Impossible Things (42 page)

“We’re just going to do some screening today,” he said. “The Idelman-Ponoffo Short-Term Memory Inventory. It consists of reading strings of numbers, letters, and words and having the child repeat them back to you, forward, backward, from the middle—”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “Dr. Young gave it to me when he tested me last year.”

“Oh,” Andrew said. He had had the idea Dr. Young didn’t know her, that she had been picked at random by the elementary school. “Good. You’ll be asking the questions, and I’ll be monitoring their responses. They’ll be hooked up to an EKG and autonomic response sensors, and I’ll be videotaping the testing.”

“Don’t you think all this equipment is liable to scare five-year-olds?”

“That’s what you’re here for. They know you already, and you’ll be the one interacting with them. Don’t start the test immediately. Talk to them awhile, and then we’ll hook them up as unobtrusively as possible and start the test.”

She went and got the first kindergartner and brought him in. “This is Matt Rothaus,” she said.

“Wow, neat!” Matt said, racing over to look at the temporal oscillator.
“Star Trek: The Next Generation
!”

Carolyn laughed. She leaned forward. “Do you like
Star Trek
?”

I know you, Andrew thought. I’ve never seen you before, but I’ve heard you laugh and lean forward just like that.

“What did you do in Show and Tell today?” Carolyn was asking Matt.

“Heidi threw up,” Matt said. “It was gross to the max.”

At lunch Dr. Lejeune set her tray down next to Sherri’s. “How’s Heidi?” she asked. “It isn’t the chicken pox, is it?”

“No. Nervous stomach. Her mother—”

“Don’t tell me. She ran off with the man who installed their cable TV.”

“You’re kidding!” Sherri said. “Where did you hear that?”

“I was kidding. What about her mother?”

“Oh, she just lessons Heidi to death. Ballet, tap, swimming, tae kwon do. The poor kid probably wishes her mother would run off with somebody and leave her alone.” She sighed. “I wish somebody would run off with me.”

“What about Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Old Paperwork? Are you kidding? He’s never even looked at me.” She took a bite of macaroni, hamburger, and tomato sauce. “I think my timing must be off or something. I always meet guys after they’re already married or engaged. Would you believe I was out with strep throat when Dr. Young did all that testing last March or I could have been the one down there in that cozy little music room with Dr. Simons?”

“All what testing?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“The testing he did to find somebody to work with Dr. Simons,” Sherri said, eating her peach slices. “He did all kinds of interviews and stuff and then gave the finalists all these psychological tests. If I’d known how gorgeous Dr. Simons was, I’d have taken a few tests myself, but I thought whoever Dr. Young picked was going to work with
him
!”

Dr. Young had gone up to Fermilab in February and been gone two months. She had assumed—correction, he had let her assume—he was working with the cyclotron that whole time, trying to get his subatomic hodiechrons to switch phases. “The school wouldn’t have copies of those tests, would it?”

“Are you kidding? Old Paperwork makes me make copies of
everything
.” She stacked her silverware and milk carton on top of her plate. “My timing’s always been off. In college I kept meeting guys who’d just been drafted.” She stood up and pushed her chair in. “It’d be great if this time-machine thing of Dr. Young’s worked, wouldn’t it? You’d be able to go back and get the timing right for once.”

“Yes,” Dr. Lejeune said. “It would.”

•    •    •

Wendy called after school and told Carolyn they had an out-of-town volleyball game and could Carolyn bring her money for McDonald’s and some Gatorade to drink on the bus. “Coach Nicotero says we have to have lots of electrolytes.” She and Andrew weren’t done testing Heidi Dreismeier, but he told her to go on and he’d finish the last few questions.

Carolyn ran by the grocery store and bought the Gatorade and a two-liter bottle of black-cherry pop, which she’d decided was the secret ingredient in the suicides. She took Wendy the Gatorade and the money and picked up Liz at the high school.

“Can you drop me over at Lisa’s?” Liz sad. “Harvard sent her a recruitment video. I don’t know, though. How important do you think coed dorms are?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn said, stopping in front of Lisa’s. “We didn’t have them.”

“You’re kidding. How did you meet guys?” She gathered up her books and got out of the car. “Oh, I almost forgot. I saw Dad. He said to tell you he and Linda had to go out to the mall to look at warm-ups. He said not to wait supper.”

Carolyn went home and made herself a suicide, adding a very small amount of black cherry to try it out. Not only did we not have coed dorms, she thought, we weren’t even allowed to have boys in the dorm. The dorm mother ran a bed check at midnight, and you could be expelled for sneaking a boy into your room, but I still managed somehow to meet boys, Liz. They sat next to me in class, and they danced with me at mixers, and they called me on the phone.

The phone rang. “Thanks a lot for running out on me,” Andrew said.

“What happened?” Carolyn asked. “Did Heidi throw up?”

“Worse. Her mother came in. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to convince her Heidi doesn’t need hodiechronicity lessons.”

“Sherri says she read this article about Housewife Hysteria, and that’s what she thinks Heidi’s mother has,” Carolyn said. She took a sip of the suicide. Black cherry was not the secret ingredient. “She can’t find a socially acceptable outlet for her frustrations and longings.”

“So she makes poor Heidi take belly-dancing. She spent forty-five minutes telling me about their Suzuki lessons. I felt like I was caught in some horrible time dilation. It serves me right for going into this business.”

“How did you get into this business anyway?” Carolyn said, opening the refrigerator and peering inside to see if there were any other flavors of pop she could try.

“You mean why did I decide to study time? Well, I …” There was a long pause and then he said in an odd voice, “Isn’t that funny? I don’t remember.”

“You mean you just sort of gradually got into it?” There was a jar of maraschino cherries in the refrigerator door with one cherry left in it. She ate the cherry and poured the juice into the suicide. “You just drifted into it?”

“Temporal psychology isn’t something you just drift into,” he said. “This is ridiculous. I can’t for the life of me remember.”

“Maybe you still haven’t gotten used to the altitude or something,” Carolyn said, trying out the suicide. Maraschino-cherry juice wasn’t the secret ingredient either. “And you’re probably under a lot of stress with the project and all. People forget things when they’re under stress.”

“You forget phone numbers and where you put your keys. You don’t forget why you picked your chosen vocation.”

“I can’t remember whether I had the chicken pox,” Carolyn said. “I even called my mother. She said I didn’t
have it when I was little, but she thought I’d had it when I was in college, and when she said that, it sounded right, but I can’t for the life of me remember. It’s like there’s a big hole where the—”

“Nebraska State College,” Andrew said.

“What?” Carolyn said.

“Your college. You went to Nebraska State College. That’s where I know you from.”

“You’re kidding. You went to NSC, too?”

“No, Stanford, but—” He stopped. “You didn’t ever go to California when you were in college, did you? For spring break or something?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “Did you ever come to Nebraska?”

“No, and you still think I’m trying the old ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ routine, don’t you?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “I think you probably had a girlfriend in college that I remind you of.”

“Not a chance. Stephanie Forrester was blond and malicious.”

She certainly was, Carolyn thought. Making him usher at her wedding.

“Brown and gold,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“Your school colors. Brown and gold.”

She looked at the suicide and then poured it down the sink. Her school colors were brown and gold, and Andrew had never said a word about Stephanie Forrester until this minute, but she knew all about it, how the head usher was in love with her, too, how they’d gone out drinking clockstoppers and—

“I’ve got to go fix supper before my husband gets home,” she said, and hung up the phone.

Dr. Lejeune had hoped Sherri would look for the tests right away, but when she went into the office after school, Sherri said. “Oh, I forgot all about that. Old Paperwork
suddenly decided he wanted me to take an inventory of the supply closet,
including
counting the individual sheets of construction paper.”

“How old is Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Six, seven,” Sherri said, counting green. “Forty-three.”

“Forty-three,” Dr. Lejeune said thoughtfully, watching Sherri count. “Are you aware that obsessive attention to detail is a classic symptom of sexual repression?”

“Nineteen—you’re kidding,” Sherri said. She looked at the half-counted stack. “Where was I?”

“Nineteen,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Are you sure he’s never noticed you?”

“I’m sure. I’ve been wearing fuchsia for a week.” She finished the stack and tamped it down and along the side to straighten the sheets back into line. “I’ll try to look for those tests as soon as I finish this inventory.”

Dr. Lejeune went down to the music room to see what she could find out from Carolyn, but she wasn’t there and neither was Andrew. They had probably gotten lost in all the equipment, Dr. Lejeune thought, looking at the metal boxes stacked next to the piano and lined up under the blackboard. She wondered what he needed the photon counter for. And the spectrum analyzer. She didn’t even know what some of this stuff was. She picked up a gray metal box that wasn’t plugged into anything. There were no dials or markings on it except an on-off switch. Whatever it was, it was turned on.

The lights went off. “Hey!” Dr. Lejeune shouted. She took a step in the direction of the door. She crashed into the wastebasket. “Hey!” she said again.

“Sorry,” Dr. Young said, and the light came on. He came down the narrow ell and into the main part of the room, looking oddly guilty, as if she had just caught him at something. “I didn’t know anybody was in here, and I saw the light on. It’s a waste of electricity to leave a light
on in an empty room and—” He stopped. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Dr. Lejeune said, surprised.

He was looking at the box she was still holding. She set it down on the piano. “I was looking for Dr. Simons.”

“What for?” he said suspiciously. “You weren’t going to try to fix him up with Bev Frantz, were you?”

“I wanted to ask him what he thought of the children he’d tested so far,” Dr. Lejeune said stiffly. “The computer isn’t showing even a glimmer of a hodiechron, long or short. You should check before you turn out the light. It got black as a coal mine in here.”

Dr. Young looked guilty all over again, and he still couldn’t take his eyes off the box on the piano.

“I’ve got to go finish running the extrapolations,” Dr. Lejeune said, and went back up to the office.

Sherri was counting yellow construction paper. Dr. Lejeune asked if she could use the phone in Mr. Paprocki’s office to call the university. “Forty-two, forty-three,” Sherri said. “Sure. You have to fill out these.” She handed Dr. Lejeune a sheaf of forms an inch thick.

“I’ll call collect,” Dr. Lejeune said. She went into the office, shut the door, and called the physics department. “I need to talk to somebody who worked on the temporal oscillator with Dr. Young,” she told the graduate assistant who answered the phone. “I want to know exactly what it does.”

“The main unit?”

“I suppose so,” Dr. Lejeune said. She hadn’t been aware the thing had more than one part.

“It has two functions. It produces the agitational stimuli, and it stores the temporal energy collected by the portable transmitter-receivers.”

“Agitational stimuli?”

“Yes. A combination of subsonic emissions and subliminal messages that produce an excited emotional state in the experimental subjects.”

Yes, and I’ll bet I know what those subliminal messages are saying, Dr. Lejeune thought.

“I don’t suppose this ‘main unit’ looks like a lava lamp, does it?”

“A lava lamp? Why on earth would a temporal oscillator look like a lava lamp?”

“Good question,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Tell me about these portable transmitter-receivers.”

It took two more days to finish kindergarten. Brendan James was the last one on the list. “Maybe we should just skip him,” Carolyn said. “He’s under a lot of stress.”

“I’m not sure we have enough time left today anyway,” Andrew said. It was nearly two-thirty. He could tell because the third grade was rattling past on their way out to recess. “Let’s put it off till tomorrow, and I’ll ask—”

The lights went out.

“Just a minute,” Andrew said. “I’ll get the flashlight. You can’t see a thing in here.”

That was an understatement. It was as black as pitch, as black as a mine shaft in there. It was so black, it seemed to destroy his sense of direction as well. He took a step toward the piano and cracked his knee against the desk. Wrong way. He turned around and started in the opposite direction, his hands out in front of him.

“I’ll try to find the light switch,” Carolyn said, and there was a loud metallic crash.

“Stay right where you are,” Andrew said. His hands hit the keyboard in a clatter of notes. “I’m almost there.” He grabbed for the piano top and got hold of one of the square metal boxes and then the other. The flashlight wasn’t there. He patted his hands over the surface of the piano. “Did you move the flashlight?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Did you?”

“No,” he said, turning in the direction her voice was coming from. He crashed into the wastebasket. “I can’t
see a thing,” he said. “It’s black as the pit from pole to pole in here. Where are you?”