Also in the bedroom were dust-free framed photographs of Jazz’s father and mother; on the wall a life-size Marilyn Monroe poster; a cabinet standing close to the window, containing cups won in various ski events; and again affixed to the wall a battered pair of bright yellow skis and sticks which must be of some special significance. A recessed cupboard in a narrow passageway had showered Harry with an accumulation of skiing requisites, and beside Jazz’s video cassette recorder were haphazardly stacked films of all the main winter athletics for the last five years. While Jazz hadn’t been available to participate, still he hadn’t been willing to miss out entirely.
There were photographs of girls, too, quite a pile of them, in one corner of a bedroom drawer; a scrap-book contained a photographic record of Jazz’s military term; perhaps significantly, a second album carefully wrapped in an old pullover consisted of faded letters to Jazz from his father.
Harry had let the feel of all of these things sink in. He’d slept in Jazz’s bed, used his kitchen and bathroom, even his dressing-gown. He discovered several phone numbers of old girlfriends, called them and asked about Jazz, discovered them to be a mixed bunch with little in common except their obvious intelligence, and the fact that one and all they thought Jazz was ‘a very nice guy’. Harry was starting to think so, too; and where before Michael J. Simmons had been merely a means to an end – hopefully to the discovery of Harry’s family – now he had become something of an issue in his own right. In short, the horizon of Harry’s obsession was expanding beyond purely personal interests.
At this stage, too, Harry had felt that he now must get a little closer to Simmons himself. Or if not the real man, then at least his metaphysical echo. Simmons no longer existed in this universe, but he had once existed in the past . . .
In Harry’s incorporeal days he had been able to travel into the past and ‘immaterialize’ there: he’d been able to manifest a ghostly semblance of himself on the bygone event screen. Now, embodied and fully corporeal once more, this was no longer possible; it would create unthinkable paradoxes, perhaps even damage the structure of time itself. He could still travel in time, but while doing so he must never attempt to leave the metaphysical Mobius Continuum for the real world.
Not that this was a necessity; to achieve his aim on this occasion, time-travel itself should suffice. And so he entered the Mobius Continuum, found a past-time door and journeyed back a little way, less than two years into the past. In doing so Harry had altered his position in time but not in space; he still ‘occupied’ Jazz Simmons’s flat. And so, when as he judged it he had journeyed far enough and reversed his direction to head once more for ‘the future’, he knew beyond a reasonable doubt that the strong blue life-thread which travelled parallel to his own must be that of Simmons. For after all, he’d picked it up in Simmons’s flat. And following that life-thread into the future, he also knew that he was now about to prove one way or the other any similarity between Simmons’s -transference? – and those of his wife and son.
The proof wasn’t long in coming, and temporaneously it agreed exactly with the time Darcy Clarke had specified in defining Simmons’s exit point. Although he expected it, still Harry didn’t see it coming, just an eyeball-searing blaze of white light; following which … he journeyed on alone. Jazz Simmons had gone – elsewhere! The same elsewhere, presumably, as Harry Jnr and Brenda before him.
Harry didn’t need to go back and play it all over again; he’d seen the same thing plenty of times before, and it was always the same. There was nothing new here, the only difference being that Simmons had gone in a single white instantaneous blaze, while the departure of Harry Jnr and his mother had been accompanied by twin bomb-bursts. As for what those terminal flares signified, Harry was at a complete loss. He only knew that before the white dazzle blue life-threads raced for the future, and that after it those life-threads no longer existed. Not in this universe, anyway.