The Link (23 page)

When Harry goes to the men’s room, she tells Robert that it wasn’t her idea, that she feels terrible about it. She tried to talk Harry out of it but could only go so far without being suspicious. As for her and Robert, she just hasn’t made up her mind yet. It’s a terribly difficult decision. “Please bear with me,” she says.

Midnight comes and kisses are exchanged. He gives Cathy a light peck on the lips, smiles lovingly and whispers, “Be happy.”

Then the show begins—and the next phase of Robert’s “calling” takes place.

During the performance, he becomes increasingly—and most uncomfortably—aware of a man in the audience who seems delirious with adoration of the singer, making loud, excited noises at every familiar number, giving her standing ovations, whistles and hoots when she is finished with each song.

After a while, Robert finds himself unable to look at the singer at all, his gaze fixed on the man. Something is wrong. He feels it powerfully. The emotion rises.

Abruptly, as a number ends and the man rises to move for the stage, Robert gasps, seeing a knife in his hand. Jumping up so quickly that he knocks his chair back on the woman sitting behind him, Robert lunges toward the stage, moving clumsily between the tightly packed tables.

Then he freezes, seeing, now, that what the man is holding in his hand is a long-stemmed red rose. The singer takes it, thanks the man who throws her a kiss and returns to his table.

A sense of crushing disorientation covers Robert. He looks around at the people staring at him, then returns to the table, looking ill because of his blunder. He apologizes to the woman (who glares at him, her husband muttering threats) and sits again.

The woman goes on singing, holding the rose and microphone at the same time.

The feeling remains.

Robert shifts in his chair, breathing erratic. He looks at the man again. Shakes his head. There’s something wrong. He can’t get rid of the conviction.

Cathy saves the moment. Seeing what’s happening, she leans over and says, in a soft, clear voice, “Don’t try to fight it, Rob. Let it happen.”

He looks at her in mute despair, then turns away. “All right,” he mutters. He notices Harry’s perplexed look.

The man is still cheering and whistling, making excited whooping noises as the singer performs.

Robert gets up, ignoring the woman’s voice behind him. His face a mask of stone, he drifts to the back of the room and starts to edge in on the man. He sees nothing but the man, feels nothing but the danger he knows is present.

Suddenly, the man stands, reaching into his side pocket. This time, Robert has no hesitation. Leaping forward, he grabs the man and flings him down. The shot from the pistol in the man’s hand goes harmlessly into the ceiling.

Screams. Furor. The man held down by many. Police sent for. The singer, shaken, thanking Robert for saving her life. “I’m grateful I was able to,” he says.

Then he returns to the table and sits, shudders. Cathy takes his hand and holds it tightly. “You must never fight it again, Rob,” she tells him. “Never.”

Still disconcerted when he returns to his room (Cathy and Harry tell him they will say their goodbyes in the morning) Robert undresses, takes a shower, dons his pajamas and gets in bed. The incident on top of Cathy’s imminent departure has just about undone him.

He turns on the t-v set to distract himself.

The result is otherwise.

Westheimer is being interviewed on a late-night talk show, taped earlier.

“Viewed in the perspective of modern clinical psychiatry,” Westheimer says, “there is a direct line of continuity from the convulsive nuns of Loudon, the witches of Salem, Mesmer’s somnambulists and Charcot’s hysterics to today’s so-called psychics.

“Possession by devils, demons or precognitive visions is part and parcel of the same continuum, all schizophrenic reactions on the pathological side of that continuum.

“In point of fact, the so-called ‘occult explosion’ we hear so much about today is nothing more than a massive breakthrough of psychological repressions in a period of social stress.

“What are called psychics are little more than psychiatric borderline cases, belong to the lunatic fringe of society.”

Robert is moving to turn off the set when Westheimer manages to segue his remarks into a comment on the presence, (representing the Extended Sensory Perception Association, no less) at an “ostensibly” scientific convention, of a “certain lightweight ‘popular’ author” named Robert Allright who comes from a family “admittedly stained” by Spiritualist dogma and superstition.

“Son of a bitch!” Robert shouts, hurling a shoe at the set. He is enraged at Westheimer, trembling as the psychologist talks about Robert’s “séance medium” mother, aunt and grandmother, his spiritualist minister sister.

“Are we expected to believe that such a man is objective on the subject of psychic phenomena?” sneers Westheimer. “Not to mention the potential sales of his series of ill-advised books on the subject. This is precisely the sort of individual who—”

Robert turns off the set and paces restlessly, a sense of murderous fury toward Westheimer apparently twisting his insides into knots.

He tries to use the bio-feedback control to reduce his tension. It doesn’t work. Steadily, an iron-hard cramp extends across his diaphragm just beneath the rib cage.

He walks ceaselessly, back and forth, rubbing his solar plexus. He takes a Valium. “Relax, relax,” he tells himself. “He isn’t that important.” He still thinks it’s his reaction to Westheimer.

It keeps getting worse. Is it appendicitis? It occurs to him. No. The rigidity lies across his entire abdomen and, in spite of the pain, he can breathe without distress, his pulse rate is normal, he is not perspiring, not nauseous. The situation is maddening. No symptoms whatever except for the locked-in-place hardness of a band of muscles across his upper abdomen.

A montage of passing hours, Robert pacing; almost phoning for a doctor, changing his mind; almost calling John, then hanging up, it’s past four a.m.; pacing, pacing, rubbing his stomach. Wondering what in God’s name is happening.

Finally, exhausted, he falls across the bed. CAMERA MOVES IN SLOWLY on him.

He begins to shake. His entire body vibrates. He is helpless in the grip of some irresistible force, held in its vise.

Visions spill across his mind. His father. His mother. Ruth. John. Ann. The house in Brooklyn. Bart. Cathy. Peter. The crystal.

And a temple wall, a strange symbol cut into it.

Robert is convulsed as though by an electric current. He can see the room but also the tumbling visions. A roaring fills his ears.

Bit by bit, the effect slows down, then, at long last, stops. He sighs in gratitude. The tension in his diaphragm has gone, the pain. Slowly, his legs straighten out. He rolls onto his left side and falls instantly asleep.

He opens his eyes. It might be an hour later or a second. CAMERA VERY CLOSE ON him.

He is aware of something pressing at his right shoulder. Curious, he reaches back to feel what it is.

Smooth wall.

Still half asleep, he moves his hand along the wall as far as he can reach.

Nothing but wall, unbroken and continuous. He tries to turn to see where he is. He is lying against the wall with his shoulder.

He stares groggily at it. There is something wrong. The wall has no windows, no doors, no furniture against it. It could not be the wall of his hotel room. Still, it looks familiar.

Suddenly, it comes to him, and CAMERA FLIES BACK TO REVEAL that it is not the wall.

He is floating against the ceiling

Startled, he rolls over, bouncing, looks down. Below him is the bed.

And, on the bed, him.

“Oh, God, I’m dying,” he whispers. The stomach tension and vibrations have destroyed him. He makes tiny, frightened noises. “I don’t want to die,” he says.

“I won’t!” he cries.

Abruptly, he is swooping down to his body on the bed and “diving” into it.

He shudders, opens his eyes and wakes. He stares at the ceiling with unblinking eyes.

He has just had his first out-of-the-body experience.

It will not be his last.

The jarring phone bell startles him awake. Barely conscious, he reaches for the receiver.

“Rob?”

“Uh.” He struggles to wake.

“We waited for you at breakfast,” Cathy says. She hesitates. “We have to leave now.”

“Leave?” He pushes up on an elbow, dazedly.

“I’ll call when you get back to New York.”

He wants desperately to wake up, say the right things but he can’t.

“Goodbye, love,” Cathy says.

The phone receiver buzzes in his hand. Robert stares at it, then closes his eyes.

“Cathy,” he whispers.

As Robert is checking out of the hotel, he sees Westheimer and Stafford talking on the other side of the lobby.

Confronting them, he excoriates Westheimer for his character assassination on the talk show and tells him he’s fortunate that Robert is not the suing kind or he’d have a court case on his hands.

“If there’s a next time though,” he says, “I may just break your jaw.”

He looks at Stafford coldly. “You choose strange friends, Doctor,” he says. “I trust it doesn’t mean you’re at ESPA as his hatchet man.”

Stafford bristles at this. “I am my own man, Mr. Allright,” he replies.

“Glad to hear it,” Robert says. He glares at Westheimer. “Go to hell, Donald,” he snaps and walks away, trying to ignore Westheimer’s burst of scornful laughter.

A limousine is waiting in front of the hotel courtesy of the man whose daughter lives in the Tahoe house.

En route to picking up the medium, Robert sits inside the lavish, leather-smelling interior, muttering to himself about the strange and uncontrollable things happening to him.

“An OOBE, for God’s sake,” he says. “Who needs that?”

“Sir?” says the driver.

“Nothing, I’m just talking to myself,” Robert tells him.

“Yes, sir,” says the driver.

She is waiting at a corner, sitting on a bus stop bench, a small, worn overnight case beside her, a copy of a National Enquirer-type newspaper in her hands. She is in her late twenties, plain, a little overweight.