanced up occasionally to observe this girl who was making his imagination dance off into still another fantasy.

  “Miranda,” he said with a shy smile, “please be nice to us.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Wellfleet?”

  “Just be nice to us.” He made a bravura flourish on the guitar, laid the instrument down, and stood up. “We’re through, you see. Washed up. Kaput. Sexually sterile. We’re going down, you’re going up. Doom of the white race is in America. D. H. Lawrence wrote that forty years ago and corporative America hasn’t caught up with him yet. Lawrence was a famous English writer. Doom of the white race is in America, he said.”

  She answered without expression, “I thought what Lawrence said was doom of our white day is in America.”

  “Good for you, Miranda. That’s right, so he did. But it means the same thing. You know. We never understood. What I mean is that, well, I mean that we never understood women as women and our own women were – well, you know …”

  Her face had become a black mask and it made him feel so ashamed of himself that he left her abruptly and went out to the small lounge where his guests were sitting with Esther. From a feeling in the atmosphere he sensed that there had been little conversation between them.

  “Hullo, Madeleine,” he said to the poetess and noted that Esther’s estimation of her cleavage had been accurate.

  She looked at him with determination. “You remember what I said, Timmie? You remember, don’t you? I’m going to do it tonight. Somebody’s got to say that word over the channels and this will be another first for you.”