Up The Line

“Fine, fine. Been there?”

“To Istanbul? Five trips.”

“Not Istanbul. Constantinople.”

“Same place,” I said.

“Is it?”

“Oh,” I said. “Constantinople. Very expensive.”

“Not always,” said black Sam. He touched his thumb to the ignition of a new weed, leaned forward tenderly, put it between my lips. “Have you come to Under New Orleans to study Byzantine history?”

“I came to run away from my job.”

“Tired of Byzantium so soon?”

“Tired of being third assistant statutory law clerk to Judge Mattachine of the Manhattan County More Supreme Court, Upper.”

“You said you were—”

“I know. Byzantine is what I study. Law clerk is what I do. Did.”

“Why?”

“My uncle is Justice Elliott of the U.S. Higher Supreme Court. He thought I ought to get into a decent line of work.”

“You don’t have to go to law school to be a law clerk?”

“Not any more,” I explained. “The machines do all the data retrieval, anyway. The clerks are just courtiers. They congratulate the judge on his brilliance, procure for him, submit to him, and so forth. I stuck it for eight days and podded out.”

“You have troubles,” Sam said sagely.

“Yes. I’ve got a simultaneous attack of restlessness, Weltschmerz, tax liens, and unfocused ambition.”

“Want to try for tertiary syphilis?” Helen asked.

“Not just now.”

“If you had a chance to attain your heart’s desire,” said Sam, “would you take it?”

“I don’t know what my heart’s desire is.”

“Is that what you mean when you say you’re suffering from unfocused ambitions?”

“Part of it.”

“If you knew what your heart’s desire was, would you lift a finger to seize it?”

“I would,” I said.

“I hope you mean that,” Sam told me, “because if you don’t, you’ll have your bluff called. Just stick around here.”

He said it very aggressively. He was going to force happiness on me whether I liked it or not.

We switched partners and I made it with Helen, who had a firm white tight backside and was a virtuoso of the interior muscles. Nevertheless she was not my heart’s desire. Sam gave me a three-hour sleepo and took the girls home. In the morning, after a scrub, I inspected the suite and observed that it was decorated with artifacts of many times and places: a Sumerian clay tablet, a stirrup cup from Peru, a goblet of Roman glass, a string of Egyptian faience beads, a medieval mace and suit of chain mail, several copies of The New-York Times from 1852 and 1853, a shelf of books bound in blind-stamped calf, two Iroquois false-face masks, an immense array of Africana, and a good deal else, cluttering every available alcove, aperture, and orifice. In my fuddled way I assumed that Sam had antiquarian leanings and drew no deeper conclusions. A week later I noticed that everything in his collection seemed newly made. He is a forger of antiquities, I told myself. “I am a part-time employee of the Time Service,” black Sam insisted.

4.

“The Time Service,” I said, “is populated by square-jawed Boy Scouts. Your jaw is round.”

“And my nose is flat, yes. And I am no Boy Scout. However, I am a part-time employee of the Time Service.”

“I don’t believe it. The Time Service is staffed entirely by nice boys from Indiana and Texas. Nice white boys of all races, creeds, and colors.”

“That’s the Time Patrol,” said Sam. “I’m a Time Courier.”

“There’s a difference?”

“There’s a difference.”

“Pardon my ignorance.”

“Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.”

“Tell me about the Time Service.”

“There are two divisions,” Sam said. “The Time Patrol and the Time Couriers. The people who tell ethnic jokes end up in the Time Patrol. The people who invent ethnic jokes end up as Time Couriers. Capisce?”

“Not really.”

“Man, if you’re so dumb, why ain’t you black?” Sam asked gently. “Time Patrolmen do the policing of paradoxes. Time Couriers take the tourists up the line. Couriers hate the Patrol, Patrol hates Couriers. I’m a Courier. I do the Mali-Ghana-Gao-Kush-Aksum-Kongo route in January and February, and in October and November I do Sumer, Pharaonic Egypt, and sometimes the Nazca-Mochica-Inca run. When they’re shorthanded I fill in on Crusades, Magna Carta, 1066, and Agincourt. Three times now I’ve done the Fourth Crusade taking Constantinople, and twice the Turks in 1453. Eat your heart out, white folks.”

“You’re making this up, Sam!”

“Sure I am, sure. You see all this stuff here? Smuggled right down the line by yours truly, out past the Time Patrol, not a thing they suspected except once. Time Patrol tried to arrest me in Istanbul, 1563, I cut his balls off and sold him to the Sultan for ten bezants. Threw his timer in the Bosphorus and left him to rot as a eunuch.”

“You didn’t!”

“No, I didn’t,” Sam said. “Would have, though.”

My eyes glistened. I sensed my unknown heart’s desire vibrating just beyond my grasp. “Smuggle me up the line to Byzantium, Sam!”

“Go smuggle yourself. Sign on as a Courier.”

“Could I?”

“They’re always hiring. Boy, where’s your sense? A graduate student in history, you call yourself, and you’ve never even thought of a Time Service job?”

“I’ve thought of it,” I said indignantly. “It’s just that I never thought of it seriously. It seems — well, too easy. To strap on a timer and visit any era that ever was — that’s cheating, Sam, do you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean, but you don’t know what you mean. I’ll tell you your trouble, Jud. You’re a compulsive loser.”

I knew that. How did he know it so soon?

He said, “What you want most of all is to go up the line, like any other kid with two synapses and a healthy honker. So you turn your back on that, and instead of signing up you let them nail you with a fake job, which you run away from at the earliest possible opportunity. Where are you now? What’s ahead. You’re, what, twenty-two years old—”

“—twenty-four—”

“—and you’ve just unmade one career, and you haven’t made move one on the other, and when I get tired of you I’ll toss you out on your thumb, and what happens when the money runs dry?”

I didn’t answer.

He went on, “I figure you’ll run out of stash in six months, Jud. At that point you can sign up as stoker for a rich widow, pick a good one out of the Throbbing Crotch Registry—”

“Yigg.”

“Or you can join the Hallucination Police and help to preserve objective reality—”

“Yech.”

“Or you can return to the More Supreme Court and surrender your lily-white to Judge Mattachine—”

“Blugh.”

“Or you can do what you should have done all along, which is to enroll as a Time Courier. Of course, you won’t do that, because you’re a loser, and losers infallibly choose the least desirable alternative. Right?”

“Wrong, Sam.”

“Balls.”

“Are you trying to make me angry?”

“No, love.” He lit a weed for me. “I go on duty at the sniffer palace in half an hour. Would you mind oiling me?”

“Oil yourself, you anthropoid. I’m not laying a hand on your lovely black flesh.”

“Ah! Aggressive heterosexuality rears its ugly head!”

He stripped to his jock and poured oil into his bath machine. The machine’s arms moved in spidery circles and started to polish him to a high gloss.

“Sam,” I said, “I want to join the Time Service.”