As I walked over to a picnic table in front of the dock shelter, a bright green grasshopper jumped past me, and I felt as if I weighed only fifty pounds. Past the flagpole, the redwood trim on the Thompson Point residence halls glowed in the sun. But there was something off kilter with TP as well. It was there, right in plain sight, but it took a minute or so for me to realize that the trees around the buildings had been repaired: there were no broken branches, none of the trees were laying in the water, and none of them were split, yet they were shorter than they should have been considering that The Point was fifty years old.
I started a fast walk through the trees near the dock and was soon striding on the path along the edge of the lake, past the picnic shelter with its geodesic dome—which was white. Last night it had been brown. I felt the gremlins clustering at the base of my spine, waiting for one more weird revelation to start their attack. So I rationalized that maybe I’d been so messed up on drugs the night before that I couldn’t tell brown from white. I quickened my pace, and walked over a little wire and wood bridge that crossed a small rivulet behind a residence hall. My senses were high, probing everywhere as I reached the sidewalk between the dorm and the Lentz Hall commons unit—which didn’t look new, but it didn’t look half a century old, either.
Just leaving Lentz was a familiar figure of a girl—familiar as an old statue, even though it’s been decades since you last saw it. Her honey blond hair was down to her waist, and an apricot shift with big flowers clung to her immature figure, revealing skinny legs with a soft blond down glistening in the sun. The figure waived at me.
“Hey, Peter!” she yelled.
The girl was not so much walking as gliding down the sidewalk with a deportment that indicated that as far as she was concerned, anything that was going on in the world at this moment was about as okay as it could be, and that the moon, the stars, and all of the planets were in their proper order, as her horoscope for the day revealed.
When the girl was 50 feet from me, her vaguely familiar figure became chillingly real. It looked like Marta, the woman who had sent me the letters that past summer.
But that’s impossible!
The girl was wearing rose-colored sunglasses and a big hat that threatened to flop over her face. As unreal as it was, I felt as if I were the only person on the planet. And when she got within five feet of me, it was as if I’d been pulled into a bubble of infinite wellbeing. A strong scent of saffron incense clung to her clothes.
“Peter, how are you?” she asked in a way that would imply that I was the most important person in the world, and meeting me was the single most important event in her life. Furthermore, the “are” carried an additional connotation: that regardless of how I responded or how I felt, everything was indeed okay with me.
“Are, are you…you look like…Marta?”
“Yes, I’m Marta!” she chirped proudly.
“What…but you look... what brings you here?”
The girl gave me a sideways look. “You mean right now?”
“Yes, right now!”
“I came to check the mail.”
“What!? I mean what are you doing on this campus?”
The girl looked at me as if I were nuts.
“Going to school, just like you… and, I’m late for class.” She looked serious for just a moment.
“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
