Mr. X by Peter Straub Page B

desk. During the distribution of the blue books and question sheets, I felt as if I had taken nothing stronger than a cup of coffee. I opened the blue book, read the first question, and discovered that not only did I understand it perfectly, I could visualize every detail of the relevant pages in the textbook as if they were displayed before me. At the end of the hour I had filled three blue books and completed all but one of the extra-credit questions. I floated out of the classroom and gulped a quart of cold water from the nearest fountain.
    The calculus exam was twenty-two hours away. I took my guitar into the lounge and spent the afternoon playing better than I had thought possible for me. I skipped dinner and forgot about my meal job. Instead, I remembered the bridge to “Skylark” and the verse to “But Not for Me.” I knew who my mother had met on the sidewalk outside Biegelman’s—me, the real me, this one. After six or seven hours I said, “I have to memorize the math book,” and returned to my room on a wave of applause.
    When I opened the calculus textbook, I found that I had already memorized every page, including footnotes. I stretched out on the bed and observed that the cracks in the ceiling described mathematical symbols. Someone yelled, “Dunstan, phone call!” I floated to the telephone and heard Simone Feigenbaum asking me how I felt. Great, I said. Had the pill done any good? I think it did, I said. Did I want another one? No, I said, but maybe you could come back to my room.
    “Are you kidding?” Simone laughed. “I’m still sore. Besides, I have to study for my last exam. I’m going home afterward, but I’ll see you after the break.”
    I levitated back to my room and stretched out. Sleep refused to come until seven in the morning, when absolute darkness swarmed from every wall and corner and escorted me into unconsciousness.
    Someone who may or may not have been me had possessed the foresight to set my alarm clock for an hour before the exam. The same someone had shifted the clock to my desk, forcing me to get up when it yowled. Once I was on my feet, I reeled to the showers and stood beneath alternating blasts of hot and cold water, realizing that I had slept through both breakfast and lunch, in the process missing two tours of duty before the pots and pans, andwould have to survive the math exam before satisfying my hunger. I rummaged through my desk drawers, discovered half a packet of M&M’s, an entire Reese’s peanut butter cup, and the greenish, salt-flecked remains clinging to the bottom of a potato chip bag. I rammed this gunk into my mouth on the way to the exam. Professor Flagship strolled from chair to chair, handing out thick wads of paper covered with mathematical formulae. He said, “This is a multiple-choice examination. Check off the answers and use the blue books for calculations.” To me, he added, “I wish you luck, Mr. Dunstan.”
    I believe that I had a dim grasp of the first few problems. All the rest were in a mixture of Old Icelandic and Basque. I kept falling asleep for two-second, three-second naps. Occasionally I covered a page with doodles or scrawled the random words that limped across my mind’s surface. At the end of the hour I tossed the question sheets and blue books into the heap on the table and went off-campus to guzzle beer at a student bar until the return of unconsciousness.
    My recurring dream descended once again.
    All the next day I lay in bed listening to the slamming of car doors and shouts of farewell. Because I didn’t remember going to the bar, I did not understand that I had a monstrous hangover. How could I be hungover? I almost never drank alcohol. To the extent I was capable of thinking anything at all, I thought that I had come down with some spectacular new variety of flu.
    Memory returned in dreamlike, photographic flashes. I watched my hand add a caricature of Professor Flagship’s face to the body of a lion with stubby wings,