LITMIR.BIZ

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I waited a few seconds and heard clicking noises, a funny bleeping tone, and then a recording that said that the number was no longer in service. I called Information, but the operator told me that there was no record of a Mancini residence in Murphysboro. Miserably disappointed, I sat down on my neatly-made bed and flipped through the phone book again. The Mancini number was there, and I had no memory of them moving.

      Maybe I’ve gone back to a different past.

      I sat on my bed and spent a half hour staring down at my dull leather boots in a futile attempt to ignore the 20th century. Finally the knob to the hall door twisted, and Harry slumped into the room with a subtle nod.

      He didn’t have his usual four or five books under his arm; instead there was a single box. I remembered that my roommate was a person of rigid habits, so this change intrigued me. He sat down at his desk, opened the box as if it contained, say, a vase from the Ming Dynasty that he had stolen from some museum, and pulled out a shiny new gooseneck lamp.

      He plugged it in and twisted the switch on top of the shade. The lamp flooded the desk with a strong warm light.

      “Hey, this is really cock, Federson…” he said. “Look, man, it has three settings….soft…”

      Click.

      “…medium...”

      Click.

      “...and high.”

      Click.

      Harry moved the lamp from one position to another on his desk, twisting around the gooseneck, and putting it through its paces by repeatedly switching it from low to medium to high.

      I remember this!

      I remembered Harry buying a new lamp. Come to think of it, I remembered a lot of things from the ‘70s now.

      “Nixon is going to resign in ‘74!” I muttered.

      “What did you say, Federson?” Harry mumbled into a book.

      “I said…nice lamp, and…”

      I pushed hard on that 38-year-long block to my memory, until something finally trickled out.

      “Harry, wear your seatbelt.”

      “What? What about a seatbelt, Federson?” Harry looked up.

      “You’re going to be in a traffic accident soon. A squirrel or something darts in front of you and if you don’t wear your seatbelt you’ll wind up in the emergency room with a concussion and a big lump on your forehead. The right side, I think.”

      Harry looked at me in shock.

      “Federson, now you’re getting spooky.” He reached for his pipe.

      “Harry, promise me. Promise me, that you’ll wear the damned seatbelt.”

      “OK, Federson, I will.”

      But I didn’t believe him.

      With a bemused expression, Harry settled on a medium setting for his lamp, lit his pipe, went back to work, and apparently didn’t notice the shiny new coat of wax on the floor.

      I had a clear idea of the history of the future until 2009, but the farther I went back, the hazier world events became. Within my reach was the maroon mechanical pencil the soldier had given to me on the train. I picked it up; it seemed to fit my hand perfectly. Without thinking, I wrote in neat cursive script, something I had not done for decades.

      1. Nixon resigns in August of 1974 because of his role in the cover-up of the Watergate breakin.

      2. Gerald Ford becomes president. He’s followed by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush the Elder, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush the Younger, and Barack Obama.

      3. Inflation will go to double digits in the ‘70s.

      4. In 1975, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest wins Best Picture.

      5. The space shuttle Challenger will blow up shortly after launch in 1984. (I think)

      6. The PC will be invented in the ‘70s and will be used on a massive scale, as will the Internet, by the ‘90s.

      7. The Cold War will end in 1991.

      8. 9/11

      8. The White Sox will win the World Series in 2005, for the first time in 88 years.

      10. The “Great Recession” will start in 2007.

      11. Barack Obama, the first black president, will be elected in 2008.

      12. In May 2009, an inland hurricane will sweep through Southern Illinois, creating widespread destruction.

      13. In October 2009, Peter Federson will be yanked back in time to 1971.

      I found a red magic marker in my desk and printed over the top of this list:

      WHAT I KNOW.

      And I taped the paper to my wall next to my desk.

      Soon, Harry closed his book and placed it on the shelf, and got up to leave.

      “Going to lunch, Federson?”

      “Naw, I got some things to do.” I wasn’t hungry, anyway.

      Clouds filled the sky, the air smelled of rain, and the gremlins, who thrived on gloomy weather, were standing by to pluck a nerve. I knew what was coming.

      Don’t think… function!

      I slid open the blond wood accordion door to the closet, and felt that I was intruding on someone else’s privacy: my own, thirty-eight years removed. Some clothes were on hangers and the rest were piled on the dresser, which was built into the closet.

      What a garish assortment: bright red plaid bell bottoms with cuffs, shirts with huge collar points, wide paisley neckties in brutally clashing colors…clothing designs that in any other period of recorded history would be considered absurd. I found a tin of aspirin in the pile—probably handy for headaches caused by the sight of that gaudy stack of fabric.

      The clothes in the dresser looked as if they had been dumped out of the same bag that had been emptied out onto my desk before I had cleaned it up. Grayish underwear, a couple of turtleneck shirts, two pairs of new jeans that were as stiff as corpses, a hopelessly wrinkled maroon sweatshirt with SIU in a white circle on the front. But on top was a well-organized sock drawer, the socks neatly rolled into themselves.

      “Well, some things never change,” I murmured, remembering that the sock drawer in my trailer was organized the same way.

      And there, hanging in the closet, was the project of the day: twenty pounds of laundry stuffed into a ten-pound bag.

      In the laundry room, in the basement of the dorm, I stuffed my clothes in the washers, which only cost 10 cents for a load, got them going, and went back upstairs. A half hour later, I bounced back down the stairs and found a stopped dryer full of somebody else’s dry clothes. I laid them neatly on the laundry table and put my clothes in the drier. Thirty minutes later, while whistling a Chopin Etude, I trotted downstairs again to pick up my clean laundry, but it wasn’t in the dryer…it was on the floor.

      As I was angrily picking it up, I heard behind me: “Listen, asshole, don’t mess with my shit. Do you hear me?”

      I turned around and saw a six-foot-tall kid staring at me with squint-eyed fury. Muscles bulged under his cutoff T-shirt.

      “They seemed dry to me,” I said as the gremlins banged my nerves.

      “Bullshit!” The kid looked like he was going to leap at me. I backed warily away from him with my dripping clothes in my arms and darted up the stairs. This was the incident that I had been harboring in my mind for nearly 40 years, and it hit me with a psychological body blow. With shaking hands and mounting anger, I flipped through the Von Reichmann Book.

      “The nervous person must understand that other people are entitled to have opinions that differ from yours,” I read

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