The Mountain Cage (14 page)

Miller drove into Westview and parked in front of the Dairy Queen. He could pretty much get whatever he needed in Westview or out at the Wal-Mart; there had been no need for him to drive to Hannaford.

He had been avoiding Hannaford for months now, ever since the night the Dunn Bridge had collapsed and all those people had been killed. Seeing it all on TV had been enough, and for a while it had been one of the biggest news stories in the country. All the talking heads had gone on about mass psychoses and mob psychology and a lot of other speculation, and the news crews had taped miles of footage of the Hannaford Center Mall and the ruined bridge and interviews with just about anyone who had been part of the mob and survived and also with family members of the dead.

Not, Miller thought, that any of them had been able to shed any light on the incident. Of the fewer than four hundred survivors, no one seemed able to remember a blamed thing. That Chris Szekely of WKLY had done a five-minute interview with another survivor, some girl named Jess Richter, and even though they had both been part of the mob, neither of them could recall very much of what had happened.

Miller walked up to the Dairy Queen take-out window, ordered a small vanilla cone with chocolate dip, then wandered over to one of the outdoor tables. Joe Allard had called him up that morning, to tell him that somebody on the Hannaford City Council had promised that construction of the new bridge would be completed by next year and that it would be a lot safer than the old one. He and Lois would be able to come out and see Miller more often without taking that darned Route Five detour.

Miller sat down and bit into the ice cream and chocolate coating. The main street of Westview, which a year ago had consisted of little except the Dairy Queen, a gas station and convenience store, a post office, a bank, and a couple of shops selling antiques and used books, was going through a bit of revitalization lately. A young couple had renovated one of the old Victorian houses on the street and turned it into the Westview Bed and Breakfast, and another Victorian had been turned into offices for a small business. Somebody had told him that the business used to have its offices near the Hannaford Center Mall, but had decided to move a couple of months ago. Well, he could understand wanting to do that, after the bridge collapse and all.

As he was finishing his cone, a Honda pulled up in front of the Dairy Queen. A young blonde woman got out of the car and went to the take-out window. By the time she was walking toward him with her ice cream cone, he knew who she was. He might have recognized her sooner, but then he had never expected to see Chris Szekely wandering around in Westview.

Miller got to his feet as she approached. “Miz Szekely,” he said. She lifted her perfectly arched brows. “Name’s Miller Oretskin. I used to see you on the news.”

“Used to.” The newswoman’s mouth twisted. “Those are the operative words.”

“You been … on vacation?” Miller asked, tentative.

“I was canned. Once I’d done my stories about the mob on the bridge, WKLY didn’t need me any more. Management was beginning to worry about my future mental stability, too.” She sat down across from him and just kept talking, surprising Miller with her frankness. “Most of the Dunn Bridge survivors have had trouble hanging on to their jobs, and at least half of them are in therapy. I lost two colleagues there, Bruno Flick and my cameraman, Joe Unger.” She gazed past him. “You know, if the news director had sent Alexa Browne out to the mall that night instead of me, I might have been the one with the network gig in New York now.”

“Well, you were always one of my favorites on the Action News,” Miller said as he sat down again.

She smiled at him. She was an awfully pretty woman, even if she did look a lot thinner and somewhat older than she had on the news. “It’s nice of you to say so. Thanks, Mr …” She paused.

“Oretskin, but you can call me Miller.”

Chris Szekely nibbled at her ice cream. “At least I don’t have to worry about watching my weight at the moment.”

“Wouldn’t think you’d have to worry at all about that.” He tried to think of what else to say. “Hope things work out for you. I thought you did great on the Action News.”

“Oh, something’ll turn up. I have a couple of applications in with old friends. A station in my old home town is interested.” She shook her head. “Next to my home town, even Hannaford is a swarming metropolis.”

Miller, unused to keeping up many conversations, let her finish her cone in silence, then said, “What brings you to Westview? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Curiosity.” She was staring across the street at the remodeled white Victorian that had been turned into offices. The business had installed one of those dishes on the roof of the building near a gable, a dish much like his satellite dish but considerably larger. MindData Associates, they called themselves. According to Dan Howell, who owned the Dairy Queen, they had something to do with designing communications equipment, had some sort of government contract, and bought a lot of hot dogs and ice cream from him.

“Curiosity?” Miller asked. “What about?”

“MindData Associates.” Chris Szekely gestured at the sign and logo in front of the white Victorian. “I spent a lot of time going through the list, the people who died, those of us who survived, finding out whatever I could about everybody. I guess I was looking for some sort of pattern, something that might explain what happened to us.”

“And did you find anything?”

The reporter frowned. “We were people of all ages, all kinds—there wasn’t any pattern that I could see. But there was a man on the list of the dead who worked for MindData Associates, and I found out later that another one of their employees, an electronics engineer, committed suicide about a week after the … after the incident. I was getting kind of obsessed with looking for a pattern by then. I kept wondering what it meant.”

“Maybe not much,” Miller said.

“Except that every time I think of MindData Associates, I keep thinking that it does mean something and I’ve just forgotten.” She lifted her head and he saw the distress in her blue eyes. “I keep thinking that I should know. When I found out that they’d moved out to Westview, I …” Her voice trailed off.

Miller supposed that he should excuse himself and go on about his business, but he had nothing much else to do except get some groceries at the convenience store, and it wasn’t every day that he got to converse with a TV personality. Besides, he felt sorry for the young woman. It couldn’t be easy for her, having to live with what had happened and not knowing how it had come about.

“What made you decide to live in Westview?” Chris Szekely asked.

“Actually, I live outside of town. I’m way out in the country. Guess I just wanted to be away from too many people.”

“Maybe you’ve got the right idea. Sometimes people do tend to get too close.”

There was no traffic along the street, but that wasn’t unusual for the middle of the afternoon. Across the way, at MindData Associates, Miller noticed that a man was leaning out of one of the third floor gables to fiddle with the big dish.

“You never get over it, you know,” he heard himself say, and felt the people on the bridge pressing around him, screaming as the surface under their feet gave way. He felt a hand grasp his own. “Oh, God,” he said, and heard Chris repeat the words inside him, “I can remember now,” and he was on the bridge, resonating with the others again, part of the All.

Abruptly he was inside himself again. Miller sat still, breathing hard, afraid to move. He steadied himself. Probably been watching too much television, he thought, too much of the news. Maybe he shouldn’t have watched that retrospective on the bridge disaster the other night.

He let go of the reporter’s hand. The fellow across the way had finished whatever he was doing to the dish and had closed the window again. “Oh, God,” Chris Szekely said, “I think it was coming back to me, what happened.”

“A flashback,” Miller said. “Guess that’s normal.” He stood up and looked down at her. “Sure you’re going to be all right, young lady?”

She gave him a half-smile. “I’ll be fine. When I get out of this area—I’ll be fine.”

“Hope so. Always liked you on the news.” He made his way to his pick-up truck, then glanced across the street. Something seemed to flutter at the edges of his mind as he gazed at the white Victorian. He was getting suggestible in his old age. If he didn’t watch it, he might turn into one of those people who started imagining all kinds of strange plots and who thought weird forces of some kind were sending signals to them.

He got into the truck, fumbled in his pocket for his keys, and saw Chris Szekely pull out in her Honda. As she drove out of town, he was momentarily tempted to follow her, then turned east toward the route that would take him to his house. Sometimes people do tend to get too close to each other, he thought.

Afterword to “Common Mind”:

I first had the idea for this story—just a glimpse of a scene, which is often how my stories begin—in the early 1990s. After making notes and writing a few paragraphs, the story died on me, largely because I didn’t know where it was going and also had not yet figured out why the characters were behaving as they did.

Sometimes a story can be forced, even if you don’t know where it’s going, since there’s a chance you might find out where it’s headed during the process of writing, but forcing a story can also be a wasteful enterprise. Scenes get written, fail, and have to be thrown out; false starts and abrupt halts are common. Occasionally the unconscious will kick in and help you discover the story as you go along, but usually a story that refuses to be written is telling the writer that it isn’t yet ready to be written. In the case of “Common Mind,” my problem turned out to be a lack of underlying assumptions, a rationale for the situation the characters faced. The writer doesn’t have to explain everything in a story, but does have to know much more than is ever revealed to the reader for the story to live.

My conscious mind had lost track of “Common Mind,” but apparently my unconscious had not yet given up on this tale. When editor Kim Mohan asked me for a story in the late 1990s, “Common Mind” sprang from my head immediately, this time fully formed. A more methodical writer might have consulted her notes and past drafts, but I ignored mine, started writing from scratch, and finished “Common Mind” in a few days.

So to say that I dashed “Common Mind” off may be accurate enough, as far as it goes. But the actual writing of any piece of work is often the least of the writer’s efforts, the last stage in a very long process. The story’s actual development took years, which is almost always the case with me.

ALL RIGHTS

Darcy Langton dreaded her daily journey to the post office. She knew only too well what her mailbox would yield—bills she could not pay, along with more rejections.

Lately, no one wanted to buy her stories; she wondered why editors kept encouraging her to submit them. Maybe they just wanted to keep her on tap in case the hot new writers they were buying now either priced themselves out of the market or self-destructed. Maybe they just wanted to pretend they were good guys after all, sensitive caretakers of writing talent instead of stripminers and exploiters of it. Maybe it was part of a vast conspiracy, in which editors regularly got together and cackled about all the suckers to whom they were giving false encouragement. Maybe—

Going to the post office often provoked such musings. Darcy’s agent would have told her that it was simply a matter of too many stories chasing too few markets. Agents were supposed to think that way, and Leonard McDermott Lowell was more hardheaded than most, which was one of the reasons she had asked him to represent her work ten years ago. Still, he hadn’t been doing much for her lately. Maybe he was too busy hyping his hot new clients to publishers to tend to her paltry business affairs.

Her post office box was empty, except for a suspiciously thin envelope from Leonard McDermott Lowell & Associates. Darcy clenched her teeth, suspecting it was a letter telling her that Canyon Books had rejected her proposal for a new novel. She locked her box, crossed the room, and leaned against a table as she prepared to read of her doom. Disaster it would be, after six months of waiting to hear from an editor who had encouraged the submission only to lapse into a lengthy silence. Darcy would have to go back to her old job at Burns and Royal to make ends meet, assuming the bookstore still had an opening. Leonard might at least have called to tell her about the rejection, and to commiserate with her, instead of heartlessly notifying her in a letter.

She tore open the envelope. A statement from her agent fell out, along with a check. She stared at the check for a long time, not daring to believe it. Twenty thousand dollars for a new edition of her first novel,
The Silent Shriek,
and this was apparently only the first part of the advance. Leonard’s statement revealed that more would be forthcoming on publication, six months from now.

Ecstasy and an overpowering feeling of relief flooded through her. She had been reprieved from the torment of having to go back to working in a bookstore where her own books were conspicuously absent from the shelves and always had to be special-ordered by the one or two customers who wanted to buy them during their brief duration in print.