Get Me to the Church on Time

6.

I’ll never forget the first time I visited my cousin Lucy in New Jersey. Lots of things in the suburbs were different. The trees were skinnier, the houses were lower, the cars were newer, the streets were wider, the yards were bigger and the grass was definitely greener. But the main thing I remember was my feeling of panic: there was nowhere to hide. The picture windows, one on each house, seemed to stare out onto a world in which nobody had anything to conceal, a terrifying idea to a pre-teen (I was eleven going on fifteen) since adolescence is the slow, unfolding triumph of experience over innocence, and teens have everything to hide.

I was glad to get back to Brooklyn, where everyone knew who I was but no one was watching me. I had the same safe feeling when I slipped out the kitchen door into Aunt Minnie’s tiny (and sadly neglected) backyard. The yards in Brooklyn, on Ditmas at least, are narrow slivers separated by board fences, wire fences, slat fences, mesh fences. Adulthood in America doesn’t involve a lot of fence climbing, and I felt like a kid again as I hauled myself carefully over a sagging section of chainlink into the Murphys’ yard next door.

Of course, they weren’t the Murphys anymore: they were the Wing-Tang somethings, and they had replaced the old squealing swing set with a new plastic and rubberoid play center in the shape of a pirate ship, complete with plank.

The next yard, the Patellis’, was even less familiar. It had always been choked with flowers and weeds in a dizzying, improbable mix, under a grape arbor that, properly processed, kept the grandfather mildly potted all year. The vines had stopped bearing when “Don Patelli” had died, the year I started high school. “Grapes are like dogs,” Uncle Mort had said. “Faithful to the end.” Everything Uncle Mort knew about dogs, he had learned from books.

A light came on in the house, and I remembered with alarm that the Patellis no longer lived there, and that I was no longer a neighborhood kid; or even a kid. If anybody saw me, they would call the police. I stepped back into the shadows. Looking up, and back a house or two, I spotted a shapely silhouette behind the blinds in an upstairs window. A girl undressing for bed! I enjoyed the guilty, Peeping Tom feeling, until I realized it was Candy, in Aunt Minnie’s guest room. That made it even better.

But it was time to get moving. Unplug the stupid TV and be done with it.

The loose plank in the Patellis’ ancient board fence still swung open to let me through. It was a little tighter fit, but I made it—and I was in the Blitzes’ yard, under the wide, ivy-covered trunk of the maple. The board steps Studs and I had nailed to the tree were still there, but I was glad to see that they had been had been supplemented with a ten foot aluminum ladder.

At the top of the ladder, wedged into a low fork, was the treehouse Studs and I had built in the summer of 1968. It was a triangular shed about six feet high and five feet on a side, nailed together from scrap plywood and pallet lumber. It was hard to believe it was still intact after almost thirty years. Yet, there it was.

And here I was. There were no windows, but through the cracks, I saw a blue light.

I climbed up the aluminum ladder. The door, a sheet of faux-birch paneling, was padlocked from the outside. I even recognized the padlock. Before opening it, I looked in through the wide crack at the top. I was surprised by what I saw.

Usually, when you return to scenes of your childhood, whether it’s an elementary school or a neighbor’s yard, everything seems impossibly small. That’s what I thought it would be like with the treehouse Studs and I had built when we were eleven. I expected it to look tiny inside.

Instead it looked huge.

I blinked and looked again. The inside of the treehouse seemed as big as a gym. In the near corner, to the right, I saw the TV—the six-inch Dumont console. The doors were open and the gray-blue light from the screen illuminated the entire vast interior of the treehouse. In the far corner, to the left, which seemed at least a half a block away, there was a brown sofa next to a potted palm.

I didn’t like the looks of it. My first impulse was to climb down the ladder and go home. I even started down one step. Then I looked behind me, toward Aunt Minnie’s upstairs guest room window, where I had seen Candy’s silhouette. The light was out. She was in bed, waiting for me. Waiting to begin our Honeymoon.

All I had to do was unplug the damn TV.

It’s funny how the fingers remember what the mind forgets. The combination lock was from my old middle school locker. As soon as I started spinning the dial, my fingers knew where to start and where to stop: L5, R32, L2.

I opened the lock and set it aside, hanging it on the bracket. I leaned back and pulled the door open. I guess I expected it to groan or creak in acknowledgment of the years since I had last opened it; but it made not a sound.

The last step is a long one, and I climbed into the treehouse on my knees. It smelled musty, like glue and wood and old magazines. I left the door swinging open behind me. The plywood floor creaked reassuringly as I got to my feet.

The inside of the treehouse looked huge, but it didn’t feel huge. The sofa and the potted palm in the far corner seemed almost like miniatures that I could reach out and touch if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. They sort of hung in the air, either real small, or real far away, or both. Or neither.

I decided it was best not to look at them. I had a job to do.

Two steps across the plywood floor took me to the corner with the TV. It was better here; more familiar. Here was the ratty rag rug my mother had donated; the Farrah Fawcett pinups on the wall. Here was the stack of old magazines: Motor Trend, Boy’s Life, Playboy, Model Airplane News. Here were the ball gloves, the water guns, right where Studs and I had left them, almost thirty years before. It all looked the same, in this corner.

The TV screen was more gray than blue. There was no picture, just a steady blizzard of static and snow. The rabbit ears antenna on the top were extended. One end was hung with tinfoil (had Studs and I done that?), and something was duct-taped into the cradle between them.

A cellular phone. I was sure we hadn’t done that. They didn’t even have cellular phones when we were kids; or duct tape, for that matter. This was clearly the other end of the connection from La Guardia. And there was more that was new.

A green garden hose was attached to a peculiar fitting on the front of the TV, between the volume control and the channel selector. It snaked across the floor toward the corner with the brown sofa and the potted palm. The longer I looked at the hose, the longer it seemed.

I decided it was best not to look at it. I had a job to do.

The electrical power in the treehouse came from the house, via a “train” of extension cords winding through the branches from Studs’s upstairs window. The TV was plugged into an extension cord dangling through a hole in the ceiling. I was reaching up to unplug it when I felt something cold against the back of my neck.

“Put your hands down!”

“Studs?”

“Irv, is that you?”

I turned slowly, hands still in the air.

“Irv the Perv? What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to unplug the television, Studs,” I said. “Is that a real gun?”

“Damn tootin’,” he said. “A Glock nine.”

“So this is how you got all your medals!” I said scornfully. My hands still in the air, I pointed with my chin to the six-inch Dumont with the cell phone taped between the rabbit ears, then to the impressive array across Studs’s chest. Even off duty, even at home, he wore his uniform with all his medals. “That’s not really your Nobel Prize around your neck, either, is it?”

“It is so!” he said, fingering the heavy medallion. “The professor gave it to me. The professor helped me win the others, too, by speeding up the baggage carousel at La Guardia. You’re looking at the Employee of the Year, two years in a row.”

“The professor?”

Studs pointed with the Glock nine to the other corner of the treehouse. The far corner. I was surprised to see an old man, sitting on the brown sofa next to the potted palm. He was wearing a grey cardigan over blue coveralls. “Where’d he come from?” I asked.

“He comes and goes as he pleases,” said Studs. “It’s his Universe.”

Universe? Suddenly it all came perfectly clear; or almost clear. “Dr. Radio Dgjerm?”

“Rah-dio,” the old man corrected. He looked tiny but his voice sounded neither small nor far away.

“Mother took in boarders after dad died,” Studs explained. “One day I showed Dr. Dgjerm the old treehouse, and when he saw the TV he got all excited. Especially when he turned it on and saw that it still worked. He bought the cell phones and set up the system.”

“It doesn’t really work,” I said. “There’s no picture.”

“All those old black and white shows are off the air,” said Studs. “Dr. Dgjerm had bigger things in mind than I Love Lucy anyway. Like creating a new Universe.”

“Is that what’s swelling up the inside of the treehouse?” I asked.

Studs nodded. “And incidentally, helping my career.” His medals clinked as his chest expanded. “You’re looking at the Employee of the Year, two years in a row.”

“You already told me that,” I said. I looked at the old man on the sofa. “Is he real small, or far away?”

“Both,” said Studs. “He’s in another Universe, and it’s not a very big universe.”

“Not big yet!” said Dr. Dgjerm. His voice sounded neither tiny nor far away. It boomed in my ear; I found out later, from Wu, that even a small Universe can act as a sort of resonator or echo chamber. Like a shower.

“My Universe is small now, but it’s getting bigger,” Dr. Dgjerm went on. “It’s a leisure Universe, created entirely out of Connective Time that your Universe will never miss. In another year or so, it will attain critical mass and be big enough to survive on its own. Then I will disconnect the timelines, cast loose, and bid you all farewell!”

“We don’t have another year,” I said. “I have to unplug the TV now.” I explained about the Butterfly Effect and the hurricanes. I even explained about my upcoming wedding in Huntsville. (I left out the part about my Honeymoon, which was supposed to be going on right now, as we spoke, just three doors down and a half a floor up!)

“Congratulations,” said Dgjerm in his rich Lifthatvanian accent. “But I’m afraid I can’t allow you to unplug the D6. There are more than a few hurricanes and weddings at stake. We’re talking about an entire new Universe here. Shoot him, Arthur.”

Studs raised the Glock nine until it was pointed it directly at my face. His hand was alarmingly steady.

“I don’t want to shoot you, Irv,” he said apologetically. “But I owe him. He made me Employee of the Year two years in a row.”

“You also took a sacred oath!” I said. “Remember? You can’t shoot another Ditmas Playboy!” This wasn’t just a last-ditch ploy to save my life. It was true. It was one of our by-laws; one of only two, in fact.

“That was a long time ago,” said Studs, looking confused.

“Time doesn’t matter to oaths,” I said. (I have no idea if this is true or not. I just made it up on the spot.)

“Shoot him!” said Dr. Dgjerm.

“There’s another way out of this,” said a voice behind us.