The Toynbee Convector

“Help! Cecy! Light! Give us light! Cecy!”

“I’m here!” said Cecy.

The old man felt himself touched, twitched, tickled, now behind the ears, now the spine. Now his knees knocked, now his ankles cracked. Now his lungs filled with feathers, his nose sneezed soot.

“Will, his left leg, move! Tom, the right leg, hup! Philip, right arm, John, the left! Fling! Me for his flimsy turkey-bone body! Ready? Set!”

“Heave!”

“Double-time. Run!”

Grandpa ran.

But he didn’t run across the aisle, he ran down it, gasping, eyes bright. “Wait!” cried the Greek chorus. “The lady’s back there! Someone trip him! Who’s got his legs? Will? Tom!”

Grandpa flung the vestibule door wide, leaped out on the windy platform and was about to hurl himself out into a meadow of swiftly flashing sunflowers when:

“Freeze! Statues!” said the chor

us stuffed in his mouth. And statue he became on the backside of the swiftly vanishing train.

A moment later, spun about, Grandpa found himself back inside. As the train rocketed around a curve, he sat on the young lady’s hands.

“Excuse,” Grandpa leaped up, “me—”

“Excused.” The lady rearranged her sat-on hands.

“No trouble, please, no, no!” Grandpa collapsed on the seat across from her, eyes clammed shut. “Damn! hell! Statues, everyone! Bats, back in the belfry! Damn!”

The cousins grinned and melted the wax in his ears.

“Remember,” hissed Grandpa behind his teeth, “you’re young in there, I’m a mummy out here!”

“But—” sighed the chamber quartet fiddling behind his lids—”well act to make you young!” He felt them light a fuse in his stomach, a bomb in his chest.

“No!”

Grandpa yanked a cord in the dark. A trapdoor popped wide. The cousins fell down into a rich and endless maze of color and remembrance. Three-dimensional shapes as rich and almost as warm as the girl across the aisle. The cousins fell, shouting.

“Watch it!”

“I’m lost!”

“Tom?”

“I’m somewhere in Wisconsin! How’d I get here?”

“I’m on a Hudson River boat. William?”

Far off, William called: “London. My God! Newspapers say the date’s August twenty-second, nineteen hundred!”

“Can’t be! Cecy?!”

“Not Cecy! Me!” said Grandpa, everywhere at once. “You’re still between my ears, dammit, and using my other times and places as guest towels. Mind your head, the ceilings are low!”

“Ah ha,” said William. “And is this the Grand Canyon I gaze upon, or a wrinkle in your nut?”

“Grand Canyon,” said Grandpa. “Nineteen twenty-one.”