Free Time Travail by Howard Waldman Page B

the contemporary mess, the cracks, the
dirt, the stains, the roaches.)
    But now he knew the way to give the machine
vertical and maybe later horizontal freedom. Some of the images to
recapture were upstairs in this house, but most of them were in the
other house, the blonde’s house, standing where the old house had
stood. Wouldn’t I like to see the other people who had lived in the
old house? There had been his mother and father, younger, his
uncle, his grandparents. There had been himself and myself,
younger.
    Wouldn’t I like to see Rachel Rosen?
    No, I said out loud as though he’d spoken not
scrawled that crazy invitation. I forced my mind into emptiness and
listened on for a while to the game with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Pirates evened up as Hank Greenberg connected and sent the ball
into the center-field grandstands. Then there was a burst of static
and Red Barber’s voice faded. The static slowly faded too. Now the
only sound was a painful snore coming alongside me on the cot where
Harvey was sleeping.
     
    When I pulled myself up out of the silent
cellar it was almost two in the afternoon. I went past Hanna
slouched in the armchair looking at TV. She was chewing a candy bar
and drinking beer. I climbed the stairs to the bedroom, leaving
behind me the vulgar contemporary TV voices. I pulled the curtains
and collapsed on the bed.
    Baseball was the thing that flashed on (or
the thing that I allowed to flash on) in my built-in display
monitor. It was all there, saved on my hard-drive. I marveled at
the capacity of my hard-drive to restitute all that early junk.
Actually it may have been a sign of debility, of the daily loss of
gigabytes, as in A Space Odyssey where the hero removes memory-unit after memory-unit and
the poor murderous super-computer HAL is finally reduced to
babbling early things like “Mary had a little lamb.”
    The uniformed figures started coming back.
His contraption was a primitive time machine of sorts, apparently.
But the images they induced in my mind were a million times
superior to the poor distorted ones his screen displayed, if I
could believe his description of myself pedaling away for the
Static Electricity Machine in a flickering blur. On my back,
staring up at the mottled ceiling I was able to summon up
weak-chinned Peewee Reese, shortstop, swarthy Harry Lavaghetto on
third, of course slugger Dolph Camilli on first. Wasn’t somebody
chunky called Hodges on second base? Hadn’t I got the Brooklyn
infield in the early 1940s?
    For hours I safely resurrected baseball. I
couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe my hard-drive was softening but I
extracted lots of things from it tucked away for decades but saved
and available like the line-up of the unbeatable St Louis Cardinals
with their sluggers-row, the pansy Philadelphia Athletics, hitless
wonders, guided by ancient Connie Mack, a gentlemen so a loser,
into eighth place, year after year.
     
    I even started salvaging a day in Ebbet’s
Field, good seats behind the catcher. Even a stain of mustard from
the hotdog ( HeissHund I say
as a joke) on my scorecard which records St Louis’ two homeruns in
the third inning. Brooklyn going into the last inning has a string
of goose eggs. Now I explain the fine points to her even though she
doesn’t know the basic rules of baseball. I see her politely
intense look as I explain a double play. She must be bored, but
like so much else, doesn’t allow it to show.
    I want to say I’ll teach her baseball.
“ Ich werde
dich Baseball lernen ,” I
say in my atrocious German, learned practically for her sake. She
thanks me politely, corrects the verb and adds, “Dear.” Of course
it’s not the inconceivable English word. It’s the indirect personal
object dir instead
of dich . But that
intimate form of “you” is almost as good as “dear” even though it’s
no more than a corrective echo of my verbal intimacy with her in
her unwanted language.
    The crowd rises to its feet yelling. She
rises with