Fool's Gold (12 page)

Imagine… darkness and enclosing walls. The darkness came quickly, reaching out around him. And then the walls were there, shutting him in. The dark was hard and heavy and it covered his face and stopped his breathing. Crushing, smothering, endless darkness that…

He was out of bed then, without even knowing how he'd gotten there. Out of bed and pacing up and down, up and down, willing his heart to stop racing, and fighting to keep down the sound that ached in his throat. Seven steps to the dresser and seven back to the bed. Count the steps. One, two, three, four… Don't think about anything else. Only the counting and walking and breathing. Deep breathing, deep, deep breaths of good, clean air.

After what seemed like a very long time his heartbeat slowed and his breathing began to be easier, and by the time he climbed back into bed he was pretty much back to normal except for slightly shaky hands and an occasional shudder or two.

Okay, Rudy, old buddy,
he told himself. So much for the implosion method.

W
HEN RUDY GOT
back into bed after the implosion disaster the first thing he did was throw the book by Dr. Grosser across the room. Then he turned out the light and pulled the covers up to his chin, keeping his eyes wide open. If he kept his mind firmly on what he could really see he wouldn't be able to picture anything “as realistically as possible.” Particularly not “whatever it is you are most afraid of.”

He could see the foot of the bed quite clearly in the bright moonlight, and beyond it the old oak dresser that, according to Natasha, had been in the same spot even way back when she was a little girl and the room had been hers. He stared at the dresser, concentrating on the details of the old-fashioned golden oak mirror frame and trying to make out all the photos and souvenirs that he'd stuck in under the edge. When that got boring he switched to trying to picture how it might have looked when it was Natasha's—covered with girl stuff and with maybe a tutu hanging from one of the mirror's support poles.

Yes, a tutu for sure. Natasha, or Linda as she had been called then, had told him that she'd known she wanted to be a ballet dancer when she was only four or five years old, just as he had always known he wanted to be an actor and comedian. When he concentrated he could almost see her, a little girl with long, fat pigtails, spinning around the room in a tutu.

It was something he hadn't really thought much about before—Natasha as a kid planning her future. And now, thinking about how her life had turned out made him feel a little angry at fate, or maybe at people. People like old Art Mumford, and his own father for that matter. Or whoever's fault it was that Natasha didn't get to make her dream come true. He thought about it for quite a while and the good news was that feeling angry for Natasha turned out to be a great way to keep his mind off other things. He went on working at feeling angry about the way fate had treated Natasha until he fell asleep.

It wasn't until midmorning the next day that Rudy managed to talk himself into fishing the phobia book out from under his desk. After all, he told himself as he kicked back on the bed in a comfortable reading position, he hadn't finished reading about all the other methods of treating phobia patients. There was no reason to give up just because the
implosion
method had been such a complete wipeout.

The next method of treatment that Dr. Grosser went into was something that he called “progressive challenges.” The idea seemed to be that the patients were to take small gradual steps toward conquering their fear. It gave as an example the case of a woman who had agoraphobia—the same problem that Murph's mother had. At first the patient was asked to stand in the open doorway of her home. Only for a minute or two at first, but gradually increasing the time. Then she sat in a chair on the veranda, and next out on the lawn. She was supposed to concentrate on pushing herself to go a little longer and a little farther, but at the same time reminding herself that she was free to go back inside any time she felt she had to.

Rudy liked that part. The being free to back out at any time. It seemed like a person could stand almost anything if he felt sure he could stop it anytime he wanted to. But on further consideration it occurred to him that there was a major difference in the two situations. In the case of the woman with agoraphobia, what she was gradually moving toward was something pleasant, like going downtown and shopping and meeting people. And in his case what he would be moving toward would be doing something not only terrifying but also dangerous and illegal—going down into an abandoned mine. Down into a dark, airless…

No! He was getting ahead of himself. The point was that you had to move slowly and gradually. Gradually. That was the key word. But in the meantime he went on to read about a third method of treatment that turned out to be something called “attitude readjustment.”

Attitude readjustment, it seemed, was changing how you felt about whatever you were afraid of by having things you particularly like happen to you when you were in the scary situation. Like the woman with agoraphobia was treated especially nice by her family and served things she particularly liked to eat while she was sitting outside the house. And a girl who had acrophobia so bad that she couldn't even go near a window in a tall building, had her boyfriend go with her as she went up in a skyscraper. Then the boyfriend was supposed to do what the book called “offer expressions of affection” whenever they were near stairwells or open windows.

Now, that was a treatment Rudy could definitely relate to. He could really see how it might work for him, especially if someone like Stephanie Freeman would do the “expressions of affection” bit. Realistically, however, he had to admit that he'd probably never get Stephanie to make out with him in an abandoned gold mine. Stephanie just wasn't the type to fool around in a place like that. Particularly not with someone she'd already turned down in perfectly normal places, like out behind the multipurpose room during school dances.

But, on second thought, there was the storage closet. There was just a chance that she might agree to the closet, if he could come up with the right approach. Maybe if he made it into a kind of scientific experiment. Stephanie was really into science, entering exhibits in all the science fairs and that sort of thing. What he could do was explain the claustrophobia problem and the “attitude readjustment” thing and ask her if she'd like to be part of a scientific experiment to see how well the treatment worked. She might really go for that kind of an approach, especially if he could think of some way to make it into a science fair exhibit.

It was, he decided, worth a try. But in the meantime it might be a good idea for him to practice a little, just to be sure he could pull it off, without completely freaking out. It would be all right if he were a little nervous about crawling into the closet with Stephanie. Perfect, in fact. She'd expect that. But a serious case of the screaming meemies would probably be more than she would bargain for. So he'd just have to do a preliminary experiment or two. Marking his place in
Conquering Your Fears,
he hid it under the mattress before he left the room.

In the front hall Rudy stood for a moment breathing deeply and trying to center his mind on Stephanie before he pulled back the latch on the closet door, swung it open, and peered in. The storage closet, situated as it was under the stairs, was really more of a cupboard than a real closet. It was only about four feet tall at the highest point and from there it tapered back to nothing at the small end.

The light was dim, but as his eyes adjusted he was able to make out a bunch of winter boots in one corner, the M and M's roller skates in another, and a stack of boxes and foot lockers against the back wall. It all looked very familiar, which wasn't surprising, since in the past he'd used the closet a lot. For years he'd kept his skateboard and baseball stuff there, and before that when he was a real little kid he'd even used it as a place to play. He could vaguely remember some game about a dragon's lair.

And that, now that he thought about it, was pretty strange—that when he was really little he'd crawled around in the closet, and curled up way down at the small end, and it hadn't bothered him at all. And right up until last year he'd been able to keep his stuff there without any problems. But then, ever since last Christmas when Moira locked him in, he had not so much as opened the door until now.

There was no light switch in the closet, and no window. Fighting back an urge to slam the door and walk away, Rudy reminded himself of what he was intending to do—to sit in the closet and imagine making out with Stephanie. He was going to crawl way back beyond the boxes and… but gradually. It was important not to forget about gradually. Sitting down in the hallway, he put his feet inside the closet up to his ankles, closed his eyes, and began to imagine. Once or twice he opened his eyes and scooted an inch or so forward, but half an hour later when the M and M's pounded up onto the front veranda, he hadn't gotten very far. At least he hadn't gotten very far into the closet. He'd made all sorts of progress with Stephanie. Too bad it was all in his imagination.

As it turned out, that was the last phobia treatment Rudy tried for several days—not that he'd given up on the whole experiment. Even though his lack of progress had been a disappointment, he really did intend to go on trying. It was just that he seemed to be extra busy for a while.

For one thing, he was spending a lot of time at Murph's helping him learn to use his new word processor. There had been a computer club at school and Rudy had found out that he was just naturally computer friendly. So when Murph finally got a word processor—he'd been talking about it for years—Rudy was able to help him out. The problem seemed to be that Murph hated his computer. At least he did at first.

“It never does what I want it to,” he told Rudy over the back fence. “I give it a perfectly reasonable command and it just says ‘invalid entry' and then sits there smirking at me. I came dangerously close to using an ax on it several times yesterday.”

So Rudy went over to see if he could help. The computer was another Apple, like the ones at school, but a newer model. It wasn't all that different, however, and that first morning it didn't take Rudy very long to find out what Murph had been doing wrong. But for the next few days other problems kept coming up, so Rudy kept having to go back, reread the instruction books, and try things out until he came up with another solution.

In between word processor discussions, Rudy and Murph managed to get in quite a bit of general conversation on other topics as well—like the whole phobia thing. Without mentioning why he had any particular reason to be interested, Rudy simply told Murph that his story about his mother's agoraphobia had gotten him interested and he'd started a research project on the general subject.

“I was really surprised how many different kinds of phobias there are,” he told Murph. “A person can hit the panic button about just about anything, I guess. Cats, rats, spiders, snakes, germs, high places, escalators, doctors, people in uniforms. I mean, you name it, there's somebody who's scared to death of it. In fact, I'm thinking of working up a stand-up comedian routine about people with phobias. You know, like one about a guy who has this deathly fear of anchovy pizzas, or something.”

Murphy, who was straightening things up and putting his computer's dustcover on for the night, chuckled and said he guessed phobias were extremely numerous all right, not to mention very common. “Almost all of us probably have one or two, or have had at some point in our lives. Fortunately most of them are fairly mild or quite temporary.”

“Right,” Rudy said, “like nyctophobia, for instance. Probably ninety-nine kids out of a hundred are afraid of the dark when they're little.” Then he told Murph about how he used to dash down the hall on his way to the bathroom. “I'd go…” he said, and started acting it out—the bulgy-eyed peek down the dark hall, the frantic dash, and then, once he'd made it to the light switch, the smug look back over his shoulder at all the frustrated monsters.

Murph was still chuckling when Rudy checked his watch and made another frantic dash—this time for home. The M and M's were due back from Eleanora's.

The other thing that was taking up a lot of Rudy's time was, of course, the baby-sitting, which was turning out to be a little less boring than he expected it would be. He couldn't say why exactly, but it probably had something to do with his natural instinct to find out about things. What he'd started researching this time was the M and M's themselves, like trying to find out why they fought so much, for instance.

A lot of the problem seemed to be because of the differences in their personalities. Of course, he'd always been aware that even though Moira and Margot were sisters and only about a year apart in age, they weren't really much alike, but he'd never given the subject much thought. Researching Moira and Margot, which involved a lot of observation, interrogation, and even some visits to the library, turned out to be very enlightening.

The observation was easy. Moira and Margot were so used to having Rudy around that they usually went on doing whatever came naturally, whether he was watching or not. Even when he came right into their room while they were playing.

The room itself was pretty interesting when observed scientifically. Of course, he'd noticed before that one half of the M and M's room looked more lived in than the other, but he'd never been interested enough to figure out why. But as soon as he started doing a careful examination it quickly became obvious what was going on. Everything had been divided so that Margot's belongings were on one side of the room and all of Moira's stuff was on the other. And while Margot's half was fairly neat and well organized, Moira's usually looked like the scene of some kind of minor explosion. The only thing they couldn't divide was Blob, their fat little pet hamster, so his cage sat right in the middle of the room—and even Moira's half of the hamster cage looked a lot less sanitary. Rudy felt that was a particularly significant bit of research data.