Sound Mind

by Tricia Sullivan

Genres: Science Fiction; Genetic Engineering; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

When Cassidy Walker stumbles into the middle of the highway, bloodied and bruised, Bard college in flames behind her, and manages to flag down a ride, she thinks the worst is over. Arriving in the nearby town of Red Hook, Cassidy tries to call her parents but the phone lines are down - no radio or television signals are being received either. The town, it seems, is cut off from the rest of the world. But that's not the strangest thing. Not by a long shot. Nobody in Red Hook has even heard of Bard College. Furthermore, they claim that Cassidy is not a music student, but a hand at the local stable. And she has lived in a house she can't remember, with people she barely knows, for over a year.

The world is fracturing. Cassidy just knows it - just as she knows that she is responsible. As Cassidy undertakes the ultimate road trip, through bubbles of reality, she will find that everything she thinks she knows about herself is wrong. Is she losing her mind or is the world a far more complex place than she thought?

Release date: January 1, 2007

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 704

Sample

I made it to 199 and stuck out my thumb.

Normally I wouldn’t hitchhike but I couldn’t have walked much further on that leg. I had already come four miles. I’d ditched all my books, so all I had in my backpack were a couple of sticks of gum, my Pro Walkman with some recent recordings, a notebook and the bra I’d taken off while Craig and I were messing around in his room. For some reason, when IT happened I’d had the presence of mind to put on my sweater and stuff the bra in my backpack before climbing out the window. Saving your bra isn’t a very practical use of a precious five seconds; but then, climbing out the window wasn’t too bright, either.

Craig lived in one of the Ravine Houses, which are these wooden dorms built on stilts out over the wooded ravine. They look like treehouses, and they sway like treehouses, so when the place first started shaking we didn’t think anything much about it. We were sitting on the floor and Craig was sharing his Captain Beefheart LP collection with me. This was maybe less kinky than it sounds, and I complained that I was bored.

‘OK, Cassidy-the-Real-Musician,’ said Craig, and reached into my backpack. ‘Let’s find out how your stuff compares, then.’

He pulled out a white plastic bag with Staples Office Supplies printed on it. He took out a cassette and held it up over my head.

‘That’s not mine!’ I cried. It wasn’t; I’d found it near the dead guy the other night. I tried to get it off Craig but he wrestled me away and stuck it in the deck. I tackled him, things got kind of horny, and I wasn’t really paying attention to the music.

I didn’t yet know that I was hearing the first approach of IT, right there in Craig’s tape deck. Still, I tried to get him to turn the music off, because I didn’t like it, but he wouldn’t let me near the deck. That was how the bra came off.

I was laughing so hard that at first I didn’t hear the screaming. But we both heard the first explosion, so Craig told me to stay put and went to check things out.

I took the tape out of the deck and put it in my backpack. A minute later there was more screaming and a lot of demolition-site noises, and I smelled smoke. I opened the door and the hallway was on fire. So I grabbed my sneakers and went out the window.

Got banged up pretty bad when the building went down. I was still clinging to a strut and ended up jumping clear just in time. I scraped one leg on a protruding nail and twisted the other ankle when I landed. I also bit my lip so hard that I was sure it would be detached, but it only swelled.

I clapped my hands over my ears. The sound of IT was all around: in the air, in the ground, in the trembling branches with their ragged autumn leaves. I started running. Away from IT, into IT, through IT.

A pickup whizzed past me and my thumb on 199. I blinked away grit, feeling embarrassed. I had never hitched before. I wasn’t prepared for the feeling of rejection.

There were some pieces of concrete on the highway, and a fallen tree blocked Annandale Road on the other side. The traffic light was out. I could hear, but not see, a helicopter somewhere over the river. When a green Pathfinder stopped at the fallen tree I limped over and banged on the window.

There was a blonde woman inside. She was wearing a Mets cap and sunglasses, and she had put her head and arms on the steering wheel like she was asleep or crying. When I banged, she jumped and then shrank back away from me, reaching for the glove compartment with her right hand, using jerky, panicked movements.

‘What do you want? Get back!’ she yelled. Behind her back, her hand closed on a king-sized Milky Way and I saw the knuckles go white as she gripped it, bringing the candy bar forward with a defensive jerk; then she seemed to realize what it was and chucked it into the back seat. She groped some more in the glove compartment.

I wanted to laugh, but by this time I was pretty tired because I’d come about three miles from campus on the bad leg, and the initial burn of adrenalin was gone, leaving me sort of in a daze. My whole body was starting to ache and feel heavy. I guess I didn’t look too good, either.

‘Whoa,’ I said slowly. ‘Chill out. I was only going to ask for a ride.’

A Volkswagen hurtled past us, spraying me with gravel. I had to lean against the side of the Pathfinder. The woman had finally grabbed what she was looking for: a sharpened screw-driver. But once she had it she just kind of looked at it, then at me.

‘You’re hurt,’ she observed. She sounded suspicious. I shrugged. I could hear the helicopter approaching from the direction of Rhinebeck, fast. The woman frowned at the screw-driver.

‘I don’t know what …’ she said. ‘I’m a little … look, it’s shaking in my hand. Look at my hand shake!’

I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to get in the car with her after all. If she was this nervous, she might crash. But now she glued me with a blue-eyed stare and said, ‘Come on. Get in.’

As I climbed up into the passenger seat I had, like, a muscle insurrection. As in none of them would work. I had to lean out to pull the door shut, and the helicopter dove at us and swooped past as I fought with the door and the wind. It was a military aircraft and I could see a guy with some kind of big gun leaning out the side. He didn’t point it at me. He didn’t have to – I freaked out anyway.

‘Jesus!’ I screamed, and the woman threw the Pathfinder into reverse and then into first gear, weaving it around the fallen tree with a roar and a squeal. I grabbed the door with both hands and threw my whole body weight backward into the car. The air pressure shifted and I was thrown against the driver as the door slammed. She kept accelerating: by the time we hit fifty I was back in my own seat, apologizing and cursing at the same time.

The helicopter lifted and went haring off towards Bard. I leaned on the dashboard, wide-eyed, and watched the road hurtling toward us. We were lucky that nobody seemed to be coming the other way, because this woman was kind of all over the place, side-of-the-road-wise.

‘It’s OK.’ I kept saying it over and over, hoping she would slow down but she didn’t. ‘It’s OK, we’ll be OK.’

The woman glanced at me, braking and looking left and right as she got ready to take the Red Hook turn.

‘You got blood on your face. Were you at the bridge?’

I checked out my face in the vanity mirror and wished I hadn’t.

‘Bridge? No. What happened at the bridge?’

She glanced at me again, then stepped hard on the gas. She gave a little laugh. ‘You don’t want to know. I’m Michelle, by the way.’

‘I’m Cassidy. Nice to meet you.’

I felt like a jerk when I said that, but Michelle didn’t even seem to listen. She swerved around an eighteen-wheeler coming the other way, even though she had plenty of room and didn’t have to. As a result she clipped the edge of Kurt’s Truck Stop parking lot and the Pathfinder rocked from side to side like a boat. An electronic chime sounded to warn her that we were about to tip over.

‘Oops,’ she said. ‘Sorry about that. Should you be going to the hospital? Because I’m going to Red Hook and that isn’t really the right way if you’re going to the hospital, now that I think about it.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I don’t care. I’ll go anywhere as long as it isn’t Bard.’

‘Bard?’

‘Yeah, Bard College, you know? That’s where I just was, when … well, if you don’t want to talk about it …’

I stopped talking. I didn’t want to provoke Michelle. She was awfully antsy. Her face twitched.

‘Was it really Soviet? I talked to a guy who saw it take out the bridge. He said something big hit the water half a mile south.’ She shook her head like she was arguing with herself. ‘They set up a roadblock and they got boats out there looking for survivors. Cars got swept off the bridge and everything. I wanted to stay and help the divers – they could’ve used the back of my car, and I got ropes and stuff, I got a first-aid kit. But the police made me go back. One army chopper, is that the best they can do after two hours?’

I steadied myself on the dash again as we hurtled around a bend. The bridge was down. What the hell.

‘So were you on the bridge?’

‘No, I was at Bard.’

‘Who’s Bart?’

The suspicious look came back again. My right leg was throbbing and my left ankle was so swollen I doubted I’d be able to walk on it at all.

‘Bard,’ I said. ‘Where I go to college.’

Michelle took her eyes off the road a little too long and the Pathfinder drifted right, brushing against some overhanging bushes. She corrected just in time.

I saw her shake her head to herself. People can be funny about Bard students. The locals seem to hate us.

‘Where is this college?’

‘Oh, it’s just a couple miles from where you picked me up. I’m surprised you didn’t see the sign.’

‘Never heard of it,’ she said in a clipped tone. ‘And I lived in Red Hook all my life. The Moonies live up by there, though.’

I didn’t say anything for a minute. There was indeed a Moonie complex in Barrytown, just down the road from Bard. Did she seriously think I was a Moonie? There had to be something wrong with this woman.

‘I really appreciate the ride,’ I said finally. ‘If you could drop me anywhere in town, that’d be great.’

There were no police in Red Hook (‘Diverted to Poughkeepsie, big surprise,’ snorted Michelle) but there were enough guys with CBs and megaphones to cover each of the four roads. Everybody and his lesbian aunt were trying to fill up at the crossroads Shell gas station where Michelle dropped me. I was uneasy about the proximity of all that gasoline, especially after what had happened at Bard. I started to cross the street with some vague intention of getting a ride to the hospital from there when I noticed the crowd lined up at the payphones that were fixed to the brick wall between the Shell station and the Tivoli Gardens restaurant.

I stopped. It was crazy to go to the hospital if the emergency room was going to be overrun. It was a long line for the phones but I decided to call my mom and try to get home. I stood in line, trying to ignore the weird looks people were giving me. Instead, I pictured my mom in my mind. It would be lunchtime: she’d be in the staff room having coffee with Ethel or reading a magazine and eating a tuna sandwich. If I was lucky, I could just catch her before her afternoon sculpture class started. She’d go into a panic when she heard my news. Maybe she already knew, if it was on TV. Anyway, she’d panic. Then she’d tell me not to panic. Then she’d call Dad and he’d drive up and pick me up at the hospital. Maybe he was even on his way already. Yeah, that would be good.

The sun shone on my face, making me want to close my eyes. I was really tired. I took a half-melted Nestlé crunch out of my backpack and ate it slowly, taking deep breaths of gasoline-smelling air. My tongue felt exhausted when I ran it over my gums to clean up the chocolate. Of all the muscles in my body my tongue had been the least used, and it still went on strike. My eyelids drooped and I shut my eyes for a little while. I swayed on my feet.

At the nearest pump a whole pickup-load of construction workers had the radio tuned to an emergency broadcast, but the announcer kept getting blotted out by the sound of IT. I shuddered, wanting to hear the news but cringing every time the sound of IT overpowered the radio … Route 9 closed south of Poughkeepsie, Route 84 closed at the New Paltz bridge … IT … governor’s office issued … IT … Mike in our helicopter over … IT … not to stockpile … IT … emergency generators … IT IT IT IT—

I put my hands over my ears and glared at the men. They listened with focused intent. How could they do that? How could they stand the sound of IT? Were they hearing something that I wasn’t? Or was it the other way around?

I had a bad feeling. Maybe I was the one hearing things.

So maybe I was just paranoid, but stuff can happen to your head when you see things other people don’t see. Or when invisible people put staples in you while you’re inside the piano. Not that I wanted to think about that.

Back at Bard I can remember jamming my feet into my sneakers and running across the dirt track that passed for a road-cum-parking lot in front of the Ravine Houses, squeezing between the bumpers of cars that were piling up in the rush to get out. One of the dorm proctors was trying to get his jeep across the big field between the Ravine Houses and Tewksbury and bypass the road entirely, but the field was soaking wet and he’d gotten stuck. Some guy called Shawn who lived in Bluecher House went jogging over in his Doc Martens and ripped jeans and Butthole Surfers T-shirt, dragging his girlfriend Pru who was wearing only panties and a leather jacket. They started trying to move the car.

I made it out into the field; then I first heard IT. The sound was coming at me from all directions. I was awestruck. The sound opened up rooms in my mind that I’d never known existed. I seemed to remember places and ideas that I knew hadn’t happened to me. I wondered if it was like tripping – which I’ve never done but you hear enough about it at Bard to feel as though you have.

For a few seconds – and I’m guessing how long it was, but I’d say it was really only a few seconds even though they were stretched-out, long, intense ones – I was in balance with the sound and it filled me and I felt empty at the same time. I felt like a guitar string that’s been tuned to its neighbors, tightrope-taut and in perfect resonance. But then IT kept going. ITs sound kept mounting and increasing and taking strange turns, and in a flash I lost it. Lost my scrambled eggs and OJ, lost my composure, lost myself for a little while at least.

When I got up off my knees and wiped the puke off my chin, Shawn and Co. had managed to push the jeep back onto the road. I saw Craig then, standing in front of the burning Hirsch House with his T-shirt pulled up over his face because of the smoke, looking from side to side. I thought maybe he was looking for me. Where Craig’s dorm had been there was now just a ragged chunk of the front porch, framed by bright light and trees beyond. Craig’s blond hair was gray with ash. I wanted to go to him. But the sound made that impossible. IT was getting more and more intense. I had the horrible feeling that the sound was actually drilling its way outwards from inside my body.

Then a shadow passed over everything. At the same time, the fire jumped from Hirsch to the line of cars, and I threw my arms over my head and eyes and flattened myself to the ground like a rabbit in a strong wind. I looked up and saw Craig get in a VW Bug.

‘No, stupid!’ I cried, but I couldn’t hear myself. I was panting and I could smell my armpits and my groin in the sheltered air between my clothes and my body. Something big was passing overhead. It wasn’t a bird and it wasn’t a plane and it wasn’t Superman. My first thought was that it was a UFO, but the way the air was moving I could swear I heard the beating of wings so big that I wouldn’t want to see them. I was totally cowed. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited. I don’t even know what I thought I was waiting for. I wasn’t thinking. I was just reacting.

The shadow moved off me. I got to my feet, but I didn’t look up at the sky. I didn’t want to see IT. ITs sound continued at the same intensity, but the volume abated so that now IT was all mixed up with people yelling and the explosions of gas tanks as cars caught fire. I saw flames running along the hood of the VW. I must have seen the explosion, too, but I don’t remember that part. I know that I pointed my butt at whatever happened and ran from it, slipping on the wet grass. I felt gangling and useless and the leg wasn’t cooperating, but I dragged myself forward anyway.

Ahead loomed the white bulk of Tewksbury, the ugliest building on campus and the only dorm that looks and feels like a dorm. Everything about it screams Institution. Under normal circumstances I would never go there, and even under these circumstances, it seemed a stupid place to be. Everybody else was running out of the building and I had to stand aside in the stairwell to let hysterical freshmen get loose.

I went in. I had to get away from the sound.

Tewks has a laundry room in the basement, and piano practice rooms with soundproof walls. I went into a practice room and sat under a battered old spinet, but I could still hear IT. I tried another room; same thing. Finally I went into the laundry room, where somebody’s jeans were slushing around in one of the machines and somebody’s colors were spinning in the dryer, and all that white noise took away the thing I didn’t want to hear. I crouched next to the warm dryer and tried not to see the Volkswagen containing my boyfriend going boom on my mental projection screen, over and over and over.

Somebody was tapping me on the shoulder. I was in Red Hook and it was almost my turn to use the phone.

I turned around and took my hands off my ears. The pickup truck was gone and I couldn’t hear IT on the radio anymore. A round bearded face with glasses confronted me.

‘Jeremy!’ I heard myself exclaim. I sounded overjoyed, like some popular chick at a party fakely greeting a guy she doesn’t really like. ‘Hey, what’s up? Are you OK?’

It was hard to read his expression through his beard and glasses, which I was sure he used to cultivate his overall air of faintly superior detachment. Jeremy is the kind of person who knows everything about everything and always wants to tell you. If he sees you drinking an Anchor Steam he’ll lecture you about the politics of independent breweries. He has a thick voice, the kind that always sounds like he’s got some mucus or something way down in his throat, or like he’s talking through a mouthful of peanut butter.

He said, ‘Yeah. I’m OK. You look like shit.’

I was kind of surprised he even remembered who I was. He was my friend Anitra’s former boyfriend, and I’d seen him around the music department – he even took a computer-music class last year. I sat in on it but it was too dry for me. So was he. The last time I’d run into him, I’d asked him the standard, ‘How was your summer?’ question and he’d said, ‘I spent it calculating pi as far as I could. Got about seventeen pages.’

Now I snorted. ‘I guess you weren’t there, then. I look good compared to …’

I halted. The first few people that you see on fire, running and then falling down and not getting up, you don’t really take in the information. By the time your brain has gotten around to figuring out what it is you’re seeing you’re practically inured to it – or something has happened, anyway, to make you numb and unfeeling. Or just sick-headed – because I had this tremendous urge to make flip remarks about human torches. I realized I was probably skating on the edge of sounding nuts.

‘I wasn’t where?’ said Jeremy.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to start crying; not in front of him.

I tried not saying anything for a minute. It was my turn for the phone. I dialed my mom’s work number but I got one of those annoying beeps and an uptight female recording telling me to check the number and dial again. I did, and it was the same thing. I tried calling home; I could leave a message on the machine, anyway. The exact same thing happened.

‘That’s weird,’ I said to Jeremy. ‘The phone’s not going through.’

‘Let me try,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s this phone.’

I stood back and he dialed, had a brief conversation, and hung up. He shrugged.

‘I just called the house. Got the machine. Seems OK.’

I tried again, with him watching me. It still didn’t work.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘How am I supposed to get home? I can’t take a bus all the way to New Jersey.’

I tried calling Ben’s office, but that phone didn’t work either. I called his home number. Machine, of course. I stammered some kind of message and hung up. Ben would know what to do, wouldn’t he? I mean, he hadn’t known what to make of the stapling thing but maybe he would know what IT was all about. Music-wise.

I followed Jeremy into the gas-station office. There were a few racks of groceries and some magazines, and a lot of people talking semi-hysterically. The TV was showing rack and ruin in Poughkeepsie, but I couldn’t hear the reporter’s voice over the din of the real people. I thought I heard a faint hum of IT starting to come through, like fire starts to ignite paper with a spreading black stain before it bursts into flame. I tried to ignore it.

‘I don’t think you’re going to get to Jersey,’ Jeremy said. ‘The highways are all blocked. I’m supposed to be in Albany. I had to turn around and come back.’

He opened his wallet and took out an Amex gold card. A lot of Bard students had them. Mom and Dad paid the bill. I started working my way through the crowd that was jammed into the tiny station, looking for something to eat.

Then this girl Leona from my dorm walked in. I dodged behind the Hostess rack for a minute to try to compose myself. Leona always made me nervous. She reminded me of the younger sister of this guy Paul I really really liked in high school. The younger sister, Diane, was a gymnast but not built like a typical anorexic gymnast, no: she was compact and muscular and, as my friend Janie once cattily remarked, ‘She has the same legs as Paul,’ who had really solid legs from skiing. But of course that kind of bulk looks nice on a guy but not on a girl. Especially a short girl. Anyway, due to this resemblance I’d always found myself staring at Leona and feeling a weird mixture of being intimidated by her and jealous of her and attracted to her. But we’d never been friends. When I talked to her on the first night of freshman orientation our conversation went something like this.

Me: ‘Where you from?’

Her: ‘New York.’

Me: ‘Yeah, what part?’

Her: ‘Manhattan’ – i.e., the real New York, stupid.

Her: ‘Where are you from?’

Me: ‘Um … Jersey.’

Silence.

Still, I found myself drawn to Leona and I’d even wondered if it meant I was a lesbian or bisexual or something and I ended up avoiding her for this reason and also because I suspected she was stupid and – worse yet – that she thought I was stupid.

Hence me hiding behind the Hostess rack. But she must have spotted me because she came around the corner and said, ‘Hey. What’s up?’

I blurted, ‘How’d you get here?’

She looked at me pityingly and I could tell it was going to be another one of those conversations.

‘I got a ride?’ she said, raising the pitch of her voice at the end like she was asking a question: her way of letting me know she did indeed believe I was an idiot.

I grabbed her shoulders and shook her.

‘Where from? From the city?’

Leona pulled away, aghast. ‘No. From work. What’s the matter with you? You didn’t even show up this morning. I heard Dominic just disappeared and Hannah locked herself in the house. Sally can’t pay anybody.’

I stopped shaking her and tried to pull myself together. She was talking about my job. How did she know about my job?

‘You work at Moonshadow.’ I said it like a statement, but of course it wasn’t true.

‘Duh. Cassidy, what’s with you? Come on, you can’t let this disaster stuff get you down. Everything’s going to be OK.’

Leona had never worked at Moonshadow that I could remember. It was hard to picture her shoveling shit. I wondered if she rode the racehorses or something and that was why I hadn’t known about it.

‘I came to buy chocolate,’ I said irrelevantly. ‘I don’t know where to go or what to do. I can’t go back to Bard.’

‘Who?’

Oh, here we go again.

‘Never mind,’ I said.

It must have been then that I started to adopt the shut-up-and-wait-for-the-authorities-to-arrive game plan. Not that it was a real strategy, more like a default response to terror. And it does seem to be something people do. Pass the buck, I mean. I know why I did it. When you grow up in the suburbs you don’t tend to think of yourself as responsible for the world as such. You don’t even consider yourself as living in the world: you occupy this semi-abstract realm of TV and shopping and school, waiting for your life to start. You get a fuck-this attitude by the time you’re fourteen. Well, I did, anyway. When I got to Bard and everything was chilled and there were no cliques and being different was better than being in fashion and everybody hung out getting stoned with everybody else and the professors expected you to actually think and credited you with some intelligence and you were allowed to try new things – well, I admit I did suddenly turn sincere. Or, at least, the edge of my cynicism about the world got blunted a little.

But that change must have been only superficial, because as soon as IT swooped down on campus and drove me out of Annandale and into redneck Red Hook, I reverted to my original nature. I became suburban again. I wanted somebody else to fix it. I wanted to call the monster-exterminators and charge the whole thing on my mom’s credit card. I didn’t want to deal at all.

‘We’re going to get out of here,’ Leona said. ‘We got space in the back. You could come.’

She said it reluctantly, like she’d half-thought better of it.

‘Jeremy said the roads were blocked.’

‘Preston has a four-wheel drive. We can go over the fields.’

‘Where?’

‘The city. Preston’s paying for the diesel right now. He’s got a credit card. Do you have any money?’

I shrugged. ‘Like, ten bucks,’ I said.

Now I could hear Preston arguing with the girl behind the counter and I guess she didn’t want to honor the card on account of the phone lines being down. I don’t know where Jeremy had disappeared to, but he was gone and so was his Infiniti. There was a line of about fifty cars backed up on the 199 waiting for gas, and the shelves of the minimart were looking pretty bare with everybody stocking up.

We went outside to wait, me with a Diet 7-Up which was all I could get hold of in the crush, Leona with a pack of Winstons and a bag of M&Ms. With my paint-stained Dr Scholls I scuffed at oil spots on the pavement in time to ‘Timebomb’ on Preston’s car stereo. Preston was a cornfed Iowa boy with blond hair who said ‘yup’ and ‘nope’ and ‘maybay,’ but he took his Public Enemy seriously. ‘I’m studying their angle on syncopation and space-time architecture,’ he said earnestly when he brought a tape into Ben’s class once. Preston’s roommate Cliff called them Pubic Enema. Relentlessly.

It was all very thin and bland; just life. Just pavement and cloudy late-summer sky and the taste of M&Ms because that was the kind of thing we bought when we were hungry, like kids let out of mom’s sight, just because we could. I was bored and, underneath that, anxious.

All these people lining up to get out of town, they were just responding to what they heard on the CB, or to word-of-mouth rumors, or maybe to the TV reports that had cropped up thick and fast on local news. Evidently we were cut off from the rest of the state. How, exactly, nobody could or would say; but you couldn’t cross the Kingston Bridge to get to the Thruway, you couldn’t get to the Taconic, you couldn’t take a train. The only media stations that worked were the local ones. No one knew what was going on. Was it nuclear war? A seismic event? Invasion by aliens?

‘An unexplained atmospheric disturbance,’ the news people were saying. The correspondents had a glassy, vague look. I probably looked like that, too. I don’t think anyone else in Red Hook had seen IT, because they were all acting pretty normal and none of them were the walking wounded like me. Nobody else from Bard seemed to have made it out yet. The only Bard students I could see had been off-campus at the time of the attack. None of them wanted to hear the word . . .