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
