diploma while I was moving, so since I was passing through town I went up to the high school to get a printout of my records. They’ve lost them, too.”
The yearbook was wrong.
What Carl remembered was black, with gold letters. This was dark green, the date—1966—and the title silver. Not as bold as he remembered, either.
What happened to my copy? The black one? Did I lose it in a move? He touched the crinkled finish of the cover, almost afraid to open it. Everybody has a high school yearbook! At least from their senior year. He’d bought one, he knew. Five dollars? No, that couldn’t be. This book was thick and would cost more than that. Five dollars, his memory stubbornly insisted. Well, maybe they’d had some kind of subsidy so the students paid a discount price.
He remembered the day he picked it up in homeroom, looking for his own picture, his friends’ pictures, the book delivered at the last minute from Heckman’s Binder in Winchester twenty miles away. Signing his friends’ yearbooks and having them sign his. The agony of trying to think of something clever to write. Then what? Surely he’d taken it home? Shown it to his parents? But he couldn’t for the life of him recall doing that. As if the book had vaporized when he walked out of the school with it.
And the book had been black. It had had gold letters. This one—
Inside, nothing was right. Not the layout, not the format. Pictures angled across the pages instead of sitting where they belonged. Captions were set as silhouettes: footballs, tennis rackets, even faces. Where were his teachers? He didn’t know these people. Where was that ass Kenton, who had drilled him in English for two years? Or the physics teacher, a face he remembered perfectly but couldn’t quite put a name to, or Bullis the Bull, the martinet of mathematics?
Where, for that matter, was Carl Johnson? Among the students, the only Johnsons were a Dale Johnson, who was in the class that Carl thought he belonged to, one James Johnson, a sophomore, and a Jackie Johnson, a freshman girl. None bore the faintest resemblance to Carl or to anyone he could remember.
He closed the book and leaned back in the chair. The faint sounds of the library drifted around him as he sat motionless, his hand on the cover of a book he’d never seen before in his life.
Gradually, an odd calmness settled over him as if he had penetrated to the eye of the hurricane. Or perhaps it was numbness. In the past few minutes, years of his life had vanished. And there was nothing he could do now but accept it and try to find out how it had happened.
Could it be a trick? A gigantic hoax? If it were, it would have to have been perpetrated by someone with huge resources. Someone like the government.
Or could it be his own mind that was betraying him? There were dozens of mental disorders, delusions, memory losses, that happened to people every day.
I’m in a parallel universe, he thought. That’s it. All those science fiction stories had something going for them after all. That tunnel of gray fog was the bridge to an alternate world. Somehow, sleeping, defenses down, he’d crossed that bridge, and now—
Oh, for God’s sake! Carl slumped in disgust as a memory surfaced. Talk about making an ass of yourself! I missed picture day. He’d had the flu.
How could he forget that?
No wonder he hadn’t paid much attention to the yearbook. He wasn’t even in it, as he should have remembered that ugly little fact. The flu had kept his mug shot out of the book. But then why didn’t he notice any of his friends in the pictures?
Leaving the book on the table, he went back to the main room. The woman who had helped him was sitting at a microfiche viewer, jotting down notes. She looked up as Carl stopped beside her. “Did you find what you were looking for?” She seemed genuinely interested.
Carl nodded. “More or less. Could I see the Tribune ? For June?”
“Of sixty-six also?”
“Yes.”
“Of
The yearbook was wrong.
What Carl remembered was black, with gold letters. This was dark green, the date—1966—and the title silver. Not as bold as he remembered, either.
What happened to my copy? The black one? Did I lose it in a move? He touched the crinkled finish of the cover, almost afraid to open it. Everybody has a high school yearbook! At least from their senior year. He’d bought one, he knew. Five dollars? No, that couldn’t be. This book was thick and would cost more than that. Five dollars, his memory stubbornly insisted. Well, maybe they’d had some kind of subsidy so the students paid a discount price.
He remembered the day he picked it up in homeroom, looking for his own picture, his friends’ pictures, the book delivered at the last minute from Heckman’s Binder in Winchester twenty miles away. Signing his friends’ yearbooks and having them sign his. The agony of trying to think of something clever to write. Then what? Surely he’d taken it home? Shown it to his parents? But he couldn’t for the life of him recall doing that. As if the book had vaporized when he walked out of the school with it.
And the book had been black. It had had gold letters. This one—
Inside, nothing was right. Not the layout, not the format. Pictures angled across the pages instead of sitting where they belonged. Captions were set as silhouettes: footballs, tennis rackets, even faces. Where were his teachers? He didn’t know these people. Where was that ass Kenton, who had drilled him in English for two years? Or the physics teacher, a face he remembered perfectly but couldn’t quite put a name to, or Bullis the Bull, the martinet of mathematics?
Where, for that matter, was Carl Johnson? Among the students, the only Johnsons were a Dale Johnson, who was in the class that Carl thought he belonged to, one James Johnson, a sophomore, and a Jackie Johnson, a freshman girl. None bore the faintest resemblance to Carl or to anyone he could remember.
He closed the book and leaned back in the chair. The faint sounds of the library drifted around him as he sat motionless, his hand on the cover of a book he’d never seen before in his life.
Gradually, an odd calmness settled over him as if he had penetrated to the eye of the hurricane. Or perhaps it was numbness. In the past few minutes, years of his life had vanished. And there was nothing he could do now but accept it and try to find out how it had happened.
Could it be a trick? A gigantic hoax? If it were, it would have to have been perpetrated by someone with huge resources. Someone like the government.
Or could it be his own mind that was betraying him? There were dozens of mental disorders, delusions, memory losses, that happened to people every day.
I’m in a parallel universe, he thought. That’s it. All those science fiction stories had something going for them after all. That tunnel of gray fog was the bridge to an alternate world. Somehow, sleeping, defenses down, he’d crossed that bridge, and now—
Oh, for God’s sake! Carl slumped in disgust as a memory surfaced. Talk about making an ass of yourself! I missed picture day. He’d had the flu.
How could he forget that?
No wonder he hadn’t paid much attention to the yearbook. He wasn’t even in it, as he should have remembered that ugly little fact. The flu had kept his mug shot out of the book. But then why didn’t he notice any of his friends in the pictures?
Leaving the book on the table, he went back to the main room. The woman who had helped him was sitting at a microfiche viewer, jotting down notes. She looked up as Carl stopped beside her. “Did you find what you were looking for?” She seemed genuinely interested.
Carl nodded. “More or less. Could I see the Tribune ? For June?”
“Of sixty-six also?”
“Yes.”
“Of
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