The Cauldron

by Jean Rabe

  But he didn’t. Nor did he remember a nineteen-car pile-up at the intersection of the bypass and 22, the result of a late-season sleet storm. In the same issue of the paper, though, President Reagan called for an embargo on oil from Libya, and he did remember that!

  Carl took a deep breath and threaded another reel into the viewer. In May, more tornadoes, these in southern Illinois. Ten dead. The click of recognition, a resurgence of the chill that never fully retreated: Yes, I knew about those. He worked his way on, through a plane crash in Louisiana in July, more minor disasters in August.

  In September he drew his first major blank since the tornadoes.

  Thirteen hundred people had died in a flood in El Salvador. Carl sat staring at the headlines, searching his mind for the faintest wisp of recognition. None. But surely, if six hundred people in Peru had left an impression, twice that many half as far away should, too?

  Nor did he have the faintest recollection of a horrifying fire in an apartment house in L.A., or of a helicopter crash at an air show in Germany.

  In mid-October, stories started to look familiar again. The explosion in a tunnel in Afghanistan in November was solid. So was Leonid Breshnev’s death. An earthquake in North Yeman killed almost three thousand, nothing like the stunning toll in Iran last June, or the one in Armenia a few years ago, but he remembered it …

  Carl sat back and rubbed his eyes. Except for a period from late August through the middle of October, all that was needed to jog his memory was a picture or a few lines of type. For that period, though, nothing jogged it. Which meant what?

  At least it was a pattern. None of the stories—or memories—involved either Omega or himself, but it was more than he’d had before.

  But there was more to the pattern than the timing. If it’s a pattern at all, and not just wishful thinking—or grasping at straws, more likely.

  What about the other gaps, the ones outside the main, August-to-October one? The tornado-balanced semi, for instance: surely if he’d ever seen it, he’d remember that picture. And that pile-up on the bypass—nobody killed, but dozens injured, and twelve hours to clear the wreckage. The Omega plant had been out that way! He would’ve been working there when the storms hit. He would’ve had to take a different route than usual to get home. But reading those stories raised not the faintest echo of recall.

  Reading those local stories.

  “Oh, god,” he whispered. He remounted the January reel and wound again through the months. By the time he reached September again, the chill was almost unbearable. But he no longer had any doubt. The second pattern was even clearer than the first: except for the two months in the fall, he remembered virtually every major national and international story. But he remembered not one thing, zero, zilch, nada about what had made news in and around Morgantown in 1970 or ‘71.

  A feeling of triumph battled the chill to a draw. He had existed before he moved into the duplex in Roseville and went to work for Harry! He just hadn’t existed where he remembered existing.

  Before he lost his nerve, before the chill could come flooding back and paralyze him, he snatched up the February 1970 reel and fumbled it into the viewer. The obituary wouldn’t be there. He had known that almost from the start. But its nonexistence would no longer mean that his mother hadn’t existed. All it would mean now was that she had lived—and died?—somewhere else. Wherever he, Carl, had also lived.

  ***

  Chapter 18

  Emotionless, he looked at the obituary page for Wednesday, February 20, 1970, and found no mention of Ellen Johnson, or of Ellen … Ellen …

  He frowned, trying to recapture the name that had flicked through his mind. Not his mother’s maiden name—that had been Warren—something else …

  Giving it up, Carl shoved the microfilm back in its box and into its place on the shelf. He’d solved as much of the mystery as it was possible to solve, he told himself. Answers to the remaining questions—where had he really lived those first twenty-some years? How much of what he “remembered” about Morgantown had happened at all?—could not be found in Morgantown. They might be in any of the thousands of towns scattered across the country.

  Or in none of them.

  It would take years—and dollars—to search through them all, looking for matches to what he carried around in his head. No, it was time to head back to Roseville and jump into Harry’s next project. If Harry would have him. And if he was able to work, if what he had learned here proved to be enough to keep the nightmares at bay.

  He was striding past the checkout desk when the street door burst open. The girl he’d given a ride to stumbled inside, looking even more harried than when she had wandered away from his car an hour before. Her face was flushed, her chest heaving. The knapsack was on her back, awry, one strap sliding off her shoulder.

  She leaned back, the knapsack against the door, blocking both halves. Carl saw her swallow, noticed she had two studs in each earlobe, garnets and sapphires. The woman at the checkout desk stood up.

  “May I help you, Miss?” she asked uneasily.

  The girl shook her head as if she’d just emerged from water, hauled her knapsack strap back onto her shoulder, and looked around. Her eyes met Carl’s and widened.

  “You again!” she gasped.

  Carl blinked. The woman at the desk turned to look at him.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Mister Carl Johnson,” the girl went on, sounding both fearful and defiant, “or how you do it, but this is the second time you’ve dragged me away from my breakfast, and I’ve had it! You just knock it off, you hear me?”

  Whatever she was snorting must have hit her really hard. “Sorry,” Carl said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He put his shoulder to the right half of the door and started to edge past her. The girl jerked away. As her knapsack thudded against the opposite side of the door frame, she stiffened. Her face twisted in a grimace, then, an instant later, transformed itself into an emotionless mask. Carl hesitated, wondering if she had injured herself.

  “Don’t bug out, man,” she said, her voice as expressionless as her face, as if she were reading the words from a script she’d never seen before.

  My god, he thought. What now? At least she hadn’t hurt herself. He tried a smile. “Sorry. I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.” She didn’t respond. “Can’t stay.”

  She clamped her hand around his forearm. “I’ll go with you.”

  He tried to shake her off, but the fingers bit into his sparse flesh. “Hey,” he said weakly, glancing sidelong at the woman at the checkout desk, “you don’t have to break my arm.”

  “Should I call somebody?” the woman at the desk asked. She reached for the telephone. “Nine-one-one?”

  Carl started to nod. The girl’s fingers clamped even tighter and the nod got lost in a wince. “Please, I gotta find out if I know you from someplace else,” she said, her voice still robotically flat.

  For a moment he could only gape at the eerie contrast between what the girl said and how she said it, between her iron grip on his arm and the expressionless mask of her face, but then the meaning of her words penetrated. His stomach did a sudden flip. If by some miracle this girl knew where he had really spent the first twenty-two years of his life—

  Swallowing, he shook his head at the woman at the checkout desk. “No need to call anyone,” he said quickly, and then, when she didn’t immediately put the phone down: “Her folks are friends of mine. I’ll get in touch with them.”

  Without waiting for any more of a response to his lie, he backed out the door, the girl still attached to his arm. She stumbled on the brass threshold, and then on the top step as the door clunked shut behind them. On the sidewalk, out of sight of the checkout desk, he stopped and faced her.

  “You know me from someplace else?” he asked, leaning close and peering into her blank eyes. “You mean besides the ride I gave you? You knew me before that?”

  “I sure hope—”

>   She stopped. Her eyelids fluttered. The mask vanished. Her eyes dropped to her hand. She let go of his arm as if she’d discovered she was holding a cobra.

  “You did it again,” she said, her voice no longer flat but filled with a mixture of fear and anger. “You did it again!”

  “Did what again?” What the hell was going on with her? Was she just another street crazy, one with a full-blown case of multiple personality? The way Nixon’s cutbacks had emptied the mental wards in the early seventies, anything was possible. But if there was even the slightest chance that she—or one of her personalities—really did know him from somewhere else, if that was why she’d looked at him in the Embers, if that was why she’d asked for a ride—

  “What are you doing to me?” she asked, her voice and eyes both suddenly plaintive as she tilted her head back to search his face. “Please—”

  Carl swallowed. “You said something about missing breakfast,” he said, deliberately softening his voice. “Come on. I’ll buy lunch.”

  Her eyes hardened for a moment, her nostrils flaring. Then she sighed, not quite a shudder. “From the way things have been going, I probably don’t have a whole hell of a lot of choice. All right, let’s go—before I come to my senses and try to brain you with the first blunt object I can lay my hands on. Besides,” she added with a snort, “if you’re with me, maybe I’ll actually be able to eat something before I get dragged off again!”

  O O O

  The place she picked had outdoor tables and sold pizza by the pie and by the slice. It also had a salad bar, the sight of which brought the first genuine smile he’d seen to her face. Carl paid for the salad bar and for a fourteen-inch pizza with mushrooms, black olives, and extra cheese. She was already moving along the salad bar with a plate when he turned away from the cash register.

  “My god,” he said, when he caught up with her. “How do you stay so thin?”

  “How do you stay alive?” she shot back, glancing at his own half-filled plate.

  “I ate breakfast less than two hours ago,” he reminded her.

  They settled at one of the outdoor tables. She ate neatly but wasted no time. “So,” Carl said when she slowed and began glancing toward the window where the order numbers were displayed, “do you live here in Morgantown?”

  “Morgantown?” The girl looked up from the remnants of her salad, glanced around at the sunlit street. “Is that where I am? No, I don’t live here. Just passing through.”

  “How about a name? You never did tell me who you are.”

  “Jerrah,” she said, surprising him: he’d almost expected her to clam up. “Jerrah Foxxi.” Frowning, she added, “Please don’t make a joke of it.”

  “Not if you promise not to ask me how the weather is up here, or whether I play basketball.”

  She shrugged, and then grinned faintly. “Deal.”

  “Jerrah Foxxi …” He shook his head. “Sorry, no bells.”

  “Should there be?”

  “I was hoping there would, after what you said back at the library.”

  She frowned. “And what did I say that got your hopes up?”

  “That you thought you knew me from somewhere. Or words to that effect.”

  The frown deepened. “I said that?”

  “You did.”

  Silence, then a shrug. “If you say so.”

  “You don’t remember saying it?”

  She shook her head as she forked up a slice of tomato. “But if it makes you happy, I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Greencastle.”

  “I know where that is,” Carl said. “But I’ve never been there.”

  “Then I guess that’s not where we met.” She speared the one remaining olive with her fork and popped it into her mouth, chewing. “If we met.”

  “Did you ever live anywhere else?” he asked. “Say ten or fifteen years back?”

  She shook her head. “Greencastle and environs, born and raised, until I went away to college.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Hell yes, I’m positive!” she flared. “What kind of dummy do you think I am? Look, Mister Carl Johnson or whatever your name is, don’t you think this game has gone on long enough? In the first place, I still do not recall—do not recall, got that? I do not recall saying anything about knowing you from somewhere else. In the second place, if I had said it, I would’ve been lying, because I don’t know you from somewhere else. And I don’t know you from Adam. I do not know you, period.”

  “But you did say—”

  “What the hell difference does it make to you what I said or didn’t say? I’m the one getting jerked around, not you!”

  “Jerked around? How?”

  “How?” She snorted. “How? How the hell should I know? I’m just the jerkee! You’re the jerk doing the jerking!” Abruptly, her scowl was edged with uncertainty, maybe fear. “You are, aren’t you?”

  Carl swallowed, shook his head. “Not so far as I know. In fact, I’ve been subjected to some world class jerking around myself the past few days,” he said. Or out-of-this-world class, he added to himself, remembering the hypothetical things that might or might not have yanked him into that foggy limbo, out of the paths of a semi and a pair of bullets.

  “So tell me about yours, and why you think I’ve got anything to do with it.”

  “You’ve got something to do with it because every time I get picked up and marched someplace, there you are at the end of the track, that’s why!”

  “Picked up? Marched?”

  “Whatever! All I know is, I got about two bites of toast in that place this morning when you left, and the next thing I know, I’m staring in your window asking for a ride—a ride that I do not want! Same thing the next time I tried to eat, after you let me off downtown. Food shows up and I blank out and I’m in a library, not a restaurant! And there you are again!”

  “You blanked out? You can’t remember walking from the restaurant to the—”

  “No, I don’t remember! Okay?” She shook her head violently and looked toward the pick-up window. “Where’s that pizza? Are they growing a cow for the cheese?”

  Shading his eyes, Carl saw that his order number had come up. “It’s ready,” he said. “Hold on, I’ll get it.”

  Coming back with the hot pizza on a round of cardboard, he saw Jerrah gripping the edge of the table as if to anchor herself in her seat.

  “Took you long enough,” she muttered as he set the pizza down. She grabbed a piece instantly. “So what’s your story?” she asked around the first mouthful.

  Where to start? Not with the fog and the times when, like her, he had suddenly found himself someplace he didn’t remember going, certainly not with his—insane?—suspicion that something in the fog was doing these things to him—to them both. She was—understandably—spooked enough already.

  “Let’s just say things have gone crazy for me the past few days,” he said. “For one thing, the first twenty or so years of my life have disappeared. Or been misplaced.”

  “Amnesia?”

  “Something like that, I suppose,” he lied, then returned to the truth, such as it was. “I’ve lived in Roseville, four or five hundred miles from here, near Milwaukee, the past eight years, but I remember growing up here in Morgantown, going to school, the whole routine. Only nobody here remembers me. And there’s no record that I ever attended school or anything else.” He swallowed. “I figure all this stuff I remember must’ve happened somewhere else, but I don’t have a clue where that somewhere else is. That’s why, when you said you thought you knew me—”

  “I’ve been to Milwaukee a few times for the festivals, been to the Dells when I was a kid. Janesville once with an uncle. Don’t think much about Wisconsin. Certainly didn’t see you there.” She snorted and continued her assault on the pizza. Carl fell silent and waited patiently. As the pizza disappeared, her frown seemed to grow less angry, the looks she darted at him from under lowered
lids less furtive, more—thoughtful? When she finished, she stared for a long moment at the two slices that were still left, finally sucked in her breath and looked up at him.

  “Like I said,” she began, “I don’t remember ever seeing you before, anywhere, anytime. But the way things have been going today, ever since I got within evil-eye distance of you—” She shook her head, some of the anger returning, but with it some of the fear. “You swear you’re not doing it to me?”

  He shook his head in answer. “Word of honor. I’m at least as confused about it as you are.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Anyway, that walk from the Wendy’s to the library isn’t the only thing I don’t remember or that doesn’t make sense. I’m not missing twenty years, like you, not yet, but …”

  “How much—” he began when her voice trailed off into silence.

  “Don’t rush me!” she snapped. “It’s going to sound stupid enough without you rushing me! Okay?”

  “It can’t sound any stupider than me misplacing two thirds of my life,” he said, forcing a smile.

  Her scowl faded into a sigh. “Don’t bet on it. For starters, I don’t have the faintest idea why I’m even in this stupid town. Didn’t even know what it was called ‘til you told me!”

  “You’re saying you blanked out and woke up in Morgantown?”

  She shook her head. “It’s even dumber. I was on a bus this morning, heading from Summer Fest to get home, and for no reason at all I pulled the cord and it stopped and I just got off. I mean, out of the blue, I’m thinking, ‘hey, why don’t I get off here?’ So up I stand and forward I walk and I’m going down the stairs when the driver yells, hey, you forgot your pack, so somebody threw it at me and I could hardly stand still to catch it.”

  Carl nodded at her, remembering he’d had to wait to turn left into the Embers lot for a Greyhound with Chicago on its sign. “I think I saw your bus.”

  “Yeah. So I’m standing on the sidewalk looking around, wondering what kind of crazy stunt I’d just pulled, and the bus takes off!” Jerrah started playing with the droplets of oil that had collected in the bottom of her plate, using one tine of the fork to tease them into connecting into one big drop. “So what do I do but start walking,” she finally resumed, “right back the way we’d come. Next thing I know, I’m three or four blocks away, in front of that Embers place and I have to go in. I mean, I’m just a grad student, I don’t have enough money for anything more upscale than a McDonald’s. But then I see their sign outside about a breakfast special, and I think, well, maybe I can afford that, so I go in and I see you, and—”