Chapter Three—Not a Dream

Chapter Three—Not a Dream

The tea, when it came, was in a beaker.

Roberto had washed it first, she saw, and dried it, and he set it down in front of her on a folded paper towel with the air of a man apologizing for the only cup the building could offer, and the Professor watched this small ceremony with the impatience of someone who had stopped noticing years ago that he lived in a place without proper cups. Claudia wrapped her hands around the warm glass and did not drink, because the heat in her hands was more useful to her than the tea, and waited for the old man to begin, which he was visibly preparing to do, as an engine prepares, with a great deal of internal motion that has not yet reached the wheels.

“You will want,” the Professor said, “to compare it to something. Everyone does. It is the first thing the mind reaches for when it is handed an object it has no shelf for. It looks along the shelves it already owns and it grabs the nearest thing of roughly the right size and it says, this is like that. And it is always wrong, and the wrongness is not trivial, because the comparison you choose decides in advance what you are permitted to see.” He held up one finger, not at her, at the room, at an imagined hall of people who had wronged him. “So before I tell you what it is, I am going to tell you what it is not, and I am going to be tedious about it, and you are going to let me, because the alternative is that you spend the rest of the evening seeing the wrong thing.”

“All right,” Claudia said.

“It is not a drug.” He said the word as though removing it from himself with tongs. “It is a compound, administered by infusion, and yes, it is a chemical, and yes, it acts on the brain, and on the strength of those three facts a generation of reviewers decided they already knew what it was, because they had a shelf for chemicals that act on the brain, and the shelf was labeled drugs, and the things on that shelf are recreational, or they are medical, and either way they are about the person taking them. They change how you feel. They are an event that happens inside you.” He leaned forward. “This does not happen inside you. That is the entire point and they could not hear it, because they had already chosen the shelf.”

“What does it do, if it doesn’t happen inside you.”

“It puts you somewhere.” He said it flatly, and let it sit, and the flatness was a kind of test, that he was watching to see whether she would flinch at the plainness of the claim or wait for the rest. She waited. His shoulders came down a quarter inch. “It puts you, bodily, into a past era. Not the memory of one. Not a representation. The thing itself, going on around you, indifferent to you, full of people who are not aware that they are in the past because for them it is the only tense there is.”

Behind her Roberto set the washed beaker on the drainer, and then set it down a second time, more quietly, as though the first had been louder than he had meant it to be.

“And the other comparison,” Claudia said. “The one you really hate.”

The Professor’s mouth moved in a way that on a less guarded face would have been a smile.

“You were listening, earlier.”

“You told me you wait for the word. I assumed there was a reason you’d built a whole habit around one word.”

“The word is dream.” He sat back. “And it is the worst of them, because it is the most generous. The people who say drug are being dismissive. The people who say dream think they are being kind. They are giving me the benefit of the doubt, and every part of it is a knife, because a dream is authored entirely by the dreamer. The faces are faces you have seen. The rooms are rooms you have been in, rearranged. Nothing can happen in a dream that you did not, at some level, supply.” He turned the finger toward her now, finally, gently. “Tell me. In the place I put people. Can they encounter a thing they could not have invented?”

“I don’t know yet,” Claudia said. “You haven’t put me anywhere.”

“A correct answer.” He seemed pleased by it in the specific way of a man pleased to have his pedantry met with pedantry. “Then I will give you the thing that ended the argument for me. A volunteer came back describing the wrong layout of a street that had been rebuilt sixty years before, and we found the layout afterward in a fire-insurance map in a basement in another country. A dream has no access to a fact you do not have. You are the one thing in the experience that does not belong there.”

“And don’t say hallucination,” Claudia said, because she had been about to, and wanted the credit for not.

“Do not.” He looked genuinely gratified. “It is the cleverest of the wrong words. But a hallucination is laid over the world. The man who sees a thing that is not there is still in his room and the floor still holds him. What I do takes the room away. The floor, the wall, the year.” He tapped the bench. “And a hallucination cannot make you cold. They come back chilled, my travelers, from winters a hundred years gone, in the clothes they sat down in, and the body spends the next hour catching up to a cold it had no business feeling. You do not recover for an hour from a thing your own brain invented. You recover from weather.”

Roberto had settled onto a stool against the wall, out of the lamplight, watching the lecture land on someone new.

“So that is the first thing it is not,” the Professor said. “It is not yours. You do not author it. Which leads directly to the part that everyone finds intolerable, because we are a species that cannot bear to be a passenger.” He counted it off on his fingers, and she saw that she was being given the rules, finally, not as a list he had prepared but as the natural consequences of its not being a dream, each one falling out of the last. “You do not choose when. You cannot say, take me to a Tuesday in the spring of 1850. The compound does not deal in dates. It finds an era. A texture, a weather, a decade if we are fortunate, and it deposits you somewhere within that, and where within it is not yours to say. You are not the pilot. You are the cargo.”

“How wide is an era,” Claudia said. “When you say it finds one.”

“Wider than you would like and narrower than is useless. Years. Sometimes the better part of a decade. We have learned to aim, a little, with preparation, with the right associations carried in by the traveler, but aiming is a strong word for what is really a kind of leaning, and the compound honors the lean or it does not, according to laws we do not have.” He moved to the second finger. “You do not choose what you wear. You arrive in whatever is on your body at the moment of infusion. There is no costume. There is no preparing your appearance for a period, because the compound takes you as you are, and so you arrive, always, dressed as a person from a time that has not happened yet, which is the most dangerous fact about the whole procedure and the one every volunteer underestimates.”

He said this last directly to her, and held it there a moment, and Claudia heard the warning and filed it, and made an error she did not feel as an error. She filed it as information and not as fear. She was an archivist. She believed, at the bottom of herself, that anything she had correctly noted she had correctly handled.

“And you do not choose when you return,” the Professor said, third finger, and his voice changed slightly on it, lost a little of its performance. “The duration is not ours. An afternoon, we say, but we say it the way you would say a piece of string is about so long. Some have been gone twenty minutes by the clock in this room. One was gone the better part of a day, and we sat here, the two of us, and watched the body breathe and did not know if the rest of him was coming back to it.” He did not look at Roberto when he said this. Roberto, against the wall, did not move.

Roberto got off the stool and went out into the corridor. Claudia took it for the ordinary business of a man with a building to see to. He was gone long enough for her to notice, and came back with nothing in his hands.

“You haven’t told me about the ancestors,” Claudia said.

The Professor’s face closed.

It closed slowly, with an old animal’s caution, and she had stepped onto the one board in the floor the house had been built to keep her off.

“Why do you ask about ancestors,” he said.

“Because it is the first thing anybody would want. Not a decade, not a plan. Their own dead. The ones the family stopped talking about.” She had not planned the speech and did not know where the certainty under it came from, only that it was there. “If you have sent a dozen people into the past, some of them went looking for their own, and I would put money on it being the largest single category. You have talked to me for an hour and you have not said it once, and a gap that clean is not an accident. So either you’ve never let anyone do it, which would be its own kind of answer, or you have, and something about it is the reason this room goes quiet when I say the word.”

For a moment no one said anything at all. The space heater ticked. Roberto, against the wall, had stood up at some point during her speech without her seeing him do it, and was no longer pretending to be furniture.

“Some have gone looking for their own,” the Professor said at last, carefully, each word laid down like a man crossing ice. “It is, as you say, a common wish. To witness a grandmother as a girl. To stand in a room with a father before the father became disappointed. The compound permits it, in the sense that it permits anything, which is to say it permits the leaning and then does as it likes.” He paused. “Most who try it are simply not found by the people they seek. The era is wide. Your grandmother’s whole girlhood is a needle in a decade, and the compound sets you down in the haystack and you go home having met no one you came for. That is the usual outcome. It is disappointing and it is safe.”

“And the unusual outcome.”

“Is why I do not encourage it.” The flatness was back, the door-closing flatness she had heard in him when he said time, and behind it now she could hear what the flatness was for. “There was one result I do not discuss. Not because I am protecting a secret. Because I do not understand it, and a man in my position has learned what it costs to speculate aloud about things he does not understand. A volunteer went looking for his own, and was, we believe, found. And he came back, and the body was unharmed, every measure we had said unharmed, and he was not unharmed, and what was wrong with him was not a thing I have a word for, and I have a great many words.” He stopped. “He is alive. That is the most I will say, and I will say it because I am not in the business of frightening you with the parts I cannot explain. I am in the business of frightening you with the parts I can.”

Claudia looked at Roberto, because the Professor had said we believe and we had, and the other half of that we was standing by the wall with a face he was failing to keep still, and Roberto looked back at her and said nothing, and the nothing was the loudest thing that had been said in the room since she came down the stairs. She filed it. She did not know yet what folder it belonged in.

“Have you been,” she said. “Yourself. To any of it.”

The answer came too quickly. “No.”

“Why not. You built it.”

“I am needed at this end,” the Professor said, and turned away to adjust a fitting on the apparatus that did not appear to require adjusting, and Claudia watched his back. A man who had given his life and his standing and his good name to put other people into the past had just declined, in five words and a turned shoulder, to say why he had never once gone himself. She did not push. You do not force a drawer on the first evening in a house you have only just been let into.

Roberto crossed the room. He did it quietly, and crouched down beside her chair so that his eyes came level with hers and she had, for once, to actually look at him, and what was in his face was plainer than the attentiveness she had failed to notice all evening, and badly frightened.

“You have heard him,” he said, low, for her and not for the old man’s turned back. “The part he can explain, and the part he cannot. Most people, they hear the part he cannot explain, and they go home, and this is the correct thing to do. I am asking you to be a person who goes home.” He looked in her face for it, the ordinary instinct toward keeping oneself alive, and did not find it. “No,” he said, very quietly, answering himself. “You will not.”

“When can I go,” she said.

Behind her, Roberto made a small sound, the beginning of a word, the start of an objection that he had clearly made before and lost before, and the Professor turned back around, and the look on his face was the look of a man who has been fishing a dead lake for years on the strength of a rumor that it once held fish, and has felt, at last, the line go tight.

“Soon,” he said. “There are things to prepare that I can prepare. There is one thing I cannot, and you would do well to think about it between now and then, because it is what will undo your first attempt no matter what else we get right.” He nodded at her, at the whole length of her, at the cardigan and the work trousers and the sensible shoes she had worn down to the sub-basement to find him. “You will arrive in exactly what you are standing in. The past does not issue you a disguise. And there is no afternoon in the last hundred years, not one, into which a woman dressed as you are dressed can walk without every person in it knowing within a breath that she is wrong.”