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Death date on a BART train
"Zodiac"
The first few sections of a novel by Robert Fagen
Put on &TOTSE for review and helpful suggestions
Please pass this on to anyone you may think would
enjoy it, and return any commentary via &TOTSE
Thank yew fer yer support!
Copyright 1991, Robert Fagen, All Rights Reserved
"I never would have tried to ask her out if I had known I was going to
die," was the last thought that Mitchell Brodan had as he slumped in his
seat on BART.
The date was April 17, 1993, and it was about 5:15 in the afternoon
when it appeared that the thalmus of a non-descript, young, white-collar
commuter failed to continue the steady respiration doctors associate with
living tissue. It was not a coincidence that Mitchell represented the
essence of the average person.
Mitchell Brodan was nothing special to look at: medium height,
slightly curly brown hair, brown eyes, completely unremarkable facial
features barely accented with John Lennon glasses and a scraggly moustache.
Even where he worked was a boring, paper shuffling business with bland grey
cubicles on the 14th floor of a dull granite building in the pasteurized,
depersonalized financial district of San Francisco. He was a computer
programmer for FanChex, a Northern California ticket broker. He works on
tiny modules of big accounting systems that make sure record shop owners
don't steal the proceeds from the 30th Anniversary Rolling Stones Tour
tickets that are on sale at your local FanChex outlet.
To complete the picture of the average working stiff, Mitchell wasn't
happy with his job. He had a problem with being an insignificant cog.
Particularly because he was a cog in a machine that produced nothing but
slips of paper that measured the success and popularity of others. The one
release he had from the endless and dreary existence that life offered him
was writing. He would retire to his writer's garret in the Rockridge area
and create worlds that held far more appeal to him that what was then his
reality.
With all this in mind, there is also one immutable law in the
universe: Every Rule Has an Exception. The splash of color in Mitchell's
grey landscape was Anne. Anne Fleishman was the traditional "nice" girl.
In the finest tradition of Doris Day and Debbie Gibson. Her parents were
from Greenbrae, she was a cheerleader in high school, and when she phoned
home for money from college, her car's brakes really did need fixing.
There really wasn't anything special about that Friday. It had become
a tradition that Mitchell would ask Anne out to dinner or to happy hour,
and she would come up with some excuse to not go out. It wasn't that Anne
didn't like Mitchell, he was reasonably charming, didn't smell bad, and was
a reasonably nice guy. The only problem is that there wasn't anything
"behind the scenes." Anne didn't think she had a reason to go out with him
because she didn't think there was anything to discover.
Mitchell looks at the clock and sees that it is getting close to 4:00.
Getting up from his cubicle, he wanders over toward the copy room and,
coincidentally, Anne's desk.
"Hi Mitchell," Anne says in a tone reflecting the number of times this
scene has been played out on a Friday afternoon.
"Oh, hi Anne. Ready for the weekend?"
"Almost. I've got to wrap up some last minute details on the
installation plans for the Audio-File stores. Are you going anywhere?"
"I hadn't planned on it. I was thinking of stopping off at the Royal
Exchange for a beer on the way home, and maybe going to Cha-am for Thai.
Say, do you have any plans?"
For once, Anne thinks that it may turn out to be a good time, but for
once, she actually does have plans. She hesitated, then said "I know it
sounds like a cliche, but I promised my parents that I'd come down to the
house for dinner." After seeing the usual crestfallen reaction, she adds
"But let's do something after work on Monday, for sure."
Of course, Mitchell's crestfallen reaction is sincere, and he perks up
slightly at this mention of a hint of a possibility, but even that isn't
enough to lift his sagging spirits. "OK," he says with little enthusiasm,
"that sounds like a plan. Have a good time at your parents. See you
Monday morning."
With yet another of a long, unbroken string of defeats under his belt,
Mitchell goes back to his cubicle, and slaps around the keyboard with a
vengeance. He mutters to himself, "Well, stupid. What did you expect? 'Oh
Mitchell, you big stud! Carry me away from this mundane existence and
drive me wild with your inexhaustable charm and wit'."
After screwing up one too many things in his distracted state,
Mitchell decides to call it a day, instead of working until 8, like he
usually does when depressed. Which is usually every Friday night that he
tries to ask Anne out.
Still mildly fuming over the lack of success with the opposite sex
that he has come to expect from himself, he hears a voice in the back of
his head. It is his mother telling him, "You're going to give yourself a
heart attack one of these days if you keep bottling up all that anger."
This of course sets him off even more than he is normally able to do to
himself.
By the time Mitchell has worked his way out of the building and down
into the BART station, people are starting to get out of the way of this
person with a glazed stare and just a fleck of foam at the corner of his
mouth.
Mitchell is already on automatic pilot at this point. Oblivious to
the crush, the BART ticket floats from his wallet of its own volition, and
registers Mitchell's presence now inside the turnstile. His tennis shoes
drag the rest of his body through the crowds and down the escalator to the
train platform. Following the lead of his umbrella, he navigates onto a
train, and finds someone getting up as he feels an overwhelming need to sit
down. As his jeans bend to accomodate his body sitting, Mitchell feels as
if he is sliding down, out through the legs of the jeans, and through the
floor of the train.
Of course, what all of the 'normal' people see is completely
different. Most of the people on that platform saw someone stumble on to
the train with a glazed look in their eyes. Most of the people in the
train saw someone that somewhere around the 19th Street Station had a heart
attack and collapsed. Most of the people watching continued to do just
that: watch. As usually happens, one person had the presence of mind to
attend to the stricken young man, and the authorities were duly summonned
to deal with this impediment to the daily commute.
"I'd swear that this is an acid flashback, but I've never dropped
acid...It does seem kind of strange that my point of view seems to place me
somewhere on the floor, I could have sworn that I was on the seat...I
wouldn't think that I've died, but then again, maybe I did, and I'm not
laid out on the floor just because I feel like it...I always thought that
dying would involve something that I've read about in the
Inquirer...Usually it's described as floating outside of your body and
having your fat Aunt Marge beckon to you from the end of a long dark
tunnel...but I guess I must not be dead since I think I'm just lying here
looking up at the people looking down and the train is still rolling
along...They do look kind of worried, and that guy there is holding a pair
of sunglasses under my nose...how bizzare, the glasses didn't fog up...oh
well, i must be dead, i suppose it is just a matter of time before the
train pulls into the station and an ambulance pulls up and the paramedics
get out and wheel the stretcher up to the platform and grab my body and put
it on the stretcher and cover it with a sheet and go back down to the
ambulance and put me in and get inside and drive to the hospital and
unloadmethere and rollmeintotheemergencyward and putmeintheelevator and
godowntothebasementwherethemorgueislocated and
filemeawayinadrawerwithmynameonitthattheclerkgotfrommywallet and
theytrytocallmynextofkinbutheyareallonvacation...."
"Of course that was all a very strange nightmare," thought Mitchell,
as he tried to flip the covers from over his head. The air was very close
and stale, and had a faint rubbery smell. Still struggling with the
covers, he feels a constricting loop around his big toe.
"I always seem to have bizzarre dreams after I go out drinking
tequila. At least, I think I must have gone out drinking tequila,
otherwise I wouldn't feel this bad." Finally, it registers with Mitchell
that these aren't the normal sheets and blanket that he has at home.
Unless he became a bedwetter without remembering it, he wouldn't have
rubber sheets with a zipper down the front on his bed.
Coming to a realization, "I guess it would make sense that if I had
been dreaming that dream, maybe I'm still in it, and this is a body bag in
a hospital." Following that line of reasoning, Mitchell searched for and
found the zipper, opened the bag and sat up. Forgetting that bodies are
usually stored in drawers, he bonked his head against the low clearance
ceiling.
"Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop, oh, wise guy, eh?" Mitchell said in his best
Moe Howard impression, as he rubbed the now sore spot on his forehead.
Being more careful, he pushes the drawer out into the room and sits up
blinking rapidly.
"So, that's what it's like being dead. Now I can say I've done
everything. I guess the best way to wrap up this crazy dream is to get my
butt back home so I can sleep it off for real." With that, Mitchell
reaches down, takes off and drops the toe tag, and drops down to the cold
linoleum floor. He walks over to the swinging doors, and looks through the
window at the snoozing night clerk.
Face down and open on the desk is the latest Stephen King collection
of short stories. Mitchell ponders for a moment, and decides that nothing
could be more appropriate.
"If this weren't a dream, I would feel sorry for that poor schmuck who
would have to explain the disappearance of a corpse," thought Mitchell as
he padded down the hallway, and out the back door of the hospital,
barefoot. Taking his bearings, he walks toward home with more spring in
his step than a corpse should have.
Mitchell finds himself in the clutches of an evil scientist from a
refugee "Twilight Zone" episode that has put him in a soft room with
thousands of bees swarming. The bees are crawling all over Mitchell's arm,
and most of them are repeatedly stinging him. With a start, Mitchell wakes
up to the incessant drone of the alarm clock, to discover that he has been
sleeping on his arm.
"I guess that part of the dream was about the least strange," he
thought. "I guess I must have had one of those 'dreams-within-a-dream'
that some people get. Funny how real the second part felt."
Mitchell felt justified in 'remembering' that he had been on another
tequila bender. This was rooted in the fact that if he hadn't been
drinking, he must be crazy, in which case it didn't matter if he had been
drinking or not. Also, he felt like a cat had mistaken his mouth for a
litter box, which was his usual condition for a morning after.
Getting out of bed, he takes of the previous night's clothes, and
throws a bathrobe over his shoulders. Stumbling around the apartment with
his eyes half shut, he makes his way to the front door in his attempt to
bring in the paper.
Opening the front door, there are three papers. "That stupid newskid
can't seem to get it through his head that I only want ONE paper. I don't
have a goddamn cat or parakeet, so why would I want extra papers?"
Picking up the three papers, he notices that one is rather thick.
Looking at the papers front pages he says, "Wow, this is Sunday and
Monday's paper along with Saturday's. I must have been passed out all
weekend! I guess I better get ready for work. I just wish that I had
another weekend to recover from this one, I'm dead tired."
As Mitchell heads for the kitchen for his morning Froot Loops, he
realizes that he never put on his glasses. This is no big deal, but he can
see everything clearly. "I guess I must have been mixing carrot juice with
the tequila. Maybe I'll get written up in Scientific American as the man
with poor eyesight in remission." As he pours a bowl of cereal, he
remembers that he should have picked up some milk on the way home Friday
night, but didn't remember doing so. Opening the refrigerator, "Damn. I
didn't pick up any milk, there's the old carton." Picking up the carton,
it feels more than half full.
"How did that happen? I know for sure that there wasn't nearly this
much Friday morning. Maybe the cereal and milk fairy has decided to smile
on me this week." Looking at the clock, "Shit, I guess I better get my
butt in gear, or I'll miss the train."
Mitchell then continues with his morning routine, but slightly
interrupted. One of the interruptions was that he didn't read the paper.
If he had, he would have seen a small piece in Saturday's paper about a
corpse that disappeared from the morgue on Friday night. He also would
have seen his own name in the obituaries, with a footnote about the fact
that the authorities are looking for the body. It seems that one Alan
Marston fell asleep during his shift, and apparently some ghoulish
personalities had come in and stolen one freshly dead body. Mr. Marston
will be placed on probation, and the police expect to find the perpatrators
any time now. Memorial services will be postponed pending the return of
the body.
None of this is on Mitchell's mind as he does one of his better jobs
shaving himself. He can only remark how wonderful is it to go into that
dreaded task with a positive attitude and come out without nicking himself.
"Normally I cut open a minor artery, at least. I guess if you go in
expecting to get the job done quick and neat, then it helps. Speaking of
quick and neat, I wonder how my mustache filled in like it did. If it
wasn't attached to my face, I wouldn't think it was mine. I suppose it is
true that tequila puts hair on you. I better stop before I start to look
like an ape."
With the clock still ticking, Mitchell fairly flys through the rest of
his morning routine. The clothes that he thinks would look nice almost fly
into his hands, and they look better pressed that he remembered, but just
the way he would expect if they had gone to the cleaners. With the
oddities of the morning slipping into the past, Mitchell finds his way out
onto the street and down toward the BART station.
"With the way that this morning is going, I'll probably get to the
station 15 seconds before the train, get on the train just as the doors
close, and find a seat with a discarded comics section lying open on it,
waiting just for me." As these items come to pass, one by one, Mitchell
feels the cold hand of coincidence do a tapdance up his spine. After
making an effort to dismiss the events as mere circumstance, and burying
his head in the comics, Mitchell is able to put this in the back of his
mind.
The sun is shining brightly for what should be a gloomy January day,
and the brisk wind is almost making the trailing ends of the ladies scarves
snap. Mitchell emerges from the BART station exit with a detached look in
his eye. Nothing seems to be quite correct this morning, yet he really has
nothing to complain about. It is as if all of the petty irritations that
he has come to know so well no longer exist. Many of the things that have
always bothered him and have seemed to be permanent fixtures in his daily
routine have disappeared. All because he decided early this morning that
nothing was going to go wrong, and he would face everything with a smile,
even if it killed him.
He walked toward the lobby of his building with the determined,
unhurried, quick pace that is the hallmark of someone who works in the San
Francisco financial district. It is a casual walk that moves more like a
run. It comes mostly as a self defense mechanism against the normally bad
weather, which is wet, windy, or, more commonly, both. As Mitchell passes
by the security desk, the guard looks up. Unlike Mitchell, the guard has
read the Sunday paper about the disappearing corpse, and does a double
take. The guard then questions whether he should continue drinking
"Thunderbird" in his off hours, decides it is what has kept him sane up
until now, then goes back to his morning paper.
Mitchell rides up the elevator in the customary silence. Everyone is
obediently looking at the numbers slowly flashing by, or at the back of the
head of the person in front of them.
Mitchell exits the elevator at his floor, and decides to breeze in the
front door, instead of taking his customary shortcut through the back
entrance of the offices he works in. As he opens the door and walks in, he
says, "Good Morning, Roseanne!" to the receptionist.
As Roseanne is looking up, Mitchell can tell she is down in the dumps
about something. He jokingly asks, "So who died?"
When her eyes register his face, Roseanne responds quite promptly with
an ashen face, a blank stare and a loud scream. She follows up this odd
behavior with a very convincing faint. As Roseanne is slowly sliding under
her desk, Mitchell realizes that it is possible that his nightmare wasn't
really a dream.
Becoming somewhat panicked himself, Mitchell runs out of the foyer,
around the corner to the emergency stairs, and through the alarmed door.
He is leaping down the stairs three at a time as the fire claxons begin
their high-pitched whine. Once he reaches the ground floor, he dashes out
onto the street and jumps aboard a Muni streetcar about to close its doors
and rumble off.
Mitchell manages to grab a seat in the crowded car. Of course there
was the standard complement of dirty, smelly, gross Muni riders that
Mitchell expected to find on the bus. It isn't that you normally do find
that type of group of people on a Muni, but Mitchell expected the situation
to be uncomfortable, so that's how it turned out. Mitchell didn't know
this yet, but if he had truly expected everyone to smell like lilacs, he
would have been much more comfortable. If he had changed his expectations,
the people on the bus would have all been participants in the local
florists trade expo, all going out to the Japanese Tea Gardens to admire
the philaznia's.
It turns out that the bus Mitchell happened onto was the one headed
out to Golden Gate park. The ride out was stop and go. During the ride
Mitchell thinks to himself, "I really don't understand what has been
happening. First I had that crazy dream on Friday, but that could be
explained if I decided to take Mr. Daniels or Mr. Beam home to discuss
matters."
"Of course, that only works if I actually did get plastered and spent
the weekend in a drunken stupor. What if I really did go through what I
thought I went through. What if I'm really National Enquirer bait at this
point?"
"That would be a real trip if I actually died. I've died and gone to
heaven... or maybe I went to hell. Maybe my 'previous life' was really
something like Purgatory, and I've been sent to hell 'cause I wasn't a
faithful follower of Pat Robertson."
"I suppose that I really haven't died, even though everyone else
thought I did. Maybe I just fell into a deep trance like one of those
Indian fakirs. It was kind of funny though. As I was dying on BART, I was
thinking that it would be par for the course if I had a heart attack. I
was almost expecting it to happen, and it did. While it was happening, I
was thinking that this was the last thing I'd really expect, even though I
like irony as much as the next guy."
Mitchell got off just before the streetcar crossed Stanyan. "This is
just what I need," thought Mitchell," A nice quiet morning in the park with
lots of shiny happy people doing shiny happy park-like things." He then
wandered through the neighborhood streets and into Golden Gate park.
The sunlight has burnt off the early morning fog and has etched sharp
black triangles on the sides of the houses lining the streets around the
Park. There is an assortment of joggers trying to halt the inevitable
deterioration of their bodies. There are a number of parents and children
wandering through the Park, and they all seem to be enjoying the fresh air
and sunshine. There is a balloon vendor selling bubbles of primary color.
There is a woman nearby that is extracting pastel spheres from a diaphanous
fog, placing the orbs on waffle cones, then handing them to children with
as yet clean faces and hands. The occasional grandfather is pushing the
occasional granddaughter higher and higher on the swings while the
occasional grandmother shoots looks that would kill at the mischevious
grandfather.
Mitchell strolls along the lane and nearly breaks out laughing as he
absorbs the atmosphere around him. "This place looks like a Norman
Rockwell painting. Maybe I should leave them to their peace. The misery
that I have is probably contagious. With the way things are going in my
life, a sniper will probably start picking off little kids from the third
floor of that apartment building."
Moments after this dismal thought passes through Mitchell's mind, he
gets an uneasy feeling that something bad is about to happen. He sees
ahead of him a small child on a tricycle. The girl can't be any older than
four or five. The kid isn't riding, she is standing on the back step of
the tricycle, and pushing with her foot. The tassels from the handlebars
are making twin plastic rainbows fluttering in the wake of her progress.
When the shot split the air, Mitchell's stomach dropped, and it seemed
like everything went into slow motion. A slug penetrated the right side of
the skull of the ponytailed girl and left a small, neat hole. A moment
later, the whole left side of her head exploded in a thousand fragments of
bone and blood. The girl began to collapse like a wilting flower caught in
a time lapse experiment. What seemed like an eternity later, Mitchell felt
rather than heard the staccato report of multiple shots being fired.
Then the film in Mitchell's head sped up to normal. He heard a heart-
wrenching scream, and turned to see a woman. She was ashen. Her hands
were fluttering near her face like two butterflies. Her eyes followed the
collapsing body of the girl as if they were connected by an invisible
thread. Her look of disbelief was overwhelmed by the absolute terror and
panic welling up behind her eyes and spilling out over her whole
expression.
Mitchell panicked. He turned and ran. He heard the shouts and
screams behind him, and wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else. He
felt an insane guilt beginning to rise in his gut. It was reaching up from
somewhere deep in his belly and wrapping a cold hand around his heart.
As he ran to nowhere in particular, the thought began to form in his
mind that he was somehow responsible for the killing of that bright-faced
child. He began to think that he was the angel of death who summmoned the
assassin. For a brief moment, he almost believed it. With the
'coincidences' of the last few days, he began to think that maybe he did
die, and his personal hell was to go around and engineer the death of
babies. All the while, he continued to run.
These thoughts chased each other around Mitchell's head as he covered
block after block. Mitchell was oblivious to the people looking at him as
he ran past. He was completely consumed by these thoughts on the border of
insanity. Mitchell ignored the sirens of the police and paramedics going
the other way. He continued to run up and down hills, block after block,
until the blocks added up to miles. He ran with traffic, against traffic,
across traffic, and passed through the lines of people and cars as if he
were a meteor falling through clouds. He was only thinking about getting
away from the Park as quickly as his feet could carry him.
He was running east down Fulton, and he came to a screeching halt as
he saw Highway 101 and the Civic Center ahead. He had run nearly two miles
in under 10 minutes. He didn't even feel tired. Mitchell had been a fair
middle distance runner in high school, but that was years ago. He had been
flying a desk for a long time now, and he didn't exercise nearly as much as
he ought to.
"There's no way that I should be feeling this good after doing what I
just did. I should be collapsed on the ground, cramped up, sweating, and
wheezing for breath. Here I am, and I'm not even breathing hard. I
haven't even broken a sweat."
These thoughts cross Mitchell's mind, and as the picture of what he
expects begins to form in his mind, he suddenly finds himself collapsed in
a doorway, a perfect picture of someone who has just run a marathon.
In between his gasping breaths and the high frequency throbbing of his
temples, Mitchell thinks, "I must have become a cartoon. It's like when
Wiley Coyote runs over a cliff, he doesn't fall until he looks down. I
wasn't tired until I thought about the fact that I should be exhausted."
The occasional passer-by does just that: walks by without looking
down. They ignore Mitchell because they think he's another indigent with
the poor taste to collapse near where they are walking. So what if this is
a reasonably well dressed bum, if you start making exceptions to help these
people, then you'll never have time for the important things, like lunch
with the boss.
Eventually, Mitchell's body gets back to something resembling normal,
and he gets up and brushes himself off. "As long as I'm down here at the
Civic Center," he mutters to himself, "I might as well drop in on the
Library to see what psychosis I have."
With that, Mitchell ambles over to the library at a much gentler pace
than he used while exiting the Park.
Mitchell follows a group of school children through the front doors of
the library. He thinks, "They must be on a field trip. Good thing they
decided to come to the library instead of the park."
Still feeling a little tired, he sits down on a bench near the main
circulation desk. Mitchell leans back and closes his eyes, and despite the
morning's events, he starts to feel calm. The quiet of the library is a
soothing pool of non-activity. It is so soothing, he begins to snore.
Rather loudly.
The librarian behind the circulation desk notices the source of the
disturbance, and glides out from behind the desk and over to the
perpetrator.
She is not actually a librarian, but a co-op student on loan from the
Berkeley library school. She is a master's candidate in her mid 20's, and
not at all unattractive. Her only problem is that she seems to be falling
into the librarian stereotype. This isn't really her fault. She is so
busy trying to excell in her field, that she doesn't really take her
personal appearance very seriously. By default, she seems to be adopting
the garb and mannerisms of everyone's worst librarian nightmare, right down
to the cat-eye glasses on a chain.
"I wish those bums would stop coming off the street and napping right
in front of my desk," thought Laura, as she adjusted her pince-nez. "You
there," she said, while poking Mitchell with a ruler, "yes, you. Get up
and away from here right now. I'm sick of you vagrants smelling up my
library, and I want you out of here this instant."
"Oh... I'm sorry, I just ran here, and I must have dozed," said
Mitchell as he snapped out from his slumber.
"I don't care if you just ran the Bay to Breakers after a week without
sleep, this is NOT a dormitory. I want you to move on, or I'll call the
police."
Mitchell sheepishly replied, "I didn't mean to fall asleep, I've just
had a rough morning. I came to look up a book. Would you really mind if I
still did? I promise not to nap in the stacks." He looks at her with his
best hurt puppy dog look. Mitchell at this point is looking beyond the
sour countenance, and seeing someone he really wouldn't mind going out
with.
Laura sees something in his expression that says he really has had a
hard day, and isn't your basic bum looking for a warm place to sleep. She
says, "Well, I guess it wouldn't be so bad if you actually wanted to use
the library. But if I catch you again, I'll have to slap you silly."
Laura sees a look in his eyes, but she can't be sure if that look is
interest in her, or relief that he really isn't in trouble. "He must be
relieved," she thinks, "no one would want to go out with a librarian, after
all."
Mitchell shakes his head to remove the last cobwebs from his
conciousness, and says, "Maybe after I find what I'm looking for, we could
go out to lunch."
"I don't know, I normally don't eat lunch."
"Well, ok. Maybe some other ti..."
"But I could make an exception today. I get my lunch break at 11:30.
I'll be up here at the front desk until then," Laura threw in after
remembering the emptyness of her social calendar over the last few weeks.
"Good, then it's a date," Mitchell said. "By the way, where is the
card catalog?"
Laura carefully inspected her shoelaces as she pointed to the file
drawers over by the elevators. She said, "See you at 11:30. Bye."
Mitchell waved his thanks, and walked over the catalog.
Walking in the direction Laura pointed, Mitchell furtively glances
over his shoulder and sees Laura furtively glancing right back at him.
They both whirl away, and both of them roll their eyes back in thier heads
while wearing stupid grins on their faces. Laura goes behind the
circulation desk and proceeds to date stamp a patron's library card instead
of the check-out card.
Approaching the card catalogs, Mitchell starts to scan the little
labels on the drawers. He is running his finger over the brass hooks and
windows that the cards are encased in. He starts at the "A's", and wanders
to the right from there, hoping for something to catch his eye as a likely
starting point. He makes it all the way down to the "P" drawer when he
spots a likely topic.
"Psychology," thinks Mitchell, "is probably the best place to look if
you suspect your mind is playing tricks on you. Of course, how can you be
sure you are really reading a psych text, and not 'Miss Marple does
Cambridge'?"
Grabbing the well-worn brass handle, Mitchell slides out the darkly
stained oak drawer. It sticks a little on the left side, but by wiggling
the drawer from side to side, Mitchell is able to extract the set of cards.
He sets the drawer on the scratched top of the catalog housing, and starts
to riffle through the psychology references.
"Advanced Analytical Techniques... What's this subject reference at
the bottom? 'Subject: Also see 'Head Cheese Manufacturing''? I guess I
can understand the 'head' part, but 'HEAD CHEESE'? Maybe I better look at
a different title."
"Reference and Inference in Analysis... Wait... I don't believe it!
This one has a reference to head cheese manufacturing too! Maybe all of
this is one big practical joke."
Mitchell is now thoroughly confused and concerned that someone is
staging an elaborate joke at his expense, and returns the drawer to the
catalog. He goes up to the drawer that contains 'Parapsychology' and pulls
it out. Looking through it, he finds a number of titles on out-of-body
experience, perception, and mind-altering drugs. All of these cards have
references to 'Head Cheese Manufacturing'. A nervous chuckle starts to
bubble up out of Mitchell's gut.
"This has got to be a stunt. In a few minutes I'm going to come
across a card that says 'Smile, you're on Candid Camera'." At this point,
Mitchell decides to pull a drawer at random, and look at an unrelated
topic. This way, if there are pranksters behind this, they would have had
to change out all of the cards. He pulls out the B drawer and examines
titles on bathysphere design and construction. All of the cards have a
reference to head cheese manufacturing.
At this point, Mitchell is about to start laughing like a maniac. To
try and head this off, he decides to give in and pull the card with the
reference. Taking out the H drawer, he sets it down with hands that are
starting to shake. Thumbing slowly through the cards, he comes to the part
where head cheese should be listed. Instead of a normal catalog card, he
finds a piece of vellum with a handwritten reference. The reference is not
the Dewey Decimal classification he expected, but directions to a specific
part of the library. Thoroughly confused, and not caring any more,
Mitchell rips the card out from the catalog.
Following the directions, Mitchell walks past the elevator toward the
rear of the library. By the emergency exit, he opens an old wooden door.
Behind the door is a staircase leading down. Still referring to the card,
he turns on the lights and proceeds down into the basement.
Turning left at the bottom, the stairwell opens up into a dusty
warehousing space, lit only by metal shaded bulbs swinging from wires
leading up toward the ceiling. On either side of the central isle, there
are metal cantilevered shelves. On the shelves are old boxes that must
contain books and maps that have been archived to dead storage. The
directions tell him to walk between the fourth and fifth shelves on the
left hand side, and step up on the ladder he will find there to get a
leather bound volume he will find on the top shelf.
"This is even more ridiculous that finding the reference on all of the
other cards. How could this card know that there is a ladder at a certain
point, and that there is going to be a book sitting out on the shelf. It
looks like all of the other books and things are in sealed boxes."
Despite his doubts, Mitchell follows the directions, and finds exactly
what the card told him he would find. A leather bound book. The title is
"Expected Answers".
At first glance, the book looks just like any other, but always leaves
you with the impression that you missed something about it. It has a
leather covered binding that has been stained to a dark color by time and
exposure to air. The pages are gilt edged, but when the book is closed, it
does not look like individual pages in a book. It looks like a solid band
of gold around the edge. It seems to glimmer with its own light. The
binding and cover are deeply and intricately engraved. It is mostly
scrollwork, with the occasional latin phrase buried in the illumination.
Mitchell climbs down the ladder with the book, and starts back out to
the main part of the library with it.
Retracing his steps, Mitchell climbs back up the stairs and out the
door he came in through. Turning toward a distant corner of the library,
he walks over to a relatively quiet carrel, sits down, flips on the light,
and places the book on the desktop in front of him.
"I guess I shall have to find the answers I expect in here," thinks
Mitchell, as he runs his fingers over the elaborate design in the cover.
"If I don't, I wonder if I can sue the author for false advertising because
he used this title. I would think any jury would agree I've been subjected
to mental anguish"
"The gilding on the edges of the pages, it's so strange. It's so
smooth, it looks like there aren't any pages, it seems like it's a cold
slab of metal."
As Mitchell feels along the edges of the pages, he jerks his hand back
with a start and says, "Whoa, how bizzare! It's actually warm and soft.
It feels like someone's skin."
With a look of complete confusion on his face, and more than a little
panic in his eyes, Mitchell chews on his fingernail while trying to decide
if he should open this strange book.
Slowly he reaches out and lifts the cover a fraction of an inch.
Peering into the wedge of darkness that he has created, it looks like the
first page is a standard blank flyleaf. Slightly relieved by finding the
first feature of this book that is normal, Mitchell opens the cover
completely and lays the book flat on the desk.
With a little less hesitation, Mitchell begins to turn pages. He
flips through the first five or six pages, and still hasn't found any
printing. Now he starts to turn the pages faster and faster. Still no ink
anywhere. He takes a handful of pages, and starts to riffle them from
front to back. There aren't any words, pictures or drawings anywhere.
"OK, I'm pretty sick of this. Why would anyone go to all this trouble to
lead me to a blank book?"
As Mitchell says this to the open book in front of him, the gilt
edging on the pages looked like it began to glow. At this point, Mitchell
didn't even think of trying to rub his eyes in disbelief, because his
capacity for being boggled has been exhausted.
Slowly, dark patterns begin to swirl around on the open pages. The
patterns coalesce into words. The words say, "Because my pages are only
blank if you aren't asking any questions."
As it turns out, Mitchell's capacity to be flabbergasted has not been
completely exhausted. Mitchell rolls his eyes around, because he now
thinks he knows what this is. He says to the book, "You must be a
prototype for that 'computer in a book' concept that what's-his-name in
Silicon Valley came up with, and this whole crazy chain of events has been
some real strange and intense marketing campaign."
"Nope, sorry," displayed the book.
"OK, then what are you?" asked Mitchell.
"I thought you'd never ask. I am an instant access reference guide.
I was placed here to help you acclimate to your new environment and to
explain what has assuredly been a highly stressful 72 hours. Have you ever
read 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams?"
"I did back in high school," said Mitchell.
"It would help to think of me along those lines. You ask the
question, then I will compose an answer for you and display it on my pages.
It really doesn't matter which pages you are turned to, but if you want to
give the impression that you are reading a book, you may want to turn the
pages as you go along."
"Won't it seem kind of stupid for me to be talking to a book?" asked
Mitchell.
"You don't need to verbalize your requests. After analyzing your wave
patterns while we have been talking, I now have a signal I will watch for
that precedes when you are asking me a question."
"What company makes you?" thinks Mitchell.
"I am not manufactured by any company in the sense you are thinking
of. I am not currently permitted to elaborate further on that subject.
Soon, that question will be fully explained to you."
"OK then, who placed you here, and who set up that elaborate card
catalog scheme? How did whoever it was know I was going to look at the
cards I did, and that I would even look in the card catalog?"
"First, I cannot yet tell you who is responsible. Second, they knew
you would do what you did because they expected you to do exactly what you
did."
"What do you mean 'expected me to do exactly what I did'?"
"The responsible party merely set it their mind that you would at some
point come to the library, examine the card catalog, find the cards that
you did, and pick up myself. Since you had no expectations of what you
would find or do at the library, your perception of reality was governed
that of your 'sponsor'."
"Do you mean to tell me that I'm under drugs or hypnosis, and none of
this is real?"
"No, I mean to tell you that all of this is real. It is as real as
the gunman that shot that small child in the park earlier. If your sponsor
had wanted you to climb the ladder to get me, then slip off and break your
neck in the process, that is what would have happened, and you would be
dead. At least, you would have stopped perceiving the world around you,
and moved on to a different frame of reference, which is what passes for
death in this reality."
"Don't tell me that catastrophe happened just because I expected it
to!" thought Mitchell as he remembered the little girl's face, and a wave
of guilt racked his body. "I think I have to throw up."
"Here is a perfect example, you are expecting that you are going to
throw up, so if you continue this way, you will vomit. If you decide that
you don't expect yourself to toss your cookies in a library, you will not.
It would be more difficult, but if you expected to vomit ballpoint pens, it
would happen."
Mitchell decides that this sounds crazy coming from a book, but gives
it a whirl. In his mind, he fixes a picture of himself sitting in a
library, reading a book, and NOT horking in a wastebasket. Sure enough,
the wave of nausea passes. As the sick feeling leaves him, it is suddenly
replaced by excitement.
Suddenly, the events of the last three days are visible in a new
light. Everything now begins to make sense. "I was uptight on Friday, and
all but expected to have a heart attack and die. For some reason, probably
because I really didn't believe it was happening, I really didn't die,
although it looked to everyone else like I did. I guess if reality looks
like something to someone else, then that is reality for them."
Reading his thought, the book adds, "Correct. It is a key point to
keep in mind that you are able to influence the actions of others by the
expectations you set for yourself and for the environment that they
perceive."
"Well then, I think I have some work to do," said Mitchell to himself
as he closed the book and headed toward the front door. "The first order
of business is to take this book out of the library with me. I can't
imagine that I have to check it out." With this thought fixed firmly in
his mind, Mitchell walks toward the exit with the expectation that the book
he is carrying does not have the anti-theft protection of all the other
books in the library.
As he walks past circulation he hears Laura, "Mitchell, are we still
on for lunch? It's almost 11:30."
Mitchell stops and turns toward her. Thinking fast, he expects to
find a business card with his home phone and address on it inside of his
pocket. He reaches in, pulls it out and hands it to Laura. "I just
remembered a lunch appointment with my banker that I can't afford to miss.
Tell you what though, here's my card so you can call me at home. Why don't
you give me your number, and we'll go out to dinner tonight. I'll call you
later this afternoon."
"Ok," says Laura as she scribbles down her name and number. She
thinks to herself, "Ok, so he's backing out, and I'll probably never hear
from him again."
Seeing her thoughts in her eyes Mitchell quickly adds, "Tell you what,
why don't we plan on me picking you up at 8:00, and we'll go out somewhere
nice. Where do you live?"
"Berkeley."
"Perfect, I'm living in a house that I'm renting in Rockridge. Why
don't you write down your address, I'll pick you up, and we'll come back
into the city for dinner."
"That sounds nice," said Laura, as she wrote down the rest of the
information. She took off her glasses and flashed a demure smile at
Mitchell as she handed him the slip of paper. Just as Mitchell expected,
she didn't notice that Mitchell was walking out with what appeared to be a
library book without having to check it out. She said, "See you at 8:00
then."
"See you later," said Mitchell as he walked out the front door and
into the sunlight.
Walking down the front steps, Mitchell looks at the book. All of the
library paraphernalia has disappeared. The sticker on the binding with the
Dewey Decimal classification is gone. Looking inside the front cover, even
the pocket for the checkout card has vanished. At this point, Mitchell is
no longer slack-jawed at such occurrences, as he has now come to expect
them.
"I think that my life has definitely taken a turn for the better. In
keeping with my new frame of mind, I think I'll just walk around the corner
of the building, and get into my limousine. Then I'll have Clarence the
driver take me back to my penthouse apartment on Russian Hill."
Mitchell skips down the remaining steps two at a time, and turns the
corner of the building with a flourish. He stops in mid stride when there
is nothing but curbside in front of him. He does a double-take and looks
up and down the street. There is no limousine waiting for him anywhere,
and there doesn't appear to be one with his name on it coming down the
street, either. Through the soles of his shoes Mitchell can feel the
fibers of the rug starting to slip. Ducking into an alley, Mitchell flips
open the book to a page in the middle.
"Oh Book! Why didn't that work?" he thinks rather loudly at the book.
The book explains,"If you try to imagine something that even you
wouldn't believe, it won't work. After all, this is not a power to make
wishes, it is a talent to shape your personal reality and the realities of
those you interact with. If you don't have a strong enough will to force
immediate change, then slow change must be fostered by convincing others of
your desired reality through small steps."
The lightbulb goes on over Mitchell's head. "Oh, so it's just a big
con game!"
"Right, so start small, and get others to expect what you want them to
in small stages..."
"That way, I can eventually force greater and greater change by using
the will of people whose expectations I've changed!"
"Exactly! By the way, you don't have to call me 'Book'. My name is
Bob."
"OK... Bob... I guess I better get started with shaping the world in
my image." After thinking about it for a few moments, Mitchell comes up
with an idea of how to start the changes he wants. First, to test his
theory, he expects to find about $2,000 in twenties and fifties in his
wallet. Setting Bob down, he pulls his wallet out of his back pocket and
looks in the billfold. He sees a lot more green than he had in there that
morning.
"Baaaaaaaaaaab! This is great!" Mitchell exclaims as he stuffs the
wallet back in his pocket, and scoops up Bob. Continuing his war whooping,
he shakes Bob up and down over his head much like a prizefighter shakes his
gloves after winning by a knockout.
Regaining his composure, Mitchell goes out into the street and flags
down a cab. As he gets into the back seat he says to the driver, "I need
to go to the BofA at 345 Montgomery, the main office. And step on it."
After a pause, "I always wanted to say that."
"What, ain't you never rode in a cab before, or what?" said the cabbie
as he looked over his shoulder into the back seat. Seeing that Mitchell
wasn't paying attention to him, he flipped down his 'For Hire' flag, threw
the taxi in gear and squealed away from the curb.
As the taxi drove up Leavenworth and was nearing the intersection with
California, Mitchell was filling in the details of his soon to be found
financial independence.
Copyright 1991, Robert Fagen, All Rights Reserved
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