The man was a movie director, apparently, and he had just finished filming a movie that he hoped would summon the boy's ghost so that he could take the ghost into himself and let the boy experience his life, since the boy would never get one of his own.
In 1926 he had made a movie that had been crafted to accomplish this, by using "depth-charge symbols," as he put it, to evoke a powerful psychic response from audiences — but at the movie's only screening, a private one, several of the seats and some cars in the parking lot had burst into flame, and Chaplin — yes, Marrity realized, this was Charlie Chaplin! — had never released that film, A Woman of the Sea, commercially. The potent symbolism in this new movie, titled City Lights, was much less compulsive.
Einstein argued passionately against using this new movie in this way, and he hinted at the effect such an undertaking had had and was still having on himself.
He didn't convince Chaplin, but the premiere wouldn't be for another two weeks, and Einstein and Lieserl took a train to Palm Springs in the Mojave Desert, where they stayed with an old friend of Einstein's, Samuel Untermeyer. Palm Springs was a village scattered across a few dozen acres of the vast springtime desert between the Little San Bernardino Mountains to the northeast and the San Jacinto Mountains to the southwest, and its social center was the Spanish mission-style resort hotel El Mirador, with its square four-story tower that could be seen for miles over the pink sea of wild Desert Verbena blossoms.
Einstein had gone for long walks alone at dawn across the flat mountain-ringed landscape, and Tony Burke of the El Mirador had driven the old physicist far out into the Mojave Desert, as far as the desolate Salton Sea — and when Einstein appeared cheerful in the El Mirador at dinner one evening, even picking up a violin and joining the string trio in the hotel lobby, Lieserl knew why. He had lost Caliban — he imagined that he had exorcised the intrusive spirit in the desert wastes.
But Lieserl knew what had become of that fugitive soul. The thing had come to her in a dream, and in her childless grief she had let it in.
At the premiere of Chaplin's movie, Einstein was able to induce the theater's manager to interrupt the film at the end of the third reel; the house lights were turned up while an announcer asked the audience to pause and admire the theater's architecture. Chaplin lunged from his seat beside Einstein and charged up the aisle to force the resumption of the film, but the escalating chain of symbols — the bald man wearing the star hat, the man throwing himself into the river, the blind flower seller whose sight would be restored — had already been broken, and Chaplin's dead son had not been summoned.
That had been on January 30, 1931. Chaplin didn't again try to use the movie as an invocation, but that was because Lieserl, with the help of the ghost in her mind, was assembling a new version of Einstein's maschinchen in the shed behind her house.
She did an exploratory run with it on March 9, 1933, and dismissed as a coincidence the small earthquake that followed. Then, with Chaplin as a nervous observer, she used it the following day. In her hand she was clasping the broken lens from a pair of reading glasses she had had to replace in 1930.
And she found herself in Berlin, watching her three-years-younger self feeding baby Derek by gaslight in a narrow upstairs kitchen.
Her younger self didn't know yet that she was pregnant, and learning it while feeding a quarrelsome two-year-old in a shabby apartment shouldn't have made the prospect of motherhood look attractive; but the older Lieserl's tearfully passionate description of the postabortion dreams, and the impressive fact of her having come back through time just to deliver this message, proved to be enough to convince the younger Lieserl that she should not abort her child.
When Lieserl had arranged some gold coins on the floor and let the recoil take her back to 1933, she had stepped into noisy confusion.
Chaplin had experienced some kind of involuntary astral time-dislocation himself, and had found himself pressing his hands into the wet cement in front of the Chinese Theater in 1928 — an event that had hitherto been a disquieting blind spot in his memory; this had panicked him, and so had the fact that the ground was still shaking and the power lines still swinging in a major earthquake, and even more so the fact that the yard was now scattered with naked infant girls.
Within seconds the infants had disappeared, but it took half an hour for Lieserl to get Chaplin calmed down, and only afterward was she able to call up the new memories of her revised time line, and remember that the baby she'd been pregnant with had miscarried in the late summer of 1930.
And even in this new time line, she remembered having let Caliban into her head in Palm Springs more than two years ago, in December 1930. In this time line she had had no abortion to atone for, but Caliban had come to her in a dream as a lost child, and she had not been in a state to say no to a child wanting to be let in.
She called Chaplin's chauffeur and got him to pick up his shaken employer. Early radio reports said that more than two hundred people had been killed in the earthquake. She was physically sick with guilt, but in her dreams that night Caliban was giddy and singing.
Marrity was leaning back against the headboard with his eyes shut, but the hand he was clasping was Charlotte's, smooth and warm.
Frankie, came his grandmother's remembered voice in his head. Have I been talking in my sleep?
Yes, Grammar, he thought. Go back to sleep.
Did I burn the shed? It was her voice, but she had no German accent now.
You did your best.
Okay. You take care of that little girl of yours.
The contact was gone, but he thought, I will, Grammar.
Marrity could still hear Mishal asking questions in German — but now Marrity could hear faint answers being spoken between the questions, and again it was Einstein's hand he was holding in his left hand.
Marrity opened his eyes and shifted them to the left. Between himself and Lepidopt was the old man himself, with the resigned pouchy face and the disordered white hair and mustache. Then it was the middle-aged man he had seen on the mountain trail in the snow, and then it was a bright-eyed, dark-haired child sitting beside him. Einstein's ghost was cycling through all the ages he'd ever been. When the figure glanced sideways at him and smiled, it was a young man in his late twenties, and the young man's face was that of Marrity's long-lost father, just as Marrity remembered him from the age of three.
Marrity had reflexively clasped the young man's hand before he remembered that he hated his father, and a moment later recalled that his father had been killed in 1955 — and then he reminded himself that in any case this was Albert Einstein, the original of whom Marrity's father had been a copy deposited on a snowy trail in the Swiss Alps for Lieserl to rescue.
Old and white haired again, Einstein spoke in Marrity's mind, in English. What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?
It was one of Prospero's lines from The Tempest.
I need to rescue my daughter, thought Marrity, from Caliban, the boy you brought back from oblivion.
This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, said Einstein. There are yet missing of your company some few odd lads that you remember not.
These too were lines of Prospero's.
How can I save my daughter? thought Marrity desperately.