The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  “Damned if I know what they’re gonna do,” Joe said.

  Miller sighed. “There’s one thing they’d probably better do, and soon, and that’s figure out how to get all those folks off that old bridge.”

  Thoughts about resonance and amplitude were flowing to Chris from the rest of the mind. That was how she perceived her companions now, her other selves, the other parts of her own intelligence.

  “Not quite.” Another thought was coming to her now. “Not yet. The distinctions among us still remain, and it seems that some are stronger than others, have more forceful thoughts, ones that respond more readily to the transponder and then come to dominate the rest.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” Chris and several others recited in unison.

  The answer came. “We wanted crowd control. The question is: who’s going to control the crowd?”

  “Some doofus screwed this project up big time,” several voices murmured. “Hope somebody can turn off that transponder, or at least had the sense to set it to shut down automatically.”

  Chris noticed dimly that she and all of the people standing to either side of her were all resting their arms against the railing. She gazed at the river below, watching the reflections of the bridge lights dancing on the dark water. She thought of how easy it would be to climb up over the railing and leap into the river, sink under the water and move with the current that was like the thoughts flowing into all of them.

  “… came to the mall to get ready for what I have to do.” Chris straightened, attentive to this new, darker, more despairing thought. “There’s no more reason to go on. My business is gone, my wife is gone, my investors are going to sue and the IRS is sure to come after me. I can’t dig myself out of this hole. Funny—once I made up my mind that I’d have to cash in my chips, just drive out to the bridge and jump off and finally do myself in, I felt a whole lot better. Felt better than I have in a long time.”

  “Felt a lot better,” a group of children near Chris said softly as she mouthed the words silently.

  “No reason for that, brothers and sisters.” Another more forceful mind and voice were speaking to her. “Ain’t no reason to give up hoping. A better day’s coming. The good Lord doesn’t give a body more than a body can bear.”

  Someone began to sing. Voices rose in song all around her. Chris reached for the hands of the people standing to her right and left as she sang. She could not remember if she had ever heard this song before, yet she knew it, and everything in her warmed to the sound.

  “Rejoice and sing!” Everyone around Jessamyn was shouting out the words. Still clutching the hands of Kyle and the guy called Rich, she swayed to the sound of the hymn. She hadn’t been inside a church since leaving high school, but she knew this hymn.

  “Make a joyful noise,” she sang aloud, hearing Rich and Kyle repeat the words. The unhappy, despairing thoughts that had troubled her so much only a few moments ago were easing. Hope flowered inside her again; the ruin that was all that left of the business and the failing marriage were things that they could all put behind them now.

  “The good Lord doesn’t give a body more than a body can bear,” Jessamyn said with Kyle and Rich and the group of uniformed men over by the railing and all of the people on the bridge.

  “And death is the end of all suffering,” more voices responded.

  They sang and stamped their feet. The pavement under her feet shook to the sound of the music. She lifted her left foot and then her right, part of the All, part of the mind making a joyful noise on the bridge, and it almost seemed that the railing and the girders and the sidewalks of the bridge were humming and wailing and singing along with her.

  Chris was still singing and stamping her feet in unison with the others when the surface under her suddenly heaved, throwing her forward. She caught a glimpse of others in the long line at the railing grabbing at one another, still singing.

  Abruptly the voices inside her fell silent. She was so closed in on herself that for a moment, she was afraid that she had gone deaf. Then she heard a sharp tearing metallic sound; the pavement around her seemed to be rippling. Everything under her heaved again, nearly tossing her into the air.

  People around her were screaming. Grabbing at the railing, Chris pulled herself to her feet and was thrown forward again. She caught herself and hung on to the railing. She knew then that the bridge was collapsing under them. She hung there, watching as people dropped from the bridge, falling toward the river in rows, almost as if someone had choreographed and synchronized their movements, and then lost her grip and fell into the darkness.

  “Kyle!” the girl next to Rich screamed. “Kyle!”

  Rich scrambled to his feet, trying to remember how he had gotten here. He had been with the others over at the mall and had followed them to the bridge. They had all been together, in perfect communion, monads with windows open wide enough to catch a hurricane, and now everything around him was rippling and cracking and shaking like an earthquake had hit.

  “Anna!” he cried. He did not know why he could no longer hear the others. “Anna!” The pavement suddenly ripped open in front of him. He had a moment of realizing that the bridge was coming apart before he dropped into the abyss.

  Chris felt a hard surface against her back and gradually became aware that a blanket covered her. As she drew in some air, a sharp pain stabbed at her left side. She opened her eyes and saw a dark shape looming over her.

  “Better stay still,” the shadowy form said in a tenor voice. “You’ve got a broken rib. You were one of the lucky ones, lady.”

  Chris closed her eyes, waited for a few moments, then opened them again. The sky above her was blue with daylight, the air warm against her face. She carefully took a breath and realized that someone had taped her around the midriff. Fighting through the pain, she forced herself up and leaned on her right elbow.

  She looked in the direction of the bridge. All that remained of the structure were the pylons and some of the metal framework and girders. She was lying on a stretcher along the bank; other stretchers with people on them were being carried toward the ambulances and other vehicles parked on the road above them. Then she looked out at the river and saw the bodies. There had to be over a hundred just floating there, amid the small boats moving among them. Men on the boats were thrusting long poles into the water to pull the bodies out.

  “Oh, my God,” Chris murmured.

  “I know you.” A black-haired young woman in green scrubs squatted next to her. “You’re on the eleven o’clock news—Chris something.”

  “Chris Szekely.”

  “I’m Dr. Rahman.”

  Satellite trucks and a few buses were parked on either side of the river. Chris saw two vans with network logos on them and another from CNN. “How many?” Chris asked.

  “How many what?”

  “How many died?”

  Dr. Rahman cleared her throat before answering. “At least a thousand that we know of so far, and I don’t think a lot of the others are going to survive.” She paused. “As soon as we get the seriously injured on their way, we’ll move you and the ones who aren’t so badly hurt. They had to send in teams from as far away as Windsor to handle this.”

  Chris was silent.

  “How did it happen?” the physician asked. “I mean, what made all those people act like that?”

  Chris frowned. She could not remember much of anything except driving to the mall with Bob Unger and then being on the bridge in the middle of a mob. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Hey,” Dr. Rahman said, “you’d better rest. I shouldn’t be bothering you now.”

  Chris lay down again and stared up at the sky. There was a kind of hole in her mind, in her memory, almost as if something had overloaded her mental circuits and burned them out somehow. She grasped at that notion, thinking for a moment that her memories were returning to her, then closed her eyes once more.

  Miller drove into Westview and parked in front of the Dairy Q
ueen. He could pretty much get whatever he needed in Westview or out at the Wal-Mart; there had been no need for him to drive to Hannaford.

  He had been avoiding Hannaford for months now, ever since the night the Dunn Bridge had collapsed and all those people had been killed. Seeing it all on TV had been enough, and for a while it had been one of the biggest news stories in the country. All the talking heads had gone on about mass psychoses and mob psychology and a lot of other speculation, and the news crews had taped miles of footage of the Hannaford Center Mall and the ruined bridge and interviews with just about anyone who had been part of the mob and survived and also with family members of the dead.

  Not, Miller thought, that any of them had been able to shed any light on the incident. Of the fewer than four hundred survivors, no one seemed able to remember a blamed thing. That Chris Szekely of WKLY had done a five-minute interview with another survivor, some girl named Jess Richter, and even though they had both been part of the mob, neither of them could recall very much of what had happened.

  Miller walked up to the Dairy Queen take-out window, ordered a small vanilla cone with chocolate dip, then wandered over to one of the outdoor tables. Joe Allard had called him up that morning, to tell him that somebody on the Hannaford City Council had promised that construction of the new bridge would be completed by next year and that it would be a lot safer than the old one. He and Lois would be able to come out and see Miller more often without taking that darned Route Five detour.

  Miller sat down and bit into the ice cream and chocolate coating. The main street of Westview, which a year ago had consisted of little except the Dairy Queen, a gas station and convenience store, a post office, a bank, and a couple of shops selling antiques and used books, was going through a bit of revitalization lately. A young couple had renovated one of the old Victorian houses on the street and turned it into the Westview Bed and Breakfast, and another Victorian had been turned into offices for a small business. Somebody had told him that the business used to have its offices near the Hannaford Center Mall, but had decided to move a couple of months ago. Well, he could understand wanting to do that, after the bridge collapse and all.

  As he was finishing his cone, a Honda pulled up in front of the Dairy Queen. A young blonde woman got out of the car and went to the take-out window. By the time she was walking toward him with her ice cream cone, he knew who she was. He might have recognized her sooner, but then he had never expected to see Chris Szekely wandering around in Westview.

  Miller got to his feet as she approached. “Miz Szekely,” he said. She lifted her perfectly arched brows. “Name’s Miller Oretskin. I used to see you on the news.”

  “Used to.” The newswoman’s mouth twisted. “Those are the operative words.”

  “You been … on vacation?” Miller asked, tentative.

  “I was canned. Once I’d done my stories about the mob on the bridge, WKLY didn’t need me any more. Management was beginning to worry about my future mental stability, too.” She sat down across from him and just kept talking, surprising Miller with her frankness. “Most of the Dunn Bridge survivors have had trouble hanging on to their jobs, and at least half of them are in therapy. I lost two colleagues there, Bruno Flick and my cameraman, Joe Unger.” She gazed past him. “You know, if the news director had sent Alexa Browne out to the mall that night instead of me, I might have been the one with the network gig in New York now.”

  “Well, you were always one of my favorites on the Action News,” Miller said as he sat down again.

  She smiled at him. She was an awfully pretty woman, even if she did look a lot thinner and somewhat older than she had on the news. “It’s nice of you to say so. Thanks, Mr …” She paused.

  “Oretskin, but you can call me Miller.”

  Chris Szekely nibbled at her ice cream. “At least I don’t have to worry about watching my weight at the moment.”

  “Wouldn’t think you’d have to worry at all about that.” He tried to think of what else to say. “Hope things work out for you. I thought you did great on the Action News.”

  “Oh, something’ll turn up. I have a couple of applications in with old friends. A station in my old home town is interested.” She shook her head. “Next to my home town, even Hannaford is a swarming metropolis.”

  Miller, unused to keeping up many conversations, let her finish her cone in silence, then said, “What brings you to Westview? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Curiosity.” She was staring across the street at the remodeled white Victorian that had been turned into offices. The business had installed one of those dishes on the roof of the building near a gable, a dish much like his satellite dish but considerably larger. MindData Associates, they called themselves. According to Dan Howell, who owned the Dairy Queen, they had something to do with designing communications equipment, had some sort of government contract, and bought a lot of hot dogs and ice cream from him.

  “Curiosity?” Miller asked. “What about?”

  “MindData Associates.” Chris Szekely gestured at the sign and logo in front of the white Victorian. “I spent a lot of time going through the list, the people who died, those of us who survived, finding out whatever I could about everybody. I guess I was looking for some sort of pattern, something that might explain what happened to us.”

  “And did you find anything?”

  The reporter frowned. “We were people of all ages, all kinds—there wasn’t any pattern that I could see. But there was a man on the list of the dead who worked for MindData Associates, and I found out later that another one of their employees, an electronics engineer, committed suicide about a week after the … after the incident. I was getting kind of obsessed with looking for a pattern by then. I kept wondering what it meant.”

  “Maybe not much,” Miller said.

  “Except that every time I think of MindData Associates, I keep thinking that it does mean something and I’ve just forgotten.” She lifted her head and he saw the distress in her blue eyes. “I keep thinking that I should know. When I found out that they’d moved out to Westview, I …” Her voice trailed off.

  Miller supposed that he should excuse himself and go on about his business, but he had nothing much else to do except get some groceries at the convenience store, and it wasn’t every day that he got to converse with a TV personality. Besides, he felt sorry for the young woman. It couldn’t be easy for her, having to live with what had happened and not knowing how it had come about.

  “What made you decide to live in Westview?” Chris Szekely asked.

  “Actually, I live outside of town. I’m way out in the country. Guess I just wanted to be away from too many people.”

  “Maybe you’ve got the right idea. Sometimes people do tend to get too close.”

  There was no traffic along the street, but that wasn’t unusual for the middle of the afternoon. Across the way, at MindData Associates, Miller noticed that a man was leaning out of one of the third floor gables to fiddle with the big dish.

  “You never get over it, you know,” he heard himself say, and felt the people on the bridge pressing around him, screaming as the surface under their feet gave way. He felt a hand grasp his own. “Oh, God,” he said, and heard Chris repeat the words inside him, “I can remember now,” and he was on the bridge, resonating with the others again, part of the All.

  Abruptly he was inside himself again. Miller sat still, breathing hard, afraid to move. He steadied himself. Probably been watching too much television, he thought, too much of the news. Maybe he shouldn’t have watched that retrospective on the bridge disaster the other night.

  He let go of the reporter’s hand. The fellow across the way had finished whatever he was doing to the dish and had closed the window again. “Oh, God,” Chris Szekely said, “I think it was coming back to me, what happened.”

  “A flashback,” Miller said. “Guess that’s normal.” He stood up and looked down at her. “Sure you’re going to be all right, young lady?” />
  She gave him a half-smile. “I’ll be fine. When I get out of this area—I’ll be fine.”

  “Hope so. Always liked you on the news.” He made his way to his pick-up truck, then glanced across the street. Something seemed to flutter at the edges of his mind as he gazed at the white Victorian. He was getting suggestible in his old age. If he didn’t watch it, he might turn into one of those people who started imagining all kinds of strange plots and who thought weird forces of some kind were sending signals to them.

  He got into the truck, fumbled in his pocket for his keys, and saw Chris Szekely pull out in her Honda. As she drove out of town, he was momentarily tempted to follow her, then turned east toward the route that would take him to his house. Sometimes people do tend to get too close to each other, he thought.

  Afterword to “Common Mind”:

  I first had the idea for this story—just a glimpse of a scene, which is often how my stories begin—in the early 1990s. After making notes and writing a few paragraphs, the story died on me, largely because I didn’t know where it was going and also had not yet figured out why the characters were behaving as they did.

  Sometimes a story can be forced, even if you don’t know where it’s going, since there’s a chance you might find out where it’s headed during the process of writing, but forcing a story can also be a wasteful enterprise. Scenes get written, fail, and have to be thrown out; false starts and abrupt halts are common. Occasionally the unconscious will kick in and help you discover the story as you go along, but usually a story that refuses to be written is telling the writer that it isn’t yet ready to be written. In the case of “Common Mind,” my problem turned out to be a lack of underlying assumptions, a rationale for the situation the characters faced. The writer doesn’t have to explain everything in a story, but does have to know much more than is ever revealed to the reader for the story to live.