Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel Page 3
I walked back into the Finney Room and retyped the date 2006 repeatedly to see whether I could get the time machine working again. A light blinked once but the digital readout remained unchanged. “Fuck!” I shouted. Perhaps I’d caused a blackout. Then it occurred to me that I might be stuck in the past. What the hell was I going to do? I’d first moved to New York in 1984, and the thought of reliving my youth as a middle-aged man was depressing. (And this would be depressing one year before Prozac was first introduced in the United States.)
I considered going outside, curious about what it would be like to walk around New York again in 1986, but I was afraid that while I played time-tourist I’d miss Taylor, who, I was sure, would rescue me. Unless Dick Cheney lied and told Taylor I’d used the time machine to go back and earn some breakup money. Anything was possible with Cheney. Perhaps he was getting rid of me to make it easier to manipulate Taylor. I soon decided speculation was fruitless. I’d been reading and thinking about Cheney for six years and still had no idea what motivated his behavior. It was like trying to ascribe volition to a Venus flytrap.
According to the digital clock on the control panel it was 1:37 a.m. I was exhausted and there was a comfortable-looking double-sized brass bed in the Finney Room. I went back outside and grabbed the issue of Time magazine and fell asleep while reading about Molly Ringwald. When she was six, she recorded a blues album called Molly Sings, and the last thing I recall thinking was, The Blues? Wait till she sees what happens to her acting career.
2
THE NEXT MORNING I woke up and realized that I hadn’t been rescued. Taylor was late. Then I thought about that. Can you be late if someone’s waiting for you in the past? It sounded like a lame Zen koan. I shoved the thought aside as a new worry appeared. Perhaps Taylor had no idea what year I ended up in; maybe I would be stuck here forever. Suddenly all of my imprisoned internal organs started banging on the bars of their cage. I tried to subdue my panic and feel confident that Taylor would figure out some method of tracing my whereabouts. Even if Cheney lied, Taylor was smart enough not to be hoodwinked for long. Then I recalled that he’d believed in Cheney’s policies for the past six years. I repeatedly told myself, “He’s a MacArthur fellow who received their ‘genius grant,’” ignoring the fact that he could never keep track of his wallet and keys.
Lying in bed, I felt like a hypocrite. I’d been complaining about the greediness of the Republicans, and now I was just as disgusting as them. I hadn’t thought about using the time machine to help humanity but only to make money for myself. It served me right to be sent back to 1986. (I tried in vain to suppress the thought of how much money I could make if I took Cheney’s advice and bought Microsoft stock.) Then, with almost trembling disbelief, it dawned on me that my sister, Carol, was alive. In 1986 she lived in Crescent City, California. Carol had committed suicide in 2001. She put a bullet through her head. For a year she’d been severely depressed, but I’d never dreamed that she would kill herself. The blow of her death had been so painful that the next morning, I woke up crying uncontrollably, almost as if I’d been sobbing in my sleep, something that seemed to be physiologically impossible. Bartleby had licked the tears from my face, something he’d never done before. Carol had been the first person I came out to, the first person I called when something hilarious happened, and the first person I called when something horrible occurred. Her death made my life less interesting, a loss of sustaining joy that had been as everyday as eating. I confronted the bitter paradox that the only person who could have possibly comforted me about Carol’s death was Carol. Then I had to accept that since she was gone forever, I would always remain bereft.
Of course, I also remembered my father was alive in Buffalo in 1986. In a few years, he’d be forced to retire from the state police and discover that losing his job felt as if he had retired from living. Soon, he began drinking heavily at beer-and-shot bars where if a man ordered a White Russian, that commie would be shown the door. Six years after his retirement my father was dead from congestive heart failure due to alcoholism. Drinking yourself to death is a patient form of suicide that, though never a surprise, is nevertheless always shocking.
Suddenly time travel seemed like the biggest guilt trip. I thought it was grossly unfair that I had to deal with two suicides. It made me feel like we should change our family name to the Lemmings. There wasn’t any way I could spin this—and believe me, I tried—as some Sophie’s Choice moment where I had to choose one family member over another. We had tried to get my father to quit drinking after he became an alcoholic, and it hadn’t worked. But what was I going to do, take a pass on trying to save him a second time out of cynicism or laziness?
The thought of being able to see and talk to them again seemed providential. I sat up, feeling jittery and confused, knowing that I needed to do something immediately. I should call Carol—no, I should go and see her. I could prevent her death. I could warn her about her impending depression, possibly readying her to deal with the crisis when it came.
With my father, it was less clear-cut. Once he started drinking heavily he couldn’t stop. Should I go to Buffalo and warn him? Call him now? Would a one-man intervention from the future be more convincing than the attempt by his entire family to stop him from drinking? I didn’t know. The future in the past was just as much an unknown as it was in the present. It occurred to me that trying to save them might cause me to be stuck in the ’80s, but that was a punishment I’d willingly endure.
I considered that by altering the past, I might change the future. Someone’s good fortune could become bad, but didn’t that also suggest that someone’s misfortune might change for the better? I’d already changed the past just by showing up there. And is there such a thing as destiny or fate? In my own life, I could think of examples of what at the time had seemed like bad luck that had turned out to be a lucky break. In 1977 I’d applied to NYU’s undergraduate film school and to my astonishment had been accepted, but even with scholarships and financial aid, I couldn’t figure out how to pay for the tuition and the cost of making a film. The numbers didn’t add up in a way that someone from a middle-class family, one generation away from farmers, could justify. Instead, I’d gone to SUNY Buffalo, which had felt like a huge failure at the time. Years later, it hit me that if I had come out in New York City in 1977, the odds were that I would probably have become infected with HIV and died sometime in the ’80s. Not going to NYU had probably saved my life. It’s always made me wonder what other close calls in my life had gone unrecognized.
I ultimately decided that every action has unforeseen consequences and that I wasn’t altruistic enough to let my sister die just to possibly avoid World War III. Sorry, Future! At any moment Taylor could show up and whisk me back to the present, but I vowed then that I wouldn’t go back until I’d tried to save Carol. I didn’t want to return to the future shouldering a double load of should-haves: things I should have done differently in my life, along with the things I should have done differently when time travel gave me a second chance to do them again.
My stomach was growling and I needed coffee badly. It was six a.m. on the West Coast: too early to call Carol. The Finney Room had a small kitchen area, and a quick survey revealed an empty refrigerator and bare cupboards. It made sense. Taylor never did any grocery shopping in our time, so why should I expect him to do it in the past? I decided to go out, but it felt eerie. It’s unsettling when your youth recaptures you. In case Taylor showed up while I was having breakfast—I had no doubt that he was trying to find me—I wrote him a note asking him to wait for me. I left it prominently placed on a table near the front door. Even easily distracted Taylor would spot it. Then I recalled that I didn’t have the right kind of money for that era. My colorized tens and twenties would look counterfeit. Taylor had said the dresser was filled with cash. Opening a drawer, I found a treasure chest brimming with silver dollars, double eagles, and large denomination bills going back each decade until the 1890s. If I’m stuck her
e, at least I’ll live well, I thought, before grabbing a thick stack of hundred dollar bills that had been printed in 1982.
In the bottom drawer were four Glock 22 semiautomatic pistols with enough ammo to start my own war with Iraq. There was also a key for the apartment that was attached to a Gore-Lieberman key chain, a goofball joke of Taylor’s. He had thought of everything. I looked out the window and saw a man on the sidewalk, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. I removed my sweater. My sartorial style is Standard Gay Guy (take ten years and ten pounds off Standard Straight Guy), and my usual black Izod shirt (in summer) or sporty zip-up sweater (in winter) and blue jeans were always accessorized with a good haircut and the latest sunglasses.
If you’re going to time travel, New York’s the first place you should visit. It’s always been a jumble of past, present, and future; a nineteenth-century brownstone stands next to an Art Deco office building, built across the street from an undistinguished apartment tower thrown up in the early ’70s, a real eyescraper whose blunt ugliness makes even atheists pray that it will be torn down. I’d left on a snowy day in December and had arrived two decades earlier on the first hot, muggy day in June. The day when New York goes from balmy to brutal overnight and you notice even the pigeons have sweat stains under their wings.
Outside on the street, I marveled at the SoHo I remembered. There were relatively few people walking the sidewalks. Back then the area was still primarily known for the cast-iron facades of its buildings instead of the vacant faces of tourists. Then I noticed the automobiles; they were all boxy and uniformly ugly, more carton than car, especially compared to the more curvaceous models that would supplant them. I walked down Prince Street to Wooster, taking stock of businesses that had moved or closed. In 1986, SoHo barely clung to its bohemian identity and was still marginally more interested in Andy Warhol’s paintings of dollar bills than real cash. I felt strangely disoriented. It’s one thing to contemplate the roads not taken in your life, but it’s another, more outlandish experience to actually walk those boulevards again. It was scary, but also exhilarating. I’d deliberately broken a law of physics and was driving in the wrong direction on a one-way street.
I craved a Starbucks double-shot skim latte but understood I’d have to fly to Seattle to place my order, since caffeine hadn’t yet become America’s favorite recreational drug. Fortunately, I remembered the Cupping Room was a block away and went there for breakfast after buying the Times at the Korean deli on Spring Street. I placed my order of poached eggs, sausage, and dry wheat toast, then looked at the front page of the paper. The date: June 12, 1986. I scanned the headlines: a Solidarity leader in Poland . . . Thatcher . . . Gorbachev . . . President Reagan appointed someone to the Federal Reserve. I tried to remember when Reagan had died. Was it in 2003 or 2004?
As I hurried back to the Singer Building, I spotted the Sylvia Gallen Gallery on West Broadway and stopped walking. I was stricken with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. Sylvia had given me my first job in New York. I looked at my watch. It was after ten and my twenty-sixyear-old self was working the front desk. I was wildly curious to talk to myself, something no other sane person in history had ever done. But it would have to wait. I could be returned to my own time at any minute and my mission was to talk to my sister. Of course, Carol might not even be home, and my message for her was not one you could leave on an answering machine. Then I realized I could tell Junior about Carol’s suicide. Whatever happened to me, he’d be here. Junior could be her guardian.
I saw movement in the front window of the gallery. The shutters that blocked the interior space from the unwanted intrusion of sunlight opened and a tall, dark-haired young man stepped inside the window, carrying a placard. There was a moment of uncanny confusion similar to unexpectedly catching your own reflection in a mirror.
It baffled me that back then I didn’t think I was handsome. In New York I’d always thought other young men’s beauty towered over me in the same manner that the Chrysler Building would have dwarfed my parents’ house in Buffalo.
Junior still had a spiky head of black hair, the sudden reappearance of which overjoyed me, as if I had been reunited with a long-dead childhood pet. At that point in my life, I’d joined a gym and like a holistic Dr. Frankenstein creation began the noninvasive operation of exchanging my weakling body parts for those of a muscle man.
He wore a black and gray vertically striped shirt that looked ridiculously like stylish prison-wear—perhaps from the Bastille. The short sleeves were cut high on Junior’s newly muscular arms, which he showed off with the Look-What-I-Made pride of a kid who’s built a go-cart. I’d mercifully deleted that shirt from my memory. Striped apparel had been banished from my wardrobe long ago. After a certain age, no one needs to add more lines to his body.
His skin was smooth and unblemished, without my crow’s feet or laugh lines or sun-damaged spots or the occasional broken blood vessel or weird brown spot that had appeared on my neck sometime after I turned forty. One of the many problems with aging is that you begin to think of yourself as a slob because your birthday suit can never be cleaned or pressed no matter how spotted or wrinkled it gets. He also wasn’t wearing eyeglasses. My eyesight had been perfect until I turned forty-two.
Junior and I quickly exchanged the almost imperceptible third-eye wink of recognition that two strange gay men give each other when they meet or pass on the street, the mutual acknowledgment that your private parts are public knowledge to other members of the cognoscenti.
It upset me terribly when I read the sign Junior placed in the gallery window:
Gary Wright Maps June 11th–July 11th
Gary was the only artist on Sylvia’s roster who became a friend of mine. He made beautiful, intricate ink-and-watercolor maps that included finely detailed roads, croplands, and forests, even tiny railroads. I still owned one of Gary’s drawings of the Galapagos Islands. Gary was a polymath and possessed the seemingly effortless conversational flair that had impressed me about New Yorkers when I first moved to the city. He could talk about anything, from the extinction of Haast’s eagle to explaining that Diane Arbus’s name was properly pronounced Dee-Anne—the estate is very picky about that. It had been a revelation to discover that people who could talk about anything didn’t always have to be unbearable. Sometime during the early ’90s, Gary had moved to Florida, where he later died—of cancer, not AIDS. It was impossible not to feel bleak, recalling his death and all my other friends who had died. Junior checked to see whether the sign was centered properly, glanced at me, seemed to almost smile, and then stepped back inside the gallery and closed the shutters.
I stood frozen at the doorway. I should call Carol, but the temptation to meet myself was irresistible. I could afford to spare half an hour, but still waited on the sidewalk. The prospect of meeting myself made me feel awkwardly shy and embarrassed. I tried to think of how I would introduce myself: “I’m you, only with less hair and problems you can’t imagine!” That would win him over. Would he even recognize me? He would have to be disappointed by my appearance. I still had muscular arms and a firm chest, but had reached the age where every time I was photographed there was a fifty–fifty chance of a slight double chin vandalizing my portrait. I’d also added two inches to my waistline over the past two decades, but didn’t feel as bad about transitioning from slim-fit to relaxed-fit jeans. The extra weight didn’t bother me, since I didn’t require other men to have washboard abs in order to think they were sexy. What if he hates my looks? That was stupid, I thought. Not every relationship in my life has been based upon physical appearance. I have a great personality; however, my charm is contingent on not being dissatisfied with my job, unhappy with my appearance, or in the midst of ending a fifteen-year relationship.
Once inside the gallery, it almost felt as if I were stalking myself. I was disappointed to see that I wasn’t seated behind the reception desk. As usual, Sylvia was in her office talking on the telephone; she always left the door open. It was impossible
not to listen inadvertently to conversations that I thought I shouldn’t be hearing—an art collector’s ex-nanny poked a number 9 knitting needle through his Miró, and where could he get it surreptitiously and expertly repaired before it went to auction at Sotheby’s? After Sylvia hung up, she would stroll out of her office and discuss with me—a nobody from Buffalo—what she had just been talking about, almost as if she considered it part of my job to eavesdrop.
Sylvia stood up. She was much younger than how I remembered her. Her hair was still mostly black—she hadn’t gone completely silver yet—and I’d forgotten how she used to gently twine her fingers through a lock of it when trying to solve a problem. She began flipping through a file drawer, peering intently through angular black eyeglasses whose severe modernity said “art dealer” in the same way bejeweled turbans signaled fortune-tellers. She wore an up-to-the-minute designer black suit—Sylvia always wore black—and her signature Calder silver brooch. (She claimed it was her “forged signature look” after she’d swiped the idea from Georgia O’Keefe.)
The gallery had a small kitchen area, and I must have been in back getting a cup of coffee. I’d started drinking coffee under Sylvia’s tutelage. “John,” she’d say while filling each of our mugs, “drinking coffee is how adults face the day; the ritual of turning an initially repellent bitter brew into something more palatable each morning—by adding milk and Sweet and Low, or, since you’re still young and distressingly slender, real sugar—and then actually convincing yourself that you not only look forward to it, but actually relish it, is a daily lesson in how to live.”