"Tanner On Ice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)

Chapter 3

They weren’t crazy about the idea. They’d have liked to keep me a few days for observation, and tried to talk me into staying overnight at least. But I wasn’t having any. I had a lot of new reality to adjust to, and I didn’t even know what most of it was. Twenty-five years! I wanted to go home and start catching up.

So I had my first shower in twenty-five years, standing a long while in the hot spray and hoping it would warm my bones. Then I got dressed – the clothes still fit me, as why shouldn’t they? – and signed myself out of the hospital. That’s an expression – in actual fact there was nothing to sign, and no bill to pay. And there wouldn’t be anything in the papers, either, about Rip Van Tanner’s emergence from Time’s magical icebox. One of the good things about being a known security risk is that the government can ring down a curtain of secrecy when it wants to. This time around, I have to say I appreciated it.

Outside, Fischbinder slipped me a twenty-dollar bill. “Cabs cost more than they used to,” he said. “But then so does everything else. If you have any medical problems, call me. For other problems, I can recommend someone for you to talk to.”

“Other problems?”

“It’s quite an emotional adjustment you’ve got to make. Some therapy might not be a bad idea. But the first thing you will want to do is eat a meal and get a good night’s sleep. But you don’t, do you?”

“Don’t?”

“Don’t sleep, according to what I read in your file. You get government disability for it, if I remember correctly.”

“A hundred and twelve dollars a month.”

“That won’t go too far these days, I’m afraid.”

“It never did,” I said. “I wonder. Do you suppose I’ll be able to sleep as a result of all this?”

“Of being frozen, you mean? I can’t think why. No proof that freezing restores the sleep center, not that I’m aware of. Still, there’s an irony there, wouldn’t you say?”

“Irony?”

“For years you couldn’t sleep at all,” he said. “And then for all those years that’s all you did. Ironic.”

The cab cost more than it would have in 1972, but I still had change from Fischbinder’s twenty dollars, even after a good tip for the driver. He was from East Pakistan, which now seemed to be called Bangladesh, and he was evidently not the only one of his countrymen to have reached New York. There were plenty of Indo-Pak restaurants on the way home, and the streets were full of Asian and Latin American faces as they had never been before.

And that was the least of it.

The city was changed utterly. Whole blocks of buildings I’d been seeing my whole life, and which had still been there a few days ago in my personal time scheme, had been replaced by other buildings out of a science-fiction movie. And some places looked somehow the same while managing to be entirely different. Times Square, for instance. All the old wonderful signs were gone, but they’d been replaced by other more wonderful signs, and the result was still unmistakably Times Square.

I’m going to leave it at that. What’s the point in noting every change that caught my eye? The city had done what all cities do – although, being New York, it had done it faster and more dramatically than most. It had changed, it had evolved. And, from my particular vantage point (or disadvantage point, if you prefer) it had done it overnight.

My cab headed north on Broadway, past Lincoln Center (which was still there, thank God!) and across Seventy-second Street. As the blocks passed and the meter clicked away and Hassan Ali chattered away about the adventure of driving a taxi in this extraordinary city, I felt my anxiety level starting to climb. Because every turn of the wheels and every click of the meter brought me closer to home.

And what was I going to find there?

I had lived for years in four and a half rent-controlled rooms on the fifth floor of a tenement on 107th Street west of Broadway. And, freshly defrosted and out of the hospital, I was blithely returning to my home, as I had always returned to it after each adventure in foreign lands. I had always come home, and it was always there waiting for me.

But what made me think it would be there now?

I stopped the cab at Ninety-sixth Street, paid the driver, and walked the rest of the way. Eleven blocks, just over a half a mile. I passed some familiar stores and some unfamiliar ones. I didn’t spot any familiar faces.

Would my building still be standing?

No reason to assume so. There were new buildings strewn all along Broadway, and whatever had been there before was gone forever. From what I could see there had been less change on the side streets, but that was no guarantee that I wouldn’t find an empty lot where I used to live, or a thirty-story high-rise.

Even if the building remained, that didn’t mean I still lived there. After all, I’d been away for twenty-five years. Sooner or later even the most patient and understanding of landlords would tire of waiting for the rent. God knows who would be living in the apartment that used to be mine. God knows what had become of my books, my correspondence, of everything I owned.

And what about Minna?

I stopped dead in my tracks. I hadn’t thought of Minna in – well, in twenty-five years, of course, but, more to the point, in the couple of hours since I’d returned to consciousness. And now, having thought of her, I could think of nothing else.

Minna had been six years old when I first encountered her in the basement of a house in Vilna, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. She was at the time the idolized captive of two dotty old ladies, who believed her to be the sole living descendant of Mindaugas, who had been in his turn the sole king of an independent Lithuania for a little while back in the thirteenth century. Minna’s captors saw her as a monarch in training, the logical choice as queen when Lithuania achieved her independence. Meanwhile, they kept her hidden away so no harm could come to her.

I got her the hell out of there and installed her temporarily in my place on 107th Street, fully intending to find a home for her, but Minna made it very clear that 107th Street was home and she didn’t want to leave it. I took her to Canada one time and almost lost her forever in the Cuban pavilion at the Montreal Expo, but aside from that she’s been happily ensconced in my apartment ever since, picking up languages from the building’s polyglot tenants, tricking my occasional female companions into taking her to the Central Park Zoo, and picking up a fair education without ever crossing the threshold of an actual school.

She was not quite eleven when I let Harald Engstrom pour me that glass of brandy, so that made her what? Thirty-five, thirty-six in November.

That was now. But back then she’d been a little golden-haired child waiting for… well, not her father and not her uncle, because we’d never entirely defined our roles. Her father figure, anyway. The guy who made a home for her, and put food on the table, and tucked her in at night. That was the guy she’d have been waiting for, and the son of a bitch never turned up.

So what happened to her?

Best-case scenario, I thought, some friend of mine took her in. A couple of times when I’d had to travel I left her with Kitty Bazerian, and maybe she’d called Kitty when I failed to reappear, and maybe Kitty gave her a home. Or maybe she wound up in an orphanage, or in a foster home, or on her own somewhere in the city.

Impossible to guess what had become of her, and each guess was more disturbing than the last. I quickened my pace and tried to concentrate on the changes in the neighborhood. Better to focus on the superficial, I decided. The important stuff was too unsettling.

My house was still there.

No one had knocked it down, I saw. Nor had it collapsed of its own accord, although I suppose it was a quarter of a century closer to doing so. But it looked the same as ever from the outside. Built sometime in the late nineteenth century, it had achieved a state of decrepitude by the time I moved in that it had been able to maintain without apparent effort ever since.

I went into the vestibule and checked the double row of buzzers. About a third of the slots lacked names – tenements generally house a few folks with a passion for anonymity – and the names I saw were not the names that had been there the last time I looked. What had become of E. GOLDSTEIN and M. VELASQUEZ and MARKOV FAMILY? And who were T.D. SHIRRA and PATEL and R. BESOYAN?

And then I saw a name I recognized. 5-D – E.TANNER.Oh?

My front-door key didn’t fit the lock. No surprise there, not after so much time. Even a lethargic landlord changes the locks every few years. I used to be able to slip the old one with a credit card, but this one seemed to be made of sterner stuff. I rang a couple of bells – Patel, for one, and someone named Gilbey – and somebody buzzed me in and I climbed four flights of stairs. That wasn’t any easier than it had ever been, but it wasn’t noticeably harder, either, and I suppose that was something to be thankful for.

My name was still on the bell. I pondered that fact as I climbed the stairs. I still lived here, but how could that be?

A doppelganger, I thought. A sixty-four-year-old Evan Tanner, padding around in a moth-eaten cardigan and carpet slippers, writing cranky letters to cranks all over the world, making coffee in my kitchen and sleeping in my bed. And what would happen if we crossed paths? Would one of us vanish in a puff of smoke? If so, which one would it be? Or would we cancel each other out like positive and negative charges, both simultaneously ceasing to exist?

I know it sounds far-fetched. But the whole day had been far-fetched from the moment I opened my eyes, and it wasn’t growing ever more plausible with the passage of time. It was only the persistent chill deep in my bones that let me believe I really had been in the deep freeze. If I could swallow that particular camel, why strain at a doppelganger?

I mounted the last step, walked the length of the hallway, and stood in front of my own door. The nameplate beside the doorbell held my name, but I didn’t ring the bell, nor did I knock on the door. I just stood there for a long moment, listening but not hearing anything, and then I tried my key in the lock, and it turned. I pushed the door open and walked on in.

It was still my apartment.

Oh, it was different. The walls had been painted – probably more than once – and there were different pictures hanging on them. Some of the furniture was new, but some of it was the same as it had been when I left it. And the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves which I’d installed in every room were there still, and I recognized my books on the shelves.

Could time have somehow stopped in here even as it had gone on outside? But it hadn’t stopped in here. There were new things – a matte black radio and record player, from the looks of it, and an entire carousel of what were evidently miniature records, smaller than 45s, and holding entire symphonies. And, on what had been my desk, there was some strange sort of television set all tricked out with a typewriter keyboard. There was a test pattern playing on the screen, winged toasters flying hither and yon to no discernible purpose.

I looked closer and tapped one of the typewriter keys to see what would happen. Incredibly, the popup toasters popped away, wings and all, and the screen brightened, with different rectangles of print and pictures appearing here and there on it. It couldn’t be an ordinary television set. It was something else, and I had evidently done something to it, and I hoped it wasn’t disastrous.

“Who’s there? Did someone come in?”

I looked up. A tall blond woman, quite beautiful and entirely elegant, had emerged from within the apartment. My doppelganger’s paramour? The son of a bitch had good taste, I had to give him that. Long golden hair, high cheekbones, a full-lipped mouth, a pointed but not severe chin. Full breasts, a trim waist, long legs. I wasn’t sure what she was doing here, but I was perfectly willing for her to keep on doing it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I touched a key, and something happened to your toasters.”

“My toasters? Oh, the screen saver. That’s nothing.” She’d been looking at the screen, and now she looked at me. “My God,” she said. “It’s you. Evan, it’s really you!”

“It’s really me,” I agreed, mystified. But who the hell was she? She hadn’t been here when I left. She was the sort of thing I’d remember.

“Evan,” she said, “don’t you know me? Have I changed so much? Because you have hardly changed at all.”

But she didn’t say any of that in English. She said it in Lithuanian.

“Minna,” I said. “Minna, is it really you?”

“Of course it is,” she said. “Who else would it be? And it is really you, Evan. I thought you were dead. All these years, Evan, I thought you were dead.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not.”

“I know that, Evan. And in my heart I always knew it. For years and years I waited for that door to open and for you to walk in. And then I stopped waiting, or at least I stopped thinking about it. And then the door opened. And then you walked in.”

“Good thing you didn’t change the lock.”

“Oh, Evan,” she said, and threw her arms around me.

It was very strange. She missed me, of course, after all those years. And I didn’t exactly miss her, because it seemed to me I’d last seen her just two days ago when we had breakfast together. If I missed anyone, it was the eleven-year-old girl I’d scrambled a couple of eggs for, and that little girl was gone, and this, this goddess had taken her place. I’d been a sort of father to that little girl, albeit an unorthodox one. I didn’t know what I was going to be to this grown woman, and I was a little leery of finding out.

“You kept the apartment,” I said. “How did you manage that?”

“I just paid the rent each month, Evan. I bought a money order at the post office, filled it out in your name, and sent it in.”

“How did you get the money?”

“There was some in the apartment. You showed me where you kept cash for emergencies.”

“That couldn’t have lasted very long.”

“And there was your check every month from the government.”

“My disability check, $112 a month.”

“They kept raising it over the years.”

“Really?”

“Cost-of-living increases, I think they called it. Anyway, it’s up to $428 now.”

“That’s a respectable sum,” I said. “Or at least it would have been back in 1972. But if the cost of living has increased proportionally, then I suppose it’s still a pittance.”

“It’s useful,” she said. “It’s gone up more than the rent has. It pays the rent now, as a matter of fact.”

“That’s great.”

“I had to cash your checks,” she said, “or they would know you were dead, and then I would lose the apartment. Besides, I couldn’t believe you were dead. If you were dead I would know, I would feel something here inside me. But if you were alive, surely you would not stay away for so many years. Evan, where were you? What happened to you?”

I went over to the bookcase. “There used to be a bottle of scotch here,” I said, “but I suppose it’s long gone.”

“There’s liquor in the kitchen. Scotch? Or would you like some brandy?”

“Not brandy,” I said with a shudder. “Scotch will be fine.”

“You stay here,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

She came back with two glasses. I was about to ask her just when she started drinking whisky when two things occurred to me. One – it was none of my business what she did, and two – she was seventeen years past the legal drinking age. (I later found out they raised the drinking age to twenty-one while I was chilling out in Union City. She was really only fourteen years past it.)

“Little Minna,” I said, taking a glass. “Did you live here alone all the time?”

“Except when I was married.”

I almost dropped my drink. “You were married?”

“For two years, and we lived together for a year before that. At his apartment, in the East Village. But I kept this place, Evan, and when the marriage broke up I moved back.”

“You were divorced? What happened?”

“Things just didn’t work out.”

I took a long drink of scotch. I wondered how it would sit after all those years, but it went down just fine. I felt the glow spreading in my body, rich and warm. But the warmth didn’t seem to be reaching the bone-deep chill.

“Did they make you go to school, Minna?”

She shook her head. “I stayed home,” she said, “and I read the books, and I think I learned more that way than I would have learned in school. And of course I had jobs, because the monthly check wasn’t enough to live on.”

“What kind of jobs could you get?”

“In the neighborhood. Helping out in the shops, delivering for the liquor store, working at the newsstand when the Sunday Times comes out.”

“Assembling the sections.”

“That’s right. I was always available to work, because I didn’t have to go to school.”

“Handy,” I said.

“Yes. And then when I was seventeen I look tests and got my general equivalency diploma so that I could go to college.”

“You went to college?”

“At Columbia. I took some tests, and I guess my scores were good, because they gave me a scholarship. I majored in history, and then I got a master’s in comparative linguistics, and then went back to history for my doctorate.”

“You’re a doctor,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What did you choose for a thesis topic?”

“The reign of Mindaugas in Lithuania.”

“Your ancestor.”

“So they tell me.”

“If I’d been here,” I said, “I could have written your thesis for you. But I guess you did a good job of writing it yourself. And why shouldn’t you pick Lithuanian history as an area of expertise? You grew up speaking the language, and you’re going to be queen if the place ever gets its independence.”

“That’s what we always said, Evan. But now that Lithuania is independent, nobody has come knocking on the door to offer me a crown.”

Lithuania was independent? What was she talking about? The Soviets would never allow it.

“Little Minna,” I said again, for lack of anything better to say. “Little Minna the Doctor. Only you’re not so little anymore.”

“I grew,” she said. “Evan, I’m thirty-five years old. And you must be-” She broke off, frowning in puzzlement. “How old are you, Evan? Because you don’t look any older than the last time I saw you.”

“Oh,” I said, and tossed off the last of the scotch. “Well, it’s a long story.”

I told her all of it, or as much of it as I’d pieced together from my own knowledge and what I’d learned from Fischbinder and Westerley. Minna asked questions and made comments, and when I reached the end she gave me a long and thoughtful look.

“I asked how old you were,” she said, “and you didn’t answer, and now I understand why. Because it is a question without an answer, isn’t it, Evan? You were born sixty-four years ago, but it is more accurate to say that you are thirty-nine.”

“Like Jack Benny,” I said.

“I am thirty-five,” she said, “and you are thirty-nine. That is going to be very difficult to get used to.”

“You’re telling me.”

“When you are a child, adults are so much older that they inhabit a different universe. Then you grow up and the age difference is not so great, not so important. I have friends now who are fifteen or twenty years older than I. They were grown-ups when I was a child, but now we are all grown-ups and it is possible for us to be friends.”

“Yes.”

“But this is different. There really is hardly any age difference between us, Evan.”

“That’s true.”

“I always thought… promise you won’t laugh.”

“I promise.”

“I always thought you would marry me when I grew up. I believe it’s a natural fantasy for a child under such circumstances. But now I have grown up and you have returned and you are still a young man. It is very confusing.”

“I know.”

“In a few days,” she said, “I will find my own apartment.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. This is your apartment. You’ve been living here for the past thirty years.”

“But it’s your apartment, Evan. I kept it for you, with all your books and files. Everything is here for you.”

“And it’s a large apartment,” I said. “Lots of rooms, anyway, even if they’re not very big rooms. Certainly enough space for two people.”

“I suppose we can see how it works out.”

“It’ll work out fine,” I said, “and if it doesn’t work out, then I’ll be the one to move.”

“No, I’ll move.”

“No,” I said, “I will. It’s my apartment, so I get to decide who moves out of it. Except I really don’t see why either of us has to move. I think we’ll do fine here.”

“You can have your bed back,” she said. “I’ll be comfortable on the couch.”

“I think the bed should go to somebody who sleeps,” I pointed out, “and I don’t. When I need to stretch out and do my yogic relaxation, the couch is fine.”

“You still don’t sleep?”

“Not as long as my body temperature stays in the plus column. At least I don’t think I do. I’ve only been on my feet a couple of hours, so I wouldn’t be sleepy yet in any case.” I had a sudden image of Minna getting ready for bed – this new Minna, not the child I remembered – and I tried to blink it away. I turned aside, and there was the television set with its curious keyboard, and I snatched at it as a topic of conversation and asked her what the hell it was.

“It’s a Mac,” she said.

“A Mac?”

“Yes, a Macintosh.”

“A Macintosh. Isn’t that a kind of apple?”

“Yes, it’s an Apple Macintosh.”

“Don’t you mean to say it the other way around? A Macintosh apple.”

“Apple is the company,” she said, pointing to the corporate logo on the metal box that supported the TV set. “And Macintosh is the name of the product line. And this particular model is a Power Mac 6600.” And she went on to tell me a lot about it in a string of sentences that made no sense at all to me, using words like “modem” and “megahertz” and “hard drive” and “gigabyte.” That last got mixed up in my mind with the trilobite, the not uncommon fossil of a triform prehistoric creature, and I was trying to work that out when she said, “Evan, you don’t know anything about computers, do you? I guess they didn’t have them when you got frozen.”

“Companies had them,” I seemed to remember, “and there were these punch cards that you weren’t supposed to fold, mutilate, or spindle.”

“This is a personal computer,” she said. “And it doesn’t use punch cards. It uses software, but you just install it and forget about it. Unless it’s Windows 95, in which case you have problems with it.”

“Oh.”

“And you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“No,” I said, “but it’s just another language, and I have a good head for languages. What do you do with this thing, Minna?”

“Anything you want.”

I gave her a look.

“I’m sorry, Evan. It’s just that everybody takes computers for granted, and of course there’s no way for you to know what they are. You can do almost anything with them. You can create a document, you can maintain a database-”

“Create a document,” I said. “You mean like forging a passport?”

But that wasn’t what she meant. She explained, and I found the explanation reassuring. “In other words,” I said, “you do what you used to do on a typewriter, except you can edit it before you print it out. But it’s basically the same thing. So what’s involved really is a matter of learning a new language. It’s like the difference between driving an automobile and flying an airplane. You really do need a new vocabulary, but what you’re doing isn’t all that different.”

“I guess so.”

“And the other thing you said? A database?”

“I suppose you could say it’s not much more than a glorified card file.”

“See? Language. Vocabulary. What else can you do with this thing?”

Then she started talking about E-mail and the Internet and the World Wide Web, and it wasn’t just a new language, it was a whole new world. I realized this, and I guess it showed in my face, because she stopped herself in the middle of an incomprehensible sentence and reached to take my hand.

“Evan,” she said gently, “I think you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”