The homeless continued to arrive, and to gather in silent clusters in the famous places of Manhattan.
Attempts were made to find ringleaders to blame for all this. But no one seemed to be in charge. No one could be held indisputably responsible for what was going on. It appeared to be a genuine mass movement-the revolt of the disadvantaged.
The police became lax at enforcing the laws designed to keep the ugly side of the city out of the public gaze. The jails were overcrowded anyhow. Advocates for the poor sprang up. And it wasn’t only the poor who were involved. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers, their own jobs at risk, began to sympathize with the homeless: Too many people were close to that condition themselves.
Law enforcement began to fall off. The poor camped out in the parks. Soup kitchens sprang up on street corners. Attempts were made to round them all up; but there were always more where they came from. The poor, the homeless, began to perceive this as their opportunity to gain a little footing in the American scheme of things.
A semi-permanent campground came into being in Central Park, not far from The Tavern on the Green. And, for a while, the homeless lounged around New York, displaying to all their poverty, hunger, diseases and discontents. Over small guttering garbage fires the destitute assembled. Politicians filled the newspapers with their pronouncements on this state of affairs. New York appeared to be sinking into second class status. And there was no other city ready and able to take over its position.
The embarrassment was too big to handle, to finesse, to blame on other people.
Something had to be done.
New funding was found for the drop-in centers. This, due to the emergency nature of things, was provided by special taxes on the wealthy. A special tax on front-leading businesses and corporations was voted into law. Contributions were solicited from any who could afford them. The rich were disabused of their favorite pursuit, getting richer. The drop-in centers were re-established.
Some thought this marked the beginning of a new era in political leadership. They were wrong, of course. The new funding was a temporary measure, to be kept in place only until the silent masses became silent again, and, above all, invisible.
History resumed its march to further advantage the advantaged. After this temporary upset, American life resumed its march to help those who least needed it.
THE SYMPATHETIC DOCTOR
I had been on a city street in New York. Now, suddenly and for no discernable reason, I was on a dirt road in the countryside.
Ahead of me I could see a city, a lot of little stone and marble buildings, piled high up the side of a hill.
The other people on the road were peasant types. They wore what looked like smocks, pulled back from the shoulders because it was hot out, even though it seemed to be almost evening. The people around me were mostly colored a medium olive-brown. Some of them carried staves, or maybe they were cudgels. Some of them were herding goats into the city. The bleating of the goats was the loudest sound I heard.
What did I do? The first thing I did was get off the road, sit down on a small boulder, and try to figure out what had happened to me. I’ll tell you, I was shaking.
I had just been on West End Avenue and 96th street. Now I was standing in rolling, open land, and there was an ancient-looking city in the near distance, a bunch of small marble and brick buildings piled on a hill.
I thought, “Oh-oh, Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more.” Except that I had no Toto with me.
I was in this place alone, and I was wearing a sort of sheepskin tunic, and leather sandals had replaced my Nikes, in fact all my clothing was gone, and my wallet with it, but now I had a leather pouch hanging around my neck by a leather strap.
I opened the pouch. There were a few irregular coins in it, and when I looked at them, I could make out Greek letters.
That’s when I decided I must have passed through some sort of a portal or doorway in time.
Why just me and no one else? The mind moves at lightning speed to find answers. Maybe I had a rare blood type, though they had never told me so at Flower and Fifth hospital. Maybe I had a peculiar brain configuration. Who the hell knows?
There was no one around I could ask. The people passing on the road were peasant types, dressed much as I was, and some of them were leading donkeys, and some were driving goats.
I’ll tell you, it freaked me out.
I can’t really remember what I had been doing before all this began. Going to the subway, I think.
I know, I’m in a stressed state. Maybe I’m not responsible for what I’m saying, but believe me, I’m telling the truth as I know it.
I was in the past. My condition was made all the worse by my inability to do anything about it. To have any control over it.
It’s like someone, some god or demon, told me, “OK, we’re going to give you one of the most precious dreams of mankind. We’re going to let you walk in an age not your own, an age out of the splendid past.”
This someone could also have said, “We’re also going to give you automatic command of the local language. We’re going to dress you appropriately, and we’ll even throw in a little local currency so you can buy yourself a drink. What do you think about that?”
I would have gone for it with effusive thanks. But that’s before it happened, and I could see it’s not working out like I thought it would.
I heard a voice call out, “Ho, wayfarer! Wait for me!”
I turned. A small, portly, bearded man dressed similarly to me came bustling up.
“You’re new around here,” he said. I nodded. “And you’re going to Corinth.” He gestured at the city ahead of us.
“So what?” I said.
“You’re not from around here?”
“No,” I said.
“So you’re going to need a place to sleep in Corinth.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“Have you got a place?”
I shook my head.
“This is your lucky day. I’ve got just the place for you.”
Well, I was pretty sure the man was a charlatan of some sort, but I needed to talk to someone so I just nodded, not making much in the way of replies, which didn’t slow him down at all. He told me about The Mysteries, an organization he was an agent for. The Mysteries of Hermes owned Hermetic temples all over Greece. They were in accord with the main religion of the country, the worship of Zeus and the Olympians, of whom Hermes was one.
“It isn’t very expensive to join the organization. And in return, the owners of the temples will make sleeping quarters available for you in whatever city you visit.
It sounded to me like: If you join our Elks club, you can sleep in any of the Elk lodges around the United States. Can’t beat that for a travel bargain.
I nodded.
“In Corinth,” he said. “the main temple is right near the marketplace. Handy for business.”
I nodded again. It was pretty impressive, in a way.
I didn’t know how to get rid of the guy, so I let him tag along with me. Anyhow, I would need a place to sleep.
Pylas, as he called himself, invited me to an inn for a bowl of lentils. I accepted. It was a sort of low dive—the ancient equivalent of a trucker’s cafÈ, maybe. Pylas had his own utensils, and when I looked in my pouch I found that I had a big wooden spoon.
It was pretty exciting being in ancient Greece. If I hadn’t been so nervous about what was going to happen next, I would have asked him where I might find Plato or Aristotle. But I didn’t ask. That was just too touristy for me.
Pylas continued talking to me about the advantages of joining the Mysteries. He found me a place to sleep that night on the portico of one of the Hermes temples. He never got a chance to collect a fee, because I was gone before he woke up. I don’t mean I left of my own free will. I just woke up somewhere else.
I woke up in another city, this one built of wood and stone, and with broad paved streets. In a square ahead of me was a Byzantine-style church.
I was wearing a sort of unbelted smock woven of some coarse fabric. I had wooden clogs on my feet.
It was crowded. There were a lot of people pushing around in the square. Most of the men were bearded. A lot of them wore fur hats. The sky overhead was gray, and there was an icy wind.
It took no great intelligence on my part to decide I was probably in Russia.
The people were all talking in what must have been Russian. It didn’t sound like Russian to me. I understood it. It seemed to be the only language I spoke, just as Greek had been my only language yesterday.
Russia. And not in modern times, because I saw no cars. Only horses and carriages.
I knew I had to keep a low profile, stay out of trouble. My best bet was to find some really cheap tavern, get a bowl of borsht and a piece of bread, see if I could stay the night there, and hope that I’d find myself somewhere else in the morning.
Whoever or whatever was doing this had moved me so twice now. Why not a third time?
I was thinking so hard about staying out of trouble that I blundered right into it. I started to walk and stepped right in front of an officer on a horse.
I dodged out of the way, and the horse dodged in the same direction. I would have gone under his hooves if the rider had not promptly pulled him back on its hind legs.
The officer swung out of the saddle, came up and glared at me belligerently.
“Are you blind? Why did you get in my way like that?”
I cowered, mumbling apologies.
“You’re not going to last long in St. Petersburg like that. Where are you from?”
“Odessa,” I said, the first name that came to my mind.
“Really? You don’t sound like a southerner. Let me see your travel permit and city pass.”
My heart sank. This officer seemed to be in his early thirties, gorgeously turned out in a tight-fitting uniform of blue and red and gold.
“Well?” he said. He scowled, his drooping black moustache drawing down around his long chin.
I looked in my bag. No papers. Just a couple of rubles to buy dinner with, if I hadn’t run into this.
Time to improvise. “My papers are gone,” I said. “I was in an inn earlier, and someone must have stolen them.”
He glared at me. His eyes were very blue and cold.
“You have no papers?”
“No, your excellency. I just came here to find work. I’m harmless, believe me.”
My declaration of harmlessness seemed to stir his suspicions. “Maybe you are and maybe you’re not. Steady, Sonya,” he said to his horse—his mare—who was acting skittish. “Anyhow, it’s something for the politicians to sort out.”
A small crowd had gathered around us. The officer looked around. A tall, thin man in a long black overcoat stepped forward.
“Yes, Captain, is there anything wrong?”
“This fellow doesn’t have his papers. Claims to be from Odessa, but his accent’s all wrong.”
“Is that a fact?” the tall man said. He made a hand gesture. Two men, dressed similarly to him, came up. The crowd fell back and ostentatiously paid us no attention.
The first man said, “You’d better come with us.”
And that’s how I found myself in St. Petersburg’s prison, the Peter and Paul Fortress.
The two men led me through a series of gates. From their occasional muttered conversation with each other, I learned we were going to the Trubetskoi Bastion, facing the river Neva. They said that Bakunin had been held here, and Kropotkin before him. When I asked why I was being held, they didn’t answer. Then one of them grunted that it would all be explained to me in due course.
A guard unlocked an iron door and led us into a corridor. There were cell doors all along it, and there were stoves, fed from the corridor, which heated the cells.
The guard unlocked a cell and locked me in. I was alone in a fair-sized square room, perhaps fifteen feet on a side. It was very hot in the room. There was a window at one side, within a deep embrasure in the thick walls. It was covered with an iron wire net. I could see a wall perhaps twenty feet away. And I could catch a glimpse of the gray St. Petersburg sky. And there I sat, now in despair.
These men probably thought I was subversive. No matter who was in charge of Russia, that didn’t promise well for me.
An hour or so later, the warden, bearded, in a baggy dark suit, visited me. He brought pen and paper, and advised me to make as full confession as possible if I hoped for any clemency.
He advised me to write the complete truth, left the pen and paper, and then left.
I didn’t know what to write. The truth as I knew it was wilder than anything they might have encountered in the pages of Baron Munchausen. They seemed to want something political from me. But I didn’t know anything about the politics of this period. I was probably in Russia some time before the First World War. No one was going to believe that I was a loyal Czarist.
I lay down on the iron cot in a state of complete despair. Despite the stifling heat, I fell asleep. And when I awoke, I was somewhere else.
I woke up with no sense of transition. One minute, I had been in Russia, in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul fortress, probably at the turn of the 19th century; now I was standing on a modern city street down which automobiles moved. Automobiles! I was back in modern times.
A wave of dizziness hit me and I had to lean against the side of the building to keep from falling. I sometimes experience vertigo on these locale-changing journeys.
The cop must have been standing right close by watching me. He walked up and asked, “You all right, bub?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “It’s just—”
“Just what?” he asked.
He seemed sympathetic. There was one thing I really wanted to know. It seemed such a simple, natural question. So I blurted it out.
“Could you tell me what year this is?”
You see, knowing when you are is more important than knowing where you are. Once you can pinpoint when you are, you’re half familiar with it already. You have some idea how to cope.
But this is not the question to ask if you’re trying to pass unnoticed.
The cop didn’t answer, but began asking me a lot of other questions. When I couldn’t tell him where I was staying, or even produce a driver’s license—I was in a seersucker suit with a five dollar bill in one pocket and nothing else—his suspicions were further aroused
“Where do you come from?” he asked.
“My last stop was St. Petersburg.”
“St. Petersburg, Florida?”
“St. Petersburg, Russia. Around the year 1900 as near as I could judge. But I’m not an expert on these matters.”
He stared at me. I realized I shouldn’t have said that. I was showing off, perhaps, or, more accurately, I was reaching out desperately for sympathy. Not a hanging offense. But the cop was really suspicious of me now. When I could produce no identification, not even a driver’s license, his opinion that I was a crazy person was confirmed.
‘Where are you from?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Wait, I do know. New York. A place like this.”
He nodded. “Come along with me,” he said. “I know a place where you can spend the night. Maybe a couple of nights. Your last stop was St. Petersburg, you said? In Russia? You’ll like this better.”
He took me (I really had no choice in the matter) to a large graystone building a few blocks away. It appeared to be a hospital of some sort. A receptionist signed me in. Several attendants brought a wheel chair, strapped me in it, and wheeled me down the corridor. They took me to a room with a bed, two chairs, and a bureau. They unstrapped me, motioned me to one of the chairs, and left.
I got up and tried the door.
It was locked.
I sat down again. I calmed myself by remembering that no matter how long they tried to keep me here, I’d likely be out pretty soon. A day or two at the most, to judge by how it had already gone.
Then, if this followed the form, I’d find myself in a new place, at a different time, with a new set of problems.
Quite a lot of time passed. I dozed for a while, sitting in the chair. Then, suddenly the door opened and a man walked in. He was tall, with dark, curly hair. He appeared to be in his early forties. He wore a long white doctor’s coat. A stethoscope hung around his neck. He had a metal-backed clipboard under his arm. He wore a plastic nametag which read Dr. Irving Schwartz, M.D., Ph.D.
“Good morning,” he said. “We don’t seem to have your name on file.”
“I’m Jonathan Weiss,” I told him.
He said, “How are you this morning, Jonathan?”
“I’m here,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “But how are you, really?”
“Literally, I am as you see me. But actually, I am in a different state.”
Dr. Schwartz was carrying a pad on a clipboard, with a ball-point pen attached. He made a note, then gave me what I considered a searching look. “Interesting differentiation. Would you care to explain further?”
I looked at him—searchingly, I suppose. He had a square, honest face. A small dark beard, well trimmed. He looked sympathetic, open-minded, intelligent. I decided to take a chance.
“This has been a difficult day for me,” I said.
“Oh?” He made a mark on his clipboard. “How so?”
“Well, I just arrived here in your city this morning.”
He nodded. “Plane? Train?”
“None of the above,” I told him. “I just showed up. That is to say, I opened my eyes a little while ago and found myself in a strange place, which turned out to be your city. The policeman who questioned me outside must have thought I was behaving oddly. He brought me here.”
“Now let me get this straight,” the doctor said. “You just opened your eyes and found yourself here? Where were you before this? Where were you last night?”
“My last stop was St. Petersburg, Russia, around the turn of the century, I think. Before that, I was in ancient Greece. Around 300 B.C., I think, but I’m no expert on these matters. I can barely make sense of the Greek alphabet. I think I was in Post Homeric Greece, but pre-Platonic, I think.”
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