Time Storm

5

When the red flush of the sunset above the horizon to our right began to grow narrow and dark, and stars were clearly visible in the clear sky to the east, I pulled the van off the road into a comfortable spot under some cottonwood trees growing down in a little dip between two hills and set up camp. It was so warm that I had the tent flaps tied all the way back. I lay there looking out at the stars, seeming to move deeper and deeper in the night sky, becoming more and more important and making the earth under me feel more like a chip of matter lost in the universe.

But I could not sleep. That had happened to me a lot, lately. I wanted to get up and go sit outside the tent by myself, with my back to the trunk of one of the cottonwoods. But if I did, Sunday would get up and come out with me; and then the girl would get up and follow Sunday. It was a chain reaction. A tag-end of a line from my previous two years of steady reading, during my hermitlike existence above Ely, came back to me. Privatum commodum publico cedit—“private advantage yields to public.” I decided to lie there and tough it out.

What I had to tough out was the replaying in my head of all the things that had happened. I had almost forgotten, until now, my last summer in high school when I started teaching myself to read Latin because I had just learned how powerfully it underlays all our English language. Underlays and outdoes. “How long, O Cataline, will you abuse our patience?” Good, but not in the same ballgame with the thunder of old Cicero’s original: “Quo usque, Catilina, abutere patienta nostra?”

After the sweep of the first time change that I thought was my second heart attack come to take me for good this time—after I had found I was not dead, or even hurt—there had been the squirrel, frozen in shock. The little grey body had been relaxed in my hands when I picked it up; the small forepaws had clung to my fingers. It had followed me after that for at least the first three days, when I finally decided to walk south from my cabin and reach a city called Ely, that turned out to be no longer there. I had not understood then that what I had done to the squirrel was what later I was to do to Sunday—be with it when it came out of shock, making it totally dependent on me.... Then, a week or so later, there had been the log cabin and the man in leggings, the transplanted Viking or whoever, who I thought was just anyone cutting firewood with his shirt off, until he saw me, hooked the axe over his shoulder as if holstering it, and started walking toward me... .

I was into it again. I was really starting to replay the whole sequence, whether I wanted to or not; and I could not endure that, lying trapped in this tent with two other bodies. I had to get out. I got to my feet as quietly as I could. Sunday lifted his head, but I hissed at him between my teeth so angrily that he lay down again. The girl only stirred in her sleep and made a little noise in her throat, one hand flung out to touch the fur of Sunday’s back.

So I made it outside without them after all, into the open air where I could breathe; and I sat down with my back against the rugged, soft bark of one of the big cottonwoods. Overhead the sky was perfectly clear and the stars were everywhere. The air was still and warm, very transparent and clean. I leaned the back of my head against the tree trunk and let my mental machinery go. It was simply something I was stuck with—had always been stuck with, all my lifetime.

Well, perhaps not all. Before the age of seven or eight, things had been different. But by the time I was that old, I had begun to recognize that I was on my own—and needed no one else.

My father had been a cipher as far back as I could remember. If someone were to tell me that he had never actually realized he had two children, I would be inclined to believe it. Certainly I had seen him forget us even when we were before his eyes, in the same room with him. He had been the director of the Walter H. Mannheim private library in St. Paul; and he was a harmless man—a bookworm. But he was no use either to me or my younger sister as a parent.

My mother was something else. To begin with, she was beautiful. Yes I know, every child thinks that about its mother. But I had independent testimony from a number of other people; particularly a long line of men, other than my father, who not only thought so, also, but told my mother so, when I was there to overhear them.

However, most of that came later. Before my sister was born my mother was my whole family, by herself. We used to play games together, she and I. Also, she sang and talked to me and told me stories endlessly. But then, after my sister was born, things began to change. Not at once, of course. It was not until Beth was old enough to run around that the alteration in my mother became clearly visible. I now think that she had counted on Beth’s birth to do something for her marriage; and it had not done so.

At any rate, from that time on, she began to forget us. Not that I blamed her for it. She had forgotten our father long since—in fact, there was nothing there to forget. But now she began to forget us as well. Not all of the time, to start with; but we came to know when she was about to start forgetting because she would show up one day with some new, tall man we had never seen, who smelled of cigars and alcohol.

When this first started happening, it was the beginning of a bad time for me. I was too young then to accept it, and I wanted to fight whatever was taking her away from me; but there was nothing there with which I could come to grips. It was only as if a glass window had suddenly been rolled up between her and me; and no matter how I shouted or pounded on its transparent surface, she did not hear. Still, I kept on trying to fight it for several years, during which she began to stay away for longer and longer periods-all with my father’s silent consent, or at least with no objections from him.

It was at the close of those years that my fight finally came to an end. I did not give up, because I could not; but the time came when my mother disappeared completely. She went away on one last trip and never came back. So at last I was able to stop struggling; and as a result I came to the first great discovery of my life, which was that nobody ever really loved anyone. There was a built-in instinct when you were young that made you think you needed a mother; and another built-in instinct in that mother to pay attention to you. But as you got older you discovered your parents were only other humanly selfish people, in competition with you for life’s pleasures; and your parents came to realize that this child of theirs that was you was not so unique and wonderful after all, but only a small savage with whom they were burdened. When I understood this at last, I began to see how knowing it gave me a great advantage over everyone else; because I realized then that life was not love, as my mother had told me it was when I was very young, but competition—fighting; and, knowing this, I was now set free to give all my attention to what really mattered. So, from that moment on I became a fighter without match, a fighter nothing could stop.

It was not quite that sudden and complete a change, of course. I still had, and probably always would have, absent-minded moments when I would still react to other people out of my early training, as if it mattered to me whether they lived or died. Indeed, after my mother disappeared for good, there was a period of several years in which Beth clung to me—quite naturally, of course, because I was all she had—and I responded unthinkingly with the false affection reflex. But in time she too grew up and went looking somewhere else for attention; and I became completely free.

It was a freedom so great I saw most people could not even conceive of it. When I was still less than half-grown, adults would remark on how strong-minded I was. They talked of how I would make my mark in the world. I used to want to laugh, hearing them say that, because anything else was unthinkable. I not only had every intention of leaving my mark on the world; I intended to put my brand on it and turn it into my own personal property; and I had no doubt I could do it. Free as I was of the love delusion that blinkered all the rest of them, there was nothing to stop me; and I had already found out that I would go on trying for what I wanted as long as it was there for me to get.

I had found that out when I had fought my mother’s withdrawal from us. I had not been able to stop struggling against that until it had finally sunk in on me that she was gone for good. Up until that time I had not been able to accept the fact she might leave us. My mind simply refused to give up on her. It would keep going over and over the available data or evidence, with near-idiot, unending patience, searching for some crack in the problem, like a rat chewing at a steel plate across the bottom of a granary door. A steel plate could wear down a rat’s teeth; but he would only rest a while to let them grow again, and then go back once more to chewing, until one day he would wear his way through to where the grain was. So it was with me. Pure reflex kept the rat chewing like that; and, as far as I was concerned, it was a pure reflex that kept my mind coming back and back to a problem until it found a solution.

There was only one way to turn it off, one I had never found out how to control. That was if somehow the knowledge managed to filter through to me that the answer I sought would have no usefulness after I found it. When that happened—as when I finally realized my mother was gone for good—there would be an almost audible click in my mind, and the whole process would blank out. It was as if the reflex suddenly went dead. But that did not happen often; and it was certainly not happening now.

The problem my mind would not give up on at the moment was the question of what had happened to the world. My head kept replaying all its available evidence, from the moment of my collapse in the cabin near Duluth to the present, trying for one solid, explainable picture that would pull everything together.

Sitting now under the tree, in the shade of a new-risen quarter moon and staring up at the star-bright sky of summer, I went clear back to reliving my college days, to the paper I had written on the methods of charting stocks, followed by the theoretical investments, then the actual investments, then the penthouse suite in the Bellecourt Towers, hotel service twenty-four hours a day, and the reputation for being some sort of young financial wizard. Then my cashing out and buying into Snowman, Inc., my three years as president of that company, while snowmobile and motor home sales climbed up off the wall chart—and my marriage to Swannee.

I had never blamed Swannee a bit for what had happened. It must have been as irritating to her as it would have been to me to have someone hanging on to her the way I ended up doing. The way I had decided to get married in the first place was that I had gotten tired of living in the penthouse apartment. I wanted a real house, and found one. An architecturally modern, rambling building with five bedrooms, on about twenty acres of land with its own small lake. And of course, once I had decided to have a house, I realized what I really needed was a wife to go along with it. And I looked around a bit and married Swannee. She was not as beautiful as my mother, but she was close to it. Tall, with a superb body and a sort of golden-custard colored hair, very fine, that she wore long and which floated around her shoulders like a cloud.

By education she had been headed for being a lawyer; but her instincts for work were not all that strong. In spite of the fact that she had done well academically in law school, she had never taken her bar exams and was, in fact, working as a sort of ornamental legal assistant to a firm of corporation attorneys down in St. Paul. I think she was glad to give up the pretense of going to the office every day and simply take over as my wife. She was, in fact, ideal from my standpoint. I had no illusions about her. I had buried those with the memories of my mother years before. So I had not asked her to be anymore than she was; ornamental, good in bed, and able to do the relatively easy job of managing this home of mine. I think, in fact, we had an ideal marriage—until I spoiled it.

As I said, occasionally I would become absent-minded and respond as if other people really mattered to me. Apparently I made the mistake of doing this with Swannee; because little by little she drifted off from me, began disappearing on short trips almost as my mother had done, and then one day she told me she wanted a divorce and left.

I was disappointed, but of course, not much more than that; and I decided that trying to have an ordinary, live-in wife had been a mistake in the first place. I now had all my time to devote to work, and for the next year I did just that. Right up to the moment of my first heart attack.

At twenty-four. God damn it, no one should have to have a heart attack after only twenty-four years in this world! But again there was my rat-reflex mind chewing away at that problem, too, until it broke through to a way out. I cashed in and set up a living trust to support me in style forever, if necessary; and I went up to the cabin to live and make myself healthy again.

Two years of that—and then the blackout, the squirrel, the trek south, the man with the axe... and Sunday.

I had almost shot Sunday in the first second I saw him, before I realized that he was in the same sort of trance the squirrel had been in. We ran into each other about twenty miles or so south of the Twin Cities, in an area where they had started to put together a really good modern zoo—one in which the animals wandered about almost without restriction; and the people visiting were moved through wire tunnels and cages to see the creatures in something like their natural wild, free states.

But there was no zoo left when I got there; only half-timbered country. A time-change line had moved through, taking out about three miles of highway. The ground was rough, but dry and open. I coaxed the panel truck across it in low gear, picking as level a route as I could and doing all right, until I got one rear wheel down into a hole and had to jack it up to get traction again.

I needed something firm to rest the jack base on. I walked into a little patch of woods nearby looking for a piece of fallen tree limb the right size, and literally stumbled over a leopard.

He was crouched low on the ground, head twisted a little sideways and looking up as if cringing from something large that was about to attack him. Like the squirrel, he was unmoving in that position when I walked into him—the time storm that had taken out the road and caught him as well, must have passed only minutes previously. When I stubbed my toe on his soft flank, he came out of his trance and looked at me. I jumped back and jerked up the rifle I had had the sense to carry with me.

But he stepped forward and rubbed along the side of my upper leg, purring, so much like an overgrown household pussycat that I could not have brought myself to shoot him, even if I had had the sense to do so. He was a large young male, weighing a hundred and forty pounds when I later managed to coax him onto a bathroom scale in an abandoned hardware store. He rubbed by me, turned and came back to slide up along my other side, licking at my hands where they held the rifle. And from then on, like it or not, I had Sunday.

I had puzzled about him, and the squirrel, a number of times since. The closest I had come to satisfying my search for what had made them react as they had, was that being caught by a time change jarred anything living right back to its infancy. After I first came to in the cabin—well, I had generally avoided thinking about that. For one thing I had a job to clean myself up. But I do remember that first, terrible feeling of helplessness and abandonment—like a very young child lost in a woods from which he knows he can never find his way out. If someone had turned up then to hold my hand, I might have reacted just like the squirrel or the leopard.

Then there had been our meeting—Sunday’s and mine—with the girl. That had been a different kettle of fish. For one thing, evidently she had passed the point of initial recovery from being caught in a time change; but equally evidently, the experience—or something just before the experience—had hit her a great deal more severely than my experience with the time change had done.

But about this time, the stars started to swim slowly in a circular dance, and I fell asleep.

I woke with the sun in my eyes, feeling hot and itchy all over. It was a bright cloudless day, at least a couple of hours old, since dawn; evidently the tree had shaded me from the sun’s waking me earlier.

Sunday lay curled within the open entrance to the tent; but he was all alone. The girl was gone.