by Anthology
He lifted his mug to his lips, but it hovered there without him drinking as he gazed into the dark, reflective surface. “I was puttering in the parlor, sanding down some woodwork in order to stain it. It was the sort of mechanical task that allows the mind to wander. And so mine did, until it seemed to me that I was in the kitchen of my ‘secret house,’ drying dishes with a towel. A tall, straw-haired woman was standing beside me washing them in the sink. She had the nagging near-familiarity of a once-met stranger. Perhaps I had seen her at a party in college and I never got up the nerve to walk over and introduce myself—only maybe, once, I did. I knew she was angry because she would shove the dishes into my hands in that silent-aggressive way that women sometimes use. She bore the harried look of someone once very beautiful but for whom beauty had lately become a chore. No makeup. Hair cropped in the simplest, most ‘practical’ style. Perhaps she blamed the me-that-was. Later, I remembered cutting remarks. She could have been this, or she could have married that. I don’t know why she kept slipping such hurts into our conversation . . .” He smiled ruefully. “But this first time, she turned to me and said very distinctly, ‘You have no ambition.’
“I was so startled that I snapped out of my daydream, and there I was, back in my own parlor.” He grimaced, ran a finger up and down the condensate on the outside of his glass. “Alone.”
“It’s only natural,” said Doc Mooney, “that a man living alone might grow wistful and imagine a married life he never had.”
FitzHugh laughed without humor. “Then why imagine such an unpleasant one?”
“Because you need to feel that you made the right choice.”
“You’re a psychiatrist, then, and not a pathologist?” The tones were sarcastic and Doc flushed red. FitzHugh fell into a brown study, and fixed his eyes on the far wall. The rest of us, supposing the story had come to an unsatisfying conclusion, went about our own affairs: O’Daugherty and myself to filling glasses and the others to emptying them, which division of labor made for an efficient process. Once or twice, I glanced at FitzHugh, noted his unfocused eyes, and wondered on what inner landscape he gazed. There were tears in the rims of his eyes. When he lifted his glass to me and signalled, I gave Himself a look and he gave me the high sign, so I switched FitzHugh’s drink to a non-alcoholic beer. I don’t think the man ever noticed.
“I had a son,” he told me when I handed him the freshened glass. No one spoke. Doc, from wounded pride; Danny, because of a firm headshake I gave him.
“A son, was it?” said Himself. “Sure, that’s a comfort to a man.”
FitzHugh made a face. “Lenny was anything but a comfort. Sullen, secretive. Seldom home, even for meals. Lisa blamed me for that, too.”
“He was a teenager, then.”
FitzHugh started and a rueful smile curled his lips. “Yes. He was. Is that normal behavior for that age? For the sake of other parents, I hope not. I’ve remembered flashes of him mouthing off, and once or twice I’ve even heard echoes of the foul words he used. I’ve another memory of a policeman standing in the front door holding Lenny by the arm and lecturing me.” He sighed. “Sometimes I wished we had never met, Lisa and I; and that I had married someone else and had different children; that, well . . . that everything had turned out better than it had.”
“Then it was good fortune,” I said, “that some bubble in the foam erased it.”
FitzHugh was a big man; not muscular exactly, but not frail-looking, either. Yet, he gave me a desolate look and laid his head on his arms and began to weep. O’Daugherty and myself traded glances and Wilson Cartwright said, “I know where he lives. I’ll drive him home.” FitzHugh raised his head.
“Sometimes, I remember other things. Huddled over a kitchen table with Lisa, planning a future full of hope. A young boy bursting with laughter showing me a horse he had modeled out of clay. A camping trip in the Appalachians. Holding hands in a movie theater. Fleeting moments of simple pleasures. The joy had all leaked out, but once upon a time . . . Once upon a time, there had been joy.”
A wretched tale, for who among us has not known friend or family in a like situation? Sure, the wine may turn to vinegar in the bottle. And yet, who can forget how sweet it once tasted?
Himself nodded as he wiped a glass clean. “Are you ready to tell us now?”
FitzHugh grunted, as if struck. His eyes darted about our little group and found me. “It was no chance bubble,” he said, shaking his head sadly.
That startled me. “Then, what—?”
“I don’t know what sort of research my dream-self was doing. I recall enough tantalizing bits to realize it was down a different avenue than I’ve explored. But I do remember one especially vivid dream. I had built a chronon projector.”
Doc Mooney snorted, but Himself only nodded, as if he had expected it. Maura Lafferty wrinkled up her forehead and asked, “What’s a chronon projector?”
Frustration laced the physicist’s voice. “I’m not sure. A device to excite time quanta, I think. Into the past, of course. There’s nothing but formlessness future-ward of the bow wave. Perhaps I had some notion of sending messages to warn of tornados or disasters. I don’t know. The projector was only a prototype, capable only of emitting a single chronon to a single locus. Enough to create a ripple in the pond; not enough to encode a message.” He upended his mug and drained it and set it down hard on the bar top. “Call it a ‘cue stick,’ if you wish. Something to send a billiard ball into the packed chronons of yesterday and start random ricochets of cause and effect.
“Yesterday, I had no classes to teach, so I stayed home to paint my dining room. I was thinking about mutable time; and I had my hand raised, so.” And he held his right hand just before his face. “There must have been some congruence of my train of thought and my posture, because in that instant I was standing in a lab before some great machine and my hand was gripping a switch, and I remember . . . Lisa and I had had an argument over Lenny, and I remember . . . I remember thinking that if I projected the chronon to the locus when Lisa and I met—to that time and place—I could create a ripple in the Dirac Sea, a disturbance in the probabilities and . . . It would all never have happened. None of it. The heartache, the bitching, the sullen anger—” He fell silent.
Himself prompted him. “And . . .?”
“And I awoke in a strange house, silent and alone.” He looked a long way off, seeing what, I do not know. Himself laid a hand on his arm.
“Wisht. What you had, you lost well before you threw the switch.”
FitzHugh grabbed O’Daugherty’s hand and held it tight. “But, don’t you see? I lost all the hope, too. The memories of all the joy that went before; of a bright-eyed five-year-old whose smile could light the room. Of the possibility that Lisa and I might have worked it through.” He and O’Daugherty exchanged a long, mutual look. “I owed her that, didn’t I? I owed it to her to try to solve our problems and not abolish them as things that never were.”
“Sure,” said Himself, “the bad comes mingled with the good; and if you excise the first, you lose the other as well.”
“There’s one thing I hold on to,” FitzHugh said.
“And what’s that?”
“That Lisa—whoever she is, from whichever college mixer or classroom where we never met—that in this revision, she’s had a better life than the one I gave her. I hold that hope tight as a shield against my crime.”
“Crime?” said Danny. “What crime was that?”
FitzHugh wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. “Lenny. He was never born. He’ll never have a chance to grow out of his rebellion and become a better person. Lisa is out there somewhere. Lisa has . . . possibilities. But there is no Lenny. There never was that bright-eyed five-year-old. There never will be. When I disturbed the time-stream, I wiped him out. I obliterated his life: all the hopes and fears and hates and joys . . . All the possibilities that were him. How is that so different from murder?”
The silence grew long.
Then FitzHugh pushed himself away from the bar and stood a little uneasily. Alarmed, Professor Cartwright took him by the elbow to steady him. FitzHugh looked at the rest of us. “But it all never happened, right? There oughtn’t be any guilt over something that never happened.”
It was Danny who spoke—hesitantly, and with more kindness than I had looked for. “Could you not build another of those chronon projectors and aim it back and correct what you did . . .?” But he trailed off at the end, as if he already suspected what the answer must be.
FitzHugh turned haunted eyes on him. “No. History is contingent. There’s no chance that a random disturbance to the revision would recreate the original. You may break the pack on a pool table with a well-aimed shot. You cannot bring the balls back together with another.” Cartwright guided him to the door, and the rest of us watched in silence.
“The poor man,” said Maura, when he had gone.
O’Daugherty rapped hard on the maple counter top, as if testing its solidity. “So fragile,” he said, almost to himself. “Who knows if another time wave might be roaring down on us even now, a vast tsunami to wash all of us away?”
The O Neil returned from the back room with a glower on his face. “Ireland will get the Six Counties back before I get that pool table,” he said. “Let’s go on back to the house, Mickey.”
“I’ll catch you later,” I told him. “It’s a busy night and Himself can use the help as much as I can use the cash.”
The O Neil shook his head. “O’Daugherty, you need to take on a partner, and that’s a fact.”
Himself shrugged and served him a parting glass of black Guinness. “Someday, maybe,” he said. Me, I glanced over at the photograph on the wall, where O’Daugherty stood, arms crossed and legs akimbo, before his newly opened pub; and it seemed to me, though I don’t know why, that the picture was all out of kilter, as if something large were missing.
BURNT NORTON (a poem)
T.S. Elliot
“Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom of their own”;
I. p. 77. Fr. 2.
“The way upward and the way downward is one and the same.”
I. p. 89 Fr. 60.
—Heraclitus
I
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
II
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London.
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.
IV
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
V
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.