Time and Again

by Jack Finney

  Martin snapped the covering from the next figure, and there stood—I won't call it a dress but a gown of bright wine-red velvet, the nap fresh and unworn, the material magnificently draped in thick multiple folds, front and back. The bead trim caught the light, glittering a clear deep red, shimmering as though the garment were moving. It was spectacular; under the overhead lights the gown glowed like a jewel. "We chose this original"—Martin touched the sad, drab dress from the museum—"because they have a diary at the Smithsonian, donated with the dress, that records when and how it was made, including the dressmaker's pattern and an unfaded swatch of the material. We've had a replica made"—he reached out, his fingers unable to resist the rich new red velvet—"that is far more the dress a living woman once wore than what's left of the actual original." He stood peering at me anxiously, then gestured to the brand-new gown. "Can you see an actual breathing woman, Si, a girl, wearing this and looking absolutely great?"

  And I said, "Hell, yes: I can see her dancing!"

  In the next couple of hours we looked at a brown-at-the-edges cloth wreck that, unimaginably, had once actually been a child's party dress. Then we studied a duplicate in some kind of fresh flouncy pink cloth, that looked the way it did the day the girl first put it on. And I saw—as they had survived and as they had been when new—a boy's suit with brass buttons and knee pants; a postman's uniform; and a man's suit including a cutaway coat with silk-faced lapels, raveling and dusty in the original, fresh and shiny in the replica.

  During that week—I couldn't keep my hands off my beginning new beard—we looked at a collection of men's and women's hats of all kinds, originals and duplicates; and of purses, muffs, gloves. And one morning I stood turning a woman's shoe in my hands, studying the brittle gray-black leather crisscrossed with cracks. The toe and a band around the top were oddly discolored, the mother-of-pearl buttons chipped; it was no longer a shoe but a curiosity. Then Martin handed me its counterpart in new leather, and it was supple in my hands, the buttons of newly cut mother-of-pearl, the toe and a wide strip around the top brilliantly scarlet. Martin was imaginative; the shoe wasn't quite new. It had the fragrance of new leather but the sole was a little scratched, the heel had lost its sharp edges, and the faint beginning of a crease lay across the shiny instep. Martin smiled and said, "The trouble with everything that comes down from the distant past is that it's old. A relic. It may tell us something of what the past was like, yet it generally contradicts any feeling that it could possibly have been used by someone really alive." He nodded at the shoe in my hands. "But that's a shoe a living person could own. We had to create it, though." I nodded; it wasn't hard to see a young girl sitting on the edge of her bed pulling this on, buttoning it, then admiring it as she revolved her foot on her ankle to make the new leather catch the light.

  During several days Martin and I sat leafing through books whose pages had gone brown and whose covers were sometimes speckled with mildew. As you turned the pages, corners flaked off; only a ghost could ever have read these. Then, from a box, Martin brought out the same books, identical except that now their covers were bright new reds, blues, and greens, their titles fresh-stamped in shining gold leaf, their pages pure white, the fresh black print still smelling of ink. Obviously these had never been read—not yet. And in my mind the eighties had begun to stir a little with life.

  Rube was in the cafeteria lineup one noon, and he joined Martin and me for lunch. Then, during the rest of that afternoon, he took me into every office, into the carpentry and metal work shop, a small library, the conference room, the tailor's and shoemaker's shop, the control room for the Big Floor, a tiny projection room, and into every other place in the building where people were working; and he introduced me to them all.

  I met Peter Marple, a young designer for the project, formerly a set designer in the New York theater, and a good one; I'd seen several plays of his, it turned out. I met Larry McDermott, the project photographer, who'd occasionally done work for an ad agency I'd once been with. I met technicians, stenographers, engineers, an accountant. I met an associate professor of history from the University of California, and people whose work wasn't mentioned; Rube referred to one of them as "our chief briber," at which the man just grinned.

  Except for the two already out on the floor—John McNaughton in the Vermont house, and George Wing, a Crow Indian and former chief petty officer who was living in the tepee I'd seen—I also met my fellow candidates. One was the man I'd seen studying medieval French; we had a mutual friend whose first name neither of us could recall. Another was Miss Eileen Jorgensen, a thin, anxious-looking young mathematics teacher from Lincoln, Nebraska, who began studying turn-of-the-century San Francisco in the classroom next to mine. And I met the good-looking Charleston girl and the man I'd watched practicing with a rubber bayonet.

  In a corridor walking toward the elevator, Rube said, "We made a mistake with that pair. They started having coffee together in the cafeteria, then lunch together, then meeting outside. Now, of course, all they're interested in is each other. They'll be getting married soon, and I suppose that's great. But we're not running a lonely-hearts club, and no one gives either of them much chance of succeeding anymore. So we've locked the barn door, and now the rule is: Pass the time of day with the other candidates when you see them around, but no fraternizing; okay?"

  "Sure, as long as I'm too late for the Charleston girl." We rode down in the elevator—it was ten after five—and walked across town together, stopping in at the Algonquin for a drink.

  I spent an hour, one morning, in Doc Rossoff's office, while he taught me the technique of self-hypnosis. It was surprisingly easy; at least the technique was. He had me sit down in his big green-leather easy chair and get comfortable. He said, "Close your eyes if you like, though it's not necessary." I closed them. "Now, just silently tell yourself that you are becoming more and more comfortable, more and more relaxed in body and mind both. And let it become true. Then tell yourself that you are slowly, gradually, moving into trance. A light trance, fully awake and aware. Don't let the word 'trance' bother you; it's simply a convenient term for a state of somewhat advanced receptiveness to suggestion; nothing mysterious about it. Presently, when you feel you've achieved it, tell yourself in so many words that you are under self-hypnosis. Then test it: Tell yourself that you are temporarily unable to lift your arm. Try it, and if you really can't lift your arm you're in trance. Make any self-hypnotic suggestion you wish, then. If you had a headache, for example, you'd tell yourself you were going to count to five, and that your headache would have faded away before you finished. Or you can blank out thoughts, emotions, memories, and make them return later by posthypnotic suggestion. Okay? It's really a remarkable tool."

  I nodded, and he left me, to try it out. I did what he'd said, and felt myself grow wonderfully relaxed and comfortable. Presently I told myself I was gradually moving into light trance, and it seemed to me I could feel it happening. Sitting there, motionless, almost drowsy, I told myself that I could not lift my arm, that it was powerless to move. Then, my eyes on my coat sleeve, I tried to lift my arm, and almost hit myself in the eye as it popped right up.

  I tried again, taking more time, feeling every muscle relax; and the only part of me that didn't know I was in hypnosis was my arm; up it came every time like an eager but stupid dog who doesn't quite understand the trick. Doc came back presently, listened, and told me to practice at home, preferably when I was actually tired and sleepy.

  One morning Martin Lastvogel had a screen pulled down across the blackboard at the front of the classroom, a slide projector on a stand at the back. We sat side by side, Martin with a remote-control gadget in his hand. He clicked it, the air fan of the projector started up, and a round-cornered square of white light, fuzzed at the edges, filled most of the screen. Another click, and the square turned into a sharp-focused black-and-white drawing, an old-fashioned woodcut. It was a street scene, a busy one—of the eighties, I supposed; there were carriage
s, wagons, pedestrians. It was well done—the artist a good draftsman—but in a style that hasn't been used for half a century. "Done directly from a photograph, very likely," Martin said quietly; unconsciously he'd dropped his voice as people do in the dark. "A lot of illustrative woodcuts were copied from photos, before photoengraving. If so, you're looking at what could be an absolutely accurate representation of an actual moment. That's what it did convey to someone of the time. With the help of that woodcut in his weekly picture magazine, a man of the eighties could visualize the scene."

  This was my own field, and I said, "But it's not how we convey reality. Reminds me of Japanese art, the perspective flat, and even Westerners' eyes slanted. To us his drawing is unreal, but to his own audience—"

  "Right. Supply your own lecture, and do me out of a job. I've got a family to support, you know. Okay; we gave a copy of that cut, and a batch of others, to Sidney Urquhart. You know him?"

  "I've seen his work: street scenes, city scenes. Watercolors, mostly. He's pretty good."

  "He knows how to tell you what a city is like; you think he succeeded here?" Martin clicked his control, and a Sidney Urquhart that I wanted to own filled the screen. It was the scene we'd just looked at, detail for detail. And it was also a drawing. But this was in color, the pen-and-ink outlines filled in with brushed-on india inks in strong shades. It was the same scene but impressionistic; the thing moved. What I'd so often tried to do staring at Katie's stereoscope views, he'd got down on paper; the carriage horses were really trotting, the dray horses beside them sweaty and straining with effort. Carriage wheels were revolving, the spokes catching the light, and a mustached man dodging through the traffic was darting, his feet nimble and busy; you saw it. As Urquhart's sketch flashed onto the screen there was an instant when I was standing on the curb watching the scene and it was almost real.

  Martin's control clicked, the screen went white and empty, another click and the big square was a sepia photograph: Two women in long dresses and big hats were walking, their backs to the camera, down a wide sidewalk shaded by immense trees; one of them carried an open umbrella against the sun. To their left lay a grassy parkway in which great trees grew, shadowing the street; to their right, long sloping lawns. Beyond the parkway lay the shade-dappled street, empty except for an open buggy, its horse tethered to a hitching post. It was a good moment; the photographer had caught a nice scene. Sitting in the semidarkness studying it, I could believe—I knew—that it had once really happened. But it was frozen in time, infinitely remote, and the two women up there were never going to take the next step.

  A double click, and Sidney Urquhart's glimpse of the same moment filled the screen in color. It was only a sketch now, an impression, but the women's next step was imminent. They were really walking, then-bodies flowing into the next step, feet just lifting from the last one, and you knew that up out of sight the leaves of those trees were stirring and that the women, if somehow you could strain enough to hear, were quietly talking.

  We spent all that morning looking at, first, a drawing or photograph of the early eighties, then a "translation," which was Martin's term, and a good one, by Urquhart, Karl Morse, Murray Sidorfsky, or someone else. Not all of them succeeded, and some only partly. But some of them worked, and I'd suddenly experience the thrill of glimpsing the actuality of a moment of the past.

  Long before we were finished I knew I could do the same thing. I didn't need Urquhart now or anyone else; I, too, could look at an old cut or photograph and do the work of getting myself into and fully perceiving it until I found and touched the long-ago realness that had produced it. I could do it as well now as the makers of most of the new drawings I'd seen up there on the screen—better, I thought. Whether I could show it as well, whether I was artist enough, I wasn't sure; I doubted it. But I knew I could do it in my mind.

  Walking to the cafeteria for lunch, I said so to Martin, and he nodded. "It's how we hoped you'd feel; Rossoff predicted it. But you won't have much time for actually sketching, and the point of this morning was to give you a head start; we've got a lot of stuff for you to study and translate for yourself." I spent three days then, alone with the projector looking at scene after scene of the eighties, staring, working at finding the actuality that lay under the surface of each, gaining experience and speed as the time passed.

  At four o'clock one afternoon, in the tailor's workroom, I was measured from head to foot. Then I stood in my socks, holding a pail of sand in each hand, while a bootmaker traced the outlines of my feet.

  During most of one week Martin lectured from file-card notes. What was the population of the United States in 1880? he asked me for a starter. I cut our present population in half and said a hundred million, but Martin told me to cut it in half again; there were only fifty million Americans then, most of them living east of the Mississippi. In the West, buffalo still roamed the open prairie, the new transcontinental railway was a national marvel and excitement in a way that even space travel isn't today, and Indians were still scalping Whitey. It was a very different country and world; there were animals alive that are now extinct, and social systems, too; Europe was full of kings, queens, emperors, czars and czarinas then, and they weren't figureheads, they ruled.

  Martin talked about how the world traveled and moved its goods. There were steamships, and the railroad was decades old. But just the same, cargo vessels still moved largely by sail and most of the world traveled as it always had, on foot or by horse. Most people in America lived and died in the state or even the town they'd been born in; more people traveled across the ocean than across the country. Yet different as the world of the eighties was, Martin said, it was closer to ours than it seemed; walking through that horse-and-buggy United States, Lee De Forest was a nine-year-old boy already thinking about the problems involved in the invention of radio, sound movies, and television. At the end of one day, waiting at the elevator with me, Martin said, "It's a hell of a different world, Si, but it isn't alien to this, and I think you could be at home in it."

  Kate thought my collar-length hair and my new brown beard—I'd begun trimming it—made me particularly handsome, and I agreed. She'd begun helping me with my homework at night now. I'd taken her to lunch one day, at a Madison Avenue restaurant, inviting Rube and Dr. Danziger, and they'd liked her. Katie is attractive, physically and personally; she's intelligent, tactful, and can be witty if she's in the mood; she has charm. And after that, they let her visit the project; Dr. Danziger himself showed her the Big Floor, then his secretary showed her through most of the rest of the project. I wasn't along; I was too busy with Martin Lastvogel.

  So now, in a sense, Kate was fully in on the project, and on more nights than not, usually at her place though sometimes at mine, she drilled me on facts from Martin's lectures, using his notes. And she worked with me on getting the feel of the eighties from the photographs and woodcuts I brought home. One Saturday morning I took her to the project and showed her the reconstructed dresses, hats, gloves, and shoes of the period, and she was fascinated, wishing she could try an outfit on. She was a big help, and I think she speeded up the learning process for me. Martin thought so anyway. And she was a tremendous help with the self-hypnosis technique; Kate got it right away just from my description of how you were supposed to do it. That made me realize it was really possible, and from Kate's description I got an idea of the actual feel of slipping into "trance." So that one night at her place, sitting in her antique rocker, a very comfortable chair actually, I made it: My arm genuinely would not, could not, move, and I sat staring at it, fascinated. I told myself then that it was now free to move, tried it, and it did. Now I told myself that I would forget my own street address and stay in trance until Kate spoke. Then I sat there trying to recall my address, and it simply wasn't there to remember; it was both fascinating and a little frightening. I looked over at Kate who was reading through some of Martin's notes, and she happened to look up at the same time. She smiled and said, "Any luck?" and I k
new my own address just as always, and could feel that I was out of trance.

  "Yeah, finally," I said. Then we spent an hour studying samples of money; coins of the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, including gold pieces; big old bank notes issued by local banks pretty much in their own designs and actually signed by the bank presidents; and the ones I liked best of all, gold certificates redeemable not in silver but in gold and printed on the backs in an orange-colored ink suggesting gold.

  Once in a while Kate and I did other things: took a drive on a weekend, took a walk, even saw some friends. And one night—Kate and I had been seeing almost too much of each other, I felt, and I think she did, too—I phoned Matt Flax, but got no answer. Kate was going to iron, wash her hair, that sort of thing, and get to bed early. But I felt restless, and I phoned Lennie, and then Vince Mandel, who lived in town, but got no answers. So I stayed home and read, deliberately getting my mind off the project in a one-night vacation from it. In my living room I sat reading a one-volume complete Sherlock Holmes which I generally picked up whenever I had nothing else to read. At Dr. Danziger's request I'd quit reading newspapers, magazines, and modern novels; I'd also unplugged the television and my radio, no hardship.

  Every day at the project I sat listening to Martin, a clipboard in my lap, and I spent part of one afternoon tasting food. That was after lunch, which I'd skipped at Martin's request, and the cafeteria was empty except for the fat middle-aged cook, Dr. Rossoff, and me. First the cook brought in a plate of mutton, potatoes and beets, all boiled, and set it down in front of me. Rossoff sat across from me, and the cook stood beside the table, both watching me, and grinning a little. I ate a little of each of the things on the plate, tasting, staring off into space like a wine connoisseur. I'd never had mutton before, and didn't know what to expect; it seemed all right. But the potatoes and beets tasted—not quite the way they should have. I chewed away, trying to figure out the difference, and pretty soon Rossoff said, "Well?" I swallowed, and said, "They're better, they taste better. They have more flavor than I'm used to."