But oh, the voices, to hear so many voices once again. In my time I had disapproved of the long-voweled accent of Boston, which I equated with brawling, ignorance, and drink. In the here and now that same drawl sounded melodic, expressive, sincere in the best and earthiest way. Ha. It was akin to entering a house and smelling a favorite food cooking on the stove.
And the crowds, the throngs outsized even those from the weeks before our expedition set sail. I met police officers who stood straight and puffed their chests. I held babies, thrilling to their animal aliveness even as my heart clenched with the memory of little Agnes. I played checkers in a park with old men who defeated me without mercy, for which I thanked them.
The city opened its arms to me. I saw a film, so bright, frenzied, and loud it caused me to perspire. I visited the control tower of Logan International Airport, giant aircraft going and coming in a pandemonium as frightening as it was sublime. I visited the Old North Church, symbol in the story of early American freedom. I rode on a bus that became a boat that became a bus again as we toured the harbor and Commons. I strolled the lawns of Harvard University, I stood to applause in the Statehouse chamber, I rode an elevator to the Skywalk of the Prudential Center, the city at my feet, and off to one side the infinite Atlantic.
I must say a word about touch. In my time, reserve was lauded. Men shook hands only, women touched arms only, couples of any standing made contact in public only with their eyes. Here and now seemed the opposite, with displays of intimacy in every direction. Couples swooned in each other’s arms in broad daylight. Men hugged; I saw it repeatedly. Women strolled arm in arm. Travelers crowded onto trolleys and trains, like so many sheep in a fold.
This contact, I hasten to add, extended to me. I was hugged, touched, patted, squeezed like some fruit perpetually being gauged for ripeness. Hm. At first it demanded accommodation on my part, a resistance to the impulse of withdrawing, but by degrees I came to like it. It seemed almost a way of treating bodies as friends. It felt warmer.
One day Dr. Philo broke a shoe on the sidewalk, and we stopped at a shop to have it repaired. The woman at the counter was wizened, with three hairs bristling from her chin. Her husband labored in back. She brought the shoe to him, then returned to the counter. Lacking other customers for the moment, she eyed me, and I wondered if perhaps she recognized me. After the cobbler returned from behind his curtain, she rang up the cost and made change for Dr. Philo. As we made for the door the woman rushed around the counter and pulled me down into an embrace so fierce it surprised me. What’s more, she planted a buss on my neck and thanked me for showing the world that Boston is a smart city. Smaaht was how she said it.
Out on the sidewalk again, Dr. Philo elbowed me. “All the women fall for Judge Rice,” she teased.
“I will never wash my neck again,” I replied.
Not everyone delighted in my presence. Dr. Philo took me to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, which I had visited long ago on the day between my father’s death and his funeral. I had sat there all the silent afternoon. The loss of my last parent was a finality without mercy. Moreover, a barrier no longer stood between me and mortality. My generation would be next. Thus in the here and now, when I stepped beside Dr. Philo to open the heavy doors, their weight was burdened by personal history. Whilst we stood in the foyer, an old woman crept toward me with her rosary raised.
“Get thee behind me, Satan,” she hissed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust you shall return.”
“Why are you accosting me?”
“We are given only one life on this earth,” she said. Her manner of speaking bared yellow teeth. “Then there is life everlasting.” She crooked a bony finger at me. “You are a walking blasphemy. Your existence is a sin.”
“While you,” Dr. Philo called over her shoulder, drawing me away, “are a nasty old crone.”
“Get thee behind me,” the woman said, louder.
Dr. Philo led me into the central nave, where the echoing stones compelled us to silence. At once I had fresh eyes for beauty. The stained-glass windows shed multicolored light on the pews. The aspiring arches drew our eyes toward God.
The woman’s anger remained in my mind, naturally, but not topmost. There was too much competition. I was a student of the present and every day brought a deluge of novelty: a web of colored lines on a map corresponded to routes in the city’s transportation system; streetlights shone when the sun went down, with no one needed to spark them; signs beside the roads directed a ceaseless stream of vehicles like so many bees in a hive; refrigeration; lawn-mowing machines; timepieces worn on the wrist.
Often I reminded myself that our species had not become smarter over the years, nor any more moral than is its nature, and what I witnessed merely represented the culmination of a century’s exertions.
Possibly the rate of change and discovery had been greater when I was a youth, and the combination of steam power and coal had multiplied a thousandfold the force a man could exert with a lift of his hand—provided that hand was guiding a mechanical lever. Possibly neither of these eras came near in courage and adventure to the decades in which people cast monarchy from their backs and shouldered the burdens of democracy. Perhaps those times shrank beside the days when men sailed toward the edge of the globe, and discovered a new world. And those days possibly were eclipsed by the dawn of the scientific method. Which in turn must bow to the invention of the plow. And so on backward to the commencement of human time.
Yet then I would encounter another tool or toy of the present, and surrender my judicial prudence all over again. For example there was the device through which images from one time and place are sent to another, countless options, a torrent of information, a lifetime’s worth of narratives happening at once—the television. At first I was amazed. Soon I found it predictable, however, and dulling to the senses. There were only two subjects, death and money, both taken to violent excess. The one exception was my old amusement, baseball. The game was unpredictable, at least, with moments of alertness and speed. Dr. Gerber’s computer held more appeal, until I inadvertently spied that journalist Dixon savoring a screen filled with pendulous breasts.
He hardly held supremacy for lewdness, however; I heard obscenities everywhere, as though the world were populated entirely by longshoremen. Drivers, pedestrians, shopkeepers, professionals, all exercised the lower end of their vocabulary without reserve or apology. Had no one told them that coarseness lacks dignity?
One afternoon Dr. Philo and I sat on a trolley about to depart, and two schoolgirls hurried on at the last moment: pigtails, plaid skirts, as fresh as apples. They flounced into their seats, met eyes, and simultaneously pronounced a single syllable of filth that no lady of my era would have uttered at any time.
I startled easily: when an engine backfired, a police car passed shrilly, or someone yelled. The violent images from television had made me suggestible. A door slammed and I wheeled, expecting to see a gun. A jet bellowed overhead and I resisted the urge to cower against the nearest building. A car honked and I jumped.
Another disconcerting observation: memory was worth less than a fig. You could have brought me before a black-robed justice, and with my hand upon the holy book I would have sworn before him, God, and all, that I knew every building on Newbury Street, the names of each crossing avenue, the nearest place horses could be watered. Yet when Dr. Philo and I strolled that boulevard one sunny afternoon, peering into shops and pausing to enjoy some flowering azaleas, I found the order of the cross streets had changed. In my memory they fell, from east to west, in reverse alphabetical order: Fairfield, Exeter, Dartmouth, Clarendon. That day, however, when we passed Dartmouth and Dr. Philo detoured into a shop to buy a coffee, I meandered ahead expecting to see Clarendon at the next corner. The sign read EXETER.
“One moment,” I said to her. “Hurry on with me,
would you?”
She held the coffee at arm’s length whilst keeping up, and I was certain the next block assuredly would be Clarendon. Yet the sign read FAIRFIELD. I stopped in complete perplexity.
“Something wrong?” Dr. Philo asked.
“I presume that no one in the past century changed the order of boulevards.”
“I imagine not.”
“Fascinating,” I said. The rather, though, it felt a bit frightening. In what other realms have I misinformed myself? I could be wrong about the street where I lived. I might be misremembering the law. My literary references seem right, but no one around me is well read enough to correct any errors. My grasp of the past feels thin.
Thank goodness one region remains sure, as certain in my person as my bones, and it contains a population of two: my Joan, firm in mind, quick in temper, generous in tenderness, and my Agnes, a barefoot, laughing gnome of joy. Much is disconcerting in this land of unknowns. So long as that one region is secure, none other matters. The heart knows truths that cannot be altered by the sequence of the streets.
Everywhere we went, there were cameras. Sometimes it was a newsperson. Sometimes it was Daniel Dixon, who on odd days would follow Dr. Philo and myself at a distance but whom I could not persuade to join us. Often the camera was borne simply by some person who recognized me, and had a telephone in his pocket or her purse. I posed with the checkers players. I posed with the babies. I smiled with a pilot. I stood beside a surgeon after watching with astonished eyes as he removed a diseased man’s tumor, dropping it in a pan like so much rancid meat. I posed for a photo with my arm, as requested, around the shoulders of a lovely shopgirl, no more than sixteen, who had wires all through her mouth for a therapeutic purpose I was too intimidated by the sight of to ask about, and my discomfort in the moment was outdone by her delight in it.
One evening in Harvard Square we encountered jugglers of surpassing skill, including a fellow who tossed flaming batons to his partner whilst both of them rode unicycles up and down ramps. Meanwhile the city sped by uninterrupted all around.
“For my next trick,” said the cyclist in a top hat, “I need to borrow a twenty-dollar bill. Who has a twenty?”
A man raised his hand, the rider wheeled over, thanked the man for volunteering, snatched the money, and tucked it in his back pocket. “Presto, it disappeared.” Then he zoomed away while the crowd laughed.
Later he returned the cash, and at the end of the show he ambled through the crowd with the top hat outstretched. People put in dollar after dollar. I was astonished—and felt like I’d been to an impromptu circus.
One night Dr. Gerber took us, over Dr. Philo’s objections and then begrudging agreement, to what he called a nightclub. I had no money, and thus felt somewhat like the second rider on a horse: no stirrups, no reins. At the entrance a muscular man dressed entirely in black scanned me with his eyes and sneered, then waved us in.
The music was deafening, the lights bright and spinning. The songs were less melodic than those in Dr. Gerber’s headphones, with an emphasis, the rather, heavily upon the drums. Men and women mingled in close quarters. I witnessed a kind of public animalism, flirting gestures and suggestive clothing unimaginable in my former time.
Dr. Philo drank water but Dr. Gerber bought two alcohol combinations which were as clear as water and came with an olive. He handed me one, then poured half of the other into his gullet. I took one sip and thought of the fluid my father had used as fuel for our old kitchen lamp.
Dr. Gerber went by himself to the dance floor, swaying his hips, jerking his shoulders, tilting his head side to side. His hair followed, but lagging a little, and with no offense meant I thought it appeared comical. The music’s beat was so loud and low it made my chest feel like a drum. A wave of nausea passed through me, but I fought it. I did not want to upset the evening.
It was thrilling to see people of every shape and color socializing together. I watched them moving, dancing, or working their way to and around the bar.
“The crowd is from all the human races,” I shouted to Dr. Philo.
“What?” she answered. “I can’t hear you.”
I leaned down to repeat myself, and found my mouth poised over the curl of her ear. Her hair brushed my face. The words would not come and I straightened again. She simply smiled and turned to watch the dancers.
A different kind of light began flashing during the next song, blindingly bright but shining for the merest fraction of a second. It made the dancers look like machines, moving in the jerky gears of a clockwork. My stomach clenched and I closed my eyes till the song ended.
Gradually I downed perhaps half of my drink. It seemed stronger than the port I was familiar with, but it had other properties, an aggressiveness perhaps, a vigor. By mutual invitation my companions both danced for one song, though it would be a stretch to say they did so together. The rather, they barely acknowledged each other, turning and bending to their own impulses.
My experience with dancing was limited to a few youthful jigs and the occasional waltz with Joan, who carried herself at those times like a glass of water filled to the brim, all elegance and elevation. Here and now the lights whirled, people orbited one another, and no one touched. It was the opposite of the easy body contact I’d seen on the streets, and I wondered which was sham.
As the song finished, a smiling Dr. Philo returned to the counter and took a long draw from her water. I intended to ask if we might return to the lab. I’d grown tired, and the music’s unceasing throb had troubled my stomach. How could people endure it for an entire evening?
Suddenly a man stood between us, calling an order to the fellow behind the bar. Next he bent and shouted something to Dr. Philo, who made a quizzical expression I construed to mean she had not understood him. The man was broad-shouldered, and smelled strongly of cinnamon and lime. He pulled out a pen and began drawing on a napkin: one triangle below, one triangle above, a line connecting them, and as he was darkening the upper area I saw it was identical to the drink with the olive Dr. Gerber had bought me. Lastly the man drew a question mark and looked at her.
Dr. Philo blinked, realized his meaning, and mouthed, “No thank you.” Then she stepped around him to stand beside me, took my arm in both her hands, and rested her head on my chest. I held my breath. Let it last, let it last.
The stranger pulled up in a manner that attempted to make him look taller. His drink arriving, he paid and swaggered away. Dr. Philo released my arm and drained her water. She tilted the glass and jiggled loose the last chips of ice. I turned to the space between myself and the bar, and disgorged my dinner.
Thus my first visitor the following morning was Dr. Borden. He stood on a little stool beside the examination table, squeezing a pump that tightened a cuff on my upper arm. “I’m thinking it was a bunch of external factors,” he said.
“Quite possibly. The music was deafening, and the drink—”
He raised a finger to silence me. He listened through his stethoscope whilst releasing the squeeze of the cuff. I wondered what he was hearing. Sometime I ought to wear that listening device.
Dr. Borden pulled the earpieces down and wrote something on his clipboard. “You really are in fine shape, considering.”
“Glad am I to hear it,” I said, giving him a hearty voice. “But it puts me in mind of a question I’d like to ask of you.”
He stepped down from the stool and folded his arms. “Fire away.”
“Doctor, I submit that you and your medical team need not be measuring my health any longer.”
He tucked the stethoscope’s listening part in his pocket, hooking the other ends around his neck. “What do you mean?”
“My heart has shown no indication of stopping, nor my blood pressure of vanishing. Yet you persist with these assessments, and others which are invasive of my privacy. I am well. More so every day, and here we are”—I checked
the numerical clock in the control room—“on day sixty-nine.”
Dr. Borden produced from his kit a metal cylinder with a conical black tip, and I turned so he could insert it in my right ear. “Please continue.”
“It cannot have escaped your notice, despite last night’s incident, that my appetite has returned.”
“I am aware of that, yes.” He moved to the other ear. “Go on.”
“My sleep habits are consistent. Daily activity levels. Levity of mood. Speed of reading and conversation.”
He put the device away and produced another one, similar but with an arm that had a light at the tip. He raised it to my right eye. “Come to your point.”
Hm. I had hoped for dialogue. I might have known better, having encountered his type among attorneys often enough. He moved the light to my left eye, then alternated between them.
“My point, Doctor, is that I am fully restored, and as you say, in fine condition. Might it not be time for me to regain some freedom from examination? Must my voiding continue to be weighed? Could we hazard giving this room a curtain, and me a modicum of privacy? Might we stop waking this man for blood pressure tests during the night?”
Dr. Borden sighed and stepped away. He leaned against the near wall and contemplated the floor. He tugged on the point of his beard. Finally he adjudged our conversation more important than his shoes, and lifted his face. “Do you remember when I spoke during the news conference?”
“I was not present for your remarks.”
“That’s right.” He snapped his fingers. “I’d forgotten. Well, that day I referred to the people who opposed our work as ‘ignorant.’ The word escaped in an unguarded moment, and revealed the height of our arrogance. Now there is a subgroup among the protesters that calls itself ‘the Ignorants.’ Their signs say things like ‘I Don’t Matter’ and ‘I Know Nothing.’ ”
“You had expected the dissidents to lose interest.”
The Curiosity Page 21