She even had a faint thought of getting the sax back from Brian and trying to learn the intricate phrasings; perhaps that was one way to get into the mind of her dad. She put the record back in its paper sleeve with care, folded her father’s words into the cardboard sleeve, and returned it to the shelf, tapping it in firmly to line up with the other records. Sam’s World War II memoirs, which he called “In War Times,” were somewhere in the attic.
But no. Brian had taken them home with him too.
She picked up a hinged photo holder that was on the bookshelf. She had seen the facing pictures a thousand times: her father in his Army uniform; her mother in hers. She stared at the pictures for a long minute, and when she closed her eyes the afterimage remained.
She set the picture back on the shelf. Why
hadn’t
she read the notebooks, after all these years? Because she was too busy? That had been her excuse. She’d wanted a nice long time in which to sort them out properly.
Right. Such luxuries of time were just a fantasy. She had been afraid to read them.
When her father was still here, it would have seemed like prying. He’d never invited her to delve into his life then. And after he left, the pressure of having been the cause of both parents’ disappearance had made her want to forget. Why relive such devastation, such deep heartbreak?
But—and now she was angry, as she strode here and there in the living room, the screened porch, the library, trying to find a flashlight—if her parents had known about the possibility, why had they not explained it? Cautioned her? Cautioned them all? Thrown the damned thing in the fire? She, Megan, and Brian had found the Infinite Game Board under that loose board in the attic floor. And
played
with it when they were kids. Kept it all secret from their parents, as their parents had tried to keep it secret from them. No wonder they were all crazy. Megan had her Perfect Life, where everything was under control, all mapped out; Brian was a recovering alcoholic, and Jill had rushed to get married, have a baby, and work her fingers to the bone, all as if it would make some kind of difference, as if she were paying some kind of weird penance, racking up points in the Game Board world. Her parents themselves had lived two lives—maybe more!
“Who knows!” said Jill, throwing up her hand, then heading for the junk drawer in the kitchen. After all, was it possible for one teenage girl to thwart a planned presidential assassination? Nancy, her therapist, had simply filed that one under “Megalomania, extreme.”
And she was right! Jill yanked open a drawer, and it fell to the floor with a crash. There. She reached down and snatched up the old flashlight that rolled across the kitchen floor.
She had been funneled down a path as surely as a marble, in their old Mouse Trap game; was released by a gear after a roll of the dice, rushed through the open bathtub drain, zigzagged down those crazy stairs, and lowered the trap on the opponent’s plastic mouse.
No, she had not arrived in Dallas on her own. But how? What was that mysterious gap; why did her memory not function as it should? Damn it all! She decided to try the attic. There might be something there to help her remember.
The damned flashlight was dead. She jettisoned the spent batteries in the trash can and poked around in other drawers for new batteries, increasingly worried about Dad’s papers. Sure, Brian had taken some boxes, but maybe there were more. She would call him tomorrow first thing and tell him to bring them all back! They belonged in the house.
She paused. That wasn’t what was really bothering her, was it? Mere possession of the past?
The Infinite Game Board, from which all of this trouble, this strangeness, this sense of her life drifting into two separate parts, was safely gone, left in that previous world.
She was worried because those journals might have information about how it had been made.
Why did she think this?
She found a cache of ancient batteries, tried several, and finally found some that worked. She waved the resulting beam across the dining room, yanked open the attic door, and began to climb.
She thought the journals might have classified information because her parents were so very strange. Because Gypsy Myra, in her comic, had created just the sort of history-changing, time-altering Device that had landed Jill, in real life, in the nuthouse, and because the story of Gypsy Myra, the Madwoman of Time, had come from the Game Board.
Mom and Dad had known about the Game Board—the
Device:
the word popped into her mind, from that phone call. The Device. They had all used it, once, played some kind of game that involved an airplane. She thought. It was all so damned
hazy
. And what about their friend—what was his name? Winklemeyer? Wink? Hadn’t he been here, that fateful night on the screen porch when they had
all
played The Game, when they had all flown in that airplane? Even Brian, though he was, at that time, stationed in Vietnam?
The attic stairs, narrow to begin with, were further restricted by objects people had placed on them, no doubt intending to carry them up to the top when time permitted. Jill passed a pile of calendars from 1921, showing the phases of the moon, as she had done countless times; they were a part of her childhood, seemingly immovable. The door to the third floor was open again, but it didn’t matter; she had neither heat nor air-conditioning on. She was short of breath by the time she reached the attic door and pulled it open.
Jill flipped on the light switch and moved her flashlight beam around to augment the resulting dim light. She stepped forward tentatively, ignoring enticing boxes and strange, old toys that had belonged to a previous generation of owners. They’d had a loose rule that the area at the top of the stairs, inside the door, be kept reasonably clear. Despite that, she had to execute a slow, balanced ballet past and over an astonishing variety of objects that she and her siblings had just tossed in.
She stumbled over a dark object, caught herself on the back of a chair, and headed toward a looming landmark—the five-foot-high urn. Once, they had dropped Megan into it. Of course, they’d
asked
her if she’d like to be inside it first, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise to her. They had to move chairs next to it, and then she and Brian helped Megan climb in. Once inside, Megan decided she did not like it and screamed with incredible shrillness and power; it was a wonder the urn hadn’t shattered. They were yelling at her to hold up her arms and they would pull her out when their mother burst into the attic. She and Brian were sentenced to their rooms. Megan got to go to High’s for an ice cream cone.
Jill sat down on a rolled-up carpet and laughed at the memory.
After an hour of poking around, her fears had diminished, as if she had awakened from a bad dream—just what she needed, after all. She was acting like an idiot. It was all just an aftermath of her crack-up. She’d call Brian in the morning about the notebooks.
Running her light around, she noticed something odd: a checkerboard, all set up. She went closer, treading on unknown objects, some of which crunched ominously, and saw that it was dust free.
Who had been up here, playing checkers, especially in this heat? Oh, right. Abbie and Whens.
Then she saw a ragged white envelope on the floor, its contents partially spilled out.
She picked it up, squinted, and trained the flashlight on her find, which she fanned out in her hand: black-and-white photographs.
On the back of the pictures, they were identified, in her father’s handwriting, in pencil. “Germany, 1945. Biergarten, Gladbach. Soldiers in a jeep.”
Motherlode!
There was one photograph of a courtyard—tables set up, empty, waiting chairs, a bar. She heard her father’s voice as if he were sitting next to her:
“It turns out that the castle near Mönchengladbach is the mansion of Joseph Goebbels who unwittingly donated a magnificent couch to our company day-room that I told you about the other day. Reyhdt is the sister-city or suburb to Gladbach, there being no separation between them. I didn’t visit either the
Volkspark
or Goebbels’s mansion, so I wasn’t aware that the ‘mansion’ is actually an ancient castle. Not surprised, just not aware.
“Neither was I aware that an American general had taken possession and was assigning sleeping accommodations to honored guests; again, not surprised.
“The
Volkspark
also provided picnic tables, picnic benches and the bar and bar foot rail for our C Company
Biergarten
in the brick-walled garden behind our apartment building. The summer house served as the back of the bar, with the cooler, an old-fashioned arrangement of a barrel on the bar lined with beer coils wrapped around the inside perimeter of the barrel and the barrel interior filled with cracked ice. Under the bar was the barrel on tap, open coolers holding Coke, Rhine wine, pink Moselle Champagne, Krefeld cognac, and schnapps, on ice. We lit the garden with fairy lights and provided music with a record player and records (LPs) provided by Army Special Services, through speakers provided by our newfound German friend at that radio station at Koln (Cologne) I told you about.
“We sent a truck to Maastrich every week. The brewery there made wonderful beer. The deal was that we got to buy a liter per week for each guy in our organization as long as we had empty barrels to change for their full barrels. We went around Gladbach liberating glasses and mugs, beer cooler and piping and oh-those-precious barrels from bombed-out
Biergartens
. We kept finding more empties. By the time we left in August we were drawing 2,800 liters per week.
“When we got notice that we were leaving MG, the battalion club got panicky and we picked up their booze rations too. We had about a truckload of beer that we took to the transit camp. We had a guard posted. Each tent got two bottles of wine and cognac a day; pretty good stock. We still ran out a couple of days before V-E Day and were forced to celebrate by standing in a mile-long line to get two cans of beer, then getting back at the end of the line while we drank them.
“That was the beginning and end of our
Biergarten
. We had $400 in the kitty at closing time and gave it to Dick Behrens to take home and bring to camp where we were supposed to reassemble in Texas after our R & R. We never got there and he used it to get married. He was very apologetic but nobody would have traded the money to go back to camp.”
* * *
Jill remembered now, the stories he’d told about setting up the
Biergarten
. Finding the speakers, the booze, the bar from the
Volkspark
.
About how her mother had walked in, one evening, in a red dress, changing his world forever.
She turned off the lights, crept down the stairs to the second floor, and set the pictures down on a table in the hallway. Then she trudged into the bathroom, where she ran a cool bath.
Getting into the claw-footed tub, she submerged her head and ran her fingers through her hair. Cobwebs. Long-dead bugs. Ancient dust. She sorted through the shampoo bottles—where was the stuff she usually used?—and heard a noise.
Electrified, she could hear her heart pound. Where was Manfred? Probably asleep. In fact, the noise probably was Manfred. She relaxed.
“Manfred!” Clicking claws hurried down the hallway.
“You scared me, you silly dog!” Jill got out of the tub, sloshing water onto the floor, and grabbed a towel.
Then she thought she heard another sound.
Shit.
She wrapped herself in the towel and peered around the doorway. “Who is it?”
Manfred looked at her as if she were nuts.
Jill dripped her way down the hallway, intending to get her phone, and noticed that the photos she’d left on the table were now scattered on the floor. She could have sworn that she’d put them all back in the envelope.
But now, on top of the envelope, was a picture of her mother, Bette.
She was wearing a long dark coat, and her hair, pale in the black-and-white photo, was mostly covered with a scarf.
She had her arm around another woman. Jill wiped her hand and picked up the picture, squinted. Was that Gypsy Myra?
They were standing, if Jill was not mistaken, in front of the bombed-out Reichstag in Berlin.
“Damn it! If you’re here, just come out and frigging TALK TO ME!”
Manfred barked her own invitation, then whined a bit.
“Go get them, girl!” She wagged her big fat tail, which could have brushed the pictures from the table. But why would this one be so oddly displayed? What were the chances of that?
Jill, far from being afraid, was just mad. Like Whens, she seemed to have no fear mode. Brian thought she should be afraid. Well, maybe he was right; maybe she was just crazy, like they all thought, or maybe she just took too many vitamins.
She searched the house for an hour, finding nothing and no one, and finally collapsed, deeply chagrined, on the living room couch.
* * *
In her hideaway upstairs, Bette sat on the bed, her legs drawn up to her chin, smoking a cigarette, was also deeply chagrined. She ground out her cigarette with an angry, stubbing movement, and watched the moonlight glaze the treetops below. What had possessed her?
Fish or cut bait, she told herself. The problem was, she had to do both simultaneously, without a crew for the boat, but instead wanted just to dive into the blue, silky depths of her pure love for Jill, and hold her to her heart.
I am here, my love, I am present.
I love you so.
Megan
CUBA CONFERENCE
T
HE INTERNATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS SYMPOSIUM
had many tracks. Megan sat on a wrought-iron bench in the courtyard of the old hotel and studied the program.
Scientists were investigating consciousness from many different angles, through many different disciplines. There was a physics track, a neurobiology track, an evolutionary biology track, a religion and philosophy track, and a memory research track. Memory as a distributed field: theory and research. That sounded interesting.