He recalled that was what Jill had told him, so long ago, when she’d hidden it, pretending that it had gotten lost.
“Stories come from it.”
And yes, it did seem to link with consciousness, and could instill ideas or feelings, just like books could, except it had the power to bypass literacy and go deeply into the mind, and somehow even control action or engender thought or reflection, the way a timely interjection from an adult might optimally work.
He often wished he had his father’s effectiveness in picking these moments. On the shore of Lake Huron, when he was five, he and his father had taken an evening stroll. Seeing an intricate sand castle on the shining wet shore, he rushed to demolish it. After his first kick, his father quietly said, “How did you feel yesterday when somebody did that to your racetrack?” He stopped mid-kick, torn between his joy in destruction and the memory of his own feelings just a day earlier—his racetracks and pit stops and painstakingly constructed driftwood seats and stacked stone spectators so disappointingly smashed.
Someone just like him had built this. Someone just like him would feel angry and sad.
He still badly wanted to destroy the castle. Yet he felt ashamed, and did not. He still recalled that strong, direct conflict of emotions:
Should I do the wrong thing, hurt someone else, and have fun, or do the right thing, and be disappointed?
It was good to have experienced that. It changed his behavior immediately, and the lesson had lasted the rest of his life. But not every child was as fortunate as he had been. If more children could experience the gist of that, at just the right teaching moment; if they could put themselves in the place of others, and imagine their feelings …
How could one give the essence of this realization, the neurobiological event, translated to neural connections both specific and open, to parents and children everywhere, as practical a bit of information as “This is the wheel,” or “This letter represents this thought, or this sound.” Could it be like a new form of reading, or might it prove to be something more invasive, harder to shake, something that could be used by many people for many purposes?
They came across the strange stuff in the attic less than a year after moving into Halcyon House. It was in an empty space in the attic floor, beneath a board, with a trunk over the top of it. It took all three of them, pushing hard, to move the trunk. They had only moved the trunk to reconfigure an imaginary space, a pirate ship or a castle tower, and then the board was loose, so naturally they pulled it up. Inside was the squishy substance, colorful and seductive, with the firmness of Silly Putty, malleable and fun.
Megan had carelessly pitched a squeezed pinch of it into the attic jumble.
And then he had found a bit of that same stuff, and put it in his pocket. Just today.
He stood, turned his pockets inside out, then remembered emptying them in the truck to search for some change for a parking meter. Great chance of finding it there, with all that trash—unless this bit, small as a kernel of corn, was it …
At that, he flipped into his other life, the one he’d tried to hide from for so long, almost as if being in the old house, being in the attic, just the act of handling these papers, had activated something that had become blessedly dormant, the edges of which he had vanquished by drinking. The life in which he enlisted in the Navy, learned to fly fighter jets, trained in Libya at Tripoli Air Force Base, screaming out over the desert. The one in which he’d dropped napalm over Cambodia.
The one in which his own plane had erupted in flames.
Cindy was shaking him. “Brian! Wake up!”
“You were screaming,” she told him as she led him to bed. “Might it have something to do with that Scotch you were drinking?”
“Don’t let the kids touch those papers.”
When he woke up around noon, she’d folded the plans and put everything back in the box. “Did you read that paper?” she asked him. “Dr. Hadntz writes a lot about Montessori education.”
“I didn’t get that far.”
“I skipped over the physics parts, I confess.” She poured what Brian figured was her fourth or fifth cup of coffee of the day; she was a caffeine hound. She handed Brian a cup, along with a little glass bowl of pills, his vitamins. Megan, Cindy, and Jill were huge believers in the power of vitamins, and bought them mail-order from the same company. They always came with samples of protein powders or supplements the company was pushing.
“Take them. You’ll need extra today.”
“I’m fine, Cindy.”
“
Take
them.”
He did. “What’s this new white one?”
Cindy looked at it. “Came in the new box yesterday. The latest super-duper freebie, you know, like they throw in sometimes. H-something, probably stands for health, some new synergizing additive. Oh, I remember. This is good for your memory.”
“Right.” Brian choked them all down, as he did every morning; Cindy seemed to think they “balanced” him and lessened his need for alcohol. He didn’t believe that, but he did think they helped him feel better in general. “Bleah.” He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and grabbed his coffee cup.
They stepped out onto the cramped balcony, at treetop height, with a view of the neighborhood playground, where the kids were. Zoe pushed Bitsy on a swing, playing Nice Big Sister, at least for the moment. They settled into the aluminum lawn chairs that took up most of the balcony. “So what do you think?” Cindy asked.
“Jill is hiding something. We knew that, I guess, but I just didn’t realize how weird it all was, or how important it might be. It’s probably why she cracked up. All the more reason, I guess, for us to tread carefully. I think she knows what Mom and Dad did during the war, and what they did after the war. In fact, I believe they were custodians of the Device that the paper talks about.”
Cindy looked startled. “This thing was actually made?”
“After last night, I’m sure of it. It explains … everything. Mom’s disappearance, for instance. I have a feeling that Mom and Hadntz knew each other. Megan’s been saying that Mom was CIA for years. Before last night, I thought Megan was being kind of grandiose.”
“What does Jill think?”
“Jill won’t say what Jill thinks. It’s her trademark. She was extremely nervous about me taking these papers. She knows a lot more than she’s saying. She might even know where Mom and Dad went.”
“You need to press her on it.”
“I’m going to. But I want to have everything in order first.”
“Brian. I mean, before next year.”
“I don’t want to give her any way to slither out of telling us everything she knows. If I ask her anything now, she’ll just clam up. Guaranteed. What can I do—threaten to break her kneecaps? I don’t understand all of this yet. And I don’t understand what it has to do with us, not really. I’m just starting to get a distant theory. I need to be like a lawyer. Present the hard evidence. Anticipate her evasions. And with all the work we have piled up, that might take a while.”
Cindy sighed. “You Dances are all alike. ‘Oh, let’s not talk about anything important. Maybe next year. After all, we have a lot of urgent work to do and that takes up all of our time.’ Have you ever heard the word ‘introspection’? How about ‘family dynamics’? No wonder you’re all so messed up—” She looked away.
“Great place to stop talking, Cindy. I admire your tact, your extraordinary reserve.”
“I’m sorry. You’re doing fine, now, honey, and I know it’s hard. Anyway, there are a lot of strange connections in the paper. Physics and Montessori in the same sentence?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“That’s the reason I read it. Or tried to. It’s up front, in the intro. She postulates that physics combined with Montessori education could change the human brain. She indicates that she actually
met
the Montessori. When? How? Anyway, her ideas are full of optimism and the hope of peace. Peace was Montessori’s dream too—peace through education. It’s a zeitgeist thing, I guess. I’d sure like to get my hands on this gizmo. Make all that optimism
real
. See where it leads.”
“You and a lot of other people, probably.”
“Fat chance. No one ever made this. Otherwise, we’d know, don’t you think?”
Brian stared out at the ineffable there-ness of everything around him. He felt the smooth porcelain of the coffee cup between his hands, the hard web of the lawn chair beneath him, heard the susurration of leaves in the breeze.
Cindy said, “You think it
was
built.”
“Yes. The Device was built. By my dad and the guy he talks about in his journal—‘W.’ For Wink. Winklemeyer. I never met him. And—”
Cindy looked at him sidelong, eyebrows raised. “There’s more?”
Brian shifted in his chair; listened to the shouts of his children as they played. He took a sip of cold coffee.
“It was built in a different world.”
Cindy smiled, rolled her eyes, and patted Brian on the shoulder.
Jill
REINHABITING THE PAST
May 22
J
ILL GOT OFF
the Metro at the Georgetown Park stop. An escalator lifted her toward a light-filled arch, and she stepped out onto Wisconsin Avenue. Whens was with his father and the Lavender Lady. Grumpy, but he had his phone and could complain to her if he felt like it, which seemed to help a lot.
To her left was a sign for the Metro. She had a moment’s flash: In the world she now called the original timestream, there had not been a Metro stop in Georgetown. It certainly came in handy. Before, she would have had to wait for a mile-long bus ride from the Foggy Bottom/GWU stop.
To her right was the C & O Canal, an overhead freeway, the Potomac River, and across the river, Virginia.
It was twilight. Cars nosed down the steep hill toward the river and streamed into the mall’s underground parking garage. When the light changed, Jill headed uphill half a block to M Street, and turned left.
This block had once been a druggie hangout, heavy with the scent of marijuana smoke, where psychedelic music blared from narrow black-light illuminated clubs. The windows of upstairs apartments were always open in the summer heat, wafting exotic incenses into the street. Jill had often visited friends in those ragtag apartments full of furniture from Goodwill, huge houseplants, twining cats, and out-of-town crashers. The Cellar Door, on the next block, hosted many a fine performer. Jill missed all that with a feeling that verged on the visceral.
In this world, the psychedelic scene had been much more muted. Without a war to protest against, the former Air Force parachutist Jimi Hendrix, who had been a Screaming Eagle, had not composed his chilling “Star Spangled Banner” interrupted by machine gun fire and the explosions of death missiles. He was, however, alive, and a respected jazz musician.
No, in this world, this particular block of M Street rapidly went upscale after 1970. These mannered town houses, beautifully restored, were sealed against street sounds and smells. Open drapes revealed opulent rooms Jill had visited on Elmore’s arm—the homes of tenured professors, lawyers, and lobbyists with spouses in high government positions. The women, and probably some of the men, spent hundreds of dollars—or even thousands, monthly—on upkeep for their bodies, faces, and hair.
Her bookstore was at the end of the block, opposite the end of Key Bridge. Everyone crossing the bridge into Georgetown saw it. She stocked fine literature, the latest political science books, philosophy, poetry.
And science fiction. She longed for a comic section to exude the wonderful smell she recalled from childhood, but Elmore had pitched a fit about that.
She was instantly soothed as she walked through the door, which stood open. The golden oak floor shone softly. Classical music, which she would switch to some quiet Coltrane or the Strayhorn piano solos she’d just gotten her hands on. She counted seven browsers downstairs and three in the loft. Zane, one of the college kids who worked for them, was ringing up a sale. When he saw her, his mouth opened in pleased astonishment.
She smiled at him, said, “Be back in a minute,” and went to the office. She locked her backpack in a desk drawer, sorted through the mail while standing at the desk, and poured herself some coffee. Evidently Elmore had taken care of everything in his efficient way. Left to her, it would all be in a tangle. And, she supposed, with a wry sigh, it soon would be.
On her way to the counter, she asked a young woman if she could help her and showed her the biography section.
“How’s everything?” she asked Zane.
“Just fine. School’s out; sales are so-so. How are you?”
She gave him a quick hug. “Oh, I’m fine.”
“Good. We were worried about you.”
She wondered what they’d been told, but just said, “Did Elmore pay you?”
“Of course. Right on the dot.”
“Good. Okay.”
After Zane left, Jill settled onto her stool and surveyed her store. Everything looked exceedingly clean and clear, the books with their bright covers square and neat on the shelves. An hour earlier the usual evening thunderstorm had ended, and cool, still-damp air eddied through the front door. She realized that she hadn’t been here since the day before she’d … gone nuts.
Well, that was a good thing to not think about. God just had to give her grace to know what she couldn’t change.
The main problem was that it might be that she could change just about anything.
But, no. That couldn’t be possible. The therapist was right. She was a roiling inferno of insanity.
She could change some things. For instance … she slid off the stool and walked across the store to a shelf she’d focused on. There was a book in the history section that needed to be moved to the poli-sci section. There. It was all right to change little things. But how to know what was little and what was world-changingly big?
She smelled cigarette smoke. Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped.
“Sorry,” said Koslov. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She saw that he wasn’t smoking, but, as usual, his tie had flecks of ash on it. He was too close to her. She stepped back. “That’s okay.”