Saluki Marooned. Robert Rickman

mean, man, it’s all the same: air, animal, mineral, vegetable. Really, the mushrooms are the same as your french fry, even though they look different. Ya just have to be in the right reality. Like, I’m in my reality and you’re in your reality, dude, and you see mushrooms and french fries and I see…atoms and molecules. Deh ya understand?”

      “No...” I started scratching my head, and noticed that I had no bald spot on the crown. “Man! This is great!”

      With an amused expression, Marta watched me feel the top of my head.

      “Hey pilgrim, don’t worry. You don’t have to search for it. Your head’s still there.”

      “Yah, but the bald spot is gone.”

      For an instant, Marta’s lazy eyes tightened.

      “I never noticed that you had a bald spot.” She giggled. “Now tell me the truth: Were you speaking from personal experience when you said to dry out the mushrooms and smoke them?”

      “Hell no! It’ll be ten more years before I do anything like that.”

      Marta chuckled, but again I thought I saw those eyes squint a little. She lazily reached for an old-fashioned watch, the kind that women clipped to their blouses a hundred years ago. She glanced at the upside-down dial and jumped up with a start.

      “Shit! I’m late for class.”

      Probably, Incense For the Soul 101.

      She lopped out of the cafeteria, leaving in her wake the odor of saffron.

      I decided right then to avoid Marta the next time I was in the dining hall. I was trying with all of my soul to maintain my sanity, and sitting across from me was a person who was going out of her way to lose hers. Yet, even if she was late for class, at least she knew what class she was late for. I, on the other hand, had no memory of what classes I took during the spring of 1971. I also had very little memory of talking with Marta, because I’d always tried to avoid her in the cafeteria. She was too skinny to be attractive to me, and it was hard for me to translate her hip talk into 20th century English.

      With the reflexes of a cat, I jumped up from the table, placed the tray on the dishwashing conveyer belt, strode through the turnstiles to the entrance hall, and walked back to the dorm.

      The 108 Bailey was still hazy with whiskey-flavored smoke, and Harry was still hunched over his desk in a circle of light from his desk lamp.

      “How ya doin’, Harry,” I said quietly, still afraid that he would dissolve into pixie dust.

      Harry barely nodded and went back to his calculus book, and I went to my mess of a desk in search of my class schedule. It wasn’t until I got on my knees among the dust bunnies on the floor that I found the schedule, but it was of no use to me unless I knew what day it was. The month would be helpful too.

      “Harry, what’s today?” I yelled across the room.

      “Saturday,” said Harry without looking up.

      “Thanks, and what month is it?”

      This time Harry looked up.

      “You gotta be kidding, Federson.” He looked down again.

      “It’s March,” I guessed.

      “Federson, would ya quit screwin’ around?”

      “April? Is it April?”

      Harry grabbed his pipe and matches and started to light up.

      “Well shit, Federson, I guess if ya forgot steak night last month, walked into the wrong dorm room last week, and lost your class schedule again—that’s what you’re still lookin’ for, isn’t it?—then maybe you really don’t know what month it is. Okay, it’s May…May 1st …May 1st, 1971….1971 A.D.”

      “Thank you, Harry,” I said as if I were a game show host ready to introduce the next contestant. At that moment I realized I was feeling something that had eluded me for decades: I was actually enjoying myself. For a few minutes, I was once again perfectly comfortable living in 108 Bailey Hall. Counting the “In the Summertime” earlier, that made two good moments in one day. A ten-year record!

      Harry went back to writing equations in a notebook, while I looked at my schedule. The good moment ended with a crash when I saw that I had algebra Monday through Friday at 7:30 in the morning. This was the course that resulted in me flunking 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.