Michael Bishop: No Enemy But Time

“DAMN IT, KAPROW! ANSWER ME, PLEASE!”

Our contingency plan was simple. In the event the transcordions failed, I was to assess my situation and either abort or continue the mission according to my intuitive assessment. If I opted to go ahead, I was to return the Backstep Scaffold to the interior of the omnibus (in order not to leave an anomalous hole in the prehistoric atmosphere) and come back to this lakeshore site at least once a day. At regular intervals Kaprow or one of his technicians would lower the scaffold so that I could either reject the invitation or clamber aboard for a trip back to the twentieth century. The appointed times for these rendezvous were dawn, noon, and sunset. Kaprow did not want to leave the scaffold out at night for fear of retracting into the omnibus’s sensitive interior some rambunctious representative of a Pleistocene primate species. At all costs, it was necessary to avoid monkey fur in the works. Finally, Kaprow had dictated that I was not to remain longer than a week without direct transcordion contact.

Reaching over my head, I pushed the control on the scaffold and watched it withdraw upward through the bomb-bay doors of the omnibus. When these doors swung shut, hermetically sealing the guts of the time machine from Pleistocene eyes, the sky was whole again. I stood alone on the lakeshore; half-seen electric twinklings filled the air around me, like a caroling of microscopic fireflies. This phenomenon lasted only a moment or two. Staring at the place where the hole had been, I reflected that if anyone in the twentieth century successfully broke into the omnibus’s equipment hold, the vehicle would either blow apart or lose the temporal pressure sustaining its prehistoric atmosphere. A violent explosion was the more likely of these two events, according to Kaprow, but in either case I would have to live out the remainder of my life in this desolate, primeval setting.

Returning the transcordion to my pocket, I murmured, “I miss the fish.”

EncarnaciónConsuelo Ocampo, whore and black-marketeer, had decided to take her son out of her dark second-floor apartment for the first time in his life. The child had spent his first winter sequestered in a pair of chilly tiled rooms. Within these walls he had slept, fed, excreted, crawled, babbled, played, caterwauled, and eventually, despite his extreme youth and smallness, learned to walk. By late spring, then, his mother had summoned the courage to take him upstairs into the sun.

Like Cantinflas in a movie comedy currently playing in a theatre near her tenement, Encarnación was an analfebeto , an illiterate. To complicate matters, she was also mute. If she had named her child, no one knew that name. Mute, she could not speak it; letterless, she could not write it. The infant, consequently, had grown to toddlerhood in a thunderstorm of nearly continuous silence. Only his own cries, the extraneous noises of the tenement, and the half-heard murmurings of his mother’s clients had interrupted it.

Encarnación realized that if her son was ever to have a chance amid the terrible babel of adult life, she must remedy this situation. For too long she had kept him from feeling the afternoon sun on his pert, monkeyish face. That she had deprived him of this blessing, primarily because her neighbors regarded her as a fallen woman and a witch, shamed her deeply. Today she would articulate this shame by attempting to exorcise it.

Hoisting the boy onto her hip, Encarnación steeled herself to the ordeal of carrying him to the roof. Her dirty clothes she had knotted inside one of her cheap, capacious skirts, such as gypsy women wore, and this makeshift laundry bag provided a counterweight to the child. So laden, she left her apartment, walked along the gallery landing, and climbed a set of dingy interior stairs toward the building’s concrete wash house.

Expressions of wonder and fear took turns passing across the child’s face, but he hung on gamely and did not avert his eyes from a single challenge. Only the angry circle of sun peering down into the stairwell made him blink.

Near the roof Encarnación heard a sound like a single tiny fish frying in a skillet. Emerging into the open, she saw an old woman clad from pate to shoe tops in rusty ebony, all about her the sodden flags of wash day. This person gazed raptly at the Giralda, the tower of the great cathedral of Seville, while peeing into a tin can thrust beneath her concealing skirt.

The arrival of unexpected company startled the vieja , but, with a stoop and a whirl dazzling in one so ancient, she withdrew the can from between her legs, made a kind of toasting motion with it, and thereby salvaged both composure and pride.

Encarnación hesitated. Her child, his every didy in need of laundering, was wearing only a stained cotton jersey; and this old woman—hardly a friend, since no one in the building was—hurried forward to examine the boy. After easing her tin can onto the lid of the water drum beside the stairwell entrance, she poked the child with gnarly fingers, all the while gabbling furiously. Although he recoiled from these attentions, the pokes seemed to trouble him less than the spent air spiraling noisily from the vieja’s mouth. He had heard Encarnación give vent to many strange sounds, including, most often, tongue clicks meant to warn him away from mischief—but the crone’s performance was of a different order, vigorous and patterned. It hypnotized as well as cowed him.

“ Qué alerto,” declared the old woman, addressing the mother while studying the child. “Is it true that he has never heard the talk of other people? Is it true you have not taken him to the priests for christening?

Por Dios , Señorita Ocampo, if these accusations are true, you arm those misguided gossips who call you bruja . You give them cause to dishonor your name.”

Spoken to her face, the word bruja —witch—made Encarnación cringe. This calumny, she well knew, derived from her singular appearance and her neighbors’ astute surmise that her ancestors were Moriscos —that is, Christianized Moors—of uncertain steadfastness in their new faith. Disciples of Mahomet, the Moors had come to Iberia from northern Africa. Yes, but what spiritual allegiance had bound them before their conversion to Islam? Black magic, Encarnación’s neighbors would say. Mumbo jumbo. Voodooism. Imbued with misinformation and prejudice, they believed her a stalking horse for Satan. Indeed, the old woman haranguing her on the rooftop now ascribed to her, heartlessly point-blank, an odious personal quality known among Spaniards as mal ángel , or negative charm.

“A proper christening would remove this child from the realm of devils. Why do you deny him? To increase your stores of mal ángel ? Do you wish him to converse only with your titties and the evil spirits of your sins? Por Dios , Señorita, it hurts me to ask such things.”

Ignoring these impertinences, Encarnación set her child down and brushed past the old woman toward the stone basin in the laundry shed. The vieja followed her.

The toddler, meanwhile, hunkered in a wet spot under the flapping clothes, fascinated by the graceful schooling of Seville’s pigeons. They careened overhead like scraps of half-charred paper buoyed on erratic updrafts. While Encarnación, heedless of the birds, flooded the basin with cold water and unwrapped her clothes, her son reached heavenward. All his yearning was for the wheeling pigeons.

“How extraordinary, Señorita. Your baby is walking at—what?—seven months? He looks much younger, even though his head is very big. It’s the blackness in him, I imagine, this power to walk at so young an age. Do you fear he’ll lose this power if you have him christened? Do you believe you must raise him as a brujito , a warlock, to insure his survival? Is that your thinking?”