Something About Time

[Arroyos]

SOMETHING ABOUT TIME


“You’ve been looking for just two cards?”

“Yup.”

“Are they like hard to come by, these two cards, are they like rare cards, like a Mickey Mantle rookie card?”

“Not rare, no.”

“So, for how long?”

“How long?”

“Yeah, how long you been looking? A month, a year … how long?”

“Oh, man, you’re talking about time.”

“Yes, time. Days, weeks, months. How long—-how much time has passed since you started looking for these two cards?”

“Holy Hammerin’ Hank, how the hell am I supposed to know? A day goes by in here and you think, that’s one day. ‘One day,’ you say to yourself, maybe you even mark it, you know?” Mayberry pointed to lines on the floorboard under the head of his bed. “See? I counted, I tried to count, but … well, how many is that?” he asked, pointing at the penciled markings.

Slummings leaned over and tried to see the lines, squinted to count a few, but everything became fuzzy after a moment. He moaned as he straightened back up. “I’d have to get down there,” he said, “and I don’t know if I can get back up.”

“No point,” Mayberry said, “I had to stop making marks ages ago.”

“How come?”

“I had a whole row of marks, see, and then one day they came in and took me down to Therapy for … well, for something I don’t remember. And when I came back … I couldn’t remember what the marks were for. Not at first, maybe a few days later, maybe a week. You lose all sense of time after Therapy.”

Slummings pointed his two index fingers at opposite sides of his forehead and made a buzzing sound while he bounced his head around. “Like that kind of therapy?”

Mayberry laughed. “It’s almost funny when you do that.” Slummings started to repeat his little mime act but Mayberry quickly said, “Don’t.”

Slummings froze.

“It hurts,” Mayberry said.

“The therapy,” Slummings clarified.

“The remembering.”

“Oh.”

The two old men sat on the edge of a single bed in Mayberry’s room in the middle of the Men’s Wing in a mental hospital in Camarillo and said nothing. A minute passed, then two, and finally Mayberry shook his head like he was trying to get water out of his ear and said, “What was I saying?”

“Something about time.”

“I lost it. We all lose it. You can’t help but lose time in this joint. One day at a time you can hang onto, but the next day when you wake up, well, let’s just say the previous day is a bit ambiguous.”

“Ambiguous?”

“Uncertain.”

“Uncertain,” Slummings struggled to understand, “like fuzzy memories?”

“Uncertain,” Mayberry said, “like it might not have happened.”

Slummings thought that over and then asked, “How does that work? Yesterday not happening.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Oh.”

Another silence passed between the men, then Slummings stood and said, “Thanks for showing me your cards. If I see one of them others—”

“Mark or John,” Mayberry said. “Any Mark or John will do, but just those names.”

“First name, last name? I notice you have a last name Mathews but a first name Luke.”

“Middle name.”

“What?”

“It’s his middle name actually,” Mayberry explained, pointing to Luscious Luke Easter’s card.

“Luscious Luke!” Slummings exclaimed. “Who the hell names their kid Luscious?”

“The Easters,” Mayberry said, “apparently.”

“Yeah. Okay. So,” Slummings said, moving toward the door, “any John or Mark, right?”

“Any John will do,” Mayberry said, smirking. “You look for John. I know where I can get me a Mark.”

“You know but you haven’t already?”

“Complicated.”

“Ah,” Slummings said, nodding as if in agreement, but not understanding at all. “Because they’re not here in the hospital?” he ventured.

“Yeah, and because I don’t know their name.”

“So …” Slummings said as reached for the door, “how?”

“Don’t know yet. Somehow.”

“Without a name, you’re going to find this mysterious card owner?” Slummings said skeptically.

Mayberry nodded. “Mark my words.”

Slummings looked at the old man still sitting on the edge of the bed, and then he got it. He chuckled. “Good one.”

Mayberry smiled.

“Okay,” Slummings opened the door, “I’ll guess we’ll talk tomorrow. If I’m still here.”

“You will be.”

“Because of that song back there in the cafeteria? ‘You can check out but you can’t leave,’ wasn’t that it?”

“‘You can check out any time you like/But you can never leave.’”

“Bullshit. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks I’m out of here tomorrow.”

“And one hundred dollars,” Mayberry said cocking his head, “that would be what percentage of your wealth, Mr. Slummings?”

Slummings shrugged, “Not much.”

“One one hundredth of one percent?”

“Not quite.”

“So, if I bet my entire personal worth against your hundred dollars, that would hardly be an even bet, would it?”

“Depends on what you’re worth,” Slummings said.

Mayberry gestured to the room. “Whadda you think? Fifty bucks? Maybe a hundred if these cards are worth anything.”

“This is it? This is all you own?”

“This and my job in Yuma.”

“Well, that’s worth something, right?”

“Only if I can get out of here.”

“Right.” Slummings let go of the door and watched it swing closed, then stepped back across the room to where Mayberry sat. “Look, I’ll do whatever I can to help you get out. I can try to bribe the head nurse …”

Mayberry was shaking his head.

“… how about a donation, on the grounds they release you?”

“Just find the card. Use a tiny bit of your wealth to find and buy me that card. You do that and, with a little luck, I’ll find the other one and you and I can just waltz out of here.”

“Waltz? Past security? Just like that?”

Mayberry was nodding and grinning. “Yup, just like that.”

Slummings stood still and considered. Then he sat back down on the edge of the narrow bed and said, “You expect me to believe you, don’t you?”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Not believing.”

“And what fun is that?”

Slummings considered it. “None.”

“So believe, and maybe, just maybe, something happens.”

“And if not?”

“If not, well, you’re no worse off than if you don’t believe, right?”

Slummings put his head in his hands and sighed. Mayberry stood up and crossed to the desk. Pointing at the lists taped to the wall above the desk, he said, “You remember what you said when you first saw these?”

Slummings looked up, looked at the lists, then shook his head. “Nope.”

“You said something about how much time it must have taken for me to put all this data together.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Then you said there was something hidden here, in these lists and statistics, something going on that wasn’t immediately visible to the eye.”

“I said that?”

“I’ll tell you what’s hidden here.”

Mayberry turned and looked at Slummings. Slummings furrowed his brow. “I don’t remember …”

“Of course not, it was yesterday … or the day before … or the day before that.”

“I’ve only been here one night,” Slummings insisted.

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes. Absolutely. One night. I arrived by train yesterday—”

“Train?”

“Yeah, Amtrak, from Yuma.”

“The 3:10 from Yuma?”

“I suppose, I don’t remember—”

“You don’t remember what time the train left Yuma?”

“Not exactly—”

“But you do remember it was yesterday?”

“Yes, abso—”

“But the 3:10 from Yuma doesn’t run on Sunday.”

“Sunday? I didn’t travel on Sunday.”

“Exactly. You were here all day Sunday. You arrived on Saturday. Two days ago.”

“I did? No, I didn’t!” Slummings stood, defiant. “You’re just trying to fuck with my memory.”

“No, your memory is fucking with you. That’s what happens after Therapy.”

“Therapy!?! You mean,” he pointed his fingers at his head just like he’d done before. Mayberry nodded, then he made the loud buzzing sound and did a little dance. “No way,” Slummings said. “I’d remember that.”

“We never do, that’s what it does to you, it erases memory.”

“What?!? You’re saying …” Slummings hesitated even articulating such an idea. “You’re saying …”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. They erased your memory. We spent a whole day together that you don’t remember.”

“What’d we do?”

Mayberry shrugged. “Exactly what we’re doing right now. Talked, argued about memory, tried to figure out what day it was, and," pointing to the handwritten lists on the wall, "we discussed the secret hidden in those lists and figures.”

“We did?”

“We did.”

Slummings shook his head and slumped back down onto the bed. “Holy fuck. I have no memory of any of that.”

“That’s how it works in here. Time gets lost. Days get lost. And memories, well, memories don't like it here, they know the way out and they escape, when we’re sleeping I suspect, though I’ve never caught one sneaking out of the room at night. When else, though?”

Mayberry let the question hang in the air. Slummings had no answer, and Mayberry knew that. So he waited for his visitor—-his boss, owner of the baseball club he yearned to rejoin-—he waited for him to give in to the inevitable, impenetrable, ineluctable truth of life in a mental hospital.

Time could neither be measured nor contained nor counted nor recollected. Time was evasive. Time was unpredictable.

Time, as Lewis Carroll put it, was a "frumious Bandersnatch." It couldn’t be stopped or caught or tamed or killed. It would do, willy nilly, what it wanted to do.

And if you wanted to go back, to remember what happened yesterday or the day before, well, you couldn’t, because you were a different person then. And tomorrow you will be another person altogether. Only today was habitable. Only today was here.

And not for long. It too was planning to escape. So, grab what you can. “Carpe diem” as Horace put it.

Mayberry waited for the light to go on in Slummings’ eyes, and when it did, or when Mayberry thought it did, he asked, gently, “Do you want to know about the secret water deal?”

And Slummings, with tears in his eyes, asked, quietly, “Water deal? What water deal?”

[Borealis]

Look out Taffy - Ol' Yuma Bob, he's got something up his sleeves... Don't drink the water, don't drink the water, Taffy!!

[Arroyos]

Look out Taffy - Ol' Yuma Bob, he's got something up his sleeves... Don't drink the water, don't drink the water, Taffy!!

Hush up! You'll wake ol' Taffy from his long nap!

[Lions]

Is Slummings just an alternate reality of Bob himself? Maybe it's all that Yuma water causing halucinographics

[Arroyos]

Is Slummings just an alternate reality of Bob himself? Maybe it's all that Yuma water causing halucinographics

Don’t tell the real Taffy Slummings that!