LOCKER ROOM

It is Christmas Eve and Toby is alone in the locker room. The old YMCA building has been sold and only a few boys still stay on. They have moved into the locker room because it is warmer and the showers are there.

Now all the other boys have gone away somewhere for Christmas and Toby knows that most of them will not be coming back, since the building has to be vacated by January 18, 1924. Toby is reading The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then …

I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling …

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing …

The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.… The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band.… Minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring …

There is a stew simmering on a gas ring and occasionally Toby stirs it, listening to the chimes from the Salvation Army mission across the street playing “Silent Night.” He remembers other Christmases, the smell of pine and plum pudding and the oil smell of his steam engine.

He had been brought up in a three-story red brick house in a middle-western town. When he was six years old his parents died, in the flu epidemic of 1918. After that, a series of uncles and foster parents took care of him.

Nobody wanted Toby for long, though he was a beautiful boy with yellow hair and huge blue eyes like deep lakes. He made people uneasy. There was a sleepy animal quiescence about him. He never talked except in answer to a question or to express a need. His silence seemed to hold a threat or a criticism, and people didn’t like it.

And there was something else: Toby smelled. It was a sulfurous rank animal smell that permeated his room and drifted from his clothes. His father and mother had had the same smell about them, and they kept a number of pets: cats, raccoons, ferrets and skunks. “The little people,” his mother called them. Toby took the little people with him wherever he went, and his uncle John, an executive on the way up, liked big people.

“John, we have to get rid of that boy. He smells like a polecat,” Toby’s aunt would say.

“Well, Martha, perhaps there’s something wrong with his glands.” The uncle blushed, feeling that glands was a dirty word. Metabolism would have been much better …

“That’s not all. There’s something in his room. Something he carries about with him. Some sort of animal.”

“Now Martha.…”

“I tell you, John, he’s evil.… Did you notice the way he was looking at Mr. Norton? Like some horrible little gnome.…”

Mr. Norton was John’s boss. He had indeed been visibly discomfited by Toby’s silent appraising stare.

Looking back, Toby could see the twinkle of Christmas-tree ornaments. Far away his father points to Betelgeuse in the night sky. The locker room holds the silence of absent male voices like a deserted gymnasium or barracks.

The boys have built a partition of beaverboard and set up their cots in this improvised room. There is a long table with initials carved in the top, folding chairs, and a few old magazines in the main room where the gas ring is located. In one corner is a withered Christmas tree that Toby pulled out of a trash can. This is part of his stage set. He is waiting for someone.

He tastes the stew. It is flat and the meat is tough and stringy. He adds two bouillon cubes. Another fifteen or twenty minutes. Meanwhile, he will take a shower. Naked, waiting for the water to heat up, he is examining the graffiti in the toilet cubicle, running his hands over phallic drawings with the impersonal interest of an antiquarian. He is a plant, an intrusion. He has never seen the other boys, a whiff of steaming pink flesh, snapping towels, purple bruises. He leans against the wall of the toilet as silver spots boil slowly in front of his eyes.

Christmas Eve, 1923: You can see the old YMCA building. Someone he carried with: Hi/ …

“Hi. It’s me, Toby.”

His father points to a few boys still staying there … the shower’s silence. Other boys have gone away. Part time in this improvised room. Building has to be vacated by the folding time machine where the gas ring is hot occasionally. Toby pulled out of the mission, stage set, other Christmases. His part is six years old in the epidemic. Toilet cubicle, his old face, remote parents. Sleepy animal whiff of naked flesh Christmas geese in the sky. Silent night for someone died waiting for the graffiti in 1918. If you ask for something solid as shirt and pants walks … long sight you read The Monkey’s Paw? Years over phallic drawings snapping towels and purple bruises.…

Toby dresses and walks back into the “living room,” as they call it. A man is sitting at the table. He is thin and white-haired with blue eyes. His pants and shirt are red-and-white-striped like peppermint. A long patched coat is folded on the chair beside him. Wisps of fog drift from the lapels.

“Well, Toby, and what would you like for Christmas?”

“Well, sir, I guess people ask for a lot of silly things, so I’d like to ask your advice before making up my mind.”

“Yes, Toby, people do ask for silly things. They want to live forever, forgetting or not knowing that forever is a time word and time is that which ends. They want power and money without submitting to the conditions under which power and money are granted. Now I’m not allowed to give advice but sometimes I think out loud. If you ask for something solid like power or money or a long life, you are taking a sight-unseen proposition.… Now, if you ask for an ability…”

“I want to learn how to travel in time.”

“Well, you could do a lot worse. Makes you rich just incidentally. But it can be dangerous.…”

“It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.”

Toby experienced a feeling of ether vertigo as he was pulled into a whirling black funnel. Far away, as if through a telescope, he could see someone sitting at a table, a slim youth of about twenty with yellow hair and brown eyes.

A fluid plop and he was inside the youth, looking out. He was sitting in a restaurant somewhere, taste of paper-thin cutlet, cold spaghetti, and sour red wine in his mouth. The waiters looked ill-tempered and tired. Now he became aware of someone sitting at an adjacent table, so obviously looking at him that they seem for a moment to be alone in the restaurant. It was a woman of about twenty-six, neither well nor poorly dressed, with an older man and woman, probably her parents. She had, Toby thought, one of the most unpleasantly intrusive faces he had ever seen, set in an oily smile or rather a knowing smirking cringe with a suffocating familiarity that pressed on his being like a predatory enveloping mollusk.

Toby began to feel quite faint. Suddenly he spoke without moving his lips: “You’ll never get into a nice gentile country club with a look like that hanging out of your Jew face.… We like nice Jews with atom bombs and Jew jokes.…”

Dead silence, wild-eyed faces looking for the source of this outrage.

“Ach Gott!” A Jewish waiter slumped to the floor in a faint.

Toby shifted his attention to a table of blacks. “Yes and the right kind of darky too, singing sweet and low out under the mimosa, not feeding his black face in the same restaurant with a white man and getting his strength up to rape our grandmothers.”

Next a table of Latin American diplomats.

“You greasy-assed Mexican pimps. Why don’t you go back to your syphy cathouses where you belong?”

“That’s telling them!” said a southern American voice.

“Go screw a mud puppy.… And if there’s anything worse it’s a murdering mick with a bomb in his suitcase.”

A suitcase by a table of Irishmen began to tick. Toby put money on his check. He lifted his wineglass to the table of Jews: “You Jews is so warm and human. I offer to you that most beautiful of all toasts: L’chaim! To Life!…”

He was moving towards the door. “You blacks got soul.” As he passed the Latin Americans, he twitched his hips. “Qué rica mamba.… When Irish eyes are smiling…” In the doorway, Toby whipped his scarf around his neck and shouted back into the room without moving his lips, so it seemed to echo from every corner …

“Bugger the Queen!”

*   *   *

He opened the door and heavy palpable darkness blew in with a reek of brimstone. He sprinted for the corner in a black cloud, his red scarf trailing out behind him like a burning fuse. Shouts behind him. Breaking glass.

Here was 44 Egerton Gardens. He opened the door with his key, slid in and shut the door, leaning against it. A blast outside, sirens, words in his head: “Air raid … the blitz.”

He felt his way to his room at the head of the stairs. As soon as he opened the door, the sound of breathing and the smell of sleep told him that someone else was there. He touched a shoulder.

“Hello, I’m John Everson. Hope you don’t mind doubling up like this.”

“It’s all right.” Toby stripped to his underwear and slid in beside him.

They lay there, listening to the explosions. The bombs seemed to walk in a leisurely way up and down Brompton Road. A smell in the room, not just of warm young flesh. It was a rank musky ozone smell, the smell of time travel.

*   *   *

Toby woke up in a dark cottage. Mother was not back yet. He was alone and very frightened. The cottage was in Gibraltar and he knew the floor plan in the dark.

He went from his room into the sitting room and looked into his mother’s room. The bed was empty, as he knew it would be. The lights would not turn on. He lay down on her bed but the fear was there as well.

He went back to his room and tried to turn on the lights. None of them would turn on. Now even the light in his own room would not work.

He opened the cottage door and went out. Dawn light outside, but a heavy darkness lingered inside the cottage like a black fog. He resolved not to spend another night there.

Who would not spend another night there? He was two people—the boy who lived in the cottage and someone else.

He saw a boat. Durban to Gibraltar. A slim youth with yellow hair and brown eyes in a blue uniform and nautical hat was the first mate. Two officers and a crew of eight on the brigantine.

*   *   *

The boy’s mother is back from the pub where she works as a barmaid. She is sprawled fully dressed on the bed in a drunken sleep. He looks around at the potted plants, a tapestry on the wall with a minaret, an ivory elephant, a glass mouse on a shelf. In the front room, a hot plate, a square yellow tea can with Chinese characters, a faucet dripping into a rusty sink. Two men are in the room: one a thin man in his thirties with a receding chin and a pasty face, and the other a priest with reddish hair and bloodshot eyes.

Slowly the boy takes inventory of the sleazy decorations, a brass bowl with cattails in it on the mantel of the nonfunctioning fireplace, a wobbly table with a tasseled lamp, three chairs, a couch, and an army blanket.

He is the boy, but also a concerned visitor, an uncle or godfather. He is preparing to leave. Outside the cottage is a steep weed-grown slope covered with Christmas rubbish and artificial snow. He hates to leave the boy there.

On the slope, a paper paddle wheel turns slowly in the wind. Written on the wheel: THE MISSING AND THE DEAD.

The priest is talking to the mother and the other man.

“Do be careful, and if anything goes wrong don’t hesitate to contact me.”

Dead fingers in smoke pointing to Gibraltar. “Captain Clark welcomes you aboard. Set your watches forward an hour.” British we are, British we stay. Marmalade and tea in the shops, ivory elephants, carved ivory balls one inside the other, jade trees, Indian tapestries of tigers and minarets, watches, cameras, postcards, music boxes, rusty barbed wire, signal towers.

Coming in for a landing, he hears a tired gray priest voice:

“And how long will you be staying, Mr. Tyler?”