Black Pockets

by George Zebrowski

  I turned and walked back up to my door. I looked left and right and saw that the other houses were all lit up: Windows flashed from television screens. Motion detector lights blazed in driveways, reminding me of theater lights waiting for the actors to come on stage. But my house was dark. Then I realized that the sensor-lights had failed to go on as I approached the door.

  I rang the bell.

  “Sarah!” I shouted when I got no answer.

  Suddenly the house was quiet and the night was still, as in that Wallace Stevens poem, but I was not even on the right page; I was staring at a closed book, at what seemed a sudden finality, as abrupt as the impending autumn around me.

  Something had happened, I told myself, feeling certain that I would have to break into the house to find out what.

  I went around to the basement window that I had never fixed. It was on the side of the house facing Mrs. Scheler’s driveway. That feisty old woman seemed eternal; she had been ancient even when we had moved here two years ago. We called the strip of grass and bushes and her asphalt driveway between our houses “The Scheler Neutral Zone.” She didn’t like the leaves and seeds from our trees covering her driveway every year, but I noticed that her driveway was graded so that our house foundation got all the water draining from her rain gutters. I wasn’t going to cut down any trees, but if she pressed the matter I would show her how the water flowed.

  I pried out the old, wooden storm window. It seemed less decayed than I recalled. The inner window opened easily, since only half the latch was still there. I had not replaced the broken half.

  Shaking from fear of what I might find, I climbed in feet first and dropped to the floor. It was only three steps to the light switch. I flicked on the lights, and without looking around went to the stairs, hurrying from fear that there had been some kind of accident and Sarah might need me.

  I came upstairs to the kitchen door and found it open. The skeleton key I had bought was not in the lock. I turned off the basement lights out of habit, then crept into the kitchen, tasting the mustiness that followed me from the basement. I found the wall switch, and turned on the lights.

  Everything seemed normal.

  “Sarah!” I shouted as I went into the dining room. The lights went on, but the room was a shock. The heavy oak table that had gone to Sarah’s sister stood in place of our walnut elegance. The upright piano that we had given to charity was here again, up against the left wall. The built-in china closet was empty, as it was when we had moved in.

  I hurried into the living room, but it was an alien place, empty of all that we had done to make it our own. Sarah’s mother’s furniture was all here, as if a giant had taken the roof off the house and put it all back.

  “Sarah!” I shouted, hearing my voice break.

  I listened for an answer in the silence.

  Then I heard a meow.

  I turned and saw a black and white cat standing in the doorway to the living room. He gave me the penetrating gaze I had once known, then snarled at me as if at a stranger.

  A rush of feeling went through me. “Spencer!” I cried. “You’re alive!”

  I started toward him, but he turned and fled back to the stairs and down into the basement. I was breathing hard, wondering by what miracle he could be alive. I had lost my mind, I told myself, struggling to deny it...

  Spencer had died a few months ago, at the vet’s. He was seventeen years old and his kidneys were failing; to have kept him alive would only have prolonged his suffering. Sarah and her mother had held his paws as he drifted away without protest. I remembered how devastated Sarah’s mother had been, even though she had allowed us to keep her cat when she had moved out after we took over the house. Long periods of separation from her pet had not cured her of him. “Harvey’s allergic to cats,” she had told us, meaning her new husband, “and there isn’t much room in the townhouse, and we’ll be traveling a lot anyway.” I supposed she had meant that Spencer would be happier in what he had come to regard as his estate. But when she held his paw, it was as if she had never left him behind. Sarah and I had looked on, our hearts stopped by our uncontrollable denial that Spencer was breathing his last. I had been up with him the night before, hoping his illness was a passing thing as he lay there wrapped in a blanket, trying to rest and shake it off...

  But my mind was gone, and my knowing it was part of the madness. I was wandering in a nightmare because I had dared venture out for French fries. Something had not wanted me to have them, and that something had been right.

  I steadied myself against the old oak table, then sat down in one of the creaky chairs. Spencer was back, looking at me from the doorway again, confused, as he had always been whenever I failed to chase after him into the basement, where we would play hideand-seek.

  But as I gazed into his furry, lost face now restored to me, I knew that we were strangers; somehow, we had not yet met. And that lack of recognition had to be another sign of madness...

  Finally, I got up and went into the kitchen. The waterfowl calendar displayed October 1996, seven months before Sarah and I had moved here from our old college town, where we had been living in our second apartment after graduation. Sarah was teaching high school while completing her doctorate, and I was trying to write novels in between monthly stories and handyman work, mostly carpentry and some plumbing.

  I stared at the calendar in disbelief. Spencer was at my feet, staring up at me and hissing. I knelt and put out my hand, happy to see him, even if he turned out to be a ghost.

  He looked at my hand as if it was an insult, and his eyes said the usual: “Don’t you dare say cute kitty things to me.” He had never really believed he was a cat, and disliked other cats; they were beneath him. Sarah’s mother had always insisted that he thought of himself as a person trapped in a feline’s body, and I sometimes believed it.

  I stood up, then tried the wall phone. It was dead. I opened the refrigerator. It was empty. I recalled that Sarah’s mother had been in Italy in the fall of ’96. It had been her first long trip with Harvey, and they had decided to marry not long afterward. We had moved here in the spring...

  Something like that, I told myself, hoping to explain this nightmare somehow. I again stared at the calendar, as if it were the great arbiter of time, the one authority I could trust to explain my situation. Who would bother to hang an old calendar?

  Lights flashed in the kitchen window, as if a lightning storm was coming. When I heard no thunder, I went to the dining room window, moving as if in a dream. It was the routine police car patrol, and I remembered the night when Spencer had slipped outside and I had gone out in my shorts and sandals looking for him.

  “Do you always look for your cat at 3 A.M.?” the cop had asked back then.

  “He escapes,” I had explained, grinning.

  Now I realized, following the logic of my madness, that they had seen the lights and would check the house. Sarah’s mother always asked them to keep an eye on things when she was away. These suburban cops would be suspicious of anything in this quiet, parklike neighborhood, where the asphalt ribbons of road, dating back to the 1940s or earlier, were little more than driveways to the houses.

  The police car circled the block, and pulled up in front of the house. They would not know me if I opened the door. They had seen lights where there should be no lights. They might even have a key.

  I had to turn out the lights and flee before they came in and found me.

  But where could I go? It wasn’t exactly warm outside. I had only the five bucks in my wallet to buy the fries.

  Then I remembered when Sarah had showed me the places in the house where she had hidden as a child. Crawlspaces on the second floor, behind the walls and over the ceilings. Could I fit into any of them?

  I turned out the lights and groped my way up the stairs to the second floor bedroom. I opened the closet, turned on the dim light, and saw the panel.

  It slid open easily. I turned out the light, then felt my way into the closet
. I squeezed into the space, shut the panel, and waited.

  The cops moved around on the first floor. One of them came up the stairs, then went back down.

  “If there was anyone here,” he called to his partner, “he was gone as soon as he saw us coming!”

  “Yeah. There’s nothing taken down here, not even a TV or radio. Must have been disappointing.”

  I thought of Sarah’s mother hiding silver cups in the back of the old 1940s radio in the basement. Probably helped its reception, I had once imagined.

  After a while, I didn’t hear the cops. It got cold in the crawl-space, but I didn’t come out. I fell asleep, hoping that I’d wake up in front of the television with Sarah, with a bag of warm fries in my lap.

  I slept dreamlessly, and awoke with a nose full of dust, startled by the dark unfamiliarity.

  Slowly I remembered, but was afraid to move and give myself away. I crouched there, realizing that I was alone in the house, somehow at an earlier time.

  Then I began to see the course now open to me. It opened before me like the doors to a prison of time. I would live nearby and wait for the years to run out. Something had set me back two and a half years, subtracting me from my time and adding me here. What cosmic calculator could have made such a thing happen?

  As I crawled out of the attic space, the enormity of the implications hit me. Two of me lived in this time. I would have to wait for the night of April 1, 1999, when I had gone out for French fries, and then try to step back into my life. Presumably, I would see myself come out of the house and disappear, leaving me the chance to step back in.

  I was assuming that I was not mad, which is what I would assume if I were insane—except that I could also see that much. Who said that sanity was simply consensus madness?

  A chill went through me, probably from sleeping in the cold space, as much as from the doubts that played through my mind. I could not be sure that the opportunity to return would ever present itself to me. All I could do was to wait out the time.

  I could stay in the house for a while, if I didn’t turn on the lights at night. Sarah’s mother wouldn’t return until November.

  I went down into the basement and found a can of tuna among the provisions in the pantry that Sarah and I would later make into a small wine cellar. There was also a package of zwieback. They would go well with the tuna. I wouldn’t starve today. There was plenty of bottled water, and canned soups, not to mention bottles of scotch and a few boxed wines. I could heat the soups on the small camper stove Sarah’s mother had bought to deal with power failures and other emergencies. I would not signal my presence by using the kitchen.

  As I started upstairs, I heard the back door open and retreated into the basement. Spencer ran past me up the stairs, and I realized that Mrs. Scheler had to be coming in to feed him, groom him, and to clean out his litter box. Sarah and I had relied on her often enough when we were away.

  I went into the wine cellar, closed the door, and listened to her moving around in the kitchen. She loved cats, and Spencer in particular. Sometimes she had reproached Sarah’s mother for abandoning Spencer. Then I realized that Mrs. Scheler would also be back in the evenings to check on Spencer and the house—every day during the period of her cat-sitting duties. The only protection I had was that Mrs. Scheler was old and a bit dotty, and hence not very observant. With enough care, I could keep out of her way.

  I waited. After a while I sat down on the cold floor of the wine cellar and listened through the door. She came down into the basement to refresh Spencer’s litter box.

  “You dear thing,” she said to him softly. “Abandoned and alone here. But you have me. I’ll take good care of you.”

  I imagined Spencer looking at her.

  Then he meowed.

  I slept in what would later be our bedroom. During the night Spencer joined me, snuggling up against my thigh. But he was gone in the morning. With Spencer it was solidarity through the vulnerable night, pride in the bright daylight.

  I spent the day looking around the house, annoyed by all the waiting problems I would fix after we moved in. It was strange seeing the dripping faucets, electrical disrepair, and carpentry, still waiting for me. It had all been done in the future; but not here.

  And I was always listening for Mrs. Scheler.

  I realized then that I would have to live somewhere else, to get through the two and a half years that would have to pass before I could resume my life. I couldn’t stay here; sooner or later I would make a mistake and get caught. I had visions of being identified, of being brought face to face with myself before the situation could right itself—if it ever could be resolved. Some great disaster was waiting for me, and I could not imagine it.

  I sat in the shadowy daylight of the living room, thinking that maybe my return might overtake me sooner; maybe at any moment. Why assume that it would happen only at the future moment when I had left the house? I sat in the eternity of that living room, hoping for a miracle. Shapes played at the edges of my vision, memories that had yet to happen in my life with Sarah, my mysterious chemical bondmate.

  Finally, aware of my limited funds, I returned to the basement and checked the open back of the enormous standing radio. Yes, there was some silver in the unplugged works, among the dusty old tubes, including Sarah’s silver baby cup—quite beat up; but it was silver.

  I slipped out that afternoon to hock the silver. On my way back I noticed a “Help Wanted” sign in the local pizzeria. No one would know me here, so I went in and talked to the manager, an aging Pakistani who seemed to like my looks and hired me after about two minutes of conversation. My driver’s license was still good, since I had gotten it only four years earlier. No one was going to notice two years off my age. Only my two credit cards were useless.

  I would be inconspicuous in the job, since my duties were making deliveries three nights a week and working the store’s cash register the rest of the time, opening up, cleaning a bit, and locking up. I would make enough to get by until the appointed time of mysteries, when I would converge with myself. It was a mad hope.

  I rented a studio apartment, ten by ten with bath, in one of the old brick apartment buildings some ten blocks away, and went to work at eleven every morning.

  It was a dreary life.

  Sarah and I were a hundred miles away, in our beloved apartment, not yet aware that we would be moving by spring.

  Here now, two and a half years earlier, there was no one I could count on to help me, unless I was ready to call upon people who had not seen me in some time. I would have to impersonate my earlier self in order to talk to them. Living incognito, hiding nothing, would not be difficult, because there was no one who could catch me at it.

  I made enough at my job to pay the rent, and I had use of one of the eatery’s cars to come and go from work. After six months I was promoted to store manager, when old Karim retired. He had a share of the place, and seemed relieved to keep me in charge. This meant that I no longer had to make deliveries in the area. I now took orders and dispatched other drivers, and continued to do the paperwork, besides opening and closing the store.

  I opened the pizzeria by noon, so I had mornings and much of the afternoons to myself, which was not always a good thing, because I had time to twist every complication of my plight into every conceivable outcome. They came into my brain like train wrecks that I saw only as they were happening, never before.

  In my first year as a manager, I drove by the house late one spring evening and saw lights. Sarah and I had arrived. I was stunned at the predictability of it; they might have decided otherwise.

  I saw a moving van drive away one afternoon, and recalled that it was taking Sarah’s mother’s furniture away. The garage door was open another day, and I saw Gerard’s old beat-up car inside. I thought of myself as him.

  One night I received a phone order from that address. I took the order from my other self in a kind of bemused state of inevitability. Large deluxe, with a large bottle of Coke.
Something in me wanted to make this delivery, but I restrained myself and passed it along, knowing that I would feel as late and incongruous as the storied snail who had been thrown out the door, only to come back three months later to ask, “What was that all about?”

  On another evening, I drove by and saw Sarah and Gerard sitting on the enclosed porch, with only a small lamp on, and for a moment I felt a cold knife in my heart. Maybe I would never return. This branching of me would go on as I was now, exiled forever from the rest of my life. I could not take for granted what I wished to happen.

  But I had to believe that I was working my way back home. That had to be enough. Keep to the plan. What would happen if I talked to myself? Would the universe blow up? Would I throw variations into the time stream that would forever bar my return?

  I made a firm decision to pretty much ignore the world, for my own sanity, and because I feared somehow affecting the future in a way that might make my return impossible. I refused to read newspapers or watch television. After all, I pretty much knew what had happened. I resisted the urge to bet on sports events, even though the chance came my way in the restaurant through the drivers, who sometimes stopped off on their deliveries to place a bet. I remembered an old Ray Bradbury story, in which an expedition of time travelers harms a butterfly in the past and forever loses their own time.

  I was a ghost, hoping to return to my own body.

  One evening the phone rang.

  I answered it. “Say,” a woman’s voice said. “The pizza was cold!”

  “Oh,” I said to Sarah. “I’m sorry about that. Would you like a replacement?”

  “No, we already reheated.”

  “Well, next time you get a free one. Just remind me the next time you call in an order.”

  “Oh—thank you,” she said, sounding friendly. “That will be okay.” She had always been too kindly, or too cowardly, to carry through a rage.

  As I hung up the phone I began to doubt that my waiting would do me any good. They were living there, and would always live there, while I would go on with this life. Did I really think I would be able to step back into the exact right moment? What if it required a fraction of a second of speed beyond my ability, beyond any human ability? As I imagined constructing a strange, temporal razor with which to divide the moments, I knew even more clearly that I had no way to be sure that I would have a chance, a year from now or ever. No reason at all to think so.