“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.
