I hadn’t finished a poem in four years when I got the letter from the research lab. Temporal Research Institute, it said. Maybe they would attach electrodes to my head and measure how I aged away from pen and paper. My wife had forwarded it to me with the rest of my mail, in a big manila envelope with no note. She also wasn’t taking my phone calls, so I read the Temporal Institute letter instead.
“In light of my achievements,” “demonstration of a ground breaking invention,” et cetera. It had the careful vagueness some crank letters have, and the demonstration had been two days before. But I phoned them anyway, because I had nothing else to do.
In Alexander’s army now only one of three is from Macedon, and our camp is a din of Persian tongues. Tomorrow we will cross the Indus and have a victory. We have had victories already at Issus and Gaugamela and Thebes, and there will be more victories to come, but that is no promise that I will be alive. We march on bleeding feet at the cavalry’s speed, and Alexander, in his purple robes, gives no thought to Macedon.
Michael Mackenzie, at the Temporal Research place, had a tweed suit and a hearty handshake and managed to smell of aftershave even when working late. He told me he enjoyed my “novels.” Everyone had left for the night except one assistant, a guy with thinning blond hair and a colossal Adam’s apple who operated the machines. They fed me some jargon about “neural distortions in space-time” and showed me a chair covered with headphones and eyepieces and wires, which Mackenzie called the Finney Temporal Reconfigurer. Grokowski, the assistant, called it the Ghostseye.
“Look,” I said, “this has been very professionally done but I’m spoiling the payoff. In a few minutes you’re going to tell me that’s a time machine, so you may as well spit it out.”
“I think popular terms are very misleading here.”
“Oh, go ahead,” said Grokowski. “The damn thing’s a time machine.”
Mackenzie’s meaty face had turned dark red. “The hell it is.” He stood glaring at Grokowski, who stood glaring back.
“Nothing physical can ‘move’ in time,” he said when he’d mastered himself. “It would violate the laws of physics. But this device can reconstruct, in some brains, the sensory data in another mind during another time period.”
“And that doesn’t violate physics?”
“We’re still working on it,” Grokowski said, “but causality and matter conservation get away clean.”
“For ‘some’ brains?”
Mackenzie massaged his eyes. His wedding band was wide, plain gold. “Subjects’ experiences vary widely, with diminishing returns. We’re not sure why.”
My smile couldn’t have been warm. “It’s classic,” I told them. “The machine can only be tested firsthand, and since it doesn’t work for everyone, no one can ever ‘prove’ it doesn’t. An airtight con.”
Mackenzie was still drawing breath when Grokowski said, “Okay. Everyone we’ve tried to demonstrate it for has felt the same. If you don’t get any results, actually, we’d appreciate it if you wrote to the university and had us closed down tomorrow.”
I stood there for a long time under the fluorescent lights, thinking about where Bernice might be, and what she was doing, and about other times. I would have to sit in their chair before I could leave, and never know what made them choose me for their deceits.
The sun is burning high and my horse fidgets beneath me, but the stranger and his servant block the road. The master stays back, with his ragged cloak and grimy surplice and the burdock leaf plastered to his head with sweat, and his brown-toothed yeoman smiles, telling of his master’s sorcery and how dirt might be turned to gold. Their broken nags pant and sweat as if they’ll die. It’s few enough you can trust, on the road to Canterbury.
Introductions to contemporary poetry anthologies mention, usually in this order, Natasha Trethewey, Jericho Brown, David Randolph Rice, and me. Every September, in the Berkshires, I teach a survey of contemporary poetry to a crowd of bright young women in dark clothing.
“At the end of my forties,” I tell them, “my tenured body is carefully wrapped in good clothes and fed in good restaurants and flown across the country first class, a lifestyle supported by poems which I published twenty years ago while eating from tin cans. So even today a poet can be supported by his muse, but the support is usually alimony.”
The audience laughs, and waits for the master to balance his wisecracks with encouragement. But in the end that encouragement never comes. Somehow it never does come.
When the Ghostseye stopped working for me, twelve weekends later, Mackenzie came to shake my hand. It was impossible to thank me enough, he said, and the turkey wattle swayed under his chin, and he did his best to look me in the eye. He was so stoic in disappointment that I realized I was disappointed myself.
The thing to do was head back north, to my little apartment and the college. I got as far as the tavern across the street, where I sat watching my reflection watch me over the bar. He didn’t have anything good to say, either. I wondered if a drink would improve my mood, and found out it didn’t, and had another. Then my reflection and I were shrugging into our overcoats, wrapping long scarves around us for the November dark. It would be a shame not to see Constantinople again, even from far away, with shackles cutting my wrists while I rowed. I reached the door, and Stan Grokowski came in.
He stopped. The Adam’s apple moved up, quickly, and down. “You’re leaving.”
“No,” I said. “I was going out to look for you.” He looked shy about joining me, but didn’t know how to refuse. “What are you having?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
“Drink something better than that.” He had a craft beer and pretended to be treating himself. We sat for a while bringing nothing up.
“I guess your wife will be happy to see you home,” he said.
“I don’t know. She doesn’t see me at home anymore.”
“Hmm.” He looked down at the bar. His fingers ran through his hair, as if looking for something thicker. “The back of your books say you’re married.”
“I am. For a little while.” The reflected face over the vodka bottles, the one next to Stan, had gotten grey sacks under its eyes, and a tight, sour mouth. “Are you the one who invited me?”
“Yeah. They made me read poetry as an undergrad, and you at least I remembered.” I laughed. He said, “I was surprised, though. You’re not the way you are in your poems.”
“I try to spare them my personality.” There was a moment without us speaking. It was a dark, noisy little place, full of dark little noises. Our beers sat full on the bar.
“We’ll miss your way with the machine,” he said. “No telling when we’ll find another like you.”
“It can’t be that hard. You have all those reports from other subjects.”
He looked away, as if there had been a sudden motion on the other side of the room. But there hadn’t.
“Anyway, I’m not surprised,” I said. “My imagination tends to dry up pretty quickly these days.”
He looked back at me, his eyes huge and watered-blue behind their glass. “Imagination?” he said. “Hmm.” One finger traced the wet circles on the bar.
“One of my professors used to rave to us about Songs to Silence,” he said. “She kept talking about how you removed yourself from the picture, taking layer after layer of preconceptions and stripping them away.
“And the thing is, that’s what the Ghostseye needs. Someone who can open up to whatever that ghost, that dead guy in 1066, is thinking. Not someone who tries to imagine that person. Not someone who wants to go back. That won’t work.”
My throat went dry, but I didn’t want my beer. “What you’re saying, then, is that the machine’s best if you’re trying to forget yourself.”
“You got it,” he said, and treated me to a yellow smile.
Suddenly it seemed very important to find the right change for the tip, to put it down and get out of that bar as quickly as we could. “Stan,” I said, “do you have the keys to the lab?”
Onepenny is elbow-in-my-ribs and huge-miller’s-boot-on-my-toes and neck-craning-over-neighbor’s-hats. Onepenny is nut-cracking prentices and bottle-ale and garlic stinkbreath, but twopenny is more than I have. Altogether it is the most excellent of plays, and high and low alike fall quiet before the voice of Burbage. Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer, with the Globe’s banner high in the noonday sun.
I stay for all five acts.
David Randolph Rice showed up at my office the week before Christmas. My students were gone, or going, and their voices called through the crisp air of the quad, as they’d called to him and to me in our first winter of boarding school. I was keeping my hours, reading Herodotus in a narrow, cluttered room.
“Evan,” I heard someone repeating. “Can you hear me?” And there he was, with his shaggy hair and capped teeth and carefully rumpled suit: good old David, who’s supposed to be my rival.
“You had me worried for a second,” he said, clearing a pile of histories from my visitor’s chair. “I’m in town for this lecture tonight, and was wondering if you’d like to step out for a drink.”
“Afraid not. But I’ve got tea bags here.”
He smiled the profitable smile. “Giving up the demon rum, are you? Any reason?”
“Not in the mood. The self-destructive impulses don’t kick in till six-thirty.” David laughed, perhaps uncertainly, though even his uncertainty has a confident sound. He picked up Tacitus from one of the stacks on the floor.
“I heard a funny story about you the other day,” he said, riffling pages with his long fingers. “About you and that place with the trick chair.”
“The Temporal Research Institute,” I said.
“That’s the one.” He almost concealed a grimace. “Anyway, this person, I forget who, was saying you’d actually been out there, given the place some kind of endorsement. You can guess how I told him off. ‘I think I know him better than that,’ I said. ‘One of the most reasonable men alive.’ I told him writers, serious writers committed to something besides money, live by their reputations, and spreading stories is like murder.”
Sometimes with Dave it gets hard not to applaud. I leaned back in my chair.
“The thing about subtlety, Dave, is it can’t be impressive. When I stop to admire how clever you’re being, the illusion’s ruined. And anyway, who isn’t committed to money?”
There was a grimace he couldn’t conceal at all, which he tried to freeze into a smile.
“You’ve never been treated the way you deserve, Evan. Never understood.”
“I can clear up any passage you like.”
“No, it’s a shame. Anyone would drink, treated the way you’ve been.”
“All used-up writers don’t take to drink. And there’s been nothing lately for critics to misunderstand. We are talking about critics, right?”
We sat for a long moment, with no sound but the mumbling kettle. The light glared on the white plaster walls, and the outside seemed even darker because of the light.
“Bernice wanted me to talk to you,” David said.
“Thoughtful of her. Has she lost use of her tongue?”
The kettle cried, and forestalled his answer.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s a damn shame.”
“Most things are. I won’t die from not writing.”
A timid knock at the door; a student, with the same long coat and same clear eyes my students had, and the same apple cheeks: winter’s only fruit. I said, “You can lurk till five o’clock, Courtney, or come in and keep Mr. Randolph Rice company.” She looked quickly at David and away, exactly as I would have.
“That’s all right,” David said, “I’ve got dinner with your chair.” He introduced himself to Courtney, fairly gallantly, as he left.
“Let me find my new address,” I called after him, fishing in a drawer.
“Bernice has it,” he said. “I’m staying there.” Probably too boring to be gallant all the time.
I didn’t talk to David again for a long while.
Parents’ cars idle across the campus and the sun is warm above the changing leaves. I’m carrying my duffel bag through the quad. The prep-school is made of old brick and autumn-fire ivy and sunlight dappled by elms. Any one of these guys tugging luggage might be my roommate, or someday my friend, or cram for exams with me some long night. I ask some guy with his hair in his eyes if he knows where my building is and it’s his building too. He smiles. It’s a smile I could like. For no reason I ask if he’s ever read Frank O’Hara, and it turns out he has.
Is the Ghostseye an angel, to bring this back? Or a devil to tempt me with what cannot return?
Two or three days before spring registration the college president called me into her office. She was a trim, energetic woman in tweed, with a good office to wear tweed in. Outside the window, a January thaw was pretending to be spring. Inside, there was dark polished maple, portraits of rich alumnae, a compassionate expression on her face. Maybe I knew it was going to happen.
As I no doubt knew, Peabody College felt privileged to have me and had taken a special pride in my achievements. That being so, what had I done wrong? Well, wrong was a subjective word. We might do many things which were not “wrong” but had unfortunate results. The college knew I was going through a difficult period. And what business was it of the college’s? Why, precisely, was I in this office?
Had I attached myself to a project claiming to deal with time travel?
They decided to give me a leave of absence and accept a discreet resignation that summer. We shook hands and parted as friends. She had one of the firmest handshakes I’ve ever felt.
“I want you to know it’s just policy, Evan, and I don’t believe the rumors. You’re as sane as anyone else.”
It hadn’t occurred to me I wasn’t.
(I’m downstairs packing and upstairs my…)
(I’m almost done packing when my husband comes downstairs and…)
(Evan comes into the living room and I…)
I can’t do it. I didn’t really think I could.
The Institute gave me a side office in March, with a big Formica desk to write reports and show off family pictures. I wrote reports on it.
There were restrictions on how long and how often I could use the machine, which no one explained. No one explained why we had dozens of reports, in a single style, from before I came. No one explained why the machine was named after a Finney; nobody brought up Finney at all. And nobody, absolutely nobody, explained the looks they exchanged when I entered a room. Finally I had to make threats in Mike Mackenzie’s office, listen to him stammer, and watch his embarrassed, blood-shot face. I wanted to know about Finney.
“Doctor Finney has been retired since his wife’s death. But someone else wrote the reports.”
I waited. I waited some more.
A file came out of a locked drawer, and Mackenzie pretended not to watch me read.
The subject’s name had been Robert Andrew: the only one, before me, to hold contact over five minutes. He’d been a small-time actor in New York, showed up for the quick cash they gave test subjects, and got asked back because he had potential. By the time they gave him a stipend, he was coming back for other reasons.
The hundred or so accounts he left are sharp, detailed, and casually prejudiced, with no line between the host’s thoughts and his own. He gets longer and clearer over the months, but near the end an occasional word or phrase is left untranslated from the host’s mind. That should have been the warning.
One Friday afternoon in May (the 23rd, at 5:42), when everyone had gone, he hooked himself to the Ghostseye without supervision. There is no telling if he took breaks to eat and sleep over that weekend, whether Monday morning found him on his hundredth trip or his first. The Institute’s insurance pays for ongoing care.
“We would have told you,” Mike said when I was done. “We were watching for any signs.”
“I understand.” I didn’t blame him. Maybe I should have.
I got a nice letter from Dr. Finney the next week, and two weeks after that they let me go up to the hospital where they keep my predecessor. It was in the country, with nice sunlit rooms for the patients, and an attentive staff, and maybe one person discharged every eight years. Bob Andrew was wearing the paper gown he’ll wear the rest of his life. Everything was very clean.
I stood there a long time, looking into that round intelligent face and its dilated pupils, wondering: what year was it for him now? In what far country and borrowed soul did he wander? But his eyes had no answers, and neither did I.
When the Genovese have done with me they throw me in a dark hole of a cell and forget. It is too low for us to stand, too narrow for us to escape the stench of our piss-sodden straw. When I tell my travels, the prisoners jeer and my jailers charge a few coins to let strangers hear the Venetian rave. But nonetheless I tell my tale, as long as ears will listen, of the lands beyond the Great Silk Road: Zipangu and far Cathay.
I had Stan and his husband Chuck over for dinner when a process server interrupted us with something I’d been expecting. He started to tell me who it was from and I told him it was from my wife, Bernice Ellingwood Harris, or maybe just Bernice Ellingwood. It didn’t turn out to be what I’d thought, although I may have been expecting it anyway.
As I had shown evidence of an unsound mind and might be incapable of managing my own affairs, my wife, Bernice Ellingwood Harris, had petitioned the court to award her full powers of attorney. The writ had been prepared by Harvey Connell, who used to do our taxes and get drunk at our Christmas parties. Guess she wanted more than the house and alimony.
It was very late when I made my way to my bedroom and opened the lonely notebook on my desk.
I have watched on Salamis while the Persians burned our homes and wall, cut Athena’s sacred olive and burned the houses of the gods. Now I wake to look at the sea, with their masts thicker than a forest’s trees. Our little fleet relies on strategies, while the ships of Darius make a woodland on the waves.
I try to reach the morning of the argument and it fails. The day I met Bernice fails too. What can have changed so much, that I can’t see through eyes that were once mine?
We hired someone named D. Sumner Donaldson, a good lawyer who didn’t have much patience with us.
“We’ll limit the issue to competence,” he said. He was dressed in expensive inconspicuous clothing, like bank presidents or bond traders, every hair cemented into place. “We can’t go to court contradicting the laws of physics.”
“Maybe the physicists could decide what physics contradicts,” Mike suggested.
D. Sumner shook his head. “We’re talking layman’s physics, with a lay judge and a lay jury. But if we prove Mr. Harris can keep from being swindled, he can believe the moon is carved from green Roquefort.”
“You’re implying it’s not?”
I got a long, hard, bond-trader glare and old Finney, all dressed up and flown in from California, laughed softly to himself. D. Sumner didn’t seem to like him much, either.
“My God,” Mike said later, as we were hailing cabs. “The machine can’t establish even one historical fact. A waste.”
“No,” I said, and I sounded odd even to me. “There’s no price for what it does.” Then the first cab carried off the others, and I found myself alone with Finney.
He was trim and straight in his old age, liver-spotted bronze from Western sunshine and tennis, in a white summer suit and the darker-lighter glasses some old men wear. Turned out one of his daughters had recommended my poems, but he’d never gotten around to them.
“Evan, sometimes you’re like a man who’s bet his life, and others it’s like you’ve got the fifth ace. I’m not sure it’s the trial that gets you.”
I looked up the street for another cab. It was May, and the best spring weather we’d had.
“I tried the machine myself once, you know,” he told me. “Couldn’t get money to pay volunteers, couldn’t get approval to test them if I did. So I volunteered myself, like the young scientist in a B movie.” He groped for the cigarettes inside his jacket.
“I had myself a few times before it got blurry,” he said. “Caught a glimpse of Alexander once. Ever see Alexander? Of course, he was hacking us to pieces with his cavalry, so it ruined the effect. After a few weeks contact started to blur, and I could fast-talk the university into paying volunteers. I figured my own life was enough to live.” He lit up and took a long inhale.
“I tried it again after Margaret died. That was a mistake. If you go back there looking for something, it’ll kill you, like Bobby Andrew. And if you go to your own past, God help you.”
I squinted up into the sun. “What if it was a person who needed only one answer? To move forward with his life.”
“I see how someone might think that. And think it’s only once or twice, and then only once or twice more. There’s nothing you can do with the machine, Evan. Everything it can show you is done.”
“I’ll remember that.”
You would barely notice Finney’s sigh. “I hope that you do. I’ve never claimed to understand anybody’s mind, myself.”
When the Danes go away with their gold, I can see their thoughts shine already in their eyes. They glint with dreams of next summer’s war, or of the summer after that, and count the wealth of Wessex on top of Anglia and Kent. My long hall seems smaller than it did once, more full of smoke, but at either end it is open to the light. I have paid well for my peace, and I will not be king in the marshes anymore. When spring returns, my armies will not be as the Danes expect.
Poets as a rule are not front-page news. I have been lucky enough to win prizes, and none were on TV. But combine a poet’s dormant fame with picturesquely rumored madness, and reporters might siege him out of his house. The afternoon before the hearing I was in my office, giving the only interview I would give.
“It’s not about creativity.” I was saying into the phone. “It’s about realizing my ignorance. There are whole centuries, whole civilizations, my mind is just closed to. It’s very humbling.”
“Could you give me some examples?” She had a quick, efficiently friendly voice, clean as a hotel lobby.
“There’s the Incas, the Phoenicians, the Russians. The whole eighteenth century. And to be honest, most women. That realization’s more than humbling, when you’re heading for divorce.”
Over the phone I heard her open her mouth to pose a question, hesitate, and decide, finally, to cut me a break. Certainly not one I deserved. I answered a few more efficiently friendly questions and we said an efficiently friendly goodbye.
It was well after six, although the windows were full of June light, and everyone else had gone home. I put a few last things in my suit bag, transferred my whole pile of notebooks from desk to briefcase. It would be a quiet dinner with Stan and Chuck, a few laughs about the most neutral topics we could find, and an early bed, trying not to think about the morning. I took a last walk around the bland beige offices, with no sound but the air conditioning’s whine, and sat for a while looking at the chair. Not terribly impressive; it might have been a prop in a cheap movie, or a confidence game. I wondered, again, what misconception had kept me from reaching Bernice. The penalty for using the machine unsupervised was never to use it again, which hardly seemed relevant.
I sailed alone over the cold sea to Thule, and walked the tents at Agincourt before dawn, but nowhere in that night did I see Bernice, or the surprise on my face as I packed my suitcase. At last I crawled to sleep on the couch in Mike’s office and dreamed that I was a boy, playing with my dog again in the New Hampshire hills.
Somewhere near four thirty I was awake. Nothing to be done. I went back where the Ghostseye was and stood a long time. Finney had been right. In an hour or two I would shower and shave and dress myself for court. I should go eat breakfast now, and make sure I picked my best suit. That would be the wise thing.
I set the coordinates and strapped myself in the chair.
This time, no one will bring me back, I thought. And as it started I saw the calendar and clock flashing, May 23, 5:42 PM.
I already knew what the consoles said as I tore off the straps, and it was no comfort. I had reached Bob Andrew, on the day he did what I proposed to do tonight.
I should have stopped right then.
I sit in court and listened to my lawyer cross-examine my wife. She wears a sun-yellow dress and nothing anyone says can change her face.
Was it true that on April fourteenth of last year she had forced me from our jointly owned home in Alden, Massachusetts?
“He offered to leave,” she said. Attractive woman, really: perfectly even brows, high cheekbones, luminous skin. I could see how a man might get involved.
“Why was that, Ms. Harris?”
“We argued and he offered to leave. I made the same offer to him.” It was when her face was in motion that she was best.
“Didn’t your offer start the argument? Did you start by threatening to leave Mr. Harris and end up with the house?”
An objection was sustained. D. Sumner asked if she’d made her offer at the outset of the disagreement. She may have. Had she at that time asked Mister Harris for a divorce? Her lawyer objected. There had been no formal petition. Overruled. Had she at that time asked Mr. Harris for a divorce?
She might have.
The blond hair had been cut short, an expensive bob. I wondered how long ago.
“Might you have added that you never wished to see him again?”
The press looked to check my expression. But I didn’t have an expression.
“What matters is that I care about Evan and don’t want him taken advantage of.” She looked at me with unreadable courtroom eyes. Mine were probably the same.
“Which is why you got an unlisted phone number the next day?”
That was a complicated story; D. Sumner cut her off.
“On how many occasions have you spoken with Mr. Harris since then?”
There were none. D. Sumner gave me a little nod as he went back to his seat.
Her mouth had to be her best feature, in the end, and its radiant smile. But I could only see the smile in memory.
The next person my wife’s lawyer called was me. Donaldson pretended to quibble; I took the stand. And there was my good old ex-lawyer Harvey, in his discount blazer and grey slacks, looking as reassuring as he could. He honestly thought I needed help and he was sorry for me, but not for the reasons that I was.
He said, “Marriage trouble can upset us, can’t they?”
“Mine can. I can’t discuss yours.” Sumner frowned at me. A few spectators laughed. Harvey’s face creased in pained concern.
“Evan, I want to think about something. Is it possible, Evan, that a distressed man could be vulnerable to odd ideas?”
“You know, Harvey, it certainly is. But is possibility proof?”
The room got quieter. Harvey looked at me, and I could see the concern in his round baby face drain away. When he spoke again, it was briskly, without looking at me: why had I left Peabody College? To protect the college’s reputation. And where did I get my money now? From the institute, and from my poems. And hadn’t I been unable to write since this whole “Institute” thing began?
As a matter of fact, I had just finished a book.
Harvey’s face stopped, as if he’d been slapped. I could see him working out what it meant, what he would do, if the jury thought I could still write.
I said, “Would you like to hear a sample?”
He saw the case in his hands right then, a chance to let me rave out loud and end every doubt. So he said, “By all means.”
There is a story that when the poet Aeschylus was old, his heirs dragged him into court in Athens to have him declared insane. He read the jury his entry for the next drama festival of Dionysus. All I had to read were lyrics, short poems about cold love and vanished cities and the way the light fell at Vicksburg. I read to them about fire taking Chicago and Rome, about foreign civil wars and our own, about civilizations that the civilized outlive, and the strange life in a stranger’s land. I read about Walt Whitman and the last druids and the nameless that fame passed by, the passions and laughter history had swallowed for good. Through it all I read with the voice of ghosts, ghosts I have sought and known and made my friends, whose need to speak returned my tongue, whose vanished sight renewed my eyes.
When I am done there is nothing to hear in the courtroom. Harvey is looking at me from very far away.
D. Sumner talks about chance for a counter-suit, and leaves me his card in case I change my mind. David Rice passes by with congratulations, and my department chair from Peabody, and Stan and Chuck. Mike pumps my hand up and down, repeating again how wonderful this is. I smile as best I can, and agree. My wife leaves without saying a word, and I don’t try to pry behind the smooth walls of her face. Because I know now what has made me stumble when I tried to reach her, and the Ghostseye has freed me of that illusion, too. I have listened, before dawn, to my aging husband’s grating voice, full of wisecracking self-pity and windbag folly, and have felt no place for him in my heart at all, no anger and no pity and no rage. From that I know even love can vanish past remembering, and in the end all things go down to the dead.
| Jim Marino‘s other stories can be found in Apex Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Cossmass Infinities, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Cleveland. |  |