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“I used to…I mean, no, well…maybe in the future. I…never mind.”
Marta nodded, but something else was going on behind those hooded eyes.
Returning to the table after my third trip to the serving line, I noticed that she had dissected my french fry, the mushrooms apparently forgotten.
“Why aren’t you eating any of your mushrooms?”
“They’re not for eating, man,” said Marta. She glanced up and closed her mouth with a click.
As I was about to ask another question, her mouth snapped open.
“They all are really round and look the same, but they’re all different, and that’s like the universe. I mean, man, it’s all the same: air, animal, mineral, vegetable. Really, the mushrooms are the same as your french fry, even though they look different. Ya just have to be in the right reality. Like, I’m in my reality and you’re in your reality, dude, and you see mushrooms and french fries and I see…atoms and molecules. Deh ya understand?”
“No...” I started scratching my head, and noticed that I had no bald spot on the crown. “Man! This is great!”
With an amused expression, Marta watched me feel the top of my head.
“Hey pilgrim, don’t worry. You don’t have to search for it. Your head’s still there.”
“Yah, but the bald spot is gone.”
For an instant, Marta’s lazy eyes tightened.
“I never noticed that you had a bald spot.” She giggled. “Now tell me the truth: Were you speaking from personal experience when you said to dry out the mushrooms and smoke them?”
“Hell no! It’ll be ten more years before I do anything like that.”
Marta chuckled, but again I thought I saw those eyes squint a little. She lazily reached for an old-fashioned watch, the kind that women clipped to their blouses a hundred years ago. She glanced at the upside-down dial and jumped up with a start.
“Shit! I’m late for class.”
Probably, Incense For the Soul 101.
She lopped out of the cafeteria, leaving in her wake the odor of saffron.
I decided right then to avoid Marta the next time I was in the dining hall. I was trying with all of my soul to maintain my sanity, and sitting across from me was a person who was going out of her way to lose hers. Yet, even if she was late for class, at least she knew what class she was late for. I, on the other hand, had no memory of what classes I took during the spring of 1971. I also had very little memory of talking with Marta, because I’d always tried to avoid her in the cafeteria. She was too skinny to be attractive to me, and it was hard for me to translate her hip talk into 20th century English.
With the reflexes of a cat, I jumped up from the table, placed the tray on the dishwashing conveyer belt, strode through the turnstiles to the entrance hall, and walked back to the dorm.
The 108 Bailey was still hazy with whiskey-flavored smoke, and Harry was still hunched over his desk in a circle of light from his desk lamp.
“How ya doin’, Harry,” I said quietly, still afraid that he would dissolve into pixie dust.
Harry barely nodded and went back to his calculus book, and I went to my mess of a desk in search of my class schedule. It wasn’t until I got on my knees among the dust bunnies on the floor that I found the schedule, but it was of no use to me unless I knew what day it was. The month would be helpful too.
“Harry, what’s today?” I yelled across the room.
“Saturday,” said Harry without looking up.
“Thanks, and what month is it?”
This time Harry looked up.
“You gotta be kidding, Federson.” He looked down again.
“It’s March,” I guessed.
“Federson, would ya quit screwin’ around?”
“April? Is it April?”
Harry grabbed his pipe and matches and started to light up.
“Well shit, Federson, I guess if ya forgot steak night last month, walked into the wrong dorm room last week, and lost your class schedule again—that’s what you’re still lookin’ for, isn’t it?—then maybe you really don’t know what month it is. Okay, it’s May…May 1st …May 1st, 1971….1971 A.D.”
“Thank you, Harry,” I said as if I were a game show host ready to introduce the next contestant. At that moment I realized I was feeling something that had eluded me for decades: I was actually enjoying myself. For a few minutes, I was once again perfectly comfortable living in 108 Bailey Hall. Counting the “In the Summertime” earlier, that made two good moments in one day. A ten-year record!
Harry went back to writing equations in a notebook, while I looked at my schedule. The good moment ended with a crash when I saw that I had algebra Monday through Friday at 7:30 in the morning. This was the course that resulted in me flunking out of the university and being drafted into the Army to serve in Vietnam.
Why, why, why did I schedule algebra for 7:30 in the morning?
The gremlins, freshly energized, hammered flat my feelings of wellbeing, and the tension caused me to hold the class schedule so tightly that it almost tore in half. Aside from algebra, I had The History of Broadcasting and abnormal psychology five days a week and earth science for three days. I was also getting two quarter hours for being on the air at WSIU Radio. I hadn’t been on the air for a decade, didn’t even remember taking earth science, and as for abnormal psych, the professor would probably have me committed if I told him anything about my sudden time warp.
I sat at my desk and stared out the dark window in a stupor as the gremlins shoveled morbid thoughts into my head so fast that images of Tammy’s harping mouth, green uniforms, and my delaminating trailer flickered in the streetlights. Then I noticed the light behind me was flickering as well. I turned from my desk and saw Harry moving the gooseneck of his lamp with a frustrated look on his face. A spark shot out. Harry let go of the lamp and it fell, shuttering on the desk. He fetched the shade a glancing blow with his pencil.
Ding
“Sucker!” he said plaintively.
I remembered this incident! The gremlins stopped their hammering and started laughing, as did I. We laughed so hard that I could barely breathe.
“Harry, why the hell don’t you get a new lamp?” I gasped.
“Hey man, it’s okay, it just….”
“Sparks. Just sparks. The sparks are gonna set your five-gallon can of Borkum Riff ablaze, which will ignite your bottle of moonshine, blowing up the room, cremating the dorm, immolating the rest of TP, and conflagrating the campus! Then…”
“Okay, Federson, I get the message.”
“I mean, if you don’t feel comfortable with a new lamp, then get a hammer and put a few dents in it, scratch it with a nail…”
“….Man, you can either argue with Federson or argue with Federson.”
Harry unplugged the lamp and got ready for bed. My eyes stung a little—from the fatigue of being catapulted back in time? I came within one inch of the mirror and saw little red veins radiating from my pupils, on which hard contact lenses floated like transparent pebbles. It had been years since I could see so close without reading glasses. On the nightstand were my big oval Coke bottles of molded thick plastic. I popped out the contacts, put the glasses on, and looked into the mirror to see a young kid wearing big thick glasses, and a thin scraggily mustache. I vowed to definitely shave off the mustache in the morning.
The distortion from the glasses made everything look farther away than it really was, so when I reached to put the rigid plastic contact lens kit on the nightstand, it fell to the floor with a smack. I banged into the metal trash can again while attempting to retrieve the lens case, and I stumbled into the desk and knocked a pile of debris onto the floor. I looked over at Harry to see if I had disturbed him, but the moonlight shining through a crack in the drapes showed him to be fast asleep. He looked as if he were dreaming about either playing with his Erector set or undressing some girl.
For the first time in years, I fell asleep easily. This, after three BLT sandwiches, two hamburgers, two plates of french fries, two slices of apple pie, three glasses of milk, six cups of coffee, and the nail-biting uncertainty of whether I was reliving my life again or experiencing the most vivid dream in the history of dreaming.
If it was a dream, then that night, I had a dream within a dream. I was on the trail around the Lake on the Campus, walking toward a bridge, when I spotted the figure of a young woman. When I stopped beside her, she turned to me, and it was like having a bucket of ice water thrown in my face.
Catherine was standing on the path wearing a grim smile.
“Hello, stranger,” she said. Then her face turned down in profound sadness.
“I’m afraid if you don’t make it this time, you’ll die in the war.”
Before I could respond, she walked up the trail and was lost in the trees, and I woke up in shaking terror. I put on my Coke bottles and glanced at the dial of my clock radio: 3:07 AM. I remembered again that the radio had been stolen while I was homeless and staying at that youth hostel in San Diego.
I lay there, staring at the glowing dial, and realized there was something very obvious that I wasn’t seeing. It took me two or three minutes of staring at the radio to figure it out.
This radio doesn’t have to be stolen, and I don’t have to flunk algebra.
I climbed out of bed, put on my robe, crept over to my desk, turned the lamp shade toward the wall—so I wouldn’t wake Harry—and switched it on. In the dull glow of the yellow light, I bent down to check the bookshelf and found a telephone directory. Catherine’s number was easy to find, because Murphysboro—the town northwest of Carbondale—had a population of only a few thousand people, and there was only one Mancini listed. I resolved to call her first thing in the morning.
Then I found my algebra book, with a thin coat of dust on its edge. I opened it, turned to page one, and started reading.
Chapter 5
I awakened with a start after a futile night of studying algebra and not understanding any of it. The clock radio read 9:19, the sun shone around the edges of the drapes, and cool air wafted into the room through the screens.
Is this real?
I jumped out of bed and snapped open the drapes to a beautiful Southern Illinois morning. Old cars were still passing along Lincoln Drive, and archaically dressed students were still strolling along the walkways. My familiarly unfamiliar room was bright and sunny, with Harry’s side clean and orderly—he was up and gone already—and my side was a filthy mess. Yes, it was real.
Catherine!
I spotted her number taped to the radiator above the rubble on my desk. The phone was less than three steps away from me, but the distance may as well have been from the dorm to Murphysboro, eight long miles away.
On top of my desk was Taming the Agitated Mind: A Handbook for Nervous People, by Robert Von Reichmann, MD.
I opened to a sentence underlined in pencil and read it out loud: “For a nervous person, prone to obsessive rumination, it oftentimes is best to stop thinking, and to start functioning.”
My fear was in contacting my shaky past, which would then become my uncertain future that I could easily make worse than the past. I needed to stop thinking, get all the way up from the desk, trudge over to the phone, and make the call. Instead, I picked up several loose papers with scribbling on them and threw them into the trash.
First things first.
I rationalized that I could only call Catherine with a clear mind, and it was difficult—no, impossible—to be clear about anything with such a messy desk. The desk resembled my kitchen table circa 2009 before I swept all of the debris on the trailer floor. On the other side of the room, Harry’s desk was as well organized as his mind. Maybe if I organized one, the other would follow, and I would call Catherine when the desk was clean.
An hour later, I scanned my pristine, well-polished desk: the old gooseneck lamp sat in the left corner and shone a circle of light on the green blotter. A pen holder held two fountain pens—which I’d almost never used, I remembered—and in a little tray was a Long Island Railroad token with a dashing commuter stamped on its face: a souvenir from the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the only time my family ever went on vacation together. The token had gone missing in the ‘80s.
And it seemed as if other things were missing as well. I restlessly scanned the room for clues until my eyes stopped with a jolt at the telephone on the wall. The big black box with its old-fashioned dial and awkward receiver would look ludicrous clipped to my belt in place of my cell phone. Missing from my desk was the computer monitor, mouse, and printer, and underneath on the book shelf, the CPU. And missing from my dresser was the DVD player and flat screen TV. But since these technologies hadn’t been invented yet, I really was missing nothing, because in 1971, we humans were still in control of our technology, not the other way around.
I went to the janitorial closet in the hall and found a mop, a bucket, and cans of floor soap and wax. I drew some water from the shower and cleaned the rest of the room.
By 11:00 that morning, a photographer from the Daily Egyptian, SIU’s student newspaper, could have taken a Kodachrome slide of 108 Bailey for the “Best Dorm Room of the Quarter” contest. The only flaw in the perfect room was a teaspoon-sized spill of pipe tobacco on Harry’s desk.
Time to call Catherine.
With a shaking finger, I dialed the number. I waited a few seconds and heard clicking noises, a funny bleeping tone, and then a recording that said that the number was no longer in service. I called Information, but the operator told me that there was no record of a Mancini residence in Murphysboro. Miserably disappointed, I sat down on my neatly-made bed and flipped through the phone book again. The Mancini number was there, and I had no memory of them moving.
Maybe I’ve gone back to a different past.
I sat on my bed and spent a half hour staring down at my dull leather boots in a futile attempt to ignore the 20th century. Finally the knob to the hall door twisted, and Harry slumped into the room with a subtle nod.
He didn’t have his usual four or five books under his arm; instead there was a single box. I remembered that my roommate was a person of rigid habits, so this change intrigued me. He sat down at his desk, opened the box as if it contained, say, a vase from the Ming Dynasty that he had stolen from some museum, and pulled out a shiny new gooseneck lamp.
He plugged it in and twisted the switch on top of the shade. The lamp flooded the desk with a strong warm light.
“Hey, this is really cock, Federson…” he said. “Look, man, it has three settings….soft…”
Click.
“…medium...”
Click.
“...and high.”
Click.
Harry moved the lamp from one position to another on his desk, twisting around the gooseneck, and putting it through its paces by repeatedly switching it from low to medium to high.
I remember this!
I remembered Harry buying a new lamp. Come to think of it, I remembered a lot of things from the ‘70s now.
“Nixon is going to resign in ‘74!” I muttered.
“What did you say, Federson?” Harry mumbled into a book.
“I said…nice lamp, and…”
I pushed hard on that 38-year-long block to my memory, until something finally trickled out.
“Harry, wear your seatbelt.”
“What? What about a seatbelt, Federson?” Harry looked up.
“You’re going to be in a traffic accident soon. A squirrel or something darts in front of you and if you don’t wear your seatbelt you’ll wind up in the emergency room with a concussion and a big lump on your forehead. The right side, I think.”
Harry looked at me in shock.
“Federson, now you’re getting spooky.” He reached for his pipe.
“Harry, promise me. Promise me, that you’ll wear the damned seatbelt.”
“OK, Federson, I will.”
