Jonathan Lethem & Angus MacDonald - The Edge Of The Bed Of Forever

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Jonathan Lethem and Angus Macdonald

THE EDGE OF THE BED OF FOREVER

Strand knew his wife would soon notice how terribly old he was getting. It was only a matter of time.

Lingering before his bathroom mirror, he catalogued the ravages. The yellow of his eyes, the white

stubble growing up under, and out of, his nose, the saggy pouches of skin accumulating around his jaw.

There was no mistaking it. He was pulling away from his wife, agewise. And soon it would be obvious to

her.

Using the time platform had been a dirty little secret from the beginning, but at the beginning he had

had it under control. Now he was spending as much time in no-time with Angela as he was back here in

realtime with his wife. And it was turning him into an old man. He had no right to call himself forty-five

anymore. He had lost track long before, but he was surely at least fifty by now, biologically.

He opened the medicine cabinet and took out his bottle of dye --disguised as a solution for

remetabolizing corns -- and began combing it into his hair. A new irony occurred to him. His wife could

save him. By noticing his aging, and accusing him of the adultery, she would put the stop to it that he

couldn't himself. His lover, youthful, life-giving Angela, was killing him, and only his wife could save him.

He finished, mussing his hair so it wouldn't look too combed. Downstairs his wife waited for him to

join her in the large kitchen. He heard her. She was working already, piling the cotton shirts she and

Strand would decorate with commercial logos today. All would be spotlessly clean, ready for the inking

microbes they'd prepared the afternoon before. She would keep stacking them, silently reproachful, while

he read his newsclod.

Finally, dressed, showered, every hair in or out of place as required, he descended the stairs.

"Good morning" she said, too brightly. The further apart they grew the more blandly cheerful she

acted. She turned at the waist, without removing her hands from the long workbench. "How long have

you been up?"

Strand glanced at his watch, resisting the impulse to tell a meaningless lie. "Just half an hour," he said.

"Here, there's plenty of time. Come and sit."

"In a minute." She continued stacking shirts.

Strand opened the front door, picked up the newsclod lying on the welcome mat, and brought it

inside. He emptied it from its packet into the basin hidden under the table and leaned back in his seat,

waiting for the enzymes to decode the day's events and display the front page on the screen above the

counter. The image that appeared, however, was unintelligible, shot through with colored streaks and

abbreviated words. Strand picked up the packet and examined it. A muddy claw mark pierced the back.

A cat or raccoon had eaten part of the news. Strand would have to go without his usual dose of

headlines. He was surprised to find he didn't care. He felt something like relief, in fact, as he dumped the

spoiled news into a house plant's soil.

"Angela," he said, "did you make any coffee?"

He winced in pain. He had called Miriam "Angela." The name hung in the air, irretrievable. A disaster.

Amazing. He switched labels on bottles, spent thousands of dollars renting a room in no-time, and hid

a time machine around the house. All this, all the subterfuge and contortion, only to call his wife by his

mistress's name.

"Yes," she said distantly. "Here you go." Strand fought to keep his features from simply melting into a

lump on his face as she set coffee in front of him. Would she throw the cup in his lap? Or had she

somehow not heard?

"Thanks," he said, gulping, struggling to return her slight smile. "Uh, milk?" He rose to get the creamer

from the appliance alcove.

"Yes, of course." Another smile. She really hadn't noticed.

He'd gotten away with it. "No news?"

He allowed himself a small lie -- just an omission, really -- as reward for getting through the crisis. "I

wasn't in the mood," he said.

Strand had only been to the offices of NoTime, Inc., once, years before, to set up the account when

he and Angela began their affair. He'd arranged then to have the daily code updates delivered to a

storefront maildrop so Miriam wouldn't see them. When he left the house today Miriam showed little

curiosity. His painstakingly rehearsed speech about a visit to the podiatrist had done the trick.

Since his first visit to NoTime, the company had grown. The offices were newly plush, the receptionist

newly professional, her short dark hair styled and lacquered. Strand had flirted with her on his first visit.

Today she was almost icy. She directed Strand to a waiting area across the room, and he sat across from

the only other client there, a young man with a fashionable slush hat and heavy, tired eyes. A sagging

rucksack took up the seat beside him.

The man was drawing a diagram on a scrap of paper on the table between them. Strand leaned

forward to catch a glimpse. A problem in Radial Bowls. It looked like the man -- little more than a boy

-- was sketching alternate aiming strategies, based on which of the 4,320 target regions his opponent

seized.

"I used to play a little Radial," Strand said, as cheerily as possible.

"I'm the regional NCAA champion," came the reply, in a distracted monotone. His voice was quiet.

"No."

"Yes," said the man, a little defensively. "I'm Zip Lignorelli." He looked up and stared at Strand. "I've

been playing for State since I was a freshman. Youngest champion ever."

Strand recognized the boy's face. "You were on the newsclod yesterday. You won -- no, you lost a

pasture."

"I lost. I'm losing four pastures to one."

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Jonathan Lethem & Angus MacDonald - The Edge Of The Bed Of Forever

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