The Man With No Time

25

The Empress Pavilion was jammed as always, but we'd come early enough to get a table.

Mrs. Summerson sat possessively next to Doreen, who had inadvertently brought Charlie to me. She and Mrs. Summerson had gotten the pilgrims settled in at the church and gone back to Mrs. Summerson's house for a long catch-up chat. They'd been there, undoubtedly sipping tea, when Charlie and his boys dropped in, using the address Lo's henchman had volunteered. Dexter had found Doreen bound and gagged in my bedroom when he'd come to pick up Charlie and Bluto.

By now, the other pilgrims had already been dispatched to Las Vegas.

Eleanor had claimed the chair to my right, between me and Mrs. Summerson. Across the table, Horace was spooning out something mysterious for Pansy, who passed it on to the twins. The twins were being good enough to convince me, momentarily at least, that they'd been worth all the fuss. Tran, looking brown and healthy, sat next to Pansy.

The three wild cards were seated opposite Eleanor and me: Hammond, Sonia, and Orlando. We'd been halfway out the door when Hammond had called and asked if I was free for lunch, and some perverse instinct had prompted me to invite them to join us.

“Nice place,” Hammond said, every inch the good sport. He loathed Chinese food as much as I loathed television evangelists.

“Ooooh, dim sum, Sonia said, eying the waiters and their carts. "Keep an eye on me, Al, or I'm likely to outweigh you.”

Hammond patted her hand, lowered his head at me, and charged. “Been a lot going on lately with the Chinese.”

“Boy, hasn't there been?” I asked brightly. “It's all you hear about.” The story had been everywhere, and Stillman's show-with me furnishing background, off-camera through a voice filter-had actually broken news off the TV pages. The cops had located dozens of Charlie's earlier slaves in Los Angeles, although surprisingly few of them seemed to be women destined for sordid lives of sexual servitude.

Hammond had no way of knowing about the four bodies Dexter, Captain Snow, and some Doodys had dropped into the sea, heavily weighted, about six miles offshore. Nor did he know about Everett, whom the Doodys had placed aboard an eastbound train after pounding his parents' phone number and address out of him and threatening their lives if Everett ever came back to L. A.

“Nothing to do with your little hypothetical problem,” Hammond said.

“That was just uncles,” Eleanor said, the picture of innocence. In justice, she didn't know about the bodies, either. I was going to tell her eventually, probably the next time we made love. Like maybe in an hour.

On the other hand, maybe we'd just make love.

“I spent decades doing the Lord's work among the Chinese,” Mrs. Summerson volunteered, “as a missionary. Misery among those fine people is an everyday commonplace. It doesn't even make the news.”

Hammond registered the fact that she was a missionary with a heavy blink.

“Same Vietnamese,” Tran said, serene and secure in the knowledge that he'd given thirty thousand dollars to his mother and had already bought a ticket to New Orleans, where he planned to buy a shrimp boat. “Always trouble.”

I grabbed a breath to interrupt him and winced. Beneath my turtleneck, I was taped from navel to gullet like a mummy who got the curse wrong and aimed it at himself.

“You're Vietnamese?” Hammond asked, looking not at Tran but at me.

“He's sweet,” Sonia said, beaming at Tran. “Look at his adorable little face.”

“Look this,” Tran said. He glanced down, pulled a quarter out of his salad fork, and spun it across his fingertips.

“Magic,” Orlando said impatiently, “is just a trick against time.” He was apparently peeved that we hadn't shown up with a seventeen-year-old girl in tow. Sonia hit him with an elbow.

“Say again,” Tran said, lifting his eyebrows.

“We've all been sitting here at the table,” Orlando said, “so we know you didn't slide that quarter under your salad fork. We've all had experience with salad forks, so we know they don't have quarters inside them, because no salad fork in the past has ever had a quarter in it. You contradict time when you pull the quarter out of the salad fork, which is why it's entertaining.”

Eleanor leaned in and rested her chin on her hand. “Do you still think time travels in one direction only?” she asked Orlando.

He shrugged impatiently. “Maybe it's all here at the same time: past, present, future. We can all look at the past. You do it every time you look at a star. The light you see started traveling toward us years ago, maybe millions of years ago. There isn't even any way to know whether the star is still there. It might have exploded when dinosaurs hatched eggs in Montana. It might flicker out tomorrow night, as far as we're concerned, but its death actually happened, in earth time, while some Tyrannosaurus rex was eating a little mammal. Back when mammals were nothing to worry about.”

“Bringing it closer to home,” I offered, “there isn't any way to be certain that a person you think you know is still there, either.”

“Your time, his time,” Orlando mumbled. “They're not the same.”

“I've been thinking,” Eleanor told him, “about time. Since the last time I saw you, I mean. I've decided I'm no fan.”

“I'm sure that time is bereft,” Orlando said crankily.

“It changes us in ways it shouldn't,” she continued. “It separates us, it makes us strangers to the people we're supposed to love. It buries the past and obscures the future. It dulls and yellows the world around us. Eventually, it kills us, but it doesn't even let us off that easily. First it turns us into something we don't want to be: frail, ailing, dishonest with ourselves and mistrusting of others. And then, when we're hurting, it slows down to give us leisure to wish for what we were.”

“Oh, please.” Orlando sounded disdainful. “If you want to think about it in personal terms.”

Eleanor slipped something into my hand, something with sharp edges. “I think about everything in personal terms,” she said. “I'm a person. I think time is a cheat. It encourages us to make bets we can't win and then snickers nastily when we try to go back and bet again. What it doesn't tell us, what we can't know when we're young, is that all bets are for keeps.”

The thing in my hand was a postcard, a brightly colored picture of some rosy-cheeked Asian people standing around with some animals that might have been yaks. “But still,” Eleanor continued, “what strikes me is that most of the ways we measure time are beautiful. Old pocket watches. Medieval water clocks, dividing the day and night into so many splashes of water. Sundials. Aztec calendars carved into wheels of stone. Time counted in music, three or four beats to the measure. Stonehenge. Did you know that the ancient Chinese used incense clocks? They took a metal plate and cut a design into it, a single complicated groove, and they filled the groove with different kinds of incense, one for each two-hour period. Then they lit one end. People could wake up and know what time it was by the perfume they smelled.”

“Dr. Summerson gave me an incense clock,” Mrs. Summerson said wistfully. “Sung Dynasty.”

I turned the postcard over and stared down at it.

It was postmarked China.

“We never know what time it is,” Orlando insisted. “My time and your time-”

“Hush,” Sonia said. And, miraculously, he did.

It was a normal, junky, third-world postcard, printed on cheap, fiber-flecked paper that had been soiled by many hands. Hello children, it said, in rigidly rectangular English script, a script with years of missionary-school practice behind it. I ask your forgiveness.

Eleanor leaned over and kissed me on the ear as I read the signature. It said Lo.

I folded the card in half and looked up, catching Hammond in the act of giving me Force Ten Cop Suspicion.

“Do we have time for all six courses?” I asked.