Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation

“Seeing—?”

“But of course that’s not true. I see for myself.”

“Of course.”

“I see for myself.”

“Sure. All right.”

“There’s no one else in it, there’s not a fragment, there’s not a single other person.”

“All right , Jeremy.”

I stopped going out. I stopped answering the phone. I let mail stack up on the sideboard. Mealtimes Jeremy and I went down to the kitchen together and ate an entire box of chocolates or Miss Vinton’s liverwurst or nothing at all, it didn’t matter. If he was working I lay on the couch in the studio and swung one foot in the air. I looked at the skylight. I knew all the cracks and dead leaves on it. He didn’t work very much, though. I had thought he would go faster than he did. Some days he just doodled on a scrap of paper, or sat in his armchair chewing his fingernails, or walked around and around his piece without ever once looking at it. If I spoke, he wouldn’t answer. I stopped trying. I lay back and watched brown leaves scuttle across the skylight in the wind.

What we did most was watch television in the dining room. Of course that wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing, but I was trying to see things through his eyes, after all. I sat beside him and watched from morning to night. I’d never guessed how caught up you can get in television programs. On the soap operas people’s lives were ruled by some twisted design underlying everything, something we were too ignorant to see. On the panel shows they talked back and forth so courteously, their faces so cool and untextured. Look how they waited for one speaker to stop before another began! Look at the way they chose their tones without a second’s faltering — a cheerful tone after a dark one, a question, a trill of laughter, a note of sudden firmness. All so perfectly orchestrated. How well behaved they were! I turned toward Jeremy and opened my mouth. I wanted to see if I had the same effect when I spoke, but unfortunately I couldn’t think of a thing to say. He wouldn’t have heard me anyway.

In the afternoon there was Sesame Street . I was afraid it would remind him of his children, but it didn’t seem to. He watched it like a child himself. When the numbers zoomed out at him he started and then relaxed. He always hoped today’s number was a high one that took a lot of singing. He laughed in all the funny places, and bounced a little in his seat. Well, they were kind of comical. There was one skit in particular — a thing where a little puppet complains that nothing but a skinned finger has happened to him all day. Then it turns out he skinned his finger running from a dog and the dog was running from a lion who was let loose by a monkey when the fire engine hit the monkey’s cage … well, I don’t remember the exact events but Jeremy certainly did enjoy it. They must have showed it about twenty times over, and every time he sat forward in his seat to peer and nod, and when it was done he would sigh and look down at his knees.

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.”