Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  Celine had died of a sudden heart attack while still in her forties, and Richard had stopped teasing Kevin about the cleaning after that.

  Richard settled down on the couch and was pleased to see that the television had remembered to record the Miami game. He’d programmed it before the season even began, as he was going into the hospital to be treated for his throat cancer, in what he’d suspected at the time was an act of raw bravado.

  The game had been over half a day already, and he had no idea who’d won. Richard thought briefly that he should call Mike and tell Mike he’d managed to go 12 hours without knowing who won the game, before remembering that Mike, who’d graduated from Miami with him, had died the same year as Anna.

  That bothered him. He knew he had lapses; you couldn’t get into your nineties without having lapses. But he hadn’t expected to have them with this almost-young body he was wearing.

  Then the game started, and he forgot about it.

  HE AWOKE IN the middle of the night, starving and needing to use the bathroom, and didn’t know where he was at first. The television was on – he almost never turned it off – and it was showing highlights from the Miami game he’d fallen asleep watching. Miami had beaten Clemson 33 to 14 – the Hurricanes were undefeated so far this year.

  He got a dreadful shock in the bathroom, when the lights came on. He’d forgotten everything, forgotten he was dying of throat cancer, forgotten the treatment, forgotten the plastic surgery on his nose, the cloned ears they’d stuck to the side of his head, the removal of the loose skin from around his throat.

  He had a panicked moment as a young man stared at him out of the mirror. It jolted him bad, made his heart race. (The transform viruses were thorough; one of them was regrowing the muscle in his heart that had been scar tissue for forty years now. Another had tightened the muscles around his eyes and refocused the eyes themselves; without his glasses on Richard saw himself in the mirror more clearly than he’d managed in decades.)

  He was looking at a black-haired Kevin. Kevin’s eyes, Kevin’s mouth ... not Kevin’s nose, Kevin had his mother’s nose – not that the nose was what Richard remembered, either, from his own youth; it was what the surgeon had given him a few weeks ago. It looked okay. Kevin’s ears, close enough. Mostly the hair was different – Kevin had Anna’s brown hair, not the black hair Richard now saw growing from his own skull and sprouting as black stubble on his upper lip and along his jaw. The hair on his skull was still so short it was perfectly straight, but Richard knew that as it grew in it would form wiry curls. The girls had loved that, when he was young. Anna had loved it, had loved running her fingers through it.

  The strawberry milkshake designed for his DNA was waiting in the refrigerator for him, two gallons of it. He was sick of it already but if he didn’t drink it the hunger was unbearable. He went to the kitchen and poured himself a tall glass of it and drank it standing in the kitchen, then placed the glass in the sink, went back to the bathroom and shaved and showered and brushed his teeth.

  None of his clothes fit him. He dressed in the most recent of his clothes, purchased after he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. They hung loosely on him. He had to cinch the belt down to its last space to hold his pants up.

  The first gray of morning had touched the sky when he went into his office and turned the computer on. He’d cashed out all his stocks after the diagnosis, put them into CDs with Kevin as the beneficiary. It annoyed him to see that the general market, including several of the stocks he’d been in, had climbed steadily during his illness. He checked his mail and was at first startled and then annoyed again; even after the spam filters had fired, there were so many thousands of messages waiting for him it was going to take him hours to wade through them and see if anyone he wanted to hear from had written him.

  He got himself another milkshake, a smaller one, went out onto the porch and sat in the wicker chairs, and watched the sun rise while he drank it.

  He couldn’t think of anyone whom he felt an urgent need to contact. He’d outlived all four of his sisters. Anna had one sister, Patty, and a brother, Don; they’d both been dead a decade as well. He supposed he’d get in touch with Celine’s children at some point; they were on the East Coast, though, and had only called him a couple times during his illness. It was unkind of him to assume they wanted his money, but he knew they did, so there was that.

  He sat on the porch for a while. From his back yard he could see the beach, could see Pacific Coast Highway. When the traffic was starting to get busy, he went back inside and called Kevin. He could tell he’d woken the boy up, from how groggily he answered the phone. “How you doing, Dad?”

  “Good. You work today?”

  “It’s Sunday, Dad.”

  “You’re not working, then? If you had your own practice you could make those decisions, you know.”

  “I don’t work on Sundays.”

  “Good. Come take me shopping. I need new clothes.” Richard hadn’t used the holoset; holding the handset to his left ear, he held his right arm out, watched it shake as he tried to hold the hand level. “And I want to find a gym that I can go to.”

  FOR THE NEXT month, Richard went to the gym every day. He was astonished and pleased at how quickly he bulked up. What was left of the fat he’d carried around for the last fifty years was almost gone when he left the hospital; six weeks after leaving the hospital his body fat was at eight percent, and he’d put on almost ten pounds of muscle. He’d taken to driving down to the gym in Santa Monica every morning around 10 A.M., when the traffic died down. At first he’d walked on the track for ten minutes at a time, then twenty, followed by weight work, followed by the sauna. Within a month he was working out an hour a day: running on the track, followed by weight work, followed by swimming. He hit 180 pounds two days before Christmas – the weight he’d boxed at, three quarters of a century previously, growing up in the slums of Corona.

  MANDY TAUGHT TAI Chi at the gym. She caught Richard’s eye almost immediately; she taught the course in a white gi. She didn’t wear a bra, or need one, and after she’d been sweating for a while Richard could see the black g-string she wore through the white cloth. She was the first woman he’d been attracted to since Anna died – it didn’t surprise him: he found himself being aroused by women on tv, lately.

  She had short black hair and looked Latina except for her eyes, which looked Asian. When Richard asked her what race she was, she smiled at him and said, “Golden People” – Richard wondered if that was a polite way to tell him to mind his own business, or if she meant something by it; he’d never heard the phrase before.

  He’d been taking the Tai Chi class three times a week for nearly a month before they’d spoken other than casually: one day Mandy said, “You learn fast.”

  “I’ve studied Tai Chi before,” Richard admitted. “I’m just rusty.”

  “Where’d you study?”

  “The Zen House.”

  She looked at him oddly. “They tore that down when you were a little boy, Richard.”

  Richard hesitated. “No, not that one. I used to live in, Chicago. There was one in Chicago called that.”

  “Oh. Well, you’re re-learning quick, then.”

  THEY HAD DINNER together the first time a Friday night a few days after New Year’s. She was a vegetarian so he took her to the Inn of the Seventh Ray, in Topanga Canyon, and had a table outside under the h
eat lamps, next to the creek. It had been raining and the creek was high, rushing past them only a few feet away from their table. Richard had hesitated about it; the last time he’d been there had been with Anna, and she’d been sick at the time.

  It went well enough. The place was as Richard remembered – he was pretty sure he recognized the middle-aged woman inside the New Age bookshop as the young waitress he and Anna used to ask for. The menu seemed different to Richard; he recognized no single item on it, though the sort of food they served had not changed, lots of vegetarian dishes, a few meat dishes served for committed non-vegetarians. Richard had the filet mignon and put up with Mandy’s polite disapproval. She had a Portobello mushroom dish in a plum sauce that was, he was forced to admit, better than his steak, when he tried it.

  He took her home, to the apartment she shared with a friend, on 10th street in Santa Monica, and kissed her good night.

  THEY SLEPT TOGETHER for the first time the next Friday night. Mandy made a point of telling him that her roommate wouldn’t be home until Sunday. Richard took her out for the evening; they went to dinner and a play, a revival of “A Chorus Line.” She’d wanted to go dancing; Richard had refused, saying he didn’t know how to dance ... which was mostly true; he certainly knew none of the dances Mandy knew.

  Richard surprised himself by being nervous. It vanished though, once they got down to it, and afterwards he was lying in her bed, drifting off to sleep with Mandy curled up against him, her head on his shoulder, their sweat drying on them, when Mandy said, “Are you married?”

  It brought him instantly awake. “No.”

  “Were you?”

  Richard took a long time answering. “Yeah. She died, though. A while ago.”

  “How long?”

  He knew what she was asking. “She died seventeen years ago – it’ll be eighteen years, end of March. We were married forty years before that.”

  He could tell it didn’t surprise her. “Yes,” she said softly. “I thought so. You’re that guy, the really old one who survived the treatment. The oldest one to survive.”

  “Yeah.”

  He could hear her breathing, in the darkness of her small bedroom. “You don’t seem old to me.”

  “I’ll be ninety-four this summer.”

  She sat up in bed. “How rich are you?”

  He sat up next to her. “Why?”

  “The treatment, how much did it cost?”

  Richard shook his head. “I don’t know. My son was managing my accounts while I was sick. He paid the bills, I don’t know exactly what it came to.”

  “I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars?”

  It had been in the millions, Richard knew. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “I didn’t pay it.”

  “My dad died,” she said. Richard knew she was looking at him, but he couldn’t see her dark eyes at all. “The year before last, on August the fifth. About a year and a half ago now, I guess. He couldn’t afford the treatment, not even by selling everything he owned. So he died. He was only sixty-two.”

  “THERE’S GOING TO be a war over this,” Richard said.

  “I know,” Kevin said. “There have been murders, though they’re being kept quiet.”

  They were having breakfast together at Googie’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, before Kevin went into his offices in Beverly Hills, where he provided therapy to men and women, mostly women, who were richer and more neurotic than he was.

  Richard sipped at his coffee, black with cream. “Not one person in a thousand can afford it.”

  “It’ll get cheaper.”

  “How fast? Fast enough?”

  “Fast enough to prevent war? Probably not,” said Kevin. “You broke up with that girl, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad. I’d have liked to have met her. I think she was good for you.”

  “I had to change gyms. I’d bought a year’s membership in advance at that gym, I barely used 4 months of it.”

  “It was hard for you to see her?”

  Richard shook his head. “Hard for her. She was good about it, but it was bothering her.”

  “For a cheap bastard, you do the right thing often enough.”

  “A year in advance!” Richard marveled. “I felt damned optimistic the day I did that. I figured I might cheat myself out of it by dying from the throat cancer – it never occurred to me I’d fuck myself out of it.”

  “How’s that going?”

  Richard shook his head and didn’t answer.

  A DAY CAME in late March, eighty degrees with eight-foot swells at Malibu State Beach. Earlier that month a storm in Tahiti had stirred the waters. At Malibu Beach, a week later, the waves were coming in at eight feet, some higher than that. Normally the water off Malibu was cold from the southbound Arctic current; today it was warm, sixty-five or a little better.

  Kevin called in the morning. When Richard answered the phone Kevin yelled in his ear, “Surf’s Up!”

  RICHARD BROUGHT HIS longboard and met Kevin at the beach. “I’m not sure I’ll be going in the water,” Richard said.

  “I brought you my spare wetsuit,” said Kevin. “Try it on, it should fit you.”

  “I haven’t done anything like this since the treatment. My bones –”

  “Are fine,” Kevin said. “A lot of old people suffer from osteoporosis, but you didn’t.”

  “You sure? I just assumed –”

  “Old man, I know more about your medical condition than I ever wanted to. You have bones like steel.” Kevin popped the trunk of his Mercedes and pulled two wetsuits out. He threw one at Richard. “Suit up.”

  AS THE DAY wore on, Richard thought that it was one of those days you tell your children about when you get old. There were forty or fifty surfers in the water over the course of the day; Richard was one of only two with a longboard. At one point a young girl, a tight bodied cliché on her shortboard, paddled by him and stopped long enough to say, “Hey, guy. That longboard’s a Bill Stewart, right? My uncle used to ride one of those.”

  “Yeah,” said Richard. “A Bill Stewart Classic. This ... this was my father’s.”

  She smiled at him and paddled on, sixteen years old and sun-blonde and unconcerned about getting old, about people who had more money than she did, about anything except the next wave.

  The sets were superb. Richard couldn’t remember having seen a better day at Malibu, not even sixty, seventy years ago, when he’d been surfing daily. The kids around him were catching rides that made them look like pros on the circuit. The waves were coming in hard enough, Richard knew most of them would have sore shoulders the next day, from paddling their way out past the waves.

  One moment etched itself into Richard’s awareness: sitting on his board, a sharp wind turning the water choppy and the sun turning the points of the choppy waves into diamonds. Sitting out sixty yards from shore, Richard watched Kevin ride a wave in. He could remember sitting on this same beach, on the sand that time, forty years previously, having difficulty catching his breath after his first heart attack, and watching a much younger boy ride his shortboard over rather smaller waves in to the beach, aware of the boy making sure that his father was watching him as he rode.

  Sitting there in the water, watching Kevin ride the eight-footers in, Richard watched Kevin’s head turn, saw his fifty-three-year-old son looking to see that his father was watching him as he rode the wave into shore.

>   THEY WENT TO dinner together at a fish restaurant Richard liked, at Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. Richard had put on a gray sweater and pair of pants as the day cooled; Kevin was still wearing the shorts and t-shirt he’d had on under his wet suit, now thoroughly dried by the afternoon sun.

  Richard ordered a scotch and soda with his sand dabs; Kevin looked at him curiously but said nothing. His father had given up drinking, at his mother’s insistence, when Kevin was still a little boy. As far as Kevin knew Richard had not had a drink in fifty years or more.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day,” Kevin said. “About the war. It’s all about population pressure. People can’t live a very long time and have children the way we used to.”

  The one drink had made Richard’s lips go numb. He remembered the feeling well, even after all the years of sobriety. “This an excuse for you to give me no grandchildren?”

  Kevin shook his head. “I may yet. But there are too many people on this poor planet already. Something needs to change or the cost of our long lives is going to be bloody short lives for an awful lot of innocent people.”

  “I expect you’re right,” Richard said. “But –”

  “Hey!” A tall blond man, one of the surfers Richard had seen over the course of the day up at Malibu, was sitting in shorts and t-⁠shirt and sandals over at the bar, with a couple of his friends. “Hey! You! Yeah, you, the black-haired dude!”

  Richard looked at him. “What?”

  “You say that fellow with you was going to get you some grandkids?”

  Richard thought back. “I think,” he said, carefully, smiling a little, “I said he wasn’t going to.” He focused on the blond surfer and suddenly Kevin could hear New York in his voice: “Not that it’s any of your goddamn business.”