TIME BIND
AT SCHOOL they had called me Lightfoot, which saved me from being called Brain, or Filmworm, or something like that. Still, no one will ever know what sweat the combining of my talents caused me during my efforts, finally successful, to get into the Time Complex Building. I did it night after night (time after time, if you like) lightfooted, my kindled brain already at work as the microfilm passed before me on one of the office screens.
I was a quick study. My mother used to scold me for the speed with which I tore through homework, sometimes while braiding my hair, or filing my nails, any little chore done by the physical half of me while my demented and forceful twin, the head, galloped off with essay prizes, runner-up in physics contests, Science Fair winner, and all that.
There was still the problem of getting into the central vault of Time Complex, which necessitated further studies but easier ones, since the material was actually available at the library, if you knew where to look for it. Nobody paid me any attention when I tramped through, I’d been in and out of there for so many years; yesterday and today and, they could be sure, tomorrow too, with the squint line getting deeper between my eyes and my once fair skin fading.
Lightfoot I still was, all the same, having taken pleasure in staying in decent shape, even while the brain went on sloughing off its neurons. If I had drunk less sake would my short-term memory have lasted longer? Ah, that’s one of those questions . . .
I’ve reached an age where details bore me, so I won’t go into them, about how I did learn the secrets of the vault door. They weren’t really secrets, hardly anything physical is; you just have to gather up the pieces of information, like the ingredients for a recipe, and blend them.
There remained for me one scary part: my first trip. Head and body out of sync, I’d be done for. All of me in sync but time warped, like an old doorway, and I’d be done for. Of course, that was the risk I knew I’d have to face.
No glass booth. No dais with leather strappings on the chair. A green plastex console and at the right of it, set into the vault floor, some metal slats, tightly closed like a fist. Oh, just open up and let me dive through. I thought, listening to the solemn tread of the guard. I smiled in my conspiracy with the console. What would the guard think if he came in, seeing a middleaged woman with grey in her hair, setting the console dials and muttering hope? Muttering dialogues which had never been but might be? Taking both parts, her and him, me and you?
There was absolutely no sensation at all, but almost instantaneously I was in a big lecture hall, lightfoot, in acrylic pants which slid like fingers over my taut haunches. Wearing my double strand of ambers and a nose-clock. The lecture is just over and he stands with a group of his peers near the podium. With all my nights of rehearsal behind me I speed toward him, hand outstretched, smiling.
“Oh, how very nice to see you!” he says, and I plunge into their midst, reeking of anticipation, well aware of the impression I make and afraid that I’ll lose my not very good balance at this game.
“I enjoyed your paper very much,” I say, “in fact, I thought it was superb, and full of surprises.”
His smile is always shy. Of course he hasn’t got twenty years of rehearsal behind him as I have. “How nice of you to say so,” he says. His eyes are blue. I always knew they were. “You’re looking well,” he says, holding my hand.
“You’re looking simply marvelous,” I say, closing his hand up warmly between my palms and holding on more than is necessary.
“Why don’t we—?”
“Yes, couldn’t we—?”
Here some inadvertence occurs, possibly I slipped on the slats or something, and the lecture hall vanishes, it’s pitch-dark in some place comfy, I’m laid out on my back and he’s just climbing on.
“Darling,” he says, kissing my breasts alternately.
“Oh that feels so good,” I say, helping him while at the same time wondering, frantically, where we left his friends and how we got here and what the hell happened in the interval? I expected a lot of that machine but hardly that it would book hotel reservations, so where am I?
There is a tremendous sound of hammering and before he even has time to roll off I’m poured back through the years to stand beside the console, hearing the noise in the corridor outside the vault door. It was just that damned guard, drumming out a new dance step, which echoed highly magnified through the alloy archways.
After I caught my breath, which took a while, I checked the time, I checked the dials. There was no explanation for what happened, for the timing to be so badly off. There hadn’t even been time for any conversation. I mean, I never found out how he really was, whether he was working up a new paper. Obviously there was a lot about this business I still had to learn. Back to the library. Back to the lightfoot entry to all those offices upstairs in the Time Complex Building.
The next trip would have to go better. At least we should chat about the weather, and how his cactus collection was coming along, whether the Old Man (Cephalocereus senilis) had blossomed yet, that kind of thing, like two real people with a relationship, which we’d never had.
I thought it would take me a week to check out each step and find out where I’d gone wrong. It took me more like three weeks, during which I accumulated a lot of tension and several splitting headaches, but didn’t dare take any pills because they’d slow down my thinking. I’d just have to manage until the job was done; I was determined to work it out.
Convinced finally that I had it figured, I went back wearing my no-skid, best-grip sandals to prevent slippage, just in case that was part of it.
We are cantering side by side, he on a bay gelding and me on a small chestnut mare. My shining black hair streams out behind me. He is wearing a hard derby. Up the languorous slope in slow motion, green hill against fiery blue sky. There at the top, the white fence bars to be jumped. Side by side we’ll sail over. I collect the mare between my knees, and glance over at him. He smiles. His eyes are grey and beautiful. He raises his riding crop to the brim of his hat with a nice little salute to me as I take the mare up on the snaffle.
Up she goes, like a bird, over the fence with her hind legs tucked up neat and nice. Only we keep going, straight out into the blue, sailing away on a perfect level.
Desperate, I crane my neck: behind me there is the fence on top of the hill, there are hedges and trees; there, far below me in a lovely meadow, he canters away on the bay horse.
What has happened this time? I want to know. I yank on the reins but she sails on out like a rocket through the purest of blue skies, the air is hitting my nose and making me dizzy, we’re so high up I can see the curve of the earth; hey, this is dangerous! I’m about to yell, when that mare puts her head down and bucks me off.
I sat up on the steel slats, sweating with rage and fright. No sound of the guard. How much time did I spend in that fruitless effort? My watch had stopped; that figured. Back to the library stacks.
As I passed the green plastex console, I resisted an impulse to kick in its panels. I couldn’t do that, because I intended to get some good out of it yet.
“You look thin, are you losing weight?” several people asked me during my next course of study. Well, what did that mean, that I was too fat, or that the weight loss emphasized certain boninesses, or that they saw a faraway look in my eyes? A long-ago look, perhaps? I was going to get that machine to take me back and just once it was going to go right, all the dialogues I’d prepared, what I say, what he says, what we say and do together.
The next time I encounter him his eyes are hazel and his hair just going white above the ears. We’re in the office of a highly esteemed scientific journal where he has brought in his manuscript. It’s abstruse as hell and full of symbols which are not on my typewriter, which means, since I have said, “I’d be delighted to type it for you,” I’ll have to put in the symbols by hand. It will take me a long time but I have only a short time and none at all to spare.
“After dinner?” I suggest.
“Why not?” he agrees.
We concur. We comply. We are sitting in a pinkly shaded booth over snail salad and sake martinis. We are eating rare steak garnished with mushrooms. We are holding hands and murmuring into each other’s echoing ears just as I always knew we would; palm to sweating palm down the avenue with everyone giving us envious glances, when the enormous facade of the hotel toward which we aim lights up from top to bottom in blazing green neon:
SHE HAS HER PERIOD
and I was lying crossways on the steel slats, tears in my eyes, biting my knuckles to stifle the sound of my sobs, for fear the guard would hear me. The guard had given up dance steps this week, or perhaps it was a different person this time; he was practicing a split whistle. I imagined that his whistles were boring little holes into the metal halls and naves of the building. It was no longer: what happened? It was not: where am I? anymore. It was beginning to be: why am I in such a fix? After the amount of work I had put in on this private project, I would see it through.
This time as I passed the console on the way out, I reached over and slapped one of its panels, though that didn’t provide me with much satisfaction. I felt these mishaps couldn’t go on much longer. All I wanted was one simple little episode which never happened but might have; it was not going to affect anything in the world, and I was taking full responsibility for my own part. Just once. Before I got too damned old to even care and as it was, I kept forgetting what color his eyes were.
His eyes are a light brown with amber flecks, beneath arched brows which are still dark though his hair, parted sharply to show pink scalp, is pure white. We are at table with his learned friends and my smile is cool as I murmur, “En brochette, of course,” which is my witty reply to a question I didn’t quite catch.
They all laugh heartily, give me approving glances. I can see him flush with pride in our friendship and I am so happy, he is so happy. There is a small hangnail on my right pinky which annoys the hell out of me but I pick at it under the table where no one can see.
The dinner is over, the brandies finished; flushed with pride and delight in each other, witty, beautiful, and best of all, together, we say good night to the gathered company and go off toward the grand staircase.
Above the first step there is a fantastic chandelier, white milk glass with baroque pink flowers and mint-green leaves; the light shines through milkily, dim, opalescent; an extraordinarily romantic chandelier and appropriate for the occasion. His hand presses mine reassuringly as we begin to mount the stairs. They are covered with a wine-colored carpet which has a curious kind of black and gold braid along the edges and each riser is edged with gold tacks which have curiously wrought heads.
The staircase is very wide, and we mount it side by side, hand in hand, flushed with exertion and anticipation, the eighth stair, the tenth stair, the seventeenth stair. There is another chandelier over the landing, this one pale blue and lavender, bits of crystal hang down in drops and fringes all around, flashing light into our eyes. I feel his hand press encouragingly on the small of my back, one thumb tentatively strokes my hip, yes, we are climbing the magnificent stairway to our bed of love above but why is the staircase so long and neverending? There are far too many landings; there are little sideways stairways, like the tributaries of a river.
There are lights flashing on and off the console. In one motion, ungainly though it may have been, I leaped off the closed steel slats and smashed my fists against that console in despair. Still keeping my wits about me, though, and not raising my voice; just cursing in a whisper until the thing should have fused into slag. The lights on the console went out and it stood cool and silent.
For a little while, listening to the guard walk the hallways, I confronted this misery, wondering if it was a fake, if all the technical information I’d absorbed was some kind of a joke. The Sunday supplements had suggested that it augmented history in some indescribable way; the commercial programs variously described it as Time Machine, History Machine, Truth Factor, Truth Detector, Headless Marvel, and, in one case, the Whizz Bang, to which the physicists objected, saying it cheapened the concept of time travel.
I had studied every paper on the concepts and the hardware; I had set the dials correctly; I had experienced no discomfort in traveling. What happened when I got there, then? Everything seemed to be all right at this end. I’d give it one more try, before I settled down into sniveling about my aches and pains, and declined into imbecility over a sake on the rocks.
The guard was neither dancing nor singing, he sounded like yet another person, with a light but rather brittle step, as if he were an elderly man doing the rounds. Perhaps they had different shifts. I’d have to be more careful, for without having any such amusements as singing, dancing, and whistling, this guard might be far more alert.
I’d take a week to check everything out, to double-check it. To rest my head and soak my body or perhaps the other way around, anything that might help. Anything, damn it. I would have one night of delight with him before it was too late, and that wasn’t much to ask. A night, a week, six months, a good relationship for a year, was that asking too much? It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been considerate the first time around, knowing he was preoccupied with professional matters, that he had serious attachments, and I wasn’t then any too sure of myself, any more than I was now sure of what color his eyes had been.
It is too dark to see what color his eyes are and anyhow they are closed, he is snoring, and has put his pajamas back on. I lie there in a bitter and resentful daze for a few minutes, then snap on the lamp. A forty-watt bulb, it doesn’t do much for the cracked walls and peeled paint of our hideout.
“Huh?” he says, putting one skinny forearm across his eyes to shield them, and he snores again, deeply. He sleeps with his mouth open. After a moment I raise my own forearm and regard the large pores and liver spots with the dismay of recognition.
Good God, how long have I been here?
I turn my head on the moldy pillow and look at his sparse white hair, the white stubble beginning to appear on his chin, the skeletal fingers of his hand limp against his own shoulder.
Good God, what if I don’t get back?
Back to my studies, to my one-mile jog very morning, well, it’s just half a mile these days; to the quiet simplicities I really enjoy. What if I live here now? It seems to me the time has passed alarmingly and this isn’t at all what I had started out to do or be, nor him, either, when his eyes were blue or hazel and he was becoming famous and for how long, I’d like to know, is he going to lie there and snore?
The vault door snores and rasps as the guard comes in. The room lights up as the blinking console lights flicker and go out. I’m lying on the tightly closed steel slats, clasping my aching head with both hands.
He comes over and takes me by the arm, pulling me to my feet. “What are you doing in here?” he asks, more surprised than angry. “It’s impossible for unauthorized personnel to get in here.”
“No it isn’t,” I say. “Not if you really put your mind to it.” I turn around, out of his grasp, and kick the console, but not hard enough to injure myself. As you get older, you have to be more crafty about these expressions of emotion.
“Now, now,” he says, “don’t do that. You’re not even allowed in here.”
“Yes, but—” I say, turning around to him.
And there he stands. His hair is white and his eyes are still blue.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, stunned by his presence. Did he pop up between the slats right behind me? I wonder.
“I’ve worked here for years,” he says, regarding me kindly but firmly. “Why do you ask that?”
“What about all those papers? The ones I offered to type for you? The lectures? The dinners with all your peerless friends?”
He smiles, and guides me toward the door with one skinny hand on the fat of my back. “Oh, that,” he says, smiling. “Yes, those days. I was promising, I certainly had ambitions, but it turned out I wasn’t good enough, after all. I do remember you, vaguely. Do you want some coffee? I have a thermos.”
“Well, thanks,” I say, sort of lingering to glance back at the vault room where I’d failed so badly. “Aren’t you going to arrest me?”
“Of course. I’ve already sent in the word. I still don’t understand how you got in there like that.”
Sipping his coffee, I say, “They used to call me Lightfoot.”
“Did they? Nicknames are funny things. They used to call my wife Fickle, but it was because she had freckles. She says it started with her school friends calling her Freckles, but gradually—” and he launches into an interminable account of his wife’s past, and goes on and on until they come to take me away, a whole squadron of slim men in squeaky shoes whose eyes are any color I don’t remember. Everything considered, they handle me gently.
Their sergeant says: “You’re charged with breaking and entering. Understand your rights?”
Rights, yes. But breaking and entering what? I wonder. Reentering somewhere? Breaking in or breaking out?
They put me away in a cell where I dozed for the rest of the night. In the morning they released me, my lawyer insisting I had not broken any law. If he only knew how right he was, though if I’d been able to follow my intentions, some laws would have lain in shards. They rarely sentence you for your intentions, though; perhaps they figure you can do that for yourself.
So there I was, free to go home to my filmscreen and warmed sake, and I found that’s what I wanted. Though I wouldn’t have said so, years ago when I knew whether his eyes were brown or grey.