“So another eight or nine months pass — eight or nine months! — and the thing’s fucking with me, mentally. I wasn’t working so I’ve got way too much time on my hands, all right? He’s got me turning into Lenny Bruce! I’m actually starting to get paranoid. I was on all this medication — lithium and shit — these were the pioneer days of bipolar! — but I’d stopped taking it for the reasons you always do and I started to drug a bit. That’s the cycle. OK? And I’m getting more and more fixated on this fucker. We’re getting closer to the legal endgame — is this not fantastic? — where the court’s gonna have to rule against the tinkerer’s appeal. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing all this reading — about stalkers and assassins. I’m not even sure how I got into that. But one of the books says sometimes the snapping point for these freaks is when they’re humiliated by the court system. Like if a wife gets a restraining order against her husband and he kills her when he probably wouldn’t have if she hadn’t taken that final step, hadn’t publicly confronted. I start to think (I’m also doing crystal meth, which isn’t exactly helping my thought processes): what if this guy guns me down? Right at the courthouse? I mean, I’m a semipublic figure — I wasn’t as known then as I am now… probably not too hard to find, though, right? You could spit Off-Broadway and find me in some equity waiver. What if this guy does a Stephen King — what was that movie with Jimmy Caan and Kathy Bates? — what if he kidnaps me and performs a little genital surgery? Or buries me alive in some sub-basement? This is what’s going through my head, Bertie! So I go nuts a few weeks, looking over my shoulder, checking phone messages — then I start to think, enough already. We had a court date scheduled. Now, I wasn’t sure if he was going to show, which at this point would have been worse for me, psychologically. He was probably out of options. Couldn’t maneuver anymore. I do some serious thinking, and here’s what I come up with: I’m gonna call the guy. That’s right. I’m gonna call the bogeyman on the phone. Preempt him. I must have done a shitload of coke and scotch and I don’t even want to think what. And I finally call him up at like midnight — remember, by now, in my head, he’s Arthur Bremer! — and I leave this message on his machine. He doesn’t pick up. I’m relieved — sort of. Though part of me actually wouldn’t have minded talking. So I say, See you in court. But nonconfrontational. I tell him I want to work something out — I’m talking to the machine—because I’m tired. I want to resolve it, peaceably. Totally whacked but trying to make sure my voice is friendly even though in the back of my head I’m worried he’ll pick up in the middle and say, ‘I’m gonna cut your dick off, stuff it in your mouth, and set you on fire! Put that in your time machine!’ This is how psychotic I’ve become.
“We show up in court. And there he is, King Nerd — a white, worried, harmless guy. We both sign some document saying we’re going to work it out. He writes me a check for two hundred fifty dollars. And I don’t give a shit. Fuck the money. And he’s apologetic. Had this battered briefcase. Like me! A schlemiel. I actually felt sorry for him. Then I get this brilliant idea. I’ll ask if he can sell me the time machine I saw on his shelf the day I first walked in. I don’t even care if it’s finished! I’ll buy it, as is—for the thirty-five hundred I already gave him. But first, I need to ask if he still has it. I do and he says, Yeah. So fuck it, I’ll get the sample. It won’t all have been in vain. It’ll even be funny, a kind of symbol of the folly of my great quest. So I say, Can I have that? For the two-fifty? It’s actually thirty-five hundred but I say two-fifty. Then ‘we’ll be even.’ And he says, No! Now, it wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to sell it that riled me — I mean, it was that too! — but I’m remembering the way he said it, like I was some rube who walked into Cartier to bargain them down over a necklace in the window. He was actually being smug! So I get this little smile on my face — at this point, I don’t even want to ask why he won’t sell it because the whole thing is like so piled sky-high with psychotic bullshit. Then send me a Polaroid. That’s what I tell him — but still friendly, like, OK, you win. Right? I mean, it’s so tragically risible that I thought a Polaroid would be a fitting souvenir. I asked if he’d take a snapshot — and all he had to say was yes, even if he never planned to — you know, my way of giving him a way out — and he says, No. Again! He actually said that he couldn’t. In the same smug way: like I’m a tourist being reprimanded by a guard for touching the Rodin.
“On the way home from court, I wondered if the time machine I’d seen two years earlier had been a quickie mock-up, a cardboard plant, to lure me in. I mean, more and more the guy was like someone Ricky Jay would play in a Mamet flick. But to what end? What was the big score here? Thirty-five hundred dollars and a Small Claims hassle?
“A week or so later, I was recounting the story to Clea — this is a long time ago, we’d just started seeing each other — and I have this ecstatic revelation. Almost like a religious experience. I realize this man, this tinkerer, wasn’t human. The motherfucker wasn’t real. This wasn’t my medication — or lack of it — talking. I came to the conclusion it was some kind of entity that was trying to tell me something. What it was trying to say was, you can’t go backward—and you can’t go forward, either. This… this schleppy thing was illuminating the arrogance of my aspirations, and the pain and suffering it had caused. I became absolutely convinced that if I tried calling the man’s number again, there’d be a recording. That I misdialed — or it didn’t exist. Not ‘disconnected’ but nonexistent. And if I visited where he lived, the little workshop would be shuttered or razed. You know, where you see the postman and he says, ‘That place has been vacant for thirty years.’ And I knew there’d be no record of our time in court — no paper trail. I didn’t even want to look into it. I knew it all — and oh shit! That was another thing: I lost the check. For two-fifty. Never found the check. It fucking vanished. And to this day, Bertram, I’m a thousand percent certain my theory is sound. It’s a Twilight Zone episode, OK? With a Zen twist. You believe in this kind of shit, don’t you? How can you not? And it turns out — the moral of it — is one of the most beautiful things life ever taught me.” He paused, then said, “Do you understand, Bertie?”
I nodded.
He looked out the cold, dirty window into the dark.
“The week after we built our time machine, Jeremy went off to Capri to join my father. And that was where he drowned.”
1 OK, it was hard to stay mad at him. So I’m an enabler, I’ll admit. Feel better?