by Rick Lenz
At one point in the dream I heard the voice of the guy in the baseball cap (he is me, I’ve claimed, although—as I think I’ve said before—I’m no longer sure). I heard him say, “A little low-gear this morning, aren’t we, Mr. Cade?” I didn’t know why he was being so formal with me. It was as if, despite his teacherly reproach, he was trying to pay me more respect than I’m used to, more than I consider is actually due me. And in a way, I confess I appreciated that extra consideration. It seemed to me the least we all deserve.
“Exactly,” he said.
He’d been reading my mind. “What else?” I asked him, but he just looked at me, as if he knew things but didn’t know exactly how to tell them to me, or was paying deference to the old man’s diminished capacities.
I tried to remember the hard questions I’d wanted to ask him, but I couldn’t think of one. So I said, “It seems to me you’re expecting me to put my faith in … silence, in the invisible, in nothing more than intuition. What I need to know is, what am I not seeing?”
“Anything, I assume, because you act as if you believe in nothing.”
“That’s not true. I see what has to be magic all around me, but I don’t know what it is or where it comes from.”
“So then I’m wrong, you are seeing something—something spectacular.”
“Yes, but I don’t know what it is, or how to explain it.”
“And what you’re left with is …?”
“Doubts, thousands of doubts. And fear. I have endless fears.”
“I can imagine.”
…He shrugged and I studied our images in the mirror behind the bar, wondering which one of us was real, if either of us was.
“What are you looking at?”
“I’m trying to figure out who we are.”
He laughed. “You don’t look at what conceals the truth to find the truth.”
“If I could just make out who you are and what I am and what we’re doing together, maybe I’d have a shot at understanding why I got sent on this journey. I mean, I’d like to get back a little control over my life.”
He shook his head, took his hat off, then put it on again, but backwards. “This is how the kids wear them these days, huh?”
“What days are these?” I said. “I’ve lost track.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
He smiled. “Do you believe the past causes the present?”
“What?”
“What do you think?”
“Does the past cause the present? I don’t know, I guess.”
“But the past is gone,” he said. “How can something that doesn’t exist have any bearing on this moment?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t the history we all live through change the world?” I realized as I asked it that that was a dense question, the way I’d put it. “I mean it changes the way we look at the world. And how we look at the world is what the world is.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “And I don’t think you’d want to subject that theory to any serious test of logic.”
“No, I’m right,” I insisted. I didn’t like being told I was wrong. “Reality is what we perceive it to be.”
“Same with that one.”
That made me mad. “Look at the diminishing number of species in the world. If we hadn’t been greedy for all that ivory, the elephant population wouldn’t be dwindling the way it is.”
“That’s true,” he said. “But listen to the question again: ‘Does the past cause the present?’ I’m not talking about what we did or didn’t do. I’m asking you about time, time itself—time past or any other form of it—I’m saying it has no effect whatever on what is, on right now. Can time undo? Can it restore?” He picked up the LA Times still lying on the bar. “Can time reverse one single occurrence from the so-called past?”
I had no answer. In fact, I was suddenly pretty sure he had me. He was right. And it was disconcerting, to say the least, to realize that the old man I was didn’t get to be that way, physically, mentally or any other way, because time did it to me. Time has no tools. Time is not the culprit. I don’t even know if there is a culprit. At any rate, it wasn’t the past that had turned me into this crotchety old man. So I asked him what seemed like a reasonable question, at least at the time. “What is time?”
I was watching him very closely. A big grin spread over my old self’s face. Through a robust laugh, he said, “I don’t know. I’ve got suspicions, but I’m not positive.”
“What do you suspect?”
“Well …” He lifted the bill of his cap and scratched the back of his head. “The way it feels to me … is that there probably isn’t any such thing—time, I mean. If there was, there wouldn’t be any eternity. I mean eternity flat-out eradicates any notion of time. My own personal feeling about time (if I’m allowed a personal feeling about anything) is—fuh-geddaboudit. It doesn’t exist. It just seems to me,” he went on, “as if for some unknown reason, this is something almost none of us have chosen to look at very closely.”
And here he started to fade away.
“No, no, don’t go yet,” I said. “I haven’t learned a single thing.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Eventually you’ll know everything. I can’t travel your road for you. I seem to be you, but I’m not … exactly—except of course in the sense that everything—time, if you want to go on believing in that, as well as space, and the outer borders of reality itself—are all at the exact center of you.”
“So maybe I am you.”
He smiled. “Yes, maybe you are.”
“Would that make this a magic experience?”
“I prefer to think of it as a holy one. Whenever you encounter yourself it’s a holy experience.”
He shrugged, smiled, and was entirely without form. Only these words lingered: “The thing you have been looking with is the thing you are looking for.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” I called after him.
“Pleasure, like pain, comes and goes,” he said. “Joy, rediscovered, lasts forever. It’s really cool.”
Then there was only silence, and I knew I’d missed my chance again. At first, I felt a sharp disappointment.
But by the time I woke up, I was okay. I felt more or less ready to do whatever I have to.
I take a few moments to mark the passing of the old Richard Blake. Still a little fuzzy in the head, it occurs to me to pee in his shoes, but that doesn’t seem very mature, so instead, I tear up his Denny’s Early Bird card.
Then, with my mind on the future (in this case—I hope—the past), I place the ebony box next to the alexandrite ring on the counter between the bedroom and kitchenette and open it. I do my best to replicate the conditions of light and sound I remember from the two times Maggie Partridge sent me back, which means silence and only indirect daylight through the windows.
But it’s far from silent in my room; I should have known. I can’t get into the picture and am unable to transport myself into deep space, or back to anything outside the shabbiness I’m living in. If there are any wormholes in my apartment, they were made by worms.
I work with the ebony box several times for the next two days, but still no luck.
I consider the consequences of what I’m trying to do. If I manage to get back to 1956 again, and do what I want to—not make waves, stay out of Lily’s bed—L.M. Partridge will never exist in the form of Maggie, or Lily Margaret, or any other way. Maggie Partridge said she wasn’t judging me morally, but wasn’t that really a way of telling me, “Please don’t stay out of Lily’s bed—because if you do, it will render me null and void”? Did she take such a risk with her existence, her very survival, because she was hungry for immortality through her work? How does that differ from athletes willing to die pitifully young in order to break some trivial record?
And why didn’t the cancellation of Maggie Partridge’s existence obliterate this whole experience? Why didn’t I, at the moment
of the non-conception of Dr. Partridge, find myself sitting in my house in North Hollywood with no memory of any of this? I assume the original Dr. Maggie Partridge gambled that I wouldn’t return to a moment when I might make a decision to stay out of Lily’s bed and cancel her own existence.
I remember Dr. Partridge’s words: “Jack Cade’s life can’t just arbitrarily end.” I wonder if I stumbled across proof of that at Doug and Bea’s. On the other hand, I was a drunken old man that afternoon a few days ago. What makes me think I wasn’t hallucinating? And if I am out there in that other form, what does that have to do with the man whose body I’m walking around in?
The lunatic is in the hall.
I don’t know anything. I haven’t for a long time now, unless I count the dawning perception that living and dying terrify me equally.
Long after nightfall, I drive out to La Vieja, park my car down the street, and walk through the darkness to 1833 Shoemaker Drive. I have on a black jacket, a black cap, and easy-fit blue jeans.
I duck behind a hedge at Amy Jaekel’s old house, go around to the back, then slide with considerable difficulty through a gap in the wooden fence into the Blakes’ old backyard. There are no lights on inside. It’s two in the morning. She’s probably asleep.
Although it’s only the middle of October, it’s a cold San Fernando Valley evening. I sit on the ground near the old mesquite tree but far enough away from it that the sky won’t be blocked out by its branches. The weatherman said there is a high-pressure area in Los Angeles and as a result, clear skies. I plan to sit in the backyard of Richard Blake’s old house and look into the night sky from the exact point in the universe where he lived.
If—predicated on Einstein’s curvature of space-time—dreamtime theory is what it’s represented to be, and if the universe is five dimensional (or more) as I was told dreamtime connotes, and if I can, with Jack’s particular susceptibilities to autosuggestion (and, by now, my experience at it), once again enter into that dreamtime, as I have apparently done before … I can at least hope I will travel back to April 10, 1956.
Or else, I’m just nuts, and I’m stuck as this old man until I croak.
The night grows colder, the ground damper. I have no success with time transportation but do pretty well imagining myself through the younger eyes of the souls inside me—at least the ones I know about. I see a disoriented old man trying to do something any child knows is impossible.
The lunatic is on the grass.
As I steal away from Lily Margaret Partridge’s backyard shortly before dawn and am getting into my Dodge Dart, I look back at the house and see that a light has been turned on in a room on the second floor.
A lonely figure is silhouetted in the window, looking blindly out into the darkness, her parakeets twittering behind her like a feathery Greek tragedy chorus.
Back at my place, in a hot bath, trying to drive the chill out of my bones, I am haunted by visions of Lily Margaret. When I was sitting in the backyard, I was able to feel her upstairs in the house. I imagined her being aware in some animal way of her father sitting out in the wet grass trying to figure out a way to transport himself back to an earlier time. No doubt she couldn’t have conceived of this. But maybe she could—maybe that was right down the middle of what her solitary brain could conjure. Maybe she was aware of the inside-out logic of what I was doing and that I was doing it, and she welcomed it. Maybe it had started earlier. Maybe the notion of the cancellation of her existence, and the termination of her pain forever, was squirting around the impenetrable regions of her consciousness all the time father and daughter were having their tête-à-tête, three or four days ago, the second Friday in October of 1996. I giggle, imagining the board of directors meeting when they decided I was no longer mentally ill and that they should release me from Coolidge into the population at large.
In the kitchenette, I stare at the alexandrite, under fluorescent light. Pale green. In bed, I can’t sleep. I think of Lily and Margaret. I look at the alexandrite again. I have thought of it as the touchstone to a horror story. The truth is, this unfathomable gem has been the marker for two stories. One emerges out of darkness and fear—the red, nighttime facet. The other, the green daylight façade, reveals a place in me where, if I were to tap into myself and see what I am, I might be surprised. In a good way.
I might find immensity—my home, my garden, my wife, my freedom, my life.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16, OR THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1996
I wake up shortly after noon with the beginnings of a cold. By evening, it has blossomed into wheezing and sniffling, and I work with the deep space in the ebony box again.
Nothing.
I take my watch and the alexandrite ring off, wash my hands and face, dry off, wrap myself in a blanket, and slump down in front of the television, surfing channels, feeling miserable.
I watch an old I Love Lucy rerun. Lucy is dressed up like a man, and Ricky pretends he doesn’t know it’s her.
I doze off. When I wake up, Lucy and Ricky are on the road to Hollywood. It’s an I Love Lucy marathon. My cold is brutal. I doze off again.
When I wake up next, they’re showing What’s My Line? I’ve never seen reruns of that before. I don’t have a TV Guide, but I guess I’m watching the Nickelodeon channel on cable. The next time I look up, a white-haired man, nearly as old as I am, is talking to the camera. He says, “The ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are afraid to go to the brink, you are lost.” An announcer says, “Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.”
I close my eyes again.
I don’t have cable television.
I open my eyes and take a deep breath through my nose. It’s entirely unclogged.
My cold is gone.
I reach for my tumbler of Scotch and drain it.
As I put the glass down, I look at my hand.
It is not an old man’s hand.
I haven’t had a Scotch in decades. “John Foster Dulles?”
I get out of the chair easily and turn from the television to see Margaret standing in front of me, her hands on her hips.
“Please, Richard. We’re guests here. Come in and join us this instant.”
“I’ve lost my ring.”
“Well, drunks do things like that.”
“But I don’t care.”
24
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1955
It is somewhere between eleven and eleven thirty p.m. I am at the home of the head of the geology department at UCLA, Dr. H.P. Tandler. I am (according to what’s happened previously) about to lose my job.
I haven’t gone back to the same time, and I remember something about a “Cauchy horizon” and the impossibility of traveling from certain moments to certain other moments, then realize I don’t really care. I’m back. I’m close enough. I’m young again.
I give Margaret a kiss that feels to her—I can tell—as if it has passion in it. As a matter of fact, it does—passion and joy. I squeeze her shoulders. “I’m going to go wash my face and come back in and join the group.” On my way to the washroom, I turn back to her. “Damn, Margaret. You look fine.”
She stares at me, suspicious, stimulated. “Please hurry,” she says in an imperious, puzzled tone. Frowning in a funny, sexy way, she leaves the room to go back to the party.
I go into the guest bathroom. In the mirror is Jack’s first memory of Richard Blake, even younger—three months, ten days, a few hours, and a couple of nanoseconds, compensating for my distance from the mirror. My eyes fill with tears.
I look at my ringless right hand. The last time I saw the alexandrite, it was on the counter between my bedroom and kitchenette of the apartment over forty years later. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t the real magic anyway.
I sober up fast. Olga Tandler corners me when I rejoin the others and I listen, engrossed, as she tells me everything she likes and everything she f
inds “synthetic” about Los Angeles, and I bob my head and smile and agree with all of it, never puncturing her airs with even subtle unkindness, and it occurs to one side of me or the other that somewhere along the way that arrow has been eliminated from our quiver.
At midnight, she kisses me with wet enthusiasm and soon, far from being hostile to me, Dr. Tandler’s wife will be my biggest supporter. She stands closer after the kiss, whispering how much we have in common on little puffs of warm moist breath. As Margaret and I leave the party, I imagine Olga Tandler telling her husband what a bright, charming young man that Richard Blake is.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 1956—WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 29, 1956
Margaret, Lily, and Richard/Jack take up housekeeping again. Richard doesn’t get fired from his job. He quits going to bed with his wife’s sister, and I think it’s likely Margaret never purchases a revolver.
There is a confrontation a few days later. It seems that my new openness has wiped out Margaret’s earlier tendency to let her anger smolder inside her and she is now speaking more directly. After dinner one evening, the three of us are watching television. Lily gets up, yawns pointedly, and says, “Richard, I’m going to bed now.”
Trying to conceal a wince, I say, “Sweet dreams, Lily.”
But she doesn’t leave. She repeats herself. “I’m going to bed now, Richard.”
After she’s gone upstairs, Margaret says, “You’ve been sleeping with her, haven’t you?”
I confess, then, expanding on my contrition, go on to make it the most convincing acting job of my career. I should get a nomination.
Most nights, I come home from school and work at tasks around the house until well into the evening, only stopping to sit down with Margaret and Lily to eat dinner. Later, I join them to watch the last program or two on television before going to bed. I don’t think Margaret ever forgives me. Once, she says, “I have to go out for a while. Can I trust you to stay out of my sister’s bed while I’m gone?” But our life does finally get back to something resembling functional, even though my habitual unease never goes away.