Sherwood stood up. “How did you know my middle name is Evan?”
“Will you get out, please?”
“I want to know.”
“I happen to have a good memory, that’s all.” Trefethen crossed to open the hall door for him. “Now don’t give me any trouble, just leave.”
“But it’s important to me! I want to know, I want to know what I’ve done for the past eleven years!”
“You have carried the role far enough, Mr. Fisher. Now leave before I am forced to take stern measures.”
There being no apparent alternative, Sherwood picked up the money and left the office.
* * * *
On the way back to the motel Sherwood stopped in a cocktail lounge, hoping to find solace in the air-conditioned, plush surroundings and soft lights, a moment’s respite from the puzzle so that he might go refreshed to do battle with it again. But he did not find comfort there. He ordered his drink and felt lonely and friendless among the late afternoon patrons who chattered around him, each looking and sounding so secure and confident in his life. Walter Evan Sherwood was not of this day and age; he was a man apart, a man out of time, a man transposed from his generation.
What the psychiatrist had known about him kept eating at the edge of his mind. Would any of these people know it, too? Maybe I should have pressed Trefethen, he thought. But the doctor’s look had been a menacing one and I am in a poor position to press anyone. Start pushing people around and I’ll end up with the police pushing me around and wouldn’t that be great?
What was it Trefethen knew? Am I a criminal? Has he read some account of me in the paper? Maybe it’s just as well he didn’t believe me. He might have called the police if he had.
The drinks failed to do anything, so he left the lounge feeling lost and purposeless, returning to the motel, hoping he’d find the girl had returned. But she wasn’t there, hadn’t been. Things were just as he’d left them.
He lay on the bed trying to think things through, seeking a possible, positive course of action. There seemed only one and that entailed a trip halfway across the United States, but there didn’t seem to be anything else, and besides, he had the car.
He decided to take it and dozed off wondering if, when he awakened next, it would be eleven years from then, he’d be forty-eight, and it would go on and he’d be fifty-nine the next time, then seventy, eighty-one, ninety-two…one hundred and three…
FIVE
The water bag Sherwood had bought in Los Angeles as a safety measure in crossing the Mojave was still draped over the hood ornament when he rolled the car to a stop in the parking area in front of the administration building of Illinois Midwest College In Farrell.
The trip from the west coast had been uneventful and short, paced as it was by his sense of urgency. He had made the last run from Hastings, Nebraska, to Farrell in one jump, beginning shortly after midnight because he had only tossed and turned in the motel bed there and decided he might as well be on the road; there’d be time for sleep after he found what he had done with his life. Or would there? What if it turned out he had done something terrible? It was the thought of a possible something terrible that kept him moving. What was it. the doctor had said? Some experience that made the mind refuse to accept reality, wiping out the memory? But the doctor didn’t seem to think it was amnesia. Just a joke.
His entry into Farrell was that of a stranger. No one waved and there was no glimmer of recognition in anyone’s eye even when he stopped downtown to ask directions to the campus—not that he expected anything, but he had been in Farrell more recently than he had Los Angeles, and though the townspeople were not apt to remember one of many students, he could not be sure, especially since he had been remembered as far away as Los Angeles by a man named Trefethen.
Sherwood turned the car northward where the school he should have recalled sprawled over the north end of the community, a composite of college and residence buildings, elm-lined streets, curved walks, looking ever so much as he imagined it, except for air conditioners that protruded from windows—he could not get used to this breaking of architectural line, the second most pronounced change in eleven years, the first being the forests of television antennas that had sprouted everywhere.
The administration building was clearly the oldest building on the campus, the face of it covered completely by ivy except where the windows were, and the broad stairs were not concrete but hewn stone that had failed through the years to keep true to the mason’s level. Inside the large double doors that hissed closed behind him it was cool, a gratification after the muggy July Illinois heat, and he examined the small signs over the doors, finding the Office of Admissions and Records half way down the corridor.
The lone woman in the office rose from a far desk, slipped her glasses off her nose to let them hang on two blue ribbons from around her neck, picked up her handkerchief and came to the counter to say pleasantly. “Can I help you?”
“I’d like to take a look at my records,” Sherwood said without hesitation. “My name is Walter Evan Sherwood.”
She smiled. “Wouldn’t you rather have a transcript? It can be easily arranged; most everyone does it. That way you don’t have to wait while we look for it. We’ll run it through photostat and send it wherever you like. It costs only fifty cents.”
“No, I just want to look at it and take a few notes.”
“That’s odd, you know,” she said, moving away to a large filing cabinet. “Most people just send letters and a money order or check. Not very many come to look up the records personally.”
“I started in nineteen forty-six.” he said helpfully. And he had a thought: Suppose I have no record here? Suppose I didn’t go to school at all?
“It doesn’t make any difference. We file them all alphabetically. Sherwood, is it? Let’s see.” She drew out a drawer. “It ought to be easy to find. Sheldon, Sheldon, Shelley, Shenton… Mmm… Sheridan. That’s more like it. Sherman, Sherman. Sherman. Never knew we had so many Shermans. Sherwood. There. No. That’s Perry Sherwood. Ah, here we are. Walter Sherwood. Walter Evan Sherwood.” She withdrew the folder and carried it to the counter. “Pre-Med. I suppose you’re a doctor now.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking the card and not wanting to commit himself, eager to have a look at-it.
“You understand you’re not to take the card out of the office.”
“I understand,” he said, nodding, wishing she would leave him, absorbed in the paper.
Walter Evan Sherwood had started the first semester 1946-1947 at Midwest with Chemistry 102, Hygiene 101, English 101, Zoology 101, Physical Education and Math 114, and for a moment he was sad to think of his not remembering any of it. His grades were excellent, too, with only a single B, and that in English. Well, he had never cared much for gerunds and ablatives and parsing. But he was surprised by the good marks nonetheless.
The second semester 1946-1947 was much like the first, with a more advanced chemistry, inorganic and qualitative analysis, trigonometry, English again and comparative vertebrate anatomy, and the grades were all A’s. Quite a student, this Walter Sherwood, he mused.
He looked for the first semester 1947-1948, found instead the summer semester 1947, and thought: I didn’t rest in the summer, did I, I wonder why I was in such a hell of a hurry why did I get nothing but A’s didn’t I have a social life or anything to interfere? Now why was I running like that?
He looked down the column. It ended with the summer of 1948, with vertebrate embryology. What then? That only represented three years of work. He looked up into the eyes of the woman.
“Are you really Mr. Sherwood?” she asked.
“Why do you ask that?”
“If you’re not, I shouldn’t be letting you see those records.”
“Well, I am.”
“You were looking at them as if you’d never seen them before, as if you never heard of this Sherwood.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I wish I never had.” And when she laughed
and he knew he had convinced her, he put the card down. “Looking at this record only brings back how hard I worked, packing three years’ work in two years. I should have finished the four years.” He sighed with a weariness he did not feel and waited for her to take the bait.
“That would have been silly,” she said. “Sure, you could have gotten your B. S., but that’s all. You should be happy you transferred out.” She ran a polished fingernail under the card, picked it up and inserted it in the folder. “Too many of them just put in their four years and that’s it, no direction, no goal, just getting a degree and going on from there. At least you knew where you were going.”
“Yes,” he said lightly. “Thank God for that.” Come on, come on, tell me what I want to know.
“Did you do as well in medical school?”
“Oh, yes.” He felt the sweat begin, not wanting to be at this disadvantage, seeking a way to turn it so she’d give him information instead, trying to smile extravagantly and knowing it was only a shadow of a grin. “By the way, do you have it recorded where I went? I mean, I want the record straight.”
She opened the folder and nodded. “I’m sure this is right.” What is it? he wanted to scream.
“Ryerson Medical in Chicago?”
“That’s right.”
Sherwood thanked her and left the building, buoyant with a sense of real accomplishment. May 15, 1946, was no longer the end of the Walter Sherwood he knew. He had traced himself through the summer of 1948. Oh, he hadn’t done any more than establish the fact that he had gone to Midwest for two years, but at least that was definite. The little things, the place (or places) he lived, the things he did, his extracurricular activities, the people he knew, loved, hated, tolerated, argued with, the people who made up his life for those two years at Midwest were at the moment unimportant compared with the larger information, the picture of his entire life, the joining together of the two threads, the one dangling in a room in a house on Dahlia Drive in Los Angeles on May 15, 1946, and which now dangled provocatively at the end of summer in 1948, and the other end of the thread which lay loose and untied in a motel on Colorado Boulevard in July, 1957.
The threads must be joined, had to he joined before he could feel a whole man. There would be time for filling in, for putting the flesh on the bones, later.
Webster, Illinois, was only a jog off the route to Chicago from Farrell, so Sherwood abandoned the good road to turn off on an older, cracked highway to the small town. He would have rather continued on to Chicago, but with Webster so close he felt he should visit it to see where Morley Donn Fisher was supposed to live, telling himself he’d be wise to be careful and unobtrusive because he didn’t know what Webster knew of Mr. Fisher and for all he knew there might be a warrant out for his arrest.
The town was one of those that had flourished in the days of the horsedrawn vehicle, being midway between a certain number of larger communities, thriving with the advent of the motorcar, but withering on the vine with the coming of larger, straighter highways and belt lines, bypassed and forgotten, trains no longer stopping at the old station, the stores run down, the streets bumpy and badly in the need of repair.
Sherwood drove through the two-block business district, then started to circle it, looking for Summit Avenue. He found an old wooden Street sign that designated it, started west, noting the numbers as he went. They stopped with 508. There was simply nothing beyond it except a railroad crossing and the beginning of a corn field. He went down the rutted road for more than a mile, not finding a house.
There was, then, no 1213 Summit Avenue.
He turned around, followed the street to the business-section. There was no continuation of Summit Avenue on the other side of town.
Morley Donn Fisher did not live at 1213 Summit Avenue in Webster, Macon County, Illinois, because there was no 1213.
And also because, more probably, there was no Morley Donn Fisher, he told himself.
He toyed with the idea of inquiring at the post office, but decided against it. He was too close to Chicago and what he could find at the Ryerson Medical School to jeopardize what might happen if he got out of the car in Webster.
Still, the puzzle of Fisher and the fictitious address kept gnawing at his mind, and he wished he could put it in place along with the other unsolved parts, fitting them together as a whole and seeing it all at once and making sense out of it.
* * * *
He saw Ryerson Medical School in the bright light of the next morning, a time-worn brick building on Chicago’s north side, a point equidistant to a half dozen hospitals, though it was Wright Memorial that was the training ground for the student personnel, and it looked like anything but what he thought a medical school Should, an office building with its fluorescent lighting perhaps, or a hospital, even a small factory was conceivable, but there was no denying the chiseled-in-stone Roman letters that told what it was above the columns to either side of the entranceway.
Sherwood stood across the street from it for a while, watching several groups of young men and women with books under their arms coming and going, chatting as they moved on the broad steps, and he felt alien, not moved by the inner compulsion of this other life he’d had, and feeling he was a stranger about to inquire into the history of someone else, a creature long dead and forgotten, but finding it necessary to take this step because it was all part of the job now, to fit this in with the rest, not knowing what he would find, suddenly not caring too much because this was so foreign to his nature now.
He moved across the street like any other man, moving up the steps now as the others had, passing the portals he surely must have passed countless time before, knowing he was closer to what he was seeking, that there might even be recognition here in this busy place, seeing the high ceilings and walls, the cleanliness of it, and the smells he associated with things medical, thinking my but this is an old place but I suppose its age has nothing to do with what’s taught here.
“Dr. Sherwood!”
Sherwood looked at several faces before he saw him, a fair-sized, black-haired man with a ruddy face, heavy eyebrows and glasses, wearing a gray smock with pencils and instruments in a breast pocket beneath which was stitched in a label bearing the words Max Rankel.
The grinning man extended a long hand from the smock sleeve as he approached, and when Sherwood took it he pumped it hard. “Where’ve you been, Walt? You dropped out of here as if you didn’t know us. How’ve you been?”
“All right…Max, isn’t it?”
“You’re darn right,” Rankel said, slapping his upper arm heartily. “Don’t tell me you’d forget old Rankel that easy now, bud. Gee, you look good. Whatever you’re doing must agree with you.”
“It has, Max, Nice to see you again.”
“Come on, come on, what’re you doing here, anyway? You know not many ever get enough time to come back.” He chuckled. “Maybe most of them are too damn glad to get the hell out of here, eh?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sherwood said indefinitely. “I thought I’d come around and take a look at my records. Might bring back some of the old times,” he said truthfully, trying to fit Rankel’s mood and wondering how best to use it.
“They can do that any old time in the office. This calls for a celebration.” He looked at a wall clock and groaned. “And there’s all day yet and I can’t take off because of the end of summer work. Look, what’re you doing for lunch? We could run down to Amy’s—”
“Well, there are a few things I have to do, Max.”
“Sounds like old Sherwood, always on the go. Tell you what, Walt, there’s a class this morning, we’re working on three dogs, perineorrhaphy and all that for the catheter deal in this section—you know the routine. I’ll be there until about eleven, so let me know.”
Sherwood smiled, not making heads or tails of what he was talking about. “Maybe you can do one thing for me before you go, Max.”
“Sure, Walt. Name it, boy.”
“Which of my old
instructors do you think I ought to see first?”
“Are you kidding? Old Booey’s been, heartsick since you left like that. He had you figured for an assistantship, you know. You’d better go on up and see him.”
“Where’s he at now, Max?”
“Still the same place.” He darted a look at the clock. “I got to be sailing. Damn fools’re apt to weigh out enough nembutal to put those dogs away for keeps if I’m not there to steady their grubby little hands.” He moved down the hall, saying over his shoulder, “Don’t forget now.”
Sherwood turned away, wondering who Rankel was and what he did at Ryerson, certain he had in him at least one source of information if all the others failed. He found the office, met a woman who chatted indifferently while she produced his records, and looked them over.
Medicine, physiology, histology, pathology, microanatomy, minor surgery, major surgery, clinical medicine, and a host of others, some of them hardly pronounceable, and all A’s. Once again he marveled at the Sherwood that was and the drive that had been his, never letting up, moving to Ryerson from Midwest, plunging right in in the fall of 1948, working without ceasing through the spring of 1951.
“You should be proud of that record, Doctor,” the woman was saying. “Not many of them manage to go through the way you did.”
“Thanks,” he said, moving the forms across the counter to her and wondering exactly what she meant. He could see he got through in a hurry, but that was no change from Midwest. “Can you tell me where I’ll find Dr. Booey?”
“Oh, he’s not been changed.”
Why did they insist on putting it that way?
“Would you mind telling me just where that is?” he asked, deciding to chance the direct question.
“Why, third floor south,” she said, giving him a puzzled look.
“Thanks.”
SIX
SHERWOOD FOUND Dr. Booey where the office girl said he would, but of course he did not know at first it was Dr. Booey, this man he saw lecturing to the crowded classroom, his back to anatomy charts on the wall. The lecturing man gave him one glance, said something to the class Sherwood could not hear, put his pointer on the desk and walked through the door to the hallway to him.
The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack Page 26
