My thoughts had fled into this familiar territory while I stood caged in the elevator. It made the ghosts more distant, less clamorous. Nevertheless, when I let myself into our home, they followed.
A smell of turpentine drifted amidst the books which lined the living room. Laurie was winning somewhat of a name as a painter, here in the 1930’s when she was no longer the preoccupied faculty wife she had been later in our century. Offered a job in the Patrol, she had declined; she lacked the physical strength that a field agent – male or, especially, female – was bound to need upon occasion, while routine clerical or reference work didn’t interest her. To be sure, we’d shared vacations in mighty exotic milieus.
She heard me enter and ran from her studio to meet me. The sight lifted my spirits a tiny bit. In spattered smock, red hair tucked under a kerchief, she was still slender, supple, and handsome. The lines around her green eyes were too fine to notice until she got near enough to embrace me.
Our local acquaintances tended to envy me a wife who, besides being delightful, was far younger than myself. In fact, the difference in birthdates is a mere six years. I was in my mid-forties, and prematurely gray, when the Patrol recruited me, whereas she had kept most of her youthful looks. The antithanatic treatment that our organization provides will arrest the aging process but not reverse its effects.
Besides, she spent most of her life in ordinary time, sixty seconds to the minute. As a field agent, I’d go through days, weeks, or months between saying goodbye to her in the morning and returning for dinner -an interlude during which she could pursue her career without me underfoot. My cumulative age was approaching a hundred years.
Sometimes it felt like a thousand. That showed.
“Hi, there, Carl, darling!” Her lips pulsed against mine. I drew her close. If a dab of paint got onto my suit, what the hell? Then she stepped back, took both my hands, and sent her gaze across me and into me.
Her voice dropped low: “It’s hurt you, this trip.”
“I knew it would,” I answered out of my weariness.
“But you didn’t know how much…. Were you gone long?”
“No. Tell you about it in a while, the details. I was lucky, though. Hit a key point, did what I needed to do, and got out again. A few hours of observation from concealment, a few minutes of action, and fini.”
“I suppose you might call it luck. Must you return soon?”
“In that era, yes, quite soon. But I want a while here to – to rest, get over what I saw was about to happen…. Can you stand me around, brooding at you, for a week or two?”
“Sweetheart.” She came back to me.
“I have to work up my notes anyway,” I said into her ear, “but evenings we can go out to dinner, the theater, have fun together.”
“Oh, I hope you’ll be able to have fun. Don’t pretend for my sake.”
“Later, things will be easier,” I assured us. “I’ll simply be carrying out my original mission, recording the stories and songs they’ll make about this. It’s just… I’ve got to get through the reality first.”
“Must you?”
“Yes. Not for scholarly purposes, no, I guess not. But those are my people. They are.”
She hugged me tighter. She knew.
What she did not know, I thought in an uprush of pain – what I hoped to God she did not know – was why I cared so greatly about yonder descendants of mine. Laurie wasn’t jealous. She’d never begrudged the while that Jorith and I had had. Laughing, she’d said it deprived her of nothing, while it gave me a position in the community I was studying which might well be unique in the annals of my profession. Afterward she’d done her best to console me.
What I could not bring myself to tell her was that Jorith was not simply a close friend who happened to be a woman. I could not say to her that I had loved one who lay dust these sixteen hundred years as much as I loved her, and still did, and maybe always would.