Time Travel Omnibus, page 554
But all Max Kingery said, stiffly, the day we were introduced, was, “How do you do,” then he stood there nodding rapidly a number of times, finally remembering to smile; and that’s all I said to him. It was in the spring, downtown in front of the bank, I think, and Max was bareheaded, wearing a light-brown, shabby-looking topcoat with the collar turned up. He was a black-haired, black-eyed man with heavy black-rimmed glasses, intense and quick-moving; it was hard for him to stand still there. He was young but already stooped, his hair thinning. I could see this was a man who took himself seriously but his name rang no bell in my mind and we spoke politely and parted quickly, probably forever if we hadn’t kept meeting in the bakery after that. But we both came in for coffee nearly every afternoon, and after we’d met and nodded half a dozen times we were almost forced to sit together at the counter and try to make some conversation.
So we slowly became friends; he didn’t have many. After I knew him I looked up what he’d written, naturally, and found it was a first novel which I’d reviewed a year before. I’d said it showed promise, and that I thought it was possible he’d write a fine novel some day, but all in all it was the kind of review usually called “mixed,” and I felt awkward about it.
But I needn’t have worried. I soon learned that what I or anyone else thought of his book was of no importance to Max; he knew that in time I and everyone else would have to say that Maxwell Kingery was a very great writer. Right now not many people, even here in town, knew he was a writer at all but that was okay with Max; he wasn’t ready for them to know. Some day not only every soul in Mill Valley but the inhabitants of remote villages in distant places would know he was one of the important writers of his time, and possibly of all time. Max never said any of this but you learned that he thought so and that it wasn’t egotism. It was just something he knew, and maybe he was right. Who knows how many Shakespeares have died prematurely, how many young geniuses we’ve lost in stupid accidents, illnesses, and wars?
Cora, my wife, met Max presently, and because he looked thin, hungry, and forlorn—as he was—she had me ask him over for a meal, and pretty soon we were having him often. His wife had died about a year before we met him. (The more I learned about Max, the more it seemed to me that he was one of those occasional people who, beyond all dispute, are plagued by simple bad luck all their lives.) After his wife died and his book had failed, he moved from the city to Mill Valley, and now he lived alone working on the novel which, with the others to follow, was going to make him famous. He lived in a mean cheap little house he’d rented, walking downtown for meals. I never knew where he got whatever money he had; it wasn’t much. So we had him over often so Cora could feed him, and once he was sure he was welcome he’d stop in of his own accord, if his work were going well. And nearly every day I saw him downtown, and we’d sit over coffee and talk.
It was seldom about writing. All he’d ever say about his own work when we met was that it was going well or that it was not, because he knew I was interested. Some writers don’t like to talk about what they’re doing, and he was one; I never even knew what his book was about. We talked about politics, the possible futures of the world, and whatever else people on the way to becoming pretty good friends talk about. Occasionally he read a book I’d reviewed, and we’d discuss it, and my review. He was always polite enough about what I did, but his real attitude showed through. Some writers are belligerent about critics, some are sullen and hostile, but Max was just contemptuous. I’m sure he believed that all writers outranked all critics—well or badly, they actually do the deed which we only sit and carp about. And sometimes Max would listen to an opinion of mine about someone’s book, then he’d shrug and say, “Well, you’re not a writer,” as though that severely limited my understanding. I’d say, “No, I’m a critic,” which seemed a good answer to me, but Max would nod as though I’d agreed with him. He liked me, but to Max my work made me only a hanger-on, a camp follower, almost a parasite. That’s why it was all right to accept free meals from me; I was one of the people who live off the work writers do, and I’m sure he thought it was only my duty, which I wouldn’t deny, to help him get his book written. Reading it would be my reward.
But of course I never read Max’s next book or the others that were to follow it; he died that summer, absolutely pointlessly. He caught flu or something—one of those nameless things everyone gets occasionally. But Max didn’t always eat well or live sensibly, and it hung on and turned into pneumonia, though he didn’t know that. He lay in that little house of his waiting to get well, and didn’t. By the time he got himself to a doctor, and the doctor got him to a hospital and got some penicillin in him, it was too late and Max died in Marin General Hospital that night.
What made it even more shocking to Cora and me was the way we learned about it. We were out of town on vacation six hundred miles away in Utah when it happened, and didn’t know about it. (We’ve thought over and again, of course, that if only we’d been home when Max took sick we’d have taken him to our house and he’d never have gotten pneumonia, and I’m sure it’s true; Max was just an unlucky man.) When we got home, not only did we learn that Max was dead but even his funeral, over ten days before, was already receding into the past.
So there was no way for Cora and me to make ourselves realize that Max was actually gone forever. You return from a vacation and slip back into an old routine so easily sometimes it hardly seems you’d left. It was like that now, and walking into the bakery again for coffee in the afternoons it seemed only a day or so since I’d last seen Max here, and whenever the door opened I’d find myself glancing up.
Except for a few people who remembered seeing me around town with Max, and who spoke to me about him now, shaking their heads, it didn’t seem to me that Max’s death was even discussed. I’m sure people had talked about it to some extent at least, although not many had known him well or at all. But other events had replaced that one by some days. So to Cora and me Max’s absence from the town didn’t seem to have left any discernible gap in it.
Even visiting the cemetery didn’t help. It’s in San Rafael, not Mill Valley, and the grave was in a remote corner; we had to climb a steep hill to reach it. But it hardly seemed real; there was no marker, and we had to count in from the road to even locate it. Standing there in the sun with Cora, I felt a flash of resentment against his relatives, but then I knew I shouldn’t. Max had a few scattered cousins or something in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The last time he’d known any of them at all well they’d been children, and he hadn’t corresponded with them since. Now they’d sent a minimum of money to California to pay expenses, more from family pride than for Max, I expect, and none of them had come themselves. You couldn’t blame them, it was a long way and expensive, but it was sad; there’d been only five people at the funeral. Max had never been in or even seen this cemetery, and standing at the unmarked grave, the new grass already beginning, I couldn’t get it through my head that it had anything much to do with him.
He just vanished from the town, that’s all. His things—a half-finished manuscript, portable typewriter, a few clothes, and half a ream of unused yellow paper—had been shipped to his relatives. And Max, with a dozen great books hidden in his brain, who had been going to become famous, was now just gone, hardly missed and barely remembered.
Time is the great healer; it makes you forget; sometimes it makes you forget literally and with great cruelty. I knew a man whose wife ran away, and he never saw her again. He missed her so much he thought he could never for a moment forget it. A year later, reading in his living room at night, he became so absorbed in his book that when he heard a faint familiar noise in the kitchen he called out without looking up from his book and asked his wife to bring him a cup of tea when she came back into the room. Only when there was no answer did he look up from his complete forgetfulness; then his loss swept over him worse than ever.
About six months after Max died, I finished my day’s work and walked downtown. This was in January, and we’d just had nearly a month of rain, fog, and wet chill. Then California did what it does several times every winter and for which I always forgive it anything. The rain stopped, the sun came out, the sky turned an unclouded blue, and the temperature went up into the high seventies. Everything was lush from the winter rains and there was no way to distinguish those three or four days from summer, and I walked into town in shirtsleeves. And when I started across Miller Avenue by the bus station heading for Meier’s bakery across the street and saw Max Kingery over there walking toward the corner of Throckmorton just ahead, I wasn’t surprised but just glad to see him. I think it was because this was like a continuation of the summer I’d known him, the interval following it omitted, and because I’d never really had proof that he died. So I walked on, crossing the street and watching Max, thin, dark and intense; he didn’t see me. I was waiting till I got close enough to call to him and I reached the middle of the street and even took a step or two past it before I remembered that Max Kingery was dead. Then I just stood there, my mouth hanging open, as Max or what seemed to be Max walked on to the corner, turned, and moved on out of sight.
I went on to the bakery then and had my coffee; I had to have something. I don’t know if I could have spoken but I didn’t have to; they always set a cup of coffee in front of me when I come in. My hand shook when I lifted the cup, and I spilled some, and if it had occurred to me I’d have gone to a bar instead and had several drinks.
If you ever have some such experience you’ll learn that people resist believing you as they resist nothing else; you’ll resist it yourself. I got home and told Cora what had happened; we sat in the living room and this time I did have a drink in my hand. She listened; there really wasn’t much to say, I found, except that I’d seen Max Kingery walking along Miller Avenue. I couldn’t blame Cora; my words sounded flat and foolish as I heard them. She nodded and said that several times she’d seen dark, preoccupied, thin young men downtown who reminded her a little of Max. It was only natural; it was where we’d so often run into him.
Patiently I said, “No, listen to me, Cora. It’s one thing to see someone who reminds you of someone else—from a distance, or from the back, or just as he disappears in a crowd. But you cannot possibly mistake a stranger when you see him close up and see his face in full daylight for someone you know well and saw often. With the possible exception of identical twins, there are no such resemblances between people. That was Max, Cora, Max Kingery and no one else in the world.”
Cora just sat there on the davenport continuing to look at me; she didn’t know what to say. I understood, and felt half sorry for her, half irritated. Finally—she had to say something—she said, “Well . . . what was he wearing?”
I had to stop and think. Then I shrugged. “Well, just some kind of pants; I didn’t notice the shoes; a dark shirt of some kind, maybe plaid, I don’t know. And one of those round straw hats.”
“Round straw hats?”
“Yeah, you know. You see people wearing them in the summer. I think they buy them at carnivals or somewhere. With a peak. Shaped like a baseball cap, only they’re made of some kind of shiny yellow straw. Usually the peak is stitched around the rim with a narrow strip of red cloth or braid. This one was, and it had a red button on top, and”—I remembered this suddenly, triumphantly—“it had his initials on front! Big red initials, M.K., about three inches high, stitched into the straw just over the peak in red thread or braid or something.”
Cora was nodding decisively. “That proves it.”
“Of course! It . . .”
“No, no,” she said irritably. “It proves that it wasn’t Max; it couldn’t be!”
I don’t know why we were so irritable; fear of the unnatural, I suppose. “And just how does it prove that?”
“Oh, Pete! Can you imagine Max Kingery of all people wearing a hat like that? You’ve got to be”—she shrugged, hunting for the word—“some kind of extrovert to wear silly hats. Of all people in the world who would not wear a straw baseball cap with a red button on the top and three-inch-high initials on the front . . .” She stopped, looking at me anxiously, and after a moment I had to agree.
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “He’d be the last guy in the world to wear one of those.” I gave in then; there wasn’t anything else to do. “It must have been someone else. I probably got the initials wrong; I saw what I thought they ought to be instead of what they were. It would have to be someone else, naturally, cap or no cap.” Then the memory of what I’d seen rose up in my mind again clear as a sharply detailed photograph, and I said slowly. “But I just hope you see him sometime, that’s all. Whoever he is.”
She saw him ten days later. There was a movie at the Sequoia we wanted to see, so we got our sitter, then drove downtown after supper; the weather was clear and dry but brisk, temperature in the middle or high thirties. When we got to the box office, the picture was still on with twenty minutes to go yet, so we took a little walk first.
Except for the theater and a bar or two, downtown Mill Valley is locked up and deserted at night. But most of the display windows are left lighted, so we strolled along Throckmorton Avenue and began looking into them, beginning with Gomez Jewelry. We were out of sight of the theater here, and as we moved slowly along from window to window there wasn’t another human being in sight, not a car moving, and our own footsteps on the sidewalk—unusually loud—were the only sound. We were at the Men’s Shop looking in at a display of cuff links, Cora urging me once more to start wearing shirts with French cuffs so I could wear links in my sleeves, when I heard footsteps turn a corner and begin approaching us on Throckmorton, and I knew it was Max.
I used to say that I’d like to have some sort of psychical experience, that I’d like to see a ghost, but I was wrong. I think it must be one of the worst kinds of fear. I now believe it can drive men insane and whiten their hair, and that it has. It’s a nasty fear, you’re so helpless, and it began in me now, increasing steadily, and I wanted to spare Cora the worst of it.
She was still talking, pointing at a pair of cuff links made from old cable-car tokens. I knew she would become aware of the footsteps in a moment and turn to see whoever was passing. I had to prepare her before she turned and saw Max full in the face without warning, and—not wanting to—I turned my head slowly. A permanent awning projects over the store fronts along here, and the light from the windows seemed to be confined under it, not reaching the outer edge of the walk beyond the awning. But there was a three-quarter moon just rising above the trees that surround the downtown area, and by that pale light I saw Max walking briskly along that outer edge of sidewalk beside the curb, only a dozen yards away now. He was bareheaded and I saw his face sharp and clear, and it was Max beyond all doubt. There was no way to say anything else to myself.
I slipped my hand under Cora’s coat sleeve and began squeezing her upper arm, steadily harder and harder till it must have approached pain—and she understood, becoming aware of the footsteps. I felt her body stiffen and I wished she wouldn’t but knew she had to—she turned. Then we stood there as he walked steadily toward us in the moonlight. My scalp stirred, each hair of my head moved and tried to stand. The skin all over my body chilled as the blood receded from it. Beside me Cora stood shivering, violently, and her teeth were chattering, the only time in my life I’ve ever heard the sound. I believe she would have fallen except for my grip on her arm.
Courage was useless, and I don’t claim I had any, but it seemed to me that to save Cora from some unspeakable consequence of fear beyond ability to bear it that I had to speak and that I had to do it casually. I can’t say why I thought that but as Max approached—his regular steadily advancing steps the only sound left in the world now, his white face in the moonlight not ten feet away—I said, “Hello, Max.”
At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer or respond in any way. He walked on, eyes straight ahead, for at least two more steps, then his head turned very slowly as though the effort were enormous, and he looked at us as he passed with a terrible sadness lying motionless in his eyes. Then, just as slowly, he turned away again, eyes forward, and he was actually a pace or two beyond us when his voice—a dead monotone, the effort tremendous—said, “Hello,” and it was the voice of despair, absolute and hopeless.
The street curves just ahead—he would disappear around its bend in a moment—and, as I stared after him, in spite of the fear and sorrow for Max I was astounded at what I saw now. There is a kind of jacket which rightly or wrongly I associate with a certain kind of slouching, thumbs-hooked-in-the-belt juvenile exhibitionist. They are made of some sort of shiny sateenlike cloth, always in two bright and violently contrasting colors—the sleeves yellow, the body a chemical green, for example—and usually a name of some sort is lettered across its back. Teen-age gangs wear them, or used to.
Max wore one now. It was hard to tell colors in the moonlight but I think it was orange with red sleeves, and stitched on the back in a great flowing script that nearly covered it was Max K. Then he was gone, around the corner, his fading footsteps continuing two, three, four, or five more times as they dwindled into silence.
I had to support Cora and her feet stumbled as we walked to the car. In the car she began to cry, rocking back and forth, her hands over her face. She told me later that she’d cried from grief at feeling such fear of Max. But it helped her, and I drove us to lights and people, to a crowded bar away from Mill Valley in Sausalito a few miles off. We sat and drank then, several brandies each, and talked and wondered and asked each other the same questions but had no answers.
