Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (15 page)

I stop walking suddenly. I have come halfway down the path toward the creek without thinking where I am going or why. Now I stop and the night noises press in on me. “They are alike,” I say, and I am startled by my voice. All other sounds stop with the words.

I think of the stack of file cards, and those I added tonight, and I am amazed that I didn’t see it in the beginning. Roger is right, the townspeople are dreaming the same dreams. That isn’t really what he said. What he said was that the dreams of the people here would remain stable, unchanged by the experiment, while those of the students would change as they adapted to this life. I haven’t asked about that part of the research, but suddenly I am too curious about it to put it out of my mind.

Are they changing, and how? I start back, but pause at the door to the house, and turn instead to the street and town. I slow down when I come in sight of Sagamore House. It is very late, almost two in the morning. The second-floor light is the only light I have seen since leaving my own house. I take another step toward Sagamore House, and another. What is the matter tonight? I look about. But there is nothing. No wind, no moon, nothing. But I hear… life, stirrings, something. This is Somerset, I say to myself sharply, not quite aloud, but I hear the words anyway. I look quickly over my shoulder, but there is nothing. I see the apple trees, familiar yet strange, eerie shadows against the pale siding of the hotel. Across from Sagamore House on Wisteria there is the old boarded-up theater, and for a moment I think someone has opened it again. I press my hands over my ears and when I take them down the sound has stopped. I am shaking. I can’t help the sudden look that I give the corner where the drugstore burned down seven or eight years ago.

We wait in the shadows of Sagamore House, under the apple trees for the movie to be over, and then Father and Mother, Susan’s parents, Peter’s, come out and take us along with them for an ice-cream soda in the drugstore. We know when the movie is ending because of the sounds that filter out when they open the inner doors. Faint music, laughter, a crash of cymbals, always different, but always a signal, and we come down from the trees, or from the porch and cross the street to wait for them to come out.

I stare at the theater, back to the empty corner, and slowly turn and go home again. One of the boys was playing a radio, I tell myself, and even believe it for a moment. Or I imagined it, the past intruded for a moment, somehow. An audio hallucination. I stop at the gate to my yard and stare at the house, and I am desperately afraid. It is such an unfamiliar feeling, so unexpected and shattering, that I can’t move until it passes. It is as if I have become someone else for a moment, someone who fears rustling in the dark, who fears the night, being alone. Not my feelings at all. I have never been afraid, never, not of anything like this.

I light a cigarette and walk around the house to enter the kitchen, where I make coffee and a sandwich. It is two-thirty, but sleep seems a long way off now, unwanted, unneeded. Toward dawn I take a sleeping pill and fall into bed.

Roger, Sid and Doug invite me to have dinner with them in Hawley on Saturday, and I accept. The mountain road is very bad and we creep along in the station wagon that they have brought with them. No one is talking, and we all glance back at Somerset at the turn that used to have a tended scenic overlook. The trees have since grown up, and bushes and vines, so that there is only a hint of the town below us. Then it is gone, and suddenly Sid starts to talk of the experiment.

“I think we should call off the rest of it,” he says.

“Can’t,” Roger says. “Eight days isn’t enough.”

“We have a trend,” Sid says.

Doug, sitting in the back seat, speaks up then. “You’ll never keep them all here for two more weeks.”

“I know that, but those who do hang on will be enough.”

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“Boredom,” Sid says. “Good God, what’s there to do in such a place?”

“I thought that was part of the experiment. I thought you wanted a place with no external stimuli.”

“Quote and unquote,” Sid says. “Staunton’s idea. And we did, but I don’t know. The dreams are strange, and getting stranger. And we’re not getting along too well in the daytime. I don’t know how your people stand it.”

I shrug and don’t even try to answer. I know he won’t understand. Traffic thickens when we leave the secondary road for the highway on the other side of the mountain. It feels cooler here and I find that I am looking forward to a night out with more excitement than seems called for.

We have drinks before dinner, and wine with dinner, and more drinks afterward, and there is much laughter. Doug teaches me three new dance steps, and Roger and I dance, and I find myself thinking with incredulity of the plan I have been considering to take Father out of the nursing home where he belongs and try to care for him myself. I know that he will never recover, that he will become more and more helpless, not less. How could I have planned to do such a thing? He needs attendants to lift him, turn him in bed, and at times to restrain him. I have tried to think of other alternatives for him, but there are none, and I know that. I know that I have to write to the director of the home and apologize to him.

At eleven Roger says we have to go back. Doug passes out in the car as soon as he gets inside, and Sid groans. “There he goes,” he says. “So you do me tonight.”

“Where are the others?” I ask.

“On strike,” Roger says. “They refused to work on Saturday and Sunday, said they needed time off. They want to forget their dreams for a couple of nights.”

“I’ll do it,” I say.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I’ll do it. You can wire me up and everything tonight.”

It is agreed, and we drive back over the mountain, becoming more and more quiet as we get to the old road and start to pick our way down again. By the time we get back to Somerset, and I am feeling soberer, I regret my impulsive promise, but can think of no way to back out now. I watch Sid and Roger half carry, half drag Doug from the station wagon, and I see the flutter of his eyelids and know that he is not as drunk as he would have us believe. I start to walk to my house, but Roger says for me to wait, that they will drive me and bring me back with my pajamas and things, so I stand on the porch and wait for them, and I stare across the street at the vacant theater. I know that three nights ago I imagined the past, but since then I have been taking sleeping pills, and my nights have been quiet, with no more hallucinations or dreams.

My house is noisier than usual. I glance at the two boys, but neither of them seems to notice. They sit in the living room and wait, and ahead of me on the dark stairs the rustlings hurry along; they pause outside my parents’ room, scurry down the hallway and precede me into my room, where, when I turn on the light, there is nothing to see. I know it is the settling of floorboards untrodden for eleven months, and rushing air, and imagination. Memories that have become tangible? I don’t believe that, but it has a strangely comforting sound, and I like the idea of memories lingering in the house, assuming a life of their own, reliving the past.

I fold pajamas and my housecoat, and grope under the bed for my slippers, and the thought comes that people are going to know that I spent the night at Sagamore House. I sit on the bed with my slippers in my hand and stare straight ahead at nothing in particular. How can I get out of this? I realize that Somerset and New York are arguing through me, and I can almost smile at the dialogue that I am carrying out silently. It seems that my strongest Somerset argument is that if I am going to live here with my invalid father, I can’t return with a reputation completely ruined. I know what Somerset can do to a woman like that. But I’m not going to come back with him, I answer. Or am I?

It is getting very late and I have to go through with it; I have promised. Reluctantly I take my things downstairs, hoping that they have left, but of course they are still sitting there, talking quietly. About me? I suspect so. Probably I puzzle them. I regard them as little more than children, boys with school problems to solve. Yet we are all in our twenties. I suppose that because I have my degrees and a position of responsibility, my experience seems to add years to my age, and even as I think this, I reject it. Sid has told me that he spent three years in the army, served in Vietnam, so what is my experience to his? Sid has tried to draw me out, has visited twice, and has even gone canoeing with me, but standing in the doorway looking at them I think of them as so very young, prying into things they can’t understand, trying to find answers that, if found, will make them question all of reality. I shake my head hard. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking about, but I feel afraid suddenly, and I suspect that I have drunk too much earlier, and I am so very… weary. Sleeping pills leave me more tired than the insomnia they alleviate.

They make small talk that I recognize, the same sort of small talk that a good doctor uses for a nervous patient before measuring his blood pressure. I am churlish with them in return and we go to the sleep lab silently. I understand all of their equipment and I have even had electroencephalograms made when I was studying, so nothing is new to me and the demonstration is short. Then I am alone in the darkened room, conscious of the wires, of the tiny patches of skin with adhesive gel tape that holds the electrodes in place. I don’t think I’ll be able to go to sleep here wired up like this, at least not into the deep sleep that should come in an hour or so. I deliberately close my eyes and try to picture a flame above my eyes, over the bridge of my nose. I know that I can interrupt my alpha waves at will with this exercise. I imagine Roger’s surprise. But suddenly I am thinking of S.L. and I blink rapidly, wondering what kinds of waves I am producing now for them to study. S.L. won’t go away. I ask, what does the S. stand for, and he smiles broadly and says Silas. Does anyone name children Silas any more? So I ask about the L. and he says Lerner, which is perfectly all right, his mother’s maiden name, but he doesn’t like the idea of going around as S. Lerner Wright. It is a farcical name. He is S.L. Lying in the dark room of the almost empty hotel, I can think of S.L. without pain, without recriminations and regrets and bitterness. I remember it as it was then. I loved him so very much, but he said not enough, or I would go with him to Cal Tech and become Mrs. S.L. Wright, and forever and ever remain Mrs. S.L. Wright. I realize that I no longer love him, and that probably I didn’t even then, but it felt like love and I ached as if it were love, and afterward I cut my hair very short and stopped using makeup and took several courses in night school and finished the next three years in under two and received degrees and a job…

I am awakened by the telephone and I lift it and mumble into it. “My car isn’t working right, trying to back up on the road into Somerset and can’t make it go. I keep slipping downward and there is a cliff in front of me, but I can’t back up.”

I dream of the telephone ringing, and it rings, and I speak, less coherently, and forget immediately what I have said and sleep again. In the morning I have memories of having spoken into the telephone several times, but no memories of what I said. Sid enters and helps me out of the bird’s nest of wires. I wave him away and stumble into the bathroom where I wash my face and come really awake.

Sid? I thought Roger was the meter man of the night before. I dress and brush my hair and put on lipstick, and then find them both waiting for me to have breakfast with them. Sid has deep blue circles under his eyes. At a sunlit table with a bowl of yellow roses and a few deep green ferns, I wait for them to break the silence that has enveloped the three of us. There is a sound of activity in town that morning, people getting ready to go to church in Hawley, cars being brought out of garages where they stay six days of the week, several people in the hotel dining room having an early breakfast before leaving for the day. Many of them stay away all day on Sunday, visiting friends or relatives, and I know that later the town will be deserted.

“So they talked you into letting them wire you up like a condemned man?” Dorothea stands over the table accusingly. “Are you all right?”

“Of course. It’s nothing, Dorothea, really nothing.”

She snorts. “Up all night, people coming and going all night, talking in the halls, meetings here and there. I never should have let them in.” She is addressing me still, but the hostility in her voice is aimed at the boys, at Staunton, who has just entered the dining room. He joins us, and there are dark hollows under his eyes. He doesn’t meet my gaze.

We have coffee in silence and wait for our orders. I finger a sensitive spot on my left eyelid and Sid says quickly, “One of the wires came off during the night. I had to replace it. Is it sore?”

“No. It’s all right.” I am upset suddenly by the idea of his being there in the night, replacing a wire on my eye without my knowing. I think of the similar role that I play in my daily life and I know how I regard the bodies that I treat. Irritated at the arm that has managed to pull loose a needle that now must be replaced in the vein. Never a person, just an arm, and a needle. And the quiet satisfaction when the dials are registering correctly once more. I feel the frown on my face and try to smooth it out again.

Staunton has ordered only toast, juice and coffee, and he is yawning. He finishes his last crumb of toast and says, “I’m going to bed. Miss Matthews, will you join us here for dinner tonight?”

The sudden question catches me off guard, and I look at him. He is regarding me steadily and very soberly, and I realize that something has happened, that I am part of it, and that he is very much concerned. I am uneasy and only nod yes.

When he is gone I ask, “What happened? What’s wrong?”

“We don’t know yet,” Roger says.

Sid pours more coffee and drinks it black. He is looking more awake, as if he has taken a bennie or something. “We have to talk with you, Janet. I’d like you to hear some of our tapes, including your own, if you will.”

“You should get some sleep,” I say irrelevantly.