By now I’m brushing my teeth in my tiny bathroom and wondering if I can get away without taking a shower. I look at the mildewed blue tiles cracking around the tub teetering on top of cross hatched two by fours. Then I sniff my armpits. They smell worse than the bathroom.
Dream time is over. If I jump in now and skip my customary newspaper, coffee and donut I can make it to the greatest company in the universe to slave for on time. And hey, it really could be a lot worse. At least I get to be surrounded by guitars all day, and occasionally get to play them. Try doing that in some cubicle where your only perks are paranoia and claustrophobia.
It’s show time. Turn on the hot water and strip for inspection in front of the tiny sink mirror.
I wonder how this weathered, craggy, and hollow visage of mine manages to look so puffy and bloated in the toothpaste flecked mirror. Maybe it’s the forty watt energy saver bulb that lends my face an Iggy Pop cadaverousness. But probably not. Considering all the booze and lousy food I’ve stuffed into it, and all the situations I’ve put it through, ugly as it is, it’s better than I deserve. Luck is all in the seeing. When a man achieves a certain age, he gets the face he deserves.
My head is going through the old suddenly looking across the arc of life thing. Somehow I can’t think of anything I’ve ever done that was right. A life where wrong has won the fifty-fifty crap shoot with right eighty five per cent of the time. And I can’t think of any examples of the other fifteen per cent.
The only reason I figure there must be a flaw in this negativity is the fact of my survival at all. But maybe that was just dumb luck worked in by a creator with a weird sense of humor.
The almond face looking back at me is not very appealing. The left ear is a little off kilter due to the speedy ministrations of the trauma unit at Elmhurst Hospital. It had been almost completely cut off by a safety razor wielding ex-con, now deceased, who had also almost gouged out my left eye, slashed open my scalp, and left me with other cuts too numerous to remember, three months before I took up respectable employment at GSI.
It is a long elliptical visage with deeply socketed eyes that once looked soulful back when I was in my promising early twenties. Now they look back at me with shadowy bags under the cornflower blue irises.
Like the broken windows of a haunted Victorian mansion. Promising only the unkept promises of opportunities lost and beauties never to be tasted. A face with a great future behind it.
Eyes of a dog who never had his day, looking at a sunset. Bad doggy. Sad doggy. Hanging head covered with salt and pepper hair. Eyes perched above a nose red and blotchy from too many nights drunk into morning stupors, and too many morning stupors vomited into lost afternoons.
Dark shadows triangulate below the cheekbones and end in two deep rips on each side of my weak, thin lipped mouth, the right one deeper and more canyon like than the left. I suppose that one must be my "good side" for anyone who wants to snap my portrait. At least I have a chin devoid of doubling. But the neck is getting geezer wattles.
Due to the rigors of a life spent moving equipment and other sundries, the body itself is in better shape than I deserve it to be, but it’s certainly no Adonis. Nevertheless, it’s quite utilitarian, and capable of fifty clean push-ups on even a bad morning. A Toyota of a body below a momento mori head.
I give my penis a little grab and shake to see how Mr. Happy is hanging. Then I flex my biceps and wish, as I always have, that both expressions of my masculinity were bigger.
A body women still sometimes find attractive, much to my surprise. Apparently not because of its outside, but that I have always treated them with respect and assumed them to be intelligent. It never ceases to amaze me that women still report this to be a rare characteristic in men.
I, along with them, am thoroughly amazed that men as a statistical rule, still have not escaped our apish roots to quite the extent that they aspire us to. I suppose the root of much human disappointment resides in the optimistic expectation that people will "grow out" of this sort of thing, as well as so many others.
And I am sure I overly idealize women in general, evidenced by how many women remark to me that they have no female friends.
We equally share the optimist’s fate: disappointment. Selfish greedy creatures in their twenties simply grow into uglier, greedier, and more selfish creatures as they age. And, God, I must be one.
However, I’m finally respectably desperate. At the ripe old age of 38, I’ve had a paycheck for more than three straight years. A personal record breaker of outstanding proportions.
I love it when I get my recorded income report card from Social Security. It’s got more gaps than ink.
But that’s all changed. I’m a Guitar Systems International guy. A retail turbo slave, but a bill meeting turbo slave, albeit always a little late.
So I need to humor old Norm. The last thing I need as a career move would be to have him deciding to simply drop in the store and go ballistic on the sales floor.
"It’s time travel, Weasel. Pure and simple."
In the mirror I see the six foot 5 inches and 300 odd pounds of Norman the Neck looming behind my flat, hairy, clam white butt like a gargantuan Babylonian idol. Bigger and uglier than I ever remembered. My heart slams beating into my mouth.
I can’t afford to lose my composure, though. Fortunately my shift doesn’t start until one o’clock, so I’ve got plenty of hang time to back pedal his Neckishness. I grab a towel and wrap it around my shriveling manhood.
I soak a wash cloth and hit my pits with it and liquid soap. The shower will have to wait. Norman’s not to be denied for the moment. Whatever it is, however, this time I’m having nothing to do with it.
"How’d you get in here like that?"
"I just told you. Time travel, pure and simple."
Considering all the noble visionaries, dedicated scientists, and even saints of the last half century who have dared their very souls to pursue this topic, why do I have the sinking feeling that the twisted knitting needles of humanity’s absurd fate have found the nearly nonexistent Neck of Norman?
"I would say only if time travel is a skill developed in our upstate hospitality arrangements for the convicted criminal population. Nice job getting through the locks. I know Medeco ain’t all it could be, but I should have at last heard something."
"Weasel, I don’t know how to explain to you the effort it took for me to get all the way over here from three days hence in Miami. And I certainly won’t appeal to your prurient interests by describing the three lovely professionals who are awaiting me there right three days from now. But I thought I could give you credit for having enough imagination to appreciate what I’m trying to do for you.
"Go to prison get a vocabulary. Since when do you use a word like prurient?"
"I’ve been using it for the last nine years."
"Norman, it hasn’t even been seven years since I last saw you. So just when was that nervous breakdown you had? Or is there some new drug I ought to know about?"
"Try Occam’s Razor, Weasel. The simplest causal explanation-"
He disappeared!
"-is that I’m telling you the truth. And I’m telling you, Weeze, I’m dying to tell somebody about it."
Now he’s perched six feet behind me, squatting like a three hundred pound toad, in my dubiously constructed, mold tormented shower/bathtub, which is perched atop two foot boards due to the basement apartment‘s tendency to flood..
"Norman, get off that thing before you crush the motherfucker!"
"I will not crush your maternal fornicator. Given my spatio-temporal oscillation frequency, I am as light as your proverbial feather. And tougher than leather. Catch the poetry?"
"Neck, I don’t exactly know what’s been going on with you these last few years, and God only knows, we’ve had some real Kodak moments we can share at the saloon. But, right now I’ve got to hammer my pitiful ass into some kind of shape to hit the sales floor- "
"You never can be late if you transcend temporal restraints, Weasel."
"Neck, later with this sci-fi goof you’re running here. If you need an alibi, I ain’t it.
$#34If you need money, about the best I can do is spot you a twenty. And the only reason I can do that is I got paid yesterday. But if you need a shrink, or any other kind of sounding board-"
Truth to tell, now I’m terrified. Not of any of this pseudo-scientific folderol, but what if this nightmare hellhound follows me to work, wagging my termination behind him? Even after three years of employment, I’m still only a paycheck away from homelessness.
"That little demonstration didn’t help?"
"What demonstration? I figure with about nothing on your hands but time for the last five odd years, you probably have a whole deck of cute little parlor tricks you figured out, especially the fine art of getting behind somebody before they notice. And so just how good was your love life in the showers?"
"I was never in prison, except perhaps the metaphorical sense that we are all prisoners and slaves to one thing or the other. Even your lungs yearn to breath free inside a rib cage, Weasel.
And so just how lovely was that day you are going to have today? That is all going to depend on how our conversation goes now."
"Neck, despite the fact you don’t have much of one, I’ll still rip out your neck and shit down it, if you fuck with my job. I’ve been legal and happy about it for a good three years-"
"Happy huh? Then explain to me why you were telling your fellow schlemiel employee yesterday afternoon at exactly four oh seven pm that Guitar Systems Inc., was "not Hell at all, but something more akin to a concentration camp for musicians." And don’t deny it. I was just there.
"And so just how much happier are you now than you were when you were making that remark then?"
Glassy shards of ice rip through my veins. That’s as true as it gets. And there is no way he was there in the ramshackle warehouse when I made that remark.
Beep beep!! Red alert! Defenses crumbling. I could almost buy this hogwash. Nevertheless, there’s something funny looking about Neck’s demeanor.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but he suddenly looks redder, and I would almost swear that a moment before that he looked a little green around the gills. Rather like he did that night we entered the body disposal business. If he were a photograph, I’d say he was shifting in and out of different degrees of resolution, but none of the shifts are dramatic enough to make me question anything other than my own retail exhausted senses.
"Okay my time traveling flaming asshole, let me go into Devil’s Advocate mode. I still have that twenty I can lend you, so why don’t we just head on down to the OTB, and make some serious vacation plans with it?"
For the briefest lick on the neck of time I think I see a rainbow of smoky colors coruscate his body. Yet again I promise myself to quit drinking for good. This is a mega-hangover. That’s what it is. In fact it’s one of those mega-hangover dreams where you really cannot shake reality off it. Shouldn’t it be stopping just about now though?
"Weasel, don’t be so specious. And let me put it as elegantly as possible. Could you possibly remember to look up something that happened yesterday, tomorrow, and also remember to get over to the racetrack on time to bet on it today?
"See, it’s not that a time traveler doesn’t know everything that happened across the whole stretch of time and human history. It’s just that one can’t remember everything at every moment, now can one?
"Those who are associated with the Antichristian Schools have a saying. ‘The master carpenter would be wise to have borne in mind the last nails first.’"
He’s getting that diaphanous and smoky look for a moment again. What the hell did they do to him, or he to himself in the joint? I was on relatively good behaviour last night so this can’t be some kind of schizo alcoholic hangover. Hell, I even remember how I got home.
"That’s a waffle worthier of someone named Weasel than Neck, Neck."
"No waffle at all. You see, mass is not only relative to energy, as per Einstein, there are also temporal coefficients. All that I represent here is an access to superior technology.
"Please note that your earlier impression that I occasionally seem to coruscate, is no misapprehension. When a spatial-temporal phase shift is executed, a vast investment of energy is required. However a non-spatial temporal displacement is a piece of cake.
"Quantum Theory already has a whiff of this idea in the mathematics that indicates that a point mass converges on infinity when its velocity approaches that of light.
"And to answer in advance your question as to how I appear to know what you are thinking, I keep oscillating between time frames with no mass displacement, which requires little to no energy at all on my part. The principle is the same as the employment of the body’s center of gravity as a pivot point in the martial arts. It’s all in the wrists, so to speak."
"Okay, Neck. You win. Just don’t pull any displacements around me at work and everything will be fine. Please leave my job out of this. So get out of my way and let me at the sink so I can shave."
"Not to worry, little weasel. Soon you will need fear nothing like the Saturday I have already seen in store for you. Soon you will be like a God when I fill you in on this one. I look forward to the ripeness of your time."
And then he was gone. With a sigh of relief and a trembling hand I apply my handy disposable razor to my throat before I remember that I forgot to lather up. A little jet of blood and a pull at the growth beneath my jaw line reminds me.
And what was that he was telling me about time travel and memory again? BACK TO THE CONTENTS