I could go on forever. Not I but the things.
They could go on forever. They want to take control. I have to stop
and select. The only way you can master it all is through selection
and when selection goes (as it’s been doing, alarmingly, more and
more often these last weeks) then you’re in real trouble.
What I have to select for what I’m doing now
are the packs of dirty, ragged, wiry, hard-fisted, stinking,
expertly spitting kids, thirsting for Jewish blood that they were
quick to sniff out in the junk-heap.
Once they burst in on us knocking apart a
brass bed. Harvey fled. He was awful at all sports but he could run
fast. It must have been atavistic. They caught me and pushed me
around, but not too hard. I expected them to beat me bloody.
“Tell your clipcock pal we’ll beat the shit
out of him next time.”
They implicitly placed me outside the
circumcised.
“He ain’t no pal of mine,” I said in great
fear, purposefully imitating their grammar as my hair and eyes
involuntarily imitated theirs and their grandfathers’, those
drunken joyous participants in the pogroms my mother used to tell
me about, sparing me no details.
Harvey was afraid of them but didn’t hate
them the way I did. He would dismiss them, echoing his father, as
“human garbage”. I can still hear their favorite expression:
“clip-cocked Christ-killers”: a throatful of phonetic ugliness,
like a choking with hatred, like preliminaries to spitting.
Again I should stop because what you get
going back this way is not just the objects and people with the
original sharpness of vision but also the sharpness – sometimes
like a knife-blade – of the original emotion they aroused.
One last thing about them. Periodically they
sallied forth across the tracks and ravaged our shack and also used
it as a mass latrine and left excremental misspelled anti-Semitic
slogans on the walls.
Finally they were bested by Jewish cunning.
Even Hitler acknowledged this characteristic. His side had nobility
and courage but was a little short on brains. Harvey hooked up
wires from the Ruhmkorff coil to the brass doorknob. Twisting the
knob made the interrupter vibrate. It was set for five seconds.
Longer would have killed you. I know because one day I forgot and
tried to open the door. The amperage was low but it delivered about
40,000 volts. As I jigged about Harvey observed me with interest
until the five seconds were up and I was free although still
jerking like a spastic.
One of them must have gotten the same
treatment. They didn’t try to break in any more. Instead, they
would stand at a safe distance and heave rocks like Neanderthals at
that shack of enlightenment. Eventually we gave up the shack and
fitted up the cellar of Harvey’s house as a serious lab. By this
time Harvey’s father was beginning to take seriously the things his
son’s teachers were saying about him.
We didn’t limit ourselves to electricity and
chemistry. We’d sneak out after eleven when there was less
parasitic light in the sky from the town and scrutinize stars and
planets with a homemade Newton reflecting telescope made out of a
big cardboard shipping-tube. Harvey ground the four-inch mirror. We
split double stars and saw the four known moons of Jupiter.
The rings of Saturn were a marvel.
Venus was a big disappointment even at that
age: lovely at a distance but just a blank disk close up. I was
forewarned.
Mars wasn’t much either: a rusty blur. We
couldn’t see the canals or the polar caps. Andromeda was another
disappointment. Even at X 200 it resolved into nothing more
spectacular than a faint smear of light.
I remember what Harvey said as, teeth
chattering in the January cold (the seeing was best in winter), we
took turns peering at that nearest galaxy to ours. We were looking
at time past, he said, back at the galaxy as it had been 2.2
million years ago. He said that there were billions of stars in
that galaxy, some probably suns to planets, and you could imagine a
super-evolved race equipped with telescopes able to view the earth.
Right now they would see the earth as it was before the appearance
of man. In 2.2 million years they would see the two of us as we had
been, now, talking about them.
It sometimes happened that I guided Harvey
to new fields of study in unorthodox ways. The starting-point was
the preposterously bogus ads I came across in SF pulp-mags
(
Amazing
and
Astounding Stories
) and answered. Not the miracle cures for piles, eczema and
impotence or correspondence courses for would-be detectives but the
promised exercise of marvelous powers. Even after prolonged contact
with Harvey’s brilliant rational mind I remained a sucker for the
marvelous.
There was the “magic X-ray tube.” The
incompetent illustration showed a cloth-capped young man gazing
through it at his hand. The bones of his hand were visible. Another
cloth-capped young man – maybe the same one – was shown peering
through it at a young woman. There was a crude (artistically
speaking) hint of a petticoat beneath her long dress. You could
guess the apparatus penetrated to more essential things that
couldn’t be shown in the magazine-ad. At only thirteen my mind was
already turned that way.
The magic X-ray tube set me back $2.50. It
turned out to be a tube with a feather pasted to a celluloid disk
inside. When you looked through it the feather vaguely broke up the
object. My hand and girls were broken up but remained opaque.
Harvey whooped and jeered. He tried to
explain the principles of X-rays to me but he must have been
dissatisfied with his explanation because he started studying the
phenomenon. He decided that we would construct a Roentgen
apparatus.
The tube was expensive. To get the money I
mowed lawns till I was dizzy and swiped coins from newsstands.
Finally it was set up, the Coolidge tube and the screen coated with
zinc sulfate (ZnSO
4
). “OK,
here we go,” he said, not moving. He expected me to stick an
experimental hand in the ray. I had the rare sense to
refuse.
So he did it himself. He saw his own bones on
the screen. I was scared to. Even then I was afraid of revelation.
Harvey wanted to go further. It was his basic and fatal
characteristic. He wanted to see his own skull. He did. After, he
suffered fits of dizziness, vomited and an ugly red rash appeared
and spread on his right temple.
A couple of months later I came across an ad
for hypnotism in the SF pulp. Again the same old theme. The crude
drawing showed a strong-chinned man with rays streaming from his
eyes fixing a girl meant by the artist to be pretty and subjugated.
I sent the $1.75. Again I got stung. The seven-page booklet was
full of anecdotes. The last three paragraphs dealt in general terms
with operational techniques: magnetic passes, masterful gazes,
soothing invitations to slumber.
I tried it on Harvey, both of us seated
facing each other.
“You’re feeling sleepy, sleeepee sleeepeee
…”
I said that over and over again and woke up
frightened in my chair I didn’t know how much later. Harvey was
still in his chair but now reading a popularization of the theory
of relativity and taking notes. He wasn’t paying any attention to
me. I hammed it up. I got up goggle-eyed with my arms stuck out
like a sleepwalker and barged into him. He ended up believing that
it had all been an act. But it hadn’t been and I was scared.
None of this involvement with applied science
helped me at school. I was disastrously bad at math. Physics was a
closed book to me. Even in chemistry I got no more than C+ because
of the arithmetic involved in the reaction formulas. I longed for a
scientific career but basically I didn’t have a scientific bent of
mind. I couldn’t get beneath the surface of phenomena.
With me it was superficial aesthetic
pleasure: those light-blue crackling sparks, the swaying
pearl-necklaces of hydrogen bubbles arising from an electrode, the
pulsing green glow of white phosphorus. I remember the bulb Harvey
hooked up to the induction coil and the transfiguration of dull
daylight minerals into glowing violet jewels. I wanted to see them
that way over and over.
He humored me but what interested him was
what underlay fluorescence: excited electrons, wavelength and
amplitude, photons, Planck’s constant. I never tired of the rings
of Saturn, a self-sufficient midnight spectacle. Harvey didn’t
bother looking any more. He was beyond or rather beneath spectacle:
into orbital mathematics, gravitation and centrifugal force,
ultimate reality.
Harvey was a straight-A+ student except for
English where he couldn’t do better than a shameful B+. Even though
he shone in grammar (he was great at anything structured) his
compositions had no imagination and Shakespeare and George Eliot
bored him. In math and sciences he was a genius.
For a while we were in the same math class.
He witnessed my unending humiliation but the spin-off benefit for
me was that I sat next to him and he would sometimes let me copy
during tests. It depended on his mood.
Harvey’s presence disrupted the class even
though he never opened his mouth. He fascinated the teacher, an old
German refugee stiff as a Prussian officer. It sometimes happened
that Mr Weintraub deliberately stumped us with an impossibly
advanced problem and invited Harvey to the board.
“No,” he would say, “no,” as Harvey began the
calculation in what must have been an unorthodox way and at some
point the “noes” would stop and then a dubious “yeess” would begin
and then become a dogmatic excited “yes!”
At the end of a few weeks Harvey disappeared
from our class, a blow because now I had to confront tests on my
own. He was promoted in fast motion to junior and then senior
science and math classes and soon left the students there far
behind. He could have graduated from high school at fifteen but
they reined him back and he got his diploma only at sixteen. He
went to CCNY with the other prodigies.
By this time we’d begun to drift apart. The
bond of science had loosened.
We didn’t move in the same circuit, he once
said when I delivered his order of technical books at half
price.
I remember one of the last of our
astronomical sessions. There was a winter sky above us snapping
with stars. We were studying Jupiter with the Newton and at about
midnight Rachel joined us. I invited her to view one of Jupiter’s
mythological love-partners, Io or maybe it was Europa. Harvey stood
apart watching me adjusting the ocular for her. I wanted to tell
her, confidentially, that I was going to show her the heavens.
“
Jetzt ich zeige dich der
Sternen
,
”
I say in my awful
German.
“
Jetzt zeig’ ich dir die
Sterne
,
”
she corrects automatically. She
breathes O when she looks. I credit myself with indirect authorship
of that little spontaneous cry, so unlike her. She doesn’t retreat
from the clandestine growing proximity of my body to hers because
she’s millions of miles away in outer space.
That must have been the winter of 1943,
Harvey’s second year in college. I was still desperately trying to
graduate high school. It was in the summer of the year before that
Rachel Rosen had come over to live with the Morgensterns. The
families were vaguely related on his father’s side.
She was from Vienna originally and in 1938
she and her parents got out in time and took up residence in
France, then she was sent to Lisbon in 1940 in time and then later
to the States. Her parents were caught in France and eventually
went up in smoke. They must have got last-minute consolation at the
thought that their beloved daughter had been spared the same fate.
It goes to show you.
She was nineteen at the end but looked
younger. She had a cat called Mitzi, a photograph of her parents, a
mathematics textbook her father had written and two dolls which she
placed against her pillow.
I’ll stop there. I won’t let myself get
caught this time as I almost did a while ago with the junk-heap and
the Polacks. I have to go faster. You can’t linger. I’ve learned
that time past is like quicksand. If you run fast over it you’re
safe. But if you linger it starts eating you, foot, ankle and calf.
You get sucked under. It fills your mouth and then your lungs. Then
you’re quicksand yourself and if somebody thinks of you in the
special way Harvey and I did, much later, about our dead then I
guess you suck them down too the way you were sucked down. It’s
something like vampires or zombies.
***
Three
Not much else but at least the hill that gave
its name to the town was still there. Also on top of it the
Methodist church and its huddle of illegible stones. From there you
had a good view of Harvey’s neighborhood and what had happened to
it. It used to be a scattering of old-fashioned frame houses
standing at their ease on big lots full of clutter and billowing
wash. There’d been empty lots everywhere, fields almost, where you
could catch grasshoppers in the tall grass and butterflies off the
golden-rod in fall despite all the empty bottles and oilcans. In
summer the overall impression you got was of shabby green
space.
I hadn’t seen it for thirty years. We’d moved
to Brooklyn shortly after the fire. There was no connection. My
father had found work there. My mother went on visiting the
Morgensterns but I’d never returned to Forest Hill except once,
nine years after the fire, and that had turned out to be a bad
mistake.
I had trouble picturing the way Forest Hill
had been. Bulldozing years had reshaped the town into a chaotic
geometry of housing developments and a big shiny shopping center.
There was no more shantytown on the other side of the tracks. As a
matter of fact there were no more tracks. I wasn’t assailed by
waves of nostalgia for the butterflies on the golden-rod and what
went with it. I’d foolishly decided to walk to Harvey’s house the
long way round because of the nice September afternoon. By the time
I got to the top of the hill for the view, lugging the flight bag,
my brand-new English shoes were killing me.