by Harvey Click
“I’m not learning anything,” I said after a week had passed.
“You’re a stupid man, you learn slow,” the Monk said. “But I snap my fingers now, and you learn some more.”
I fell instantly into a trance, and when I awoke I again remembered the droning voice but nothing of what it had said.
“You’re coming along,” the Monk said. “Soon you know how to leave your body, if you got the guts.”
I got up from the sofa and stared out the window at the hilly road that twisted past the house. It was mid-afternoon but dark as midnight. A hard November rain was driving the last leaves off the trees into the muddy front yard. Winter was blowing in, and I dreaded the first snow.
“I don’t think you’re teaching me anything,” I said. “I think you hypnotize people and make them believe they’ve gone back to the past. Pretty soon I’ll wake up from one of those trances and believe it too, but it’ll just be hypnotic delusion.”
“Bah, I teach you more than your stupid brain want to learn,” the Monk said. “Here, I give you proof. While you snooze in your trance, I already go back there to that winter night where you want to be. I already go back there and look out your own past eyes at that long-ago time. I live in your own past head and taste the wine you drink and see your sweetheart with her cute brown hair with some streaks of red. Them streaks don’t look real to me, they come from a bottle I think. Her name is Jane Shelley, and you were gonna get married in a little while. She come over for dinner this night, but you drink too much wine and start to argue, so she get upset and keep filling her glass up too. Three bottles empty now, and you open number four. Want me to go on?”
“No,” I said.
“The reason you argue with her,” the Monk said, “is ’cause she went to see an old college friend last night and wasn’t home at midnight when you called and still wasn’t home at three a.m. You think she seen him too many times these days, so you think maybe she getting in some good fucks before the wedding bells chime. She tell you he’s just an old queer friend dying of AIDS, but you don’t buy her story.”
I stared out the window at the cold rain freezing into slush. “That’s enough,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“I see her sitting right there in that leather chair,” the Monk said. “Now you hurt her feelings so bad she starting to cry. Don’t she look pretty with all them tears in her eyes, don’t you love to play that pretty picture back every night when you can’t sleep? Sure you do, you keep me here so you can learn how to play it back real good and slow. So pretty soon she get up and start yelling, ‘I don’t have to put up with this shit, I’m going home!’ ”
For a moment, the old man’s voice sounded almost like Jane’s. The wind picked up, and the slush suddenly turned into snow, white flakes spinning wildly in the cold air.
“You tell her that’s good, you don’t want her around here no more ’cause you don’t wanna catch a disease from all her sick boyfriends. You throw her coat and purse at her and watch her go out the door, even though snow is falling hard and you know she’s too damn drunk to drive. You keep yelling at her as she get in her car, and the last words you yell are—”
“Shut up,” I told him, snow falling hard on the twisty road and my final words to Jane spinning back to me in the cold wind as I watched her get in her car.
The last thing I had said to her was, “I don’t care if I ever see you again!”
***
I don’t care if I ever see you again. The words had haunted me for three years. They were with me day and night like bitter ghosts of icy snow spinning in my brain, telling me I should be the one who was dead. Her story about her college friend turned out to be true: the sick man who had shown up weeping at her funeral was obviously gay and not her lover. Not that it mattered any more to me whether she had a lover; all that mattered was to somehow turn back the clock and make her live again.
But making her live again wasn’t easy. November turned into December, and by now the whole house reeked with old-man stench, but I still hadn’t learned anything except how to fall asleep whenever the Monk snapped his fingers.
“You’re wasting my time,” I said as I lay down on the sofa for his daily lesson. “You haven’t taught me anything. I give you room and board, and all you do is make my house stink.”
“Bah,” the old man said. “It’s my time you waste, and if you want to go back there, you better do it soon before my time is all run out. I already teach you everything you need to know, but you don’t got the guts to make the leap. Let go your soul, and it will walk through long years like walking through the next room. It can go back to that old mess and be there now. But it takes guts to leave your body behind and venture out there in the wild, where time and reason don’t make sense. You don’t got the guts.”
“I do,” I said.
“Good. Then I’m gonna snap my fingers, you take the leap this time.” He snapped his fingers, and my eyelids fell shut. “Rise up now,” he said. “Rise up now and leave all that dumb dead weight behind.”
I did. At first it felt wonderful, like flying weightless and unmoored in a strange dream. I felt myself floating up to the ceiling while my body lay asleep on the sofa, and then I felt myself passing through the ceiling to an upstairs bedroom. A breeze wafting through a cracked window caught me and tossed me somersaulting through another ceiling up to the attic, and as I stared down at the dusty piles of half-remembered junk on the attic floor the breeze lifted me and pressed me up against the rafters like a blown leaf.
Suddenly the dream was a nightmare. I felt the blustery December wind whistling through the frozen roof shingles and was terrified it would suck me up out of the house and I’d be lost forever in the cold gray sky. I tried to cling to the airy substance of my being, but I was a nothing that weighed less than an atom struggling against the vast stormy chaos out there. I tried to scream, but I had no voice, just the sharp shriek of winter wind reaching in through the roof shingles and the terror of the endless cold universe outside.
Then I suddenly found my voice and was yelling and thrashing on the sofa, anchored again in the comfortable gravity of my body.
“There, you see?” the Monk said. “I told you it’s simple.”
***
I felt dizzy and sick for the rest of the day. The next day the old man wanted to send me out of my body again, but I told him I was too frightened.
“What if I get lost?” I said. “What if I can’t find my way back? Will I just drift around like a ghost out there forever?”
“I got something to guide you back,” the Monk said. He reached inside his filthy shirt, pulled a leather necklace over his head, and handed a pendant to me. It was a tarnished silver star with five points.
“This is a powerful talisman,” he said. “You hold it tight in your hand, and if your soul begin to get lost it can always find its way back to this star. This pentagram blaze so bright it can shoot its sharp rays clear out there in the long-ago time, and you can always find your way home. My old teacher give it to me.”
“Who was your teacher?”
The old man grinned and said, “I learn from the best. Now to work. Think on that one long-ago night and nothing else. Don’t move nowhere in space, ’cause the space where you want to be is right here in this room. Just float in this room like a feather drifting through time and think on that one special night. Let that one night be your only map and compass when your soul step out into the big land called everywhere and forever. Be there now.”
He snapped his fingers, and gravity folded in on itself like a collapsing balloon. I tumbled backward through specters of forgotten memories, those countless hours when I had sat on this sofa wanting to be dead but afraid to die, that dreadful day when I had spilled my cup of coffee on my only black suit while I was getting ready to go to her funeral, that night of near-insanity after she was buried when I had sat here calling her phone number over and over hoping if I called enough times I’d finally hear
her voice instead of a recording. I thumbed through the memories like photographs and at last found the night I was looking for.
I was inside the head of a stranger who was sitting on the sofa and glaring at Jane without even noticing her beauty. The stranger was drunk, and the intoxication felt sickening to me because for some reason I hadn’t been able to drink since the night of her death. The stranger was lighting his pipe, and the Cavendish smoke tasted strange as it bit the stranger’s disgusting tarry tongue because for some reason I had stopped smoking after she died. Everything felt strange, especially the repulsive thoughts squirming inside the stranger’s head, drunken stupid anger of a damned stupid fool.
“I kept trying to call you all night long,” the stranger said. “Maybe you had to sleep with your sick friend to keep his chills away, is that it?”
Jane refilled her wineglass and didn’t say anything. She was sitting in the leather chair across the room and avoiding the stranger’s eyes.
I had forgotten her face. I had thought I remembered it with perfect clarity, but what I remembered wasn’t the same as what I was looking at, lips thinner and less predictable, hair shorter and skin less perfect. I had forgotten that blue vein visible beneath the pale smooth skin of her forehead, but somehow it made her face more beautiful, delicate blue vein throbbing with blood that would soon spill down a shattered windshield.
She was avoiding the stranger’s eyes because she was starting to cry. I watched her wipe her face with a tissue, but the stranger scarcely noticed her tears. He lurched up off the sofa to grab the wine bottle, and I felt like a tiny child carried piggyback on his drunken father’s shoulders, a specter of forgotten childhood memory that carried me to a different time and place where Dad was drunk and Mom was screaming at him and the little boy I used to be was crying. Dad grabbed the boy off his shoulders and tossed him up into the air like a ball.
I tumbled through the cold wind of time and heard the Monk’s voice saying, “Think on that one single night and nothing else, it be your only map and compass. Your space is right here in this room.”
I fell back into the head of the stranger, who was refilling his glass with Burgundy. “I guess your sick friend needs a lot of nursing,” he was saying. “Last time I called it was three a.m., and you still weren’t home. Apparently you had to nurse his sores all night long.”
“I don’t know what time I got home,” Jane said. “I was tired and went straight to sleep.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s hard work playing doctor,” the stranger said. “After a while, all those injections probably made you sore between the legs.”
I tried to make his mouth say something different, but the same disgusting old words kept spilling out, words that had haunted my nightmares for three years.
“You want to play doctor, then I will too,” the stranger said. “Tomorrow I think I’ll go pay a house call on Sarah White. Remember her? She always used to like my medicine—I bet she still has some deep aches she’d like me to heal.”
He lurched back to the sofa, wine spilling out of his glass onto the carpet, and I felt myself falling in and out of time with each drunken dizzy step.
“Why are you doing this?” Jane asked. “I thought we were going to have a nice time tonight.”
“You had a nice time last night, but don’t expect it twice in a row,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to have a nice time myself, and it won’t be with you.”
“Stop it, Sam,” she said.
Her voice sounded small and hurt. The stranger glared at her just long enough to notice her tears, and I felt the sharp cruel edge of his satisfaction. He was winning this argument. He was going to beat her down until she was soft and remorseful, the way he wanted her.
“To tell you the truth, I’m ready for a different patient,” he said. “I’m sick of being your personal gynecologist.”
“Stop it,” she said. “I don’t have to put up with this shit.”
I tried to stop it, but the stranger’s head was reeling with self-righteousness, and his lips kept moving.
“Stop what, this fucking wedding?” he said. “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. Let’s stop this wedding and this whole damn relationship while we’re at it.”
Jane sat there wiping her face. Her tears looked warm and sweet, but the stranger knew he wasn’t going to win this argument by kissing them off her face. Let her cry some more, he thought. Let her suffer.
I knew the next words he was going to say. I struggled hard with dizzy drunken brain tissue, but the same old words slurred out.
“Yeah, let’s just call this whole fucking thing off,” he said. “I don’t want to catch some kind of STD from all your poor sick boyfriends.”
“I’m going home,” Jane said.
“Good.”
He threw her purse and coat at her, expecting her to cry harder and show him how much she loved him with those nice warm tears streaming down her face, but she didn’t. She put on her coat and slammed the door behind her.
He staggered to the door and opened it, and cold snowy wind slapped his face. A winter storm had blown in while they argued. He watched her get in her car and start the engine, but then she got back out. Good, she was going to come back now and apologize and swear that she’d never be gone again when he tried to call her.
No—she was just scraping her windshield.
“Go ahead and leave,” he yelled. “See if I give a damn.”
She didn’t look at him. The stranger watched her scrape her windshield, and his brain felt weak now, surprised and disappointed that she was leaving. It’s now or never, I thought. I tried to make his mouth move, tried to make it say just one nice word and maybe she would come back, but his lips were numb with frozen time. The stranger just stared stupidly, his head swirling with Burgundy and the night wind sharp with swirling snow.
Jane finished scraping her windshield and was getting in her car when the stranger’s frozen lips finally moved. I fought with his brain, but it belonged to someone else, someone I hated. I knew his next words by heart, and they spilled out like vomit in the cold wind.
“I don’t care if I ever see you again!”
I woke up thrashing and moaning on the sofa, dizzy and sick. I sat up and vomited on the carpet.
The Monk grinned at me and spat a ball of phlegm into an ashtray. “Time’s an ocean,” he said, “and you get seasick.”
***
Two weeks later I said, “This is hopeless. I can’t change anything his mouth says or his muscles do. All I can do is look helplessly out his eyes while she gets in her car.”
“Yeah, and then you puke like a baby,” the Monk said. “This house beginning to smell bad.”
I stared out the window at the thick January snow glittering in the front yard like rock formations on an alien planet. Everything seemed alien, my past, my present, even my own body. I had lost thirty pounds and was no longer able to teach my classes. Teaching assistants were doing my work for me.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said. “I’m losing my mind.”
“Bah,” the Monk said. “Some people almost dumb as you change the past. They do it even now while we waste time in this stupid talk.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “I’ve been back there how many times now, and I can’t change anything. His muscles are like, I don’t know, like clockwork gears that always turn the exact same way no matter what I do. He’s like a robot, and I can’t alter a single word that comes out of his mouth.”
“You can change the past if you try,” the old man said. “I used to change it many times just for fun.”
“Then you go back there and do it for me. I’ll give you all the money you want.”
“Look at me,” the Monk said. “I’m too old and sick now to change time. This job is yours, and if you don’t do it yourself it won’t get done.”
“If you’re telling the truth, and there are other people changing the past right now, then why don’t we notice it? I mean, every
time the past is changed the present has to change too, all the history books and everything else.”
“That’s right.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense. Let’s say I go back there again and somehow change what that asshole does so that Jane doesn’t die. Then the newspaper has to change too, no obituary, and a certain grave isn’t dug, and a certain junkyard doesn’t get her wrecked car, and in countless ways the world has to be rewritten.”
“I know twelve languages to speak like native,” the Monk said. “But my English isn’t so good, so I tell you in simple speech. Time’s like a TV with many channels, and we just watch one. These worlds called everywhere forever are infinite, and there are worlds even enough for your Jane to live in. You make the asshole who was you say different words so she don’t get in her car and drive away that night, and when you wake up on the sofa she still be alive. Maybe you be married by now with ugly brats that look just like you, or maybe she hate you and marry someone else, but she still be alive.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll give it one last try.”
I lay down on the sofa, and the Monk sat across from me in his chair. I took the pendant from around my neck and clutched it tightly in my right hand so it would guide me back if I got lost.
He snapped his fingers and said, “Be there now.” Gravity folded in on itself, Jane wiping tears from her face while a delicate blue vein in her forehead throbbed with blood that would soon spill down a shattered windshield.
“I kept trying to call you all night long,” the stranger said. “Maybe you had to sleep with your sick friend to keep his chills away, is that it?”
He lurched up off the sofa to grab the wine bottle, and I felt like a tiny child riding piggyback on his drunken father’s shoulders. The child is father to the man, I thought, and I fought hard with the stranger’s muscles but couldn’t override them.
“I guess your sick friend needs a lot of nursing.”
I wrestled with the stranger’s mouth but couldn’t change a single drunken syllable, old Burgundy wine and Cavendish smoke and hateful words sticking like tar on his tongue.