Time Travail by Howard Waldman Page B

the petty satisfaction one morning of seeing
Hanna with a bruised forehead. It was worth the abuse I got.
    It took me a whole day just to set up my
hi-fi system and find the best positioning for the speakers. I
spent as little time as possible in the house when Harvey didn’t
need me. I took my meals in town. Twice a week he gave me long
lists of components and I would drive out to an electronics place
in Long Island City in his old Volvo station wagon with Hanna
brooding in the back seat. She was there for the muscle-work of
loading and unloading. She didn’t say a word to me. She wasn’t
talking to me and Harvey couldn’t, most of the time.
     
    He spent all his time in the cellar working
over electronic devices he called “sensors.” Under construction
they looked, not surprisingly, like a cross between the inside of a
TV set and a computer. Supposedly they would give his machine
mobility and allow it to pull in more than ancient darkness and
voices. I nodded gravely. I told myself I didn’t believe for an
instant that it was possible to summon up old images despite his
exploit with the old radio-voices. Somehow I made a distinction
between capturing images from the past and capturing old
disincarnated voices. Didn’t my own machine do that to Caruso and
Chaliapine? My reasoning wasn’t scientific.
    The only constructive work I did in the
cellar was a little soldering. He couldn’t stand the acrid fumes.
Mostly I deconstructed. I dismantled junked computers and TV sets
and stocked the components in a vast stretch of labeled
pigeonholes. There were hundreds of them. It looked like a giant
honeycomb with metal larvae in the cells.
    Clearing out the cellar mess was also part of
my duties. Once a week I drove the Volvo to an industrial wasteland
and watched Hanna hurl the bulky unburnable stuff onto a junk heap.
Twice a week, rain or shine, Havey made me incinerate the
inflammable stuff in the back yard near the pylon, probably to
spite the neighbors. It made a lot of smoke. I was careful to
choose times when the wind didn’t blow it the blonde’s way. Harvey
always watched me as I kneeled before the heap of cardboard and
wood scraps with a box of kitchen matches. “Good job,” he would
croak when it caught. It was the only praise I ever got from
him.
    Finally, I talked, vaguely, about the old
days. Was expected to anyhow but not vaguely. It turned out to be
an essential part of the job. I was his paid memory-booster. His
memory was riddled with blanks, he said. He blamed the hospital
people for it with their ray and chemical treatment. He made it
sound as though they were plotting against his brain instead of
trying to cure him. He explained that he’d be exploring those old
days with the machine eventually and badly needed guidance. He
spoke about sightings, agonic lines, spatio-temporal bearings, I
don’t know what else.
    When I said I didn’t understand he explained
that my memories would simplify the task of navigation once the
machine became fully operational. He had to know roughly when and
where and who.
    I answered his questions, more or less, as
long as they were limited to the shack days. When he tried to go
beyond them I found ways out. I said I couldn’t work and talk at
the same time. I was putting the components in the wrong
pigeonholes. He told me to stop pigeonholing and to go on talking.
So then I had to say, “I don’t remember,” over and over again to
those questions about particular people from that time, the way
they looked. I didn’t like talking about the dead. “Symptom of
age,” I’d say about my faulty memory. So we’d work on in
silence.
    Once, after a half-hour’s silence, he said:
“Not even her eyes? The color?”
    “Age,” I said and we went on working in
silence.
    I was involved in other ways with his memory
problems. Once a week I had to join him in a hunt for his earlier
mother. He had a silver-framed photo of her but in her last years.
She was shrunken and