Review: Time Adjusters and Other Stories

No time like the present.



A little clue of what to expect from Bill Ectric's collection can be gleaned from an interview on his website with Clay "Lightening Rod" January. Ectric explains that while he liked writers that experimented with literary technique -- William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, Jacques Derrida -- he liked Quentin Tarantino and Indiana Jones and other "pop escapism" equally. "You know, a lot of people are afraid to admit they like pop. Hell, it's all good. If Shakespeare had video he would have used it. I don't care. Right in the middle of something commercial there can also be something profound." Ectrics' Time Adjusters and Other Stories, a collection of nine short stories, is all that: a potent blend of cut up, deconstructionism and other transgressive literary conceits, shot through with a pop sci-fi sensibility.

The title itself is a giveaway, strong evocation of the book's subject matter: time; it preoccupies these stories. In The House and the Baboon, time evaporates: "This was not at all the blissful 10:30 AM vibe; time was running out. Christmas was over and the toys were broken." There are time-lines, the right time ("before we became teenagers and old enough to be tried as adults"), the characters have all the time in the world, time stops (the narrative is interrupted with an intermission), and a door is a passage to another time.

Pulling a sick day off work to write an article on a local haunted house, the narrator drops in with his wife's cousin who is staying with two bikers next door for a diversion and to take his mind off the Sears plumber who has not shown up. Mark, a self-described "red-neck queer", and the narrator take full advantage of the hosts being away and break open a bottle of good Scotch. They hatch a scheme for revenge: re-requesting the plumber calls out not to the original address, but to the haunted house over the road, where Mark will "stuff pages of the Sears catalog up his ass." With a time travel formula "we found in a pawn shop when we were kids...we would get our wish if we didn't fight time," time folds in on itself and an episode from childhood involving a neighbour's baboon is replayed, with the plumber and the boys now as adults saving their young selves from the wild animal. "One day I'm going to make it back over to their house to catch up on my parallel existence," Ectric writes.

Science fiction is a much-maligned genre and, like punk music and singing the blues, is seemingly easy to do, but very hard to do well. Ectric has no worries in this department. In the title story Time Adjusters, Ectric takes us back to the 1980s, a "strange time for me." Working as an underwriter for the American Wage Insurance Company, the narrator comes into contact with a new technology that "involved catching reflections in the sun's rays as they bounced off the Earth, to analyze potential sites of floods, earthquakes, and other disasters," avoiding insuring clients in those disaster locations. Aside from the practice being morally bankrupt, which Ectric suggests it is, the technology is flawed: "Nobody could imagine that the enormous flux of energy between the Earth and the Sun would cause actual disruptions in time and space, but that is what happened."

Time warps, there are time holes in which 16th century Spanish explorers turn up in the Banana Republic shop in Jacksonville Landing, Neanderthals are used as cheap labour, people disappear and the narrator's memories of the baseball cards he collected when he was younger are corrupted:

"I got both Mickey Mantle and Roger Marris. But where are they now? Recklessness! Sometimes I find them old and faded; other times they are brand new and slick. You can almost smell the bubble gum. But sometimes I look into the drawer and they are not there at all."

The Little Robot, set sometime in the future, is perhaps the most straightforward of Ectric's sci stories, concerning a boy in an orphanage who has to choose between the rosary's his mother gave him or the toy robot from his father. While the administrator "felt pride and a sense of accomplishment for leading the boy away from superstition and toward a practical, scientific past-time," little Josh has other ideas. Sensitively written and told with a mature and evenly weighted style, The Little Robot is a little gem.

Ectric does a nice line in Penny Dreadful horror as well. In Miss Glenly's Dreadful Room, a conversation on deconstruction unravels Miss Glenly, a retired English teacher who has taken to sleeping on her porch, avoiding the room where her husband committed suicide. Quack is the tale of Gunter Clark, a "mild-mannered man, always dressed like he was going fishing," unable to convince his doctor he has a duck growing in his rectum (the doctor prefers to think it's cancer).

Continuing the mild-horror theme, Fear Flight takes the reader into the world of out-of-body experiences, memory loss and incubuses, Bucket Head, a Nightmare on Elm Street-esque romp through a school kid prank in which a bucket is glued to the janitor's head and Club Web, dedicated to William Burroughs and written as a gothic cut-up poem about a vampire role-playing club.

The Beats, the group that "spoke of new freedoms and wild adventures, which sometimes scared the more conservative public," get another outing, this time in Cut Up (The Stolen Scroll). Gritty, slick and very cool, Cut Up is a fictional tale of the Jack Kerouac On the Road scroll and perhaps the greatest act of rebellion of all: its theft. Stolen on impulse, "the way he imagined most "beat" things were done. A deviate jazz note thrown into the mix," Jim can't handle the heat and wants to return it anonymously without having to do jail-time. He composes a message using the cut-up technique as to the scroll's whereabouts and posts it on the LitKicks website, figuring that fans can work out its hiding place. In a piece worthy of David Lynch, that secret message turns deadly as the mob assume it mean something else altogether and are out to silence Jim.

Though Ectric tackles some pretty heavy subjects, his style is unpretentious and his tales narrated in a cheerful lilt, making Time Adjusters and Other Stories a sometimes surreal but always fun read. And with Bill Ectric, the devil is in the details. Beneath the science fiction, the horror and the mystery, he nails life's foibles -- "10:30 AM which is like magic hour when you call in sick because it's not too late, plenty of possibility left in the day, and usually some good TV shows come on about this time. Old reruns, sensational talk shows and Judges Court." -- and creates a peculiar Ectrician world: "the only thing I hate about Florida is the sun" and "Wistful evenings sometimes begin with sunny afternoons."

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Time Adjusters and Other Stories by Bill Ectric
iUniverse
116 Pages