No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  After that I sponged myself down with yesterday’s T-shirt and dug into my shaving bag for my toothbrush, razor, and blades. In retrospect, much of this attention to dress and cleanliness seems ridiculous to me, but in spite of my survival training I had not yet broken completely free of the twentieth century. My most sinful indulgence that morning was changing my underwear. This feat (although detailing it may invite ridicule) I accomplished without taking off my chukkas, for it seemed imperative to me to be able to run if danger threatened. I had trained barefoot with Babington, but I still did not trust myself to negotiate a landscape littered with acacia thorns. Keeping my shoes on meant stretching the elastic around the leg holes of my briefs, but that was a lesser evil than having to flee a leopard in my stocking feet. Actually, I was more worried about having only two packages of Fruit of the Looms left in my pack, and I devoted a good ten minutes to washing out yesterday’s pair in the stream bed. These I placed on a euphorbia bush to dry.

  I probably should have spent my sunrise on the shores of Lake Kiboko. If Kaprow had dropped the scaffold to me at dawn, I had not been there to witness the event or to confirm for him the fact of my continuing existence. However, I could not convince myself that I had missed anything, and the singing of the habilines was a phenomenon worth at least another day in the Pleistocene. Our contingency plan, along with our matched set of transcordions, had temporarily broken down. White Sphinx would find a way to retrieve me, surely, but for the moment I had to hold my own.

  As I fetched my Fruit of the Looms from the euphorbia on the edge of the glade, I saw marching single-file across the savannah, north-northeast toward Helensburgh, a pack of hyenas. Prodigious creatures, they were good, if frightening, examples of the extinct Pleistocene megafauna. I froze, hoping that some of the laughter I had heard intermittently all night—the nerve-racking cachinnations of brigands—had signified a successful hunt.

  I counted fifteen slope-backed hyenas in all, each of the eleven adults as big as the biggest male lion. It being July, the wind was blowing gently from the southwest, from the hyenas to me, and upon it I could smell the unmistakable tang of carrion. The animals’ coarse, yellow-brown pelts were marbled with interlocking swirls of black, and their unlovely faces bespoke the smugness of—Ngai be praised—satiety. That, in them, was a condition I could gratefully stomach.

  Alistair Patrick Blair often said of hyenas, “I wish the bloody buggers had never been born.” This giant variety—although he had obviously never had the chance to see one—he especially detested. Their great crime, in his eyes, was their nearly wholesale disposal of the bones of their two-legged contemporaries. By this indiscriminate feeding behavior, they had eradicated from the fossil record an invaluable store of information about human origins. My distaste for hyenas was less lofty: they killed as well as scavenged, and they stank.

  When the hyenas had gone, I gathered up my gear, including my freshly laundered shorts, and struck off into the bush to establish a home base much closer to Helensburgh.

  * * *

  Once, that second morning, I thought I saw bipedal creatures roaming the veldt to the north, as if stalking prey, but the heat haze and the intervening herds of antelope may have played tricks on my vision.

  A short time later I arrived at the head of the Minids’ V-shaped clearing and squatted like a breakwater between the fingers of forest pointing into the savannah. The Minids saw me at once, and three or four children who had been tumbling in front of the huts together stopped to watch what I was doing. An elderly male hooted to his younger compatriots in alarm. Struggling to control the pounding of my heart, I dug nonchalantly at the grass. I examined individual sprigs, turned over rocks, sniffed my fingers appraisingly.

  Quite by accident, a fortunate one, I discovered a scorpion. It lifted its stinger and moved on me in immemorial scorpion fashion. Meanwhile, I knew, the Minids had formed an attack group of their own and were advancing on me with upraised clubs. Deliberately ignoring the habilines, I made a show of rapidly striking the scorpion with my knuckles—a technique much beloved of baboons—until the odious little beastie was so dazed that a flick of my finger capsized it to its back. Next, I removed the stinger, along with the poison sac, and killed the scorpion with a squeeze.

  By this time every Minid in Helensburgh was watching me. In fact, Helen had joined the males in their cautious war party. I saw her, club in hand, tiptoeing toward me along the left-hand side of the clearing. The males were spread out in a sagging U, moving slowly but methodically forward. I tried not to betray my nervousness.

  Making an involuntary moue, I put the best face I could on the eating of the scorpion. The idea was to demonstrate to my bipedal brethren that, all appearances to the contrary aside, I was one of them, a bona fide grass-grubbing, arachnid-crunching, down-to-earth habiline. Further, if permitted to, I could contribute to their food-gathering industry, as witness my success in finding the scorpion.

  Nothing doing.

  The menfolk closed on me more menacingly, the hair on their shoulders erect. Helen’s intentions appeared no more friendly than those of her male counterparts. She fell in behind a macho hombre with a tangled black beard and the astonishing tonsorial discrepancy of a Thin Man mustache. This dude, the largest in the band, was almost certainly the Minids’ alpha Romeo, for which reason I had already mentally dubbed him Alfie. Helen, however, had at least an inch in height on him, and it was interesting to note that she had not waited for his okay to join their assault group, a fearsome juggernaut of nationalistic feeling.

  The taste of scorpion acrid on my palate, I stood up. I raised my hands. Because I was taller than the herbivorous australopithecines with whom they shared a portion of the bush-and-savannah habitat, the Minids stopped. Further, I was as nimble on my feet as the habilines. Come the crunch, fear and adrenaline fueling me to victory in spite of my chukka boots, I felt sure I could do a Jesse Owens on even their fleetest and most tenacious sprinter. For now, though, I spread my arms and showed them I was holding neither club nor stone.

  The habilines, renewing their approach, stalked to within fifteen or twenty feet of me, perilously near. Reluctantly, I unsnapped my holster, drew my pistol, and pointed it skyward. A single warning shot would probably send them scrambling for cover, but it would also set back my hopes of cementing a relationship of mutual acceptance and trust. In the face of this dilemma I began to talk, spilling out the Pledge of Allegiance, the Preamble to the Constitution, the entire text of a Crest toothpaste commercial, several nursery rhymes, and the lyrics to a goldie-oldie popular song, all in soothing, confidence-inspiring tones that I hoped would resolve the crisis in my favor. For a moment or two they listened attentively, then flashed one another a series of significant looks whose meaning—“Attack!”—I somehow intuited.

  Desperate, I began to sing. I sang in a rich, lilting tenor, and I sang with feeling:

  “A day ago,

  I had a lovely row to hoe.

  Where did it go?

  Oh, all has changed, and rearranged,

  From but a single day ago . . .”

  The sound of this plaintive melody spilling from my lips gave my attackers pause. Or maybe it was not so much the music itself—a simple ditty, heartfelt and direct—as the sheer unexpectedness of my singing it for them. Singing was even better than eating scorpions as a proof of my habilinity! Although virtually spellbound through the second refrain, my audience then began to tire of my performance. Exchanging a series of rapid glances and gestures, they resumed closing in on me. Their faces made it easy to decide what to do for an encore.

  I fired my pistol.

  The effect was dramatic. Three of the males fell to the ground as if I had poleaxed them, two others ran into the woods, and a sixth beshat himself and dove sideways with his arms over his head. Still in front of me, dazedly crouching, were Helen and the steadfast Alfie. In Helensburgh itself a pandemonium of shrieks and gibbering had broken out among the women and children, but this die
d away quickly as they hurried for shelter. With their menfolk routed, however, who would defend them? I was cutting a decidedly Genghis Khanish figure, but my assumption of this autocratic role gave me no pleasure. I had probably blown my chance of achieving a workable detente with the Minids.

  Extending one hand, I took a step or two toward Helen and Alfie. They backed away. The remaining habiline males rolled over, leapt up, and hightailed it for the huts, there to make a stand if I chose to pursue them. The fellow who had lost control of his bowels oared himself backward over the grass, scraping fecal matter from his derriere, while the warriors who had run into the forest returned to see what was happening. A brave people. My pistol shot had signaled a shift in the balance of power in almost the way the explosion of an atomic device over Hiroshima had signaled a similar alteration between the Allies and the Japanese. At least, however, I had fired a warning—I had plenty of bullets.

  “I’m not going to do it again,” I assured Helen and Alfie. “That was to save my life.”

  But they, too, withdrew to the huts, where, among a congregation of fuddled, uncertain faces, they stared at me as if I were Death Incarnate. When I made no move to press my advantage, two or three of the males began gesticulating with their clubs, hooting belligerently, and indulging in ridiculous swagger, their hackles lifted along their shoulders and their chests puffed out.

  In the thicket to my right, however, a young Minid male was scrutinizing me with almost chilling calm. He had large, limpid eyes and a professorial dignity. He and Alfie seemed more dangerous foes than the vainglorious gasbags dancing about before the huts, and I decided to get out of Helensburgh to avoid having to shed anyone’s blood.

  “Goodbye,” I told them. “Look for me to make this up to you. All in all, I’m not such a bad dude. Goodbye . . .”

  Oh, all has changed, and rearranged,

  From but a single day ago . . .

  Chapter Nine

  Van Luna, Kansas

  October 1964

  LYING IN BED ONE NIGHT, Anna and John-John long since tucked in and told “sweet dreams” in the other bedroom, Jeannette tried to explain her ambivalent feelings about her hometown to Hugo, who was smoking a cigarette and desultorily following a George Raft and Ida Lupino late movie on the portable TV that sat on the chest of drawers. His cigarette smoke curled eerily in the mirror behind the set.

  Hugo stubbed the cigarette in a glass ashtray with a SAC emblem in the bottom. “I am now gettin’ serious, mujer. I am now ready to tell you what the trouble is.”

  “Yes?”

  “The trouble is that Van Luna is not real.”

  “Not real?”

  “I said that, yes. Not real. Instead, Van Luna is like a spotless laboratory chamber, very clean. Good air, sweet water, pretty white mice for its population. Stick a little brown mouse in, and what’s the big difference? The white mice stay pretty, and the brown mouse gets fed and sniffed at just like everybody else. It isn’t real, Van Luna. It’s just like a laboratory chamber with little food and water bins.”

  Jeannette pulled herself away from Hugo, drew up her knees, and took the ashtray from his hands. “Little food and water bins? What are you talking about? My father has faced economic reality every day of his life in this town. It’s done things to him, too. That isn’t real?”

  “Are we talkin’ about John-John or your father?” Hugo let his eyes drift back to the TV screen, where Ida Lupino was testifying, animatedly, before a packed courtroom.

  “Look, you know the reality of supporting a family on a noncom’s pay. That’s why you’ve moonlighted at the store. Are you trying to tell me that sort of thing isn’t real?”

  “Not me.”

  “And the competition’s beginning to get him down. It’s twisted him—my own father—into stinginess, of all things.”

  “Van Luna is very real for your father,” Hugo acknowledged.

  “But it’s not real for you, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Of course it’s real for me, Jeanie. You were askin’ me—I think—about John-John and these people because his skin is black. You’ve changed the subject out from under me.” He tapped a cigarette from a Marlboro flip-top box, lit it like George Raft, and waggled the burning tip under Jeannette’s nose. “You don’ listen, mujer. You listen sideways, anyway. So I’m gonna repeat this only once: The problem you’ve discovered is that for John-John—not for me or you or Mr. Rivenbark or Mrs. What’s-her-face—Van Luna is not real. If you like to worry about that, Jeanie, go ahead, please. Worry up a storm.”

  Jeannette handed the ashtray back to Hugo, then moved closer and put her chin back on his shoulder. “Do you think we should move into Wichita, then?”

  “What for?”

  “So that he’d have someplace real to live. A borderline neighborhood, not too run-down. That sort of thing.”

  “Hell no. That would be crazy.”

  “But I’m trying to—”

  “But nothin’, Jeanie. The best place for kids to grow up is a place that ain’ too goddamn real. In Bogotá, you know, I’ve seen the little orphan boys—the gamines—runnin’ in packs, sleepin’ in the streets under newspapers. And Zaragoza, and Sevilla, and other such realities. Screw ’em. You want to take John-John to Mississippi, maybe?”

  “I don’t want to take him anyplace. I was just—”

  “Good.” He jabbed his cigarette toward the television set. “Look at that Ida Lupino. She’s a real bitch in this one, eh?”

  * * *

  Later, well after midnight, Jeannette went into the children’s room to check on them.

  A nightlight glowed in the tiny room. This was a clown with a bulbous nose and a pair of round, upraised fists. Outward from the bedside table on which he stood, his hands and nose shed a circle of pale orange light, a fuzzy nimbus. Anna lay half out of her covers on her trundle bed, while across the room from her, still in a crib, John-John sprawled with one tiny hand extended backwards through the spindles. Jeannette rearranged Anna’s bedding before approaching the boy. She found him in the throes of dream.

  Supine, his head seeming to pivot on the knob of bone at the back of his skull, John-John was making a gentle, gargling noise. His eyelids had fallen back, like the eyelids concealing the bright marble eyes of a Madame Alexander doll. Half hidden from view, however, John-John’s eyeballs jiggled from side to side in the upper portions of the sockets, their faintly muddy whites pulsing in time. Jeannette had witnessed this strange phenomenon dozens of times since bringing John-John home from Spain, but it never failed to disconcert her.

  “Dear God,” she murmured.

  The Air Force doctors at the McConnell dispensary, to whom she had taken the child about both his slowness in learning to speak and these uncanny nocturnal fits, always assured her that John-John was perfectly healthy. He had an especially vivid dream life, perhaps, but the fact that his eyelids rolled back did not imply that he was suffering from epilepsy, petit mal, or any other nervous disorder. In fact, the vividness of his dream life might well be inhibiting—temporarily—his development of certain postinfantile speech patterns. The dreams were a substitute—a temporary substitute—for language development. Besides, Jeannette was supposed to keep in mind that he was not yet two, and that he was probably still adjusting to his transfer from a Spanish- to an English-speaking culture, and that in every other respect he seemed to be completely normal. The doctors, of course, had never had to confront the spectacle of his jiggling eyeballs and pulsing whites at one o’clock in the morning. They did not have to square this upsetting image of the child with their picture of the quick, active, curious kid scooting about their dispensary. Nor did they have to worry very much about the enigma of his first eight or nine months.

  “What’s the matter, Jeanie?”

  She turned and saw Hugo in the doorway, his boxer shorts ballooned about his hips and another cigarette burning in his fingers. “He’s doing it again,” she told him.

  “It’s okay. H
e always stops.”

  “I don’t like it.” She gripped the edge of the crib. “I can’t stand it, in fact. It scares the hell out of me.”

  “He’s dreamin’. The doctors have told you. Why do you get so”—he gestured with the cigarette—“so histérica?”

  “Because I’m a mother!” Anna stirred in her bed and, whispering, Jeannette asked, “What the hell does he have to dream about? And why do his eyes have to come open like that?”

  “Maybe he’s not really asleep, eh? Maybe he likes to watch you get riled up like this.”

  “Tell me, for God’s sake, what he’s dreaming about.”

  “Puppy dogs, and ridin’ in his stroller, and eatin’ ice cream. Who knows, Jeanie, who knows?”

  “It’s none of those things.”

  “What do you want me to say, then? He’s dreamin’ of his real mother, of España and poverty? You like that better?”

  “I don’t like any of this.” She began to cry.

  Hugo, his cigarette between his lips movie-gangster fashion, came into the room and embraced her. “It’s all right, Jeanie. We can wake him up if you want to.”

  “No. I won’t do that. Let him dream.”

  It hurt her to watch him, though. The real John-John—the lower hemispheres of his eyeballs fluttering, his delicate fingers spastically grasping air—seemed miles and miles away, trapped in an eddy of experience forever beyond her knowledge or comprehension. At such times he was utterly lost to Jeannette, and she wanted to be closer, closer, closer. His dreaming was a barrier to closeness, the dream-racked body he left behind an accusation and a taunt.