The Masks of Time Read online

  Gradually our relationship deepened into something subtle and intimate. I suppose I was essentially an uncle figure to them, since I was in my mid-forties, Jack was not yet thirty, and Shirley hardly into her twenties; yet the tie was deeper than that. One would have to call it love. There was nothing overtly sexual in it, though I would gladly have slept with Shirley if we had met some other way; certainly I found her physically attractive, and the attraction increased as time and the sun burnished from her some of the charming immaturity that made me at first think of her as a girl and not as a woman. But though my relationship to Jack and Shirley was a triangular one, with emotional vectors leading in many paths, it never threatened to break down into a seamy experiment in adultery. I admired Shirley, but I did not — I think — envy Jack his physical possession of her. At night, when I heard the sounds of pleasure sometimes coming from their bedroom, my only reaction was one of delight in their happiness, even while I tossed in my own solitary bed. One time I brought a woman companion of my own to their place, with their approval; but it was a disaster. The chemistry of the weekend was all wrong. It was necessary for me to come alone, and oddly I did not feel condemned to celibacy even though my sharing of Shirley’s love with Jack fell short of physical union.

  We grew so close that nearly all barriers fell. On the hot days — which meant most of the time — Jack was accustomed to going about in the nude. Why not? There was no one in the neighborhood to object, and he scarcely needed to feel inhibited in the presence of his wife and his closest friend. I envied him his freedom, but I did not imitate it, because it did not seem proper to expose myself in front of Shirley. Instead I wore shorts. It was a delicate matter, and they chose a characteristically delicate way to resolve it. One August day when the temperature was well above one hundred degrees and the sun seemed to take up a quarter of the sky, Jack and I were working outside the house, tending the little garden of desert plants they cherished so warmly. When Shirley emerged to bring us some beers, I saw that she had neglected to don the two strips of fabric that were her usual garments. She was quite casual about it: setting the tray down, offering me a beer, then handing one to Jack, and both of them totally relaxed all the while. The impact of her body on me was sudden but brief. Her ordinary daily costume had been so scant that the contours of her breasts and buttocks were no mysteries to me, and so it was purely a technicality, this crossing of the line between being covered and being revealed. My first impulse was to look away, as if I were an unexpected intruder coming upon her by surprise; but I sensed that this was precisely the inference she wished to destroy, and so I made a determined effort to equal her sangfroid. I suppose it sounds comic and preposterous, but I let my eyes travel deliberately down her bareness, as though some fine statuette had been presented to me for my admiration and I was showing my gratitude by examining it in detail. My eyes lingered on the only parts of her that were new to me: the pinkish mounds of her nipples, the golden triangle at her loins. Her body, ripe and full and lustrous, gleamed as though oiled in the bright midday sun, and she was evenly tanned throughout. When I had completed my solemn, foolish inspection, I downed half my beer, arose, and gravely peeled away my shorts.

  After that we ceased to observe any taboo of nudity, which made life very much more convenient in what was, after all, quite a small house. It began to seem wholly natural to me — and, I assume, to them — that modesty was irrelevant in our relationship. Once when a party of tourists took the wrong fork in the road and came down the desert track to the house, we were so unaware of our nakedness that we made no attempt to hide ourselves, and only slowly did we realize why the people in the car seemed so shocked, so eager to swing about and retreat.

  One barrier remained forever unbreached. I did not speak to Jack about his work in physics, or about his reasons for abandoning it.

  Sometimes he talked shop with me, inquiring after my time-reversal project, asking a hazy question or two, leading me into a discourse on whatever knot currently impeded my progress. But I suspect he did this as a therapeutic act, knowing that I had come to them because I was in an impasse, and hoping that he could bring me past the sticking-point. He did not seem to be aware of current work. Nowhere in the house did I see the familiar green spools of Physical Review or Physical Review Letters. It was as if he had performed an amputation. I tried to imagine what my life would be if I withdrew wholly from physics, and failed even to picture it. That was what Jack had done, and I did not know why, and I did not dare to ask. If the revelation ever came, it would have to come unsolicited from him.

  He and Shirley lived a quiet, self-contained life in their desert paradise. They read a good deal, had an extensive musical library, and had outfitted themselves with equipment for making and playing back sonic sculptures. Shirley was the sculptor. Some of her work was quite fine. Jack wrote poetry which I failed to comprehend, contributed occasional essays on desert life to the national magazines, and claimed to be working on some large philosophical tome, the manuscript of which I never saw. Basically I think they were idle people, though not in any negative sense; they had dropped out of the competition and were sufficient unto themselves, producing little, consuming little, and thoroughly happy. By choice they had no children. They left their desert no more than twice a year, for quick trips to New York or San Francisco or London, pulling back hurriedly into their chosen environment. They had four or five other friends who visited them periodically, but I never met any of them, nor did it seem as though any of the others were as close to them as I. Most of the time Jack and Shirley were alone together, and I gather that they found one another completely rewarding. They baffled me. Outwardly they might seem simple, two children of nature romping nude in the desert warmth, untouched by the harshness of the world they had rejected; but the underlying complexity of their renunciation of the world was more than I could fathom. Though I loved them and felt that they were part of me and I of them, yet it was a delusion: they were alien beings, in the final analysis, detached from the world because they did not belong to it. It would have been better for them if they had managed to sustain their isolation.

  That Christmas week when Vornan-19 descended upon the world, I had gone to their place in deepest need. My work had become hollow to me. It was the despair of fatigue; for fifteen years I had lived on the brink of success, for brinks border not only abysses but also precipices, and I had been scaling a precipice. As I climbed, the summit receded, until I felt that there was no summit at all, merely the illusion of one, and that in any event what I had been doing was not worth the dedication I had given it. These moments of total doubt come upon me frequently, and I know them to be irrational. I suppose that everyone must give way periodically to the fear that he has wasted his life, except, perhaps, for those who have wasted their lives and who mercifully lack the capacity to know it. What of the advertising man who breaks his soul to fill the sky with a glowing, pinwheeling cloud of propaganda? What of the middle-echelon executive who pours his life into the shuttling of tense memoranda? What of the designer of automobile hulls, the stockbroker, the college president? Do they ever have a crisis of values?

  My crisis of values was upon me again. I was stymied in my work, and I turned to Jack and Shirley. Shortly before Christmas I closed my office, had mail deliveries suspended, and invited myself to Arizona for an indefinite stay. My work schedule is not keyed to the semesters and holidays of the University; I work when I please, withdraw when I must.

  It takes three hours to drive to Tucson from Irvine. I locked my car into the first transportation pod heading over the mountains and let myself be whirled eastward along the glittering track, programmed for a short-run trip. The clicking mind in the Sierra Nevada did the rest, omnisciently detaching me from the Phoenix-bound route at the right time, shunting me onto the Tucson track, decelerating me from my three-hundred-mile-per-hour velocity, and delivering me safely to the depot where the manual controls of my car were reactivated. The December weather on the Co
ast had been rainy and cool, but here the sun blazed cheerfully and the temperature was well into the eighties. I paused in Tucson to charge my car’s batteries, having robbed Southern California Edison of a few dollars of revenue by forgetting to do it before I set out. Then I drove into the desert. I followed the old Interstate 89 for the first stretch, turning off onto a county road after fifteen minutes, and leaving even that modest artery shortly for the mere capillary leading to their pocket of uninhabited desert. Most of this region belongs to the Papago Indians, which is why it has avoided the plague of development enveloping Tucson, and just how Shirley and Jack acquired title to their little tract of land I am not at all sure. But they were alone, incredible as that may seem on the eve of the twenty-first century. There still are such places in the United States where one can withdraw as they had done. The final five-mile stretch I traveled was a pebbled dirt track that could be called a road only by semantic jugglery. Time dropped away; I might have been following the route of one of my own electrons, backward into the world’s dawn. This was emptiness, and it had the power to draw forth torment from a cluttered soul like a heat pump soothing the dance of the molecules.

  I arrived in late afternoon. Behind me lay rutted gulleys and parched earth. To my left rose purple mountains dipped in cloud. They sloped off toward the Mexican border, leading my eye straight around to the flat, coarsely pebbled desert on which the Bryant house was the only modern intrusion. A dry wash through which water had not flowed in centuries rimmed their property. I parked my car beside it and walked toward the house.

  They lived in a twenty-year-old building made of redwood and glass, two stories high in the living quarters, with a sundeck to the rear. Beneath the house was its life-system: a Fermi reactor that powered the air-conditioning, the water circulators, the lighting, and the heating. Once a month the man from Tucson Gas Electric drove out to service the unit, as required by law wherever a utility has declined to run power lines and has supplied an isolated generating unit instead. The fifty-yard storage unit below the house held a month’s supply of food, too, and the water purifier was independent of city lines. Civilization could disappear entirely, and Shirley and Jack might remain unaware of it for weeks.

  Shirley was on the sundeck, busy with one of her sonic sculptures, spinning a leathery thing of intricate lines and glowing textures, whose soft birdlike twitter had immense carrying power as it crossed the desert to me. She finished what she was doing before she rose and ran toward me, arms outstretched, breasts jouncing. As I caught her and embraced her, I felt some of my weariness ebb away.

  “Where’s Jack?” I asked.

  “He’s writing. He’ll come out in a little while. Here, let me get you moved in. You look terrible, darling!”

  “So they’ve been telling me.”

  “We’ll fix that.”

  She snatched my suitcase and hurried into the house. The saucy twitching of her bare rump reassured and refreshed me. and I grinned at the two firm cheeks as they vanished from sight. I was among friends. I had come home. At the moment, I felt that I might stay among them for months.

  I went to my room. Shirley had everything ready for me: fresh linens, a few spools beside the reader, a nightglow on the table, a pad and stylus and recorder if I wanted to set down any ideas. Jack appeared. He pressed a flask of beer into my hand and I thumbed it open. We winked in mutual delight.

  That evening Shirley conjured a magical dinner, and afterwards, as warmth fled from the desert on this winter evening, we sprawled in their living room to talk. They said nothing whatever of my work, bless them both. Instead we discussed the Apocalyptists, for they had come to be fascinated by the cult of doom that now was infesting so many minds.

  “I’ve been studying them closely,” said Jack. “Do you follow it at all?”

  “Not really.”

  “It happens every thousand years, it seems. As the millennium comes to its close, a conviction spreads that the world is about to end. It was very bad toward 999. At first only peasants believed it, but then some very sophisticated churchmen began to catch the fever, and that did it. There were orgies of prayer and also the other sorts of orgies.”

  “And when A.D. 1000 came?” I asked. “The world survived, and what happened to the cult?”

  Shirley laughed. “It was quite disillusioning for them. But people don’t learn.”

  “How do the Apocalyptists think the world is going to perish?”

  “By fire,” said Jack.

  “The scourge of God?”

  “They expect a war. They believe that the world leaders have already ordained it and that hellfires will be loosed on the first day of the new century.”

  “We haven’t had a war of any size in fifty-odd years,” I said. “The last time an atomic weapon was used in anger was 1945. Isn’t it safe to assume that we’ve developed techniques for sidestepping the apocalypse by now?”

  “Law of accumulating catastrophe,” Jack said. “Static builds toward a discharge. Look at all the little wars: Korea, Vietnam, the Near East, South Africa, Indonesia—”

  “Mongolia and Paraguay,” Shirley offered.

  “Yes. On the average, one minor war every seven or eight years. Each one creating sequences of reflexive response that help to motivate the next, because everybody’s eager to put into practice the lessons of the last war. Building up a mounting intensity that’s bound to explode into the Final War. Which is due to begin and end on January 1, 2000.”

  “Do you believe this?” I asked.

  “Myself? Not really,” Jack said. “I’m simply stating the theory. I don’t detect any signs of imminent holocaust in the world, though I admit that all I know is what comes over the screen. Nevertheless, the Apocalyptists catch the imagination. Shirley, run those tapes of the Chicago riot, will you?”

  She slipped a capsule into the slot. The entire rear wall of the room blossomed with color as the playback of the telecast began. I saw the towers of Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Boulevard; I saw bizarre figures spilling out over the highway, onto the beach, cavorting beside the icy lake. Most of them were painted in gaudy stripes like mummers on the loose. Most were partly naked, and this was not the innocent, natural nudity of Jack and Shirley on a hot day, but something ugly and raw and deliberately obscene, a wanton flaunting of jiggling breasts and paint-daubed buttocks. This was a display calculated to shock: Hieronymus Bosch grotesques set loose, waggling their nakedness in the face of a world regarded as doomed. I had not paid attention to the movement before. I was startled to see a girl hardly adolescent rush before the camera, whirl, flip up her skirt, crouch and urinate in the face of another reveler who had fallen in stupor. I watched the open fornication, the grotesque tangles of bodies, the complex couplings that were more accurately triplings and quadruplings. An immensely fat old woman waddled across the beach, cheering the younger rioters on. A mountain of furniture went up in flames. Policemen, bewildered, sprayed foam on the mob but did not enter it.

  “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” I muttered. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Since July, Leo,” said Shirley quietly. “You didn’t know?”

  “I’ve been very busy.”

  Jack said, “There’s a distinct crescendo. At first it was a movement of crackpots in the Midwest — around ’93, ’94 — a thousand members or so, convinced that they’d better pray hard because Doomsday was less than a decade away. They got the proselytizing bug and started to preach doom, only this time the message came across. And the movement got out of hand. For the last six months the idea has been building that it’s foolish to waste time in anything but fun, because there’s not much time left.”

  I shuddered. “Universal madness?”

  “Quite so. On every continent the profound conviction that the bombs fall a year from January 1. Eat, drink, and be merry. It’s spreading. I hate to think of what the hysteria will be like a year from now in the supposed final week of the world. We three may be the only
survivors, Leo.”

  I stared at the screen for a few moments more, appalled.

  “Shut that thing off,” I said at length.

  Shirley chuckled. “How could you not have heard of this, Leo?”

  “I’ve been out of touch with everything.” The screen darkened. The painted demons of Chicago still leaped obscenely through my brain. The world is going mad, I thought, and I have not noticed it. Shirley and Jack saw how rocked I was by this revelation of the Apocalyptist apocalypse, and they deftly shifted the subject, talking of the ancient Indian ruins they had discovered in the desert a few miles away. Long before midnight I showed my weariness and they saw me to bed. Shirley returned to my room a few minutes later; she had undressed, and her bare body glowed like a holiday candle in the doorway.

  “Can I get you anything, Leo?”

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  “Merry Christmas, darling. Or have you forgotten that too? Tomorrow’s Christmas Day.”

  “Merry Christmas, Shirley.”

  I blew her a kiss, and she turned out my light. While I slept, Vornan-19 entered our world six thousand miles away, and nothing would be quite the same for any of us, ever again.

  THREE

  I awoke late on Christmas morning. Jack and Shirley had clearly been up for hours. There was a bitter taste in my mouth and I did not want company, not even theirs; as was my privilege, I went into the kitchen and silently programmed my breakfast. They sensed my mood and stayed away. Orange juice and toast came from the output panel of the autochef. I devoured them, punched the black coffee, then dumped the dishes in the cleaner, started the cycle, and went out. I walked by myself for three hours. When I returned I felt purged. It was too cool a day for sunbathing or gardening; Shirley showed off some of her sculptures, Jack read me a little of his poetry, and I spoke hesitantly about the obstacle to my work. That evening we dined magnificently on roast turkey and chilled Chablis.