“Edinburgh, yes,” Atwick was saying. “Splendid mountain in the middle of the city. You worked under Phillip MacKenzie?”
“Mackenzie? Nope, don’t think I did,” Jeff said, wondering what he would say next if pressed. His credentials, after all, would not stand up to anyone who knew the real Geoff Harris, or even very long to anyone who knew someone who knew Geoff…
The sound quieted down a bit, and it occurred to Jeff that Atwick had a familiar British accent, maybe like a surgeon he half-remembered hearing once in a hospital…
“Of course, it’s a large university—” Atwick began.
“Professor Harris, it’s good to see you outside of the classroom!” Carla joined the men. Jeff was delighted for the intrusion.
“You know, I’m really mad at you for that C+.” She batted her eyelids flirtatiously at Jeff.
“Well, Carla, if Professor Harris had graded you for good looks, I’m sure you would have received an A+. Am I right, Jeff?”
“Absolutely,” Jeff said—thinking that, if his grasp of history was right, in a few decades that kind of bantering could bring both Atwick and him up on sexual harassment charges. He shuddered. Insane days they were, at the end of the 20th century. He’d be doing the world a big favor if the only thing he did back here was change that…
“Aw, I can’t stay mad at you guys, you’re too charming,” Carla mewed. “Do you believe in dancing with students, Professor Harris? Professor Atwick has already honored me with one of his cha-chas.”
Atwick bowed. “The honor was all mine.”
“Well, I’d be pleased to dance with you, Carla,” Jeff laughed, “but I’m afraid these new dances are too much for me.”
Carla smiled and subtly shifted her body so that her curves were more prominent. “I was thinking of something nice and slow.”
“Well, in that case, I’d be a madman to refuse.” Jeff winked at Atwick and extended his arm to Carla. He looked in vain for Laura as Carla escorted him to a room in which “The Best of Johnny Mathis” played incessantly.
An hour and who knows how many red dresses later, Laura came up behind Jeff. “Hi,” she whispered in his ear and kissed it. “Find out anything interesting?”
“Actually, yeah,” Jeff said, and handed Laura a glass of wine. “Amazing how many people seem to know the future when you’re primed to hear that in their conversation. One kid told me that he thinks the Beach Boys will go on to become second only to the Beatles in musical importance. Now how could he know that on the basis of ‘Surfin’ Safari’ and a couple of other uncreative songs in 1964?”
“Tall blond, sun-tanned boy, Mark?” Laura asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Well, he looks like one of the Beach Boys, so maybe he’s just self-impressed,” Laura laughed, and spilled her wine. “Oops.”
“You’ve got no luck with wine, have you?” Jeff was laughing too, now. He had to admit he was having a good time. “Here, take mine. I just poured it. I’ll go get another.”
“I think I’ve had fantastic luck with wine at least one time,” Laura said.
Jeff went to fetch another bottle in an adjacent room. The music there was louder than anywhere else. Jeff cringed a bit under the sound assault, then realized he was hearing something else mixed in with the music… a piercing wail coming from the next room. He dropped the bottle and ran in and found Laura shrieking on the floor.
“Laura, what’s the matter?” He lifted her face and looked intently into her eyes. They were grossly dilated. Her shrieks suddenly turned into hysterical laughter.
“Professor Harris, is she sick or something?” Sandy, who Jeff realized had been standing over them, was nearly in tears herself.
“I don’t know, Sandy. Look, could you please call me a cab?”
Jeff helped Laura to her feet. She was screaming and yelling at the top of her lungs but Jeff couldn’t make out what she was saying. She passed out in his arms in the elevator. He carried her into the back seat of the cab that arrived a few minutes later. “Get me to the closest hospital emergency room,” he told the driver, who looked as if he’d seen it all.
He carefully put her head on his lap and wiped big beads of sweat from the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were tightly shut and she drooled slightly from the corner of her mouth. He gently wiped that also. She was moaning and half-singing some Beatles song.
He had read of the effects of sixties psychedelic drugs on people—assuming that’s what this was, though it seemed a little early in the 1960s for that—and could see this was a very bad reaction, likely from something more nasty than LSD. Who the hell had given it to her?
In his day and age, treating it by simple suffusion would be child’s play. But here, more than a century earlier, with no nano-syndics at all—jeez, he hoped these “doctors” were up to this. What would they use to cleanse her chemistry? He sighed, stroked her face. There was no point in torturing himself. That wouldn’t stop her from dying. He had no choice but to put Laura in whatever primitive doctor’s hands this cabbie placed her.
But why did this happen?
Another damn mishap?
He had a searing insight for an instant. Yes, of course… But the cab swerved too sharply around some corner, and he lost it.
He looked down at Laura’s lips, and trembled.
Jeff had always found strength in the rivers of New York. He had spent hours as a child wandering along the banks of the Bronx River—more a stream, really, than a river—admiring its waterfalls, sticking his toes in its pools, following its path through the Botanic and Zoological Gardens. Years later, he would sit on the terrace of Rena’s high-rise on 125th Street, watching the powerful Hudson roll through the ninth decade of the stagnant 21st century. Good in medicine, agriculture, the intra-physics that the Thorne embodied, but not much else. Good in looking inward, backward, not outward. He walked now around Carl Schurz Park, looking down on the East River and its reflection of this 1960s city, hoping to find something he could use to recover his balance.
Laura was OK, resting in his apartment, well out of danger. That wasn’t the problem.
“Close,” the doctor had said. “Good thing you rushed her over here. Combo of booze and that kind of drug is dangerous. Good thing it responded to—”
Better get used to it, doc—you’ll see a lot more of it before this decade is over.
Thank God Laura was OK.
But Jeff wasn’t.
He had slept maybe an hour after bringing her home from the hospital, undressing her, tucking her safely in their bed. He’d had nightmares—older and younger versions of his great-great-grandmother coming in and out of his life, changing it with each appearance, editing the narrative that was him so many times that he had no bearings. Only alterations, of alterations.
Jeff had always valued the sanctity and clarity of his mind. That’s why he’d steered clear of the psychedelic drugs of his century—better to improve external reality than just your perception of it. But he figured the contamination now of his past and future was far more toxic to the psyche than the worst drugs. Coleridge, de Quincey, Huxley, Leary, Goonatilake—you’re all pikers compared to me.
But why was he feeling the brunt of this now?
Something Laura had said or done—not her almost ODing, but something that had happened then, though he didn’t know what—had unhinged him—
“Hi, honey.” A soft, cool hand touched his as he leaned against the stone embankment. He turned to Laura. She still looked pale.