In For a Penny (4 page)

He saw through the sliding glass doors that Nina was out in the back yard, playing on the swing, which was good, because even a child like Nina could have seen that he was blasted, and he didn’t need that. He couldn’t let this affect Nina. He headed upstairs to the bathroom, where he was impulsively sick. Then he lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, the pieces of the puzzle going around in his head.

. . .

“I don’t know if I
can
explain it,” Beth said, putting away the groceries. “It’s pretty weird. But there’s one obvious explanation, and you already know what that is, I think.”

“What?”

“That you’re going crazy.”

“Wait, though. I’ve been worrying about that. I thought that maybe I blanked out or something and called her up using her number, but I didn’t know I used her number, because I was blanked out, and when I un-blanked I remembered it as a star-six-nine call. You get what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. Maybe you did.”

“But where’d I get her number? We don’t have it. I couldn’t get it from information, because I didn’t know her address. I didn’t even know they’d moved to San Antonio till she told me. And Anthony heard the call-waiting click, too. I didn’t imagine that part.”

Beth shrugged. Apparently she had nothing to add. He wondered if her silence was fear, and, if so, what she was afraid of. Him? He didn’t like the thought, but he realized that he was fearful himself. Perhaps she was fearful
for
him. He saw that he had to work this out logically, find the rationale behind the irrational before it
did
drive him crazy.

“The thing is, if this is another psychic episode, it’s different again. This is
way
more complicated than the possum.”

“That’s for sure,” she said.

“Seriously. It involves screwing around with the phone lines, you know what I mean? Manipulating them with my mind. I push a couple of buttons and come up with Nancy Bronson, just like that, out of nowhere. If she didn’t call me, then I had to have contacted her … psychically, I guess you’d say. And I used the telephone to do it. This involves electricity, numbers, distances….”

“How do you know she didn’t call you? That’s an easier explanation. Maybe she’s had a thing for you all these years and she
did
call you, but she won’t admit it, because she had second thoughts when she heard your voice. It’s an easier answer, isn’t it?”

“But she said she had to call Gayle to get our number. …” He stopped. Nancy’s calling or not calling Gayle had nothing to do with psychic phenomena. If this whole thing was initiated on Nancy’s end, then Beth was probably right. But the thought of Nancy “having a thing for him” didn’t seem likely, not after ten years. On the other hand, he had always thought Nancy had been attracted to him a little bit back in the old days. It wasn’t so hard to imagine that some sort of fresh spark had reignited an old flame.

Beth was grinning at him. “I love it that you came up with a lame-brained psycho explanation instead of the obvious thing. If Nancy calls back, let
me
talk to her.”

“Sure,” Art said, but he was somehow certain that Nancy wouldn’t call back. Beth’s explanation was too simple, too pat. There was a flaw in it somewhere. The mere fact that Nancy’s name had passed through his head a week ago had monstrous implication here, if only he could see what it was.

Now he thought of something else: who had made the
first
call, the call-waiting call? He could grasp the idea that a person might somehow make a telepathic phone call, that he might get Nancy on the phone for mysterious telepathic reasons. But if she hadn’t called him first, who had?
Had he called himself?
But how could he call himself if he was on the phone talking to Anthony? It suggested an independent consciousness—someone or something inside his head who, or which, had set off the call-waiting beep. His brain reeled. Again the specter of schizophrenia loomed in his mind.

He wandered out back to find Nina, who was in the sandbox building a fort out of twigs, and for a half hour he crawled around helping, finding sticks and leaves and rocks so that Nina could keep building. In the shrubbery he found a fallen nest, which he showed to her. Pushed down into the bent twigs was a plain brown and black feather, a sparrow feather, beautiful in its simplicity

. . .

It was three days later, after he’d had time to simmer down again, that there was another phone call. It happened the same way as before, except this time he ignored an incoming call because he was talking to his father, who was ninety and troubled and couldn’t grasp the idea of being put on hold. After hanging up, still worrying about their chat, he punched in the star-six-nine return without any anticipation at all, the Nancy episode temporarily forgotten. The strangely familiar voice at the other end brought him instantly to his senses.

For a moment he was at a loss, but then, as before, he identified himself and asked if anyone there had called him.

“Art? Is that you?”

“Yeah,” Art said, “it’s me.” He still didn’t place the voice.

“This is Steven. Steven Nichols.”

“Steven! How the hell are you doing?” His hand trembled so violently that he knocked the telephone receiver against his teeth, and he had to force himself to ask Steven the same questions he had asked Nancy. He was distracted the entire time by the uncanny coincidence of having seen Steven’s name on their Christmas card list just a couple of days ago. He hadn’t given it a moment’s thought at the time, just a glance, but he recalled that it had been there, on the dining room table along with four boxes of Christmas cards that Beth was determined to get into the mail early. Here it was again—the same damned thing as with Nancy. He hadn’t talked to Steven in years.

“Not me,” Steven told him when Art asked if he’d called. “I made a couple of phone calls fifteen or twenty minutes ago, but I didn’t call you. Mine were local calls anyway. What the hell’s your area code?”

“Seven-one-four,” Art said pointlessly. He already knew beyond doubt that Steven hadn’t called him.

“Not a chance, man. It’s good to hear from you, though.” There was doubt in his voice, however. Evidently it wasn’t all
that
good to have heard from Art, at least under the circumstances: five years of silence and then a nut call out of the blue. When he hung up he wondered whether to reveal this to Beth or to keep it to himself. He remembered what Anthony had said about cutting the heads off dogs, which had seemed funny to him at the time. Now it didn’t seem so funny.

Had he
made
the possum cross the road, just like he had apparently made the phone do his psychic bidding? Why not? And if he had, then where would it end? Airplanes plunging from the sky? Cars veering off the road? His
own
car veering off the road, just as his own telephone had veered off course?

He was full of a new fear, something that he hadn’t seen before, although it had always been right there in front of him: none of these episodes was within his conscious control. All of them had simply
happened
to him while he was thinking of something else, like the onset of a disease. He hadn’t
wanted
Nancy or Steven to call. He hadn’t been in high hopes of spotting a possum. This new aspect was horrifying in its simplicity. He had a sort of psychic Midas touch, only worse, because at least Midas had to put his finger out and poke something.

He took out his wallet and found the receipt from the bookstore, then punched Krystal’s number into the phone, counting the rings, ready to be connected to any damned thing at all. The telephone had become a monster of unpredictability. The world had become a monster of unpredictability. Krystal, God bless her, answered the phone with a simple hello.

“Yeah, hey, I’m a friend of your brother’s and he gave me your number,” Art said. “I’ll come straight to the point. I’ve had a couple of psychic experiences, and I’m really … mystified. He says you’ve got some kind of group.”

He half hoped that she would ask questions so that he could unburden himself right now, but she didn’t; she simply told him to come by on Thursday night at seven and to bring cookies. He wrote her address on the receipt and put it into his wallet again. Beth might roll her eyes at the very idea of him being involved in a society of psychics, but he had to go, and realistically she would agree that he had to go. After all, Nancy didn’t know Steven from Adam, and even a skeptic like Beth would admit that the two of them couldn’t be in cahoots to plague Art with some kind of complex phone prank. Beth’s attempts at simple explanations, even the theory that he was crazy, just didn’t work.

. . .

Beth turned out to be almost encouraging about the Thursday night meeting, not even objecting to Krystal’s name. She was simply happy that he would have another ear to bend. By now the paranormal had become virtually the only subject that he could focus on. All their discussions drifted in that direction—either that or his mind drifted that way and he left Beth and the discussion behind. He had promised Nina twice that he would go feathering with her, but had put it off both times, and Beth wasn’t picking up the slack there. She was leaving Nina’s project to him, giving him a chance to keep his promises.

Krystal’s house was in Santa Ana, a nice old Mediterranean place off Flower Street with arched windows and a tile roof. The door was opened by a small man in a goatee and startlingly thick eyeglasses, who took the cookies from him. “Welcome,” he said, showing Art in. “Krystal is meditating. My name is Roderick Gunther.”

“Art Johnson,” Art said, nodding. “Pleased to meet you.” There were a dozen others milling around inside. Art seemed to be the only one who had brought cookies, although there were pots of tea kept hot on metal racks. He could smell incense and burning Sterno.

He was a little unnerved to see that the rest of the crowd were members of an identifiable type—bookish and unstylish and evidently eccentric, except for one blonde woman who looked a great deal like Marilyn Monroe. She was attractive, with an evident sexual allure and a dress meant to emphasize it, but the word neurotic sprang into Art’s mind within ten seconds of being introduced to her. She had apparently led past lives, the same phenomenon that accounted for the presence of several others of the group. All of them had been of elevated rank centuries past, although the blonde woman, whose name turned out to be Cassandra, had been a peasant girl originally, only becoming a queen, like Ruth in the Bible, after catching the eye of the king. Art found himself uninterested in this kind of thing—not that he had any grudge against it, but because past lives were just that, past. His life and its weird complications was on the front burner right now. He thought of the man who could bend spoons, but noticed right off that the spoons by the teapots were made of plastic, and he felt a little bit let down.

After pouring a cup for himself and spooning in honey, he struck up a conversation with the man who had let him in, Roderick Gunther, who had written a book on Atlantis, and although Gunther’s connection to the lost city was obscure, there were hints that he could trace his lineage back to that far-flung time. His face was narrow and he was nearly chinless, and his forehead tilted back at a surprising angle. His heavy glasses magnified his eyes, which darted back and forth as he spoke, not as if his attention was wandering, but simply because of some optical tic. He showed Art a copy of his book, which was full of line drawings and maps, none of them very convincing. Art told him a little bit about his own adventures, the predictions, the telephone rigamarole. The man considered what he was saying with apparent interest.

“Which direction do you sleep?” Gunther asked.

“Pardon me?”

“Is your bed oriented east to west or north to south?”

“North to south,” Art told him.

“Good. And you sleep with your head to the …?

“South.”

“There’s
a problem. It’s as simple as this—you’re incorrectly magnetized. Turn around. Sleep with your head to the north.”

“All right,” Art said, nodding at the man. But it was impossible, actually. Their bedroom was set up in such a way that there was only one good place for the bed. If he turned around, he’d have to have his head at the foot end, in the middle of the room, and that seemed simply wrong to him. Sleeping backwards would certainly be the first step on the slippery slope of eccentricity Art noticed then that Gunther wore shoes with Velcro straps instead of laces and that there was a trail of hooked-together paper clips attached to his heel through a brass grommet.

“I drink and bathe in ocean water,” Gunther was telling him. “Not mere salt water, mind you, but
ocean
water.”

“Can
a person drink ocean water?” Art thought of sailors, dying of thirst in open boats.

“Oh yes, very much so—an astonishing array of minerals in ocean water. You want it from ten miles out, though, far beyond any sewage outfall, preferably from the depths. I have a contract with a fisherman out of San Pedro who keeps me supplied. If you’re interested I can increase the order. He’ll fill a ten-gallon drum for twenty dollars, but you’ll have to pick it up at the docks, and only on Sunday afternoon.”

A strange idea came into Art’s head—that Gunther ‘s high collar was intended to hide gill slits. Time to move on, he thought, and he excused himself cheerfully and wandered over to where a woman who must be Krystal talked to an older woman, perhaps in her seventies. “I’m Art Johnson,” he said, introducing himself to his hostess. “We spoke on the telephone.”