“Oh, yes! Of course,” she replied. “Yolande is wonderful. I’m so glad that you invited her.”
“Good. That’s something, anyway.”
“What do you mean—?”
“Yolande!” he cried out, suddenly. “‘How are you?”
Yolande Loeb emerged from the screened-off section of the apartment to which she discreetly retired during his visits. She nodded to him and smiled faintly.
“I am quite well, Mr. Manos. Thank you. And yourself?” There was a brief catch in her voice as she moved toward him, and realizing that her eyes were fixed on his beard, he chuckled within it, saying, “I’m beginning to feel a trifle like a premature patriarch.” She smiled, and his tone was light, but he felt pain, again.
“I’ve brought you some presents,” he went on, placing sealtite packages on the table. “The latest art books and tapes, recordings, some excellent film beads, poems which have been judged by the critics to be exceptional.”
Both women moved to the table and began running their fingertips down the sealstrips, opening the parcels, thanking him for each item as it was unwrapped, making little noises of pleasure and excitement. As he studied Yolande’s swart face, with its upturned nose, numerous moles, small scar upon the brow, and as his eyes moved on to Laura’s face, flushed now and smiling—as he stood there, both hands upon his walking-stick, reflecting that it was good to have chosen as he had—something twisted softly within him and he knew pain once more.
At first, he was unable to analyze the feelings. Always, however, they returned to him as accompaniment to his recollection of that tableau: the two of them moving about the package-laden table, leafing through the foilpages of the books, holding the recording cassettes at arm’s length the better to study their dimensional-covers, chatting about their new treasures, excluding him.
It was a feeling of separation, resulting in a small loneliness, as well as something else. The two women had a thing in common, a thing which did not exist between Laura and himself. They shared a love for the arts—an area of existence for which he could allow himself little time. And, too, they were together in a war zone—alone in the room with the opponent Time laying siege. It had brought them closer together, sharing the experience of defying death and age. They had this meeting place where he was now a stranger. It was…
Jealousy, he decided suddenly; and was quite surprised by the notion. He was jealous of that which they had come to share. He was shocked at the thought, confused. But then, impressed as he always had been with a sense of personal unworthiness, he recognized it as another evidence of this condition. He then thought to banish the feeling.
But then, there had never been another Laura, or another
Was it guilt that came now in response? He was not certain.
He coded a fresh cup of coffee, and when it arrived, smiled into the eyes—his own, perhaps—which regarded him through the steam and darkness of its surface. His knowledge of the ancients stopped short with their legends and theories of Time. Chronos, or Time, had been castrated by his son, Zeus. By this—it had been contended—the priests and oracles meant to convey the notion that Time is incapable of bringing forth any new thing, but must ever repeat himself and be satisfied with variations of that which has already been begotten. And that is why he smiled…
Was not Laura’s disease a new thing come into the world? And was not his mastery of Time now to be the cause of another new thing—its remedy?
Guilt and jealousy alike forgotten, he sipped his coffee, tapping his fingers the while, to the beat of an unheard tune—as the particles and antiparticles danced before him in the chambers—and thus time was kept.
And when, later that evening, the viewer chimed, that evening as he sat there, white-smocked, before the Tachytron, archaic glasses pushed up onto his forehead, cold cup of coffee before him on the console, as he sat looking inside himself, he put aside remembered guilt for a premonition.
The viewer chimed again. That would be one of the doctors…and it was… The results of his latest experiments—rainbow journeys where no physicist had ever gone before—had been integrated with the work the doctors had been doing, and his premonition became a hallelujah reality.
He went to tell Laura they had won; went to the room outside which Time lay siege with growing frustration; went to restore the full measure of his love.
Where he found them, making love. Alone, outside the room where Time now waited smugly, savoring the taste of victory finally, Carl Manos lived more lifetimes than
They wanted to stay together, of course. He had not needed to ask that. Alone together in the timeless room where they had found love, the room Carl Manos could never again enter. He still loved her, that could never be changed. And so, he had only two choices.
He could work for the rest of his unworthy life, to pay for the power to keep the room functioning. Or he could turn it off. To turn it off he would have to wait. Wait for Time the Victor to turn his all-consuming love into a kind of hate that would compell him to stop the room’s functions.
He did neither. Having only two choices, he took a third course, a choice he did not have, had never had.
He moved to the console and did what had to be done, to
Yolande sat reading. Neruda, again. How she always came back to him!
On the bed, what had been Laura lay decomposing. Time, unaware that all, including himself, would be victims, had caught up, had won victory finally.
“ ‘Come, diminutive life,’ ” she read, “ ‘between the wings / of the earth, while you, cold, crystal in the hammered air, / thrusting embattled emeralds apart, / O savage waters, fall from the hems of snow.’ ”
She laid the book in her lap, then sat back in the chair, eyes closed. And for her, the years passed swiftly.
