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“I’m not going to school! Now come on, what are you doing here?”
I was terrified. She cocked her head, as if appraising my mood.
“OK…you caught me...” Marta confessed. “I’m not really going to college. I’m actually from the planet Neptune. We’re here to study you earthlings. And might I say you dudes are really weird…particularly you...” She laughed. “Peter, you need to loosen up, man!”
With a giggle and a wave, Marta started walking toward the Agriculture Building.
“See you at lunch,” she said over her shoulder.
This can’t be!
Even though her hat and sunglasses had covered most of her face, it looked like Marta hadn’t aged a day since I had last seen her, nearly four decades ago!
As I stared in shock at the girl’s retreating figure, I noticed old, boxy cars passing behind her along Lincoln Drive. I snapped my head around, and saw that old, boxy cars were parked in the lot near Lentz and along Point Drive as well. I ran up the drive, and found vehicles that I hadn’t seen in such good condition for years: a 1970 Impala, a 1966 Fury, a 1965 Mustang. And every one of them had Illinois license plates dated 1971.
Suddenly the Point exploded with students. Many wore Tshirts; others sported dress shirts with all of the buttons fastened or none of the buttons fastened. There were Army field jackets, denim jackets, and an occasional sport coat. The kids wore corduroy trousers or bell bottom jeans cinched with big, wide belts. And it was all unisex; there were no skirts. The students carried their books at their sides, or wore Army surplus backpacks. Their hair was long and styled in bangs, or split down the middle so that it cascaded down either side of the face.
Several of these children looked vaguely familiar.
My eyes frantically snapped from the students to the cars, to the cafeteria, to the trees and lake—looking for anything that would tell me I was still in the 21st Century.
I reached into my trousers for the pocket watch, but it was gone, and in its place was a chain with the SIU crest attached to it, along with a single key with a sticker displaying the number 108. I was standing in front of a three-story brick and concrete building in all of its mid-20th century glory, with brushed steel letters on the side wall that spelled BAILEY HALL. The redwood slats over the casement windows looked like they had been freshly stained, and glass bricks made the stairwell windows shine in the sun. This was home during my sophomore year at SIU.
I looked neither left nor right, because I was afraid I might see anything from a charging rhinoceros to Richard Nixon. I walked up to the entrance and tried the key…and the door opened. It felt as if the SIU police were about to come down on me at any minute as I ducked furtively inside a hazily familiar hall. In a trance, I walked up to 108, stuck the key in the door, gingerly pushed it open, and was enveloped in the smell of stale tobacco and whiskey. The front half of the room was neat as a pin: the bed was made and all of the books were meticulously lined up on a shelf at the bottom of a blond wood desk. Nearby was a coffee pot and a hotplate, sitting on top of a log standing on its end. As I passed the mirror above the sink, I saw the reflection of a skinny student, and turned around to address the kid, but there was no one there. I turned back to the mirror and saw the reflection of the kid again. I whirled around: there was no one else in the room. I snapped back to the mirror, and facing me was that kid with an agitated expression on his face. He looked the way I felt, except he was fifty pounds lighter and almost forty years younger and wore this ridiculous mustache and…
His eyes widened like saucers. I jerked away from the mirror as if I had seen a ghost, and faced the window overlooking Point Drive. Below it was another blond wood desk, buried in books and papers. Against the wall and facing the sink was an unmade bed with a distantly familiar dark red bedspread that I had forgotten about long ago. And next to it was a nightstand with a fake-walnut-covered clock radio, just like the one that had been stolen from me at a youth hostel I had stayed at in San Diego during a drunken binge in 1981, when I was homeless.
My mind started spinning with the realization that I was reliving in rich detail what had been only minutes ago an indistinct memory. If all of this was a hallucination, I was in deep trouble, and if it wasn’t, I was in even deeper trouble. I gingerly stepped over to the mirror and risked another quick glance at the kid, followed by a longer glance, and yet another, and still another, until I was staring at him. What I saw was not just the image of a 20-year-old youth.
Hell….what’s here for me? College again? No! Everything is in the future. The trailer, marriage, Testing Unlimited… No! Nothing’s in the future! I have nothing in the past and nothing in the future!
I lost my equilibrium and fell into the chair, in front of my desk, and stared down at an open book to stop the spinning. The first line I saw was: Nervous people must ruthlessly separate opinion from facts in their daily lives, because—good or bad—only facts can be relied upon.
I looked at the table of contents. Taming the Agitated Mind: A Handbook for Nervous People, by Robert Von Reichmann, MD.
I sat down and started reading, with the book clenched in my hands in a death grip. My concentration was desperately intense. I’d do anything to avoid looking at or thinking about what I was doing in my old dorm room, in my young body, governed by a 58-year-old, burned-out brain in the year 1971.
Chapter 4
I fell asleep at “my” desk, slumped over the Von Reichmann book, when something loud, harsh, and jangling awakened me with a jerk. I hadn’t heard the ring of an old rotary telephone for years. I jumped up with incredible speed, overturned the chair, and reached the receiver of the wall phone just as the clattering of the chair against the floor died away. As I lifted the receiver, I thought, Where the hell am I? But by the time I got the instrument to my ear, I realized that I was back at 108 Bailey Hall, Thompson Point, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
“Huh-Hello!” I said.
“Darling!”
I almost didn’t recognize her voice.
“Tammy? Is that you!?…”
“Of course it’s me. Are you expecting some other girl to call?”
She sounded so young, so intense, but without the strident overtones that later flawed her perfect voice. It was as if the miserable four-year marriage had never happened—which it hadn’t, not yet. I felt a burst of desire that was quickly overlaid by anxiety as I became fully awake.
“Hello? Hello? Peter, are you still there? Peter…”
“Yes I’m still here, but I wish I weren’t…”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I mean, that I don’t belong here.” My eyes were moving around the dorm room as I visualized Tammy at the other end of the line, probably in Urbana in her dorm room, lying on her bed, maybe in her underwear, with her red hair and perfect figure.
“What’s wrong, Peter? Is there something wrong? Tell me.”
“I mean…” I didn’t know what I meant, other than feeling suddenly nauseous and lightheaded.
“What do you mean, Pete? You’ve pulled this before. You just stop communicating. You’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”
I was looking at the wall, at shadows of the little holes. The green cinder block should have been blurred into gray obscurity by time, but instead was as sharp and colorful as a Kodachrome slide. I sat heavily on my red bedspread in a haze of wooziness. Soon I became aware of plaintive chirping coming out of the receiver now hanging from its cord.
“Peter, Peter! Are you there? What’s going on?”
I hung up.
I got up and caught a glimpse of my 20-year-old self in the mirror, and searched deep in his eyes for any signs of a 58-year-old man in there, but all I saw was the face that was on my student ID which I had found in my a dirty wallet located in my side pocket. Also in it were four dollars, a Park Forest library card, a cardboard Illinois driver’s license, and several scraps of paper with notes scrawled on them. I went into the bathroom and threw up. When I came back out, I opened the medicine cabinet, found a glass bottle of aspirin, and took two of them while sitting on the edge of my bed. I stared out the window at the big, boxy cars of the ‘70s passing by on Lincoln Drive.
Right now I’m involved with Tammy and that’s going to lead to a miserable marriage. My parents live in a Chicago suburb and are the same age as I am, or was. My younger brother—who was in his early fifties the last time I saw him—is now a high school kid. My neighborhood in Park Forest, the next-door neighbors, Rich East High School, WRHS, the high school radio station, my childhood friends…are all right there for me, three hundred miles to the north…and almost forty years in the past. If I saw them what would I think? What would they think? Would it change the future? Am I changing the future now? And what about Catherine? What’s my relationship with her now? I don’t remember!
I was frantically trying to push past a huge, implacable block of time that separated me from my memories of 1971, but after 38 years, there weren’t many memories left.
In the midst of this confusion, I heard a key scratching around in the hall door lock behind me. From the reflection in the window, I saw the door slowly open, and I gingerly turned around, afraid of what I was about to see. In shambled a short, muscular, teenager with swarthy, rounded features who wore a dull red and brown T-shirt, jeans, white socks and black canvas tennis shoes. His brown hair was considered short for the ‘70s, and he could have been mistaken for either a young gym coach or a hood.
With the briefest of nods the youth sat down, produced a curve-stemmed pipe, and with a flowing motion, scooped it into it a big can on his desk. Then he scratched a wooden match against the upturned log on the floor and lit the pipe with a long draw. Next, he picked up a bottle next to the tobacco and poured a bracer into a shot glass as the cloud of smoke hit the ceiling and spread to the four corners of the room. To me, the youth looked like a little child who had come across the pipe while playing around in his father’s liquor cabinet. The boy was exactly as I remembered him, except that he looked much too young for college—like every other student I had seen today, including myself. I sat in my chair and stared at this apparition, until I couldn’t stand the tension anymore.
“Harry! Man, it’s good to see you! How have you been?” I burst out.
The youth turned toward me, and with the pipe clenched in his teeth he said,
“Hello, snake shit.”
I stared at him in shock.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said. “You look like someone exploded a flashbulb in your face.”
“I’m just glad to see you, that’s all.”
“And I’m glad to see you, too. Now shut the fuck up and let me study. I’ve got a calculus midterm Monday.”
I was stunned by this response, and sat there sullenly watching the kid work as if he were part of a hazy dream—a dream that turned opaque when a cloud of whiskey-reeking smoke descended on me and I started coughing.
“Good God, it smells as if you set the whole damned can of that stuff on fire!”
“I thought you liked the smell of Borkum Riff.”
“Well, yah, but I’m not used to it.”
“I smoke it every day.”
“Uhhhh….That’s what I mean….. I just haven’t had enough time to recover from yesterday’s experience.”
“Federson, as usual, you’re not making any sense.”
With a hint of a grin, the youth reached for a volume from a neat line of textbooks on his pristine desk.
I looked down at my desk and saw several open books piled on top of one another, scattered pieces of paper with illegible writing on them, pens and pencils dispersed among pencil shavings, paper clips, rubber bands, a sock, photographs, and other stuff that looked as if it had been dumped out of a dirty bag. Appropriately, one of the books was open to a chapter entitled The Chaos Theory of Nature, and overlaying it all, like topsoil, was a thick coating of dust. A cobweb dominated the bookshelf that formed the desk’s lower right support.
“Uhhh, when was the last time I worked at this desk?” I said.
“You don’t remember?”
“Well, uhhh, yes, I mean…”
“This morning,” the youth said with the pipe still clenched in his teeth. “You were looking for your class schedule.”
“Did I find it?”
The kid took the pipe out of his mouth, and with a deliberate motion leaned it against the base of his lamp, and turned to his nervous roommate. “Now how in the hell am I supposed to know that? Not only did you lose your class schedule in that mess, you don’t even remember looking for it in the first place. Federson, I want to ace this test, so shut up!”
“OK, but just one more question.”
“What?”
“Have I been acting weird lately?”
“Acting weird lately,” he muttered.
That ended the conversation, and Harry Smykus buried his nose and his pipe in the book. Occasional clouds of smoke puffed up around his desk lamp as he became immersed in calculus. As I remembered, this pipe-smoking child consistently got on the Dean’s List with straight A’s. He read Freud and the Bible as hobbies, and lectured to me about both of them in the coarsest language possible.
I didn’t know what to do next, so I sat at the desk for a few minutes while staring out the window at the beautiful spring afternoon. Soon, a puff of wind ruffled the drapes and brought into the room a whiff of apple pie, and I felt the kind of hungry craving that comes with a youthful body still under construction.
In the 21st century, mirrors were not my friends, but now I hazarded yet another glance at the mirror over the sink. The reflection showed a slender, almost skinny youth who wasn’t terribly bad looking; in fact, he looked pretty damned good, except for that silly mustache. I decided to shave it off.
I took a shower in the plain-tiled bathroom, without any 21st century products like shower gel, body wash or cream rinse—just a bar of Ivory soap and bottle of Head and Shoulders. The circa 1960 nozzle, created in the days before water conservation, sprayed copious amounts of water all over the place I shaved with an old-fashioned safety razor that would cut you if you let it, so I had to be particularly careful.
“Are you going to dinner, ah, Harry?” I asked hesitantly. I was half afraid that this talking specter from my past would dissolve into dust.
“No, man, I already ate.”
I closed the door quietly and made the 30-second walk to the cafeteria, and entered “Mama Lentz”—as we’d called it in the ‘70s—with my student ID, showing me and my silly mustache, which I was still wearing. Apparently I had gotten so preoccupied with avoiding cuts while shaving with the dangerous “safety” razor that I’d forgotten to cut off the mustache. I reached up and touched it as I showed the ID and my fee statement—which proved I was registered that quarter—to the tired-looking girl who was standing at the turnstile and wearing a white uniform dress with the maroon SIU logo above her right breast.
The menu in front of the steamy cafeteria line announced that it was BLT night. This didn’t look good. I had a hazy memory of Lentz food and it wasn’t positive. Furthermore, I was wedged in a line of hairy, blue-jeaned, surly students who didn’t seem to enjoy the Mama Lentz experience either. I looked down at the serving table and saw pieces of soggy toast with X’s of overcooked bacon lying on top of thin slices of yellow-green tomatoes, which in turn rested on top of leaves of wilted lettuce.
The adjacent tray was piled with flaccid French fries, behind which was another girl sporting wisps of blond hair leaking out of her hairnet. She dumped a pile of fries on my plate.
Oh, God.
The line moaned and groaned until it emptied into the dining area. I stood there for a moment, letting my eyes scan the cafeteria, and saw vaguely familiar people wearing outrageous clothing I hadn’t seen for years. One heavily-bearded kid showed the SIU slump while filling a line of five glasses at the machine. He sported the latest student fashion: a US Army fatigue jacket with Air Force wings pinned to the collar, a Marine Corps sergeant’s stripes sewn jaggedly onto the outside of one pant leg, a little green clenched fist stitched on one sleeve, a peace symbol in the belly button region, and a little American flag sewn onto the butt of his tie-dyed jeans.
I noticed something else that isn’t seen any more in American society: Cigarette smoke rose from cheap tin ashtrays on the tables. The smoke combined with the aromas of food cooking, and even the dishwasher odors smelled comforting, in a distant way, and were surprisingly not unpleasant.
I walked to a round blonde wood table and sat down with my usual grimace, but the grimace was wasted because my back didn’t hurt at all. As I was about to take a timid bite out of my sandwich, I became aware of music trailing away from speakers in the ceiling, followed by a tympani roll and a low voice,
“WIDB Carbondale…is…together!”
Then I heard the student disk jockey.
“Ronald Ramjet on together Six, WIDB. Sunny today, high of 80. Cool tonight, low of 50. Right now, 78 degrees. Now, from out of the past, 1970, Mungo Jerry, ‘In the Summer Time’!”
Ramjet had timed his wrap perfectly over the beginning of the song until the vocal began. “In the Summer Time” was my favorite tune for decades, before the song wore grooves into my mind and I could no longer stand to listen to it. But at this moment, “In the Summer Time” sounded…brand new, as if I had never heard it before. My BLT forgotten, I was aware of nothing around me but the music.
Until I spotted Marta dancing to the beat at the salad bar. She swayed as she plucked mushrooms from the huge bowl and dropped them on her plate. Then, her love beads bouncing, she danced toward my table as Mungo Jerry sang about how you can reach right up and touch the sky, in the summer time. She sat down across from me with a lazy smile.
“Groovin’ to the music, Peter?” The scent of saffron incense that clung to her dress made it nice to live once again in 1971…for a moment.
“Oh God, yes! This is….great!” Everyone else in the cafeteria seemed to be grooving, too. Some choreographer had the students eating their food, drinking their coffee, and smoking their cigarettes in time with the music, and a costume designer had made sure that everyone wore huge collars, super-wide lapels, the paisley-ist paisley, the highest unisex heels, and the shortest dresses. Marta, meanwhile, ran over to another table, picked up some books and a bag, and brought them back. She sat down, pulled out a pair of oversized granny glasses from the blue velvet bag—on which JOHNNIE WALKER was stitched in yellow thread—and picked up a mushroom from her plate. When the song ended, I noticed Marta wasn’t eating the mushroom, but was scrutinizing it with one eye closed, like a jeweler examining a fine diamond.
“Marta?” I reached up to pull my glasses forward on my nose so that I could focus on the mushroom. But I wasn’t wearing glasses, I was wearing contacts; I could feel them in my eyes.
“Yes, dude.” Her open eye glanced up and fixed on my hand, then moved back to the mushroom she was examining. She looked at it, put that mushroom down and picked up another one.
Space cadet.
I looked down at the burnt-bacon-yellow-tomato-wilted-lettuce sandwich, and took a timid nibble, assuming that it was going to taste revolting, even with the mayonnaise I had slathered all over it. Instead, I experienced a big surprise.
“Man, this is the best BLT I’ve ever eaten….ever!” I exclaimed.
By now, Marta was examining her 5th mushroom and gave me a quick smile. I gulped down the sandwich and the fries and looked greedily at Marta’s plate.
“Are you going to eat those mushrooms, or dry them out and smoke them?” I said.
Marta sat up with a jolt. “Man, I never thought of that!” Then her eyes glazed over, and she appeared to have slid into a deeper level of concentration as she mechanically reached for an errant french fry on my tray.
I stood up and went to the serving counter. When I came back, I once again sat down with a grimace, again forgetting that I had nothing to grimace about. Marta’s eye moved away from her current mushroom and focused on me again.
“Got some pain there, dude? Hurt yourself running or something?”
“No…just some arthritis,” I said without thinking.
“You have arthritis?” Now both lazy eyes were on me.
