in the “nick of time” redux

by bob thurber

    Recently my daughter sent me an email in response to an email I had sent a few days before. She lives on the west coast with her cats and I live on the east coast with my dogs. We don't talk often, and when we do, we don't say much.

    My email had contained a link to a photograph from a Twilight Zone episode titled "Nick of Time." That episode, from 1959, is about a honeymoon couple's experience with an unusually accurate fortune telling machine, and starred a young William Shatner, who later went on to play starship Captain James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek series. 

    In the Twilight Zone episode Shatner's character, Don Carter, and his pretty young wife find themselves temporarily stranded with a broken-down car in a small mid-western town. The newlyweds end up in a restaurant, in a booth, feeding pennies to a fortune telling machine, directing questions of fate and fortune to the bobbing, plastic head of a horned devil.

    In the photograph that I sent to my daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Carter are posing with the sinister machine. William Shatner's mouth is open, as is the devil's. My message to my daughter read: Penny for your thoughts.

    In her reply, she wrote: You have way too much time on your hands.

    The message contained nothing else.

    She's absolutely right, of course.

    In middle-age I discover time, though no longer on my side, is frequently on my hands.

    Each day, as I set out to create narratives, to tell careful stories, subjective time flows from the tips of my long fingers. Creating narrative is a dreamy business but a tough job, harder than I thought it would be or should be when I explored the idea some thirty years ago; and now I find not only time on my hands, but blood. Deep pinkish stains. Most of it is my daughter's blood.

    We don't talk very often.

    Ironically, I received her reply on the 10th of April, which happens to be the date her mother and I were married.

    That marriage did not work out well.

    Shortly after my daughter's birth, that marriage imploded with a dull groaning extended popping noise, like the sound, I imagine, a ship makes when trapped in Antarctic ice, the pressure of the ice forcing the ship to rise out of the water (if it has been designed properly with a round bottom) or giving way to the force, the timbers cracking, snapping like dry twigs (if the hull's angle is steep, not designed for ice-lock).

    Twenty-six years later, I find parts of that marriage stranded on the ice. A cold memory. Still alive. Still living. Managing to find nourishment in seal flesh, using seal blubber to fuel a small stove, using seal skins to patch the tears the icy wind rips in the ancient tents. Twenty-six years on the ice. 

    Memory in the mind of man can adapt to the worst conditions. 

    I'll give you an example, an analogy of sorts: Each night I sop rags with beer and lay them out in careful strips. With rags soaked in beer I tease cockroaches from a crack in the baseboard. By morning they're good and drunk and I pop them into a baggy, then take them outside and throw the little buggers away.

    "That's so gross," my daughter said. 

    She had called, long distance, to wish me a happy something or other. It was awkward. We don't talk often.

    "Memories are worse than cockroaches," I said.

    After a long silence, she said, "Why do you say such things, why do you act that way, why can't we ever have a normal father daughter conversation?"

    For a moment I had no words. Imagine that. Me. A man who has spent his entire adult life arranging words.

    So I said, "Too much time on my hands, I guess," then I hung up the phone just as I would on a stranger.

  

Bob Thurber is an old, unschooled writer who wrote every day for twenty-five years before submitting any of his work. Most recently he is the recipient of: The Marjory Bartlett Sanger Award, The 2006 Meridian Editors' Prize, and The 2007 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize. For more information visit: www.BobThurber.net