Time Out of Joint (9 page)

In a corner of the room, on a window seat, somebody had built a model of some sort. Ragle stopped to inspect it.

"We’ll be using that," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

"What is it?" he said. It appeared to be a representation of a military fort: a hollow square in which tiny soldiers could be viewed at their duties. The colors were greenish brown and gray. Touching the miniature gun-barrel that stuck up from the top of it, he discovered that it was carved wood. "Quite real," he said.

Walter said, "We built a bunch of those. The earlier classes, I mean. CD classes last year, when we lived in Cleveland. Mom brought them along; I guess nobody else wanted them." He laughed his braying laugh again. It was more nervous than unkind.

"That’s a replica of Mormon fort," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

"I’ll be darned," Ragle said. "I’m interested in this. You know, I was in World War Two; I was over in the Pacific."

"I dimly remember reading that about you," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "You being such a celebrity... every once in a while I come across a little article about you in one of the magazines. Don’t you hold some sort of record as the longest contest winner of any of the newspaper or TV contests?"

"I suppose so," he said.

Walter said, "Did you see heavy fighting in the Pacific?"

"No," he said candidly. "Another fellow and I were stuck on a hunk of dirt with a few palm trees and a corrugated-iron shack and a radio transmitter and weather-measuring instruments. He measured the weather and I transmitted the information to a Navy installation a couple hundred miles to the south of us. That took about an hour a day. The rest of the day I lay around trying to figure out the weather. I used to try to predict what it would be like. That wasn’t our job; all we did was send them the readings and they did the predicting. But I got pretty good. I could look up at the sky and that plus the readings gave me enough to go on, so my guesses worked out more times than not."

"I imagine weather conditions were of prime importance to the Navy and Army," Mrs. Keitelbein said.

He answered, "A storm could wreck a landing operation, scatter a convoy of supply carriers. Change the course of the war."

"Maybe that’s where you got your practice," Walter said. "For the contest. Making book on the weather."

At that, Ragle laughed, "Yes," he said. "That’s what he and I did; we made book on it. I’d say it was going to rain at ten o’clock and he’d bet me it wouldn’t. We managed to fritter away a couple of years doing that. That, and drinking beer. When they brought in our supplies once a month they left off a standard ration of beer—standard, we figured, for a platoon. Only trouble was, we had no way to cool it. Warm beer, day after day." How it took him back to remember all that. Twelve, thirteen years ago ... He had been thirty-three years old. An employee in a steam laundry when the draft-notice showed up in the mailbox.

"Hey, Mom," Walter said excitedly. "I got a real good idea; what about Mr. Gumm talking to the class about his military experiences? He could give them a sense of participation; you know, the immediacy of the danger and all that. He probably remembers a whole bunch of training they gave the GIs about safety and what to do under fire and emergency situations."

Ragle said, "That’s about all there is; what IQ told you."

"But you remember stories the other guys swapped, about air-raids and bombing," Walter persisted. "They don’t have to actually have happened to you."

Kids are all about the same, Ragle thought. This boy talked along the lines Sammy talked. Sammy was ten; this boy was say, sixteen. But he liked both of them. And he took it as a compliment.

Fame, he thought. This is my reward for being the greatest—or longest—winner in the history of puzzle contests. Boys between the ages of ten and sixteen think I’m somebody.

It amused him. And he said, "I’ll wear my full general’s uniform when I show up Tuesday."

The boy’s eyes widened; then he tried to stiffen and appear blasé. "No kidding?" he said. "A full general? Four star?"

"Absolutely," he said, as solemnly as possible. Mrs. Keitelbein smiled, and he smiled across at her.

At five-thirty, when the store had been closed and locked up, Vic Nielson called the three or four checkers over together.

"Listen," he said. All day he had been planning this out. The window shades were down; the customers had left. At the registers one of the store’s assistant managers had started counting the money and setting the tapes for tomorrow. "I want you people to do me a favor. It’s a psychological experiment. It’ll only take thirty seconds. Okay?" Especially he appealed to Liz; she was the power among the checkers, and if she said okay the others probably would.

"Can’t it be done tomorrow!" Liz said. She already had her coat on, and she had changed from low heels to high heels. In them she seemed like some majestic three-dimensional pineapple juice display poster.

Vic said, "My wife’s parked out in the lot waiting. If I don’t get out there in a minute or so, she’ll start honking. So you know this won’t take long."

The other checkers, male, small, watched Liz for her reaction. They still had on their white aprons, and their pencils behind their ears.

"All right," she said. Waggling her finger at him she said, "But you better be telling the truth; we better be right out of here."

He walked over to the produce department, shook a paper bag loose from one of the bins, and began blowing it up. Liz and the other checkers gazed at him dully.

"What I want you to do is this," he said, throttling the full bag of air. "I’m going to pop this bag and then I’m going to yell a command at you. I want you to do exactly what I say; don’t think about it—just do it when you hear me yell it. I want you to react without giving it any time. You understand what I mean?"

Chewing on a piece of gum that she had pilfered from the candy and gum rack, Liz said, "Yeah, we understand. Go on, pop and yell."

"Face me," he said. The four of them stood with their backs to the wide glass exit door. It was the only door through which any of them passed to get into and out of the store. "Okay," he said, and, lifting up the bag, yelled, "Run!" And then he popped it. As he yelled, the four of them jumped slightly, startled. When the bag popped—its noise in the empty store was terrific—the four of them bolted like hares.

None of them ran toward the door. As a group they ran directly left, toward an upright support pillar. Six, seven, eight steps at it ... and then they halted, wheezing and disconcerted.

"Now what’s this?" Liz demanded. "What’s this about? You said you were going to pop the bag first, and then you went ahead and you yelled first."

"Thanks, Liz," he said. "That’s fine. You can go meet your boy friend."

As they filed out of the store, the checkers gave him a look of scorn.

The assistant manager, counting money and setting tape, said to him, "Did you mean for me to run, too?"

"No," he said, only half-hearing him; his mind was on his experiment.

"I tried to duck down under the register," the assistant manager said.

"Thanks," he said. Going out of the store, he locked the door after him, and then he crossed the lot toward the Volkswagen.

But in the Volkswagen was a heavy-set, black German shepherd which eyed him as he approached. And the front bumper of the car had a deep dent in it. And the car needed a wash.

Talk about psychological experiments, he said to himself. It wasn’t his car. It wasn’t Margo. He had glimpsed the VW drive onto the lot at about the time she usually came for him. The rest had been supplied by his mind.

He started back in the direction of the store. As he got near, the glass door opened and the assistant manager stuck his head out and said, "Victor, your wife’s on the phone. She wants you."

"Thanks," he said, catching the door and passing on inside and over to the wall phone.

"Honey," Margo said, when he said hello, "I’m sorry I didn’t get down to pick you up; do you still want me to come, or do you want to go ahead on the bus? If you’re tired I can get you, but probably it would be faster just to catch the bus."

"I’ll catch the bus," he said.

Margo said, "I’ve been out in Sammy’s clubhouse, listening on his crystal set. It’s fascinating!"

"Fine," he said, starting to hang up. "I’ll see you later."

"We listened to all sorts of broadcasts."

After saying good night to the assistant manager he walked down to the corner and caught a bus. Soon he was riding home, along with shoppers and employees, old ladies and school children.

A city ordinance forbade smoking in a public conveyance, but he felt disturbed enough to light a cigarette. By opening the window next to him he managed to get the smoke to go out, and not into the face of the woman next to him.

My experiment was a whizzer, he said to himself. It worked better than I wanted.

He had assumed that the checkers would scatter in various directions, one toward the door, one toward the wall, one away from the door. That would have supported his theory that this situation, in which they found themselves, was in some manner episodic. That a good part of their lives had been spent elsewhere, and in an elsewhere that none of them remembered.

But—each should have had his own reflexes. Not the same for all four of them. They had all bolted in the same direction. It had been the wrong direction, but it had been uniform. They had acted as a group, not as individuals.

That meant, simply, that the prior and substantial experiences of the four had been similar.

How could that be?

His theory didn’t cover that.

And, smoking his cigarette and maneuvering the smoke out the bus window, he could not immediately concoct another theory.

Except, he realized, some mediocre explanation; for instance, that the four checkers had attended some sort of function together. They might have lived in a boardinghouse together, or eaten in the same café over a period of years, been in school together....

We have a hodge-podge of leaks in our reality, he said to himself. A drop here, a couple of drops over in that corner. A moist spot forming on the ceiling. But where’s it getting in? What’s it mean?

He put his mind into rational order. Let’s see how I came across it, he said to himself. I ate too much lasagne, and I hurried away from a poker game, in which I held a medium-fair hand, to take a pill in a dark bathroom.

Is there anything previous to that?

No, he decided. Previous to that it’s a sunny universe. Kids romping, cows mooing, dogs wagging. Men clipping lawns on Sunday afternoon, while listening to the ball game on TV. We could have gone on forever. Noticed nothing.

Except, he realized, Ragle’s hallucination.

And what, he wondered, is the hallucination? Ragle had never quite got around to telling him.

But it goes something along the lines of my experience, he said to himself. Somehow, in some manner, Ragle found himself poking through reality. Enlarg ing the hole. Or been faced with its enlargement, perhaps a splitting rent opening up, a great gash.

We can put everything we know together, he realized, but it doesn’t tell us anything, except that something is wrong. And we knew that to start with. The clues we are getting don’t give us a solution; they only show us how far-reaching the wrongness is.

I think, though, he thought, we made a mistake in letting Bill Black walk off with that phone book.

And what should we do now? he asked himself. Conduct more psychological experiments?

No. One told him enough. The one he had conducted involuntarily in his bathroom. Even this last one had done more harm than good, had introduced confusion rather than verification.

Don’t confuse me any more, he thought. I’m bewildered enough now to last me the rest of my life. What do I know for sure? Maybe Ragle is right: we ought to pull out the big philosophy books and start boning up on Bishop Berkeley and whoever the rest of them are—he did not remember any philosophy well enough even to know the names.

Maybe, he thought, if I squeeze my eyes darn near shut, so just a crack of light shows, and I concentrate like hell on this bus, on the weary, hefty old women shoppers with their bulging shopping bags, and the chattering schoolgirls, and the clerks reading the evening paper, and the red-necked driver, maybe they’ll all go away. The squeaking seat under me. The smelly fumes every time the bus starts up. The jolting. The swaying. The ads over the windows. Maybe it’ll just fade away....

Squeezing his eyes together he tried to dislodge the presence of the bus and passengers. For ten minutes he tried. His mind fell into a stupor. The navel, he thought blearily. Concentration on one point. He picked out the buzzer on the side of the bus opposite him. The round, white buzzer. Go, he thought. Fade away.

Fade away.

Fade

Fa

F

With a start, he awoke. He had drifted off.

Self-hypnosis, he declared. Nodding off into a doze, like the other passengers around him. Heads lolling together, in time to the motion of the bus. Left, right. Forward. Sideways. Right. Left. The bus stopped at a light. The heads remained on an even angle.

Back, as the bus started.

Forward, as the bus stopped.

Fade away.

Fade

Fa

And then, through his half-closed eyes, he saw the passengers fade away.

Lo and behold! he thought. How pleasant it was.

No. It wasn’t fading at all.

The bus and its passengers hadn’t faded a bit. Throughout the bus a deep change had begun taking place, and like his experiment in the store it did not fit; it was not what he wanted.

Damn you, he thought. Fade away!

The sides of the bus became transparent. He saw out into the street, the sidewalk and stores. Thin support struts, the skeleton of the bus. Metal girders, an empty hollow box. No other seats. Only a strip, a length of planking, on which upright featureless shapes like scarecrows had been propped. They were not alive. The scarecrows lolled forward, back, forward, back. Ahead of him he saw the driver; the driver had not changed. The red neck. Strong, wide back. Driving a hollow bus.