“We have items and activities to discuss,” Humphrey said.
“I’m not interested,” she said. “Not interested in hearing your conversations with the Great Thinkers. Just because you own books by smart people doesn’t make you smart. All you do is sit there. You’re wasting time.”
“I know that.”
“You are,” she said, repeating the charges not from conviction but in distress at her own cruelty. “All you’ve done is sit there, looking at what other people did. You don’t do anything; you never did anything in your life. I know you had a hard time a long time ago in Russia. I’m sorry. But I—”
“This is our last conversation. Can it be nice? Please? We were friends, and now you are sick of me. But everything you say I will think about many times after. And you are right. You are right. But you are going now.”
“Where am I going? I have nowhere to go.”
“You’re leaving.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “I like you to go.” He went into her room, returning with her passport, which he placed on the Ping-Pong table.
She clasped her hands to hide their tremors at what she’d said, what was happening. This was what Venn had spoken of: cutting out the unnecessary, managing alone. She opened the passport, and a bank card fell into her hand. “That’s not mine,” she said.
“There’s money on it. You take it.”
“I’m not taking your money,” she said, unable to look at him.
“No? Well, it’s not money from me. Since when I have money? It is from Venn. He leaves it for you. He says, ‘Tell Tooly that PIN number is her birthday, month and day.’ That is what he says.”
She closed her hand over the card.
“He tells me he is leaving today,” Humphrey continued. “He says you should go, too. You must get on train and go somewhere very interesting, do something you always want to do.”
“It’s not our last conversation.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, leaned forward, eyes stinging, clutching the couch upholstery until her arm went weak.
He sat beside her. She took the book from his lap — essays by John Stuart Mill — turned it over, looked at him. “Don’t look sad, Humph. Please. I can’t bear it.”
“Sad? That is lie — it is complete and utter fabric.”
“Fabrication,” she said, sniffing, smiling.
He fetched his Ping-Pong paddle. “Game before you are going?”
She shook her head, but made two mugs of instant coffee.
He tasted his. “Where’s sugar?”
“I put in two heaping tablespoons already.”
“Must be more heaping.”
“Humph,” she said, “we’re always going to have lots of conversations. Okay?”
He smiled. “But, Tooly, I’m not really alive — I am already with my friends,” he said, pointing to his books. “I died already and I’m only watching now. You can go on with this twenty-first century. I am staying in number twenty. It is nicer for me.” The concerns of his century — inspiring millions, swindling them, murdering them — had once amounted to everything, then expired, as the species repeated itself in different generations, in different bodies, uniquely animated in each person, yet united by one fear: that upon their own deletion the world went extinct, too. The times to which he had peripherally belonged — a world war, the ideological battles thereafter — had ended, but his physical powers had not exhausted themselves, nor had the organism stopped. “I know what twentieth century has for breakfast,” he said. “It is too much work getting to know new century.”
“We’ll let everyone else test number twenty-one,” she suggested. “What do you think? If it looks nice, we’ll join them.”
“Is good idea.” He rose as if to give an after-dinner speech, then sat back down and patted her hand. “You so sweet, darlink. I go get fresh air.” He spent twenty minutes locating his coat and roll-up chess set in case he wanted to study positions, plus a few dollars in loose change. All this he narrated loudly. Farewell unstated, he closed the front door after himself. Even then, he muttered on the landing for a minute before clomping downstairs, the building door squeaking open, crashing shut after him.
Ten minutes later, Tooly left, as he had intended her to do. Reaching the end of their street, she checked the contents of her shoulder bag, ensuring that everything was there: clothing, passport, bank card. “Oh, well,” she said, pressing a knuckle into her breastbone, pushing as hard as she could, as if to cave in her chest. “Oh, well.”
Her train left Penn Station, passing the smokestacks of New Jersey, factories with windows smashed, rusty bridges, residential streets, houses whose insides she filled with blaring televisions, pregnant silences, uproarious laughter, sex, showers, cigars, chatter. She had no location of her own and none in prospect — less in common with those home-dwellers than with the sinister types lurking at each station the train pulled into, its brakes squealing to a halt, air vents gusting, a bag of chips crinkling behind her. “Last call for …” Trenton and Philadelphia, through Chester, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, onward.
2011: The Beginning
THE PASSENGERS EXPLORED their trays of foil-covered treasure, but she turned down her meal, irking the airline steward, who kept telling her that it was free. She looked out the window, smelling rubbery eggs, watery sausages. Flying reminded Tooly of her father. Whenever they’d had a bank of three seats to themselves, they left an empty one between them, she at the window, nose pressed to the glass, Paul on the aisle, looking around for a stewardess to request another ginger ale for his daughter.
There were no empty seats on this flight from New York to London. The passengers were crammed in, bulging over the armrests onto each other. She read a copy of The New York Times, whose front page contained a report that neutrinos may have broken the speed of light:
Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself — the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit — said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”
The purported discovery was shaky, the article continued, but the idea was wondrous. How Humphrey would have loved pondering it! And how odd that events went on regardless, leaving behind those who should have witnessed them.
It seemed inconceivable that he existed nowhere. Even when they’d been apart for years, she’d heard his commentary each time she ate a potato or looked at a Ping-Pong table. The proxy Humphrey inside her continued talking even now that the original had gone from existence. He most definitely was, therefore it was jarring — almost impossible — to know that he was not.
Humphrey had talked once about block time, an idea of the philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart, who in 1908 had posited that human perception deceives us: time only feels like a forward-moving flow because of the limits of our minds, whereas time actually exists, as does space, with everything in existence simultaneously, even if one is not there anymore. The events of twenty years earlier still exist, just as another country and its inhabitants exist even once you leave it. Block time was like turning backward in a novel, as Tooly had done in childhood, finding dear characters preserved, quipping and contriving as ever. Block time offered comfort to secular minds, for those who had no heaven in which to save vanished friends. Nevertheless, to Tooly there was something untrue about the theory; a slight comfort, but not true.