Magic Time Read online

  “This city’s a sewer.”

  Ely Stern stood by the window, glowering down at the glinting towers of the city in the early morning sun. From behind the mahogany desk, Dr. Louis Chernsky considered the tall, lean figure: slicked-back, shining black hair, black Italian suit, handmade shoes, white linen shirt, black silk tie. White-gold Piaget on his wrist, white gold at his belt buckle. A stiletto of a man.

  Sitting behind one’s desk was no longer really de rigueur for a therapist; in some circles it was frowned on. But on these Monday and Thursday mornings Chernsky appreciated the added distance it provided between him and this particular client.

  The mood of Stern’s litany was always the same, only the specifics varying. “Water’s poison; air’s poison. I can’t stand the art in the galleries anymore. And the women, they look at you, they’re measuring you for the settlement.”

  Chernsky stroked his beard, aware as always of how much of a Freudian caricature it made him seem, and doing it anyway. “You’re feeling isolated.”

  Stern gazed out the big plate window. Like Jesus on the mountain, the kingdoms of earth lay before him, jagged eruptions of steel and stone and glass. The view added fifteen hundred dollars a month to the cost of the office, but Chernsky felt his clients would have scorned a lesser locale.

  Stern’s eyes were dreamy. “I have this image in my mind. Going to the top of a building, emptying a flamethrower on the passing parade.”

  Dr. Chernsky’s mind drifted to the Winnebago, and the route he and Susan had planned last night. Down to D.C., then through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only two weeks, three days and twenty-two minutes away. His mouth said, “You’re feeling discontented.”

  “No, I’m the guy they modeled the happy face after.” Stern snapped open a case (white gold, of course), fished out a Gitanes, lit it with a high, blue flame. He drew the smoke in deep then exhaled impatiently, turned on Chernsky. “I’ve been paying you more than the national debt. Just when do I start to feel better?”

  Never; you’re a narcissist, thought Chernsky. But he said, “This isn’t only about feeling better. It’s about gaining insight.”

  “Insight?” Stern’s black eyes flared. “I’ll give you an insight. I wake up every morning of my life angry. I wake up, and I feel like—”

  A timer on Chernsky desk chimed. “We have to stop now.”

  “We do,” Stern said, eyes hooded. Chernsky shrugged and let the silence settle. Stern blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “Well,” he said. “Guess I’ll just go to the office and spread a little insight.”

  WEST VIRGINIA—8:13 A.M. EDT

  Fred retreated from the side of the bed when the door opened. He doubted their mother even saw him as she made her way across to where Bob lay. “Good morning, son.” Her voice was the soft archaic lilt that people who weren’t from Appalachia made jokes about: hick and redneck and hillbilly. At Stanford, Fred had worked very hard to eradicate it from his speech, but now the very intonations were like a gentle song.

  She adjusted the pillows, checked all the tubes and bags and readouts. She’d nursed at Kanawha General before her agoraphobia got so bad, and from her letters and phone calls Fred knew that the nurse who looked after Bob in the daytime had filled her in on what to check and what to do.

  “Mom,” said Bob, but of course she didn’t hear. She fussed gently with the catheter bag, changing it as neatly as a nurse would have, talking all the while.

  “Now, let’s get rid of this old nasty bag and get you a nice new clean one. How you feeling this morning, honey? I had a tolerable night myself, but you know what I dreamed? I dreamed I was having dinner at Winterdon’s, you know that pretty restaurant they got on Hope for Tomorrow? Well, I was at the next table from Steve and Christine—you remember me telling you how Christine lied to Steve about being pregnant with Lester’s baby and broke into the hospital and switched the blood tests. . . .”

  She talked on, a soft babble like a brook, and from his corner Fred watched her with concern, pity and an agony of guilt. She looked worse than she had the last time he’d seen her, unbathed, her hair uncombed, clothed in a pastel warmup suit with food stains on the bosom and thighs. Damn it, Fred thought, she used to get out a little. Doesn’t Wilma Hanson still come over Saturdays and make sure she gets out to a store or something? He realized he hadn’t phoned Wilma in weeks.

  Nor his mother, he thought. Had he called at all last week? He must have. He couldn’t remember.

  He was so tired.

  “. . . locked in a dungeon under her house. But when Shelley went in to talk to Veronica, Owen accidentally threw the switch that sealed the door, so they were imprisoned together. . . .” She wrung out a washcloth in a little basin of water, carefully cleaned Bob’s face, what she could reach of it around the tubes and the tape. Fred felt, across the room, his brother’s gratitude for the touch, for the knowledge that she cared, that she would perform these services for him and not leave him to the care of a paid nurse.

  In the onyx dark of the screens, green and orange lines ran their jagged little courses, like a background whisper, All is well. All is well.

  Mrs. Sanders, the day nurse, had told Fred three weeks ago that the doctors regarded Bob as hopeless, one of those heartbreaking, financially backbreaking cases in which the patient is stable but cannot be revived: A miracle, was what she had said. It will take a miracle.

  But if the Source Project succeeded, a miracle was exactly what would become available.

  Oh, Bob, whispered Fred, going to the side of the bed, gently reaching out to touch his brother’s still shoulder. Hang on. Hang on.

  Chapter Five

  WEST VIRGINIA—8:14 A.M. EDT

  Glancing through the ground-floor window, half-screened by the honeysuckles that seemed sometimes as if they would devour the big white house on Applby Lane, Wilma watched Arleta Wishart sponge her son’s face and thought, I’ll give her a call as soon as I’m back from the Piggly-Wiggly.

  Since the collision that had broken her son’s neck, Arleta, who had never dealt particularly well with the world, had barely been out of the house. Even as a child, Wilma had been aware that Mrs. Wishart Next Door didn’t like to be outside. Playing in the yard, she’d see the small, sloppily stout young woman in her white uniform hurrying to the bus stop to go to her job, then hurrying home again in the evenings as if she didn’t dare pause. As if there were snipers in the trees, ready to shoot her if she didn’t get to a safe place quickly.

  Later, as a teenager, Wilma made it a point to drop by in the afternoons, or ask her to go shopping or to a movie on those frequent Saturdays when the twins would be at Little League and her husband, Dr. Wishart Sr., was working at the hospital. Like the boys—who were seven years her junior—Wilma had come to accept that this was the way Mrs. Wishart was. Her husband always answered the telephone or the door, always took her shopping. When she wasn’t with him, she looked confused.

  The summer Wilma graduated from high school, a movie house opened in Beckly that had deliciously icy air-conditioning and fifty-cent matinees. She and Mrs. Wishart—whom she was calling Arleta by that time—would spend at least one afternoon a week there and hit Farrell’s for ice cream afterward. But at three o’clock Arleta would always say, “I have to get home now.”

  If asked, she’d come up with a good reason concerning the boys or her husband. But from the way she said it, Wilma understood that Arleta was afraid.

  Call Arleta, she made a mental note to herself, as soon as the nurse gets there. In the hurly-burly of graduation and the closing-down of the school year, followed immediately by the family uproar surrounding her sister Siobhan’s third divorce, it had been weeks since Wilma had been able to make sure her friend got out of the house. Arleta had never been a churchgoer, and, with no brothers in the mine, she’d never made friends in the Women’s Club that went hand in hand with the union. Wilma knew there was no one else in town with whom Arleta went anywhere.

  An odd fami
ly, she reflected, without judgment. The twins wrapped up in one another almost to the exclusion of anyone else, the mother wrapped up in the boys, particularly after Dr. Wishart’s death. One of the other young teachers at Allegheny High School had dated Bob for a while—past Arleta’s shoulder, through the open windows, Wilma could see the beautiful photo Bob had taken of the woman. But talking to her later, Wilma gathered that Bob’s story was pretty much the same as his mother’s. The mind always just slightly elsewhere, and at ten o’clock, I have to get home.

  Nothing weird or perverted, as far as she knew—and the way the teachers and the other volunteers at the Senior Center gossiped, Wilma knew pretty much everything that went on in Boone’s Gap. No ugly secrets or bloodstained bed-linen hidden in closets. Just fear. Fear so great that it excused them, in their own eyes, from participation in the pain of real life.

  Then Bob had driven down to Beckly late one night to pick up some medicine for Arleta and had come around a curve into the path of a semi heading for State Highway 64.

  Call Arleta, she thought. And call Fred. And though she didn’t exactly phrase it thus to herself, it went through her mind, watching the graying, chubby woman minister to the corpselike man on the bed, that if Arleta were Fred’s sole source of information about Bob’s condition, he might not be getting the whole story. Not that Arleta would deliberately lie to the son who had deserted her twenty years ago, who had visited so seldom since. But seeing her, in her pink-and-green warmups—she had at least two dozen sets of variously colored sweat garments, which had, Wilma mused, pretty much replaced housecoats in American culture— chatting about the latest doings of the vengeful Veronica and the manipulative Christine and all the other characters of the mythical town of Springdale, it struck Wilma how terribly alone Arleta seemed.

  Only her and her son. He trapped in a coma since May, she trapped by her love for him. And her fears.

  Isolated, just the two of them, in that big bright machinery-cluttered room.

  NEW YORK—8:14 A.M. EDT

  It was early morning, and already they were out. Ruining everything.

  Sam Lungo sat on his front-porch glider, in the shade of his scraggily elm, watching the world go by, or, at least, his part of it, the rectangle bordered on the west by Amsterdam, the east by Columbus, the familiar country beyond whose borders he did not venture. And why go anywhere? It was all the same, every place. He knew, he saw. Sally Jesse, Jerry, Ricki, the endless parade of vulgar people in black-and-white splendor on the old Dumont his mother had kept all those years, and which he had maintained since. Illuminated through the oil bubble in front of the screen, their grotesque faces distorted and true. Monsters, they were all monsters.

  It was no different for the denizens of the block. He knew all of them, their comings and goings, their trashy little lives, their ugly, secret selves. And he knew their names, not just what they called themselves, but their real names, discovered by close appraisal over patient time. Mr. Blotches, the Varicose Lady, Yellow Teeth, Loose Ways . . .

  They never came through his gate, into his front yard, onto his porch. His rambling Victorian Easter egg of a house was an anomaly on this block of brownstones, a gaudy interloper, like some odd trinket dropped by a careless god from the heavens. The adults never came, anyway. Their brats stole onto his property in the dead of night, threw rotten fruit and worse at his windows, scrawled their initials on his door.

  Looking out at the front yard, Sam sighed, feeling the familiar churning in his stomach. Try as he might to keep it pruned, manicured, subdued, the devil grass would keep encroaching, the weeds and thistles smothering the careful order he fought to maintain. The gate and fence were showing signs of ruination, too, growing ever more splintered and worn.

  He felt, as he had so often since Mother had gone, a sense of cataclysm coming on, rushing toward him, chaotic and malevolent. There was nothing he could do to stop it. Except watch, take note, remember. Mother had said there would be an accounting. If so, she hadn’t lived to see it. And in the forty-nine years he’d been on this earth, Sam had grown ever more hopeless that justice would come.

  “You there! You stop that!” Sam always tried for an authoritative tone, but more often than not it came out higher and more nasal than he intended. The Slave to the Mottled Terrier was out again, tethered to that nasty little wretch that sniffed at his rhododendron and squatted where it was least wanted.

  The Slave acted like he didn’t hear. But he heard, all right. “You are breaking the law!” Sam shrilled. “I’ve seen you before!”

  Reluctantly, the Slave tugged the protesting dog away. Glaring, Sam pulled the notepad from his shirt pocket, jotted in his cramped chicken scratches the specifics of event and time and day. It was all there, the microscopic history of this place, all the petty crimes they would want forgotten. But that would not happen.

  He was the witness.

  It was one of those glorious summer mornings, in which the splash of sunlight against the buildings and the lulling breezes made New York seem both exquisite and livable. But to Cal Griffin, it spoke only irony. His mind was a battlefield, and he felt the previous night’s dream like a black truth within—the choking stench of burning and blood, the screams that tore at him, his stillness, his failure of nerve.

  Spurred by these, Cal had embraced an action he knew to be undeniably, shamefully right and set Schenk free.

  But his masters would not concur.

  As Cal emerged with Tina from their fourth-floor walkup along Eighty-first toward St. Augustine Middle School, the street was alive with joggers, folks walking their dogs, kids heading for school. An image intruded on him, of a chill evening not long ago. Mr. Stern had lingered beyond his usual departure time and gestured Cal into his cavernous, intimidating office. Stern was in a strangely reflective mood and drew Cal into conversation. They spoke of the prairies, so familiar to Cal and alien to Stern, of Tina and of death. Eager to impress, Cal had ventured onto the subject of tactics, of will and action, had become talkative, even expansive. Stern’s eyes grew hooded. Then, frostily distant, he pointedly severed their brief intimacy, saying that frequently the most powerful action was inaction, that silence could be a blade.

  Recklessly, Cal had jettisoned both. Stern would learn of it, of course, and the consequences would be grave. He’d never be able to match this salary, and word would spread like a black stain. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have cared. But now, he was afraid.

  He glanced at his sister, pacing beside him in her school grays, book bag with its toe-shoe insignia slung over her shoulder. What could he possibly do, say, to maintain the sanctuary he had so carefully constructed for her? Tina had been only four when her world had been blasted away, and he had stepped in to be her anchor, her rock. Now he felt perilously seamed and cracked. And most alarming, a voice inside seemed to be calling him to release, to shatter, to see what emerged.

  His eyes lingered on Tina as she glided weightless beside him, her face a mask of indifference, counsel only to herself. With a shock of recognition, Cal realized that—outside her protective world of dance—she had duplicated his own stony mien, the impassive barrier he used to shield himself from the sea of humanity.

  “You there! Yes, you!” The voice cut across Cal’s thoughts like a scythe—a man’s voice, but querulously high.

  Sam Lungo, their neighbor, sat on his porch like some Buddha gone to seed, glaring at them, domed head glinting in the sun. Tina groaned. It was a familiar sight, and normally they would have continued on, Lungo’s abuse splintering against their backs. But surprisingly, Cal stopped and turned. Tina paused, uneasy.

  “You wadded that.” Lungo brandished his gangrenous walking stick in the direction of a spot on the sidewalk just beyond his yard. “The other day. You wadded that up and just—just excreted it.”

  Cal gazed near his feet and spied the crumpled Snickers wrapper. He hadn’t tossed it, of course. Nevertheless, he scooped up the offending paper and started off again.


  “No.” Lungo surged up to them with his odd, hunched crow’s stride. “No. You apologize.”

  Tina murmured incredulously. But Cal peered back at the little man, walled against the world, insulated from empathy, and saw himself.

  “I’m sorry,” Cal said, for Sam, for the futility of years.

  But Lungo, unused to pity, took it for mockery. He flushed, and his mouth twisted to a vinegary scowl. “Get out of here,” he hissed. “Go on!”

  Cal turned and walked stiffly away, as if bearing a wound. Tina dogged after him and, when she was able to catch his eye, gifted him with a smile.

  Lungo saw none of this, busied instead transforming them into one more outrage in his pad, as he whispered his venomous, as-yet-unanswered prayers.

  WEST VIRGINIA—8:35 A.M. EDT

  “Fred, what’s going on?” Bob reached out, grasped his brother . . . not exactly by the hands, because in addition to being entangled in the equipment that kept him alive, Bob— the physical part of Bob—was closed down. Not dead, but on hiatus, like an engine barely ticking over. His mind and thoughts and soul, the Bob that Fred had protected all through their insular childhood—the vague, helpless, gentle little photographer, the voracious reader of everything from Aeschylus to Wolverine who could barely speak to anyone he hadn’t known all his life—these were trapped in that body, entangled in it the way the body was entangled in its machinery.

  The way Fred was entangled by distance, by obligation to be elsewhere. By the walls around the Source in its gloomy complex of bunkers and Quonset huts and the mazes of barbed wire. By his colleagues’ endless squabbling.

  “I’ll take care of you,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Illusion? The self-delusion of an exhausted man, dozing at his desk and wishing with everything in him that he was home where it was safe? That he was with the only person in his life he’d ever truly loved? The fantasy that Bob was able to talk to him again, rely on him again for help and support as he’d done all his life?