In the evening there were the adventures, a lot of chases and escapes. Jeremy watched everything but the shows where innocent men were suspected of some crime. Then he would say, “No, no, that’s no good”—he didn’t like feeling anxious for people. He would ask me to locate a comedy, or some medical show where the only deaths were preordained. When the commercials came on, the senior citizens used the time to go get a sweater or a bite to eat but Jeremy and I sat still. These things can grow on you after a while. You admire the actors’ faces. You get fond of the background music. That funny little chewing gum dance. The Coca-Cola song where everybody seems to like each other.
When bedtime came Jeremy went without saying good night. I might as well not have been there. First he would blink and then rub his eyes and then he would wander off, sort of aimlessly, and a little while later I would hear the water running in the downstairs bathroom. Then I would go to bed myself. I didn’t sleep well. I lay curled on my side for hours, listening to the house settle down and grow quiet as if it were folding itself up, huddling inward away from the world outside. Or if I slept I might suddenly awake, at two or three or four in the morning. I sat up strangled in bedclothes, much too hot, dry-throated. It was September now and some nights the steam heat came on. The radiators warming up smelled dusty and bitter; the house seemed like an old person, all rattling bones and coughs and stale breaths.
Other painters have blue periods and rose periods, but Jeremy didn’t. His changes were in depth, not color. A flat period, a raised period. A three-dimensional period. What comes after three-dimensional? Four-dimensional. “You’re making a time machine,” I said to him.
“Hmm?”
“That explains all those weird thingummies you’re sticking in.”
“Weird? I don’t understand why you say that.”
But there he went, gluing a plastic banana from Pippi’s toy grocery store into the lower right-hand cubbyhole. Next a curly-handled baby’s feeding spoon. Poor Rachel. Objects sat jumbled in every cubicle, most of them metallic. The whole thing had the makeshift look of some mad inventor’s scale model. Is it any wonder I thought of time machines?
“Time must be the explanation for everything,” I told him. “Time loops. Little tangles in time that get knotted off from the main cord. You, for instance,” I said, and he looked up. “Do you know why you make your pieces? You’re in a time loop.”
“I am?”
“You’re cut off from the main cord. That’s how you see clearly enough; you have more distance. Maybe this statue is a sort of notation, like what archeologists jot down when they’re on a dig. You’re just visiting. But are you aware of it?”
I didn’t expect him to take me up on that, but he did. Not to the point, exactly, but, “I’ve often thought,” he said, “if I went back, you know, back in time somehow, I would never be able to show anyone how to make a radio.”
“Why would you want to?” I asked him.
“What I mean is that the twentieth century has been wasted on me, don’t you see.”
“Of course. It’s not your time.”
“I wish it were,” Jeremy said.
“No, Jeremy! Don’t you get what I’m saying? If you weren’t off in a time loop you wouldn’t be making pieces the way you do.”
“I still wish,” Jeremy said.
Then he sat down on the floor and began peeling dried glue from his fingers, like a surgeon stripping off his rubber gloves. Usually that meant he had finished work for the day. His schedule was so peculiar — three hours walking around and around the piece giving it quick shy glances, then ten minutes’ work and down he would go in this sodden heap on the floor. I slid off the couch and squatted in front of him. “Ghosts, now,” I told him. “I’ve just figured out what they are. Do you know?”
“No.”
“They’re people from the past, our ancestors, come to visit us in a time machine. Well, of course! Maybe they’re here by accident. Maybe they don’t even know what’s happened to them. They wander in. ‘Good heavens,’ they say, what’s going on? How’d I get here?’ Then they step back into their time loop, try another period. That’s why they keep fading away like they do. I bet you’ve haunted a lot of places, Jeremy.”
“I feel so hungry,” Jeremy said.
“Martians, take Martians. How come we think they’re from another planet? They’re from our planet, Jeremy, twenty centuries in the future. Wearing helmets against our outdated atmosphere and looking a little different on account of evolution. Our descendants, come back to do a little historical research.”
“Well, perhaps,” said Jeremy. “You may be right.” He gathered glue peelings into a little heap on the floor. He said, “Do you know how to make waffles?”
“No.” I took the glue peels from him and rolled them around in my hand. I had so much I wanted to say to him, and it wasn’t very often he would let me get face to face like this. “Have you ever had something just vanish, with no explanation? And you never found it again?”
“Oh yes.”
“Maybe your descendants took it.”
“They did?”
“The Martians, so-called. Maybe it’s their weakness, sticky fingers. Some of our belongings, you know, will be priceless antiques someday, and of course the Martians know exactly which ones. Know what we should do when we find something missing like that? Buy about twenty more. Like an investment. Why, right now I’ve lost my belt with the fringe. I’ve looked everywhere for it. In the fortieth century they may not even wear belts. Shouldn’t I buy a whole stack and save them up?”
“I’m so hungry, Olivia,” Jeremy said. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes, but wait, I want to ask you something.”
“I don’t believe we had any breakfast.”
“Listen. Which are you, Jeremy? A descendant, or an ancestor. Do you know?”
“What?”
“Do you know what time you’re from? Do you? Think, Jeremy. I want to find this out.”
But all Jeremy said was, “I wish you could learn how to make waffles.”
Then I slammed my hand down on his, which was resting on his knee, and he started and drew back. But instead of removing his hand he left it there, and after a long motionless minute he said in a faraway voice, “How cool you are.”
I thought he must be trying to sound hip.
He slid his hand away. Still leaning back, he reached out and touched the end of a strand of my hair with one fingertip. “You’re so cold,” he said.
Then I understood. It seemed I understood all about him now. “I am always cold,” I told him. “Never warm. Mary was warm.”
“You’re not,” he said.
We stared at each other, not smiling at all.
He liked me in the colors of ice, pale blues and grays and whites, everything smooth, preferably shiny. He never said so, but I knew. He never had to say anything at all any more. Sometimes we went days without speaking or looking at each other, and we never touched, even accidentally. We just moved about side by side, in step. We sat in identical dusty green chairs in the dining room, watching housewives win electrical appliances. When they won they screamed and hugged the emcee and took his face hard between their hands to kiss him on the lips. “I used to win things,” Jeremy said. One woman jumped up and down and landed wrong on her spike heels and twisted her ankle. Jeremy and I watched without changing our expressions, like two goldfish looking out of a goldfish bowl.