MEMORIES OF THE MARKET SQUARE MURAL (Continued)

What they did was brilliant. The muralists filled in the 1,600 square foot hole with a painting of the same two buildings it covered -- but with a twist. The former Foye and Pierce buildings were depicted as they had been nearly a hundred years earlier. The differences were subtle, old store signs reappeared, doorways aged. The finely crafted detail included 19th century items in a bakery window, even ghostly shop owners and painted reflections of Market Square as it once was. The bricks looked like bricks, the granite lintels and wood trim were hauntingly realistic. The tromp d' ceil ("fool the eye") style was so successful that pigeons attempted to land on the window sills. The town was enchanted by the biggest painting in its history. The mural artists called it a giant business card and it got them some jobs -- the nave of a catholic church, another exterior, a prison cafeteria.

Behind the wall, construction continued. In front, the spindly new trees changed color and dropped their leaves. From across Market Square, people passing on Congress Street seemed to enter a huge Polaroid of old Portsmouth, and seconds later, to re-enter the modern world. This scene, repeated again and again, formed swirling eddies of time. Often fallen leaves mixed with bits of litter would get caught in the spin cycle, and although no one noticed, here and there, a few seconds fell out of step and were lost forever. One man in the painted store shifted position and a painted reflection in a painted window changed color, now and again, with real sunlight on the Square.

These were the warning signals of the temporal storm that erupted with the coming of the woman in the window. She appeared one day leaning out from the third floor. She was decidedly Spanish, young with soft skin and dark hair. She wore a dress wide open at the neck and appeared to have a flower in her hair. Propping her head in one hand, she gazed with fascination into the street below. Everything amazed her, even the empty street at night, night after night, through the winter and into the spring until the wall came down around her.

What the mural artists really built was, of course, a time machine. We've all seen the movies and that's why we were fooled at first. Movie time machines have dials, a comfortable seat or at least an ornate portal to pass through. They make noise, spark or hiss and emit clouds of smoke. There is always music. We've been programmed to think that when the machine is moving, things get blurry. Time passes in a hurricane, Hollywood tells us, but it doesn't. A few leaves may spin and a few seconds may get lost, but on the surface, at least, the phenomenon is a gentle one. That's why the wormhole doesn't show up well in photographs, but it's there.

The woman in the window turned out to be a prostitute. The artists admitted the truth and some of the town fathers and mothers were shocked. But no one could quite figure out how to arrest a painting of a prostitute. There were those who even admitted that Portsmouth's old "red light" district had probably contributed as much to the local economy as the more legitimate enterprises of slavery and privateering. The woman was allowed to remain at her window and the artists were allowed to remain unheralded and unpaid. The wormhole, which seemed to localize around the painted prostitute, was allowed to continue doing what wormholes do.

As I recall, I didn't see the wormhole right away. My rational brain kept telling me that the whole scene was made of plywood, though something deep inside knew better. I kept trying to imagine the rest of Portsmouth at the turn of the century, using the mural as the launch pad for my weak imagination. I filled the streets with carriages, a fountain in the center, the smells of horse and hay and rotted food and burning coal. I blocked out the sounds of cars, plugged in the sounds of distant ships, a train, wheels on an untarred road. I concentrated so hard my eyes crossed, but I was not transported.

Which is about the time, lifting my head in frustration, that I saw the wormhole. Funny how you miss the obvious stuff. The woman in the window had, all this time, been staring right at me, fascinated, I assumed by my oddly styled clothes, not to mention the strange cars. The North Church steeple had been painted brown in her day, not white. The stores were all so changed, so brightly lit.

She was thinking, I can only assume, of how different her life might have been. What if she'd been born in the future, say a hundred years ahead. Strange visions filled her mind and she leaned a bit further out the window. The curtains on each side of her floated a bit in the salt breeze from the harbor and, for just a second, she saw things that amazed her. No one would ever believe her fantastic descriptions of the future, but they stayed with her, filling her dreams throughout her short unhappy life. Then she blinked to clear her brain, the wormhole flashed in her eyes, and was gone.

Copyright © 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. First published in 1997.