The Man With No Time

8

The double date turned out to be a fivesome.

“This is Sonia de Anza,” Hammond said proudly across the table. Then he forced a smile that looked like it weighed ten pounds and added, “And this is her brother, Orlando.”

Seated, Sonia de Anza was as tall as Hammond and a lot better-looking. She was dark-haired, straight-nosed, square-jawed, and striking, with oddly yellowish eyes, the longest real lashes I'd ever seen, and delicately flaring nostrils that made me think of perfume. Orlando was Sonia as a boy of seventeen, with the same features metamorphosed, as though seen through water: The square jaw added definition to her face while the fringe of lashes softened his. Even a member of another species could have seen at once that they were brother and sister. Hammond and Sonia were dressed casually, Hammond in a red muscleman's polo shirt and Sonia in a pale lavender blouse that made her skin look darkly creamy, but Orlando was decked out in an IBM-issue white shirt with a badly ironed collar and a narrow black patent-leather tie. He glanced once at my aging Megadeth T-shirt and then looked politely away.

We all mumbled pleasant preliminaries at each other, and Eleanor and I let go of each other's hands long enough to sit down. I immediately grabbed her hand back. The restaurant was Hammond's choice, one of those vestigial time capsules from the fifties where you sit in red leather booths and eat red meat, and women with red lipstick drink Manhattans with red cherries and blow smoke rings. A big Christmas tree blinked and shimmered in the foyer, dropping needles on dummy presents and scenting the air with pine. I felt like all I'd done in the past three days was eat meat. The sleepless nights were playing tricks with my sense of time, making the lunch with Hammond seem only hours ago. Lo was as two-dimensional as a figure in a frieze.

“Al says you should have been a cop,” Sonia de Anza said at once. Her voice was low and throaty, softer than her face had led me to expect.

“I did not,” Hammond said huffily. “I said he thought like a cop.”

“Gee, Al,” I said, “almost thanks for the compliment.”

“What does a cop think like?” Orlando asked. He made it sound like a trick question.

“Like a snowplow,” Hammond said, fearsomely avuncular. “We bull our way through the fluff until we hit something hard.”

“How disappointing.” Orlando offered kindly old Uncle Al the cold shoulder. “I'd hoped cops thought like Porfiry in Crime and Punishment.”

Hammond threw him a sour glance and then looked at Sonia. “Orlando's gifted.”

“He'll graduate from USC next year,” Sonia said, a little apologetically. “He'll only be seventeen.” She patted his hand. “But he's still being a little fart. He knows what cops think like. They think like me.” He opened his mouth, and she said hurriedly, “Like I.”

Eleanor nodded toward Orlando, and said to Sonia, “He's very beautiful,” and Orlando went redder than the leather in the booth.

“Well, you know what they say about appearances,” Sonia said, clearly pleased.

“Thinking like a cop,” Hammond offered, hoisting a menu bigger than The Little House on the Prairie, “how are your hypothetical Vietnamese kids?”

Eleanor withdrew her hand and very slowly turned to look at me.

“Real discreet, Al,” I said, my ears burning.

“Lookit, Sonia. Now they're both blushing.” Hammond made a show of fanning me with the menu. “Anyway, Sonia already knows about it. She's the only one I've told.”

“You don't get your kiss back,” I said to Eleanor. “I didn't get Mrs. S. from him.”

“Mrs. S.?” Hammond's ears went up the way Bravo's do when I mention food.

“Are you Chinese?” Orlando asked Eleanor, as though no one were talking.

“If I'm not,” Eleanor said, “my mother has gravely misled me.”

He leaned toward her. “How old are you?” Sonia looked alarmed.

“Far, far, too old, but thanks.”

“Have you got a sister?”

“Orlando!” his sister said. Hammond, looking at me, slowly crossed his eyes.

“No,” Eleanor said seriously. “But surely, you shouldn't have any trouble-”

“I'm too young for them,” Orlando said with surprising bitterness. “Girls at school are what, nineteen, twenty? I'm sixteen. I can't even drive.” For the first time he sounded like a teenager.

“I see,” Eleanor said. “That's a problem.”

"As long as we're talking hypothetically, Al. .” I began.

“Do you know anybody?” Orlando asked Eleanor.

“I'm thinking,” Eleanor said.

“Let's assume a hypothetical kidnapper,” I said. “Let's assume he steals a kid or two, or even just takes something precious-”

“She doesn't have to be Chinese,” Orlando said helpfully.

“That's enough, Orlando,” Sonia said, very much the older sister.

“But it would help if she could drive,” Orlando finished very quickly. Then he looked down at his plate and began to pick at the cuticle of his left thumb.

“What does he want, your kidnapper?” Sonia asked me.

“He doesn't say. Just demands that a house be left empty and unguarded for a certain number of hours and that everything of any value be sort of piled in the middle of the living room. And the person who owns the house comes home at the appointed time and the kid is right there, and nothing's missing.”

“Something must be missing,” Hammond said. “Did they check carefully?”

“Oh, yes,” Eleanor said, “this person would have checked very carefully.”

Hammond looked from her to me as the silence yawned around us. “You guys are sharing a hypothetical life, huh?”

“We have been for years,” Eleanor said.

“It was a card trick,” Sonia suggested. “He asked them to pile up everything valuable just to distract them and then, uh. .”

“Took something worth nothing?” Hammond challenged.

“This is thinking like a cop?” Orlando asked. He didn't sound awestruck.

“He risked a lot to take this kid or these kids or whatever it was,” I said. “If it was a kid, he even transported it over state lines.”

“Hey, hey,” Orlando said, snapping his fingers, “maybe he left something.”

We all looked at him.

“Sure,” he said. “Maybe the whole thing was for him to get inside when no one was there and have something. He never wanted to take anything at all. He just told them to put the stuff out because-”

“That's pretty good,” Hammond said grudgingly.

“Alternative,” Orlando said promptly. “What he took doesn't have any value at all except to him. It wasn't even with the stuff they put out. That's why he had them put the important stuff out, so they'd look there instead of anywhere else. Like Sonia said, a card trick. It's something so unimportant that it won't be missed, but it's important to him.”

“I may have a girl for you after all,” Eleanor said.

“That's the direction I've been leaning toward,” I said to Sonia. “Something that seems to be worthless.”

“Nothing is worthless to my mother,” Eleanor said, and then stopped. “Oh, good lord,” she said. She wrapped her right hand into a fist and pretended to try to force it into her mouth.

“Just some relative, huh?” Hammond said accusingly.

“Case closed, Al. All over, and at no cost to the taxpayers.”

“A kid was transported across state lines?” Sonia demanded.

“What do you think about Emily Liang?” Eleanor asked me.

“Nice little girl. Plays the piano, doesn't she? Wears a lot of pink?”

“I mean, for Orlando.”

Orlando pulled the center out of a piece of bread and rolled it up between his palms, the picture of adolescent nonchalance.

“Nah,” I said, “she's too nice for Orlando.” He gave me a startled glance.

“What do you mean, it's over?” Hammond's shoulders loomed toward me.

“The kids are home. Nothing valuable is missing. It was all a. . a-”

“A family misunderstanding,” Eleanor finished for me.

A big pill made out of bread hit me on the ear. “How could she be too nice for me?” Orlando said.

“What a question,” his sister scoffed. “Have you got a brother, uh, Eleanor?”

“Do I ever,” Eleanor said.

“And you seem so calm,” Sonia said.

“How many conversations we got here?” Hammond asked. “I feel like I've got jet lag.”

It reminded me of Uncle Lo, and it seemed like safe territory. “Just what exactly is jet lag?”

“It's a displacement of the circadian rhythms,” Orlando said, getting it out of the way so he could return to his main theme. “How could she be too-”

“Circadian,” I said. “Pretty word. Sounds like Shakespeare, the seacoast of Circadia.”

“What I really don't like,” Orlando announced to the world at large, “is when someone asks a question and doesn't listen to the answer.”

“Circadian,” Eleanor interposed, “circa dies, literally 'about a day.' A rhythm that repeats approximately every twenty-four hours.”

“An internal rhythm,” Orlando said sulkily.

“Like sleeping?” Hammond asked.

“You have hundreds of them,” Eleanor said. “Your digestive system, your basal metabolism, body temperature, endocrine glands, brain waves. All cyclic, all set to a period of about twenty-four hours. When you change time zones-” she glanced at me, realizing what I was thinking-"you, um, you have to readjust all those little clocks to local time."

“What do you think?” I asked her. We'd already more or less settled it, but nothing seemed to be settled about Lo.

She shook her head. “I don't know. I didn't know then and I don't know now. He was tired, that's for sure.”

“I'm tired, too.” I yawned again. “That doesn't mean I just flew in from Hong Kong.”

“Who just flew in from Hong Kong?” Hammond asked.

“Circadian rhythms persist for a long time, even where there's no sunlight,” Orlando contributed, more to thwart Hammond, I thought, than for any other reason. “People living in deep caves for months still function in twenty-four hour cycles. Astronauts in space, same thing.”

“Orlando is interested in time,” Sonia said, a bit wearily.

“Who isn't?” Orlando demanded.

“Can we have a show of hands?” Hammond asked.

“Time is everything,” Orlando said, warming to his subject, “and we don't know doodly about it. We haven't got words for it, even; we recycle the words we use about space. 'The near future' and 'the distant past.' Like I just said, 'a long time.' Time isn't like space in any way, but we use the same words. Space goes on in all directions. If time moves at all, it moves in only one direction.”

“Time moves in only one direction?” Orlando had jogged Eleanor's metaphysical funnybone.

“Maybe it doesn't move at all,” he said, looking mysterious. “But if it does, it moves in only one direction.”

“Says who?” Eleanor asked.

“Says atomic decay, for one thing.” Orlando sounded positive.

“I thought time was cyclic,” I said.

“You would,” Orlando said coolly. “Stone age.”

“Most of the people in the world believe in cyclic time,” Eleanor volunteered.

“Most of the world,” Orlando said dismissively, “believes in reincarnation, too. That doesn't make it anything except a remnant of a primitive worldview.”

“Yow,” Hammond said. “Listen to the boy. Am I the only one who's hungry?”

“You don't believe in reincarnation?” Eleanor was on the fence about it.

“I'd say the mix is a bit rich in former Egyptian princesses,” Orlando said. “There couldn't have been that many Egyptian princesses. How come nobody was a dung-beetle farmer, that's what I'd like to know.”

“Dung sounds great,” Hammond announced, “but I'm having steak.”

“You had steak yesterday, Al.” I thought for a moment. “Was it yesterday?”

“Time is a cycle. What about you, Sonia?”

“Surf and turf,” Sonia said. “And something white and dry.”

“I want to eat something with a head,” Eleanor said. “I'm feeling fifties. Maybe a steak, like Al's. How can you be so sure about reincarnation?”

“Because it's cyclic. Cyclic time doesn't happen in nature.” Orlando closed his menu. “I'd like pork chops.”

“It doesn't happen in nature, huh? Tell me about the year,” Sonia said.

“A perfect example.”

“For whose side?” Eleanor put an oar in.

“Prime rib,” I said. I hadn't even realized a waiter was present until I felt him behind me. He was as tall and thin and melancholy as Ichabod Crane, and he had a small hole in the elbow of his red jacket.

“Anything for starters?” he asked mournfully.

“Salad all around,” Hammond said, assuming command. “Bring all the dressings you got.”

“For my side, of course,” Orlando said. “Every year is absolutely different.”

“And wine?” the waiter asked.

“A jug of each color,” Hammond said impatiently. “Can't you see we're debating the nature of the universe?”

“Let me know if you figure it out,” the waiter said, turning away.

“Spring, summer, fall, winter,” Sonia said, counting each off on a finger. “You remember a year when they came in a different order?”

“And garlic bread,” Hammond called after the waiter.

“Oh, sure,” Orlando said. “And day and night, high tide-slash-low tide, waking-slash-sleeping, the phases of the moon, the apparent motions of the planets and stars, the solstices, circadian rhythms-I mean, give me a break. Local phenomena, card tricks. So the planet circles a star. So it rotates. Mercury doesn't. On Mercury, it's the same day all year. A Mercurian's circadian rhythms would last forever. So what? We have a day every twenty-four hours, but it's never the same day.”

“I told you he was bright.” Sonia didn't sound entirely happy about it.

“And why do you care about this so much?” I asked.

“It just pisses me off. Our brains are the most complicated things in the universe, and we don't use them. We understand time intuitively in ways we don't even consider.” He picked up the salt shaker and threw it at me.

It was a pretty quick snap. I caught the shaker left-handed, and salt poured over my forearm. “Great,” I said. “And I've been trying to cut down.”

“You just performed dozens of complicated calculations about time and space,” Orlando said. “You estimated the thing's velocity and trajectory, and you timed it to the split second. Your brain told your arm where to go and then interpreted the information from the nerves in your hand to let you know that you'd caught it, and then you made a joke. Not much of a joke, of course, but you were busy. You can do all that literally without thinking about it, but you and lots of other people persist in thinking that time is like a … a clothes dryer or something, just going around and around in easy, predictable, stupid little patterns.”

"I could have done without the 'of course,' " I said as the waiter put two carafes of wine on the table and gestured for a black-coated acolyte to set the green salads. He watched critically, dismissed the acolyte, bent forward from the waist in military fashion, placed Sonia's more exactly in the center of her place mat, and retreated, a puffy little blister of white shirtsleeve protruding through the hole in his jacket.

“Watch him go,” Orlando said. “What do you see?”

“What do you mean, what do I see? I see the waiter heading for the bar.”

“What you see,” Orlando corrected me, “is a man with his back to you, moving his legs and getting smaller. You know what it is because you're time-binding-you think of the waiter as a more or less permanent object in space and time, and you put together the different pictures you see every moment to conclude he's leaving. Otherwise you might think he's one man getting smaller and smaller, or a succession of men, each smaller than the other. Same thing when you listen to music: You hear a succession of pitches over a period of time and you put them together into a melody. Listen to something moving in the dark, and you know it's the same thing although you can't see it. It's called time-binding. Even birds can do it. Migrating starlings take off when their clocks tell them to, and stop when they get there, the same place every year. And they use, birds use, time-binding. Starlings can fix on a permanent object, like the rising sun, and use it as a reference point for takeoff every morning, even though they haven't seen it for twenty-four hours. Obscure the sun and show them its reflection, and they'll take off in the wrong-”

“Here's a man getting bigger,” Hammond interrupted, grating pepper over his salad and offering the mill to Sonia.

The maitre d' leaned in and addressed Eleanor. “Miss Chan?”

“Good guess,” Eleanor said.

“You have a phone call.”

“Where are we,” Hammond asked heaven, “the Polo Lounge?”

“I left the number on my answering machine.” Eleanor smoothed a hand over my shoulder, but not before I'd asked her to give my regards to Burt. She grabbed a lock of my hair and yanked it as she followed the maitre d’.

“Burt, huh?” Hammond grunted, shoveling a bale of romaine lettuce into his mouth. “Talk about permanent objects.”

“The reptilian brain, on the other hand,” Orlando continued as though no one had interrupted, “can't really time-bind. Its prey has to be the right shape, the right size, and moving. Surround a frog with dead flies, and it'll starve to death.”

“And that's enough,” Sonia commanded. “No more flies, no more dung. We've been very patient.”

Orlando started to say something, then closed his mouth so sharply I could hear his teeth crack together. He prodded at his salad with a forefinger, the picture of a man looking for dead flies.

“Do you really think,” Sonia asked, softening, “that Eleanor might introduce him to someone?”

On cue, Eleanor beckoned to me from across the room. Even at that distance I could see that something was wrong.

“I'll ask her,” I said, getting up.

“Collar the waiter while you're up,” Hammond said. “No Russian dressing?”

“Getting smaller now,” I said as I left the table. Orlando fixed me with a poisonous look.

The Christmas tree twinkled hyperactively at me, silhouetting Eleanor in its prism of light. She grabbed my wrist and led me toward the phone, out of sight of the table. The receiver dangled by its coiled cord, and she picked it up and gave it a shake, as though there were someone unpleasant inside it.

“I don't know whether to laugh or cry,” she said, hanging it up. “I wish I'd been born an orphan.”

“What is it?”

“It's Horace,” she said. “The jerk. He's left Pansy and the kids in Vegas and gone after Uncle Lo.”