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26.00 USD
We probably shouldn't do this, but we are including in our listing information the text of a long letter we found folded up inside an old book, in the same musty box where we found this postcard. The letter had never been mailed, and for propriety's sake, we've changed the names of the parties involved.
It was a few pages long, and if you choose to read it, we ask only one thing, that you treat it as a fiction. Because we wouldn't want anyone to think our minds were so disordered that we could ever accept such a fantasy as truth.
"Dear___,
You may remember how on your last visit, you asked about a postcard in our collection, one with a negative image of a fly overlaid onto its original image. Do you also remember how we quickly changed the subject? Well, I'm sorry for that, and want to explain.
There is a story behind that postcard we hesitate to share with anyone. Telling some stories, you know, can be tricky. People will sometimes take truth for fiction, and fiction for truth. Still, I feel we know you well enough that we can share this one with you.
You recall that Sarah and I first met at college? Well, in our second year, we managed to spend a semester studying in Paris, and it was there, in that most picturesque of Parisian neighborhoods, the Latin Quarter, that we first saw the postcard you asked us about.
On chill, cloudy mornings, we liked nothing better than to begin our day in a funny little patisserie
that served its patrons on mismatched china, and always reeked of Gauloises. They roasted their coffee daily, and the resulting smoke hung in the air, making our eyes water. Additionally, the service was slow to non-existent, but they produced what were, in our estimation, the most wonderful croissants, and priced well within our budget.
The previous owner of the postcard was an old man I will call Professor Montparnasse, though that is not his real name. No one remembers him now, except us, and we only remember him half the time.
With a mane of unkempt silver hair, a short, well trimmed beard (also silver), and a long mustache stained brown by his constant devotion to the aforementioned Gauloises, we often saw him sitting at the same table, in the same chair, peering through thick-lensed spectacles at books on history, physics, and the occult, and pausing, from time to time, to frenetically scribble notes, and complicated diagrams, onto the pages of a heavy leather-bound journal.
Of course that was intriguing enough, but when one day we saw him sifting through a large assortment of antique postcards of the type that interested us even in those days, we introduced ourselves, and spent an idle hour discussing, over our coffees and pastries, the relative merits of photographs taken by the great Leopold Reutlinger, compared with those taken by a number of his contemporaries.
Once, in the course of this conversation, while speaking affectionately of our own collection of postcards, I referred to them as "our little time machines," and the professor's eyes grew bright, narrowing speculatively. Suddenly, he stood up from his chair, explaining that he was late for a previous engagement, and had to go.
Sarah and I hovered near the table, catching the odd paper, postcard and pencil, as in a flurry of movement, the professor shuffled his portable library into some semblance of order.
We said goodbye, but then a moment after he'd gone, he was tapping on the window from outside, motioning at me to follow. I left Sarah at our table and went out to see what he wanted.
Though his arms were full of his work, and his chin barely holding in place the towering stack of books and papers, he managed to pull from somewhere an old fashioned calling card, with only his name and address in a fine antiquated font, and offered it to me.
I took it from him, and asked, "Are you sure we can't help you with some of this? We don't have
classes until eleven today, and..."
"That is kind of you," he interrupted, "but no. Please come and visit me in my rooms this Saturday. I have a postcard that might be of particular interest to you."
He turned, and putting me very much in mind of Alice's rabbit, rushed off down the street.
"Stop by anytime this Saturday," he called over his shoulder. "You won't be sorry."
I waved after him and then ducked back inside to join Sarah at our table.
"That was just weird," I said with a chuckle.
"What happened?" asked Sarah.
"I don't know, but he invited us over to his place on Saturday. ...wants to show us a postcard!"
"How mysterious."
"Yep."
Monsieur Marc, the owner of the establishment, called over to us from behind his counter. "He is a
great man, our professeur," he said, smiling. "Very wise in life."
That next Saturday morning, we enjoyed a full French breakfast in our room, by which I mean not just a croissant and coffee, but also a huge, gooey, pain aux amandes that I devoured all on my own, and at which Sarah merely glowered, over her fruit and yogurt.
We then took a taxi to the professor's address. He lived in a fine old house, though somewhat frayed at the edges. Built in the style of the Second Empire, it was four stories high, and faced a narrow avenue where several dealers in old books and maps kept their shops.
We entered through an ornately carved door fitted with a small diamond-paned window that badly needed cleaning. The ancient Madame la Concierge sat behind a small table spread with playing cards, her brown eyes peering up at us from beneath two shaggy grey brows that almost met in the center, like two wooly caterpillars leaning in for a kiss.
I handed over the professor's calling card, and she glanced at it before handing it back.
"Monsieur Montparnasse is at home," she insisted, as if we had posed an argument
to the contrary. "Top floor, then left." The first two fingers of her left hand wriggled theatrically, mimicking legs climbing a mountain. "The lift is broken," she explained. Then, duty done, she returned to what I supposed was a game of solitaire.
After trudging up four flights of stairs (his was an attic apartment), we finally reached the top floor. I eyed the old iron elevator cage with probably more resentment than it deserved. "And he said I wouldn't be sorry," I said, sucking air into my lungs.
Sarah grinned at me. "One too many pastries this morning?" she asked. "Maybe when we get back home, you'll start bicycling with me in the mornings."
"Maybe," I said doubtfully, and then 'Definitely not,' I reassured myself.
We turned left off the landing and walked down an echoey hallway that looked as if its walls still bore the soot of the coal furnace that would have warmed the place a hundred years before.
When we came to a door that had another of the professor's cards attached by a thumbtack, Sarah twisted an old fashioned bell key and we heard a rattley ringing through the door, followed by footsteps.
"How'd you know to twist that thing?" I asked, very impressed by her arcane wisdom. "I've never even seen one of those before."
"Hollywood," she answered demurely. "You'd have to get up pretty early in the morning to watch as many old movies as I have." Then she poked me in the ribs with a stiff forefinger just as the professor opened his door.
I recovered poorly from the finger jab, but he didn't seem to notice. He was in bare feet, belted trousers and a comfortably rumpled shirt, but was minus his spectacles. With an affable
"Bonjour," he stepped back from the doorway, and beckoned us inside.
We followed him through a tidy front room decorated with inexpensive antiques, down a narrow hall past a bedroom that would have warmed the heart of a Trappist monk, and past a kitchen with a week's worth of dishes in the sink. 'Definitely an old bachelor,' I thought to myself, smiling.
At the end of the hall he opened a door to a tiny room that was floor to ceiling books, old photographs, astronomical charts, and just too much stuff crammed into a small space to take in all at once. This was an attic room, and the ceiling angled sharply downward with the roof of the house, meeting the far wall almost at the cluttered floor. There was a small, sloping window through which, past a layer of pigeon droppings, shone a little daylight. There was also a desk, and two chairs. He gestured Sarah into the comfy one, and excusing himself, ran out to fetch me a stool. I hate stools.
When the two of them had settled in comfortably, and I was perched on the stool, we exchanged a little polite conversation. He offered us coffee, and we declined, having just finished our breakfast, and then he reached into a desk drawer and retrieved a postcard.
He handed it first to Sarah, who looked it over carefully, and gave an appreciative, "Ahhh!"
before handing it over to me.
It seemed an ordinary photo postcard, produced some time in the early 1900s, the sort of picture taken in almost any studio of the time and printed on postcard stock so it could be shared with friends and relatives through the mail. On the front side was an image of three very pretty young women in theatrical costume, posed in front of an unremarkable trompe l'oeil, but with no identifying text that would have suggested a professional theatrical production.
The back of the card was printed with the words "Carte Postale" and other text typical for
a French postcard of the post 1904, pre-modern era. At the bottom was a photographer attribution, "Photo Romersa, Successeur de Cibrario a Anciennement," which meant nothing to me.
I turned the card over again, carefully holding it by its edges. The unique thing about it, was an image, in negative, of a small housefly that had presumably landed on the original plate during the development process, and was now permanently fixed, as a creature of light, on the finished
photograph.
"This is great," I said, looking over at the professor, who stared at us intently with a fixed expression of anticipation. "I've never seen anything like it," I added, hoping to sound as enthusiastic as possible.
"You see the fly?" the professor asked.
"Of course. It's wonderful."
"It is wonderful," Sarah echoed, looking at me and nodding supportively. "How did it get there?"
Ah," exclaimed the professor, "In no ordinary way, I promise you. I have shown this image to no one before, but you share my interest in the past, I think. You called your postcards "little time machines." I must confess, the possibility of travel through time has been an interest of mine for most of my life, a preoccupation, really."
"And have you ever actually..." I began to tease gently, only to be silenced by a piercing glare
from my soon-to-be wife.
"Well, I will tell you," he said. "I was a professor of Physics at the university for thirty-seven years. I had access to the work of great minds, and a mind capable of grasping much of their work, but by the end of my career, I had grown to an accept the opinion of the majority, that physical travel into the past was an impossibility."
I watched tension melt out of Sarah's shoulders. "Then
you don't actually believe in time travel," she said with apparent relief.
"Ah well, in addition to my studies in physics, as a young man my mind
wandered in other directions," the professor replied. "I read Eliphas Levy, Blavatsky, and
her theosophists. I read Spare, whose words, like those of the old alchemists were intentionally confused, but whose mind and essential message was bright as a shining star. I incorporated many mediums of study into my efforts, but I never achieved physical time travel, no."
"You still believe in it as a possibility?" I asked.
"Well, there is physical travel, and then there is travel of the meta-physical sort."
Sarah and I chose that moment to share one of those looks couples will share at such times, but the professor seemed oblivious.
"I learned, with some effort, to traverse the astral planes," he continued. "a subject upon which much has been written. Having grown comfortable with that practice, I discovered little known doorways in those realms, doorways that can be made to open into the past. Such a doorway requires a key, however. An object with roots in that past, and which strongly connects the consciousness of the traveler to that moment in time."
"A postcard..." I said.
"Your 'little time machines,' yes," the professor said, nodding.
"So," I said. "We're actually talking about astral time travel?"
"Yeah," said Sarah, deadpan.
"For me, yes," he agreed. "My experiences were limited to the body of light, but..." and now his eyes grew feverishly bright. "...not so, for the fly."
"The fly?" we asked in concert.
"Just so." he said. "This is a small room, as you see, and I would not subject you to my habit," he
smiled, showing yellow teeth and nodding toward the green glass ashtray, full to overflowing, on his desk. "But when I am at my work, I indulge myself, and in this close room, the smoke grows sometimes too thick. Then I must open the window. Several months ago, It was very warm, and I had filled the room with smoke, so I opened out the window a little, and in buzzed my tiny
friend, whose image you see on that card."
"Wait," I said, "So are you saying that the fly on this old postcard, is the same one that flew in your window?"
"When I bought the postcard you hold in your hands, there was no fly in the image. As I told you, I learned to travel the astral paths, to use the old postcards as a fulcrum...a focal point if you will, opening as a window into the past. But, on my last journey, I was not alone. At the very moment I left my physical body, this little fly landed on the postcard, just so. But he did not accompany me in his body of light, no! He, this tiny creature, was transported physically, drawn into the stream of my departure, as if in the wake of a powerful ship at sea. All that remains of him now, in this present world, is this frozen image."
"But how do you know he didn't simply fly out of the window again?" I asked.
"Because I always close this room when I leave my body, window and door both. One must take precautions. The insect was here when I left, but when I returned, he was gone. And of course there is the evidence you hold in your hand.
"I see." was all I could manage to say. Clearly, the old man was delusional.
"But I wonder if you really do," he continued. "It is all in the mass of the fly, you see, in relation to the fulcrum, the postcard. If with this small postcard as a fulcrum, the fly could take such a trip into the past in its physical body, then with a very large fulcrum, perhaps I..."
"But..." I began.
"It's time for us to go," Sarah interrupted gently.
"Oh, is it?" I asked, getting up from the stool. "Already?" I tried to hand the postcard back to the professor.
"No," he said, his expression both resigned and disappointed. "Please keep it, as a souvenir of your stay in France."
It was very embarrassing. I felt sorry for the old fellow. We thanked him for his generosity, and exited as quickly as possible.
"That sad old man," Sarah said as we made our way home, tears starting in her eyes.
*****
And that is almost the end of the story...
A few days before we left Paris for the States, I bought a nice little bottle of wine and went to visit the professor again. I suppose I felt guilty about the way we'd treated him, and wanted to make amends. After all, his delusions were harmless, and he'd shown us nothing but courtesy.
Sarah hadn't mentioned him once during the previous week, but I knew she'd been very unhappy with the experience, so I didn't mention my plan to her, and just went off on my own.
I waved hello to the concierge, who was still at her game of cards. The twin caterpillers were still mounted above her soulful brown eyes, with which she gave me that stare that asks, "And who are you to me?" So I dug into my passport case and there, next to the "fly" postcard was the professor's calling card.
"Is Monsieur Montparnasse at home?" I asked, handing her his card.
"There is no one here by that name, Monsieur."
"He has moved away?"
"No one by that name has ever lived at this address, Monsieur," she said impatiently.
"I see. Well, thank you anyway," I said, and left.
Perhaps he was more upset with us than he'd let on, and had given the Concierge instructions to turn us away. 'What a shame,' I thought.
On the way back to our room, though it was a little out of my way, I stopped in at our favorite cafe, hoping to drown my sorrows in pastry. "Hi Marc," I said, greeting the owner.
"Bonjour Monsieur. Where is your pretty wife?"
"Ah, she's back at our room," I said, and then, "Say, I wanted to ask you about the professor. I haven't seen him for awhile, and I was wondering..."
"Who?" said Marc.
"The old man with all the books who sits at that table over there. You said he was wise about life, remember?"
Marc's face took on an expression probably a little like mine when the professor was telling us about his time-traveling fly.
"I'm very sorry Monsieur," he said with a shrug of his shoulders, and began studiously wiping down the counter.
Suddenly, I no longer had an appetite.
When I returned to our room, Sarah was writing in her journal at the little desk our student host had lent us. I gave her a sloppy kiss on the back of her neck, and began telling her about my unhappy experiences while trying to locate the professor.
But instead of that sweet balm of sympathy I craved, she gave me only a puzzled look. "Who?" she said.
I lay down on the bed to give the situation some thought.
I will admit now, though if you ever remind me of this confession, I will deny it, that for the briefest moment I wondered if some impish saucier had included some particularly "special" mushrooms in the Cepes a la Bordelaise I'd devoured the week before, and I'd just hallucinated the whole thing, but taking out my passport folder, I was relieved to find the postcard where I'd left it.
I tapped Sarah on the shoulder, who was back to writing in her journal, and when she turned to me, I took her hand, and firmly placed the postcard in it."The professor!" I insisted, trying to keep the near hysterical tone out of my voice. "The one who gave us this postcard. Look!" I pointed. "A time traveling housefly! Please tell me you haven't forgotten."
At first, her face registered nothing, and then, slowly, recognition dawned like a glorious sunrise. "Ohhh my," she said, her eyes going wide. "I guess I did! How could I have forgotten him?"
I kissed her. "You're not alone," I said, and began telling her again about the concierge, and Marc in the Cafe, but as I related my experiences, I became conscious of my memories of the professor beginning to grow fuzzy around the edges. It was as if my brain was a bag of sand with a hole in the bottom, and the memories slowly trickling away. With an idea born of desperation, I reached out and touched the postcard in Sarah's hand, and almost immediately remembered him clearly.
*****
And so it has gone, back and forth we pass the professor's fulcrum, an ordinary postcard that, through the unintentional intrusion of a simple housefly, enabled him to learn a way of physically traveling through time. We marvel at this photograph of three pretty young ladies, and the fly whose negative image was imprinted on it as it was pulled from this now into a now of the past, but we share the tale with no one.
We cannot explain why a physical connection to the postcard enables us to remember the man. Perhaps it has everything to do with the very real link it made for him between past and present. I somehow doubt even he could explain it in a way we could understand.
Sarah leaves herself notes in her journal, reminding her to ask me for the card, or to take it out of our album, so she can remember the old man whom she could never, ever, actually have met. And the other day she wrote down this idea: that the reason we keep returning again and again to our memory of him, has less to do with the professor, who technically does not even exist, than with ourselves, hungrily grasping at a tiny part of us. Because, after all, beyond our base physical components, what are we really composed of, other than memories, and the choices we make, based upon them?
And sometimes, when it's my turn to hold the postcard, I imagine, somewhere in Paris, an unusually large, photographic print made long ago, with an unexplainable negative image of an old man frozen brightly on its surface.
Looking forward to your next visit, sincerely, ___"
Now you tell one :)
A wonderful, wonderful card in very nice condition. Please examine our high res scans for detail.
Postage is for first class shipping in a secure photo mailer, and we happily combine shipping on all paper goods. If you purchase two cards, we will refund the postage on the second card, and when you purchase three or more cards from us at the same time, your shipping will be entirely free, except for international orders which, because of sudden increases in international shipping rates will still be charged one card's shipping fees on orders of three or more.
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