How Is Time Your Master?
John thought an ice-fishing trip with his grandson would take him mind off his troubles. But as he rotated the augur into the ice, a strange, other-worldly form of light slowly shattered the morning darkness. To call it light wasn’t quite accurate; it was more like a blue-tinted undarkness, the color the sky might take in an old oil painting.
It made no sense, out there on the lake, before sunrise. So, John stepped outside the ice-fishing shanty to check on his grandson, John the third, only to find him entranced, staring at what should be the open northern sky, but which was occupied by an uncommonly large, ovular object of unearthly origin. What it was John couldn’t figure, but it was getting closer, appearing larger and seemed very aware of John’s and his grandson’s presence. It was settling directly in front of them.
“Johnny,” John whispered. “Don’t move.”
Johnny didn’t move. In fact, to John, he seemed more amazed than frightened. John walked over to his grandson, knees trembling, stomach in knots, prayers racing through his mind. As he did so he noticed a circular panel in the front of the object, roughly the same shape as the object itself but smaller, reminding John, even in the midst of this extraordinary moment, of the eye of an olive. An olive nearly the size of the frozen lake on which he stood.
As he peered into the eye of the olive, he could make out several figures, one of them perfectly still and the others moving about frantically. The still figure he sensed was in charge; how he knew this he wasn’t sure, except that it was staring directly at him, projecting a sense of warmth and friendliness, despite having no recognizable facial features other than two very large black eyes. No nose, no mouth, bit of an oddly shaped head. What had appeared to be several figures behind it now seemed to John to be only one, still moving back and forth frantically, as if worried. It seemed to John to be wearing a sort of robe, almost like a bathrobe. John wondered, as silly as it sounded, if it was upset that John had interrupted its bath.
But this is my lake, John thought. At this both figured cocked their heads a bit, looking at John curiously. “I said it’s my lake,” he said out loud to no audible response. Johnny remained transfixed on the object, in awe.
John stared into the eye of the giant olive, its occupants staring back, one of them still fretting, for several minutes, then tens of minutes. There was no audible communication, nothing John would call speaking, but he was getting unmistakable messages from them, almost but not exactly telepathic. The messages were garbled. All John could make out was that they disagreed with him, presumably about whose lake it was. The calm figure remained so, its disagreement with John rather polite, bordering on bemused, while the frantic figure gesticulated wildly, pacing about. This went on for what seemed to John as half an hour, but the sun still hadn’t come up, so he reasoned it must have been less.
But how can it not be my lake, John thought again.
NO, NO, NO, he sensed unmistakably from both figures. To which he thought, as hard and as directly as he could, BUT YES IT IS.
NO, NO, NO, he received again, THAT IS NOT OUR DISAGREEMENT.
And now John was confused, and his confusion lingered on for several more minutes, as this stilted back-and-forth telepathy proved a difficult form of communication. It required great concentration, but the parties involved were slowly getting better at it.
WHAT TIME, John received, though he understood it as a fragment of a longer message he couldn’t make out.
You want to know what time it is? I reckon it’s about 6:30 in the morning, but the sun ain’t come up yet so it must be earlier, he thought.
The calm figure shook its head slowly, almost imperceptibly, while the frantic one threw its hands up yet again, exaggeratedly, and continued its pacing.
WHAT TIME ARE YOU, they clarified.
How old am I? I’m sixty-one. My grandson here is ten. Who are you, John replied, concentrating his thoughts.
Now both figures seemed irritated. IN WHAT TIME ARE YOU, they communicated, agitatedly.
John thought about this for a few seconds, and then said out loud, “It’s January 14th, 1922.”
At this the frantic figure stopped suddenly, peered directly at John for a moment, and then began pacing about again.
The calm figure shook its head slowly. WRONG, it communicated.
*
That summer John found himself behind sawhorse and sheet metal barricades, sweltering in the heat, short of breath, the smell of gunfire pungent in the air. He set down his rifle and touched his dirty fingers to his right cheek to examine the bleeding. Some light shrapnel from where a bullet dinged off the barricade, nothing he couldn’t handle.
He understood the objective, but not the plan. He didn’t know who was in charge. The idea was to take back the mine, remove the scabs—damn fools they were—and put them on the train back to Chicago. But the night before some of them hot-headed youngsters went and dynamited the railroad spur. Now whatever prisoners they took would have to be walked back to Herrin first. And for what, to keep the coal from getting to market? John couldn’t figure what they were thinking.
Near as he could tell the mine guards were surrendering, asking only for safe passage out of Williamson County. That was the whole point in the first place, John thought. But the men were seething with anger, demanding blood and vengeance. They’d lost three of their own in the gun fight with company guards the day before.
He looked over at his son, John Junior, and was reminded how little he recognized the young man he’d raised, at least since Junior had returned from the war. He’d always been hot tempered but now he was downright volatile, at times with his own wife and children. He’d led men in battle, oftentimes to their death, and seemed to have lost sight of the value of life. Now Junior had become the leader of the mob, fomenting as much anger and rage as he could, demanding eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth.
“Son,” John called over weakly, his voice raspy from a life worked in a coal mine, his body weak from labor struggle that seemed never to end. “What in God’s name are you doing? They waved a white flag. Let ’em surrender.”
“Don’t worry about it, pa. Just go on home. This ain’t your time no more.”
John leaned back against the leg of the closest sawhorse. Time, he thought, there it was again. His time versus theirs. The time embodied in everything, its non-linear passage, its perceptibility beyond the senses. He thought about what it came to mean when the alien had finally put the emphasis on YOU. In what time are YOU, it had asked, changing the nature of its inquiry. It was asking not about time in the abstract, but about John’s place in time, though the exact nature of its inquiry was beyond John’s comprehension. As their communication became more proficient, the beings’ questions became more complex. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about time since, talking about it so much his own children wondered if he was losing his mind. But he’d begun to see how the present moment was shaped, situated, like a pebble in the great river of time, and he labored to share this perspective with the younger generation, so hell bent on…
“You took food from my children, scab! You’re vermin, Goddamn vermin!”
John snapped out of his trance. He’d thought seconds had passed but it had apparently been much longer, as now the men were marching the scabs at gunpoint toward town. Some of the men were striking their prisoners with the butts of their guns, screaming in their faces, spit flying from angry, red-hot mouths. John realized that the men were arguing about what to do—whether to march them to the train station in Herrin, as they promised on condition of surrender, or to kill them all on the spot.
But he knew where it was headed. He knew what the war had done to them, but also the hunger their families experienced as prices rose, and wages returned to pre-war levels. They were trapped and desperate, prisoners of the moment, their rage finding no relief.
He got to his feet and tried to catch up with them. Not an easy task for an old man with bad lungs in the summer heat, but he shuffled on, gradually gaining ground, endeavoring to remind the men of their Christian upbringing. When he finally caught up to the crowd they’d lined their prisoners up along a barbed wire fence just off the road. John figured about twenty to thirty Italians, none of which spoke a lick of English, probably had no idea what they’d gotten themselves into.
“Y’all got a chance to run. Maybe you get away, then again maybe you don’t.” Junior’s triumphant tone united the attention of the crowd.
John seized the opportunity, drew in a deep breath and shouted a wheezy shout from the back: “This ain’t the way! This ain’t who you are! There’s no coming back from this!”
A few heads turned, but most ignored. The exception was a man John recognized as Alvin Reilly, who played with Junior when they were boys and whose momma helped organize the strawberry festival every summer. He turned to John: “They killed three of ours yesterday, Mr. Kramer. You know that. They weren’t supposed to move the coal, and they did. They stole our wages, Mr. Kramer, food from my babies’ mouths.”
Shots rang out.
Some of the prisoners along the fence dropped dead where they stood. Others scattered, running for their lives. Some were shot in the back as they ran, others were caught and beaten.
John’s mouth hung open, only a horrified gasp escaping; Alvin Reilly seemed unsure what to do.
Some of the men used a prisoner caught in the barbed-wire fence for target practice. A few of the prisoners got away. Most were rounded up and continued on the march toward town.
As the mob dissipated John sat down, exhausted. He’d seen carnage in Chicago in ’86 and heard about something similar in the next county over back in ’98, but nothing like this. He sat in a daze, vomit percolating up his throat, rancid in his mouth. He looked at the body caught in the barbed wire—poor dumb sucker with a family to feed himself—head wedged against the ground and feet in the air. Shirtless, entrails dangling down the barbed wire, a vacant dead look in his eyes. John watched the man’s blood pool around a fencepost, then gradually drain downhill, eventually into a small anthill kicked over in the chaos. In a state of disbelief, John sat staring at the anthill, watching the ants run amok, up to the encroaching river of blood and then away again, frantically searching, he imagined, for an explanation to the madness.
*
The calmer of the two alien beings seemed to now be smirking at John, bemusedly. How John got this impression he didn’t know, but it was unmistakable. They were exasperated at John’s inability to grasp their meaning, and the smirking one seemed to have given up.
This after what John perceived to be several hours, though he wasn’t sure. He didn’t think the sun had come up yet, but then again everything around him was permeated by the translucent blue light from the spaceship. Even if the sun had risen John might’ve missed it. Johnny still hadn’t moved or spoken but now seemed a bit bored by the whole thing, as if this was just another day on the ice with grandpa.
The other alien, the one in the bathrobe, had decided on a new approach. It raised both arms, each sprouting four long, spindly fingers, with which it seemed to play the air immediately above its head like an imaginary piano. The result was not exactly a sound, but a series of bubbles of different bluish-white hues played out in front of the spacecraft. They were unremarkable visually, but somehow, in a way John couldn’t describe, were audible without making noise. It was as if he could sense their changing colors through his ear canals rather than his eyes, deep and tonal, and the longer he concentrated, the more deeply he sensed them.
IN WHAT TIME DO YOU LIVE? asked the still-smirking alien.
YES, LIVE, repeated the other one, speaking for the first time, with emphasis on LIVE.
John fixated on one bubble in particular, until it resonated within his entire nervous system, and though he remained standing on the icy lake he felt as if he were inside the bubble, enveloped in its bluish-whiteness.
Inside the bubble he was back in the farmhouse of his childhood, cuddled up in blankets with his three sisters and three brothers, trying to stay warm in the winter. He was perhaps Johnny’s age, nine or ten, which would’ve made it shortly after the Civil War. They’d piled the family blankets up in the middle of the living room floor and gathered themselves under. John remembered this as a sort of a game, where they struggled and writhed against each other to gain position in the center of the pile. The winner was insulated from the cold by the bodies of his or her siblings, the losers relegated to the margins, exposed to the cold.
John was losing this particular contest. He felt irresistibly compelled to fight his way to the center, though as a grown man in a pile of children he couldn’t explain why. He recognized his big sister Anna’s legs around and the top of his little brother Roger’s head. He tried to wedge between them, figuring it the easiest route to his goal, but he couldn’t find the strength. Then he realized it was only the consciousness of his advanced age that remained in this replay of his life’s events. His body was that which he inhabited as a boy, not strong enough to break the vice grip of Anna’s thighs around Roger’s stubborn little head.
So, he gave up, and as he did so the scene around him changed. It was now mid-summer, a fine day, and his family was gathered with the other townsfolk for a feast and celebration. He was older now, perhaps fifteen, making the year 1876. The reason for the festivities occurred to him: the centennial celebration of the American Declaration of Independence. He remembered the day well now—an enormous feast of corn, beans, potatoes, pork roast, a hearty meal produced from the farms of Williamson County. Everybody brought what they could, and everybody ate well. Even his uncle Nathan, his mother’s brother, who’d lost a leg in the Civil War and now took to whiskey like it was water, relying for sustenance on the generosity of others. Which worked out well enough, being that John’s mother was a kind and generous soul who believed in sharing nature’s bounty with family and community. John took after this mother.
John’s father was a notorious crank, always grousing about givers and takers and work ethic and the like. From a distance away he noticed them quarrelling, likely about what to do with Nathan, who sat against a nearby tree, singing and playing a harmonica (rather poorly), creamed corn dribbling down his chin, empty whiskey bottle at his feet. John observed the scene before him wistfully, as it slowly dissolved before his eyes.
The alien voice boomed not exactly from the sky, but within the confines of his skull: IN WHAT TIME DO YOU SEE?
YES, SEE, the other voice repeated.
They paused for an answer that John didn’t have.
*
The ice-cold lemonade slaked his thirst and cooled his mind so suddenly as to snap him back to the present. He was sitting on John Junior’s front porch with his daughter-in-law, Gertrude, glass of lemonade trembling in his hand, Gertrude peering at him intently as if expecting some sort of answer.
“What’s that now?” he asked, unsure of the situation.
“I said,” Gertrude responded, rolling her eyes, “what exactly did you see this morning?”
John had to gather his thoughts. His head was swimming, and his vision was splotchy in the heat. His presence right there, in that space at that moment, had a tingly feeling to it he couldn’t quite place. “How did I get here?”
Gertrude furrowed her eyebrows. “Some of the boys brought you here on a wagon. They said you passed out. You forget that already, John?”
“I don’t know. Bad things this morning, Gerty. We need to talk about Junior.”
“What do you mean?”
John strained to remember the last few hours of his life. He focused his vision on the front post of the porch, its white paint chipping away, trying to reconstruct the morning’s events. Paint chips falling like bodies, the bodies he’d seen fall in a bloody heap, that day and in the past, for what reason he couldn’t exactly recall.
But he did remember the day in ’86 when the bomb went off. He’d made his way to Chicago to look for work, the farm not doing so well, and found a job in a factory called McCormack something-or-other. Overworked and underpaid, the fellas decided to strike. Mr. McCormack brought in replacement workers, scabs they called them, and when a fight broke out the police fired on the striking workers, killing four of them. John had had enough, but he decided to stand with his fellow workers the next day at Haymarket Square, to stand against a government that had chosen the side of the companies. He had no idea who threw the bomb, but he remembered the carnage well, the police firing into the crowd, people scrambling, bodies falling. Meaningless paint chips on a post nobody cared about, just apply more paint, all the same. He thought if he escaped the city, went back down south and looked for work in the mines, maybe he could escape it, but no such luck. The violence followed.
“John!” Gertrude snapped. “Where’d you go? I’m talking to you.”
The ice in his lemonade was still frozen. Gertrude was looking at him curiously, a mix of concern and annoyance. Only a few moments had passed, but John felt like he’d lived the entire Haymarket affair over again.
“You been like this for months, John, ever since last winter out on the lake. You still aint told us what happened. We’re concerned about you John. You been fading out, staring off into space, in the middle of the conversation sometimes, you come to, and you start babbling out the past, about what master we serve, all kind of crazy talk, John. It scares the kids sometimes. Little Johnny too. It scares us.”
“We got to stop ’em, Gerty, stop them boys from any more killin’. They’re in a fever pitch, Gerty, out of their damn minds. Junior too.”
Gertrude looked away, shifting in her chair nervously. “So what of it, John?”
“They ain’t our enemy, Gerty.”
“You know how hard it’s been here for the past year? Prices going through the roof, and we ain’t making nothin,’ after everything we did to support the war. It used to be so nice in your day, John, but your grandkids go to sleep hungry every night. We pretty near didn’t make it through last winter. Those immigrants come down from Chicago trying to take our jobs, food from your grandbabies’ mouth, John! It might not be right, but I ain’t standing in the way of it.”
“Gerty, I seen all this before. Your folks have too, I know it. They’re good people, I’ve known them forever. They worked at the old Carterville mine when this happened back in ’98. You know what happened then? Dead fellas everywhere.”
Gertrude stared at him blankly.
For an awkward moment, John stared blankly back. Then, “If union workers ain’t getting’ paid, why is the price of food so high, Gerty? It’s the companies to blame, not these Italians.”
Gertrude looked at her toes. No answer.
“Where are the men now, Gerty?”
“I heard they was marchin’ them scabs to the cemetery. Should be there now. But John, them Italians knew exactly what they was getting’ themselves into, they shoulda…”
John didn’t stay for the rest of her answer. He stumbled off the porch toward the cemetery on the edge of town, limp-jogging with his bad knee and bad back as best he could. It was mid-day, sun high in the sky, hot for an old man with lungs full of coal dust. Everybody knew everybody in Herrin, but townsfolk watched him hustle by like he was a stranger, the man they knew as John Kramer in a dead panic, mumbling, dirt caked to his maniacal, panic-stricken face. At the edge of the cemetery he could see the crowd that had assembled. As he stopped to lean for a moment against a lamppost his stomach heaved, Gertrude’s lemonade making its way back up, now coating the dirt road at John’s feet.
Bluish-purple splotches clouded his vision. He was dehydrated, and he knew that, but he kept his way toward the crowd of men in the middle of the cemetery. As he approached the crowd, he stopped under the shade of a large maple tree to listen. From the center of the mob, he could hear the sound of men begging, asking for water, crying for mama in a mix of English and Italian. Other men were shouting, either at their prisoners or each other, he couldn’t tell.
“John Junior, listen to me,” he called out. Either nobody heard him or they paid him no mind.
He tried to find his son in the crowd, but he could barely see. The colorful splotches now seemed to float all around, not just clouding his sight but appearing to line themselves up - too much of a pattern to be explained by dehydration, John thought. He focused on one particular splotch, and the more he focused the more he was drawn in, feeling a tingly sense of familiarity. And what he saw was not a sight but a cooling sensation, as he was drawn into the bluish-purple splotch, no longer an old man struggling under a tree in a cemetery, but in the temperature-controlled cockpit of a spaceship, well rested and serene, communing amiably with two recent visitors.
*
John was seated directly opposite the calmer of the two alien beings. The animated, bath-robed alien was now leaning against a wall in the corner of the room. Both appeared rather pleased with the progress of the situation. The seated one seemed almost giddy.
HOW IS TIME YOUR MASTER? the alien opposite John telepathed, nearly bouncing out of its seat with excitement.
“I don’t know,” John answered, confused. “Where’s my grandson?”
Both aliens looked down and to their right, at the icy lake from which John had come. Johnny sat there on the ice, no longer appearing interested in the spacecraft, tracing various shapes in the snow with his finger. He looked bored.
HOW IS TIME YOUR MASTER? they repeated.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said John.
CAN YOU BE IN NON-TIME?
“I don’t suppose.”
CAN YOU BE IN FUTURE?
“Course not.”
CAN YOU BE IN PAST?
The word ‘no’ nearly escaped John’s lips, but it didn’t feel right. It didn’t square with what he’d always intuited about the world, that the ghosts of the past inhabited the present, constituted its very structure, laid out its material possibilities.
“Well not literally, but it’s always here, I s’pose.”
The aliens looked at each other briefly and then exploded with excitement. The being opposite John stood on its chair, sat down again, then up and down again, chirping something to the other in a language John didn’t understand. The other alien was punching buttons on the wall at a furious pace, each of which lit up in indescribable colors when pressed. It was as if they were making the scientific discovery of their lifetimes, with John as their test subject.
“How long have I been here?” John was thinking again about Johnny, and how soon he’d need to get him back to his son and daughter-in-law.
At this the two aliens looked at each other again, then at John, and then started to inch closer to him. They both stared in his eyes intently, though not maliciously, and without words transmitted to him the sense that the next question was of crucial importance, the key to their efforts.
HOW IS TIME YOUR MASTER? they asked.
*
When John’s consciousness returned to the cemetery, only seconds had passed, but his journey into the blue splotch felt more like a cold bath and a solid night’s sleep. He felt rejuvenated.
He stood up and walked through the crowd to its center, determined to talk some sense into whoever he could, to stop the madness.
“…like vermin in your garden, you kick ‘em out they just come back,” he heard one man say.
“…been here too long as it is,” said another.
“…but wait just a moment here fellas, they’s trying to eat just like y’all.” A voice he recognized as Elmer Johnson’s, the local hardware store owner. But Johnson’s plea only roused more anger from the mob.
“Tryin’ to eat by taking my family’s food!”
“You kill vermin in your garden, don’t you Elmer? These here ain’t men, they’re snakes in the grass!”
John knew the men were angry, hungry, exhausted from years of fruitless labor. And that they were caught up in a moment, prisoners to their current suffering. He also knew they looked to Junior for leadership.
“John Junior! Listen to your old man for once!” he called out.
John Junior turned to him, as did much of the crowd. Six men were collapsed on the ground at Junior’s feet, their hands and feet bound with rope, all of them bleeding from the head, two of them dubiously conscious. One was bleeding profusely from a laceration to his thigh.
“Junior, this ain’t how your mama and I raised you. We raised you right Christian. We raised you to treat your fellow man with brotherly love. Now I’ve seen…”
“Brotherly love?” John Junior interrupted, angrily. “What are you talking about, Pa? You ain’t been right in the head since last winter. You been talkin’ nonsense about time, about forces we can’t see pullin’ all these strings like we’re all just puppets. Puppets!”
“Junior, fellas, don’t let time be your master, I’m telling you,” John replied, desperately.
Some men looked at John with confusion, while others looked away, their leader’s pa clearly talking nonsense. A few throats were cleared, nervously.
“Pa, you listen to me. This community appreciates you, but it’s time you step aside, let me and these men do what we have to. Alvin, can you get my father out of here?”
“C’mon Mr. Kramer,” said Alvin Reilly, “let’s step over here.”
Alvin pulled John by the arm, but John resisted. “Time to step aside? What do you know about time? You got no sense of change, you ain’t seen what I’ve seen!”
“Old man’s confused anyhow,” somebody shouted from the crowd.
“Two of my cousins died last night,” protested another.
John heard the reply from Elmer Johnson, from somewhere at the edge of the crowd: “But that was the guards, these fellas here are workers like us.”
“They don’t talk like us!” somebody said.
Impatient with the interruption, two other men helped Alvin Reilly force John to the side of the crowd, silencing his protest. “You don’t have to watch, Mr. Kramer,” Alvin said. As John was forced backward, he tripped over a tree root, landing on his back. Alvin and the others stood over him, not letting him get to his feet.
“Get on with it already! Carry out the sentence!” a man shouted.
The world once again started spinning for John. He was nauseous, could taste defeat bubbling up his throat, sensed the disintegration of whatever he’d once imagined as a social order. He wondered who’d lost their grasp of it first: himself, the men around him, or the whole damn world.
He could hear his son instructing the mob but could only make out a few words: “Fellas… understand… eye for eye… last time.”
And soon enough, it was all over. The sound of prisoners praying or pleading in Italian, then a series of gunshots in rapid succession, followed by a few moments of silence, the casual milling around of boots in the cemetery, the clicking of guns being unloaded, and the occasional “what they deserved” or “about damn time.”
As the crowd dispersed, he saw his son a couple dozen feet away, sitting on a headstone, staring at him. John tried to discern what he was thinking, but Junior’s expression was blank.
John laid his head back down on the mossy ground of the cemetery and stared up at the puffy white clouds of the sky. He thought about the day his own life would end and how on that day he might just join those very clouds, maybe he could apologize to those Italian fellas for his son’s behavior. Or maybe that was all horseshit, probably was in fact, but it didn’t matter anymore; whatever happened in death he found himself looking forward to it, or at least not afraid, there being no reason to believe it was any better or worse than the present.
~