The Time Eater

by Aaron J. French

  Fast forward to last night, the horrible abomination in James’s closet. That wasn’t Celeste, couldn’t be. That was… what the hell was that?

  The Time Eater. The thing James and I summoned twenty years ago. It has her now. It sucked her into its orbit, like all those planets and stars and quasars and—

  “Do you suspect foul play?” I asked.

  She locked eyes with me. “I don’t know. I’m too tired to think about it. I’m stressed enough as it is. And I have work deadlines approaching.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask what you do for a living.”

  “Freelance writing and newsletter writing. I do a lot of website design and editing, too.”

  “Do you write fiction?”

  “All over the map. At the moment I’m working on developing a web-blog for a professional golfing magazine.”

  “You know about golfing?”

  “No, but all the information I need is at my fingertips.” She typed on a phantom keyboard in the air.

  I smiled. “I had the feeling it was something like that.”

  “How so?”

  “The way you live, the way you’ve got your house set up… I don’t know, but it suggests a cultured, self-sustaining person, as opposed to a nine-to-fiver.”

  She made a face; this managed to get a laugh out of her. “Cultured? If you say so. I always thought I lived like a bachelor.”

  This made me laugh. “There’s truth to that!”

  After an awkward silence, as though we’d run out of things to say, Annabelle got up, pushed in her chair, and headed for the hall.

  “I’d better get to work,” she said.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  She reached into her coat, withdrew a set of keys, and tossed them on the table. They landed with a crash. “Take my car anywhere you like. You can also watch television in there.” She pointed toward the living room. Her face became serious. “Maybe you’d like to spend the afternoon talking to James?”

  Chapter Four

  I didn’t spend the afternoon talking to James. I spent it exploring the lesser-known regions of Brooklyn, the slummy to the sublime. Its boroughs and ethnic neighborhoods, its high-rise redbrick buildings, and all the little shops and eateries. It had that usual New York charm, as well as its usual grime.

  When Annabelle left me sitting at the kitchen table, I experienced an existential crisis. I knew the best thing to do was go talk to James, but I was afraid. I didn’t think my sanity could stand it. I’d gotten through the previous night by telling myself I’d imagined everything. But now Celeste was missing. I could no longer use that excuse.

  I snatched her keys, grabbed my phone and wallet from upstairs, and headed out. But as I was leaving I bumped into an attractive African-American woman tromping up the stoop, dressed in blue hospital scrubs and carrying a black bag.

  “Pardon me,” I said.

  She waved. “Nah, don’t worry about it. My fault, my fault.” She continued up the steps, opening Annabelle’s front door.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  She regarded me coolly. “I’m the nurse from Beth Israel. I come to check on my patient.”

  “Annabelle didn’t tell me a nurse was coming.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “Well Annabelle didn’t tell me some man was comin’.” She did a little flick of her wrist and went inside. I crossed the driveway to Annabelle’s Toyota, backed out and drove away.

  The hours of aimless sightseeing ended, at some length, in a place called Canarsie, known for its pier. Something of a poorer district, crowded with low-income housing projects, parking lots, and big grassy plots. Black folks milled about everywhere, and I felt self-consciously Caucasian. Men with dreadlocks and women in African floral dashikis moved along the sidewalks. When they spoke, I noted their Caribbean accents.

  I parked the car at the pier and got out. A dilapidated boardwalk ran alongside the muddy Jamaica Bay. The place seemed deserted, with overgrown weeds clutching old papers and trash. I did see a person or two standing by the railing, looking across the water with fishing poles cast over the side, staring toward the Manhattan skyline.

  I sat on a bench, enjoying the sound of the wind and the soft rumble of the water, distracting myself because I didn’t want to face the facts. I’d come to believe that women had a peculiar way of etching themselves onto a man’s existence. Once you let them in, there was no letting them out. I was bitter. After these women left you for some hot young social worker, maybe some ex-junkie punk; hell, some rock-climbing stud—they remained in your unconscious, swimming around like fish in an aquarium, until you had dreams about them, held imaginary one-sided conversations with them.

  Jenny haunted me. My mind was what she haunted, not my physical body, not my apartment back on Long Island. My thoughts. Why had the experience been so horrible? Wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself this question. If I had advice for the fledgling bachelor community, it would be “never get married to a psychologist.” That’s asking for a mindfuck.

  Despite Jenny’s expertise of the human condition, she couldn’t save our marriage. Maybe she never tried to. But I couldn’t bring myself to accept that. The most depressing idea I could think of was that she hated me so much she’d giddily let it all go up in flames. My greatest fear was that she’d engineered our relationship—the courtship, the marriage, the divorce—like some kind of science experiment. Paranoid? Perhaps.

  She used to speak to me with such clarity and directness—such coldness—that her words burst in my unconscious like arrows through a straw bale. Even now, after fourteen years—which is a very long time—her words remained with me. She’d left a size-seven carbon footprint on my brain. It was all I could do to shut her out with bitterness, solitude, whiskey, and time.

  Sitting by the weatherworn boardwalk, the crystal dark waters up ahead, the breeze on my face, my thinking became lucid. These were the moments where my perception of her shifted. Had she really been the kind of woman I remembered her to be? Or were the other memories I had—such as her and I going to the movies, having dinner together, making love on the sofa in the living room—were these the reality of my experience? How could I know the difference?

  Suddenly, a little boy came running along the boardwalk in front of me, his feet thumping loudly on the wood planks. I leaned back on the bench as his mother, a young brunette in her early twenties—scarcely a child herself—hurried after him.

  “Come back to Mommy,” she called, catching up to the boy, then scooping him deftly into her arms. He struggled for a moment before she managed to subdue him.

  “You have to stay with Mommy always,” she scolded, with genuine concern in her voice. “Remember, I know what’s best. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

  The child, gazing over her shoulder at the water, nodded. “Yes, Mommy.”

  Setting the boy down, they continued walking along the boardwalk, holding hands.

  I tried returning to my brooding, but the scene with the mother and son had triggered a memory of the vacation to China we’d taken a year or two into our marriage. We had already started fighting. Conversations turned into arguments far too often, and the only time we got along was if one of us made a conscious effort not to get upset. Jenny had a cousin living in China named Brad, a working economist who moved to Hong Kong after college and made a fortune in their free-trade system. None of the details of his work made any sense to me. It was all over my head.

  Brad bankrolled our trip to China, and we stayed for a week and a half. The first few days were difficult, as Jenny and I remained in our normal routine of arguing and bickering. But by the third day we started getting along. After that it was smooth sailing, and we had a wonderful vacation.

  The three of us went on a train ride through the Yellow Mountains. Brad had this idea that he would show us uncultured rejects what China was about. Real China, ancient China, he said. Not what the PRC had turned China into.

  Our d
estination was Chongqing, where we’d view the magnificent Buddha statues carved into the cliffs. But first we made a stop in Fengdu, The City of Ghosts, a place of spirits, demons, and ancient customs that would soon die out. Fengdu, Brad said, was one of the towns that would be drowned in the Yangtze River when the PRC completed its massive dam project. He went on and on about the deficiencies of the new dam.

  Fengdu was magic. I scarcely recall much else from the trip, to be honest. But the Ghost City never left me. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. A huge necropolis set in the side of the shaggy green mountain, shaped in the outline of a person who appeared to be rising out of the earth. An atmosphere of death and the afterlife surrounded the place, although the people living there were quite friendly.

  At one point I went off on my own and discovered a Taoist temple. I read the signs in English, learning it was the Temple of Hell, a seat of judgment where newly dead were judged and then consigned either to Heaven or Hell.

  I made my way up stone steps, flanked on either side by grotesque demonic carvings. The statues made my skin crawl. They looked very old, with terrible grinning faces, and some were poised in pseudo-sexual positions, while others crushed the heads of the living and even ate newborn babies.

  I made it through this gauntlet, into the temple proper, and stood before the massive statue of a wide-faced Chinese man. The sign proclaimed him as “judge of the soul unto Heaven or Hell.”

  I remained there for a long time. An eerie feeling came over me, and I recalled, for a moment, the thing in the sky that James and I had witnessed years earlier. I hardly thought of it anymore; most of my energy was geared toward repressing the experience. But it came back to me in the Temple of Hell, reminding me of the instability of reality, how nothing was as it seemed.

  Jenny snuck up behind me, touching my back. I jumped.

  “Jesus, what’s your problem?” she said.

  She wore a long beige coat, with belt flaps hanging at the sides, and a white blouse with ruffles. She was fond of wearing her blonde hair in a bun, as she did now, usually with a barrette or two. Her chin and cheeks were slender. She had a small pointy nose and cool blue eyes.

  “You’re scared,” she said.

  I nodded. The judge of Heaven and Hell looked down on us from his perch.

  “Of ghosts?”

  “Yes—ghosts, and these terrible demonic statues. Did you see the one over there with the twelve-inch penis?”

  She chuckled. “Must’ve missed that one. How about him?” She gestured to the wide-faced Chinaman.

  “That’s the judge of Heaven and Hell. He decides which souls are damned, and which ones enter salvation.”

  “And how did you fare against the judgment?”

  She was acting amiable, and so I wanted to get along too. But a trace of my accusatory bitterness crept in when I aimed my thumb down and said, “Damned for eternity.”

  She took my hands. “I know we fight a lot, Roger. I think that’s part of being married. I mean, you don’t know anything about relating to another person. How could you? You’re damn near a baby yourself. But I don’t fault you for that. Sometimes, I wish you were more open with me. I just wish… when you looked at me, you didn’t see your deceased mother looking back. Perhaps that’s asking too much.”

  I’d grown to despise whenever she spouted her psychology mumbo jumbo. At the beginning, I’d found it interesting—until the hundredth time it cut into my soul. She was always right, which was the worst part.

  I’d taken enough psych courses in college to understand a portion of what she meant when she said, I wish, when you looked at me, you didn’t see your deceased mother looking back. It was true about my mother, and it was true I probably hadn’t processed the experience. But it was all so confusing. Sometimes, I wished we could have normal arguments, about normal issues, instead of heavy cerebral shit about repressed emotions.

  “I feel overwhelmed,” I said. “I wonder if I’m capable of being your husband at all. It doesn’t help that you’re so willful and intense.”

  “Why don’t you stick to speaking about yourself?”

  “All right. I like you, Jenny, and I’m trying to work out all my anger issues, but for now, let’s just enjoy the rest of our vacation. What do you say?”

  She sighed. “Yes, we are getting along. But I want you to keep your snide and bitter comments to yourself. I know you’re upset, and I know how you feel, but you don’t get to take it out on me. Understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good. Then come here to Mommy. Mommy knows what’s best.”

  I put my arms around her, and she leaned into my chest. I kissed the top of her head. Then she said something that has stuck with me ever since. She looked into my eyes and said, “You don’t understand, Roger. You’ve never understood and you never will. That’s the tragedy with you.”

  We returned from China the following week. In no time we were back to fighting, but in spite of the mounting tension I didn’t forget the way we had enjoyed each other’s company. I don’t think Jenny forgot it, either. We couldn’t recreate those conditions in our day-to-day lives, however, and so our marriage fell apart.

  Spiriting back to the present, I studied a group of seagulls migrating across the sky, their mournful cries echoing off the nearby project buildings. I thought I was about done with the boardwalk, and with Canarsie Pier, so I got up and walked over to the car.

  Driving away, I felt nostalgic and sad. I hated that notch on my timeline marked marriage, but I simultaneously grieved for it and wished it back. What did that mean?

  It means you’re afraid of women, that you hate your childhood, that you’re a baby. It means you have no idea how to relate to another person.

  It was dark when I arrived back at Annabelle’s house. I had been gone all day. It occurred to me that she might have needed her car. I’d had my smartphone turned on, so she could’ve called me if she needed it. Still, I felt guilty for having it.

  A front of storm clouds was rolling in, casting its purple glow along the streets and sidewalks. Annabelle’s house was dark except for the light in James’s upstairs window. For a second, I thought I saw his silhouette staring down at me, a crooked shadowy thing lurking behind the curtains. I strained my eyes to see, but there was no one there. I went inside as thunder rumbled.

  * * *

  Annabelle made dinner. I washed my hands in the bathroom, then helped her set the table. We sat down, but a weight hung over us, and so we talked little. She asked where I had been all day. I told her. I asked how her work had gone. She said fine. Otherwise we remained silent: thinking about Celeste; thinking about James.

  I was also thinking about Jenny and part of me wanted to talk to Annabelle about it. I determined that might do more harm than good. God forbid I break down crying right at the table. I doubted she had much nurturing to give after all she’d given James.

  I decided to ask about the nurse I’d bumped into that morning, instead.

  “That’s Norma,” Annabelle replied. “Beth Israel Hospital released James to me on the condition that I allow them to provide nursing care.”

  “What does she do?”

  Annabelle chuckled. “All the things I couldn’t imagine doing myself. She bathes him, changes his sheets and pajamas, and gives him his morphine injections.”

  “He’s on morphine?”

  “It’s, like, his favorite thing.”

  “What else?”

  “She checks his vitals, and he’s got his bathroom and his bedpan in there, but he doesn’t always make it. Norma deals with that. She feeds him sometimes, too.”

  “And he lets her?” This was hard to believe. That dark, malformed creature passing for James up there would refuse, in my opinion, any amount of charity sent his way. He seemed content to gnaw on his own misery and waste away. I couldn’t imagine him interacting with anyone aside from Annabelle or myself.

  “Oh, he lets her. In fact, he has a crush on her.”


  “He was always popular with the ladies.”

  Suddenly she burst into tears. Her emotion startled me. There’d been no warning. She had cried a little the day before, but nothing compared to this. She was sobbing so hard her body shook.

  I felt too stunned to move.

  Why not comfort her? She’s not Jenny.

  Fuck it. I got out of my chair and stood behind her. She had her face in her hands, hiding like a frightened child, sort of curling in on herself. The arc of her spine protruded through her sweatshirt. I took a long deep breath and managed to put my ex-wife out of my mind, then placed my hands on her shoulders and started massaging.

  She responded instantly, reaching up, pressing my hands tighter against her body. Her black mane spilled through my fingertips. She sobbed louder, but eventually started to quiet. I dug my thumbs into the spaces between her scapulae, moving them in circular motions.

  How long has it been since someone’s touched her? I wondered. And then, with my usual bitterness—as long as it’s been since someone’s touched me.

  Jenny’s voice popped into my head: You have no idea how to relate to another person…

  It was true. I’d spent fourteen years of my life coming to terms with this, surrounding myself with friends and my students, the occasional “online chat-fling,” but always failing to sustain something real, much less any kind of stable romantic relationship.

  But oddly enough, as I stood behind this most beautiful woman and massaged her shoulders, I made the decision that I would get to know her, all of her, the real her. It happened just like that—like a flash of insight. I would figure out how I could relate to her as a human being. I wasn’t going to be frightened, and I wasn’t going to worry about getting hurt. I was going to be open.

  She swooned to my touch, turning her head so her hair rested on my knuckles. It felt soft and smooth, like satin.

  “That’s nice,” she said. “You’re nice, Roger.”

  “I haven’t always been nice,” I said.