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
