скачать книгу бесплатно
But I didn’t believe him.
With a bemused expression, Harry settled on a medium setting for his lamp, lit his pipe, went back to work, and apparently didn’t notice the shiny new coat of wax on the floor.
I had a clear idea of the history of the future until 2009, but the farther I went back, the hazier world events became. Within my reach was the maroon mechanical pencil the soldier had given to me on the train. I picked it up; it seemed to fit my hand perfectly. Without thinking, I wrote in neat cursive script, something I had not done for decades.
1. Nixon resigns in August of 1974 because of his role in the cover-up of the Watergate breakin.
2. Gerald Ford becomes president. He’s followed by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush the Elder, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush the Younger, and Barack Obama.
3. Inflation will go to double digits in the ‘70s.
4. In 1975, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest wins Best Picture.
5. The space shuttle Challenger will blow up shortly after launch in 1984. (I think)
6. The PC will be invented in the ‘70s and will be used on a massive scale, as will the Internet, by the ‘90s.
7. The Cold War will end in 1991.
8. 9/11
8. The White Sox will win the World Series in 2005, for the first time in 88 years.
10. The “Great Recession” will start in 2007.
11. Barack Obama, the first black president, will be elected in 2008.
12. In May 2009, an inland hurricane will sweep through Southern Illinois, creating widespread destruction.
13. In October 2009, Peter Federson will be yanked back in time to 1971.
I found a red magic marker in my desk and printed over the top of this list:
WHAT I KNOW.
And I taped the paper to my wall next to my desk.
Soon, Harry closed his book and placed it on the shelf, and got up to leave.
“Going to lunch, Federson?”
“Naw, I got some things to do.” I wasn’t hungry, anyway.
Clouds filled the sky, the air smelled of rain, and the gremlins, who thrived on gloomy weather, were standing by to pluck a nerve. I knew what was coming.
Don’t think… function!
I slid open the blond wood accordion door to the closet, and felt that I was intruding on someone else’s privacy: my own, thirty-eight years removed. Some clothes were on hangers and the rest were piled on the dresser, which was built into the closet.
What a garish assortment: bright red plaid bell bottoms with cuffs, shirts with huge collar points, wide paisley neckties in brutally clashing colors…clothing designs that in any other period of recorded history would be considered absurd. I found a tin of aspirin in the pile—probably handy for headaches caused by the sight of that gaudy stack of fabric.
The clothes in the dresser looked as if they had been dumped out of the same bag that had been emptied out onto my desk before I had cleaned it up. Grayish underwear, a couple of turtleneck shirts, two pairs of new jeans that were as stiff as corpses, a hopelessly wrinkled maroon sweatshirt with SIU in a white circle on the front. But on top was a well-organized sock drawer, the socks neatly rolled into themselves.
“Well, some things never change,” I murmured, remembering that the sock drawer in my trailer was organized the same way.
And there, hanging in the closet, was the project of the day: twenty pounds of laundry stuffed into a ten-pound bag.
In the laundry room, in the basement of the dorm, I stuffed my clothes in the washers, which only cost 10 cents for a load, got them going, and went back upstairs. A half hour later, I bounced back down the stairs and found a stopped dryer full of somebody else’s dry clothes. I laid them neatly on the laundry table and put my clothes in the drier. Thirty minutes later, while whistling a Chopin Etude, I trotted downstairs again to pick up my clean laundry, but it wasn’t in the dryer…it was on the floor.
As I was angrily picking it up, I heard behind me: “Listen, asshole, don’t mess with my shit. Do you hear me?”
I turned around and saw a six-foot-tall kid staring at me with squint-eyed fury. Muscles bulged under his cutoff T-shirt.
“They seemed dry to me,” I said as the gremlins banged my nerves.
“Bullshit!” The kid looked like he was going to leap at me. I backed warily away from him with my dripping clothes in my arms and darted up the stairs. This was the incident that I had been harboring in my mind for nearly 40 years, and it hit me with a psychological body blow. With shaking hands and mounting anger, I flipped through the Von Reichmann Book.
“The nervous person must understand that other people are entitled to have opinions that differ from yours,” I read out loud.
Horseshit!
“When aggravated by someone, you must decide whether you will let yourself be annoyed.”
…Yes I will!
“Laughter and anger go together like gasoline and water.”
That’s it!
I needed to start laughing immediately, or I would be carrying this nightmare around for four more decades.
“Functioning towards a realizable goal nearly always reduces nervousness,” I read.
When I stepped down into the basement again, that hulking cartoon character, a walking advertisement for SIU’s open enrollment policy, was leaning on a dryer.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said as I breezed past him.
The malevolent kid was smoking a cigarette. He looked up with a quizzical expression and then ground the butt under his heel. “What the fuck do you mean?” he said, and spat a speck of tobacco out of his mouth.
“I mean, I mean…with this humidity it takes a long time for the clothes to dry.”
“Is that so?” said the kid with a leer.
“Yup, here…” I gave him two dimes. “…make sure they’re good and dry. I mean, I did take some of your dryer time, and I forgot that it’s awfully humid outside.”
I wiped my brow. The kid took the dimes in his big paw and inserted them into the dryer, and as I had hoped, he increased the heat setting to ‘high.’ He sat down again without a word, pulled out another cigarette from his pocket, and sullenly lit it up.
An hour later I had my feet on my desk as I watched that savage walk slowly along Point Drive with his new friend: the gremlin that had been tormenting me for years. The kid was glowering—slung over his shoulders were shirts and trousers that looked like crumpled notebook paper that someone had tried to straighten out. As long as I remembered that image whenever I did my laundry, that particular gremlin would never pluck my nerves again.
My technique of reducing nervous symptoms might not have met with the approval of Dr. Von Reichmann, but it did work, and I took a deep, heebie-jeebie-free breath of nice, damp air. That’s when I noticed a faded 3x5 note card attached to the radiator with old yellow tape rippling in the breeze. On the card, some time ago, I had written:
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
Walt Whitman
I pulled out a piece of paper and my mechanical pencil. Maybe when I woke up the next morning, I’d be in 2009 again. Or some other year. Or maybe I’d have to relive most of my life all over again. I looked up at the oak tree outside the window; it would still be there in 2009, and so would I, one way or the other.
Now, what do I want from the future?
Honestly? I didn’t want to be poor anymore, yet I didn’t have the nerve resistance to hold a stressful job for very long, and until I could purchase a new and improved nervous system, all jobs would be stressful for me. I needed alternative ways to earn a living. I needed to take stock.
Stock!
I put pencil to paper:
FINANCES
Stocks that will appreciate over the next forty years:
General Electric
IBM
Microsoft
Southwest Airlines
Dell
Apple
Family Dollar Stores
Boeing
All I needed was $200 extra each month to invest in the stocks that I knew would appreciate, and then I would be set for life by the age of forty. I continued writing:
WORK
TV and radio news anchoring and reporting—stressful, but this is where my talents lie.
Radio talk show—stressful
Anything in broadcasting—stressful
Under no circumstances did I want to wind up at another part time, temporary, no insurance, Testing Unlimited-type job. I needed to be capable of taking the pressure at a radio or TV station in a medium or major market, because anywhere else would pay not much better than Testing Unlimited. I would have to get my nerves under control. WSIU would help:
To strengthen my nerves, practice techniques in Von Reichmann book every time I work at WSIU.
If I didn’t drink, smoke pot, or take drugs, and if I followed this checklist, then just maybe I could make a success of my life the second time around. I tacked this new paper next to “What I Know” on the wall to the side of my desk.
The sun was peeping through the trees, the temperature was perfect, and a light breeze was wafting through the casement window. I thought I’d reward myself with a nostalgic walk.
The SIU campus looked like pristine wallpaper that comes installed on new computers. Maybe, if there were no scenic woods in the middle of the campus, or a shimmering lake to the south, and maybe if Lincoln Drive didn’t curve in that certain way around the Point, then the campus would not have been the perfect thing that it was. I’d visited many colleges around the country, but this was my favorite. This was my alma mater.
As I strolled past the Agriculture Building on Lincoln Drive, I saw an image that, like so many I had seen in the past 24 hours, looked surrealistically familiar, but I couldn’t identify. An old man was walking toward me in gray bell bottoms and a blue paisley shirt with huge collar wings.
Probably a professor.
But as he drew closer, an old Daily Egyptian picture flashed in my mind, and I remembered the old man. He wasn’t a professor, but a student in his late 70’s going to one of the wildest universities in the country, living in the dorm, and attending classes with a bunch of crazy teenagers. There he was in his white belt and matching shoes, gripping a beat-up, old-fashioned briefcase as he slowly walked past the Life Science Two construction site. As we nodded at each other, another Egyptian article popped into my head, and I realized that I was passing a ghost. The old man had died shortly before he was to graduate.
I suspected that he would be the first of many ghosts I would see in 1971. When I got back to my room and looked into the mirror, I realized that the 20-year-old kid I barely remembered and who used to be in my young body was no longer there. So, in a way, I too was a ghost.
I found a Sherlock Holmes anthology on my bookshelf and started The Hound of the Baskervilles. I had to let the idea settle in my mind, that anyone I was going to encounter in 1971 would not be the same person in 2009, if they lived that long.
That’s why a 21st century man, now living in the 20th century, was sitting there reading about a fictitious 19th century detective.
By the time Harry got back to the dorm, it was raining again so hard that the sidewalk was covered in a mist of spray. My roommate was soaked to the skin and dripping water on the floor.
“Hey Harry, is it raining outside?”
I was back in good humor.
“No snake shit, I was walking my trout.” He glanced at his watch, toweled himself off, and rushed over to his portable TV.
“Bump-Bumpa-Dumpa-Bump” went the music on the TV as Harry adjusted the coat hanger/aerial.
“In color… It’s the Lawrence Welk Show!” said the chipper announcer on the black-and-white screen.
I’d forgotten about this.
I dropped my feet to the floor and walked over to the TV. There was Lawrence standing amid a shower of bubbles. “Anda nowa wonderfulla people, the Lennon sisters are gonna singa a songa from that famous rock and a rolla groupa-The Bee-AT-lees!”
The Lennon sisters sang “A Hard Day’s Night,” accompanied by a string band, a harmonica, and an accordion.
“Harry, you gotta be kidding,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth.
“Shush, Federson,” Harry said as Lawrence walked out on the stage wearing a Beatles wig and introduced Joe Feeney, who started singing “Eight Days a Week.”
“But Lawrence Welk? If anyone hears about this around here they’ll expel you from the university. No college student of the ‘70s ever watched Lawrence Welk, especially if he attended SIU.”
“I watch it, Federson; it’s good clean entertainment, so bite me!” Harry sat entranced and watched Joe sing in his piercing tenor voice.
Harry was as mesmerized by this program as he was by Freudian psychology, duck hunting, calculus, weight lifting and the Bible. Yet, I had no idea why he liked The Lawrence Welk Show. Well, now was the time to find out. I broke in during the Geritol commercial.
“Harry, why do you watch Lawrence Welk?”
He looked up from the TV with an expression that indicated this was a new question from his roommate. “No man, it’s personal.”
