The Alexandrite

by Rick Lenz

  When I get home, there are two messages on my machine. The first voice says, “Jack, it’s Gordon. They think your look is perfect, but you weren’t there with your reading. Sorry, babe.” Click.

  The second caller is a woman. “This is Friday, ten thirty in the morning. My name is Maggie Partridge. I’m a psychophysicist.”

  I snort at the machine.

  “I’ve come across something in my work that you may be very interested in. Could you meet me today? Say three o’clock? The address is 1833 Shoemaker Drive in La Vieja. It’s extremely important.” She has left her telephone number.

  “What the hell’s a”—the phone rings—“psychophysicist?” I pick it up.

  “Hiya, Jack. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

  I don’t say a word; just wait for more bad news.

  “It’s not going to work out,” says Doug Crossley. “I have to replace you.”

  “But we’re into dress rehearsals.”

  “The guy who was going to play it before I hired you has suddenly become available, and I owe it to him. He’s played the role before.”

  “You owe it to him? That’s not a reason. What about me?” It feels as if this is the second red-hot skewer I’ve had plunged into my guts in an hour. “You can’t do this to me, Doug. It’s just not decent. You weren’t making cuts yesterday, were you?”

  “Whoever said show business was decent, Jack? Hey, listen, buddy, there’ll be other parts. Polonius isn’t much of a role anyway. This is no comment on your talent.”

  I hang up, take several deliberate, deep breaths, gobble a couple of pills, wonder why Sophie doesn’t love me anymore, force myself to stop thinking about her, then mechanically telephone Morgan’s Gifts and ask to speak to Mrs. Hightower.

  The young man tells me she’s out and won’t be back until late in the afternoon. I tell him I’ll call back later.

  I lie down, try to straighten out my tangled thoughts, whimper for a while, and fall asleep.

  In our backyard, next to my faux Zen garden that’s not feng shui the way I’d pictured it, but crowded with grasses that looked perfect at the nursery, I practice the ritual training moves of judo but can’t concentrate.

  My attempt at mind control melts into blind rage: “Shit, fuck, shitty cock fuck!” It’s not enough that I’ve been dismissed by my wife. Now, I’m fired from a job I was doing for fucking free. How can someone fire you when you’re working for fucking nothing? And how can my wife, who promised “for better or worse,” leave me when all that’s happening is I’m going through a little rough patch? It’s not permanent. I’ll get a better fucking attitude.

  I sink to my knees as if I’m going to pray, but instead I shout, “When I’m good and fucking ready!”

  Like a rabbit in high weeds, my instincts tell me I’d better be alert for predators, monsters in my own backyard. It doesn’t matter how well I think I’ve hidden myself. I have to watch out for everything—my own crazy impulses, for example.

  For a few seconds I feel a wash of serenity. I stand up, and with my right knee bent, my left leg stretched back and my right hand reaching toward the sky, I gaze upward, avoiding looking at the sun.

  I see it anyway, reflected brilliant green in my alexandrite.

  I am changing too, into an angry man I don’t recognize but also do. I don’t know why this is—that I’ve lost all perspective. I have been telling myself lately that I am getting more tolerant of change, but my wife has left me with no warning at all—and for no fucking reason—and I feel like a pathetic fraud.

  I guess that’s a reason.

  Maybe—it occurs to me—my real problem is that until now, the characters I’ve played have been at least a little under my control and that that’s something I’ve come to need. Now, the world seems to be acting root and branch on me, randomly shifting my colors and the colors around me. Considering my ghastly breakdown of confidence and my nightmares, I wonder again if I’ve finally gone the whole tree and am now entirely insane.

  But I don’t necessarily want to do anything about it. To be honest, I’ve always been a little afraid of that part of me that I don’t know—that thing that goes on underneath in people, the ghost in the machine, I think it’s called. I don’t trust the ghost in my machine.

  I have an image of my new life, living by myself, no wife, no children, no work, no interests; and it crosses my mind that it wouldn’t necessarily be such an awful thing if I went to sleep tonight and didn’t wake up.

  Then it strikes me that I’ve just had about the saddest idea a human being can possibly have.

  “What the hell’s a psychophysicist?”

  “Fuck it.”

  2

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1996 (CONT’D)

  I drive west toward La Vieja. I haven’t been this deep into the Valley for years. When my mother and I first moved to California, it was still the Los Angeles I recognized from books and movies. Now, it defines urban sprawl—strings of North Hollywoods, Burbanks, Sylmars, and Pacoimas spreading off in every direction from the ocean to the mountains and all the way up the sides of those mountains as far as they can get without falling back on top of themselves.

  Following a Thomas Guide, I find Shoemaker Drive just below the foothills. The houses are a mongrel mix of brick, stucco, and wood. As I drive nearer to the mountains on the north, I see a road sign: No Thru Traffic. Shoemaker Drive seems to be ending. I drive around for a while trying to find a continuation.

  Finally, I make my way back to a gas station/restaurant I passed a quarter mile earlier. It’s a bleached clapboard structure with a couple of pumps out front. A sign hangs from a frayed wire cable. It reads Dick’s Gas and Hot Food.

  Inside, a middle-aged woman sits behind the cash register waxing hair off her legs. A Sally Hansen box lies open on the counter, spilling out a half dozen strips.

  “Hi. Excuse me. Can you tell me what happened to Shoemaker Drive?”

  She glances up at me but her concentration remains on her chore. “Shoemaker’s right out there.” She nods in the direction I’ve come from.

  “But it ends at fifteen hundred.”

  She chuckles. “Yeah. I know.” She rips a strip of hair off her leg and winces. “Jesus, I hate that.”

  “Do you know where the rest of Shoemaker Drive is?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Is anybody around who would? Is Dick around?”

  “No, but I’m his wife. My name’s Bernice.”

  I see. “Okay. Thanks anyway.” As I start to leave, she heaves a sigh, as if she’s telling me this against her better judgment.

  “If you just drive down that road by the wash there and take a sharp left just before it dead-ends, I bet you’ll run right into Shoemaker again.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Come again.” She rips another strip of hair off her leg.

  I find the rest of Shoemaker Drive; 1833 is at the head of another cul-de-sac.

  It’s a two-story Georgian home made of stone and brick with impressive, peaked dormer windows on the second floor and a portico over the front entrance that’s supported by white fluted columns and looks as though it has been magically lifted from its natural setting somewhere in nineteenth-century New England and set down by way of some absentminded real estate developer’s typographical error in the San Fernando Valley.

  I park my Jaguar on the street at the end of a long flagstone driveway lined on either side by a density of blue agaves, walk to the front door and ring the bell. No one seems to be in any hurry to answer. I notice that two of the columns supporting the portico must have collapsed or almost collapsed once, judging by the white plaster patch job and some steel support struts. I hate being under heavy things that look like they could fall on me, so I move back to the front steps and gaze around at the neighborhood.

  La Vieja, “the old lady,” is unsurprisingly not a newly developed area of the Valley. The houses nearby are mainly single-story wooden structures barely substantial
enough to keep out the Santa Anas, and very few of the lawns are well looked after. On a couple of them, old cars sit rusting, but there is a pleasing variety of trees: elms, oaks, Brazilian peppers, olives, silver maples, liquidambars, a full range of citruses, a half dozen varieties of palm, loquat, guava. Some of the trees have buckled the sidewalks they shade.

  I ring the bell again and move back to the front steps. A little girl is pedaling a tricycle a few houses away. I wish Sophie and I hadn’t put off having children.

  Oh, God. That’s all we need: another victim of a toxically ambitious actor.

  Maybe this is turnaround day. Maybe today I’ll put an end to the world of the terminally self-involved. I need to explore other places, other people; actually see the world through the eyes of the character I hope to God is somewhere inside me. I look out at La Vieja again and feel in my guts that there are new and friendly universes somewhere out there, ripe for discovery. I’ve been so obsessed I’ve finally gotten to crisis point, my dried up humanity like a thirsty dog lying by his empty water bowl, hoping his master—or actually, any passerby would do—will spot his problem before it’s too late.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Cade. Thanks so much for coming.”

  I swivel around. She’s opened the door without a sound. A handsome woman, about thirty-five, with a way of looking deep into my eyes. She has an athletic, feminine figure and is dressed in tailored slacks and a matching silk blouse. She wears her auburn hair in an attractive blunt cut.

  “Dr. Peacock?”

  She corrects me. “Partridge.”

  “Oh, of course. I’m sorry. I think I remembered that name from the game Clue—Mrs. Peacock.”

  A whisper of a smile. “It’s perfectly all right.”

  Inside, seeing the gray slate floor of the foyer, I look abruptly up toward the top of the stairway and the second floor.

  A blade of ice stabs into my spine and slices out to every extremity. Even in the warm light of day and from this reverse angle, I recognize the scene of my nightmare.

  She leads me through a low-ceilinged passageway, no more than six feet long into a spacious, once-elegant living room. I feel dizzy. I stare at several nicely made reproduction Victorian pieces—a moss green sofa with a pattern of pale yellow flowers, a rocking chair, a couple of small tables, and some imitation Tiffany lamps. On one of the walls, over a massive stone and carved mahogany fireplace, is an oil portrait of a lovely golden-haired woman. I don’t know why—she isn’t a lookalike—but she trips a memory of the picture of Marilyn Monroe in the window of Morgan’s Gifts.

  A modern television monitor is in the nearest corner next to a camcorder on a tripod.

  Dr. Partridge gestures to a low-backed chair upholstered in faded velvet. “Would you like some coffee? I brought a thermos.”

  “No, thanks.” I sit heavily.

  “You’re sure you’re all right? You look pale.”

  “I’m fine. What is this place?”

  She is charmingly embarrassed. “I’m sorry, love. You don’t know anything about this, do you? This is a wonderful old white elephant of a house, leased to the county by the private party who owns it. It was built in the 1930s by an eccentric old man who loved this climate. He did it for his wife. But as it turned out, she didn’t love this climate. She spent one night here and fled back to Boston. Now the county takes care of it. They run occasional tours through it, although as you can imagine, this part of the Valley doesn’t draw many visitors. The owners would like to get rid of it, but they can’t get their money out of it. So they’ve just been sitting on it for years. You’re sure about the coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t know why I’ve asked you here. I’ll get to the point.” She sits across from me on a small settee. “You took part in a field experiment in hypnosis a couple of years ago with something called the Southern California Psychology Group through the Screen Actors Guild, right?”

  “That’s right. How would you—?”

  “Would you mind telling me how you happened to get involved with that?”

  “I don’t mind. I was between jobs. Sometimes out-of-work actors get approached to do that kind of thing. They paid me basically carfare to be hypnotized and to answer a bunch of questions.”

  “What questions?”

  “I don’t know. I was hypnotized.” I feel as if I should be angry, but I’m not. For some reason I feel giddy. “How did you know about that? Did you have some connection with it?”

  “No. But audiocassettes were made. The project fell apart—insufficient funding—and the tapes were destroyed, but not before I came across some of them. Most were not very interesting, but yours were. If it makes you feel any better, I was told at the time that the participants had signed off on those tapes.”

  “How did you reach me?”

  “Through your agent.” She clears her throat.

  Looking around the living room, I have the feeling I’m in it for some good reason that I simply haven’t heard yet and that soon this game will be over and everything will be made clear to me.

  “Then, listening to your tapes, I made a discovery. And I couldn’t keep it to myself. This hasn’t gone beyond me, and it won’t.” She gazes into my eyes without blinking. “Don’t you want to know about my discovery?”

  “Okay.”

  “How would you feel about my videotaping our conversation?” She points at the camera.

  “I don’t think I’d like it. Are you going to tell me why you asked me here?”

  She takes a sip of coffee from a plastic mug and puts it down. “What do you know about string theory?”

  “Pardon? Not much. Very little. Something to do with physics. Infinitesimal strings inside … what, quarks? Something like that?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know much about it either,” she says. “The best of us don’t. We’re just pretty sure we’re on the track of something that’s up there in significance with the wheel, the printing press, and digital technology. Did you ever hear of someone called Richard Blake?”

  “No.”

  “Your tapes from that experiment told me very little about you but a lot about a man named Richard Blake, who lived in this house during the fifties.” She gets up and moves to the television. “I’d like to show you a piece of videotape.” She turns on the monitor.

  A tall middle-aged man with a high forehead, long but fleshy face, ears flat to his head, twinkling eyes and an open, cheerful smile appears on the screen. He is delivering a lecture that is intercut with shots of an attentive audience of college students. On a blackboard behind him is an equation: Ruv—½ guvR = 8π Tuv. Beneath that is scrawled “Einstein’s ten independent equations, condensed into one.”

  The man speaks enthusiastically in a croaky baritone. “Light travels at one foot per nanosecond. If you stand eight feet from a mirror, the image you see of yourself is sixteen nanoseconds younger than you are as you see it. If we had a mirror in a distant galaxy and looked at it through a more sophisticated telescope than now exists, it might show dinosaurs walking the earth. Einstein explained gravity by showing how mass causes space-time to curve—not to obey the rules of Euclidean geometry. A time traveler is someone whose timeline loops back and intersects with itself—as a helix does. This, despite the fact that from the time traveler’s perspective, he has been traveling toward the future all the time.”

  The professor smiles at his mesmerized listeners, then continues, “According to quantum mechanics, you can make an object appear spontaneously. Physicist George Gamow demonstrated that years ago on a subatomic scale.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  Not taking her eyes off the screen, Dr. Partridge says, “Listen. Please.”

  “Time is the fourth dimension,” says the lecturer. “If I am to meet my daughter in the city, we must agree on three space coordinates and another number signifying time. Aboriginal wisdom, however, tells of a second ti
me: dreamtime. If that existed, the universe would be five dimensional. Some theorists, myself among them, are saying that if there were two dimensions of time—time, and let’s just call it dreamtime—I could meet not only my daughter, but also myself.”

  With conspicuous glee, he throws a hand over his head and sweeps it around in a large circle.

  “We could loop around in the time/dreamtime plane and visit anywhere in time we wanted. If I’m an eligible subject, I can see myself off on the journey I just completed, simply by capitalizing on my presence in time/dreamtime. Superstring theory suggests that our universe actually has eleven dimensions. Some physicists have discussed the possibility that one of the curled-up dimensions connoted by superstring theory could be a time dimension—such as dreamtime. If it exists, then we can most certainly time travel. Now, then”—he rubs his hands together like he’s about to serve barbecue—“we know that there are two subject requirements for movement through time: an absolute duplication of location and a person wholly susceptible to hypnosis.”

  “This man’s insane.”

  Partridge hits the freeze-frame, leaving the professor with his mouth half open on the screen.

  I’m woozy all over again. “Who is that?”

  “This is a tape of a lecture delivered recently by a physicist named Robert Hinkle. And he’s anything but insane. He’s one of the leaders of a small group of physicists who have recently reopened dialogue on the possibilities of time travel.”

  “And you’re showing it to me because …?”

  An audible gulp of breath, then, “I think you’re more than coincidentally tied to a man who once owned this house. I think you used to be …” She pauses and takes in another gulp of air. “I think you used to be someone called Richard Blake.”

  I find the presence of mind to close my mouth. When I open it again: “Is this a joke?”

  “I want to try to send you back in time.”