Machine Dreams

microscope, proceeded jerkily, in silence. Maybe if they synced in music, rock music, even classical music. Maybe if the films were in color. What color were cells? Billy thought the endless tones of gray were sad as hell.
    His thoughts drifted. Last night Danner had come out to Towers to bring him a birthday cake. She brought a boyfriend with her, Jim his name was, a nice enough guy, and two pints of ice cream. The cake was chocolate with white icing, and Danner put twenty candles on it, one to grow on. They’d set the cake up on the only table in his dorm room, all of them laughing, and when she leaned over, lighting matches, the ends of her long hair had caught fire. Billy put it out fast with his hands, but a few strands near her face were scorched. Danner made a joke about Buddhist protests; no harm was done and they ate cake until most of it wasgone. This morning, pulling on his jeans, he’d thought he smelled the acrid odor of burnt hair, and he remembered the scared look on her face as she’d pulled back from the candles. Billy shifted in his seat. There was no smell at all in the bio classroom of Sumner Hall.
    The bell rang. All around him books slammed shut, bodies shuffled. Everyone got up at once and moved, a bored herd on its way to cafeteria lines. He sat and let them pass, watching the tiers of seats reassert their emptiness. All summer, he’d waited to come to college. After he was in college, it seemed he was waiting for something else. What was he waiting for now?
    He figured he would drive to Bellington. It wasn’t fair if he didn’t tell Jean right away.
    The summer before he started college, Billy worked as a lifeguard at the State Park, a wilderness of rhododendron and pine crossed with trails. The trails were steep and rocky above the winding river, dotted with bridges, picnic tables, stone-hewn barbecue pits, fireplaces built in the Depression by CCC men. The river wound or rushed according to season; every spring someone drowned in the rapids, the river twisting violently around boulders and big rocks that created deep pools in the current. Teenagers from nearby towns went camping or tubing; they hiked the trails back along the river, toting beer and food far from the park entrance. They waded out to favorite rocks, awkwardly carrying ice chests, blankets, radios. Couples staked space on a flat rock and swam off the side in summer when the river was calm; they grew drunk slowly and necked in the sun.
    Families stayed farther up where there were guards, where the river was cordoned off near the refreshment stand and rest-rooms. Billy sat there in his tall white chair, a silver whistle on a chain around his neck, and watched dragonflies skim across the water. Weekends the park was crowded, the stretch of paved riverbank spread with towels and bathers. Transistor radios blared pop legends. Young mothers, high school girls a few years before, lay insensate, their faces blank. They listened to Top 40 and oiled their thighs. Sometimes they started conversations.
Hey there, aren’t you Billy Hampson? What class was it you were
in—two years ago, right? Or I knew your sister, she was just three years behind me. Where was it she went off to?
Billy watched toddlers in the wading pool, a shallows roped off with plastic cord and multicolored floats. Even on weekends, the young mothers were alone. They were girls whose husbands worked Saturdays or watched TV ballgames; they bought new bathing suits every summer at K-Mart and read romance paperbacks. Already they seemed transformed into an isolated species; groups of boys who came to the park in such numbers never glanced at them.
You’re a Hampson. Aren’t you Billy Hampson? I thought you were.
They pulled piles of plastic toys from beach bags, watched their charges wade into the water, then lay down and abandoned consciousness for a semiwakeful trance. The older women, whose children were eight and ten and twelve, came in couples and played cards. They refereed their kids’ quarrels, drank iced tea from a thermos, smoked endless cigarettes; they were stolid, asexual, and self-contained. They didn’t notice Billy unless he reprimanded their children, blowing the whistle and signaling them back to the bank for dunking or straying too far. Then the women stood up in their solid-color, one-piece suits, shouting threats and directions, snapping down the legs of the suits to cover a half-moon of sagging derriere.
    Weekdays were long, lazy, the park