Saluki Marooned. Robert Rickman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 I had stayed at in San Diego during a drunken binge in 1981, when I was homeless.

      My mind started spinning with the realization that I was reliving in rich detail what had been only minutes ago an indistinct memory. If all of this was a hallucination, I was in deep trouble, and if it wasn’t, I was in even deeper trouble. I gingerly stepped over to the mirror and risked another quick glance at the kid, followed by a longer glance, and yet another, and still another, until I was staring at him. What I saw was not just the image of a 20-year-old youth.

      Hell….what’s here for me? College again? No! Everything is in the future. The trailer, marriage, Testing Unlimited… No! Nothing’s in the future! I have nothing in the past and nothing in the future!

      I lost my equilibrium and fell into the chair, in front of my desk, and stared down at an open book to stop the spinning. The first line I saw was: Nervous people must ruthlessly separate opinion from facts in their daily lives, because—good or bad—only facts can be relied upon.

      I looked at the table of contents. Taming the Agitated Mind: A Handbook for Nervous People, by Robert Von Reichmann, MD.

      I sat down and started reading, with the book clenched in my hands in a death grip. My concentration was desperately intense. I’d do anything to avoid looking at or thinking about what I was doing in my old dorm room, in my young body, governed by a 58-year-old, burned-out brain in the year 1971.

      Chapter 4

      I fell asleep at “my” desk, slumped over the Von Reichmann book, when something loud, harsh, and jangling awakened me with a jerk. I hadn’t heard the ring of an old rotary telephone for years. I jumped up with incredible speed, overturned the chair, and reached the receiver of the wall phone just as the clattering of the chair against the floor died away. As I lifted the receiver, I thought, Where the hell am I? But by the time I got the instrument to my ear, I realized that I was back at 108 Bailey Hall, Thompson Point, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

      “Huh-Hello!” I said.

      “Darling!”

      I almost didn’t recognize her voice.

      “Tammy? Is that you!?…”

      “Of course it’s me. Are you expecting some other girl to call?”

      She sounded so young, so intense, but without the strident overtones that later flawed her perfect voice. It was as if the miserable four-year marriage had never happened—which it hadn’t, not yet. I felt a burst of desire that was quickly overlaid by anxiety as I became fully awake.

      “Hello? Hello? Peter, are you still there? Peter…”

      “Yes I’m still here, but I wish I weren’t…”

      “What do you mean?”

      “I mean, I mean, that I don’t belong here.” My eyes were moving around the dorm room as I visualized Tammy at the other end of the line, probably in Urbana in her dorm room, lying on her bed, maybe СКАЧАТЬ