Something clicked. Not audibly. Something somehow somewhere else.
Clicket. Click it. Ticklicket. Ti—
Spin. Advance and retreat. Pause. Pulse. Turn. Again. The big, shiny bowl of alphabet soup was jiggled before me. Facade. I dove through it to where the hand that held the strings of power moved. Of course. One will take me to another and that other to another still. Back. Winding and pulsing…
The marina into which we took the Hash Clash that afternoon had all the amenities, including hookups for onboard computer phones. A lot of vacationing executives liked to have such devices along on their boats.
I had lost every distressing symptom I had acquired earlier, though I was left with an overlay of almost pleasant fatigue and a lightheaded stupor of the sort I knew I could shake if I had to. No such need arose, however, and I was grateful for the anesthetization one’s body or mind sometimes cleverly provides. A huge steak could complete the spell more than adequately. But business first, I decided.
“I might as well order the tickets now,” I said, feeling a certain eagerness.
Cora smiled and nodded.
“Go ahead. I haven’t changed my mind.”
I went out and mated the simple plugs that connected us with the information networks of the mainland and the world. Then I returned to the other room, where I kept my unit.
There ought not to have been anything especially difficult or exotic about ordering the tickets. Essentially, it just amounted to my putting my personal information-processing equipment into contact with that of the airlines and the bank, along with my orders as to how many people were going where and when, and what class of service was desired. But—
It was after I’d taken care of the business. No reason then not to reach out and switch off the unit. But I didn’t. Instead, I stared at the display screen, feeling a pleasant sense of accomplishment now that the ticket…
Ticket…?
I drifted into a kind of reverie, I guess, first thinking about the ticket and what it meant, and then about the neat, smooth functioning of the machinery itself that made it all possible, and then…
It seemed that I heard Cora call to me once, but in a passive, general inquiring tone that hardly required a reply. I had a sort of waking dream then.
It was as if I were traveling along lines, bright and dark, moving at a vertiginous rate, as if I rode some crazy roller coaster—up, down, around and through—traveling back, back through some familiar territory, some landscape of the mind or spirit I might have visited in some previous incarnation, or yesterday in a moment of inattention. And there, there at the end of the line was a place where some of my life was stored away. Walls surrounded it, barring my entrance when I got there. I sought to pass them and silent alarms shook about me in my course…
“Don! Are you okay?”
I looked up and Cora was staring at me through the doorway. I managed a smile.
“I was thinking about home,” I said, shaking off the dust of dreams, knuckling my eyes and yawning.
“For a second I thought you’d fallen asleep, or—”
“—freaked out?” I finished. “No such luck. I know you have to be fed occasionally. Get ready and—”
I suddenly realized that she was wearing a dark blue wraparound skirt and a red halter.
“Give me five,” I said, “and we’ll go ashore and hunt proteins.”
She smiled. I shut off my terminal. Going home. It still felt good.
Ticketderick.
In Detroit we changed planes for Escanaba, Upper Peninsula, on the northern shore of Lake Michigan. The bright lens of the lake, along the shoreline at least, was sprinkled with the confetti of summer sailboats—an almost electrical sensation for me. Everything became feverishly familiar the farther we penetrated into my pastoral past made present. I kept pointing things out to Cora—landmarks, facts, histories sprang to mind and tongue almost unbidden.
We picked up our rental car almost immediately on landing, having brought no luggage other than shoulder bags. We drove on Highway 41 north out of the town along the shore. The sun struck the great glass of the lake a glancing blow and waves raced like fracture lines toward us. After a few miles, we turned inland on state road G38, heading toward Cornell. The dark green, shaggy horizon was comfortably near at hand. I sent my imagination on ahead, flowing through, peopling the terrain.
“I still think we ought to have phoned,” Cora said, not for the first time. “In five years people change, things change.”
Five years. Was that right? Was it that long since I’d been back? I’d given the number to her off the top of my head, not really stopping to measure things out. I hadn’t left Florida at all last year—1994—or the year before, so far as I could recall. Then, in ’92… I couldn’t quite recall what I had done in ’92.
“I’m nervous about meeting your family.”
A road sign put Baghdad fifteen miles beyond Cornell, and so did I.
I turned and smiled at her.
“You have nothing to worry about.”
“I hope not.”
“It’ll be all right”
How could it be any other way? The closer we got to Baghdad, the less concern I felt about the specifics of what we were going to find when we got there. The important thing was… I smiled… the important thing was Cora and me.
Cornell, small as it was, had evidently seen some changes in the past few years. Hardly anything about it struck me as familiar. But the road, and the tall trees closing it in on both sides—and the old railroad track, an occasional water tower, the placement of a faded billboard—felt crushingly familiar.
“That,” I said, “is new”—the first words spoken by either of us in several miles.
The first gas station that we encountered on the outskirts of Baghdad was a small, weathered Standard, not the large new-looking Angra Energy that I recalled so clearly. There was a new sign, too, at the city limits:
BAGHDAD
POP 442
I drove on into town, slowing to the posted 30. There was only the one thoroughfare passing through town that qualified to be called a highway, and while in town it was the only way that really amounted to much of a street. The sideways leading off of it were unpaved, weed-lined, rutted and potted in places. Tin-roofed houses, some few with yards sporting vehicles pillared on concrete blocks, worn threshing and tilling gear, burned-out household appliances, collapsing sheds and partially dismembered felled trees, crouched as if to conceal worn shingles and flaking paint behind rough hedges, stands of hollyhocks and clusters of lilacs gone wild.
The real trouble was that this was not the main street that I remembered. But then, perhaps at the other end of town…
Only we reached the other end of town with sickening suddenness, passed a final building and were back in the country again.
Pop 442.
It couldn’t be that small. Surely, as a child, I’d had around me some semblance, if not of city life, then of life in a world where cities existed—not this utterly isolated backwater. I remembered… more than this. Where was the red brick school with the black iron fire escapes, the white church with the steeple, the theatre with the big marquee? Where was my parents’ home?
Cora, from the way that I was driving, peering at everything, surely knew that something was wrong. Or perhaps she supposed that whatever had been wrong all along was now taking a new turn.
I braked, pulled as near to the ditch beside the narrow shoulder as I could and made a U-turn. No problem. There was very little traffic, even now, in summer. Nothing in sight. Slowly, I drove back to what would have to be called the business district. There were four stores—count ’em—and all of them were, behind old and weathered facades, utterly unfamiliar to me.