No Enemy But Time

Prologue “Next Slide, Please”

I time-traveled in spirit long before I did so in bodily fact. Until the moment of my departure, you see, my life had been a slide show of dreams divided one from another by many small darknesses of wakeful dread and anticipation. Sometimes the dreams and the darknesses alternated so rapidly that I was unable to tell them apart. An inability to distinguish between waking and dreaming may be an index of madness, or it may be a gift. After more than thirty years of trying to integrate the two into a coherent pattern, I understand that it is, or was, my gift.

When I was four, my father Hugo brought home a slide projector from the BX at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas. This was a machine with a circular tray for the slides, and if you kept clicking the changer, eventually the same scenes—the same past moments—would flash into fleeting prominence over and over again. In a way, then, each slide wheel was a time machine; and the procession of images on either the wall or the hanging linen sheet was a cyclical tour of bygone days.

To me, though, it was often more fun to have gaps in the tour, empty tray slots that translated into windows of blinding white illumination—for my father, who spoke English with a noticeable Spanish accent, liked to make up silly captions for those vacant squares:

“Moby Deek’s backside!”

“Frosty the Snowman at a Koo Kloox Klan rally!”

“A polar bear swimmin’ in a vat of vanilla ice cream!”

My sister Anna and I would shout out captions of our own, most of them even more juvenile than Hugo’s, and our mother Jeannette, who appreciated continuity, would urge him to get on with the show.

She tried to keep the circular trays filled with slides—each one held a hundred—so that there would be relatively few occasions for nonsense. It was not that she lacked a sense of humor, but that for her the wheel of slides represented a living world, a mandala of bright, recapturable experience. Her fun lay in reexperiencing each brilliant epiphany in the show.

After Hugo was transferred from McConnell to Francis E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and after Jeannette went to work for one of Cheyenne’s daily newspapers as a book columnist and feature writer, our family took fewer photographs. The slide trays still came out on birthdays, holidays, and Jeannette’s occasional moments of nostalgia—but once you had endured the programs four or five times, they were as predictable as television situation comedies. “John-John Pointing at Cows” always preceded “Jeannette Hauling John-John Out of Pasture” and always followed “John-John Bundled for October Walk.” You could count on this sequence.

From the fleeting darknesses between changer clicks, I began to create my own private “slides.” In fact, after my eighth birthday, I usually fell into a light trance whenever the projection equipment was operating; I dropped out of the here-and-now into a past even older than the one flashing by on the wall.

Already I was notorious within my family as a dreamer—not the spaced-out, chin-on-fist variety common to most classrooms, but a rare, visionary kind of dreamer—and I am now convinced that Jeannette’s apparent fondness for our slide programs was in part a function of her well-meaning desire to tie me to reality. She wanted to reinforce my allegiance to the Monegal family by impressing upon me the indelibility, the vividness, of my tenure among the three of them.

Each slide wheel, as I have said, was a time machine (a time machine with a comfortably circumscribed range), but it was also a yoke to the status quo. By ignoring the Monegal Family Past and investing each moment of darkness between the slides with a freight of private meaning, I was subverting my mother’s intentions. I was distancing myself emotionally as well as temporally.

When I was ten, I played a joke that in some ways foreshadowed the principal rebellion of my adolescence.

Hugo, a noncommissioned minion of the Strategic Air Command, had just been sent from Cheyenne to Guam. Even though there were facilities for dependents on the island, he had gone unaccompanied—not only to decrease the length of his tour, but to honor the demands of Anna (who was happy at her current school) and Jeannette (who had begun to earn a respectable paycheck from her reviewing and feature writing). That no one had consulted me about my stake in the matter was no big deal because my dreams were the same wherever I happened to be. I was trying to learn more about them, though, primarily by going to the library and poring over magazines devoted to either travel or natural history. With Hugo absent, in fact, the three of us still in Cheyenne seemed to be riding a dozen centrifugal interests outward from the nuclear heart of the family.

My joke? Well, right before Christmas that year I went to the closet where we kept our slide equipment and removed the boxes containing the trays. Back in my room I spent a good thirty minutes randomly rearranging slides, leaving gaps in the sequence and slotting several transparencies sideways or upside-down. “John-John Bundled for October Walk” ended up following a topsy-turvy “Jeannette Enjoying Beach at Cádiz,” while “Anna Watching Semana Santa Procession in Seville” gave way to a sideways-slotted “Grandfather Rivenbark Checking Out Customers at Old Van Luna Grocery.” Then I returned the trays to their boxes and the boxes to their closet shelves.

On Christmas Eve Jeannette told Anna to fetch the slides and set up for another trip into the Monegal Family Past. Anna, now fourteen, obeyed, and we gathered in the dining room. I turned off the lights, Anna clicked her magic changer, and a kind of wacky chaos ensued.

Jeannette’s reaction to my vandalism was not what I had expected. After muttering “What the hell” into her cupped hand, she gave me an appraising look, put her fingers into my wiry hair, and pulled my head into the pit of her arm. Although she would not let go, I could tell she was not angry, merely amused by the form my defiance had taken. Anna was the one who got angry. She railed about the time it would take to restore the slides to their sacrosanct order, and she refused to continue the show.

“Damn you, Johnny-boy!” she exclaimed. “You’re going to straighten this out yourself. Don’t expect any help from me.”

“Oh, Anna, it’s all right,” our mother replied. “Go on to the next one.”

“But, Mamma, he’s mixed them all up.”

Jeannette laughed. “But we know what’s what, don’t we? Let’s just run through the lot and enjoy them as they come up.”

“You can’t enjoy them. Somebody who’d never seen them before wouldn’t know what was going on.

They don’t tell a story anymore, they’re just bits and pieces of… of one big mess.”

“But, Anna, the story’s in our heads. It won’t hurt to show them out of sequence. Let’s not worry about some hypothetical somebody who doesn’t even know who we are.”

“Mamma, I’m not going to put them back the way they belong.”

“I don’t want you to. I’ll do it. It won’t be hard. They’re all numbered, anyway. So let’s just go ahead, all right?”

Sullenly, then, Anna showed the slides in all their helter-skelter, heels-over-head, gap-ridden glory, and I was not scolded. And Jeannette had spoken truthfully: The story was in our heads. Each slide evoked its own context. I paid attention to the program—the immutable program implicit even in this crazy shuffling—as I had not paid attention to any of our slides in a very long time. The Monegal Family Experience had taken on new life. My shuffling of images managed to convey nuances that linear sequence could not really communicate. Each click of the changer was a revision and a gloss.

I put my head on my mother’s breast believing that she had finally given in to the randomness of “reality.”

But then I recalled her saying, “They’re all numbered, anyway,” and I saw in the corner of each cardboard mounting the numerals she had scrupulously, minutely, inked there. These were a hedge against forgetfulness, entropy, chaos—but they seriously undercut my appreciation of my mother’s surprising tolerance of my prank. It was easy to be generous of spirit when you could instantly (or at least quickly) reorder the world to your liking. An uncharitable insight on a chilly Christmas Eve in Wyoming.

Later, when I was a teenager, I rebelled in a more vehement way against another of Jeannette’s ill-advised attempts to impose order on my random experience. And both of us suffered.