Universe 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  As a sudden inspiration, Cathy looked at the front of the magazine; it had been copyrighted two months earlier. She had forgotten that there is such a time lag between when a magazine is put together and the time it’s purchased. The footnote in the Journal had shaken her badly. Nevertheless, she could pass that off as a kind of joke by some unknown friend or associate. But who would ever guess that she would even glance through such a magazine as the movie fan thing? No one could have planned that.

  She took another glance at the article and the message to her. It made her feel terrible, in a way she felt only in her worst dreams. She could understand the feeling well enough: a sense of being lost in otherwise familiar surroundings; the knowledge that someone was doing something that concerned her, but she was powerless to understand what those plans were. She felt abandoned, and she knew that logically analyzing the situation didn’t make it any easier to accept. She had never gone along with the Freudians; just because she could perceive the roots of her neuroses, that didn’t imply that they would then disappear. They never had in the past; and now she couldn’t perceive anything. Nothing but the two anonymous messages.

  The second one had been a kind of a warning, hadn’t it? In that case, what should she do? She sat for a moment, feeling her stomach tighten and her hands begin to tingle. The answer was obvious. There wasn’t anything to do. Not until she knew what was happening.

  Leslie wouldn’t be home for at least another hour and a half. Cathy walked around the apartment, aimlessly picking up bits of clothing, putting books back on shelves. She stopped herself suddenly, realizing she was genuinely frightened. She wanted to be out of the apartment, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, except back to her office, and that was where the whole situation had begun. That thought gave her an idea, and she went to the phone. She dialed Wally’s extension, and she listened to the phone ring for a long time, until one of the English Department secretaries answered and said that Wally had left just a little while before. Cathy couldn’t bring herself to call him at home. She was still afraid he’d think the matter was foolish; she doubted that she could convince him of the fear it was generating in her.

  Cathy put on the television and tried to absorb herself in the afternoon programing. She found that very difficult. One alternative would be to read through a couple of professional journals and popular magazines that had built themselves up into a large stack on the coffee table. She picked up the topmost magazine, a two-week-old copy of Time. On the cover was a picture of someone’s advisor for something. He was looking happy. Cathy wondered if he ever had to worry about how his name might turn up in magazine articles. She started to read the issue, but then she began to feel panicky again, and put the magazine back on the pile. She didn’t want to make any more discoveries in one day. The nervousness didn’t go away; she got up, went into the bathroom, and took a couple of small blue tranquilizers. In fifteen minutes, she was relaxed and unworried again. She watched the end of a giveaway show, then a panel quiz program, and then a rerun of a situation comedy that was at least eight years old. Leslie came in, slammed the door behind her, and stalked to her room without a word. Cathy shrugged. In an hour Victor would be home, and things would all be back to normal.

  It was getting near dinnertime. Cathy sighed loudly, dumped the newspaper TV section from her lap to the floor, and went into the kitchen to make supper for the family. She had bought three pounds of spareribs. Now she opened a package of baked beans and seasoning mix. She coated the ribs with the contents of one of the little bags inside. Then she put the uncooked beans in another bag, added water, added the seasoning from another little bag, and put the ribs on top of the floating beans. Then she twisted the large bag closed, put it in a baking dish, and slid the whole thing into a preheated oven. It would sit there for an hour and a half, and then the Schumacher family would eat it. Between now and then, though, Cathy had to shuck and boil the corn.

  At suppertime, just as the timer was going off on the oven, Victor came home. “I’m late, Cathy,” he called from the living room.

  “I know,” she said.

  “What’s for supper?”

  “Ribs and beans.”

  “Terrific. Got my drink?”

  “Sure,” said Cathy, wiping her hands on the dish towel that hung on the refrigerator door handle. “Here.” She poured him an aperitif, a small glass of Amaretto, an Italian liqueur. She thought it was funny, Victor drinking—sipping—at Amaretto and sitting down to eat ribs and baked beans from a packaged mix. With the meal they all drank Coke.

  After dinner, Cathy told Leslie to clear off the table. Victor explained that he had quite a bit of work to do before morning; Cathy just nodded and said nothing. There was no hint of the objectless fears that had bothered her all day. She washed the dishes and put them away. Then she tied up all the garbage in a plastic bag and told Leslie to take it downstairs. After that, there was nothing else to do. Cathy put on some piano sonatas on the stereo and sat by herself in the living room. There were things she could have done, of course; she could have looked through her professional journals, she could have prepared her lecture for the next class, she could have written letters. But she had no energy for that land of thing. She felt anxious, even expectant of some strange event. She didn’t know yet what she was waiting for, but she felt certain that whatever it might be, it would happen soon.

  When it came time for the evening news, Cathy called Victor, but he said that he hadn’t finished his work. Leslie was already in bed. Cathy watched the news alone.

  “Good evening,” said the newscaster, “my name is Gil Monahan, and it’s time for the Ten O’clock News Wrapup. Before the headlines, I’d like to tell Mrs. Cathy Schumacher that she ought to be careful. You’re liable to cause yourself more trouble in the future if you try to avoid it now. And here’s the news. In Harrisburg this evening—”

  Cathy gave a little, stifled shriek. She went to the television and turned it off. “I ought to call the station,” she thought “I ought to find out what that was all about” She stood in the middle of the living-room floor, indecisive. At last she decided against calling the station. That might be just the kind of thing she was being warned against. “Oh, God,” she thought “now I’m really taking it all seriously.” That night in bed, she had an impossible time trying to fall asleep. Victor, asleep beside her, looked so peaceful. Cathy recalled that even up to the night before, she herself had been so undisturbed. Now it seemed unlikely to her that she would be allowed to regain her self-control.

  She stared at the shadows on the ceiling, feeling the tension in her grow, worse than that morning in her office, worse than in the supermarket, much worse than even while she watched the newscaster. She thought of taking a pill to make her sleep, but by then it was already three o’clock and she’d stay asleep until almost noon. She had responsibilities.

  She was in her office the next morning at ten o’clock. She told herself a number of trite things, all supposed to make her feel better and to minimize her remembrance of the things that had happened the day before. Time goes on, she told herself, and the memory of those odd things will fade. Work hard, she told herself, and you won’t have time to think. She picked up one of her pupils’ compositions, which she had been unable to read the previous day. She got through the same three pages she had read before, then continued. The poem on which the paper was based was only a few hundred lines long; the paper seemed to go on for volumes. It had gotten to the point in her teaching career where she had given up looking for originality, for insight, even for logical coherence. She knew these were impossible things to expect. She found herself giving higher grades to papers that were typed neatly and written with a certain familiarity with the English language. She didn’t ask a lot. She had learned that it was pointless to try.

  On page eight of the manuscript, Cathy read this line:

  This area is completely under water today.9

  Without thinking about what had happened
in a similar circumstance the day before, Cathy looked at the bottom of the page to check the pupil’s source. She read:

  9Mrs. Schumacher, if you went home right now, you’d find your husband in bed with the woman from apartment 2F.

  “Well,” thought Cathy, “at least they’re not being cryptic any more.” She stared at the page for a moment, then put the paper on her desk. She looked out of her window, across the common. The trees which in spring were so lovely now looked dead forever; among them on the common were three spired churches. To Cathy they looked empty and cold. The sky was cloudy, and the lonely, slow-moving figures across College Street added to a picture of desolation she had never seen before through that window. With a start she returned her attention to her office, to her work, to the paper she was supposed to be reading. She picked it up again. The footnote was still there, still warning her, still rather embarrassedly calling her attention to a situation she should know about. Who wrote this paper anyway? She turned back to the first page; it was done by Handy Irons, the blond, tall young man who sat far in the back. How could he know such an intimate thing about Victor? Well, it was possible, Cathy supposed, but then, how could Mr. Irons and Gil Monahan on the news know? And the authors of the movie-magazine article and the article in the Journal?

  Did everybody in the world know, except her? Isn’t that what they always said, that the spouse was the last to find out?

  Maybe so, Cathy thought, but surely they didn’t make public announcements for the benefit of everyone else in the same position. Not on the nighttime news. Not in pupils’ homework papers or magazines that the oblivious subject generally never read. Cathy stood up and went to Wally’s office, carrying the paper Randy Irons had so thoughtfully written.

  “Wally?” she called, outside his office.

  “Cathy?”

  “Yeah. Are you busy?”

  Wally came to the door and gestured that she should come in. “In the last two years, have you ever known me to be busy?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “There. What’s the matter?”

  “Do you remember yesterday?” asked Cathy. She took a deep breath; she felt like crying, and she felt foolish.

  “Barely,” said Wally. “Ifs already beginning to fade into last week.”

  “I had something I wanted to talk to you about, and then I didn’t.”

  “Right,” said Wally, suddenly serious, “I remember.”

  “Well, it keeps happening. Yesterday I thought, well, maybe it was a joke or something, but now I think I’m going crazy or I already am crazy or something.”

  “You haven’t done a very good job of explaining.”

  “I’m sorry, Wally. Did you see the Channel Five news last night?”

  “I watch Channel Two.”

  “Oh. Gil Monahan started off the newscast by telling me— me, personally, Mrs. Cathy Schumacher—to be careful. That’s not very professional, is it?”

  “No,” said Wally thoughtfully.

  “Yesterday, while I was waiting in line at the supermarket, I picked up one of those teen movie magazines. The first article I saw had an opening sentence that said something like, ‘Cathy Schumacher, you have to listen!’ That must have been set in type months ago, just so I could see it yesterday in Egerton’s. And the thing I mentioned before lunch was the same kind of thing, in my Journal of the Institute for Early English Studies. Last night I was really scared. And today it’s even worse.”

  “Did you try verifying any of these things?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. You’re too afraid to find out that they’re real, and you’re even more afraid to find out they’re delusions. You only have two choices. You could ask the people whom you think are communicating with you, and find out why they’re doing it the way they are, or you could go tell the whole thing to a doctor. I’ll bet it’s a pretty common clinical syndrome. You probably know exactly what it all means. You’re just masking the knowledge from your conscious thoughts, and your subconscious is intruding. These, uh, manifestations are just a way of you having to make some discovery yourself on a conscious level. You can put the responsibility onto these other people.”

  Cathy slid Irons’ theme across the desk. “Look at the footnote on the bottom of the page,” she said. Wally read it, turned to the first page of the paper, glanced through the rest of it, and said nothing. He handed the paper back to Cathy.

  “Well,” he said after an uncomfortable moment of silence, “have you tried calling home?”

  “No,” said Cathy.

  “I can understand that Do you want me to?”

  “No,” said Cathy, “I’ll do it. I’ll go back to my office now.”

  “Is there something I can do? I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Cathy. “I can handle it now, I think. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t completely nuts.”

  “You’re not nuts. Of course, you could be editing this whole conversation. You could be so crazy that I might be talking about fly fishing, and you’d be hearing what you want. But then we get into the arguments about perceiving reality, and it’s not even lunchtime yet”

  “Thanks,” said Cathy.

  In her own office again, Cathy sat down and stared at the telephone. Wally had made a good point, even though he was probably joking. She would never really be able to know how much of what she saw and heard was true; she might not in fact even have gone to his office. She couldn’t accept his verification. If she disallowed the premise that her mind might be altering what her senses were telling her, then no one else’s words had any validity. Including a psychiatrist’s. How could Cathy know when it was her own mind deceiving her? Could she actually prove that Wally had seen the footnote in Randy Irons’ paper, and that it said to him what it said to her? From now on, Cathy knew that she could only trust what her own mind told her that her own senses were perceiving. And she’d have to go on on that basis. There wasn’t anything else.

  But maybe she ought to see a doctor, anyway.

  She picked up the telephone, dialed nine, got an outside line, and called her home number. She listened to the phone ring, over and over, six times, seven times, eight Then Victor answered. Cathy felt cold suddenly. Hello, Victor?” she said.

  “Yes, Cathy. Anything wrong?”

  “No, no. Of course not. Why are you home?”

  Victor paused for a moment “I got sick at work today. Maybe I worked too hard last night I came home and went to bed. Why did you call? Who did you think would be here?”

  Cathy realized that she had made a mistake. “Oh, I called your office and Miss Brant said that you’d gone home. I was worried, so I called to see if you want me to come take care of you.”

  “No,” said Victor, “that’s all right I don’t feel that bad. There isn’t anything you could do, anyway. I think I’ll just take a nap.”

  “All right, honey,” said Cathy. “Feel better. Remember that I love you.”

  There was another silence. “Me too,” said Victor after a while. Cathy held the receiver, shook her head, and hung up. She walked around her little office, nervously doing meaningless tidying things. She felt helpless. That was what helped save her. She didn’t like feeling helpless.

  “An effort of will,” she thought. “That’s all it takes. All right, subconscious, you win. I’m aware. So what?” She sat down again and picked up the other student paper. She read a couple of pages, until she found the first footnote. Almost eagerly, she looked at the bottom of the page. The footnote said:

  1 These things happen, Mrs. Schumacher.

  These things happen, indeed, she thought. Somehow, she felt relieved. She took the page to the English Department Xerox machine, made a copy of it, and cut the bottom of the page into a neat rectangle. Then she put on her coat and went to the drugstore across the city common. She bought a cheap black wood frame and returned to her office. She framed the piece of the Xerox copy and hung the frame on
the wall. So many things would have to be done, have to be thought, have to be said in the next few days. The sentiment in the frame made her feel better. It returned to her a sense of security in the continuity of reality. She called Wally on the phone. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said, his voice sounding worried. “How are you?”

  “Better and better,” said Cathy. “I want to ask you a favor. I want to go out now and get really drunk.”

  “You don’t do that.”

  “I need the practice.”

  “Your problem?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” asked Wally quietly.

  “Oh, no,” said Cathy. “Not at all.”

  “Well, look,” said Wally, “getting drunk certainly isn’t the most constructive way of tackling a problem.”