The Man With No Time

“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.”

9

Hill Street Ooze

My room in the TraveLodge on Hill Street was mercifully lacking in Christmas cheer. No dying tree, no cards lining the mantel. For that matter, no mantel. I'd checked the window for a glimpse of festivity and found myself looking at a concrete wall two feet away. After my first night on the street, I'd found the dour little room a relief from the faux-Oriental facades of Chinatown, sparkling with lights and ringing with scratchily amplified carols, as