by Alan Trotter
It was another about a scientist, and Holcomb spent his time telling you how good-looking the scientist is, and how brilliant. The scientist begins the story by meeting a friend of his, a knockout frail who’s obviously hung up on him, except he’s so distracted by being brilliant he doesn’t even notice it. And she’s not the only one. Even on the way to meet her he’s setting hearts on fire—there’s one girl who sells cigarettes and another who doesn’t do anything but fall in love with scientists on the far sidewalk. The guy is a hymnal for every woman who lays eyes on him, but he’s only interested in the machine he’s working on.
The machine sounded a lot like the machine in the other story—it’s a metal cage the scientist has to climb inside, and it flickers when it gets turned on, only there’s no sitting frozen in the seat, or grey, spitting creatures, and this time for his machine to work, the scientist has to think in a particular way. He has to think with a kind of ‘drifting contemplation’, which gives the machine its charge. Holcomb calls it like a gas leak ahead of an explosion: unnoticeable, but containing a great energy.
But Holcomb hasn’t got his scientist into the machine yet. Not just because the scientist’s too busy ignoring frails: he is afraid of his machine. He’s never worried about dying before, but he thinks that now he has made this machine he could be ‘the single most important figure in the world—the world of the past and of the future, as much as of the world he felt fairly sure was still outside his window’. His death would ‘therefore be of epochal significance’. Besides, he seems to think that anything that goes wrong might not just be the end of him, but of a lot else too. He is a little wary of starting a machine that could destroy existence.
This is starting to take almost as long as Holcomb made it. What’s important is that he has an idea to make sure the machine is safe, so he rushes back to it (the knockout frail is left, staring hungrily at empty space). He works at his machine with strange tools, and by referring to pages in ‘a notation comprehensible only to the scientist’. When he is done, he has attached a safety device to tell him if his machine is safe or if it will destroy the planet: a little metal flag, hinged at the base.
That’s the take of it all, out of a lot of talking about his childhood, and how the machine’s meant to work and how the blue of his eyes catches the light.
After all that the ‘scientist climbed into the machine’, ‘steadied his resolve’ and began to think in his state of ‘drifting contemplation’, and he ‘placed his hand on the lever that might change the world, or ruin it’.
*
And he waited for a sign, with a certainty in his waiting that no spiritual man had ever achieved. With a stomachless, throat-less peace he waited, and as it threatened to become almost unbearable, a dark ball of unease growing within his head fed by his drifting thoughts and beyond the capacity of his skull to contain it, the signal he had been waiting for arrived, an advance party’s cry that it was safe to proceed: the metal flag turned to the left with a small but uncanny certainty, guided by an invisible force.
The sign had been given: the machine was safe. He found himself pulling on the lever with the same mechanised resolve.
The machine that encased him buzzed, and seemed almost to flicker, as though the world had something in its eye and was blinking this thing that should have been real and steadfast in and out of existence.
And then it was over. And he sat in the same seat, in the same room. But everything was changed.
*
It turns out, he’s travelled into the future—though only by a couple of hours. He consults clocks he keeps around the room to confirm this, including clocks that work by dripping water or trickling sand. Holcomb spends a lot of time convincing the guy that he has succeeded. The thing that makes him buy it, persuades him he isn’t being rooked, is that through the window he can see it’s now dark, when it wasn’t before. He’s happy about this, at length.
The one thing he doesn’t think of is, maybe the machine just made him pass out for a couple of hours and all he’s invented is a blackjack the size of a cigarette stand. But he hasn’t, anyway. He’s the first time traveller. He carries on being happy about it.
Then he remembers the metal flag. He returns to the machine and reaches for it, which unlike the rest of the machine is still flickering.
This is the second bit of the story that it seems worth keeping.
*
He reached to the metal flag to give the signal. This was his plan; this, in a sense, he had already done. Moving the flag now, at any time in the next hour or more, he had calculated, would cause—had, in fact, caused—the flag to move on the machine in the past, where he sat waiting to begin his journey. The machine had taken him into the future; he had installed this mechanism, this means for communicating into the past.
This was the signal, and also a proof. It showed that the scientist’s success was two-fold, he had taken the reins of time and he could steer it backwards with all the ease with which he had driven it forward. It allowed him to alert himself, before he operated the machine for the first time, that his attempt would be a success, and a safe success at that. When he saw the movement of the flag in that other time he would (he knew, because he remembered) mechanically pull at the lever and journey forward.
But as he reached to give the signal, he hesitated (had he hesitated before?) and considered, with a thrum of compassion or selfishness, what it would mean for the scientist that had been him, now sitting two hours in the past, holding on to the lever, waiting for the metal flag to move.
He would see the signal and launch himself forward, into—well into what exactly? Launch himself forward in time, and into the scientist now sitting with tentative hand outstretched.
Wouldn’t that be a kind of death? Not as grand or important a death as he had been contemplating before, not the death of the only person to have challenged the strictness of the beat to which time, relentless, marched. But the death of someone to whom he felt a more than familial closeness: a strange kind of suicide.
If, on the other hand, he left the hammer untouched and the signal un-given, then soon there would be two of him: one who propelled himself forward, and another who allowed the current simply to carry him.
Give the signal and these two individuals would be confounded together and there would remain only one.
His hand withdrew. The eerie flicker of the hammer subsided and passed.
Unsure whether to leave, to hide, to stay: he waited.
He noticed, in the bed, in the corner of the small room, a figure he recognised, sleeping restlessly.
*
It felt like the story had ended as soon as Holcomb had written the number of words the magazine would give him nickels for, and never mind that so many of the words he’d written had been about the wrong things. Or as if the story had just ended when it hit the edge of the page.
But after I’d read to the end of the magazine, and gone through the advertisements too and spent some more time with the little alien boarding the streetcar, Holcomb’s story stuck around, the same as his other one had. It made me busy with thoughts. It put a slide and sidestep in my head.
I lay down on the couch with my hat over my eyes. I lay there with my mind, the two of us thinking about what it would mean to live in the story, where anything you might try you could know ahead of time if it was the right thing to do. What would hit a dead-end and leave you throwing cards into a bucket, what would lead on and on, easy and good: you could look at a dreary performance and name it a rehearsal, and that would make all things possible.
*
I woke from a content sleep with Holcomb filling the world like he was leaning over my pram. ‘Box,’ he said, ‘wake up,’ shaking at my shoulder. ‘I’m going through to bed. You should just sleep where you are in case our friend tries the door in the night.’
I looked at him in a way that apparently didn’t communicate anything. ‘Good night,’ he said, and left.
It took a few
restless hours to get back to sleep.
*
A phone call woke us in the morning. While Holcomb spoke with the careful secrecy of someone who imagines newshawks everywhere, I went to the desk drawer where he had found the magazine. There was a small pile: I took one more and put it with the alien tourist and the cliff-top machine in my coat pocket. At some point the copper ball had moved position on his desk. Maybe he juggled it when he was stuck for ideas.
When he was done with his phone conversation he chased me out of the apartment with a day the next week when he wanted me to deliver myself back, ready to serve. The look I gave must have meant something on this occasion, because he stopped shooing and went back to his timid, beaten self. He pressed some bills in my hands until I’d agreed I’d be back. What in the phone call had convinced him he was safe until the middle of the week, I couldn’t say. Maybe his murderer was away, yachting.
I dragged my heels all the way to _____’s. I wasn’t looking forward to the two of us dealing with our foul boredom together.
*
But when I got to the apartment, I found _____ already dressed. He was flattening his hair with pomade and wearing a necktie. He’d shaved for the first time since before we’d had our steaks.
He told me to get dressed and sharpen up, Jarecki had been in touch and we were going to need some of our senses—we weren’t just taking our hats for a walk. I shaved and dressed. _____’s being so dapper made me look at my own suit, and there was a rip by the right shoulder where the stitches at the seam had given. I put my arm out in a slow, lazy right hook and the split widened like a grinning mouth.
*
We walked toward the new quarter of the city while the sun was still low in the sky, sending long shadows at us. The last mile was through what had once been a nice suburb. A place where you could free the kids with an untroubled mind, and while they were playing in the street, maybe take a dive beneath the hood of the family car, get some sun and a bit of grease on your skin. But a bad surgery had given it a new type of building, taller and sometimes neon-fronted, and some of these were pawnshops and poolrooms. As we walked down the empty street, ahead of us were the one-storey homes with attached lawns and mortgage worries, and at our side, approaching with us, the city came creeping in with everything you didn’t want to get involved in or you wouldn’t have moved out to the suburbs.
And as the city jostled at the good people of this suburb from one side, on their other was the new quarter, ugly and hostile because it was exposed and unmade, like a skeleton hung with skin the way a coat hangs on a hat stand. It had only been half built, and now it was leaving.
Mixers and scaffolds had moved in, and men with clipboards and deadlines to meet. Together they started to make the shell of a neighbourhood, which was going to be filled with wiring and water flowing through pipes, the healthy guts of a place. Then the money had stopped because the main investor had gone to jail. He was what they call a man of means, so if he was unlucky he might have spent as much as a whole night inside, but not so long the mice would remember him. It was enough for him, anyway, judging by how quick he hustled out of the city. And with him gone, work on the new quarter dried up.
We had to move out of the road for a frame house being dragged away on wheels.
We carried on into the half-made city.
*
With a couple more sections of floor and maybe a few more panes of glass you would have been happy to call it a room. _____ said that this was it, we were here, but his voice disappeared into the holes in the walls. He went and pulled a folding metal chair from behind a tarp which was protecting the dignity of a pile of dirt. The chair’s voice as he scraped it across the concrete floor was a lot clearer than his had been.
He set the chair up beside a window that was just a ten-inch-thick and five-foot-square absence of wall. I went looking for another chair, but without luck.
_____ had taken a small pair of binoculars from somewhere and was using them to peer out the window, his neck extended forward as if someone was holding a lighted cigar to the back of his head. He had a small notepad on his knee and a pencil between his teeth.
I looked out the window. There were two sidewalks but no blacktop on the road that split them. Opposite was another hollow, unfinished building, this one taller and weakly impressive, its stucco flourishes making it look like a small courthouse. It felt good that in this derelict place these marks of nobility made that building more ridiculous than ours.
After an hour of standing, I took the working end of a snapped brush from the corner of the room and cleaned as much of the dirt and dust as I could from the concrete floor in front of the window and sat down by _____’s feet. He was still leaning attentively forward. When he had the binoculars hanging on the tether around his neck you could see the impressions of the eyepieces in his face. They were deep and red.
Sitting on the floor, my view out the window was angled so I could see only the top half of the official-looking building. Whatever _____ was watching for, all I could see were rain gutters and a whole lot of sky. I was trusting that if anything happened he’d let me know, and I’d be able to take an active part in this thing we were involved with.
*
It stopped raining after a while and the clouds became occasional instead of a mass.
_____ took a couple of tongue sandwiches from his pocket and handed me the smaller one. I sat with it a while and watched as the bread slowly uncreased itself from the journey, then ate it.
One cloud looked like maybe a fraction of the turn of an ankle going into a high-heeled shoe. Another looked like the rear of a crashed car. Another like the bottom of a pair of cactuses, like it was a part of a much bigger scene in a western. The sky underneath it was reddening so I guess that was the western’s desert, although the timing and the redness weren’t quite right—a half-hour later and the trick would have worked.
It was only when _____ sat bolt upright in his chair that I noticed he’d been slouching back at all, or that it was beginning to get too dark to see him clearly.
It took me a while to get to my feet. My legs were sore and stiff and I needed to put my cigarette out to have both my arms free to raise myself.
When I got so I could see out the window at what _____ was watching, it was a man in ripped trousers with his back to us, relieving himself on a pile of planks beside the stucco building’s wall. He was hard to make out in the absence of street or window lights. When he was done, he hoisted his clothes around himself and picked up the least crushed of a pile of lightly spattered beer cans beside his right foot and drank from it.
He turned and walked in the direction of the building’s entrance. Halfway there he stopped and vomited, emptying his head like a bucket. Then he went back inside the building, through the doorless entrance.
When I turned from the window, _____ was writing in his notebook, his hand curled around almost the whole pad, making an urgent script with movements so small he could have been shivering.
Once he had done, he checked his wristwatch, noted what I assumed was the time and then announced that we were leaving, that it was getting too dark to see.
*
The next day was the hottest since hell began. But we still got up and walked out into it, this time with more sandwiches and a couple of beers for _____. We walked with our jackets over our arms and the sweat made our hats and shirts sodden.
When we got to the imitation courthouse we’d been watching the day before, _____ circled round it, pressing himself into the wall and peering suspiciously through empty window frames at empty rooms, before we went and sat in the building across the road. _____ perched on the metal seat by the window, binoculars pressed into his face again. Again I sat on the ground.
I’d been using my hat to fan myself, and after we’d eaten the sandwiches it occurred to me to look for something that might make a better job of it, and I remembered the magazines in my coat pocket.
So I read back through Holco
mb’s story of the scientist who sent himself forward in time and also didn’t. I read some of the story with the bloodthirsty alien tourists. Then I looked at the other magazine. It had on the front a submerged underwater craft of riveted red metal, with one big bulging window at its front. Swimming in the water through plants like streamers was a man with an air tank strapped to his back, carrying a harpoon. He was gesturing, alarmed, at the person inside the craft, who was green, ridged with fins, wore a gun on his hip and had two devil horns growing from the top of his head.
I read the story that went with that picture, though I don’t know why I did it or what I was hoping for.
I read more and they weren’t much better. _____ was taxidermy at the window and the magazine was junk. The room was hot and the floor was hard and tedious. I flicked pages, not fanning myself, not reading, doing nothing but flicking, until I realised that some words had jumped me on my way past, like fleas onto a passing dog. The words were ‘the ball, copper and heavy-seeming’ and they skipped and flipped about my head. They’d come from somewhere and it had to be the magazine. But I went looking for them and they’d gone, breezed.
Finally I cornered them, quivering at the top of a page under Holcomb’s name. ‘The ball, copper and heavy-seeming’ they said. ‘As to size, it was too large to hold comfortably in one hand.’
*
I read the story from the top. A man goes to sort the possessions of a friend—a brilliant friend, another genius, a scientist and a philosopher, who has gone bugs and been hauled out of his life, drooling and screaming, a hair-eating madman. And in sorting through the friend’s filthy rags and torn-up books and stained bedsheets knotted in a noose, he finds this ball, the same one I’d seen sitting on Holcomb’s desk. The same copper colour, the same size. I’d thought it was pitted with dots, but the story said it was scratched round by broken stripes in horizontal rings, and that squared with my memory and the story must have had it right.
