Quicker than the eye Read online

  «No, exhilarate my heart, oxygenate my blood!» cried Wetherby, and there he was in a chicken-yard he had trampled flat, paths some sixty feet around on which he now flailed his metal machine with scythings of ankle, toe, heel, and leg, sucking air, gusting out great laughs. «See? I do not fall! Two legs, two wheels, and: presto!»

  «My God!» cried Dr. Goff, eyes thrust forth like hardboiled eggs. «God's truth! How so?!»

  «I fly forward faster than I fall downward, an unguessed law of physics. But lo! I almost fly. Fly! Good-bye horses, doomed and dead!»

  And with «dead» he was overcome with such a delirium of pant and pump, perspiration raining off him in showers, that with a great cry, he wobbled and was flung, a meteor of flesh, over and down on a coop where the chickens, in dumb feather-duster alarms, exploded in shrieks as Wetherby slid in one direction while his vehicle, self-motivated, wheels a-spin, mounted Dr. Goff, who jumped aside, fearful of being spliced.

  Wetherby, helped to his feet, protested his trajectory:

  «Ignore that! Do you at last understand?»

  «Fractures, wounds, broken skulls, yes!»

  «No, a future brave with motion, 'tween my legs. You have come a long way, Doctor. Will you adopt and further my machine?»

  «Well,» said the doctor, already out of the yard, into the house, and to the front door, his face confused, his wits a patch of nettles. «Ah,» he said.

  «Say you will, Doctor. Or my device dies, and I with it!»

  «But.. .» said the doctor and opened the outer door, only to draw back, alarmed. «What have I done!» he cried.

  Peering over his shoulder, Wetherby expressed further alarm. «Your presence is known, Doctor; the word has spread. A lunatic has come to visit a lunatic.»

  And it was true. On the road and in the front garden yard were some twelve or twenty farmers and villagers, some with rocks, some with clubs, and with looks of malice or outright hostility caught in their eyes and mouths.

  «There they are!» someone cried.

  «Have you come to take him away?» someone else shouted.

  «Yah» echoed the struggling crowd, moving forward.

  Thinking quickly, Dr. Goff replied, «Yes. I will take him away!» And turned back to the old man.

  «Take me where, Doctor?» whispered Wetherby, clutching his elbow.

  «One moment!» cried the doctor to the crowd, which then subsided in murmurs. «Let me think.»

  Standing back, cudgeling his bald spot, and then massaging his brow for rampant inspiration, Dr. Goff at last exhaled in triumph.

  «I have it, by George. A genius of an idea, which will please both villagers, to be rid of you, and you, to be rid of them.»

  «What, what, Doctor?»

  «Why, sir, you are to come down to London under cover of night and I will let you through the side door of my museum with your blasphemous toy of Satan .

  «To what purpose?»

  «Purpose? Why, sir, I have found the path, the smooth surface, the road you spoke of at some future time!»

  «The road, the path, the surface?»

  «The museum floors, marble, smooth, lovely, wondrous, ohmigod, for all your needs!»

  «Needs?»

  «Don't be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart's content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts, careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all night till dawn!»

  «Oh, dear God,» murmured Wetherby, «why didn't I think?»

  «If you had you would've been too shy to ask!»

  «The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow's paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite's cheeks! Smooth as Apollo's rump!»

  And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.

  «Don't cry,» said Dr. Goff.

  «I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?»

  «My good man, here's my hand!»

  They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor's cheek, also.

  «The excitement will kill me,» said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.

  «No better way to die! Tomorrow night?»

  «But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your museum?»

  «If anyone sees, say you're a gypsy who's stolen treasure from a distant year. Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I'm off.»

  «Be careful downhill.»

  «Careful.»

  Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer said:

  «Did you see the lunatic?»

  «I did.»

  «Will you take him to a madhouse?»

  «Yes. Asylum.» Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. «Crazed. Worthless. You will see him no more!»

  «Good!» said all as he passed.

  «Grand,» said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.

  And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant yard?

  Dr. Goff snorted.

  «Think on it,» he said, half aloud, «no more horses, no

  more manure! Think!»

  And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.

  At the End of the Ninth Year

  1995 year

  «Well,» said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, «here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year.»

  Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journal saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. «What?»

  «I said,» said Sheila, «the ninth year's finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're married anymore.»

  Thomas floored the Journal on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his head this way and that, and said:

  «Not married?»

  «No, that was another time, another body, another me.» She buttered more toast and munched on it philosophically.

  «Hold on!» He took a stiff jolt of coffee. «Explain.»

  «Well, dear Thomas, don't you remember reading as children and later, that every nine years, I think it was nine, the body, churning like a gene-chromosome factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows, belly, bum, and earlobes, molecule by molecule-«

  «Oh, get to it,» he grumbled. «The point, wife, the point!»

  «The point, dear Tom,» she replied, finishing her toast, «is that with this breakfast I have replenished my soul and psyche, completed the reworking of my entire flesh, blood, and bones. This person seated across from you is not the woman you married-«

  «I have often said that!»

  «Be serious.»

  «Are you?» he said.

  «Let me finish. If the medical research is true, then at the end of nine years there is not an eyebrow, eyelash, pore, dimple, or skin follicle in this creature here at this celebratory breakfast that in any way is related to that old Sheila Tompkins married at eleven a.m. of a Saturday nine years ago this very hour. Two different women. One in bondage to a nice male creature whose jaw jumps out like a cash register when he scans the Journal. The other, now that it is one minute after the deadline hour, Born Free. So!»

  She rose swiftly and prepared to flee.

  «Wait!» He gave himself another jolt of coffee. «Where are you going?»

  Hallway to the door, she said, «Out. Perhaps away. And who knows: forever!»

  «Born free? Hogwash. Come here! Sit down!»

  She hesitated as he assumed his lion-tamer's voice. «Dammit. You owe me an explanation. Sit!»

  She turned slowly. «For only as long as it takes to draw a picture.»

  «Draw it, then. Sit!»

  She came to stare at her plate.
«I seem to have eaten everything in sight.»

  He jumped up, ran over to the side table, rummaged more omelet, and banged it in front of her.

  «There.! Speak with your mouth full.»

  She forked in the eggs. «You do see what I'm driving at, don't you, Tomasino?»

  «Damnation! I thought you were happy!»

  «Yes, but not incredibly happy.»

  «That's for maniacs on their honeymoons!»

  «Yes, wasn't it?» she remembered.

  «That was then, this is now. Well?»

  «I could feel it happening all year. Lying in bed, I felt my skin prickle, my pores open like ten thousand tiny mouths, my perspiration run like faucets, my heart race, my pulse sound in the oddest places, under my chin, my wrists, the backs of my knees, my ankles. I felt like a huge wax statue, melting. After midnight I was afraid to turn on the bathroom light and find a stranger gone mad in the mirror.»

  «All right, all right!» He stirred four sugars in his coffee and drank the slops from the saucer. «Sum it up!»

  «Every hour of every night and then all day, I could feel it as if I were out in a storm being struck by hot August rain that washed away the old to find a brand-new me. Every drop of serum, every red and white corpuscle, every hot flash of nerve ending, rewired and restrung, new marrow, new hair for combing, new fingerprints even. Don't look at me that way. Perhaps no new fingerprints. But all the rest. See? Am I not a fresh-sculpted, fresh-painted work of God's creation?»

  He searched her up and down with a razor glare.

  «I hear Mad Carlotta maundering,» he said. «I see a woman hyperventilated by a midlife frenzy. Why don't you just say it? Do you want a divorce?»

  «Not necessarily.»

  «Not necessarily?» he shouted.

  «I'll just simply . . . go away.»

  «Where will you go?»

  «There must be some place,» she said vaguely, stirring her omelet to make paths.

  «Is there another man?» he said at last, holding his utensils with fists.

  «Not quite yet.

  «Thank God for small favors.» He let a great breath gust out. «Now go to your room.»

  «Beg pardon?» She blinked.

  «You'll not be allowed out for the rest of this week. Go to your room. No phone calls. No TV. No-«

  She was on her feet. «You sound like my father in high school!»

  «I'll be damned.» He laughed quietly. «Yes! Upstairs now! No lunch for you, my girl. I'll put a plate by your door at suppertime. When you behave I'll give you your car keys. Meanwhile, march! Pull out your telephone plugs and hand over your CD player!»

  «This is outrageous,» she cried. «I'm a grown woman.»

  «Ingrown. No progress. Re-gress. If that damn theory's true, you didn't add on, just sank back nine years! Out you go! Up!»

  She ran, pale-faced, to the entry stairs, wiping tears from her eyes.

  As she was hallway up, he, putting his foot on the first step, pulled the napkin from his shirt and called quietly, «Wait …»

  She froze in place but did not look back down at him, waiting.

  «Sheila,» he said at last, tears running down his cheeks now.

  «Yes,» she whispered.

  «I love you,» he said.

  «I know,» she said. «But it doesn't help.»

  «Yes, it does. Listen.»

  She waited, hallway up to her room.

  He rubbed his hand over his face as if trying to massage some truth out of it. His hand was almost frantic, searching for something hidden around his mouth or near his eyes.

  Then it almost burst from him. «Sheila!»

  «I'm supposed to go to my room,» she said.

  «Don't!»

  «What, then?»

  His face began to relax, his eyes to fix on a solution, as his hand rested on the banister leading up to where she stood with her back turned.

  «If what you say is true-«

  «It is,» she murmured. «Every cell, every pore, every eyelash. Nine years-«

  «Yes, yes, I know, yes. But listen.»

  He swallowed hard and that helped him digest the solution which he now spoke very weakly, then quietly, and then with a kind of growing certainty.

  «If what you say happened-«

  «It did,» she murmured, head down.

  «Well, then,» he said slowly, and then, «It happened to me, too.»

  «What?» Her head lifted a trifle.

  «It doesn't just happen to one person, right? It happens to all people, everyone in the world. And if that's true, well, my body has been changing along with yours during all the last nine years. Every follicle, every fingernail, all the dermis and epidermis or whatever. I never noticed. But it must have.»

  Her head was up now and her back was not slumped. He hurried on.

  «And if that's true, good Lord, then I'm new, too. The old Tom, Thomas, Tommy, Tomasino is left behind back there with the shed snakeskin.»

  Her eyes opened and she listened and he finished. «So we're both brand-new. You're the new, beautiful woman I've been thinking about finding and loving in the last year. And I'm that man you were heading out to search for. Isn't that right? Isn't that true?»

  There was the merest hesitation and then she gave the smallest, almost imperceptible nod.

  «Mercy,» he called gently.

  «That's not my name,» she said.

  «It is now. New woman, new body, new name. So I picked one for you. Mercy?»

  After a moment she said, «What does that make you?»

  «Let me think.» He chewed his lip and smiled. «How about Frank? Frankly, my dear, I do give a damn.»

  «Frank,» she murmured. «Frank and Mercy. Mercy and Frank.»

  «It doesn't exactly ring, but it'll do. Mercy?»

  «Yes?»

  «Will you marry me?»

  «What?''

  «I said, will you marry me. Today. An hour from now. Noon?»

  She turned at last to look down at him with a face all freshly tanned and washed.

  «Oh, yes,» she said.

  «And we'll run away and be maniacs again, for a little while

  «No,» she said, «here is fine. Here is wonderful.»

  «Come down, then,» he said, holding his hand up to her. «We have another nine years before another change. Come down and finish your wedding breakfast. Mercy?»

  She came down the steps and took his hand and smiled.

  «Where's the champagne?» she said.

  Bug

  1996 year

  Looking back now, I can't remember a time when Bug wasn't dancing. Bug is short for jitterbug and, of course, those were the days in the late thirties, our final days in high school and our first days out in the vast world looking for work that didn't exist when jitterbugging was all the rage. And I can remember Bug (his real name was Bert Bagley, which shortens to Bug nicely), during a jazz-band blast at our final aud-call for our high school senior class, suddenly leaping up to dance with an invisible partner in the middle of the front aisle of the auditorium. That brought the house down. You never heard such a roar or such applause. The bandleader, stricken with Bug's oblivious joy, gave an encore and Bug did the same and we all exploded. After that the band played «Thanks for the Memory» and we all sang it, with tears pouring down our cheeks. Nobody in all the years after could forget: Bug dancing in the aisle, eyes shut, hands out to grasp his invisible girlfriend, his legs not connected to his body, just his heart, all over the place. When it was over, nobody, not even the band, wanted to leave. We just stood there in the world Bug had made, hating to go out into that other world that was waiting for us.

  It was about a year later when Bug saw me on the street and stopped his roadster and said come on along to my place for a hot dog and a Coke, and I jumped in and we drove over with the top down and the wind really hitting us and Bug talking and talking at the top of his lungs, about life and the times and what he wanted to show me in his front parlor-front parlor,
hell, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom.

  What was it he wanted me to see?

  Trophies. Big ones, little ones, solid gold and silver and brass trophies with his name on them. Dance trophies. I mean they were everywhere, on the floor by his bed, on the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, but in the parlor, especially, they had settled like a locust plague. There were so many of them on the mantel, and in bookcases instead of books, and on the floor, you had to wade through, kicking some over as you went. They totaled, he said, tilting his head back and counting inside his eyelids, to about three hundred and twenty prizes, which means grabbing onto a trophy almost every night in the past year.

  «All this,» I gasped, «just since we left high school?»

  «Ain't I the cat's pajamas?» Bug cried.

  «You're the whole darned department store! Who was your partner, all those nights?»

  «Not partner, partners,» Bug corrected. «Three hundred, give or take a dozen, different women on three hundred different nights.»

  «Where do you find three hundred women, all talented, all good enough, to win prizes?»

  «They weren't talented or all good,» said Bug, glancing around at his collection. «They were just ordinary, good, every-night dancers. I won the prizes. I made them good. And when we got Out there dancing, we cleared the floor.

  Everyone else stopped, to watch us there out in the middle of nowhere, and we never stopped.»

  He paused, blushed, and shook his head. «Sorry about that. Didn't mean to brag.»

  But he wasn't bragging. I could see. He was just telling the truth.

  «You want to know how this all started?» said Bug, handing over a hot dog and a Coke.

  «Don't tell me,» I said. «I know.»

  «How could you?» said Bug, looking me over.

  «The last aud-call at L.A. High, I think they played 'Thanks for the Memory,' but just before that-«

  » 'Roll Out the Barrel'-«

  »-'the Barrel,' yes, and there you were in front of God and everyone, jumping.»

  «I never stopped,» said Bug, eyes shut, back in those

  years. «Never,» he said, «stopped.»

  «You got your life all made,» I said.

  «Unless,» said Bug, «something happens.»