The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  Any woman, by crying, can make me entirely miserable, but with Selena it was doubly unbearable. I did not associate that sort of weakness with her, for one thing, and, for another, because I did not like her it made it impossible for me to notice that she was crying at all. So I got up and stood by the mantel and smoked my pipe and looked at the fire and pretended that I did not know what she was doing.

  Some fragment of sound made me look up. She had risen, and without looking at me or making the slightest sign she went down the room and out the front door. It closed behind her, but in the instant when she opened it I had seen beyond her the black, star-sprinkled sky of the Western night, and the distant shouldering silhouette of the mountains to the west. A gust of cold air went through the room and the fire flickered. Jerry stuck his head into the room for a moment when he heard the door close, but returned at once to the kitchen without saying anything. The water went on splashing in the dishpan, but he had stopped whistling.

  Nothing in life, I think, ordinarily happens in great, thunderous episodes of obvious and dramatic force. Life is a series of small things, and most of them mean much or little depending on how the observer thinks of them. I, for instance, didn’t pay any real attention to the things that happened in that room that night. And yet, if I had I would have seen a pattern in them, the pattern of the fifth act of a tragedy, when the play is all played out and only the final words, the ultimate destruction of the protagonist, await fulfillment. I see these things now for what they were worth, the last small events before an unthinkable horror of a thing was to happen. But at the time I thought merely that Selena had gone outside to get control of herself, that she would be back soon, and that it was embarrassing to be stuck into the middle of a mess like this. And I couldn’t quite get over a feeling of surprise at Selena’s crying. There didn’t seem to have been enough cause for tears, even for a woman with much less fortitude than Selena had. Thinking back, I couldn’t believe there was any real reason for her crying at all; she had been annoyed with Jerry, not hurt by him.

  After a moment I went over to the settle and sat down. Selena’s book was in my way, and as I moved it to one end of the seat, I saw it was an old copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. A book that I felt sure came from the bookcase in Jerry’s room in the Long Island house. I picked it up idly—she had left it face down and began to read at her own place:

  “. . . and as evening grew darker hundreds of variegated lamps were lit . . . The sailors danced on the deck, and when the young Prince came out there, more than a hundred rockets shot up into the sky.”

  “Hey, Bark!” It was Jerry’s voice from the kitchen.

  “What?”

  “Will you have Scotch or rye?”

  “Scotch.”

  He appeared with a tray, a bottle, a pitcher of water, and two glasses. “Even if you have practically signed the pledge, as you claim, a nightcap or two won’t hurt us.”

  “Hell, no,” I agreed. “I’m all for an occasional renewal of youthful folly anyway.”

  “You always were a philosophical so-and-so,” he said. “Personally, I just drink without thinking out a formal reason for it.”

  He poured us a couple of stiff ones. They tasted good there in front of the fire, and I took a long pull. “This is the McCoy, Jerry.”

  “Yeah. It’s good to see you again.”

  “Here’s to it.”

  “Down the hatch.”

  He poured out another apiece, and we took it slower. Jerry stared into the fire for a while and then turned to me, almost impulsively. “You see how it is.”

  “Damn it,” I said, “I don’t see anything.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully as if to find out whether I meant it. “She’s gone up there, you know.”

  “Up where?”

  “Up to the top of the mesa.”

  “My God,” I said. “In the dark? She’ll fall and kill herself!”

  His answer came after quite a while. “She never has.”

  I let that sink in for a minute. “You mean,” I asked him incredulously, “she goes up there often?”

  “Almost every night.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious as hell.”

  “But, Jerry,” I argued, “it doesn’t make sense. What does she do it for?”

  He swirled the whisky and water in his glass round and round and stared at it. “I wish I knew. I wish to God I knew.”

  “Listen,” I said. “There must be some reason. Maybe she likes to be alone and look at the stars and moon up there.” Even while I was speaking, it sounded foolish.

  “Maybe.” He added nothing to that one word for a time, and then took another drink. “I followed her once. It took me a hell of a while, even in the moonlight, to get up there. When I did, I couldn’t see her anywhere. The moon was bright too. But, of course, it’s a big place. After a while I called, but she didn’t answer.” He put his glass down between his feet and fished out a cigarette. “She must have heard me, though, because the next morning she bawled hell out of me for going up. Told me it was too dangerous, and I mustn’t do it again.”

  “For Christ’s sake!”

  He was groping in his pockets. “Got a match?”

  I found a solitary paper packet in my own pocket. There were only a few matches left in it. “Here.”

  He lit his cigarette, blew out a long funnel of smoke, and observed, “I’ve got so I don’t mind any more.”

  We had a few more drinks and felt fine and talked over the old days, and it was pleasant. Twice, I remember, Jerry put more wood on the fire before we went off to our respective beds. And when I blew out the lamp in my room, I had neither seen nor heard Selena come back to the house. But I thought to myself, she must have come in by the door into their bedroom.

  The next day was much cooler. A sharp wind was coming down off the mountains, and I was surprised to see a gray scud of cloud across the sky. Jerry and I set out, after breakfast, for a walk up toward the peak beyond and behind the mesa.

  Selena must have come home, for she was at breakfast, looking very still and without any morning small talk. She said she didn’t want to walk, and that it was not a nice day, but she hoped we’d have a good time.

  There was nothing really worth telling about the walk. We climbed pretty far up one shoulder of the peak and sat down to eat our sandwiches in the lee of a rock pinnacle. After we finished, I filled my pipe and Jerry put a cigarette in his mouth. Then, for a few minutes, we thought we didn’t have any matches. Finally he found the paper I’d given him the night before, and by the mercy of God I got my pipe going with the last one. He lit his cigarette from the pipe, and I sailed the empty match paper out into the wind. We watched it fall, idly and without attention. If I had known what was to happen, I might have paid a good deal more heed to its long, curving drop out of sight. As it was, though, we sat and smoked contentedly for a while, and looked down across the desert.

  “Bark,” said Jerry, keeping his eyes on the view, “would you be willing to tell me now what it is you know?”

  “I can’t,” I told him honestly. “It wouldn’t do you any good and it wouldn’t prove a thing.”

  “Would it prove anything about who killed LeNormand?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m positive it wouldn’t.”

  “Okay.” He was quiet, as though planning what to say next. “I’ve got something I want to tell you, and get your reaction to. Do you mind my talking about it?”

  “Of course not.”

  He leaned back against the rock, “I’ve come to the conclusion that if I could find out who killed LeNormand and why, I’d know about this thing that’s between Selena and me. I’ve been thinking over the whole business for a long time now. And I’m reasonably sure I’ve figured out what the only clue is.”

  “Pretty long-range work, wasn’t it?” But I was worried; I didn’t want to reopen that whole murder case. I most emphatically did not want to remember that nig
ht in Eldridge Observatory.

  “No,” he said calmly. “It wasn’t long-range work at all. I had the clue with me. Those equations that were on LeNormand’s table. He was working at them when he died, I’m sure of that.”

  “Even if he was,” I told him impatiently, “a few pencil scratches on a piece of paper are seldom fatal.”

  “That depends. They are if they’re an order to a firing squad. Listen, Bark, you don’t know what a big thing LeNormand was on to. The biggest thing in the world, by God!” He was silent for a second. “Do you remember any of your college math?”

  “Not much.”

  “Well, I’ll try to explain it to you in words, then. Only it’s hard to put into words. LeNormand’s work followed the stuff of a guy named Minkowski. Ever hear of him?”

  “He sounds sort of Polish.”

  “Damned if I know what he was, except that he was a great mathematician. LeNormand always spoke of him as if Minkowski was the only man who would have understood his own ideas. But LeNormand was way beyond Minkowski.”

  This didn’t interest me much. “Minkowski! Why do these mathematicians have such cockeyed names?”

  “Nuts,” said Jerry. “There have been jokes about your own name, if it comes to that, and mine sounds like part of a mouthwash. Let me try to get this across to you. Minkowski worked on the problem of time, among other things. Lots of people talk about time as if it were a fourth dimension. In a way it is; everything tangible has length and breadth and thickness and also it exists in time. It lasts. It has duration. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to grasp its existence any more than you could figure out something that lacked one of the other three dimensions.”

  “All right,” I said. “I agree to all that.”

  “But,” he went on, very earnestly, “in another way time isn’t like the other dimensions. You can’t see the time dimension of anything. You can even forget about it the way Euclid did, and do lots of things to geometrical figures, at least on paper, without taking it into account at all. This fellow Minkowski discovered that time is not any ordinary spatial quality of anything, but his idea was that it would become so if it was multiplied by the square root of minus one.”

  “My old friend,” I remarked, “the square root of minus one! I haven’t thought of it in years. It’s in the same class with that other thing, the nth power. And wasn’t there a funny-looking symbol that represented infinity?”

  “There is.” He looked at me curiously. “The inside of your mind must be a queer place.”

  “It’s cozy,” I told him.

  “Yes. Well, LeNormand figured out a set of equations that proved the serial nature of time.”

  “Hunh?”

  “Sure. There isn’t just one time. There are lots of times. Why, everybody believes in that, if you stop to think about it. You’ve heard people say, ‘time passes slowly,’ or ‘the time went by like lightning.’ Well, it’s sort of like the old song about who takes care of the care-taker’s daughter? If you talk about time passing, you’re actually measuring it against something, and that something is a sort of second time.”

  I felt distinctly confused, but I knew that once Jerry started to explain something all hell would not deflect him, so I sat and waited for the rest of it to roll over me.

  “The nearest way I can give you an idea of LeNormand’s work is to say that he applied this theorem of Minkowski’s to the conception of a serial time, or a bunch of times running on up into infinity. I know you don’t get it, and it’s not a thing you can explain even with diagrams, but I guess you can see that everyone, from Einstein to little old Bill Feldman in the Math Department, was on his neck for it.”

  “My God,” I said, “I don’t see how they even understood it.”

  “They didn’t. Well, that’s about all I can tell you about LeNormand’s theories, because it’s all I’m sure I understand. There’s one last equation. I’m working on it now. If I can decipher what he was putting down in that . . .” Jerry’s voice trailed off for a moment. “Anyhow, you see why I think LeNormand had hold of something big. He used to tell me some things you could do with his stuff, just for fun. I remember he said once that if you could control your mind after you were dead and outside your body, you could make it travel through time. He used to tell me that it would do a lot of Christians good to go back and take a look at the Crucifixion before settling down to an eternity of bliss.”

  “Nice,” I said, “a very nice, pleasant thought to take home with you.”

  “Hell,” said Jerry. “I don’t suppose he meant that stuff. Or most of it, anyway.”

  We sat there for several moments without any more words. Perhaps Jerry was thinking. For my part, I knew that I could never understand what he had been talking about, so there was no use my trying any thought. I just sat.

  After a while he went on, and his voice was lower and graver, somehow. “LeNormand was killed by some kind of chemical, or else a ray of some sort. More likely a ray, though God knows where it came from. And it must have been because of his work. There was no other reason to kill him.”

  “There was Selena.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Selena. Selena who won’t tell me who she was before we met her. Bark, can you, for God’s sake, tell me why she should be so silent about her past unless it would connect her, or someone she is sheltering, with that murder?” His voice was suddenly strained and urgent.

  “Listen,” I said quickly, “there’s nothing to that idea. And if it’s any comfort to you, it wasn’t what Parsons and I talked about, either.”

  “Thanks for that much.” He stopped a moment and wet his lips. “You don’t know, I suppose, whether he ever investigated to find out who Selena is?”

  “Yes,” I told him, “he did.”

  “And did he find out?”

  “No.”

  “You see what I have to think, don’t you, Bark? I know it was a scientist’s murder. I am certain Selena knows who did it. That’s why she’s keeping such a careful watch against giving anything away about her past.”

  “And she married LeNormand just to keep an eye on him?”

  He nodded grimly. “Yes. Damn it! Do you think I like this? Do you think I enjoy suspecting my wife of being implicated in a murder—a horrible murder, at that, and of a man I liked damned well?”

  “I think you’re building a lot on a pretty slender foundation.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, “I know that. But there’s another thing. She hates my working on that stuff of LeNormand’s. She doesn’t like it and she tries to stop me. Remember last night how she told me it was useless? That’s the word she uses when she wants to say a thing is altogether bad. Suppose she has the idea that if I go on with what I’m doing, the same thing will happen to me that happened to LeNormand?”

  It came over me at last in what torment he had been living; there was nothing I could say without putting another and equally horrible alternative in his mind, the alternative that Selena was Luella Jamison. And yet, I wish now that I had told him Parsons’ story.

  “Bark, don’t you see how much of it fits? Think how intelligent Selena is. Half the time I believe she knows more about LeNormand’s work than I do. Just from little things she lets drop once in a while. Where else could she get that intelligence from but a scientist’s family, that intelligence and her knowledge?”

  “You’re born with intelligence. You don’t acquire it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, your whole idea is crazy. It’s as thin as tissue paper, and as improbable as a movie scenario. What scientist do you suspect?”

  “I don’t suspect any of them. There are fifty men whose careers would have been ruined by LeNormand’s work.”

  “Are any of them missing a daughter or a wife?”

  He looked at me, hard. “I don’t know yet. I’m getting reports on all of them from an agency.”

  “Good God!”

  “You see, Bark,” he said quietly, “if I can’t elimina
te this horrible idea I have in my mind, I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life.”

  14. SOMETIME IS NOW

  WE GOT up, after that, and started down the mountain. The wind was cold at our backs, and we hurried. Several times I should have liked to smoke another pipe, but the matches were all gone. I muttered about that annoying fact to Jerry, and was surprised to find that he was very much bothered about it. He was certain that the matches we had used there on the mountain were the last ones in the house. I couldn’t believe it, but he was really worried. He insisted that since he was the one that did the housekeeping, he would know whether there were any more matches, and most assuredly there were not. Neither of us liked the idea of a fireless evening, a cold supper, and a long drive into town the next day. Suddenly he stopped and turned back to me with a grin.

  “Say, I know what we can do! We’ll get a fire with a spark from the car battery. Why didn’t I think of that before?”

  And we went slogging on down the slope with lighter hearts. Jerry was worried about Selena’s being pretty well frozen by the time we got there, and we hurried as fast as my legs and shortness of wind would permit.

  Our path brought us round the shoulder of a ridge and into sight of the house about a quarter of a mile ahead of us. The moment we saw it, both of us stopped. The window at our end, a living room window, was glowing with light. From the orange warmth of it in the shadow of the wall, from the way it flickered, even at that distance we knew the light could come only from the fireplace. Instantly I was disappointed. Probably some primitive survival in the back of my brain, or possibly nothing but a hangover from Boy Scouting, had made me look forward to our fire making experiment with a perverse sort of anticipation. Now it would not be necessary. Selena had a fire.

  The effect on Jerry was different. He looked at the light a while without speaking or moving. For a minute or two his expression was incredulous, and then it changed, tightened, altered, in a way that I could not analyze.