Impossible Things (44 page)

“Say someone scored a six hundred ninety-two on the Rick, what would their chances of having an extramarital affair be?”

“Six hundred ninety-two?” the graduate assistant said. “Nonexistent. Seven hundred’s a perfect score.”

Perfect, Dr. Lejeune thought. “You wouldn’t happen to have Dr. Andrew Simons’s score on file, would you?”

“I know Dr. Young did a Rick on him, but I’m not sure where it—”

“Never mind,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I already know what he got.”

Carolyn checked Wendy’s stomach every morning for two weeks, but she didn’t show any signs of getting the chicken pox, even though at one point Carolyn had five patients on Wendy’s bed, her and Don’s bed, and the family-room couch. “I can’t get sick,” Wendy told her, yanking her T-shirt down after Carolyn had checked her stomach. “We’ve got a game this afternoon. I have to start. Sarah Perkins got sick yesterday. Coach Nicotero had to call a time out and everything.”

That’s what I need, Carolyn thought, driving her to practice. A time out. Only there aren’t any in this game.

“I’ve narrowed it down to Vassar, Carleton, and Tufts,” Liz said when Carolyn got back. She was lying on
the couch dabbing calamine lotion on her legs and reading college catalogs. “How important do you think VCRs in the dorms are, Mom?”

The phone rang. “I am
so
sorry to do this to you,” Sherri said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. It’s Shannon Williams. I called her mother at the bank. Do you think I should have done that?”

“Was she there?”

“I don’t know,” Sherri said, lowering her voice.
“He
answered the phone and he said she wasn’t there, but he sounded really angry and I think she was. So can you come pick her up?”

“I’ll be right there,” Carolyn said.

She settled Erin in Wendy’s bed with her popsicle and some of Wendy’s comics. “I’ve got to go get Shannon Williams,” she told Liz, who had given up on the catalog and was watching
All My Children
.

“Is her mother in real estate, too?”

“No,” Carolyn said. Her mother is in deep trouble if her husband finds out. And how did that happen? I know how it happened, Carolyn thought. She knew exactly where he was, and she wasn’t thinking about her husband or her kids because right then they didn’t exist. Talk about time displacement. It was as if that moment, as she stood there in the dark, knowing all she had to do was put her hand on the back of his neck and pull him down to her, was out of time altogether.

Only it wasn’t. Shannon Williams’s mother was just kidding herself that it was. It would be wonderful if people could step out of time as Dr. Young seemed to think they could, go back to when they were in college and unencumbered with families and responsibilities, but they couldn’t. And standing there in the dark, Shannon’s mother should have been thinking about how much this was going to hurt her husband. She should have been thinking about who was going to take Shannon to volleyball
practice and the orthodontist after the divorce was final.

The phone rang. It was Don. “How are things going?” he asked.

“Great,” she said. “Erin Peterson is on the couch, I am on my way to pick up Shannon Williams, we are all out of Popsicles
and
calamine lotion, and you have just called to tell me you’re going to be late again.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry to do this to you when you’ve got all those kids to take care of, but somebody erased all the floor ex music, and we’ve got a big invitational tomorrow. Luckily, Linda’s got a dual tape deck at her apartment, so we’re going over there. I’ll get home as soon as I can. And listen, you take it easy. You sound terrible.”

“Thank you,” Carolyn said coldly. She opened the refrigerator. They were all out of pop, too.

“That’s what I mean. You’re so edgy. Linda thinks you’re doing way too much with all these poxy kids. She says a woman your age has to be careful not to overdo.”

“Or my arthritis might kick up again?” she said. She hung up, called the bank, and asked for the head loan officer.

“You tell Shannon Williams’s mother that I don’t care if she’s there or not, but she has a sick child and she’d better come pick her up,” she said, and hung up.

The phone rang. “I have bad news,” Sherri said.

“I don’t care who it is,” Carolyn said. “Their mother has got to come arid get them.”

“It’s Wendy,” Sherri said.

By the end of three weeks, a few scabby children had started to trickle back, but Dr. Young showed no interest in screening them.

“If we’re not going to use the music room, why don’t we at least move some of that equipment out so the music teacher can get back in?” Dr. Lejeune suggested.

“You are not moving anything anywhere,” Dr. Young shouted, his bald head turning fuchsia. “It is that kind of attitude—”

“I know, I know,” Dr. Lejeune said, but she went down to the music room anyway. She could at least shift things around so the music teacher could get to the piano.

She dismantled the video camera and stuck it in the music cupboard. At the back between two xylophones was a flashlight. That would come in handy if the lights went out, Dr. Lejeune thought. She put it in her pocket and sidled over to the piano to get the temporal oscillator. The gray box that didn’t plug into anything was still on top of the piano, but the two smaller flat ones weren’t.

She went upstairs to the office and called Carolyn. “Did Dr. Young send anything home with you?” she asked.

“The interview transcripts,” Carolyn said, sounding exhausted. “He thought I might have time to go over them, but I’ve got a whole bunch of—”

“There wouldn’t be a flat gray box in with them, would there?” Dr. Lejeune interrupted.

“I don’t think so. Just a minute,” Carolyn said. She was gone a long time. “Yeah, it’s here. I don’t know how it got in with the transcripts. Do you want me to bring it back to school?”

“No,” Dr. Lejeune said. “We can get it when we pick up the transcripts. Don’t worry about it.”

“Is the other one missing, too? There were two of them on top of the piano.”

“No, it’s not missing,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I know right where it is.”

Even with Dr. Gillis helping, it took three weeks to arrange everything, and then Andrew had trouble getting a flight to L.A. The one he finally got on was jammed. He was sandwiched in between a sleeping man and a little
girl. When the flight attendant came around with the drinks cart, he ordered a clockstopper.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I don’t know that drink. How is it made?”

“I wanta Coke,” the little girl said.

“Just give me a beer and a wine and I’ll mix it myself,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir. I can only sell you one drink at a time.”

“Fine,” he said, pointing at the sleeping man in the window seat. “Give him a beer and me a wine, and I’ll pay for both of them.”

The flight attendant slapped a napkin down on his tray and followed it with a vile-looking pinkish-brown drink in a squat plastic glass. It was not anywhere near the amount to do anything but taste the way it looked. He drank it anyway.

The little girl picked her glass up with both hands and then tried to maneuver the straw into her mouth by moving the glass around and grabbing for it with her teeth. “I’m going to see my mom,” she said between grabs. “She lives in Santa Monica. My dad lives in Philadelphia. They’re getting a divorce.”

“Oh?” Andrew said. He twisted around in his seat and tried to catch the attendant’s eye, but the cart was already fifteen rows back.

“My mom went to California to find herself,” the little girl said. She put down her glass and began blowing bubbles into it with the straw. “She lives with this guy named Carlos. He plays tennis.”

The drinks cart disappeared into the recesses of the plane.

“My dad has a new girlfriend named Heather.”

A different flight attendant came up with headphones. “Would you like to see the movie? It’s Nostalgia Month.”

“What’s the movie?” the little girl said, bending her straw in half trying to drink upside down.

“An Affair to Remember
.”

Andrew bought a headset. He put it on, turned the volume all the way down, and closed his eyes.

“My psychiatrist says the divorce has had a traumatic effect on me,” the little girl said, holding her straw above her head and catching the drips with her tongue. “He says I feel abandoned and neglected.”

Andrew took off the headphones and put them on the little girl. He put his seat back, snatched the blanket away from the sleeping man, and stared out the window of the plane. It looked like it was snowing.

Dr. Lejeune waited till nearly all the teachers had left the building and then went down to the music room and got the gray box with the on-off switch. She took it upstairs to the office and asked Sherri where Mr. Paprocki was.

“He’s got late bus duty,” Sherri said. “One of the second-grade teachers went home with the chicken pox at noon.”

“Oh,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Did he tell you about the music room?”

Sherri shook her head. She looked a little haggard, and she wasn’t wearing fuchsia, but that wouldn’t matter.

“He wants you to file all the sheet music according to key signature,” she said.

As soon as Sherri started downstairs, Dr. Lejeune walked out to the playground. She met Mr. Paprocki coming in. “Sherri sent me to get you. She’s in the music room. I’m afraid she’s coming down with the chicken pox.”

Mr. Paprocki took off at a dead run. Dr. Lejeune followed, still carrying the gray box, and as soon as he was all the way in the music room, she turned off the light.

“Hey!” Sherri and Mr. Paprocki said.

Dr. Lejeune locked the door and went up to the kindergarten. “I want to know what’s going on,” she said.

Dr. Young was sitting at the computer. “Going on?” he said, turning around. “What do you mean?” He saw the gray box. The top of his bald head went pale. “What are you doing with that?”

“I’m turning the temporal oscillator off in about ten seconds if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” she said, holding her hand over the switch. “This
is
the temporal oscillator, isn’t it? Along with the portable transmitter-receivers you sent home with Carolyn—where’s Andrew Simons’s? In his luggage?”

“Yes,” Dr. Young said. “Don’t—what do you want to know?”

“I want to know what your project really is, and don’t tell me you’re testing kindergartners’ hodiechrons, because I know that’s just a blind,” she said. “What are you really doing? You hired a housewife whose husband is never home and a psychologist who hasn’t had sex in five years, and you stuck them down in a tiny room where they couldn’t move without touching each other, and then you turned off the lights and started subsonically whispering in their ears.” She moved her hand closer to the switch. “You obviously wanted them to have an affair, and what I want to know is why.”

“I didn’t want them to have an affair,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, taking hold of the switch.

“It’s true! All right, all right, I’ll tell you everything! Just take your hand away from the switch.”

Dr. Lejeune did. Dr. Young sank down on one of the tiny kindergarten chairs. “I needed to have maximum agitation, but subsonics and subliminals aren’t enough to produce an excited emotional state, so I had to have subjects who were already under stress. People going through midlife crises experience a lot of stress. They worry about
growing old, they think about death, they long for the past. Most of them find some outlet for that longing—”

“Like running off with the Make Me Marvy man,” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Or finding God,” Dr. Young said, “or becoming obsessive about their children or their work.”

“But people who score a six-ninety on the Rick don’t have any outlets.”

“Right. So their hodiechrons would be in a maximum state of agitation.”

“And if they weren’t, you’d see to it that they were,” Dr. Lejeune said grimly. “What did you do besides the subsonics? Hire Sherri to talk about Shannon Williams’s mother’s boyfriend at the bank? Release some chicken pox virus into the air?”

“I had nothing to do with Sherri or the chicken pox,” he said stiffly. “I was simply trying to maximize their agitation so their hodiechrons would be destabilized. Hodiechrons can’t be switched when they’re stable.”

“What about Carolyn and Andrew?”

“They’re simply supplying temporal energy, which is then stored in the oscillator. The actual time-displacement experiments will be carried out on laboratory rats.”

“Oh. They’re simply supplying temporal energy. And what about what’s going to happen to them afterwards?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to them afterwards,” Dr. Young said, looking as if he were getting ready to lunge for the storage unit. “The temporal oscillator has no effect on them whatsoever.”

“No effect on them? What about all those feelings you’ve churned up? What are they supposed to do with those?”

“They’ll get over them as soon as they’re removed from contact with the temporal oscillator. Their agitation level will gradually drop back to normal, and they’ll forget about it. I don’t know what you’re so worried about. They can’t have an affair with Andrew on the way to Tibet,
and I plan to send Linda back to central casting as soon as—”

“You hired Linda!” Dr. Lejeune said, her hand trembling on the switch.

“I had to. Carolyn scored a six-ninety on the Rick. Nobody else got above a five hundred. But she was too happily married.”

“And you wanted maximum agitation, so you had to ruin her marriage.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Dr. Young said, walking carefully towards her. “Her husband scored a four-eighty, and Linda was under strict orders—”

“You wanted maximum agitation,” Dr. Lejeune said, so angry she could hardly speak, “so you took probably the only two people left in the world who wouldn’t cheat on their spouses and you poked and prodded them and subjected them to subliminals till they were in love and miserable, and you planned to go off and leave them like that, sitting ducks for the next Tibetan bar girl or colors consultant to come along, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

Dr. Young took a few more cautious steps forward. “I think you’re exaggerating. They scored above six hundred on the Rick. They won’t go off with someone else. Andrew will go back to the lamasery and Carolyn will go back to her husband.”