Lost above

October 12, 1965

The lobby, as usual, smelled like a mixture of Old Spice, cheap and expensive perfumes, detergent and beneath it all, urine.
An brief gust from the outside, vehicle choked roadway, introduced the smell of grease and exhaust.
Paul McPherson was unremarkable by any and all definitions.
He awoke one day at the age of 38 and realized he had no plan and wasn't entirely sure who Paul McPherson was.
The rotating door belched him into the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Ave.
Paul nods to the elevator attendant and switches and empty briefcase from his right hand to his left.
He does this to occupy 2.5 seconds.
The elevator will travel to the 60th floor in around 39.2 seconds.
Paul now has roughly 35 seconds to decide who he is today.
The number 60 glows on the elevator panel and a cheerful "ding" signals the extension of the last 364

days.
He nods to the attendant, his name is Joshua or James, and enters the endless rectangular fluorescence of his "bread and butter".
His office is 48 overhead lights straight on, 38 IBM Selectric typewriters, 3 "good mornings", 2 "did you see the game?"'s and 1 "what happened to you?" and an abrupt left turn.
His office door is solid oak and closes with an indescribably satisfying "clack".
In 2 minutes and 38 seconds his secretary will knock, bring him a cup of coffee and exit silently.
In 4 minutes and 58 seconds Paul will push back his chair, turn towards his office window, high above New York, and will make a decision.
There are 15 items left unresolved on his desk.

Checking In.

Mrs. Wendell Jackson opens the door to room 210, at the Coronado Motor Hotel, in Fort Walton Beach Florida and switches on the light.
The room always looks the same.
Strong evening sunlight threatens through the backs of the heavy, striped curtains.
She has no luggage. This is not a place in which she’ll stay.
Not for long.
The door behind her closes with a soft rattle.
She moves into the room and picks up the ashtray from the desk, frowning at the slogan on the matchbook lying in its black plastic hollow.
“ The smartest address on the miracle strip”.
She settles into the robins- egg blue chair by the drapes, smooths her skirt, lights a cigarette and begins her wait.
Two fingers of her right hand unconsciously tuck long, still damp, auburn locks behind her right ear and hover for a moment, making sure they stay.

Behind her, beyond the drapes, and the white- washed cinderblock of the “sun terrace”, is a turquoise pool surrounded by teal and white striped umbrellas. Beneath and around the umbrellas roam the usual hotel guests, unaware of the singularity in room no. 210.
Beyond them all, the Gulf of Mexico sparkles oblivious.
It is 5pm, October 7th, 1968 and in 90 minutes the sun will set and she will reach for the phone beside the bed.
As she smokes, she remembers seeing the motor hotel for the first time, back in ’64, when she and Wendell had chosen it at random from the AAA travel guide. It was their first trip together as a married couple and the motor hotel had looked so unremarkable.
It is 5:45 pm and she rustles across the studio room and sits on the bed, beside the telephone.
Her ghost gray reflection in the TV screen shows a hunched shouldered woman, miniscule in a halo of smoke.
In 45 minutes she’ll ring the front desk.
Their first and only night in the Motor Hotel had included dinner and drinks at the Hotel bar, followed by a late night swim, in the Hotels connected indoor and outdoor pool.
Wendell had stood at the poolside rail that night, smiling at her from the edge of the dimly lit, steaming water, highball in his upraised hand, toasting her as she submerged.
A burst of bubbles.
A cloud of multicolored light, from underwater lamps.
The sudden constriction of the tunnels brief interior and…
She’d expected to surface amidst the smattering of Hotel guests lounging around the outside pool, with stars overhead and Wendell behind her, beyond the foggy glass of the pools windows.
She didn’t.
She’d surfaced into strong sunlight, a crowded pool, no sign of Wendell and the stunned beginning her prolonged panic.
Some minutes later she’d learned that not only was it a different day, but a different year.

The days and weeks after were remembered as a disjointed blur of confused questions, badges, stethoscopes, prescription pads and streaked mascara.
Hotel management, police, private investigators and psychotherapists.
No one had an answer.
But she’d kept the room keys and made a standing reservation.

It is 6:29pm and she stubs out her cigarette, checks her mascara.
She grasps the heavy handset and drags the dial to zero.
The front desk answers and she asks for room 210.
She lays the handset back in its cradle, holding her breath.
There is an intolerable pause and the usual phenomenon of her mouth going dry.
The rotary phone rings twice.
“Hello?”
“Wendell? It’s me.”
“Helen?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“On the bed, next to the telephone.”
Helens breath catches in her throat, just like it did the first time she’d returned to this room, and made this call, amidst body wracking sobs and a sense of desperation driven whim.
“So am I… when are you now?”
“1968. When are you?”
“1975. I’m sorry.”
Each year she comes to the Coronado, swims through the tunnel and emerges into a different year, still herself, and everything the same but the date and the absence of Wendell. She makes this phone call and always he answers, but from a different year of his own, sometimes closer, sometimes farther.
It’s been twelve years since the first phone call.
The phone call will only last for thirty-eight seconds.
It took years for them to learn there was no time for answers or reason.
Only the date and hope in the random.
Helen Jackson sits for a moment, soaking in his presence on the other end of her only line.
“Maybe next time…”
The dial tone begins to leak in as he replies.
“Yeah, maybe next time…”

And then he’s gone. Again.
Helen hangs up and slowly stands, smoothing her skirt again.
Checks her hair.
At the door she pauses for a moment, staring at, but not seeing, the fire escape route map and checkout instructions.
One more deep breath and she enters the hall.

Behind her, on the striped bed cover, the impression where she sat is bigger than it should be.

1935

     It was 1982 and I was twelve years old when the year 1935 began to push slowly up, through the floor of our home. It was first felt as a dusty, tired silence. It was the silence, which settles in the corners of the homes of the elderly.

Invisible grey piles of the echoes from ticking clocks.

1935 passed slowly up through the legs of our cheap furniture, leaving clawed feet and ornate scrollwork, easily missed in passing.

It seeped into picture frames, leaching colors and lending a sepia cast to the chemical vibrancy of the computer age.

It left behind dark fedoras and flowered hats. Photos from the beach or that day at the lake became seas of black and white faces, smiling from dance floors long buried and broken.

     Outside our house, 1982 pressed close. Forty-seven years of progress and reality surrounded us.

Solid, shallow and unconcerned about the potential for ages past to reassert themselves.

But once in a while, if the late-day sun was just so, I could see thin lace curtains, like the ones which haunted our windows, being exhaled into the evening air, from the homes of neighbors. Or sometimes, while passing their opens doors, could hear the sound of a record player needle skipping, buried within the audio litter of an Atari game.

The massive console television, which squatted in the corner of our own living room, would often trade its heavy screen for a dimly lit window and an endless array of layered frequencies. Tin colored voices drifted through the air.

Eddie Cantor, The Happiness Boys and the Fleischman’s Yeast Hour were broadcasting, muffled and thin, through the heavy decades.

    Standing by a window, on carpet, which creaked, I often looked out at the houses nearby and wondered what years might be pressing up through their floors. But that wasn’t a question a twelve year old could ask.

Or maybe it was a question only a twelve year old could. Either way, I never did.

We moved and the presence of 1935 was left behind and never mentioned, but not forgotten.

In the many homes that followed I would often stand listening, or watching the picture frames, for any signs that whatever year it was, it was just the surface.

November

She'd come there, to that forlorn spot, once a year, for the twenty since he'd been lowered beneath that tree, not then planted, and whatever message drove him up, for a shutters blink, broke her mind and her camera, which never worked again.

An ordinary man stands in front of an ordinary house.
He is still in the autumn afternoon.
Except for a calloused thumb, which worries the shaft of a long brass key, in his long leathered palm.
As a child he’d stood here, with the rumors of this house flickering behind his eyes.
Haunted. Abandoned. The lair of cannibals.
And then he’d found the key, propelled by a dare, beneath the cannibal’s doormat.
On that night the porch-lights guttered as the lightning threatened, and he’d run home faster than the wind, which had brought the following the storm.

Twelve springs later, when childhood fears were put to bed by logic and bureaucracy had caged his questions, he’d used the key.
He was 22.




All these years later, as he watches the dusk gather itself in the right angles of the house, he can remember that moment as if it were seconds ago.
The heavy front door opened silently.
A waft of lemon verbena and time.
Mahogany floorboards the length of the hall, glowing with polish and…
Was it music from an old Victrola?
His weight on the lintel.

His first time in the house, his second step along what should have been an entry- hall, had landed on the rough stonework of a narrow lane, deep in the heart of a bleak, Russian farming town.
When his ravings had subsided he’d learned that he was six years older, with no personal effects, but for a long brass key.
Hospitals, begging, nights beneath hedgerows, trains and the cramped lower decks of ocean going vessels had brought him home eight years after the key had turned.
Fear and fatigue should have razed all interest in the house, should have buried every question.
And yet…

Each time, time after time, he has returned to the same spot, in which he now considers.
At times he is older by minutes and at others by years.
The number of his steps along the hallway varies, before he inevitably steps on the stone, or dirt or dead brown leaves of someplace else, sometimes near and sometimes half the world away.
And always is the loss of time and possessions, except the key.
As what had been his life fades with lost years, he has gathered a new one, filled with precautions, habits and measures. And at its’ heart is this house.
Always later than sooner, he returns to his heart.

So now he stands in the cobalt air, as the porch-lights come to life.
His mental fingers are moving memories, like abacus beads, and adding up pieces of time. In his heart and mind he wears the freshly washed age of twenty- seven years.
But the calendars tell him it is 1956 and that forty-four years have passed since his first glimpse of the hallway.
He is sixty-six years old by all measures but his own.

He is moving towards the porch.
He is wondering if his next steps inside the house will carry his years beyond the limits of his body.
What then?
He is smiling as he reaches for the door.
Yes, he sighs to himself, what then?

He steps across the threshold.
One, two, three, four…
And the door closes softly behind him.

In the front row, second from the right, is Sister Shin.
The Yongsan Catholic Seminary observes morning prayers from 7 am to 8am.
It is 8:25am and Sister Shin is pregnant.
She is also an agnostic, resting in routine.
Her smile is not for the camera.
In the back row, first on the right, is Sister Gi.
Sister Gi joined the convent to escape what he is, but couldn’t escape Sister Shin.
It is 1963 and they offer identical smiles, to a mechanical eye, as a metaphor for a moment which they they can feel flashing bright and fading.
Ahead of them... there be monsters.

The little girls fingers twine and untwine.
The photographer moves things on the surface of the camera and smiles instructions at her.
She always does what grown-ups tell her to do.
But today she’ll be extra good, because it’s her birthday photograph.
She wants only for father and mother to tell her how pretty she looks.
Amelia King will soon be six years old. It is 1933, or maybe ’34, but she can’t remember.

Mr. Arlo fondles his camera, getting her to smile more.
In just a moment he will take her photograph.
But her dolly has begun to whisper again.
Amelias’ eyes slide towards the plastic infant.
Mr. Arlo clucks softly and she is facing him again, with a big bright smile and her chin held high.
Twine and untwine.
The doll is speaking with more urgency, even though it’s against the rules.
One of it’s eyelids is frozen half open, in a conspiratorial expression.
Twine, pinch and untwine.

Mr. Arlos’ long fingers freeze in place over knobs and buttons.

The doll is speaking louder now.
Why doesn’t Mr. Arlo hear her and tell her to stop?
Amelia is afraid that the doll will move.
The doll knows more about Amelias’ father and his factory than she does. It knows what a factory is and what high, grey walls, which block the sun out, look like.
Amelia has never seen a smokestack, a transmission gear or a boiler.
She doesn’t understand what a catwalk is, or anything else her dolly says for the remaining unbearable seconds.

Snick, pop, flash, crackle and the blackened bulb cools.

“Mr. Arlo, what does mangled mean?”
His smile slips, hung on a hook and waiting.
“And what’s an incinerator?”