Uptown Local and Other Interventions (24 page)

Robby took the hint and “vanished” his complete collection of Captain Thunder up to a box up in the attic, carefully lined with a cut-up garbage bag to keep out any moisture from possible leaks, with the comics all lined up inside it, in order, each in perfect condition in its own glassine bag. He already knew what every kid eventually discovers—that adults already have so much on their minds that if you stop showing them one specific thing that bothers them, the odds are good that they’ll forget all about it in a matter of days. His mother, also, had given him the hint he needed after he got a bad mark on a math test. “This wouldn’t happen if you weren’t spending all your time on those trashy comics; don’t let me catch you reading them any more, or I’ll burn them!”

Robby immediately made sure she would be unable to catch him reading them, by no longer doing so anywhere except in bed, under the covers, after he knew his mother was asleep—he would set his alarm on its softest setting and wake up at three AM to read, again and again, the single comic he brought down from the attic box once a week when his mom and dad were both busy downstairs in the shop, and afterwards hid in the floor space under a loose board beneath his bed. To cover himself, Robby made sure the last thing his mother saw at night was him reading a math textbook, and whenever she chanced to notice how tired he looked in the morning, she would say approvingly to his father, “Look how hard your son has been studying…!”

And then, just as things seemed to be settling down, the attic caught fire.

Or part of it did. It had started as a chimney fire, started by something truly idiotic: his father throwing a pizza carton onto the dining-room fireplace. It burned too hot in a chimney that hadn’t been swept in a long time, and set the built-up soot on fire. By the time the fire department got there, the chimney fire had actually gone out…but the heat of the scorching brick had set alight the old dried-out roof joists nearby, and the roof over the extension of the house was already burning merrily, the tar under the shingles melting and dripping down from the roof. To put the fire out before it got at the rest of the house, the firemen had had to chop a hole in the main attic roof and go into the side attic that way. Everything in the extension, from roof to cellar, was drenched. The whole neighborhood was standing around, wondering at the damage, by the time the firemen left.

The main part of the house was undamaged. But now Robby found himself staring at his bedroom ceiling in the darkness. He’d lain awake for a long time, thinking about how lucky he was that the comics hadn’t been hurt. But they were still up there. At least it wasn’t going to rain tonight. He’d thought of moving them, but that would have made his mother start asking him questions—and in the present atmosphere of soot, dripping water and frayed tempers, Robby hadn’t wanted to start anything he’d regret later.

The trouble was…he heard something. Now he realized what had awakened him. There was someone up there.

It came to him instantly what was happening, and Robby slipped out of bed, threw on a bathrobe, opened his door silently, and went down the hall to the attic stairs. The whole town had been out there, today. Someone had seen the hole in the roof. Someone had sneaked over the back gate into the service yard and found the ladder, where it always stood by the feed shed, and right now someone was upstairs, going through their attic, seeing what he could steal…

Robby crept up the stairs, avoided the one that creaked, opened the attic door, closed it behind him, and stood still, letting his eyes get used to the dark. Starlight and a blue-green light reflected from the sodium-vapor streetlights out behind the back gate showed him a silhouetted form: a man, moving, a man with a box in his hands. Robby’s comics box…

“What are you doing?” Robby whispered, furious. “Put it down!”

The man froze just for a second, looked at him, his expression impossible to read in the dark. Then he was gone, down the ladder.

Robby rushed to the hole, yelled after him, “Stop! Thief!  Mom, dad, there’s somebody up here, there’s a thief!”—but by the time the house was roused, it was too late. The man had vanished into the darkness. “What did he take?” Robby’s father had said, and when Robby wailed, “My comics!”,  his mother had said “Is that all? What a relief that’s all he had time for.
 
But why would anyone do that? It’s not like they’re worth anything.”

“A collector,” Robby said, already beginning to drown in grief. “Captain Thunder number one is worth fifty dollars now…”

His mother looked over at the burnt, dripping roof joists. “Oh, don’t be silly. There are much more valuable things up here…”

“It’s downstairs he had his eye on, more likely,” Robby’s father said. “Probably he was going to try to get down into the shop from the inside, and break into the cash register or the safe. Instead, when you startled him, he just grabbed the first thing he could lay hands on and ran off.” He gripped Robby’s shoulder. “Good job, son. We’ll get that roof fixed first thing in the morning…”

They went back to their beds, and sent Robby back to his own. But there was no more sleep for him that night, and no more joy, ever. They were blind to the dreams that had been in the box, blind to the joy that those dreams had brought him…and now the dreams were gone.   

For a week’s worth of mourning he tried to tell his mom or his dad how he was hurting…but they couldn’t understand
. You’ll get over it, you’ll feel better in a while, it’s nothing important…
was all he heard. After a while, when Robby bought new comics and found they didn’t make him happy any more, because he was afraid they too might get stolen, he started to wonder if they were right. Eventually, a few months later, with a final sob of the soul, he gave up, and walled the pain away in the back of his mind, along with the old joy he had felt in the company of heroes. There his childhood ended. Rob turned all his attention to the kind of dreaming that seemed to please his dad and mom—the kind that showed him how to build practical, useful things. Over time he and his work became very useful indeed, to millions of people. His dad had died very pleased with him. So had his grandfather, who had given him the clock
. You were always good at taking care of things
,  the old man had said a few weeks before he died.
You’ll take good care of this—
  Robby hadn’t contradicted him, briefly remembering the one thing that had really mattered to him, the thing he hadn’t been able to protect.
 
Now, though, he stood again in the attic, looking at the place in the shadows where the box had been, a long time ago, and he thought:
If I can just beat the thief there…

…I can save the box.

Uli was there too, looking at him, grey-eyed, businesslike, but with that hint of edge about the eyes, like steel, sharpened. He said, 
…But you know this also: otherwise you would not have come to me again.

           
This is a repair I think you must make.

            It is irresponsible to leave something broken when it can be fixed—

*

            Rob woke up with a sudden terrible shock, one of those falling-out-of-bed sensations that leaves you with your heart racing as you stare at the ceiling. Diffuse, warm sunlight lit the white-walled hotel room and glanced off the Miro print over the head of the bed: afternoon light.
I dozed off for just a few moments,
  he thought. But when he looked at his watch, he saw that the calendar had clicked over one. It was tomorrow.

           —
and I’m going to be late if I don’t get going!

            He showered and dressed and caught the Number Four tram back up to the Hauptbahnhof, pausing only long enough to look at the easels in front of the newsstand again. Today they were shouting about the licensing of a new brothel in the city, but there was nothing about the disappearance of Robert Willingden. Rob grinned and went out into the April morning again, back to the tram stand, where he caught the Number Twelve tram to the suburbs.

            About twenty minutes later, the tram slid humming to a stop in front of the neighborhood’s post office. Rob got out and walked east to the curve in the road, bore right around it past the CoOp grocery store, where an orange-coated employee was bringing in the metal racks that displayed plants and potting soil outside during the day, and made his way two doors down to Uli’s shop.

Uli met him at the door, let him in, locked the door behind him and turned the front-of-shop lights off. From the back room, cool light spilled through the door. “This way,” Uli said.

Beyond that door lay a prosaic, linoleum-floored, gray-walled, windowless workshop lit by a pair of downhanging fluorescent tubes. Plain pinewood workbenches, each with its own magnifying lamp and all perfectly tidy, were lined up all around the walls. The one nearest the door had a PC and monitor sitting on it, the monitor showing what looked like a display from some spreadsheet software, possibly the shop’s accounts. The other workbenches all had delicate tools hung on pegboards up above them, and clocks of every kind sat on the work surfaces, the shelves, or, in the case of the various grandfather and grandmother clocks, on the floor, awaiting repair.

My grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf…so it stood forty years on the floor…
sang a child’s nervous voice in Rob’s head. He tried to ignore it as he looked at the other clocks hanging on the walls, ones that seemed to be working fine—case clocks, antique civic clocks, and a giant version of the beautiful black-and-white Bauhaus SBB railway clock with the “hovering” red-dot second hand that pushed the minute hand over on reaching the 12: next to that, also black and white, an over-jeweled Felix-the-Cat clock with eyeballs that glanced from left to right and back again in time with the pendulum tail: clocks with simple and ornate faces above every kind of pendulum imaginable—discs, mostly, though near the door Rob saw one with a silver crescent moon at the pendulum’s end. And, back in the shadows between two wall-mounted cupboards, with a pair of  massive pinecone weights dangling below it, hung a mahogany-and-ebony cuckoo clock covered with more carved scrollwork, antlers, acanthus leaves and other beautifully graven garbage than Rob had ever seen in his life.

            “First one of those I’ve seen here,” Rob said, as Uli went over to one of the desks and rolled what looked like a gray steel typist’s chair away from it toward the middle of the room.

            Uli grunted. “German,” he said, and went to the other side of the room to pull a red metal toolchest on wheels over beside the chair. “I would not have it here, but unfortunately the tourists expect them.”

            “I thought they all came from here,” Rob said.

            Uli gave him an ironic look. “Given the choice to either make cuckoo clocks or Rolexes,” he said, “which would
you
make? Those things come from the Black Forest…and meanwhile, Orson Welles has a lot to answer for. Sit down.”

            Rob sat down while Uli pulled the top drawer of the chest open, revealing a number of white paper packages about two inches square. Rob suddenly realized that what he had mistaken for a toolchest was actually a medical crash cart, and besides the white paper packages, that top drawer was packed with soft foam cut out to hold numerous syringes and vials. Rob looked nervously at these as Uli picked up one of the paper packages and peeled it open, revealing a round self-stick electrode pad with a trailing wire. Rob found that he had begun to shiver. He hoped Uli would think it was anticipation. “You said you were going to tell me how this works…”

            “Ach, there I would come up against the language barrier,” Uli said as he parted Rob’s hair toward the back and touched the electrode into place: Rob felt a brief sting of cold from the lubricant on the pad. “You of all people should know how it is. Talk tech to the nontechnical, it just muddies the waters.” Uli peeled another electrode and chose another spot, put the contact in place. “The mind knows the time. The heart knows the place. Everything else is engineering.”

            “Oh, come on. That’s just too New Age and fuzzy. There must be more to going back in time than just using the mind and the heart.”

            “Hold still. The spatial dislocation is handled by limbic and subcortical keleological transit processes,” Uli said, putting another electrode in place at the base of Rob’s skull. “Does that sound better to you? And if it does, why? All instrumentality or intervention useful to humans in this world can at base be classified in one of three ways:
 
as science, magic or chicken soup. There is no special virtue in science when one of the others will do as well. To prefer it all the time is snobbery. Though in this case it is valid enough: you think the mind and the body are two different things? Where one goes, the other must follow, assuming there are no unresolved issues to interfere. But anyway, it is not back in time you go,” Uli said. “It’s forward.”

            Rob’s eyes widened. “Uh, listen, Uli…”

            “It is the same thing,” Uli said, unconcerned, as he fastened on the last electrode. “You cannot change the way the river flows. Time can only go forward: it is no good as time otherwise. You will just go all the way around, until you come out behind the originating time instead of in front of it. Is this a problem for you?”

            Rob blinked. “It seems a long way out of the way, I guess…”

            “The only way to get where you are going,” Uli said, “
cannot
be out of your way. By definition.” He checked the last connection. “Ready?”

            Rob looked around him, carefully, so as not to dislodge the wires. “Is that all?”

            Uli consented to smile just a little. “You want flashing lights? Machines that make big impressive noises like overheating engines when they run? Unfortunately I must disappoint you.” He went over to the PC on its desk by the wall, checked it, tapped briefly at its keyboard, did something with its mouse, clicked a couple of times, and then walked carefully once right around Rob, checking the big blind free-standing cabinets there.