by Anthology
“And when the fire was out and the hose reloaded, the firemen climbed onto the fire engine—two in the high seat up front, where the reins were; the others on the low step in back, hanging on—and the horses pulled it down the driveway, turned onto Fremont Street, breaking into a trot, and that’s the last I could see of them. The firemen wore helmets and rubber coats, and they all had large mustaches, and one had a beard. Now, what about it, Oscar? You think I don’t know what I saw?”
I shook my head. “Hard to see how you could be mistaken about what you saw unless you’ve suddenly gone crazy.”
“Which I have not,” said Nordstrum. “Not yet. Come here.” He turned to walk down the old carriageway toward the street, then stopped and pointed. “Here’s where the horses stood,” he said, “well away from the heat of the fire.”
I looked down at the dirt and saw the horseshoe marks sharp and plain in the damp black earth, dozens of them, overlapping. Nordstrum pointed again with his foot and I saw the manure and, deeply imprinted in the earth at the edges of the carriageway, the long indented ribbons that were wagon tracks.
That was just under a year ago. Two months later, in September, Doug Blaisdel sold the Pollard place—cheap, as he had to, but still he was glad now that it hadn’t burned down—to a retired farm-equipment dealer from Peoria who’d grown up in Galesburg. It took all last winter and I don’t know how much money—the farm-equipment business must have been good—to get the old place fixed up; but now it looks the way it always used to, clean and white again, the lawn and iron fence and the burned window restored, and the inside of the house is beautiful. They’ve got an unmarried daughter, and last Friday they gave a dance in the old ballroom. It was a big affair, and walking up the path to the house—the daughter had invited me—I saw the house all lighted up, heard the music, and saw all the people at the windows and out on the huge porch, the big old house white and fresh and alive again, and I was glad it hadn’t burned down and the site sold for an apartment building.
Do you see? Do you understand now what’s happening in Galesburg? If you do, then you know why the phone rang late one night last fall out at the old Denigmann farm. It’s one of the finest of the farms just past the city limits; a wonderful place. There are a half-dozen acres of fine woodland including some nut trees; there’s a small but deep stream that winds through the whole farm and is wide enough for swimming in several places; and scattered over two acres of corn land are a dozen regularly shaped mounds which the kids out there have always believed were Indian burial mounds, and around which every generation of Denigmanns since they’ve owned the place has carefully plowed.
A lot of the neighboring farms are gone without a trace, the land covered with new houses. That’s necessary, of course, and some of them are nice ones. But you wonder why so many of the houses we build nowadays are so tiny, so lightly built, and so nearly identical. And why it’s necessary to lay them out in indistinguishable rows alongside raw concrete streets without even sidewalks for children to play on. And why they’ve simply got to be jammed together a few feet apart, on what was once Illinois prairie with an unlimited horizon. Can you imagine some of the houses we build today lived in and loved a century from now?
Carl Denigmann was going to sell his place to the subdividers, too, a big Florida outfit that was reaching up into the North. It was a good offer; he was fifty-nine years old, a widower, his children all grown and gone; why not? Late one night, he told me—this was last November, about the middle of the month, after all his crops were in—he was sitting alone in the farm kitchen thinking about it. Carl’s a small, strong man with black heavily grayed hair, all of which he still has, and he was probably smoking a pipe there in the farm kitchen.
Now, the Galesburg telephone company is an independent, and in the fall of last year it brought various country phone lines up to date including Denigmann’s—putting lines underground and installing dial phones. And in many a place, Carl’s included, the company didn’t bother removing the old out-of-date and now useless wall phone, unless the customer insisted on getting rid of it.
So Carl sat in his kitchen—there’s a ninety-year-old fireplace in it, and he had a fire going—staring at the fire and thinking, smoking his pipe, I’m sure. And when the telephone rang—the stuttering, uncertain grumbling ring of an old hand-crank phone—he simply got up, stepped to the wall, and answered it as he’d done hundreds of times all through his life. The conversation, then, was ordinary enough; it was just Billy Amling asking Carl if he wanted to go rabbit hunting with their twenty-twos in the woods after school next day, keeping one eye open, as usual, for arrowheads. Carl listened, half nodding, ready to agree, as always, before it came back into his head that Billy had been killed in the war in France in 1918; and the telephone receiver lay dead in his hand, not in the way of a phone when the other party has hung up, but in the completely lifeless way of a telephone that is connected to nothing any more and is just hanging on a wall without even wires leading away to the outside now.
Nearly all the rest of the night Carl Denigmann sat up thinking of all the farm had been to him, and Billy Amling, and many others, including Denigmanns who were dead long before he’d been born. And this spring Carl is out plowing it again and he expects to keep farming for at least a few more years. By then, he told me, he’ll have figured out what to do; he thinks maybe Galesburg might accept the old farm as a sort of park or preserve, with picnic tables, maybe, but mostly leaving it pretty much as is for kids to hunt through with their twenty-twos, and swim in the creek, and prowl around the old mounds, and pretend, at least, that they’re Indian graves. Carl doesn’t know, exactly, what he’ll do about the farm; he just knows he’s not going to let them subdivide it.
I’m glad about that; just as I’m glad the old Pollard place was saved, and that there won’t be a great big factory right out at the end of Broad Street, and about a lot of other things I haven’t got time to tell. I’m glad because here in Galesburg, and everywhere else, of course, they’re trying—endlessly—to destroy the beauty we inherit from the past. They keep trying, and when they succeed, they replace it—not always, but all too often—with drabness and worse. With a sterile sun-baked parking lot where decrepit, characterful, old Boone’s Alley once ran; rechristening the asphalt-paved nothingness (as though even the memory of old Boone’s Alley must be blotted from mind) with the characterless title Park Plaza. And with anonymous apartment buildings where fine old houses once stood. With concrete-block ugliness sprawling along what were charming country roads. With—but you know what they’re doing; wherever you live, you see it all around you. They even want to level Galesburg’s ancient Public Square into—well, a parking lot, of course, as though there were nothing more important.
And who are “they?” Why, “they” are us, of course; who else? We’re doing these things to ourselves as though we were powerless to stop; or as though any feeling for beauty or grace or a sense of the past were a kind of sentimental weakness to be jeered down. So what has been happening in Galesburg? Why, it’s simple enough.
Galesburg’s past is fighting back. It’s resisting us, for the past isn’t so easily destroyed; it’s not simply gone with yesterday’s newspaper. No, it is not, for it has been far too much—we are all products of it—to ever be completely gone. And so, somehow, in Galesburg, Illinois, when it’s been necessary as it sometimes has, the past has fought against the present. When the need becomes desperate enough, then the old yellow streetcars, or horse-drawn fire engines, or abandoned wall phones can and do flicker into momentary existence again, struggling to keep what I and so many others—Carl Sandburg, for one, who was born here—love about Galesburg, Illinois.
It’s hard to say whether it’s succeeding; they did, after all, chop down a lot of fine old Galesburg elms to widen Losey Street; Boone’s Alley is gone; and last year the library burned down and the townspeople voted against rebuilding it. And yet—well, I’d hate to be responsible for turning the old square int
o a parking lot, I can tell you that much. Because just last night, for example, I learned that those twenty-odd old elm trees on that big corner lot on north Cedar Street will not, after all, be chopped down. The man who was going to whack down with a power saw these trees older than himself—he was tired of raking leaves every fall, he said—is in the hospital instead, with a broken leg in traction. It’s strung up in a wire-and-pulley contraption like a broken leg in a comic strip. The neighbor who saw what happened told me that the man was standing out in the street last night looking up at the old trees and estimating which way they’d fall when he sliced through them this weekend. All of a sudden he was struck by a car that appeared out of nowhere. The police report calls it a hit-and-run accident, which it was, and the chief has assured the Register-Mail that they’ll find the car very soon. It shouldn’t be hard to find, they feel, because the neighbor who saw it happen got a good look at the car and furnished a complete description. It was a 1916 Buick roadster with a red body, varnished spoke wheels, and big polished brass headlights each the size of a small drum.
IAN'S IONS AND EONS
Paul Levinson
IAN’s IONS AND EONS . . . that’s what the neon sign said, in glowing script above the door. I don’t know when it first opened. I had been out of town for about a year, and I never could get a straight answer out of Ian. I don’t know what everyone else in the neighborhood thought when they walked by Ian’s on Johnson Avenue in the Bronx. Some kind of computer store, an electronic gimmick shop, a latter-day Radio Shack, perched on the second floor above a dry cleaner?
“We’re a travel agency,” Ian told me.
“Oh? Where do the ‘ions’ fit in, then?” I asked him. “Some kind of faster-than-hypersonic propulsion?”
“Nope. Not like that at all.”
I looked around the store. It was nondescript. I guess that was a bit self-refuting. There was an old picture of the Parthenon on one wall and a drawing of the Roman Coliseum on another, next to a stained photo of some Mayan ruin. “You specialize in travel to ancient places, like Rome and Athens, and that’s where the ‘eons’ come in?”
“Something like that,” Ian replied. He stroked his mustache. It was a fine mix of black and white. His hair was a little lighter, his eyes a little darker.
“What’ll it cost me to travel back to 2000?”
“So you knew what we do, all along.”
“Word gets around,” I replied. “You’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t.”
Ian shook his head.
“So what’s your pricing?” I asked again.
“2000 isn’t too far back; we consider it part of the twenty-first century, a break for you. The rest of the price would depend on the purpose of your trip—personal or societal?”
“Strictly personal.”
Ian scowled.
He explained that nothing was strictly personal in his business—you want to go back and kiss that girl again in the seventh grade, well that could still have unforeseen consequences for the world. And that meant such a trip required all the standard precautions, which were expensive. But they were less costly than protection from the possible results of a trip intended to change some kind of public event.
He quoted me a price, 20 percent less than the standard societal rate. “All inclusive.”
“Jeez.” I shook my head and whistled. “That’s still a small fortune.”
“You’re welcome to try the competition,” Ian said blandly. He knew that I knew there was none.
“You’ll need the complete payment up-front?”
“Obviously.”
I nodded and pressed in my account number and the desired dates of my journey on the thin terminal embedded in front of me on the counter. It fast-printed a twenty-five-page itinerary. Ian still did some of his business the old-fashioned way.
I looked at the first page. “A train?”
“Yep—somewhere between Philadelphia and Wilmington. That’s the way we do it.”
“For the East Coast?”
“For any coast.”
The itinerary was fairly explicit. Go down to Penn-Moynihan Station beneath the Farley Post Office. Fare already paid for, included in the package. Take the Tricela to Washington . . .
“Any Tricela?” I asked Ian. “They run every half hour, don’t they?”
He nodded. “The specific Tricela doesn’t matter. You supplied the date and time. It’s the speed, the curve, and what they got going on down there, under the ground, between Philadelphia and Wilmington.”
“That’s where the ‘ions’ come in?”
He nodded again. “Some kind of future underground technology produces them. They poke a little hole in the fabric of time. And if you hit it just right—at the speed and angle at which the Tricela is traveling—you get through.”
“But it doesn’t affect anyone else on the train?” I asked.
“It does not,” Ian replied. “You have to be in just the right spot on the train, at just the right time. Plus, you need to be wearing this.” Ian reached under the counter, rummaged around, and pulled out a blue-gray woolen vest with silvery buttons.
“You’ve got the 2000 model,” Ian advised. “It’s the micro-weave that attracts the ions.”
I massaged the textile between my thumb and forefinger. “Feels like wool . . . Okay if I try this on right here?”
“By all means,” Ian said. “As I told you, the vest attracts the ions only on the Tricela, between Philadelphia and Wilmington—”
I tried on the vest.
“One size fits all,” Ian said.
“Good,” I said. “And how do I get this back to you?”
“It’s all in the itinerary,” Ian replied. He pulled the counter screen back toward him and regarded it. “Let’s see . . . in 2000, you’ll find yourself on a Metroliner. You do your business back there. Then get on a northbound Metroliner. Wear the vest. And somewhere just south of Trenton, you’ll go to the right place in the train and the next thing you’ll know, you’ll be back on the Tricela, heading north, in our time. The fabric of time ‘remembers’ you. It’ll pull you back to the time you left, as long as you’re wearing the vest. The fabric of time attracts the fabric of your vest. It’s all in the itinerary,” he said again.
I looked at it again. The relevant line began, ‘Go to the café car, just as in the Tricela—’ I nodded. “When exactly in 2000 do I arrive? Can I specify the arrival date?”
“You get there on whatever month, day, hour, minute, second you leave in our time. Nothing other than the year changes. Same with the return—you get back here on whatever month, day, et cetera in 2000 you happen to find yourself on the Metroliner heading north, south of Trenton. It’s all in the itin—”
“Okay. How come the jump to the past takes place between Philadelphia and Wilmington, and the jump back to the present between Philadelphia and Trenton?”
“Several reasons. The Metroliner has a space-time configuration slightly different from the Tricela—it’s heavier than the Tricela, therefore cuts through space in a slightly different way—even when the two are moving at the exact same speed. And it’s actually helpful that the going and returning happen in different places—too much action in the same place could tear the temporal fabric with who knows what consequences.” Ian shrugged. “That’s what it is. The snap in the space-time continuum is ‘elastic,’ extending from Wilmington to Trenton. You all set?” His tone indicated he was about through with the conversation.
I tried one more question, anyway. “And you wouldn’t happen to know who built this future underground technology?”
“I would not,” Ian answered. “I’m just an agent selling tickets on a river boat. I have no idea how the river was created.”
Many people consider the post office an anachronism. E-mail has been on mobile media for decades, and if you want to mail a package, hey, just fill out a Web form, and someone will be by your side to pick up your parcel in under an hour, in most parts of the coun
try.
One thing neither the post office or the Web could ever do, though, is mail people. That still required planes and trains. Fortunately, the famous inscription above this post office usually worked as well for trains: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Trains had become swift. They usually kept their appointments. I knew it wasn’t always that way. There was a time, right around the turn of the century, when most people thought trains were all but finished . . .
I looked up at the inscription one more time for good luck and hurried downstairs to board my Tricela. It was new and gleaming. I found my seat, reserved in the itinerary, and sat down next to a blonde. She was pretty nice too.
“Going to Washington?” she asked politely.
I entered my ID into the terminal on my armrest. It beeped confirmation. “Actually, Philadelphia.” I didn’t want her to wonder where I was when we headed south from Philadelphia.
She smiled. Her eyes were agate gray and sparkled slightly in the soft train light. “Oh, I think you’ll be going down to Washington, eventually.”
I looked at her. “You’re with Ian.”
“Don’t worry—I’m included in the package.”
“But you’re not in the itinerary,” I said.
“Ian didn’t want you looking for me on the train—didn’t want you to look as if you were looking for someone you couldn’t find. That could attract attention you don’t need. Especially given the significance of your mission.”
The train sighed and glided imperceptibly into its journey. My head felt as if it was moving a million times faster.
“So . . . Ian knows I was lying, about my business being personal.”
“Of course he does. How could he not? He checked the past and the future. It’s his business.”