The Toynbee Convector Read online

  “Take a load off my mind,” muttered Grandpa, a tear trickling down from one trembling eyelid. “But if you can’t unload the damn fools,” advised Grandma, “bring ‘em back alive!”

  “If I live through it.”

  “Goodbye!” said four voices from under his tongue.

  “Goodbye!” Everyone waved from the platform. “So long, Grandpa, Tom, William, Philip, John!”

  “I’m here now, tool” said a young woman’s voice. Grandpa’s mouth had popped wide. “Cecy!” cried everyone. “Farewell!”

  “Good night nurse!” said Grandpa. The train chanted away into the hills, west of October.

  * * *

  The train rounded a long curve. Grandpa leaned and creaked his body.

  “Well,” whispered Tom, “here we are.”

  “Yes.” A long pause. William went on: “Here we are.”

  A long silence. The train whistled.

  “I’m tired,” said John.

  “You’re tired!” Grandpa snorted.

  “Bit stuffy in here,” said Philip.

  “Got to expect that. Grandpa’s ten thousand years old, aren’t you, Grandpa?”

  “Four hundred; shut up” Grandpa gave his own skull a thump with his fingers. A panic of birds knocked about in his head. “Cease!”

  “There,” whispered Cecy, quieting the panic. “I’ve slept well and I’ll come for part of the trip, Grandpa, to teach you how to hold, stay, and keep the resident crows and vultures in your cage.”

  “Crows! Vultures!” the cousins protested. “Silence,” said Cecy, tamping the cousins like tobacco in an ancient uncleaned pipe. Far away, her body lay in her bedroom as always, but her mind wove around them softly; touched, pushed, enchanted, kept. “Enjoy. Look around.”

  The cousins looked.

  And indeed, wandering in the upper keeps of Grandfather’s head was like surviving in a mellow attic in which memories, transparent wings folded, lay piled all about in ribboned bundles, in files, packets, shrouded figures, strewn shadows. Here and there, a special bright memory, like a single ray of amber light, struck in upon and shaped here a golden hour, there a summer day. There was a smell of worn leather and burnt horsehair and the faintest scent of uric acid from the jaundiced beams that ached about them as they jostled invisible elbows.

  “Look,” murmured the cousins. “I’ll be darned. Sure!”

  For now, quietly indeed, they were peering through the dusty panes of the old man’s eyes, viewing the great hellfire train that bore them and the green-turning-to-brown autumn world swinging by, all of it passing as traffic does before an old house with cobwebbed windows. When they worked Grandpa’s mouth it was like ringing a dulled clapper in a rusty churchbell. The sounds of the world wandered in through his hairy ears like static on a badly tuned radio.

  “Still,” Tom admitted, “it’s better than having no body at all.”

  “I’m dizzy,” said John. “Not used to bifocals. Can you take your glasses off, Grandpa?”

  “Nope.”

  The train banged across a bridge in thunders.

  “Think I’ll take a look around,” said Tom.

  Grandpa felt his limbs stir.

  “Stick right where you are, young man!”

  Grandpa shut his eyes tight.

  “Put up the shades, Grandpa! Let’s see the sights!”

  His eyeballs swiveled under the lids.

  “Here comes a pretty girl, built one brick atop another! Quick!” Grandpa tightened his lids. “Most beautiful girl in the world!” Grandpa couldn’t help but open one eye. “Ah!” said everyone. “Right, Grandpa?”

  “Nope!”

  The young Woman curved this way and that, leaning as the train pushed or pulled her; as pretty as something you might win at a carnival by knocking the milk bottles down.

  “Bosh!” Grandpa slammed his windows shut.

  “Open, Sesame!”

  Instantly, within, he felt his eyeballs redirected.

  “Let go!” shouted Grandpa. “Grandma’ll kill me!”

  “She’ll never know!”

  The young woman turned as if called. She lurched back as if she might fell on all of them. “Stop!” cried Grandpa. “Cecy’s with us! She’s innocent and—”

  “Innocent!” The great attic rocked with laughter.

  “Grandfather,” said Cecy, very softly. “With all the night excursions I have made, all the traveling I have done, I am not—”

  “Innocent,” said the four cousins.

  “Look here!” protested Grandpa.

  “No, you look,” whispered Cecy. “I have sewn my way through bedroom windows on a thousand summer nights. I have lain in cool snowbeds of white pillows and sheets, and I have swum unclothed in rivers on August noons and lain on riverbanks for birds to see—”

  “I—” Grandpa screwed his fists into his ears—”will not listen!”

  “Yes.” Cecy’s voice wandered in cool meadows remembering. “I have been in a girl’s warm summer face and looked out at a young man, and I have been in that same young man, the same instant, breathing out fiery breaths, gazing at that forever summer girl. I have lived in mating mice or circling lovebirds or bleeding-heart doves. I have hidden in two butterflies fused on a blossom of clover—”

  “Damn!” Grandpa winced.

  “I’ve been in sleighs on December midnights when snow fell and smoke plumed out the horses’ pink nostrils and there were fur blankets piled high with six young people hidden warm and delving and wishing and finding and—”

  “Stop! I’m sunk!” said Grandpa.

  “Bravo!” said the cousins. “More!”

  “—and I have been inside a grand castle of bone and flesh—the most beautiful woman in the world...!”

  Grandpa was amazed and held still.

  For now it was as if snow fell upon and quieted him. He felt a stir of flowers about his brow, and a blowing of July morning wind about his ears, and all through his limbs a burgeoning of warmth, a growth of bosom about his ancient flat chest, a fire struck to bloom in the pit of his stomach. Now, as she talked, his lips softened and colored and knew poetry and might have let it pour forth in incredible rains, and his worn and iron-rusty fingers tum bled in his lap and changed to cream and milk and melting apple-snow. He looked down at them, stunned, clenched his fists to stop this womanish thing!

  “No! Give me back my hands! Wash my mouth out with soap!”

  “Enough talk,” said an inner voice, Philip.

  “We’re wasting time,” said Tom.

  “Let’s go say hello to that young lady across the aisle,” said John. “All those in favor?”

  “Aye!” said the Salt Lake Tabernacle choir from one single throat. Grandpa was yanked to his feet by unseen wires.

  “Any dissenters?”

  “Me!” thundered Grandpa.

  Grandpa squeezed his eyes, squeezed his head, squeezed his ribs. His entire body was that incredibly strange bed that sank to smother its terrified victims. “Gotcha!”

  The cousins ricocheted about in the dark.

  “Help! Cecy! Light! Give us light! Cecy!”

  “I’m here!” said Cecy.

  The old man felt himself touched, twitched, tickled, now behind the ears, now the spine. Now his knees knocked, now his ankles cracked. Now his lungs filled with feathers, his nose sneezed soot.

  “Will, his left leg, move! Tom, the right leg, hup! Philip, right arm, John, the left! Fling! Me for his flimsy turkey-bone body! Ready? Set!”

  “Heave!”

  “Double-time. Run!”

  Grandpa ran.

  But he didn’t run across the aisle, he ran down it, gasping, eyes bright. “Wait!” cried the Greek chorus. “The lady’s back there! Someone trip him! Who’s got his legs? Will? Tom!”

  Grandpa flung the vestibule door wide, leaped out on the windy platform and was about to hurl himself out into a meadow of swiftly flashing sunflowers when:

  “Freeze! Statues!” said the chor
us stuffed in his mouth. And statue he became on the backside of the swiftly vanishing train.

  A moment later, spun about, Grandpa found himself back inside. As the train rocketed around a curve, he sat on the young lady’s hands.

  “Excuse,” Grandpa leaped up, “me—”

  “Excused.” The lady rearranged her sat-on hands.

  “No trouble, please, no, no!” Grandpa collapsed on the seat across from her, eyes clammed shut. “Damn! hell! Statues, everyone! Bats, back in the belfry! Damn!”

  The cousins grinned and melted the wax in his ears.

  “Remember,” hissed Grandpa behind his teeth, “you’re young in there, I’m a mummy out here!”

  “But—” sighed the chamber quartet fiddling behind his lids—”well act to make you young!” He felt them light a fuse in his stomach, a bomb in his chest.

  “No!”

  Grandpa yanked a cord in the dark. A trapdoor popped wide. The cousins fell down into a rich and endless maze of color and remembrance. Three-dimensional shapes as rich and almost as warm as the girl across the aisle. The cousins fell, shouting.

  “Watch it!”

  “I’m lost!”

  “Tom?”

  “I’m somewhere in Wisconsin! How’d I get here?”

  “I’m on a Hudson River boat. William?”

  Far off, William called: “London. My God! Newspapers say the date’s August twenty-second, nineteen hundred!”

  “Can’t be! Cecy?!”

  “Not Cecy! Me!” said Grandpa, everywhere at once. “You’re still between my ears, dammit, and using my other times and places as guest towels. Mind your head, the ceilings are low!”

  “Ah ha,” said William. “And is this the Grand Canyon I gaze upon, or a wrinkle in your nut?”

  “Grand Canyon,” said Grandpa. “Nineteen twenty-one.”

  “A woman!” cried Tom, “stands before me!”

  And indeed the woman was beautiful in the spring, two hundred years ago. Grandpa recalled no name. She had only been someone passing as he hunted wild straw berries on a summer noon.

  Tom reached out toward the beautiful memory.

  “Get away!” shouted Grandpa.

  And the girl’s face, in the light summer air, flew apart She drifted away, away, vanishing down the road, and at last gone.

  “Damn and blast!” cried Tom.

  The other cousins were in a rampage, opening doors, running paths, raising windows. “Look! Oh, my gosh! Look!” they all shouted. The memories lay side by side, neat as sardines a million deep, a million wide. Put by in seconds, minutes, hours. Here a dark girl brushing her hair. Here the same girl walking, running, or asleep. All her actions kept in honey-combs the color of her summer cheeks. The bright flash of her smile. You could pick her up, turn her round, send her away, call her back. All you had to say was Italy, 1797, and she danced through a warm pavilion, or swam in moonlit waters.

  “Grandfatherl Does Grandma know about her?”

  “There must be other women!”

  “Thousands!” cried Grandpa.

  Grandpa flung back a lid. “Here!”

  A thousand women wandered through a department store.

  “Well done, Grandpa!”

  From ear to ear, Grandpa felt the rummaging and racing over mountains, scoured deserts, down alleys, through cities.

  Until John seized one lone and lovely lady by the arm.

  He caught a woman by the hand.

  “Stop!” Grandpa rose up with a roar. The people on the train stared at him.

  “Got you!” said John.

  The beautiful woman turned.

  “Fool!” snarled Grandpa.

  The lovely woman’s flesh burned away. The upraised chin grew gaunt, the cheeks hollow, the eyes sank in wrinkles.

  John drew back. “Grandmother, it’s you!”

  “Cecy!” Grandpa was trembling violently. “Stash John in a bird, a stone, a well! Anywhere, but not in my damn fool head! Now!”

  “Out you go, John!” said Cecy.

  And John vanished.

  Into a robin singing on a pole that flashed by the train window.

  Grandmother stood withered in darkness. Grandpa’s gentle inward gaze touched her again, to reclothe her younger flesh. New color poured into her eyes, cheeks, and hair. He hid her safely away in a nameless and far-off orchard.

  Grandpa opened his eyes.

  Sunlight sprang in on the last three cousins.

  The young woman still sat across the aisle.

  Grandfather shut his eyes again but it was too late. The cousins rose up behind his gaze. “We’re fools!” said Tom. “Why bother with old times! New is right there! That girl! Yes?”

  “Yes!” whispered Cecy. “Listen! I’ll put Grandpa’s mind over in her body. Then bring her mind over to hide in Grandpa’s head! Grandpa’s body will sit here straight as a ramrod, and inside it well all be acrobats, gymnasts! fiends! The conductor will pass, never guessing! Grandpa will sit here. His head full of wild laughter, unclothed mobs while his real mind will be trapped over there in that fine girl’s head! What fun in the middle of a train coach on a hot afternoon, with nobody knowing.”

  “Yes!” said everyone at once.

  “No,” said Grandpa, and pulled forth two white tab lets from his pocket and swallowed them.

  “Stop him!” shouted William.

  “Drat!” said Cecy. “It was such a fine, lovely, wicked plan.”

  “Good night, everybody,” said Grandpa. The medicine was working. “And you—” he said, looking with gentle sleepiness at the young lady across the aisle. “You have just been rescued from a fete, young lady, worse than ten thousand deaths.”

  “Beg pardon?” The young lady blinked.

  “Innocence, continue in thy innocence,” said Grand pa, and fell asleep.

  The train pulled into Cranamockett at six o’clock. Only then was John allowed back from his exile in the head of that robin on a fence miles behind.

  There were absolutely no relatives in Cranamockett willing to take in the cousins. At the end of three days, Grandfather rode the train back to Illinois, the cousins still in him, like peach stones. And there they stayed, each in a different territory of Grandpa’s sun-or-moonlit attic keep.

  Tom took residence in a remembrance of 1840 in Vienna with a crazed actress, William lived in Lake County with a flaxen-haired Swede of some indefinite years, while John shuttled from fleshpot to fleshpot, ‘Frisco, Berlin, Paris, appearing, on occasion, as a wicked glitter in Grandpa’s eyes. Philip, on the other hand, locked himself deep in a potato-bin cellar, where he read all the books Grandpa ever read.

  But on some nights Grandpa edges over under the covers toward Grandma.

  “You!” she cries. “At your age! Git!” she screams.

  And she beats and beats and beats him until, laughing in five voices, Grandpa gives up, fells back, and pretends to sleep, alert with five kinds of alertness, for another try.

  The Last Circus

  Red Tongue Jurgis (we called him that because he ate candy red-hots all the time) stood under my window one cold October morning and yelled at the metal weathercock on top of our house. I put my head out the window and blew steam. “Hi, Red Tongue!”

  “Jiggers!” he said. “Come on! The circus!”

  Three minutes later I ran out of the house polishing two apples on my knee. Red tongue was dancing to keep warm. We agreed that the last one to reach the train yard was a damnfool old man.

  Eating apples, we ran through the silent town.

  We stood by the rails in the dark train yard and listened to them humming. Far away in the cold dark morning country, we knew, the circus was coming. The sound of it was in the rails, trembling. I put my ear down to hear it traveling. “Gosh,” I said.

  And then, there was the locomotive charging on us with fire and tight and a sound like a black storm, clouds following it. Out of boxcars red and green lanterns swung and in the boxcars were snorts and screams and yells. E
lephants stepped down and cages rolled and everything mixed around until, in the first tight, the animals and men were marching, Red Tongue and I with them, through the town, out to tine meadowlands where every grass blade was a white crystal and every bush rained if you touched it.

  “Just think, RX,” I said. “One minute there’s nothing there but land. And now look at it.”

  We looked. The big tent bloomed out like one of those Japanese flowers in cold water. Lights flashed on. In half an hour there were pancakes frying somewhere and people laughing.

  We stood looking at everything. I put my hand on my chest and felt my heart thumping my fingers like those trick shop palpitators you buy for two bits. All I wanted to do was look and smell.

  “Home for breakfast!” cried RT and knocked me down so he got a head start running. “Tuck your tongue in and wash your face,” said Mom, looking up from her kitchen stove.

  “Pancakes!” I said, amazed at her intuition.

  “How was the circus?” Father lowered his newspaper and looked over it at me.

  “Swell,” I said. “Boy!”

  I washed my face in cold tap water and scraped my chair out just as Mom set the pancakes down. She handed me the syrup jug. “Float them,” she said.

  While I was chewing, Father adjusted the paper in his hands and sighed. “I don’t know what it’s coming to.”

  “You shouldn’t read the paper in the morning,” Mom said. “It ruins your digestion.”

  “Look at this,” cried Father, flicking the paper with his finger. “Germ warfare, atom bomb, hydrogen bomb. That’s all you read!”

  “Personally,” said Mother, “I’ve a big washing this week.”

  Father frowned. “That’s what’s wrong with the world; people on a powder keg doing their wash.” He sat up and leaned forward. “Why it says here this morning, they’ve got a new atom bomb that would wipe Chicago clean off the map. And as for our town—nothing left but a smudge. The thing I keep thinking is it’s a darn shame.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Here we’ve taken a million years to get where we are. We build towns and build cities out of nothing. Why, a hundred years ago, this town wasn’t nowhere to be seen.