Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  Jerry shook his head, amused at the colossal stupidity loose in the world. “Unfortunately,” he said, “there’s not much chance of that here. They tell me the dental records were dead on.”

  I probably shouldn’t have tried to see how Helen was doing, because my own emotions were still churning. But I called her from a drug store and she said yes, how about lunch? We met at an Applebee’s in the Garden Square Mall.

  She looked worn out. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she showed a tendency to lose the thread of the conversation. She and Shel had made no formal commitment, as far as I knew. But she had certainly believed they had a future together. Come what may. But Shel had been evasive. And there had been occasions when, discouraged that she got so little of his time, she’d opened up to me. I don’t know if anything else in my life had ever been quite as painful as sitting with her, listening to her describe her frustration, watching the occasional tear roll down her cheek. She trusted me, absolutely.

  “Are you all right?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “How about you?”

  The talk was full of regrets, things not said, acts undone. The subject of the police suspicions came up, and we found it hard to subscribe to the burglar theory. “What kind of intruder,” I asked, “kills a sleeping man, and then sets his house on fire?”

  She was as soft and vulnerable that day as I’ve ever seen her. Ironically, by all the laws of nature, Shel was dead. Was I still bound to keep my distance? And the truth was that Shel did not even care enough to ease her suffering. I wondered how she would react if she knew Shel was probably sitting in my kitchen at that moment, making a submarine sandwich.

  I wanted to tell her. There was a possibility that, when she did find out, she would hold it against me. I also wanted to keep Shel dead. That was hard to admit to myself, but it was true. I wanted nothing more than a clear channel with Helen Suchenko. But when I watched her bite down the pain, when the sobs began, when she excused herself with a shaky voice and hurried back to the ladies’ room, I could stand it no more. “Helen,” I said, “are you free this afternoon?”

  She sighed. “I wanted to go into the office today, but people get nervous around weepy physicians. Yes, I’m more or less free. But I’m not in the mood to go anywhere.”

  “Can I persuade you to come out to my place?”

  She looked desperately fragile. “I don’t think so, Dave,” she said. “I need some time.”

  A long silence fell between us. “Please,” I said. “It’s important.”

  More snow was coming. I watched it through the windshield, thick gray clouds drifting toward us. Approaching cars had their headlights on.

  Helen followed me in her small blue Ford. I watched her in the mirror, playing back all possible scenarios on how to handle this. Tell her first, I finally decided. Leave out the time travel stuff. Use the story I’d told Jerry as an example of how misunderstandings can occur. He’s not dead, Helen. She won’t believe it, of course. But that’s when I get him and bring him into the room. Best not to warn him. God knows how he would react. But get them together, present Shel with a fait accompli, and you will have done your self-sacrificial duty, Dave. You dumb bastard.

  I pulled through blowing snow into my driveway, opened the garage, and went in. Helen rolled in beside me, and the doors closed. “Glad to be out of that,” she said, with a brave smile that implied she had decided we needed something new to talk about.

  The garage opened directly into the kitchen. I stopped before going through the door and listened. There were no sounds on the other side. “Helen,” I said, “I’ve got something to tell you.” She pulled her coat around her. Her breath formed a mist. “We aren’t going to go into it out here, I hope, are we?”

  “No,” I said, as if the notion were absurd, and opened the door. The kitchen was empty. I heard no sounds anywhere in the house.

  “It’s about Shel,” I said.

  She stepped past me and switched on the kitchen lights. “I know,” she said. “What else could it be?”

  A white envelope lay on the table, with my name on it, printed in his precise hand. I snatched it up, and she looked at me curiously. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Just a list of things to do.” I pushed it into my pocket. “How about some coffee?”

  “Sure. Sounds good.”

  “It’ll have to be instant,” I said, putting a pot of water on the stove.

  “Do you always do that?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Write yourself notes?”

  “It’s my to-do list. It’s the first thing I do every morning.”

  She got two cups down and I excused myself, slipped out, and opened the envelope.

  Dear Dave,

  I don’t know how to write this. But I have to think about what’s happened, and figure out what I need to do. I don ’t want to jump the gun if it’s not necessary. You understand.

  I know this hasn’t been easy for you. But I’m glad you were there. Thanks

  Shel

  P. S. I’ve left most of my estate to the Leukemia Foundation. That will generate a half-dozen lawsuits from my relatives. But if any of those vultures show signs of winning, I’ll come back personally and deal with them.

  I read it a half-dozen times. Then I crumpled it, tossed it, and went back to the kitchen.

  She was looking out the window at the falling snow. Usually, my grounds were alive with blue jays and squirrels. But the critters were all tucked away now. “It’s lovely,” she said unexpectedly. And then: “So what’s the surprise?”

  Startled, I tried laughing to gain time. “Son of a gun,” I said. “I went out to get it and came back without it.” We strolled into the living room, where she sat down on the sofa. I hurried upstairs in search of an idea.

  I think I mentioned that the wardrobe was also a small museum. There were items of inestimable value, but only if you knew their origin. We had scrolls from the library at Alexandria, a sextant designed and built by Leonardo, a silver bracelet that had once belonged to Calpurnia, a signed folio of Hamlet, a pocket watch

  that Leo Tolstoy had carried while writing War and Peace. There were photos of Martin Luther and Albert Schweitzer and Attila the Hun and Charles XII of Sweden. All more or less worthless.

  I couldn’t bear to give away Calpurnia’s bracelet to someone who would not understand its true value. I settled instead for a gold medallion I’d bought from a merchant in Thebes during the fifth century, B.C. It carried a handsomely wrought likeness of a serpent. The Apollonian priest who was with me insisted that I had acquired a steal. At one time, he said, it had belonged to Aesculapius, the divine doctor, who had been so good he cured the dead. He backed up his view by trying to buy it from me, offering six times what I’d paid for it.

  I carried it downstairs and gave it to Helen, telling her that Shel had wanted me to be sure she got it in the event anything happened to him. She glowed, and turned it over and over, unable to get enough of it. “It’s exquisite,” she said. And the tears came again.

  If that thing had possessed any curative powers, I could have used them at that moment.

  Snow filled the world. The stand of oaks bordering the approach to the house faded out. As did the stone wall along Carmichael Drive, and the hedges on the west side of the property. Gradually a heavy white curtain was drawn across the middle of the lawn. “I think we’re going to get a foot before this is over,” I told Helen.

  She stood by the curtains, enjoying a glass of Chablis. I’d started the fire, and it crackled and popped comfortably. We added Mozart, and I hoped the storm would continue.

  “I think so too,” she said. A pair of headlights crept past, out beyond the stone wall. “I feel sorry for anybody out in this.”

  I stood beside her, and we talked inconsequentials. She had recovered herself, and I began to realize that it was her proximity to me, with all the baggage I brought to any meeting, that had triggered the emotional display earlie
r. I was not happy Shel was still in the field. But during that afternoon, I came to understand that even if Shel were safely in his grave, I might still be the embodiment of too many memories. The decent thing to do would be to fade out of her life, just as Carmichael Drive and the outer grounds were fading now. But I knew I could not bring myself to do that.

  She talked about looking for a break in the weather so she could go home. But luck held and the break did not come. The snow piled up, and we stayed near the fire. I was alone at last with Helen Suchenko, and it was perhaps the most painful few hours of my life. Yet I would not have missed them, and I have replayed them countless times since, savoring every movement. Every word. I feel sorry for anybody out in this. I was out in it, and I believed I would never find shelter.

  We watched the reports on the Weather Channel. It was a heavy system, moving down from Canada, low pressure and high pressure fronts colliding, eight inches predicted, which, on top of yesterday’s storm, was expected to shut down the entire east coast from Boston to Baltimore.

  She talked a lot about Shel that day. Periodically, she’d shake her head as if she’d remembered something, and then dismiss it. And she’d veer off onto some other subject, a movie she’d seen, the latest political scandal, a medical advance that held hope for a breakthrough in this or that. There were a couple of patients she was worried about, and a few hypochondriacs whose lives were centered on their imagined illnesses. I told her how much I missed teaching, which wasn’t entirely true, but it’s the sort of thing people expect you to say. What I really missed was a sense of purpose, a reason to exist. I had that upstairs, in notes detailing conversations with Rachmaninoff and Robert E. Lee and Oliver Cromwell and Aristotle and H.G. Wells. Those conversations would make the damnedest book the world had ever seen, reports by the principal actors on their ingenuity, their dreams, their follies. But it would never get written.

  We lost the cable at four o’clock, and with it the Weather Channel.

  Gradually, the light faded out of the sky. I put on steaks and Helen made up a salad. Our timing was perfect because the power failed just as we put everything on the table. I lit a couple of candles, and she sat in the flickering light and looked happy. If the clouds had not dissipated, at least for these few hours they had receded.

  Afterward, we retreated into the living room. The music had been silenced by the power outage, so we sat listening to the fire and the whisper of snow against the house. Occasionally, I glanced up at the door of the wardrobe, half-expecting it to open. I tried to plan what I would do if Shel suddenly appeared on the landing. I was caught in the ultimate eternal triangle.

  It did not happen. We talked into the early hours, until finally she gave out and fell asleep. I moved her to the sofa and went upstairs for blankets. The heating system, of course, was not working, nor was anything else in this all-electric house. The second floor was already cooling off, but I had plenty of firewood.

  I settled into a large armchair and drifted into sleep. Somewhere around two, I woke and lay for a time, listening to the silence. The fire was low. I poked at it, and tossed on another log. Helen stirred but did not waken.

  The storm must have passed over. Usually, even during the early morning hours, there are sounds: a passing car, the wind in the trees, a dog barking somewhere. But the world was absolutely still.

  It was also absolutely dark. No stars. No lights of any kind.

  I pointed a flashlight out the window. The night had closed in, wrapped itself around the house so tightly that the beam seemed to plunge into a black wall. I felt internal switches go to alert. It looked like an effect out of a Dracula film.

  I picked up the phone to call the 24-hour weather line. But it was dead.

  “What is it, Dave?” Helen’s voice was soft in the dark.

  “You awake?” I asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Come and take a look out the window.”

  She padded over. And caught her breath. “Where’d that come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We went outside. It was the thickest, darkest fog I’d ever seen. We didn’t sleep well the rest of the night. At about six, Helen made toast over the fire, and I broke out some fruit juice. The lights were still off. More ominously, there was no sign of dawn.

  I wondered about Ray White, my neighbor. Ray was a good guy, but he lived alone in a big house, and I thought of him over there wrapped in this goddamn black cloud with no power and maybe no food. He wasn’t young, and I thought it would be a good idea to go check on him.

  “I’ll go with you,” Helen said.

  I got an extra flashlight, and we let ourselves out through the sliding door. I locked up, and we poked around until we found the pathway that leads down to the front gate. The flashlights didn’t help much. There’s a hundred-year-old oak midway between the house and the stone wall. It’s only about ten feet off the walk, but we could not see it. I heard something stirring in its branches.

  We picked our way to the front gate. I opened it, and we eased out onto the sidewalk. “The entrance to Ray’s house is across the street, about twenty yards down,” I said. “Stay close.”

  We stepped off the curb. Her hand tightened in mine. “Be careful,” she said. “Somebody might be trying to drive.”

  We started across, but the snow cover stopped right in the middle of the street. It was the damnedest thing. There was no snow at all on the other side. There wasn’t even blacktop. The surface had turned to rock. Where the hell was there rock on the other side of Carmichael Drive? A patch of grass, yes, and some concrete. But not rock.

  Something in my voice scared her. “You sure you know where we are?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  The rock was black. It almost looked like marble.

  We found no curb. No sidewalk. None of the trees that lined the far side of the street. No sign of the low wall that encloses Ray White’s sprawling grounds and executive mansion.

  We found nothing.

  I tried calling White’s name. But no one answered.

  “Are you sure we came out the right way?” Helen asked.

  4

  Saturday, November 26, Late morning.

  I woke up in a room lit only by a low fire. “You okay?” Helen asked. Her voice was thin.

  I looked at the clock on the mantel. It was almost noon.

  She came over and sat down beside me. “I’ve never seen weather like this,” she said.

  I got up, collected snow, and melted it to make water. (It’s amazing how much snow you have to melt to get a little water.)

  I went into the bathroom, and, with the help of a flashlight, brushed my teeth. I tried to draw the bathroom around me, as a kind of shield against what was happening outside the house. The shower. The medicine cabinet. A couple of bars of soap. It was familiar, my anchor to reality.

  When I returned downstairs, Helen was putting the phone back in the cradle. She shook her head no. It was still out. We opened a can of meat, added some vegetables, and cooked them over the fire. No matter what happened, we were in no personal danger. That was good to know, but it did not ease my fears.

  Helen said she wasn’t hungry, but she ate well anyhow. So did I.

  It had to do with Shel. I knew that beyond any doubt. We were in the presence of the irrational. I wondered whether we had already done irreparable damage, whether the old world had already receded beyond recall. I was terrified.

  When we’d finished eating, I went upstairs to the wardrobe. Shel would be easy to find.

  He was standing where I knew he would be: on the slopes of Thermopolae watching the troops come in. He looked good. Tanned. Fit. Almost like a man on vacation. There were a few lines around the eyes, and I knew that, for him, several years had passed since the funeral.

  “Shel,” I said. “We need you.”

  “I know,” he said gently. Below us, the Thespians were examining the ground on which they would fight. Out on the plain,
north of the pass, we could see the Persian army. They stretched to the horizon. “I will go back.”

  “When?”

  His eyes took on a haunted look. “When I’m ready. When I’m able. There’s no hurry, Dave. We both know that.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “Something’s wrong. We can’t even find the rest of New Jersey.”

  “I’m trying to live my life,” he said. “Be patient with me. I have a lot to do yet. But don’t worry. You can count on me.”

  “When?”

  “We have all the time in the world. Relax.”

  “Okay, Shel. Help me relax. If you’re going to take care of everything, tell me what’s causing the weather conditions back home? Why the power is out? Why I can’t find my way across the street?”

  “I know about all that,” he said.

  “And—?”

  “Look. Maybe it has nothing to do with me.”

  The Hellenic squadrons were still filing in, their bright mail dusty from the journey north.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  He nodded. “As do I. But I’ve promised to go back. What more do you want?”

  “Maybe you should do it now.”

  He glanced up at a promontory about a hundred feet over our heads. “What is now to you and me, Dave? What does the word mean?” When I did not respond, he knelt down and broke off a blade of grass. “Would you be willing to throw yourself from the top of that rock?”

  “That has nothing to do with the business between us,” I said. “Not even if I pleaded with you to do so? If the world depended on it?”

  I looked at him.

  “What if it didn’t matter whether you did it today or tomorrow? Or next month? Or forty years from now?”

  “We don’t have forty years.”

  “I’m not asking for forty of your years. I’m asking for forty of mine. I’ll do it, Dave. God help me, I’ll do it. But on my own schedule. Not yours.”