“What is reality?” is a question that’s been explored frequently in science fantasy, but somehow it has remained for George Alec Effinger, in this eerily quiet story, to suggest its logical reply: “Does it matter?”
George Alec Effinger s science fiction books include the novels What Entropy Means to Me and Relatives, and a short story collection, Irrational Numbers.
* * * *
Cathy Schumacher dismissed the nine o’clock class and gathered up her notes. It had stopped raining during her lecture, and she was thankful. The air outside was chilly and damp, and the Old Quad was an ugly marsh, stripped by the March rains of all the charm that often lured the freshmen to the university. Her stylish boots were providing a minimum of protection, and by the time she had crossed to Krummer Hall she was in a foul mood.
She hated being caught in the jostling crowds of students, on the way from one class to another. She did not hurry across the Old Quad, despite the weather. When she got to Krummer it was already a quarter past ten; everyone else was in class, and the narrow, dim halls were empty. She went to the English Department offices to get her mail. Of course, there was nothing of any interest: a couple of advertising letters from publishers, selling textbooks to any and all instructors, whether they were in the right department or not; two papers from her sophomore seminar, both overdue by two weeks; a notice from the Department Head concerning the locking of offices after five p.m.; a notice from a radical student organization; an exhortation to give blood; a copy of the Journal of the Institute for Early English Studies. Cathy took this bundle of paper and went to her little cubicle.
According to her schedule she was required to be in her office in Krummer from ten until noon. Cathy wanted nothing more than to go home and go back to bed, and nothing less than to listen to disappointed pupils chiseling points on an old exam. But her office hours were essential to the educational process; she knew that someday, perhaps, a real student might want to see her. She often wondered if there might not be a genuine serious young man or woman in one of her classes, hiding in the back of the room, burning with a love for Anglo-Saxon poetry. The idea was too absurd, and Cathy dismissed it with a skeptical laugh.
She put on the light in her office, tossed the mail on her desk, hung up her coat, and sighed. She went to the window, which looked out from the back of Krummer, onto College Street and the old city common of New Aulis. It was difficult to picture Ivy University in the old days, the days of straw boaters and football legends. Teaching in the university, she was forever surrounded by its heritage, never far from paintings and statues from its snobbish past. But now College Street was lined with parking meters and litter baskets, and the city common sheltered drunks and dropouts, just as in any other city. The proud statue of the Ivy Patriot that guarded the Main Gate was used by the early-arriving undergraduates as a hitching-post for bicycles. Cathy sighed again; whenever she got her feet wet she began questioning her profession.
The top of her desk was well hidden. Cathy sat down and shoved some of the books from the middle. She scooped up a handful of pens and markers and put them into an ugly white mug. The mug had a picture of the Taft Hotel on it, with the words Greetings from New Aulis! beneath it in gold script. Letters from department officials and university officers stuck out among the books, typed on university stationery, with the bright-blue seal catching her eye again and again. Cathy arranged the day’s mail in the little cleared space. She thought about sweeping the rest of the stuff to the floor, but she picked up one of the tardy papers instead and tried to concentrate.
She read three pages and stopped. The paper was about “The Battle of Maldon,” written in a marginally literate manner. No paragraph in the paper had any ideas in common with any other. The small informational content was stolen either from Cathy’s own lectures or boldly from the textbook. Ragged, thoughtless style and typographical errors had long ago ceased to amuse her, and this morning Cathy just didn’t have the courage to finish reading. She put the paper down and tried the other. It seemed worse. It was Tuesday; the owners of the papers surely wouldn’t ask about them after class on Thursday. After all, they were the ones who had submitted them late. Cathy had a good week to grade them. She certainly wasn’t in any hurry now.
The advertising letters, the notice from the Department Chairman, the student organization broadside, and the blood bulletin she crumpled together and threw into the waste-basket. “How quickly I could clean this desk,” she thought, “if only the wastebasket were larger.” That left only the Journal. It might afford some amusement, at least until the first pupil knocked on her door. Cathy opened the magazine, to see who was publishing and who was perishing.
At ten twenty-five the Sueza Tower carillon played a familiar theme from Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony. Cathy had read the “Letters to the Editor.” By ten forty-five she had finished an article by one of her former professors at Delta University. The bells were exercising on a scrap of Parsifal. Still no one had interrupted her. Cathy pushed her chair further from the desk and slouched down, searching for a comfortable position. She paged through the rest of the magazine, finding the “About People” and “News and Views” pages and looking for familiar names. The bells stopped their serenade, and for several seconds there was silence. Cathy looked up, a bit uncomfortably; the tower chimes struck the hour. She began an article that, for the millionth time, attempted to compare the kennings of Beowulf with Homeric metaphor. She read rapidly, absorbed in the article. The message was minimal, but the beauty of the quoted kennings, and the lesser, badly translated phrases of Homer, carried her through the tedious academic exposition. Abruptly, too quickly for her pleasure, she came to the last line of the essay:
—many times before. The beauty of the work will never tarnish.17
In a habitual motion, Cathy glanced down at the bottom of the page to check the footnote. It read:
17Hello, Mrs. Cathy Schumacher!
Cathy stared at it for a moment, feeling an unpleasant surprise. She turned back to the first page of the article. No, the author’s name was completely unfamiliar, some associate professor who had gone to Southwestern Utah State and was now teaching at Culpden College. Who could it be? Certainly the Journal wasn’t the sort of periodical that would permit that kind of horseplay. None of the other notes in the piece had been out of the ordinary. Cathy looked through the rest of the magazine, but the contents were as staid and dry as usual.
The tower chimes struck the quarter hour. Cathy stood and looked out the window. It was drizzling again; people were running along College Street, ducking into doorways to get out of the cold rain. It was darker now. The sounds from the street seemed louder to her, they seemed to intrude aggressively on her attention. While she stared through the window she felt herself becoming sick, with a tightness in her stomach that might never again go away. Cathy forced herself to turn away, to look at the Journal still resting on the desk. She picked it up and walked out of her office.
Her small cubicle was only one in a series along a hallway in the English Department. Two offices down was Wally Chance, an instructor with a Milton course, a Chaucer course, and a freshman survey course. Wally was a good friend, one of the few Cathy had within the university. Though his door was closed, light shone through the frosted-glass panel. She knocked, and he called permission to enter.
“Hi, Wally, it’s just me,” she said, taking the chair by his desk.
“Hello, Cathy. I was just going through these freshman papers. Thanks for coming by. Another couple of pages and I might have done something evil.”
Cathy laughed. “What we have to do is find some other thing for the kids to do. Lord, I get tired reading those papers.”
“Just being tired I could handle,” said Wally, throwing the paper he was reading back on the pile. “I don’t know. I get so angry sometimes. How is it that every one of them can read a book and not even know what they’re reading? I mean, somehow they’ve each managed to avoid realizing that Pride and Prejudice is a funny book.”
“Where grades are concerned, there’s nothing funny.”
“Well,” said Wally, “that’s a shame, then. It makes my job harder. I can’t imagine how it must be in their place.”
“You were there once, remember?”
Wally looked up and smiled. “Yes, maybe, but I was unconscious most of the time.”
“You stay that way until graduation. It’s a defense mechanism.”
Wally stood and came around his desk. “You want to see a real first-class defense mechanism?” he asked. He took her arm and led her to the door. “Come on, let’s go eat.”
“I’ve got another thirty minutes of office hours left,” she said, not really protesting, mentioning the fact out of a slight responsibility to form.
“No, don’t worry,” said Wally. “The kids don’t come to see you until after midterms. Anyway, you came here to see me, right? Any reason?”
Cathy went through the door, followed by Wally. She watched him lock his office. She took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said, “sort of. Nothing important, though.” They walked back to her office to fetch her coat
“Fine,” said Wally. “Lunch-type conversation. If we were going to talk about something important, we ought to stay here in your luxuriously appointed headquarters. For the official atmosphere.”
“No, Wally, just let me lock up.” She picked up the Journal, with one finger marking the page that had so unaccountably frightened her. She took her coat from the hook and flicked off the lights. As a sudden afterthought, she put the Journal back on her desk. She would feel foolish carrying it all around the campus with her; surely no one else would see the disturbing side of the incident. Wally would tell her that it was funny, and flattering, and a surprisingly free thing for the Journal’s editors to allow. She didn’t want to see the article. She didn’t want to think about the greeting, or where it had come from.
They went to lunch at one of New Aulis’ more popular hamburger-and-french-fry counters, rather than one of the university’s dining rooms. Cathy explained that she really wanted to get away from the school for a little while. It didn’t matter that the hamburger place was filled completely and only with university students, some of whom she recognized from her classes. She was grateful just to sit at the noisy counter, concentrate on the cheap food, and forget everything that had to do with her job. At least, that was what she consciously wanted; somewhere deeper in her mind, something wouldn’t let her get away that easily.
Halfway through the lunch, Cathy looked at Wally and said, “Do you ever have things happen to you that you can’t explain, even when you know that there has to be a good explanation?”
“What?” said Wally, his mouth full of food, his expression a little startled.
“You know,” said Cathy, uncomfortable now that she had begun the subject. “Something strange will happen, and you’ll look at it and say, ‘Okay, it may look odd, but here are the reasons.’ But the reasons just don’t satisfy you on an emotional level.”
“All the time. I’ve got three kids, remember?”
“No, no,” said Cathy, a little annoyed. “Intellectually I can accept it fine. Emotionally, though, I don’t know what to feel.”
“I’ll bite,” said Wally, sighing. “What happened?”
Cathy hesitated. “I shouldn’t even have brought the whole thing up. I mean, if I tell you exactly what happened, it will sound awfully trivial to you. But it isn’t trivial to me. That’s what I mean. Just forget it.”
“Nothing easier,” said Wally, smiling. “But if I can do anything . . .”
“It’s not desperate or anything,” said Cathy. “At least there’s that. I’m not forced into any kind of action. I just don’t know what to think about it.”
“You know, I’m not even curious. Someday, though, why don’t you lay the whole thing out for me. After you’ve figured out the meanings, though. I’ve never been very good at deduction. My experience with my kids proves that. I can never tell when they’re lying. My wife can, she can spot it in a minute. All I can do is spot when their reasoning is fallacious. That comes from grading too many papers. I think I’ve lost a valuable defense mechanism.”
“Then so have I,” said Cathy. They paid the check, got up, and went to the door. From there, Wally was going back to his office, but Cathy had decided to go home. “I shouldn’t let little things like this bother me,” she said, “but right now that’s all there is in my life. Little things. Mostly like you said, grading papers, listening to stupid kids begging for grades. And going home to hear about Victor’s hard day at the microfilm and Leslie’s hard day at elementary school.”
“It’s really true,” said Wally. “It’s true, really true. I’m not mystified.” He smiled and pressed Cathy’s hand. Then he turned and started to walk back toward the campus. Cathy went in the opposite direction, toward her small apartment.
It would be a few hours before Victor came home, and still quite a while before Leslie banged through the front door. Cathy dropped off her coat on the kitchen table, checked the refrigerator and the bathroom to see what she had to get at the supermarket, picked up her purse, made certain that she had her keys and money, and went back out. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still an ashen-gray color. All the way to the supermarket, she wondered if it would be worth the effort to call the editorial offices of the Journal of the Institute for Early English Studies. Maybe someone there could explain the footnote to her. She shook her head. The whole thing was stupid, in a way, and the only problem seemed to be the superfluous emotional importance she was attaching to it. She shook her head once more, to clear it of those thoughts, and tried to think about shopping. She succeeded only partially.
She had to wait by a checkout counter for a grocery cart. The store was crowded and noisy; in a way, Cathy was grateful. She could give her full attention to the petty annoyances of people idly clogging up the aisles of the supermarket. When she got a cart, she steered it along the far wall, making a quick inspection of produce. Victor wouldn’t eat any vegetables but corn and green beans. Leslie would okay the corn, but she wouldn’t eat the green beans. The Schumacher household ate a lot of corn. Cathy spent an irritating half hour roaming up and down the aisles, trying to plan a dinner, trying to avoid the other people in the store, all of whom seemed not to know what they were doing. At the checkout counter, while waiting for the cashier to total the purchases of the woman ahead of Cathy in line, Cathy started to read a magazine from the small display rack. She turned idly through the pages of a movie fan magazine. How different it was from the things she usually read! The content, the style, the whole attitude . . .
Cathy realized what she was doing and stopped herself abruptly. It was pure intellectual snobbery to try to criticize the fan magazine on the same grounds as she evaluated her colleagues’ articles. It was also a very unattractive trait, one she despised in other people. She began to read an article titled “Jamison Hawke—His Fear of Animals.” Cathy knew from Leslie’s recitations of movie matinees that Jamison Hawke starred in a series of inexpensively produced movies about Gror, the Wild Man. The first sentence in the article made her catch her breath. It said:
Cathy Schumacher, you have to listen! It’s important!
She stared at the magazine page for a while, until she numbly realized that the checkout girl was totaling Cathy’s purchases, many of which were still in the shopping cart Cathy finished unloading the cart, and added the movie magazine. She felt lightheaded and dizzy, she felt panicked, and she didn’t know why. All she wanted was to understand. That didn’t seem like such an unreasonable request. The checkout girl told her how much the bill came to; Cathy took the money from her purse and paid it, then carried the bag of groceries out of the supermarket and back to the apartment The movie magazine was sitting on top; Cathy didn’t look at it the whole way home.
After Cathy opened the front door to her apartment, she carried the bag of groceries into the kitchen. She pretended she was just going to put everything away, just like always, just like normal. She started humming, all the while knowing that she was being absurd, that there was no one else to fool except herself, and she wasn’t doing a very good job of that She put the magazine face down on a counter and sorted out the rest of the groceries. When they had all been put away and the bag folded and stored beneath the kitchen sink, Cathy picked up the movie magazine and carried it into the living room. She sat down on her chair and began riffling idly through the pages of the magazine. At once she saw the Jamison Hawke article, and she saw the message directed to her. Not even in a footnote this time . . . How many thousands of other readers will wonder what it means . . .
As a sudden inspiration, Cathy looked at the front of the magazine; it had been copyrighted two months earlier. She had forgotten that there is such a time lag between when a magazine is put together and the time it’s purchased. The footnote in the Journal had shaken her badly. Nevertheless, she could pass that off as a kind of joke by some unknown friend or associate. But who would ever guess that she would even glance through such a magazine as the movie fan thing? No one could have planned that.
She took another glance at the article and the message to her. It made her feel terrible, in a way she felt only in her worst dreams. She could understand the feeling well enough: a sense of being lost in otherwise familiar surroundings; the knowledge that someone was doing something that concerned her, but she was powerless to understand what those plans were. She felt abandoned, and she knew that logically analyzing the situation didn’t make it any easier to accept. She had never gone along with the Freudians; just because she could perceive the roots of her neuroses, that didn’t imply that they would then disappear. They never had in the past; and now she couldn’t perceive anything. Nothing but the two anonymous messages.
The second one had been a kind of a warning, hadn’t it? In that case, what should she do? She sat for a moment, feeling her stomach tighten and her hands begin to tingle. The answer was obvious. There wasn’t anything to do. Not until she knew what was happening.
Leslie wouldn’t be home for at least another hour and a half. Cathy walked around the apartment, aimlessly picking up bits of clothing, putting books back on shelves. She stopped herself suddenly, realizing she was genuinely frightened. She wanted to be out of the apartment, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, except back to her office, and that was where the whole situation had begun. That thought gave her an idea, and she went to the phone. She dialed Wally’s extension, and she listened to the phone ring for a long time, until one of the English Department secretaries answered and said that Wally had left just a little while before. Cathy couldn’t bring herself to call him at home. She was still afraid he’d think the matter was foolish; she doubted that she could convince him of the fear it was generating in her.
Cathy put on the television and tried to absorb herself in the afternoon programing. She found that very difficult. One alternative would be to read through a couple of professional journals and popular magazines that had built themselves up into a large stack on the coffee table. She picked up the topmost magazine, a two-week-old copy of Time. On the cover was a picture of someone’s advisor for something. He was looking happy. Cathy wondered if he ever had to worry about how his name might turn up in magazine articles. She started to read the issue, but then she began to feel panicky again, and put the magazine back on the pile. She didn’t want to make any more discoveries in one day. The nervousness didn’t go away; she got up, went into the bathroom, and took a couple of small blue tranquilizers. In fifteen minutes, she was relaxed and unworried again. She watched the end of a giveaway show, then a panel quiz program, and then a rerun of a situation comedy that was at least eight years old. Leslie came in, slammed the door behind her, and stalked to her room without a word. Cathy shrugged. In an hour Victor would be home, and things would all be back to normal.
It was getting near dinnertime. Cathy sighed loudly, dumped the newspaper TV section from her lap to the floor, and went into the kitchen to make supper for the family. She had bought three pounds of spareribs. Now she opened a package of baked beans and seasoning mix. She coated the ribs with the contents of one of the little bags inside. Then she put the uncooked beans in another bag, added water, added the seasoning from another little bag, and put the ribs on top of the floating beans. Then she twisted the large bag closed, put it in a baking dish, and slid the whole thing into a preheated oven. It would sit there for an hour and a half, and then the Schumacher family would eat it. Between now and then, though, Cathy had to shuck and boil the corn.
At suppertime, just as the timer was going off on the oven, Victor came home. “I’m late, Cathy,” he called from the living room.
“I know,” she said.
“What’s for supper?”
“Ribs and beans.”
“Terrific. Got my drink?”
“Sure,” said Cathy, wiping her hands on the dish towel that hung on the refrigerator door handle. “Here.” She poured him an aperitif, a small glass of Amaretto, an Italian liqueur. She thought it was funny, Victor drinking—sipping—at Amaretto and sitting down to eat ribs and baked beans from a packaged mix. With the meal they all drank Coke.
After dinner, Cathy told Leslie to clear off the table. Victor explained that he had quite a bit of work to do before morning; Cathy just nodded and said nothing. There was no hint of the objectless fears that had bothered her all day. She washed the dishes and put them away. Then she tied up all the garbage in a plastic bag and told Leslie to take it downstairs. After that, there was nothing else to do. Cathy put on some piano sonatas on the stereo and sat by herself in the living room. There were things she could have done, of course; she could have looked through her professional journals, she could have prepared her lecture for the next class, she could have written letters. But she had no energy for that land of thing. She felt anxious, even expectant of some strange event. She didn’t know yet what she was waiting for, but she felt certain that whatever it might be, it would happen soon.
When it came time for the evening news, Cathy called Victor, but he said that he hadn’t finished his work. Leslie was already in bed. Cathy watched the news alone.
“Good evening,” said the newscaster, “my name is Gil Monahan, and it’s time for the Ten O’clock News Wrapup. Before the headlines, I’d like to tell Mrs. Cathy Schumacher that she ought to be careful. You’re liable to cause yourself more trouble in the future if you try to avoid it now. And here’s the news. In Harrisburg this evening—”
Cathy gave a little, stifled shriek. She went to the television and turned it off. “I ought to call the station,” she thought “I ought to find out what that was all about” She stood in the middle of the living-room floor, indecisive. At last she decided against calling the station. That might be just the kind of thing she was being warned against. “Oh, God,” she thought “now I’m really taking it all seriously.” That night in bed, she had an impossible time trying to fall asleep. Victor, asleep beside her, looked so peaceful. Cathy recalled that even up to the night before, she herself had been so undisturbed. Now it seemed unlikely to her that she would be allowed to regain her self-control.
She stared at the shadows on the ceiling, feeling the tension in her grow, worse than that morning in her office, worse than in the supermarket, much worse than even while she watched the newscaster. She thought of taking a pill to make her sleep, but by then it was already three o’clock and she’d stay asleep until almost noon. She had responsibilities.
She was in her office the next morning at ten o’clock. She told herself a number of trite things, all supposed to make her feel better and to minimize her remembrance of the things that had happened the day before. Time goes on, she told herself, and the memory of those odd things will fade. Work hard, she told herself, and you won’t have time to think. She picked up one of her pupils’ compositions, which she had been unable to read the previous day. She got through the same three pages she had read before, then continued. The poem on which the paper was based was only a few hundred lines long; the paper seemed to go on for volumes. It had gotten to the point in her teaching career where she had given up looking for originality, for insight, even for logical coherence. She knew these were impossible things to expect. She found herself giving higher grades to papers that were typed neatly and written with a certain familiarity with the English language. She didn’t ask a lot. She had learned that it was pointless to try.
On page eight of the manuscript, Cathy read this line:
This area is completely under water today.9
Without thinking about what had happened in a similar circumstance the day before, Cathy looked at the bottom of the page to check the pupil’s source. She read:
9Mrs. Schumacher, if you went home right now, you’d find your husband in bed with the woman from apartment 2F.
“Well,” thought Cathy, “at least they’re not being cryptic any more.” She stared at the page for a moment, then put the paper on her desk. She looked out of her window, across the common. The trees which in spring were so lovely now looked dead forever; among them on the common were three spired churches. To Cathy they looked empty and cold. The sky was cloudy, and the lonely, slow-moving figures across College Street added to a picture of desolation she had never seen before through that window. With a start she returned her attention to her office, to her work, to the paper she was supposed to be reading. She picked it up again. The footnote was still there, still warning her, still rather embarrassedly calling her attention to a situation she should know about. Who wrote this paper anyway? She turned back to the first page; it was done by Handy Irons, the blond, tall young man who sat far in the back. How could he know such an intimate thing about Victor? Well, it was possible, Cathy supposed, but then, how could Mr. Irons and Gil Monahan on the news know? And the authors of the movie-magazine article and the article in the Journal?
Did everybody in the world know, except her? Isn’t that what they always said, that the spouse was the last to find out?
Maybe so, Cathy thought, but surely they didn’t make public announcements for the benefit of everyone else in the same position. Not on the nighttime news. Not in pupils’ homework papers or magazines that the oblivious subject generally never read. Cathy stood up and went to Wally’s office, carrying the paper Randy Irons had so thoughtfully written.
“Wally?” she called, outside his office.
“Cathy?”
“Yeah. Are you busy?”
Wally came to the door and gestured that she should come in. “In the last two years, have you ever known me to be busy?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“There. What’s the matter?”
“Do you remember yesterday?” asked Cathy. She took a deep breath; she felt like crying, and she felt foolish.
“Barely,” said Wally. “Ifs already beginning to fade into last week.”
“I had something I wanted to talk to you about, and then I didn’t.”
“Right,” said Wally, suddenly serious, “I remember.”
“Well, it keeps happening. Yesterday I thought, well, maybe it was a joke or something, but now I think I’m going crazy or I already am crazy or something.”
“You haven’t done a very good job of explaining.”
“I’m sorry, Wally. Did you see the Channel Five news last night?”
“I watch Channel Two.”
“Oh. Gil Monahan started off the newscast by telling me— me, personally, Mrs. Cathy Schumacher—to be careful. That’s not very professional, is it?”
“No,” said Wally thoughtfully.
“Yesterday, while I was waiting in line at the supermarket, I picked up one of those teen movie magazines. The first article I saw had an opening sentence that said something like, ‘Cathy Schumacher, you have to listen!’ That must have been set in type months ago, just so I could see it yesterday in Egerton’s. And the thing I mentioned before lunch was the same kind of thing, in my Journal of the Institute for Early English Studies. Last night I was really scared. And today it’s even worse.”
“Did you try verifying any of these things?”
“No.”
“Of course not. You’re too afraid to find out that they’re real, and you’re even more afraid to find out they’re delusions. You only have two choices. You could ask the people whom you think are communicating with you, and find out why they’re doing it the way they are, or you could go tell the whole thing to a doctor. I’ll bet it’s a pretty common clinical syndrome. You probably know exactly what it all means. You’re just masking the knowledge from your conscious thoughts, and your subconscious is intruding. These, uh, manifestations are just a way of you having to make some discovery yourself on a conscious level. You can put the responsibility onto these other people.”
Cathy slid Irons’ theme across the desk. “Look at the footnote on the bottom of the page,” she said. Wally read it, turned to the first page of the paper, glanced through the rest of it, and said nothing. He handed the paper back to Cathy.
“Well,” he said after an uncomfortable moment of silence, “have you tried calling home?”
“No,” said Cathy.
“I can understand that Do you want me to?”
“No,” said Cathy, “I’ll do it. I’ll go back to my office now.”
“Is there something I can do? I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Cathy. “I can handle it now, I think. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t completely nuts.”
“You’re not nuts. Of course, you could be editing this whole conversation. You could be so crazy that I might be talking about fly fishing, and you’d be hearing what you want. But then we get into the arguments about perceiving reality, and it’s not even lunchtime yet”
“Thanks,” said Cathy.
In her own office again, Cathy sat down and stared at the telephone. Wally had made a good point, even though he was probably joking. She would never really be able to know how much of what she saw and heard was true; she might not in fact even have gone to his office. She couldn’t accept his verification. If she disallowed the premise that her mind might be altering what her senses were telling her, then no one else’s words had any validity. Including a psychiatrist’s. How could Cathy know when it was her own mind deceiving her? Could she actually prove that Wally had seen the footnote in Randy Irons’ paper, and that it said to him what it said to her? From now on, Cathy knew that she could only trust what her own mind told her that her own senses were perceiving. And she’d have to go on on that basis. There wasn’t anything else.
But maybe she ought to see a doctor, anyway.
She picked up the telephone, dialed nine, got an outside line, and called her home number. She listened to the phone ring, over and over, six times, seven times, eight Then Victor answered. Cathy felt cold suddenly. Hello, Victor?” she said.
“Yes, Cathy. Anything wrong?”
“No, no. Of course not. Why are you home?”
Victor paused for a moment “I got sick at work today. Maybe I worked too hard last night I came home and went to bed. Why did you call? Who did you think would be here?”
Cathy realized that she had made a mistake. “Oh, I called your office and Miss Brant said that you’d gone home. I was worried, so I called to see if you want me to come take care of you.”
“No,” said Victor, “that’s all right I don’t feel that bad. There isn’t anything you could do, anyway. I think I’ll just take a nap.”
“All right, honey,” said Cathy. “Feel better. Remember that I love you.”
There was another silence. “Me too,” said Victor after a while. Cathy held the receiver, shook her head, and hung up. She walked around her little office, nervously doing meaningless tidying things. She felt helpless. That was what helped save her. She didn’t like feeling helpless.
“An effort of will,” she thought. “That’s all it takes. All right, subconscious, you win. I’m aware. So what?” She sat down again and picked up the other student paper. She read a couple of pages, until she found the first footnote. Almost eagerly, she looked at the bottom of the page. The footnote said:
1 These things happen, Mrs. Schumacher.
These things happen, indeed, she thought. Somehow, she felt relieved. She took the page to the English Department Xerox machine, made a copy of it, and cut the bottom of the page into a neat rectangle. Then she put on her coat and went to the drugstore across the city common. She bought a cheap black wood frame and returned to her office. She framed the piece of the Xerox copy and hung the frame on the wall. So many things would have to be done, have to be thought, have to be said in the next few days. The sentiment in the frame made her feel better. It returned to her a sense of security in the continuity of reality. She called Wally on the phone. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” he said, his voice sounding worried. “How are you?”
“Better and better,” said Cathy. “I want to ask you a favor. I want to go out now and get really drunk.”
“You don’t do that.”
“I need the practice.”
“Your problem?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Wally quietly.
“Oh, no,” said Cathy. “Not at all.”
“Well, look,” said Wally, “getting drunk certainly isn’t the most constructive way of tackling a problem.”
Cathy looked at the frame on the wall. From that distance, the footnote inside was unreadable. She laughed. “Who gives a good goddamn?” she said. After a moment, Wally laughed too.