The Man Who Floated in Time

There was something shady and sly about him. For one thing he was small and slightly built, and I have an instinctive mistrust of men who stand less than five feet five: they seem too agile and unpredictable, shifty little Napoleons who are apt to come at you from three directions at once. Then, too, his narrow glittery gray eyes, though they did actually make contact with mine, never seemed to be aimed directly at me but rather, somehow, sent a beam of vision hooking around a sharply banked curve even when his face looked at me right square on. I didn’t like that. He was about sixty, sixty-five, lean and trim, not well dressed, his gray hair cropped very short and gone at the crown.

“What I do,” he said, “is travel in time. I float freely back to other eras.”

“Really,” I said. “Never forward?”

“Oh, no, never. That’s quite impossible. The future doesn’t exist. The past is there, solid and real, a place, you know, like Des Moines or Wichita. One can go to Wichita if one makes the proper connection. But one can’t go to a city that’s never been built. It isn’t conceivable. Well, perhaps it’s conceivable, but it isn’t doable, do you follow me? I go to the past, though. I’ve seen Attila the Hun. I’ve seen Julius Caesar. I wish I could say I went to bed with Catherine the Great, but I didn’t, although I had a few vodkas with someone who did. She smelled of garlic, he said, and she took forever to come. You don’t believe any of what I’m saying, do you?”

“You’re asking me to swallow quite a lot,” I said mildly.

He leaned forward in a conspiratorial way. “You’re not the kind of man who’s easily convinced of the unusual. I can tell. No ancient astronaut stuff for you, no UFO contact stories, no psychic spoon-bendings. That’s good. I don’t want an easy believer. I want a skeptic to hear me out and test my words and arrive at his own acceptance of the truth his own way. That’s all I ask of you, that you don’t scoff, that you don’t write me off instantly as a crackpot. All right?”

“I’ll try.”

“Now: what do you feel when I tell you I’ve traveled in time?”

“Instinctive resistance. An immediate sense that I’ve got myself mixed up with a crackpot or at best a charming liar.”

“Fine. I wouldn’t have come to you if I thought you’d react any other way.”

“What do you want from me, then?”

“That you listen to me and suspend your disbelief at least now and then and ask me a question or two, probe me, test me, give me the benefit of the doubt long enough to let me get through to you. And then that you help me get my experiences down on paper. I’m old and I’m sick and I’m not going to be here much longer, and I want to leave a memoir, a record, do you see? And I need someone like you to help me.”

“Why not write it yourself?” I asked.

“Easy enough to say. But I’m no writer. I don’t have the gift. I can’t even do letters without freezing up.”

“Doing a memoir doesn’t require a gift. You simply put down your story on paper, just as though you were telling it to me. Writing’s not as hard as nonwriters like to think it is.”

“Writing is easy for you,” he said, “and time-traveling is easy for me. And I’m about as capable of writing as you are of traveling in time. Do you see?” He put his hand on my wrist, a gesture of premature intimacy that sent a quick, and quickly suppressed, quiver through my entire arm. “Help me to get my story down, will you? You think I’m a crazy old drunk, and you wish you had never given me minute one of your time, but I ask you to put those feelings aside and accept just for the moment the possibility that this isn’t just a mess of lies and fantasies. Can you do that?”

“Go on,” I said. “Tell me about yourself.”

He said his time-traveling had begun when he was a boy. The technique by which he claimed to be able to unhitch himself from the bonds of the continuum and drift back along the time-line was apparently one that he developed spontaneously, a sort of applied meditation that amounted to artfully channeled fantasizing. Through this process, which he refined and perfected between the ages of eight and eleven, he achieved what I suppose must be called out-of-the-body experiences, in which his psyche, his consciousness, his walking intelligence, vanished into the past while his body remained here, ostensibly asleep.

On his first voyage he found himself in an American city of the colonial era. He had no idea where he was when he was older, working from his searingly vivid memories of the journey, he was able to identify it as Charleston, South Carolina—but he knew at once, from his third-grade studies, that the powdered wigs and three-cornered hats must mean the eighteenth century. He was there for three days, fascinated at first, then frightened and confused and terribly hungry—

“Hungry?” I said. “A wandering psyche with an appetite?”

“You don’t perceive yourself as disembodied,” he replied, looking pleased that I had raised an objection. “You feel that you have been quite literally transplanted to the other era. You need to eat, to sleep, to perform bodily functions. I was a small boy lost in a prerevolutionary city. The first night I slept in a forest. In the morning I returned to the city where some people found me, dirty and lost, and took me to a mansion where I was bathed and fed—”

“And given clothes? You must have been in your pajamas.”

“No, you are always clothed in the clothing of the era when you arrive,” he said. “And equipped with the language of the region and a certain amount of local currency.”

“How very convenient. What providential force takes care of those little details?”

He smiled. “Those are part of the illusion. Plainly I have no real coins with me, and of course I haven’t magically learned new languages. But the aspect of me that makes the journey has the capacity to lead others to feel that they are receiving true coinage from me; and as my soul makes contact with theirs, they imagine that it is their own language I speak. What I do is not actual bodily travel, you understand. It is astral projection, to use a phrase that I know will arouse hostility in you. My real body, in its pajamas, remained snug in my bed; but the questing anima, the roving spirit, arrived fully equipped. Of course the money is dream-money and melts away the moment I go farther from it than a certain range. In my travels I have left angry innkeepers and cheated peddlers and even a few swindled harlots all over the world, I’m afraid. But for the moment what I give them passes as honest coin.”

“Yet the astral body must be fed with real food?”

“Indeed. And I think that if the astral body is injured, the sleeping real body feels the pain.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“Because,” he said, “I have fallen headlong down temple steps in the Babylon of Hammurabi and awakened to find bruises on my thigh and shoulder. I have slashed myself on vines in the jungles of ancient Cambodia and awakened to see the cuts. I have stood in the snows of Pleistocene Europe shivering with the Neanderthals and awakened with frostbite in July.”

There is an Italian saying: Se non è vero, è ben trovato. “If it is not true, it is well invented.” There was in his eyes and on his thin gray-stubbled face at that moment a look of such passionate conviction, such absolute sincerity, that I began to tremble, hearing him talk of feeling the bite of Pleistocene winds, and for the first time I began to allow myself the possibility of thinking that this man could be something other than a boozy old scamp with a vivid imagination. But I was far from converted.

I said, “Then if through some mischance you were killed when traveling, your real body would perish also?”

“I have every reason to think so,” he replied quietly.

He traveled through vast reaches of space and time when he was still a child. Most of the places he visited were bewilderingly alien to him, and he had little idea of where or when he was, but he learned to observe keenly, to note salient details, to bring back with him data that sooner or later would help him to determine what he had experienced. He was a bookish child anyway, and so it caused no amazement when he burrowed feverishly through the National Geographic or the Britannica or dusty volumes of history. As he grew older and his education deepened, it became easier for him to learn the identity of his destinations; and when he was still older, fully grown, it was not at all difficult for him simply to ask those about him, What is the name of this city? Who is the king here? What is the event of the day? exactly as though he were a traveler newly arrived from a far-off land. For although he had journeyed in the form of a boy at first, his astral self always mirrored his true self, and as he aged, the projection that he sent to the past kept pace with him.

So, then, he visited while still a child the London of the Tudors, where rivers of muck ran in the streets, and he stood at the gates of Peking to watch the triumphal entry of the Great Khan Kublai, and he crept cautiously through the forests of the Dordogne to spy on the encampments of Neolithic huntsmen, and he tiptoed along the brutal brick battlements of a terrifying city of windowless buildings that proved to be Mohenjo-daro on the Indus, and he slipped with awe through the boulevards and plazas of majestic Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs, his pale skin growing sunburned under the heat of the pre-Columbian sun. And when he was older he stood in the frenzied crowd before the bloody guillotine of the Terror, and saw virgins hurled into the sacred well of Chichen Itza, and wandered through the smoldering ruins of Atlanta a week after General Sherman had put it to the torch, and drank thick red wine in a lovely town on the slopes of Vesuvius that may have been Pompeii. The stories rolled from him in wondrous profusion, and I listened to the charming old crank hour after hour, telling me sly tales of a history not to be found in books. Julius Caesar, he said, was a mincing dandy who reeked of vile perfume, and Cleopatra was squat and thicklipped, and the Israelites of King David’s time were brawling, conniving primitives no holier than the desert folk the next tribe over, and the Great Wall of China had been mostly a slovenly rampart of mud, decaying as fast as it was slapped together, and Socrates had never lived at all but was only a convenient pedagogical invention of Plato’s, and Plato had charged an enormous fee even for mere conversation. As for the Crusaders, they were more feared by Christians than Saracens, for they raped and stole and sacked mercilessly as they trekked across Europe to the Holy Land; and Alexander the Great had rarely been sober enough to stand upright after the age of twenty-three; and the orchestras of Mozart’s time played mostly out of tune on feeble, screechy instruments. All this poured from him in long disjointed monologues, which I interrupted less and less frequently for clarifications and amplifications. He spoke with utter conviction and with total disregard for my disbelief: I was invited to accept his tales as whatever I pleased, gospel revelations or amusing fraud, so long as I listened.

At our fifth or sixth meeting, after he had told me about his adventures among the bare-breasted wenches of Minoan Crete—the maze, he said, was nothing much, just some alleyways and gutters—and in the Constantinople of Justinian and in the vast unpeopled bisonherd lands of ancient North America, I said to him, “Is there any time or place you haven’t visited?”

“Atlantis,” he said. “I kept hoping to identify the unmistakable Atlantis, but never, never once—”

“Everywhere else, and every era?”

“Hardly. I’ve had only one lifetime.”

“I wondered. I haven’t been keeping a tally, but it seems to me it must have taken you eighty or ninety years to see all that you’ve seen. A week here, a month there—it adds up, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And while you’re gone, you remain asleep here for weeks or months at a time?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “You’ve misunderstood. Time spent there has no relation to elapsed time here. I can be gone for many days, and no more than an instant will have passed here. At most, an hour or two. Why, I’ve taken off on journeys even while I was sitting here talking with you!”

“What?”

“Yesterday, as we spoke of the San Francisco earthquake—between one eye-blink and the next, I spent eighteen hours in some German principality of the fourteenth century.”

“And never said a word about it when you returned?”

He shrugged. “You were prickly and unreceptive yesterday, and I was having trouble keeping your sympathies. I felt it would be too stagy to tell you, Oh, by way, I’ve just been in Augsburg or Reutlingen or Ulm or whichever it was. Besides, it was a boring trip. I found it so dreary I didn’t even trouble to ask the name of the place.”

“Then why did you stay for so long?”

“Why, I have no control over that,” he said.

“No control?”

“None. I drift away and I stay away however long I must and then I come back. It’s been like that from the start. I can’t choose my destination, either. I can best compare it to getting into a plane and being spirited off for a vacation of unknown length in an unknown land and not having a word to say about any of it. There have been times when I thought I wouldn’t ever come back.”

“Did that frighten you?”

“Only when I didn’t like where I happened to be,” he said. “The idea of spending the rest of my life in some mudhole in the middle of Mongolia or in an igloo in Greenland or—well, you get the idea.” He pursed his lips. “Another thing—it happens automatically to me.”

“I thought there was a ritual, a meditative process—”

“When I was a child, yes. But in time I internalized it so well that it happens of its own accord. Which is terrifying, because it can come over me anywhere, anytime, like a fit. Did you think there were no drawbacks to this? Did you think it was a lifelong picnic, roving space and time? I’ve had two or three uncontrolled departures a year since I was twenty. It’s been my, luck that I haven’t fallen down unconscious in the street, or anything like that. Though there have been some great embarrassments.”

“How have your explained them?”

“With lies,” he said. “You are the first to whom I’ve told the truth about myself.”

“Should I believe that?”

“You are the first,” he said with intense conviction. “And that because my time is almost over and I need at last to share my story with someone. Eh? Is that plausible? Do you still think I’ve fabricated it all?”

Indeed, I had no idea. To treat his story as lies or fantasy was easy enough to do; but for all his shiftiness of expression, there was an odd ring of truth even to his most enormous whoppers. And the wealth of information, the outpouring of circumstantial detail—I suppose a solitary life spent over history books could have explained that, but nevertheless, nevertheless—

And if it was true? What good had it all been? He had written nothing, no anecdotes of his adventures, no revisionist historical essays, no setting down of the philosophical insights that must have grown out of his exploration of thirty thousand years of human history. He had lived a strange and fitful and fragmentary life, flickering in and out of what we call the reality of the everyday world as though he were going to the movies, and bizarre movies they were, a week in Byzantium and a month in old Sumer and an hour among the Pharaohs. A life spent alone, a loveless life by the sound of it, a weird zigzagging chaos of a life such as has been granted no other human being—

If it was true.

And if not? Se non è vero, è ben trovato. I listened enraptured. I continued to probe for details of the mechanics of it. His journeys took him anywhere on earth? Anywhere, he said. Once he had arrived in a wasteland of glaciers that he believed from the strangeness of the constellations to have been Antarctica, though it might have been any icy land at a time when the stars were in other places in the sky. Happily that voyage had lasted less than an hour or he would have perished. But there seemed no limits—he might turn up on any continent, he said, and at any time. Or almost any time, for I queried him about dinosaurs and the era of the trilobites and the chance that he might find himself some day plunged into the primordial planetary soup of creation, but no, he had never gone back further than the Pleistocene, so far as he could tell, and he did not know why. I wondered also how he had seen so many of the great figures of history, Caesar and Cleopatra and Lincoln and Dante and the rest, when we who live only in today rarely encounter presidents and kings and movie stars in the course of our comings and goings, but he had an answer to that, too, saying that the world had been much smaller in earlier times, cities being deemed great if they had fifty or a hundred thousand people, and the mighty were far more accessible, going out into the marketplace and letting themselves be seen; besides, he had made it his business to seek them out, for what is the point of finding oneself miraculously transported to imperial Rome and coming away without at least a squint at Augustus or Caligula?

So I listened to it all and was caught up in it, and though I will not say that I ever came to believe the literal truth of his claims, I also did not quite disbelieve, and through his rambling discourses I felt the past return to life in an astonishing way. I made time for his visits, cleared all other priorities out of the way when he called to tell me he was coming and, beyond doubt, grew almost dependent on his tales, as though they were a drug, some potent hallucinogen that carried me off into gaudy realms of antiquity.

And in what proved to be his last conversation with me he said, “I could show you how it’s done.”

The simple words hung between us in the air like dancing swords.

I gaped at him and made no reply.

He said, “It would take perhaps three months of training. For me it was easy, natural, no challenge, but of course I was a child and I had no barriers to overcome. You, with your skepticism, your sophistication, your aloofness—it would be hard for you to master the technique, but I could show you and train you, and eventually you would succeed. Would you like that?”

I thought of watching Caesar’s chariot rolling down the Via Flaminia. I thought of clinking canisters with Chaucer in some tavern just outside Canterbury. I thought of penetrating the caves of Lascaux to stare at the freshly painted bulls.

And then I thought of my quiet, orderly life, and how it would be to fall into a narcoleptic trance at unpredictable moments and swing off into the darkness of space and time, and land perhaps in the middle of some hideous massacre or in a season of plague or in a desolate land where no human foot had ever walked. I thought of pain and discomfort and risk, and possible sudden death, and the disruption of patterns of habit, and I looked into his eyes and saw the strangeness there, a strangeness that I did not want to share, and in simple cowardice I said, “I think I would rather not.”

A flicker of something like disappointment passed across his features. But then he smiled and stood up and said, “I’m not surprised. But thank you for hearing me out. You were more open-minded than I expected.”

He took my hand briefly in his. Then he was gone, and I never saw him again. A few weeks later, I learned of his death, and I heard his soft voice saying “I could show you how it’s done,” and a great sadness came over me, for although I knew he was a fraud, I knew also that there was a chance that he was not, and if so, I had foreclosed the possibility of infinite wonders for myself. How sad to have refused, I told myself, how pale and gray a thing to have done, how contemptible, really. Yes, contemptible to have refused him out of hand, without even attempting it, without offering him that final bit of credence. For several days I was deeply depressed; and then I went on to other things, as one does, and put him from my mind.

A few weeks after his death one of the big midtown banks called me. They mentioned his name and said they were executors of his estate and told me that he had left something for me, an envelope to be opened only after his death. If I could satisfactorily identify myself, the envelope would be shipped to my bank. So I went through the routine, sending a letter to my bank, which authenticated the signature and forwarded it to his bank, and in time my bank informed me that a parcel had come, and I went down to claim it. It was a fairly bulky manila envelope. I had the sudden wild notion that it contained some irrefutable proof of his voyages in time, something like a photograph of Jesus on the cross or a personal letter to my friend from William the Conqueror, but of course that was impossible; he had made it clear that nothing traveled in time except his intangible essence, no possessions, no artifacts. Yet my hand shook as I opened the envelope.

It contained a thick manuscript and a covering note that explained that he had decided, after all, to share with me the secrets of his technique. Without his guidance it might take me much longer to learn the knack, a year or more of diligent application, perhaps, but if I persevered, if I genuinely sought to achieve—

A wondrous dizziness came over me, as though I hung over an infinite abyss by the frailest of fraying threads and was being asked to choose between drab safety and the splendor of the unknown plunge. I felt the temptation.

And for the second time I refused the cup.

I did not read the manuscript. I was too timid for that. Nor did I destroy it, though the idea crossed my mind; but I was too cowardly even for that, I must admit, for I had no wish to bear the responsibility for having cast into oblivion so potent a secret, if potent it really was. I put the sheaf of papers—over which he must have labored with intense dedication, writing being so painfully difficult a thing for him—back into their envelope and sealed it again and put it in my vault, deep down below the bankbooks and the insurance policies and the stock certificates and the other symbols of the barricades I have thrown about myself to make my life secure.

Perhaps the manuscript, like everything else he told me, is mere fantastic nonsense. Perhaps not.

Some day, when life grows too drab for me, when the pleasures of the predictable and safe begin to pall, I will take that envelope from the vault and study its lessons, and if nothing then happens, so be it. But if I feel the power beginning to come to life in me, if I find myself once again swaying above that abyss with the choices within my reach, I hope I will find the courage to sever the thread, to loose all ties and restraints, to say farewell to order and routine, and to send myself soaring into that great uncharted infinite gulf of time.