The Wooden Sea

by Jonathan Carroll

  “Who sent you up to my time?”

  He shot me a quick, sneaky glance and looked away real fast. Then he started walking away at a frightfully brisk pace. The little fucker was trying to make a fast getaway. Hobbling after him, I managed to catch up and touched his shoulder. He shook me off.

  “Astopel! It was Astopel, wasn’t it?” I must have said the magic word because he moved away so fast that if he had been a car his tires would have laid down a patch of rubber thirty feet long. Watching him and Gus Gould go, the truth suddenly dawned on me. “Because you hit him too! You hit Astopel too, didn’t you?”

  The boy didn’t answer, but I knew I’d hit the bull’s-eye. That’s why the boy had been so worried about how I’d react to the black guy when I first met him. And that’s why he’d started hollering when I knocked Astopel down. Because he knew what was going to happen! Because he’d done exactly the same thing and ended up being shot into his future, just like me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He kept moving.

  “Hey, asshole, why didn’t you tell me what would happen if I hit him?” People standing nearby stopped to stare at the old crazy fart in red, shouting down the street at a kid who was obviously trying to ignore him.

  “I’m talking to you!”

  Gus was watching now, as were half the people on the sidewalk, but not Junior. If I’d had any legs under me I would have sprinted over and– stopping, he put his hands on his hips and turned slowly. His face showed only disgust. “Don’t you get it yet? I can’t do anything for you! You think I wouldn’t have said something if I could? You think I want to be here? Are you really that stupid?”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Be-cause-I-can’t!”

  We shouted at each other across that wide space. Sooner or later a cop was bound to appear and it was sooner. Police in Vienna wear green uniforms and white caps that make them look more like crossing guards than police. This dude was husky, wore a matching husky moustache and an attitude you could smell in five different languages. He chose to interrogate me. The prick– he had to pick on an old weak man. In red.

  “Na, was ist?”

  “What’s the problem, officer?” Probably because I answered in English and didn’t hesitate looking him in the eye, his expression downshifted to sullen and confused—a bad combination if you’re on the receiving end with a cop.

  He responded in limping, phrase-book English. “Why do you screaming? It is not allowed to scream so in Wee-ena.”

  “I’m not. I’m calling my grandson.” I pointed at Junior. I hoped the cop would see the family resemblance. The kid shrugged. The cop pursed his lips and moustache hairs went up into his nose. Out of the corner of my eye Gus Gould came hotfooting over toward us. He must have thought I was completely bonkers.

  The cop’s nametag said Lumplecker. I paused a moment to digest that and stop myself from laughing out loud. “Officer Lumplecker?”

  “Ja?”

  “What year is it?”

  “Bitte?”

  “The year. This year, now. What’s today’s date?”

  Eumplecker shot me a lumpy look, like I was trying to pull a fast one on him. “I do not understand you. My English is poor. Here is your friend. You may ask him your questions.”

  “Come on, Frannie, we gotta get to the cafe.” Gus nudged me with his hip while smiling a lot of old yellow teeth at patrolman Lumpy. Some bystander in leather shorts and green knee socks nearby said, “Was ist mil ihm?” The cop turned his annoyed attention at this unsuspecting Fritz and started shouting at him in machine-gun German. Gus and I drifted off without saying so much as an auf wiedersehn.

  “What’s the matter with you this morning, Frannie? Are you on drugs? Did you take something?”

  My father used to ask me that question when I was young and permanently in trouble. “Are you on something?” was his way of putting it. He hoped I was so there would be a valid excuse for my detestable behavior. And if he could somehow get me “off,” I’d return to normal again. Fat chance. At the time the only drug I was on was me.

  “Wait a minute! How come you can see him?” I pointed at Junior ten feet away.

  Gus unwrapped a piece of gum and put it in his mouth. “How can I see him? Why wouldn’t I?”

  I walked to the boy. “Why can he see you now? Back in Crane’s View you said no one could see you but me and the cat.”

  “Because we’re both in the wrong time slot now. Neither of us belongs here.”

  It was spring. Girls passed in sherbet-colored summer dresses, their perfumes wiggling come-hither fingers at your sense of smell. I might have been old as hell but my nose still worked. Couples strolled slowly from here to nowhere enjoying the warm weather. Street musicians played everything from classical guitars to musical saws.

  Vienna. Austria. Mozart. Freud. Wienerwald. Sacher Torte. I’d not gone there even when I had the travel bug because I’d never had the slightest curiosity about the city. London, I’d spent some time in. Paris. Madrid. Other exotic places too, but Vienna meant opera, which I hated, those Lippizaner horses that hopped on their back legs depressed me, and the town was where Hitler got started being Hitler. Who needed it? Plus George Dalemwood had visited and returned to say that generally speaking, the Viennese were the most unfriendly, unpleasant people he’d ever met. What the hell was I doing here in my dotage? Married to Susan Ginnety, no less.

  “There’s the opera house. I thought it would be bigger. It sure looked bigger in the pictures.”

  As we approached I saw the celebrated building but felt nothing. Of course a heart is supposed to surge forward on seeing certain famous sites—the Grand Canyon, Big Ben, the Viennese opera house. But my heart usually went into reverse at those moments just because it doesn’t like being told what to do.

  “Don’t forget, Frannie, we’re supposed to take a tour of the place this afternoon.”

  “Uh-huh. How far is this cafe?”

  “About another ten minutes.”

  “Jesus, that far?” My body felt like lead, like paste, stone, wood, double gravity, it felt like shit. So this was what it was like to be old? Forget it! I wanted to trade me in on a new model. Immediately. How did old people put up with it? How did they lift their unbendable, hundred-pound legs and put one in front of the other day after day? My hands were lava-hot with arthritis; legs cold with I had no idea what. It seemed like every person whizzed past us as if they were all on rollerskates; but they were only legs connected to younger, healthy bodies they took for granted. I wanted to move faster, to stop, and to weep in frustration all at the same time. “Guys, wait a minute. Hold it—I gotta rest.”

  Gus and the kid exchanged looks but stopped. I wanted to kill them both. How could they keep going while I felt like a boulder was sitting on my head?

  “Are you okay, Frannie?”

  “No I’m not okay! Just wait a minute, willya?”

  “No problem, partner.”

  “Is that a hot dog stand? What’s a wurstel?” The kid pointed to a small kiosk nearby that had different pictures of hot dogs taped to its windows. “I’m hungry. I’m getting one.”

  Between gasps, I asked if he had any money.

  “Nope. You got any?”

  Without a sliver of surprise, my hand slid over a bunch of cards in my pocket. I took them out to see what they were.

  Gus said, “Use your Visa card.”

  “They take credit cards at a hot dog stand?”

  He made a face that said I couldn’t be that dense. “Are you going to pay with a five-dollar bill? When was the last time you saw paper money?”

  “I got a card too. I got one of those. I had it all along.” Junior waved a shiny pink card and moved toward the stand.

  I could not catch my breath. My entire body felt outraged at having had to walk so far so fast. Yet I knew we hadn’t come far at all. Besides all the other shocks whirling around like multiple cyclones, I couldn’t believe this was m
e inside me—an aching, whining, grumpy, exhausted, old... shithead.

  “So tell me about your grandson, Frannie. He’s a good-looking boy.”

  We watched good-looking boy buy his hot dog, with much pointing and nodding until the seller understood what he wanted. It had been so long since I was in a place where I didn’t speak the language. Now suddenly I was in two simultaneously– Austria and Old Age.

  While concocting some piece of nonsense about my “grandson” to tell Gus Gould, I heard a huge high sound. Instinctively I knew what it was because I’d made the sound myself many times on my Ducati—the high ripping whine of a downshifting motorcycle. Turning from Gus toward the street, I saw the last thing I would ever see: A most beautiful silver and sleek motorcycle, airborne, was sailing straight at me.

  The End.

  Holes in the Rain

  The next thing I knew, I was staring at my hands. They were holding a strawberry milk shake in an old-fashioned fluted glass. They were “my” hands again—no liver spots, bread-dough skin sagging in tired layers, no knuckles the size of walnut shells protruding from beneath. Instead, the skin was a healthy color, not the patchwork quilt of sickly hues and spots it had been in Vienna.

  Slowly, I curled one into a fist and was thrilled as a child to feel no pain slither up through it. But before I got too excited, I uncurled the hand just as slowly to see if it worked the other way too. Success. Was I back? Was I me again? Putting the hand flat down on the red Formica counter, I felt the cool of the plastic beneath my reborn palm. I slid it back and forth across the smooth surface. Then I lifted my hand a few inches and had the fingers do a little dance to celebrate our return.

  “Are you going to drink that milk shake or are you trying to hypnotize it?”

  I knew it was too good to be true. I knew the voice and did not want to see the face it came from. But against the advice of every atom in my body, I turned the rotating stool to look.

  I was in Scrappy’s Diner in Crane’s View. Scrappy’s is never empty from the minute it opens at six in the morning until it closes at midnight. But the joint was empty now. That is, except for me and good old Astopel sitting way down at the other end of the counter. Watching me, he smiled like a son of a bitch.

  “Couldn’t I just have had thirty seconds of happiness alone before I saw you again? Isn’t there a law against too much you in one lifetime?”

  “You can have all the time you want, Mr. McCabe. But your clock is ticking.”

  My throat was dirt-dry so I sipped the milk shake, which tasted as good as sex at that moment. In fact I couldn’t stop sipping, which turned into glugging until the glass was empty. Even my throat felt younger, it was so happy and eager to belt the sweet stuff down.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “All right, what clock is ticking?”

  “How did you like your death? It’s certainly dramatic.”

  “Is that really how I’m going to die?”

  “Yes, a motorcycle in the head.”

  “I’ll be killed by a motorcycle in the head in Vienna when I’m a hundred years old and so worn out and cantankerous that I should have died years before. Now that’s something to look forward to.”

  “Not quite one hundred, I’m afraid.”

  “How old?”

  “I cannot tell you. You must find out all those things yourself. But at the rate you’re going, you won’t even find that out before your time is up.”

  “Explain.”

  He slid off his stool and went behind the counter. He walked toward me, picked up my glass, and poured more into it from a metal shaker. He placed it in front of me. “Strawberry, right? That’s the flavor you prefer?”

  “You made this? It’s good.”

  “Thank you. ‘Consider the last of everything and then thou wilt depart from the dream of it.’ Do you know that line? It’s from the Koran.” He drew a glass of Coke from a machine and to my astonishment, put it in a microwave oven. Setting to its highest temperature, he waited till it pinged seconds later. Removing the glass, he took a sip of what must have been six-hundred-degree Coca-Cola and smacked his lips in delight.

  “Astopel, tell me you didn’t do that. Is your tongue asbestos? Or are you the devil? Is that what all this is about?”

  “You keep looking for easy answers, Mr. McCabe. Unfortunately there are none. Perhaps you should find a better way of looking.”

  “Yeah? Well, a moment ago I was too busy being traumatized as an old man and wearing a motorcycle for a hat.”

  “That’s a pity. Because you only have four more chances to go back to your future before the week is over. When you return is up to you, but you have only these six days—

  “What do you mean, six? You said seven. You said I had a week.”

  “Look outside.”

  It was pitch-black out there. “Today’s over?”

  “Today is over.”

  “Today is Tuesday.”

  “Was.”

  “I have until next Tuesday either here or in my future to figure this out?”

  “Correct.”

  I tapped the edge of my glass on the counter. “Or else?”

  “Well, remember what Antonya Corando told you.”

  “She said she didn’t kill herself. Said someone else did it to her.”

  Astopel nodded. “And not only your own well-being is at stake now. A great many others’ as well. You have seven days because you have seven days. You can spend your remaining time trying to understand why, but I think that would be a waste.

  “Perhaps it will comfort you to know there are others in the same situation as you right this minute, Mr. McCabe.”

  “Who have to do the same thing as me?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re in Crane’s View?” “No, all around the world.”

  I drank the last of the strawberry shake. It didn’t taste so good this time.

  “Two other things to know, Mr. McCabe. You can return to your future whenever you want this week. Say the phrase ‘holes in the rain’ and you will go. Once there, however, your return to the present is out of your hands—it will simply happen.

  “The second thing to know is when you visit the future, it will always be to the day previous to the one you experienced. So your next visit will be to the day before you died.”

  “This is completely crazy.”

  “Hopefully it will eventually make sense to you.” He finished his drink and came around the counter. Without looking back, he moved toward the door.

  “Wait! One more thing: Why did I marry Susan Ginnety? Did something happen to Magda? Will something happen to her?”

  He raised his head and looked at the ceiling. “Something happens to everyone, Mr. McCabe.” And then he left.

  The streets of Crane’s View were empty and still as I trudged home from the diner. Night keeps its own sounds to itself because most of them come from the other side of silence. Because there is so little noise after midnight, your ears perk up and strain to hear anything in their neighborhood. So used to being flooded with everyday white noise, they don’t know how to relax. Ears are not happy with hush; it’s not their domain. So they turn up the volume on the single-engine plane flying by far overhead, or the lone car moving its way across the night five blocks away.

  And when those were joined by the screech of a cat being humped at that quiet hour, it was the sound equivalent of a pair of scissors jabbed into your ear. But all of them came from here and now, this moment, not the future—now. I welcomed them and wished there were more to reassure me I was back in the time where I wanted to be.

  As often happens when I’m confused, I started talking to myself. It’s a helpful habit I developed in Vietnam while trying anything to keep from going crazy in that hell.

  With the utmost concern I asked myself, “Are you all right?”

  Pause. Scowl. “All right? I’m alive. That’s it. I’m alive and don’t know what the fuck to do. What the fuck I’m supposed to do. I
know zero but am still supposed to figure all this stuff out in a week. Or else. Good luck, daddy-o.”

  Looking around at the quiet familiar surroundings, the combination of rancor and confusion for what had happened to me, combined with the love in my heart for where I was almost made me dizzy. “That’s what this whole thing does—it makes me dizzy!”

  I needed a lot of Crane’s View to regain my balance that night, so I took the long way home despite the late hour. I purposely passed the Schiavo house just to see if anything else had happened there. What was left of the burnt-out ruin was dark and silent. A few minutes later I stood in front of George Dalemwood’s place. As usual the downstairs was lit up because George doesn’t like the night. He says lit bulbs keep him company. I would have loved to knock on his door and gone in for a long talk about everything but didn’t. I knew that before I spoke with him again about any of this, I needed to think things through carefully. I was sure sometime in the future I’d want his help, so presenting the details to him clearly and calmly was essential. George was a patient, open-minded man but hearing what had happened to me that night, especially if I told it the wrong way, might make even my good friend reach for a butterfly net.

  I sighed/said, “Go home, Fran. Go home to your family.”

  Smith sat like a statue on the top step of the porch to our house, looking as if he had been waiting for me to return. I was so tired I’didn’t even say hello. Reaching down, I just stroked his head a few times and then opened the front door.

  Home sweet smell. The Dutch have a line that goes something like the sound of a clock ticking is always nicest at home. Even better are the smells of home. One whiff and the soul knows where you are before the mind does. I stood in the front hall and, closing my eyes, simply breathed home for a little while. After what I had been through, it was God’s perfume. My life was on that air. The people I lived with, the objects we owned, the cat, popcorn someone had made earlier, Pauline’s CK One cologne; even the dust smelled familiar.

  Upstairs the two women would be asleep—Magda in sweatpants and one of my Macalester College T-shirts, her body sprawled across as much of the bed as possible. Pauline in a nightgown huddled on an edge of her bed as if she were afraid of taking up too much space. Unlike her mother, she slept lightly, she had bad dreams; her closed eyelids always fluttered.