Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel Page 2

  “Your secret entrance is in a dressing room?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Taylor snapped and turned away from me as we entered an elevator and rode up three floors. He was right to be angry. For years, I’d treated him horribly due to my concern for the future of humanity. That’s one thing liberals don’t like to admit: we want a better world and we’re determined to make everyone miserable until we get it. The chilling thought occurred to me that breaking up with someone you love to criticize might be the only way to save yourself from becoming unlovable.

  We were scanned, frisked, stripped of our clothes, scanned again buck-naked, then allowed to dress, and scanned once more before we were allowed to get near the time machine. Taylor rubbed his earlobe before we entered the final steel door. It was a nervous habit that I’d first noticed when he asked me to move in with him. That tiny gesture always softened me. I was excited and proud of Taylor. He’d done what he set out to do. He looked at me and grinned. I hadn’t seen him this gleeful in months. Actually in years, which made me feel like shit.

  “Here’s my time machine,” Taylor announced as we walked into a control room. He pointed to a plate-glass window. “We call it the Finney Room!”

  I’d expected a gleaming machine of some sort, humming with blinking lights, but behind the window was a studio apartment, furnished in the steampunk style that Taylor loved. Steampunk’s a retro-sci-fi homage to high-Victorian interiors where modern appliances are made to look as if Jules Verne used a rosewood-and-ivory-inlaid microwave (sitting on brass legs with pawed feet) to warm his cognac. Taylor had once seriously suggested steampunking our apartment, but I told him it was too close to dressing up as Gandalf on the weekends.

  Our heads turned when the steel door opened and six men in gray suits wearing ear jacks walked in. The last man had a German shepherd on a leash. The dog methodically sniffed the room, and when he finished the lead man said, “All clear for Angler.” The steel door opened again, and a balding, gray-haired schlub wearing wire-rimmed glasses scurried in. It took me a second to believe I was seeing Vice President Dick Cheney. Was Taylor insane? I couldn’t bear him on TV in my living room, let alone tolerate him standing next to me. I glared at Taylor and he shrugged. “He wanted to meet you.” He was trying to deflect my fury by behaving like a cute boy who’d spilled his milk. It didn’t work. This was an unforgivable betrayal. I wanted to vomitboard both of them.

  “This is my partner, John,” Taylor said before sitting down at his desk to check his e-mail. He checked his e-mail obsessively to the point where I fantasized about e-mailing him six times a day, “Talk2meUahole.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Cheney responded as he offered me his hand. He was shorter and friendlier than I’d imagined. On television he seemed mean and imposing. Yet in person he appeared grandfatherly— granted, a grandfather who’d cut you out of the will—but still that was a step up for him. There was an awkward moment as I decided what to do. I shook his hand. This is how people end up as accomplices to murder, I thought. They just wanted to be supportive or they’re overly polite and don’t want to cause a scene.

  Cheney ordered the agents to wait outside, and they departed.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said. “Taylor speaks about you in the same way I talk about Lynne. Someone indispensable to his life and happiness who’s always busting his balls. Has it ever occurred to you that if you were more successful, and made more money, you might start partying with us? And if you did, you might make Taylor’s and my life easier.”

  I assumed he was trying to be funny. His lips parted on the right side as if joy were leaking from his head.

  “You don’t want me to become a Republican,” I said. “I’d be the one elephant who’d never let you forget anything.”

  “You’re right,” Cheney said. “There’s nothing worse than a bleeding-heart Republican. They’re in favor of gun rights, but then want a bullet stamp program for poor people who can’t afford ammo. Right, Taylor?”

  Taylor looked up from his laptop. “You’re right, Mr. Vice President.”

  “Call me Dick.”

  You’re both dicks, I thought.

  Cheney peered through the plate-glass window. “So this is it? It looks a lot like my grandmother’s house.”

  It was impossible to determine if Cheney was joking. From his expression, I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or had a toothache. He walked over to address me.

  “Taylor said you have your own business, right? Selling funny books?”

  “People in my business don’t refer to them as ‘funny books.’”

  Cheney shrugged. “That’s what we called them when I was a kid.”

  I sell new, used, and rare comic books and graphic novels at my shop. Sherkston’s Comics isn’t large—it’s a storefront with a bathroom. I’d once dreamed of owning a gallery devoted to selling the rarest and most valuable comic books, but most of my clientele were hard-core comic collectors with thick heads and thin wallets. Loud argumentative guys from Jersey or Queens who can distinguish correctly between “mint” and “gem mint” but use invented terms like “staple fatigue” in order to get me to shave ten bucks off the price of X-Men #44. These guys can gasbag for hours about how Batman peaked in ’83, and don’t get them started on issue #214 of Superman, where some hack writer with a sloppy editor let Clark Kent use his heat vision to warm up a TV dinner without removing his eyeglasses, impossible because the lenses would melt. Most days I eagerly commiserated with embittered gray-haired men who lamented the always in perfect condition, nearly complete run of Ironman or The Silver Surfer that their mothers threw out. My responses always had to be diplomatic since many of them still lived with their mothers. One day as I opened up the store, I found myself proudly thinking, I get by, which later depressed me for weeks when I thought that’s exactly what someone on a respirator would say if his mouth wasn’t filled with plastic.

  “What are you going to use this for?” I asked Cheney. The thought of him and Bush rewriting history was as horrifying as the thought of them rewriting Proust. They’d turn a complex seven-volume literary masterpiece about memory into a series of Post-it notes.

  “We don’t know yet,” said the vice president. “Change history, I guess.”

  His nonchalance revealed the guiding principle of his administration: lack of concern.

  “It’s not that simple,” Taylor said. “It’s possible that the past might allow for multiple timelines that still achieve the same result. Just as you can add six plus three or two plus seven and either way, you get nine.”

  “Well, we just have to make sure time travel is used for the good of the country,” Cheney said. “I don’t want it used for personal gain.Although I have to admit it would be tempting to go back and ka-ching. You could make real money with a time machine. Go back and buy Wyoming for a nickel.”

  “Changing history shouldn’t be done lightly,” Taylor said. “I mainly built this out of scientific curiosity, to see if time travel was possible. And I hope it may clear up some historical mysteries: what happened to the Anasazi? Did Shakespeare write his plays? But I also hope this time machine is never used. It’s more of a backup system in case we fuck up the world completely.”

  “Sort of an ‘In Case of Emergency Break Time Barrier’?” I asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “I change history every day,” Cheney said. “You get used to it.”

  His casual disregard for his life-and-death responsibilities was disgraceful.

  “You’re running the country like it’s a . . . a hobby,” I said.

  “So? I like to fish and I’m good at it.”

  “No,” I replied. “You’ve run the country like your other hobby: hunting. You let bin Laden shoot us in the face, after you’d been warned.”

  Cheney didn’t react at all, but Taylor’s eyes locked on mine.

  “That’s disrespectful to him and me,” he said.

  I didn’t apologize to t
he vice president or Taylor. I didn’t care if I was rude. It was my one chance to say what had been burning inside me for six years.

  “What have you ever done to change the world?” Cheney asked. “Have you ever done one thing to make the world a better or safer place? Liberals jabber on about problems but you never do anything to solve them. You’re like car alarms that no one can shut off. You know, you can actually try to solve problems without waiting for the government. Global warming? Get your carbon footprint out of your ass and invent a solar car. You actually have to take action. It might not work out, but at least you fucking tried.”

  He shut me up. Once a month I volunteered for an AIDS group, but I didn’t confuse my hiccups of charity for virtue. On the street or subway, I repeatedly said “Sorry” to homeless panhandlers, a comment that was more of an apology to my troubled conscience than an actual response to someone else’s suffering. I told myself I wasn’t indifferent: I was in a hurry, or I was in a bad mood, or I had my own anxieties and problems. Every now and then I did hand out some spare change, but you can’t solve real problems by nickel and diming them.

  Cheney turned to Taylor. “How’s this thing work?”

  “It’s super easy to operate,” he said while waving him over to the window again. “You see those switches on the wall? The green switch starts the process while the red switch stops it. You just type in the date you want to travel to on one of the keyboards.” There were two sets of switches and keyboards. One set was inside the Finney Room and the other was in the outer control room. The keyboards appeared to have been manufactured by an early typewriter company with round keys raised by intricately incised bronze stems, while the flat screen looked like a gentleman’s dresser mirror being held in place by elaborate nickel-silver clasps. Sitting next to the computer was an old-fashioned candlestick telephone and a wooden case lined with black velvet. It held a dozen gunmetal-colored bracelets or cuffs.

  “What are the bracelets for?” Cheney asked.

  “They’re portable time machines. They’ll allow time travel to any year, whereas the Finney Room can only go back as far as 1904, when this building was built.”

  “A straight guy would’ve made key chains,” Cheney observed with a chuckle.

  Taylor’s put-on smile was more a show of teeth than an expression of happiness. I suppressed the urge to say, “It’s because he loved Wonder Woman as a kid. It’s his one chance to design super-powered accessories.”

  “I was told to make them as small and portable as possible.” Taylor spoke each word with an unnaturally deliberate precision, a sign he was enraged. He pointed to a large Anglo-Indian style chifforobe standing against a wall.

  “Those drawers are filled with old money. Tens of thousands of dollars from each decade for the past hundred years.”

  A cell phone buzzed and Cheney fished it out of his jacket pocket. He answered the call. “Hello, Mr. President. I am. He’s right here. Sure.” Cheney handed his phone to Taylor. “It’s for you.”

  Taylor accepted the cell like a beauty queen being handed a dozen roses. His delight in talking to the world’s most famous incompetent ended my desire to protect his feelings.

  “I’m surprised he’s calling now,” Cheney said. “He hates doing business after six. I always thought that it was a good thing the terrorists attacked in the morning. If they’d chosen evening flights, the country wouldn’t have had his full attention until the next day.”

  “Tell him, ‘Mission Accomplished!’” I shouted, shaking my head in disgust. “We should break up. Why would anyone build a time machine that puts history in the hands of a president who’s a complete failure at navigating the present? You must be as stupid as he is. It’s the most dangerously moronic thing anyone’s ever done.”

  Taylor covered the cell with his hand. “Go fuck yourself !”

  Cheney scratched his nose. “Guys,” he said. “Don’t say things you’ll regret later. Lynne and I have a fight rule. Always say the second meanest thing you can think of, not the first. It’s why we’ve been together for forty-two years.”

  Taylor glared at me, his expression a mixture of bewilderment and fury, the look that asks, “Why do I love you?” Then he shook his head in sorrow and walked into the next room.

  “I don’t know why Kennedy started this thing in New York,” Cheney said as he studied a keyboard. “It makes more sense out west.” He shrugged. “New York probably gave him more opportunities to get laid.”

  Cheney rubbed his hands together. “I don’t suppose Taylor would mind if we have a look inside.” He opened the door of the Finney Room and with his other hand invited me to enter. Once inside I had to admit the steampunk furnishings looked better than I would have supposed. Less theme-parky and more like a luxurious Edwardian men’s club.

  “I’d heard you two are going through a rough patch,” Cheney said as he opened an empty desk drawer. His comment made me angrier. If Taylor was discussing our relationship with him, that was reason enough to end it.

  “You should try to work things out. New York’s a pricey place to be single.”

  A rush of panic about my lack of money made my stomach feel like an empty purse. I’d fully considered that if I broke up with Taylor, I wouldn’t be able to afford to live in Manhattan and would have to move to Brooklyn. When you break up with someone in New York the odds are high that one or both of you will end up paying more to live in a much crappier apartment. It’s why the residents of New York think of the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of the city. After a hundred years of looking for love, she’s still single, lives alone, and probably can’t afford to move. The prospect of making easy money with a time machine was tempting.

  “Too bad you can’t use this thing.” Cheney gestured to the computer keyboard. “Go back and buy Microsoft stock in 1986.”

  His comment made me want to use the time machine to change my history of bad financial decisions. Go back to 1994 and scream at myself: “Buy real estate!” Instead, I said to Cheney, “I’d go back to 1963 and buy twenty gem mint copies of The Amazing Spider-Man #1.” I was amazed to be discussing my personal life with Dick Cheney. Of course, right then talking with anyone would have felt easier than speaking with Taylor.

  “They’re worth thirty grand apiece,” I added.

  Cheney looked at me. “That much?”

  I nodded. “And the first issue of Fantastic Four came out in 1961. I could probably pick up the entire series in secondhand bookstores. It might even be possible to go to Marvel headquarters and buy the original artwork for both issues!” I said, lost in my dollar-sign daydream. “Back then no one thought about preserving that stuff. Original drawings from the first issue of Spider-Man would be worth a fortune.”

  With that money, I could afford to buy an apartment in Manhattan instead of having to move to Brooklyn or, God forbid, Astoria.

  “You need to think big,” Cheney said. “I didn’t get to be vice president by thinking small.” The sound of another buzzing cell began to emanate from somewhere on his body. I wondered why he would have two cells. “That’s my family line,” he explained before grabbing it and checking the screen.

  “I have to take this,” he said. “It’s my daughter Mary. She’s having girlfriend problems and calls Dad to complain.” Cheney put the phone to his ear and said, “Hi, Honey . . .” as he stepped out of the Finney Room. While he talked, I noticed a group of framed sepia photographs hung on a wall. They were clearly not old, as one was a picture of a smiling straight couple standing in front of a Ford Taurus. I forgot their names but recognized them from Taylor’s office holiday party. The guy was one of his colleagues. Next to it was a photo of Taylor, our dog, Bart, and me taken in Provincetown one Christmas. Taylor and I had our arms around each other’s shoulders, and Bart was caught in mid-stride. You could even see a few flakes of snow falling. It made me feel miserable that all three of us looked happy.

  Suddenly I heard a gentle whirring sound like wind rattling a house. I looke
d out the plate-glass window and saw Cheney throw the green switch in the control room. His lips moved as he stared directly at me. I couldn’t hear what he said but I think it was “Mission Accomplished.”

  The window and Cheney disappeared and an exposed brick wall replaced them. The room abruptly shook and then there was silence. This was bad; my entire body uh-ohed. My hands started to tremble as I rapidly typed in the time and date that I’d traveled from, mistyping it twice, before throwing the switch again. Nothing happened.

  Why would Dick Cheney send me back in time? It made no sense. You’d think he’d side with Taylor in our breakup. He was the one who gave him his time machine. I was the one who had insulted him. Maybe this was his way of getting back at me. “Yeah, liberal homo, you want to change the world? Well, first, let’s see if you can change your fucking life.”

  I opened what had been the door to the control room, but didn’t see Taylor or any computers, just a dingy hallway. Two greasy-looking pink upholstered chairs sat on either side of a small table that held an issue of Paper or Plastic: The Official Trade Journal of the Packaging Industry and an issue of Time magazine. The cover caption read, “Ain’t She Sweet” and then, in a smaller font, “Teen Actress Molly Ringwald.”

  The date on the cover was May 26, 1986.

  Something had obviously gone wrong. I didn’t want to travel back to the ’80s. The ’80s were a cultural wasteland. It’s a decade that should be remembered for the debuts of liposuction, stonewashed jeans, and twenty-four-hour news channels. It seemed unfair. There were so many other exciting and romantic periods that I would rather have visited: the Gay ’90s, the Roaring ’20s, the Swinging ’60s. The ’80s are called “The Reagan Era,” and there’s a good reason those ten forgettable years are named after a president who died from Alzheimer’s. I’d lived through the ’80s and didn’t feel any compelling need to revisit that decade. I recalled it as a time when our country and I still had a lot to learn, and there wasn’t any evidence that either of us had grown appreciably wiser since then. Instead of drinking absinthe with Oscar Wilde or playing bongos with Allen Ginsberg, I’d be lucky to meet the man who coined the word “Infomercial.”