Orbit 9 Read online

  “What in hell do you mean, through time?”

  “Oh… Sometime when you and Janet are free I’ll show you some of the sort of thing I mean.” She looked up, apologetically, and shrugged as she had that first time I met her. It was a strange gesture from one so small. It seemed that almost everything was too much for her, that when she felt cornered she might always simply shrug off everything with that abrupt movement.

  “Well, I have to get,” I said then, and turned toward the drive. “Do you have anything else to lug out here, before I leave?”

  “No. The timer and film. But that’s nothing. Thanks again.” She took a step away, stopped and said, with that same shy apologetic tone, “I wish I could explain what I want to do, in words. But I can’t.”

  I hurried away from her, to my own house, but I didn’t want anything to eat after all. I paced the living room, into the kitchen, where the coffee I had poured was now cold, back to the living room, out to the terrace. I told myself asinine things like: I love Janet. We have a good life, good sex, good kids. I have a good business that I am completely involved in. I’m too young for the male climacteric. She isn’t even pretty.

  And I kept pacing until I was an hour later than I’d planned on. I still hadn’t eaten, and couldn’t, and I forgot to make the sandwich for Lenny and take it back to him.

  I avoided Christine. I put in long hours at the lab, and stayed in the basement workshop almost every evening, and turned down invitations to join the girls for coffee, or talk. They were together a lot. Janet was charmed by her, and a strong friendship grew between them rapidly. Janet commented on it thoughtfully one night. “I’ve never had many woman friends at all. I can’t stand most women after a few minutes. Talking about kids sends me right up the wall, and you know how I am about PTA and clubs and that sort of thing. But she’s different. She’s a person first, then a woman, and as a person she’s one of the most interesting I’ve ever run into. And she has so much empathy and understanding. She’s very shy, too. You never have to worry about her camping on your doorstep or anything like that.”

  She’d been there almost two months when Pete’s letter finally arrived telling us about her. Janet read it aloud to me while I shaved.

  “ She’s a good kid and probably will need a friend or two by the time she gets out of that madhouse in Connecticut. Rudeman was a genius, but not quite human. Cold, calculating, never did a thing by accident in his life. He wound her up every morning and gave her instructions for the day. God knows why she married him, why they stayed together, but they did. In his own way I think Rudeman was very much in love with her. He said once that if he could understand this one woman he’d understand the entire universe. May he rest in peace, he never made it. So be good to her.

  “Grace sends love. She’s been redoing our apartment…”

  I stopped listening. The letter went on for three pages of single-spaced typing. The letter had left as many questions as it had answered. More in fact, since we already had found out the basic information he had supplied. I decided to go to the library and look up Rudeman and his death and get rid of that nagging feeling that had never gone away.

  “Eddie, for heaven’s sake!” Janet was staring at me, flushed, and angry.

  “What? Sorry, honey. My mind was wandering.”

  “I noticed. What in the world is bothering you? You hear me maybe half the time, though I doubt it.”

  “I said I’m sorry, Janet. God damn it!” I blotted a nick and turned to look at her, but she was gone.

  She snapped at Rusty and Laura, and ignored me when I asked if there was any more mail. Rusty looked at me with a What’s-eating-her? expression.

  I tried to bring up the subject again that night, and got nowhere. “Nothing,” she said. “Just forget it.”

  “Sure. That suits me fine.” I didn’t know what I was supposed to forget. I tried to remember if it was time for her period, but I never knew until it hit, so I just left her in the kitchen and went downstairs to the workroom and messed around for an hour. When I went back up, she was in bed, pretending to be asleep. Usually I’d keep at it until we had it out in the open, whatever it was, and we’d both explain our sides, maybe not convincing each other, but at least demonstrating that each thought he had a position to maintain. That time I simply left the bedroom and wandered about in the living room, picked up a book to read, put it down again. I found Pete’s letter and saw that we’d been invited to visit them over Christmas. I seemed to remember that Janet had gone on about that, but I couldn’t recall her words. Finally I pulled on a jacket and walked out to the terrace. I looked toward the Donlevy house, Christine’s house now. Enough leaves had fallen by then so I could see the lights.

  It’s your fault, I thought at her. Why don’t you beat it? Go somewhere else. Go home. Anywhere else. Just get out.

  I was falling. Suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet, nothing at all, and I was falling straight down in a featureless grey vacuum. I groped wildly for something to hold on to, and I remembered the last time it had happened, and that it had happened to Laura. Falling straight down, now starting to tumble, my stomach lurching, nausea welling up inside me. Everything was gone, the house, terrace, the lights… I thought hard of the lights that had been the last thing I had seen. Eyes open or closed, the field of vision didn’t change, nothing was there. “Janet!” I tried to call, and had no way of knowing if I had been able to make the sound or not. I couldn’t hear myself. A second sweep of nausea rose in me, and this time I tasted the bitterness. I knew that I would start crying. I couldn’t help it; nausea, fear, the uncontrollable tumbling, unable to call anyone. Fury then displaced the helplessness that had overcome me, and I yelled, again without being able to hear anything, “You did this, didn’t you, you bitch!”

  Donlevy’s study was warm, the colors were dull gold, russet, deep, dark green. There was a fire in the fireplace. The room was out of focus somehow, not exactly as I remembered it, the furniture too large and awkward-looking, the shelves built to the ceiling were too high, the titles on the topmost shelf a blur because of the strange angle from which I saw them. Before me was Donlevy’s desk, cleaner than I’d ever seen it, bare with gleaming wood, a stand with pens, and several sheets of paper. No stacks of reports, journals, overflowing ashtrays… I looked at the papers curiously, a letter, in a neat legible handwriting. Two pages were turned face down, and the third was barely begun: “… nothing to do with you in any way. When I have finished going through the papers, then I’ll box up those that you have a right to and mail them to you. It will take many weeks, however, so unti…” The last word ended with a streak of ink that slashed downward and across the page, and ran off onto the desktop.

  Where was she, Christine? How had I got… I realized that I wasn’t actually there. Even as the thought formed, I knew precisely where I was, on my own terrace, leaning against a post, staring at the lights through the bare trees.

  I looked at the letter, and slowly raised my hand and stared at it, both on the terrace and in the study. And the one in the study was tiny, tanned, with oval nails, and a wide wedding band…

  “Eddie?”

  Janet’s voice jolted me, and for a moment the study dimmed, but I concentrated on it, and held it. “Yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure. I thought you were sleeping.”

  In the study… who the devil was in the study? Where was she? Then suddenly she screamed, and it was both inside my head and outside filling the night.

  “My God!” Janet cried. “It’s Christine! Someone must have…”

  I started to run toward her house, the Donlevy house, and Janet was close behind me in her robe and slippers. In the split second before that scream had exploded into the night, I had been overcome by a wave of terror such as I had never known before. I fully expected to find Christine dead, with her throat cut, or a bullet in her brain, or something. Caesar met us and loped with us to the house, yelping excitedly. Why hadn
’t he barked at a stranger? I wanted to kick the beast. The back door was unlocked. We rushed in, and while Janet hesitated, I dashed toward the study.

  Christine was on the floor near the desk, but she wasn’t dead, or even injured as far as I could tell from a hurried examination. Janet had dropped to her knees also, and was feeling the pulse in Christine’s wrist, and I saw again the small tanned hand that I had seen only a few minutes ago, even the wedding band. The terror that had flooded through me minutes ago surged again. How could I have dreamed of seeing that hand move as if it were my own hand? I looked about the study frantically, but it was back to normal, nothing distorted now. I had been dreaming, I thought, dreaming. I had dreamed of being this woman, of seeing through her eyes, feeling through her. A dream, no more complicated than any other dream, just strange to me. Maybe people dreamed of being other people all the time, and simply never mentioned it. Maybe everyone walked around terrified most of the time because of inexplicable dreams. Christine’s eyelids fluttered, and I knew that I couldn’t look at her yet, couldn’t let her look at me. Not yet. I stood up abruptly. “I’ll have a look around. Something scared her.”

  I whistled for Caesar to come with me, and we made a tour of the house, all quiet, with no signs of an intruder. The dog sniffed doors, and the floor, but in a disinterested manner, as if going through the motions because that was expected of him. The same was true of the yard about the house; he just couldn’t find anything to get excited about. I cursed him for being a stupid brute, and returned to the study. Christine was seated on one of the dark green chairs, and Janet on one facing her. I moved casually toward the desk, enough to see the letter, to see the top lines, the long streak where the pen had gone out of control.

  Janet said, “Something must have happened, but she can’t remember a thing.”

  “Fall asleep? A nightmare?” I suggested, trying not to look at her.

  “No. I’m sure not. I was writing a letter, in fact. Then suddenly there was something else in the room with me. I know it. It’s happened before, the same kind of feeling, and I thought it was the farmhouse, the associations there. But maybe I am going crazy. Maybe Victor’s right, I need care and treatment.” She was very pale, her eyes so large that she looked almost doll-like, an idealized doll-like face.

  “Who is Victor?” Janet asked.

  “Eugenia’s husband. She’s… she was my husband’s daughter.” Christine sighed and stood up, a bit unsteadily. “If it starts again… I thought if I just got away from them all, and the house… But if it starts again here…”

  “Eddie, we can’t leave her like this,” Janet said in a low voice. “And we can’t leave the kids alone. Let’s take her home for the night.”

  Christine objected, but in the end came along through the woods with Janet and me. At our house Janet went to get some clothes on. Her gown and robe had been soaked with dew. While Janet was dressing, I poked up a fire in the fireplace, and then made some hot toddies. Christine didn’t speak until Janet came back.

  “I’m sorry this happened,” she said then. “I mean involving you two in something as… as messy as this is.”

  Janet looked at me, waiting, and I said, “Christine, we heard from Pete and he seemed to think you might need friends. He seemed to think we might do. Is any of this something that you could talk to Pete about?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I could tell Pete.”

  “Okay, then let us be the friends that he would be if he was here.”

  Again she nodded. “Lord knows I have to talk to someone, or I’ll go as batty as Victor wants to believe I am.”

  “Why do you keep referring to him?” Janet asked. Then she shook her head firmly. “No. No questions. You just tell us what you want to for now.”

  “I met Karl when I was a student at Northwestern. He had a class in physiological psychology and I was one of his students and experimental subjects. He was doing his basic research then on perception. Three afternoons a week we would meet in his lab for tests that he had devised, visual-perception tests. He narrowed his subjects down to two others and me, and we are the ones he based much of his theory on. Anyway, as I got to know him and admire him more and more, he seemed to take a greater interest in me. He was a widower, with a child, Eugenia. She was twelve then.” Her voice had grown fainter, and now stopped, and she looked at the drink in her hand that she had hardly touched. She took a sip, and another. We waited.

  “The reason he was interested in me, particularly, at least in the beginning,” she said haltingly, “was that I had been in and out of institutions for years.” She didn’t look up and her words were almost too low to catch. “He had developed the theory that the same mechanism that produces sight also produces images that are entirely mental constructs, and that the end results are the same. In fact, he believed and worked out the theory that all vision, whether or not there is an external object, is a construct. Vision doesn’t copy anything in the real world, but instead involves the construction of a schematic, and so does visual imagination, or hallucination.”

  I refilled our glasses and added a log to the fire, and she talked on and on. Rudeman didn’t believe in a psychological cause to explain schizophrenia, but believed it was a chemical imbalance with an organic cause that produced aberrated perception. This before the current wave of research that seemed to indicate that he had been right. His interest in Christine had started because she could furnish information on image projection, and because in some areas she had an eidetic memory, and this, too, was a theory that he was intensely interested in. Eidetikers had been discounted for almost a century in the serious literature, and he had reestablished the authenticity of the phenomena.

  “During the year,” she said, “he found out that there were certain anomalies in my vision that made my value to him questionable. Gradually he had to phase me out, but he became so fascinated in those other areas that he couldn’t stand not starting another line of research immediately, using me extensively. That was to be his last year at Northwestern. He had an offer from Harvard, and he was eager to go there. Anyway, late in April that year I… I guess I flipped out. And he picked up the pieces and wouldn’t let me go to a psychiatrist, but insisted on caring for me himself. Three months later we were married.”

  Janet’s hand found mine, and we listened to Christine like that, hand in hand.

  “He was very kind to me,” Christine said slowly sometime during that long night. “I don’t know if he loved me, but I think I would have died without him. I think—or thought—that he cured me. I was well and happy, and busy. I wanted to take up photography and he encouraged it and made it possible. All those years he pursued a line of research that he never explained to me, that he hadn’t published up to the time of his death. I’m going through his work now, trying to decode it, separating personal material from the professional data.”

  She was leaving out most of it, I believed. Everything interesting, or pertinent, or less than nattering to her she was skipping over. Janet’s hand squeezed mine; take it easy, she seemed to be saying. Christine was obviously exhausted, her enormous eyes were shadowed, and she was very pale. But, damn it, I argued with myself, why had she screamed and fainted? How had her husband died?

  “Okay,” Janet said then, cheerfully, and too briskly. “Time’s up for now. We’ll talk again tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever you’re ready to, Christine. Let me show you your room.” She was right, of course. We were all dead tired, and it was nearly three, but I resented stopping it then. How had her husband died?

  She and Janet left and I kicked at the feeble fire and finished my last drink, gathered up glasses and emptied ashtrays. It was half an hour before Janet came back. She looked at the clock and groaned.

  “Anything else?”

  She went past me toward the bedroom, not speaking until we were behind the closed door. “It must have been gruesome,” she said then, starting to undress. “Victor and Eugenia moved in with her. Karl’s daughter and son-in
-law. And Karl’s parents live there, too. And right away Victor began to press for Karl’s papers. They worked together at the university. Then he began to make passes, and that was too much. She packed up and left.”

  I had finished undressing first, and sat on the side of the bed watching her. The scattering of freckles across her shoulders was fading now, her deep red tan was turning softly golden. I especially loved the way her hip bones showed when she moved, and the taut skin over her ribs when she raised her arms to pull her jersey over her head. She caught my look and glanced at her watch pointedly. I sighed. “What happened to her tonight?”

  “She said that before she finally had to leave the farm up in Connecticut, the last night there, Victor came into her third-floor room and began to make advances—her word, by the way. She backed away from him, across the room and out onto a balcony. She has acrophobia, and never usually goes out on that balcony. But she kept backing up, thinking of the scandal if she screamed. Her stepdaughter’s husband, after all. In the house were Karl’s mother and father, Eugenia… Victor knew she would avoid a scene if possible. Then suddenly she was against the rail and he forced her backward, leaning out over it, and when she twisted away from him, she looked straight down, and then fainted. She said that tonight she somehow got that same feeling, she thinks that that memory flooded back in and that she lived that scene over again, although she can’t remember anything except the feeling of looking down and falling. She screamed and fainted, just like that other night.” Janet slipped into bed. “I think I reassured her a little bit anyway. If that’s what happened, it certainly doesn’t mean she’s heading for another break. That’s the sort of thing that can happen to anyone at any time, especially where one of those very strong phobias is concerned.”