THE AMNESIA HELMET
Buck Rogers came to the Rialto Theater in Clarksburg, Illinois, when Marlena was eleven years old and her brother Johnny was nine. Flash Gordon had been the highlight of summer before last and they couldn’t wait for the new adventure. The fact that Flash and Buck were the same person made it even better. No worries about whether or not they would like Buck. The great movie star Mr. Buster Crabbe, who had played Flash, was playing Buck, so Johnny and Marlena were certain the new hero would not disappoint.
“You think he’ll have the same uniform?” Johnny asked.
“Of course he won’t,” Marlena said. “Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are two different people. They have different uniforms in the funny papers. They even have different colored hair on Sundays.” Marlena loved the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comic strips, which her mother called “fanciful” and her father called “pernicious nonsense.” Her father didn’t like how wrapped up she was in those particular comic strips. But her mother had suggested, quietly and carefully as she always did, that these strips were “challenging” and might help Marlena’s reading skills. Marlena did well with arithmetic and science but her teacher said she still struggled a bit with her reading. Shouldn’t Marlena have every advantage? Her father grudgingly agreed.
Troublesome in a different way was Johnny’s preference for the funny animal comics—the others, he insisted, had too many words. But it was early yet and when he played with the other children Johnny showed what his mother called “recklessness” and his father called “proper vigor.” He would be a man soon enough.
“If they have different uniforms,” Johnny persisted, “then why is it the same man?”
“Because Mr. Buster Crabbe is the greatest actor of all time and nobody else—nobody else—could be Buck Rogers. Now come on,” Marlena said, the matter settled to her satisfaction. “We want to get good seats.”
On the way to the theater they met up with Pete Daniels, who was Johnny’s age but acted more like Marlena’s. Pete and his mother lived outside of Chicago but his father traveled for work and every summer Pete’s mother would bring the two of them to Clarksville, where her own family lived. Pete and Marlena were veterans of the Rialto Theater and saw all their movies together. It had rained all morning and Johnny insisted on splashing every puddle.
The inside of the theater was packed, mostly with kids but with a few adults who were there for the main feature and were determined to get their money’s worth. Saturdays at the theater before the show started were the loudest thing Marlena knew, louder than the playground, even. They made their way down the aisle to get as close to the screen as they could. Johnny was delighted with how his shoes squished with each step even though with all the noise nobody else could hear them.
They found three seats together in the middle of the fourth row and squeezed past a line of bouncing, brawling children to get to them. The noise subsided, but did not disappear altogether, during the newsreel (Johnny thought Hitler’s moustache was funny, but Pete and Marlena just thought he was creepy), rose again during the cartoon (Popeye bought all the dogs in Olive Oyl’s pet shop and set them free, but the dog catcher got them), and finally went away altogether when the serial started. Johnny grabbed his sister’s hand and Marlena squeezed it. She was so excited she almost reached over and squeezed Pete’s hand but caught herself just in time.
Afterward, Johnny said, “Where were the outer space people?”
“What outer space people?” Pete said.
“In Flash Gordon they were in outer space and there were people there. Ming the Merciless. This one doesn’t have outer space people.”
“It’s only the first chapter,” Pete said. “There’s plenty of time for outer space people.”
“I guess,” Johnny said. “That airship was neat. Did you see when it crashed in the storm?”
“I was right there, stupid.”
“Don’t call me stupid, stupid! Anyway, it was neat. And how they woke up in the future? That was great! I can’t wait for next week.”
“Me, too,” Pete said. “Too bad Mr. Delmore wasn’t there to see that airship.”
“Mr. Delmore?”
“Oh, you’re too young to remember that,” Pete said, always happy to ignore the fact that he and Johnny were the same age. “You remember Mr. Delmore’s docking pole, don’t you, Marlena?”
“What?”
“I said, you remember Mr. Delmore’s docking pole, right?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” Mr. Delmore was what their mother called “eccentric” and their father called “crazy as a loon.” Mr. Delmore had wanted to put up a tower for zeppelins to tie up to on their way from Chicago. He had seen a movie about a bunch of rich people in New York having a big party on one of the airships and had decided that was the future. The skies would be full of zeppelins, and with a docking tower Clarksburg would really be on the map and he would be rich. Everybody laughed behind his back but he actually got a couple of men from out of town to put up some money and had gotten an engineer from Urbana to draw up plans when that German ship crashed in New Jersey, and that was that. Marlena remembered the whole thing very well. She had thought it was a grand idea and was sad when it didn’t happen. The piece of land where the tower was supposed to go was still empty and none of the adults had any idea what to put there.
“I said it’s too bad Mr. Delmore wasn’t there to see Buck and that airship,” Pete said.
“You leave Mr. Delmore alone,” Marlena said.
“I ain’t bothering crazy old Delmore! Never mind him. What did you think of the show?”
Marlena paused before answering—not something she usually did. It made Pete and Johnny pay attention. “I liked it,” she said. “I liked it a lot.”
“There wasn’t anybody from outer space,” Johnny said.
“So what?” Marlena said. “Who needs them? I liked that it was here on the earth. It’s like it could really happen.”
“Could not,” Pete said. “It’s just a story.”
“Maybe,” Marlena said. She let Johnny and Pete keep talking as they walked home—it had quit raining and the afternoon sun had baked the puddles dry—and didn’t tell them what had really gotten her attention: the girl, Wilma, who just appeared for a bit near the end of the first chapter but who was wearing trousers and didn’t seem to be a princess. Marlena was even more eager for Chapter Two of Buck Rogers than she had been for Chapter Two of Flash Gordon.
They went back to the Rialto every Saturday. Johnny quit complaining when the villain Killer Kane showed up—“He’s slick!”—and was overjoyed when Buck and Buddy and Wilma went to Saturn, even if he didn’t understand why Saturn had Chinese people. Pete usually made a big show of getting up to go to the bathroom whenever there were any yucky hugging or kissing scenes, but this serial gave him no reason to leave, although in Episode Three when Buck and Buddy were sitting on Buck’s bed while Buddy tried to talk Buck into letting him go with the team to Saturn, Marlena thought sure Pete was going to get up and go, he was squirming so much in his seat. Marlena certainly wasn’t going anywhere, not with Buck there with his shirt off looking like Mr. Buster Crabbe had looked in the pictures from the Olympics.
But it was Wilma who truly kept Marlena in her seat. Wilma was awfully pretty, the way Marlena’s mother had been pretty in the old pictures of her and Marlena’s father when they were courting, but Wilma dressed like the men and seemed to be doing pretty much what they were doing. Buck was clearly in charge, of course—how could Mr. Buster Crabbe not be?—but Wilma could fly the space ship and threaten the Saturn men with a ray gun. And this wasn’t some other planet in some other solar system. This was all coming from Earth, just in the future. Marlena had never seen anything like it. It made her want to do something.
It was two episodes later that Marlena decided what she wanted to do. She liked the way Wilma had a ray gun like the others, but she didn’t have anything to work with since her father started locking his revolver away right after her mother had gotten sick and the doctor had said it would do her good to visit her family in Bloomington. But even better than the ray gun was the amnesia helmet, the device the evil Killer Kane used to control his minions. When you put the helmet on someone, he not only forgot everything, but he would do whatever you told him. Marlena could imagine all kinds of possibilities. Plus, she knew just what to use.
So she went back to the old carriage house behind their home where her father kept his tools and the family put things they didn’t have anywhere else to put. A year earlier she had gone through what her mother called “a phase” and her father called “open defiance” when she had spent several winter afternoons after school using her father’s tools to try to make an old radio do something other than be a radio. When her father found the scorch marks on the wall he whipped her, but she went back to work the next day and he had to whip her twice more to make her stop.
Marlena spent a couple of days observing her parents’ schedules to make sure she knew exactly when her father would be leaving and returning, when her mother would be out shopping or calling on the neighbors or lying on the sofa listening to the radio and sipping what her mother called “her afternoon toddy” and her father called “dissolute behavior.” She also kept watch on Johnny until she was pretty sure when he would be off playing with the other boys and not home sticking his nose in. Then she went back out to the old carriage house and went to work. She wanted to find a shirt and trousers to wear like Wilma but stealing from her father’s closet was too much of a chance on top of everything else.
Four days later—it would have been three and a half if her father hadn’t come home unexpectedly with one of his headaches, which seemed to make her mother as nervous as it made her—she finished the helmet and took it to show Johnny and Pete.
“What is it?” Johnny asked.
“It’s an amnesia helmet. Like in Buck Rogers.”
“Is not,” Pete said.
“Is too.”
“Where’d you get it?” Johnny asked.
“I made it myself.”
“Did not,” Pete said.
“Did too.”
“Daddy’s gonna whip you again,” Johnny warned.
“I don’t care.”
“I’m gonna tell,” Johnny said.
“Me, too,” Pete said.
“Go ahead. But first you both have to put on the helmet.”
“We can’t both put on the helmet,” Johnny observed.
“One at a time, stupid.”
“I’m not stupid, stupid!”
“Put it on!”
“What’s supposed to happen when he puts it on?” Pete asked.
“He’ll forget who he is and he’ll have to do whatever I tell him to do. Like in Buck Rogers.”
“Nuh-uh!” Johnny said, jumping back like he’d just seen a snake.
“It’s just pretend, dummy,” Pete said.
“You’re the dummy! I’m not putting that thing on!”
“It is not pretend! Now listen,” Marlena said. “You both put this on, and whoever’s the best amnesia man wins.”
“Wins what?” Johnny asked, stepping back forward to take a look at the helmet. Any kind of a game was all right by him.
“If you win,” Marlena said to Johnny, “I’ll . . . I’ll do your chores for a week.”
“What if I win?” Pete asked.
Marlena considered. “If you win I’ll let you kiss me.”
“Huh? Yuck! Why would I want to kiss you?” Pete’s face turned red and he jumped back as if he’d seen two snakes and a scary dog.
“All right then, dummy, if you win I won’t let you kiss me.”
Pete looked confused. “But why—”
“I’m in!” Johnny announced. “Gimme the helmet.”
Marlena passed Johnny the helmet. He almost dropped it. “Careful!”
“It’s heavy! Where’d you get this?”
“Remember when Daddy’s company was delivering supplies to Lorena’s Beauty Spot? A couple of the dryers were too small and Daddy never sent them back to the warehouse. Here, I’ll do it,” Marlena said. She set the helmet on Johnny’s head.
Johnny’s face went blank.
“Hello,” Marlena called. “Anybody home?”
Johnny didn’t say anything.
“OK, then. Walk over to that tree, turn around, and walk back.”
Johnny walked over to the elm that shaded the roof over her parents’ room, stiffly like the amnesia men in Buck Rogers. Then he turned around and walked stiffly back.
“So?” said Pete.
“He did what I told him to, didn’t he?”
“He walked to a tree. Big deal. Make him do something else.”
“Johnny,” Marlena said, “take off your belt and go hit Pete with it.”
Johnny unfastened his belt, slid it out of its loops, walked over to Pete, and slapped it over the top of Pete’s head.
“Hey! Knock it off!” Pete grabbed at the belt but Johnny pulled away from him and walked back over to Marlena.
“Ha-ha, Marlena. Very funny.”
“Still think it’s not a big deal?”
“No! It’s only a big deal if you make him forget something.”
“Fine!” Marlena looked at her brother and said, “Johnny, I want you to forget that I told you that I made the helmet.”
“I will forget that you told me that you made the helmet,” Johnny said in a monotone.
“OK, then.” Marlena lifted the helmet off Johnny’s head.
“Do I win?” Johnny asked.
“Not yet. Your turn, Pete.”
“Nuh-uh. How do I know he forgot like he was supposed to?”
“Johnny, where did I get this helmet?”
“I dunno,” Johnny answered.
“Like fun he doesn’t,” Pete said.
“He’s telling the truth!”
“How do I know?”
Marlena scrunched her eyes up like she did when she was working through an especially hard arithmetic problem. Then she opened them, went over to Pete, and whispered in his ear. “If Daddy doesn’t whip me for working in the carriage house, you’ll know that Johnny didn’t tell him, and the only way Johnny wouldn’t tell him is if he didn’t know.”
Pete thought about this. Then he stood on his toes—Marlena was two inches taller—and whispered in Marlena’s ear, “How do I know if your daddy’s really not whipped you?”
“What are you talking about?” Johnny demanded.
“Shut up, you,” Marlena snapped, and then whispered back to Pete, “When has Johnny ever not told you when Daddy whipped me? So if he doesn’t, you have to put on the helmet.”
Pete stood up tall again, leaned in close to her ear, and whispered, “OK.” Marlena didn’t know why he had to whisper that last part, but at least the deal was done.
Marlena put the helmet back in the old carriage house, carefully hidden behind a camping tent nobody in her family had ever used.
The week went by. Johnny didn’t say anything to their father and Marlena didn’t get whipped. Saturday they went to see the latest chapter of Buck Rogers—a thrilling episode in which Buck himself fell under the evil influence of the amnesia helmet—and afterward Pete said, “OK, I’ll put the helmet on. But—”
“What?” Marlena asked. He looked as nervous as he had the other day when she had offered to kiss him.
“I want to forget Uncle Baxter,” Pete said.
“Huh?” Uncle Baxter was part of Pete’s mother’s family that they lived with here in Clarksville. He wasn’t Pete’s actual uncle, but his aunt Evelyn’s brother-in-law who lived in the apartment over the family’s garage, whom her mother referred to as “that odd young man” and her father referred to as “that bum.” Marlena didn’t really know Uncle Baxter all that well, although he had always been nice to her, and once when they were over at Pete’s he had shown her and Johnny how to string two cans together to make them work like a telephone. “Why do you want to forget your Uncle Baxter?”
“I just do, that’s all! Can you make me? Can you make me forget him?”
They were almost to Marlena’s house. Johnny had run off with some boys his age who promised a game of pirates, even though the last time they kept making him walk the plank. “Of course I can make you forget your Uncle Baxter. You saw how it worked on Johnny, didn’t you? But I still don’t understand—”
“Then let’s go. You don’t have to understand.”
Pete had never asked her for anything serious before. It made her feel good, like when she gave the right answer in class. But she had also never seen him look this way before, determined but nervous, even scared, and that made her worry that whatever she did would be wrong. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes, damn it to hell, I’m sure! Come on!”
That did it. For all Pete’s acting as if he were older than he was, she had never heard him use two cuss words in a row. Something was wrong, and she was going to use the amnesia helmet to make it right. “OK, then.”
After Pete took the helmet off, Marlena asked him, “How’s your uncle Baxter?”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
Marlena didn’t see Pete for the next couple of days. Then Marlena’s mother got a phone call from Pete’s mother, who said Pete was acting as if he didn’t know his Uncle Baxter. She had made him go cut a switch and bring it back for a whipping but that hadn’t done any good. Pete insisted Uncle Baxter was a stranger and when they kept after him he ran up to his room and locked the door and climbed out the window. He had, his mother said, gotten halfway to Marlena’s house when she had caught up with him and dragged him home. Now they were taking Pete to the doctor to see if there was something really wrong. Marlena was worried about Pete, but not nearly as much as she was overjoyed that her amnesia helmet had worked again. In the serial, once you took the helmet off, you were completely back to normal. She had not dared let Pete and Johnny know how much she wanted her helmet to do more, and how unsure she was that it would. Marlena’s teacher had told them once that scientists had to do experiments more than once to make sure they worked, and if the experiments didn’t work every time, something was wrong and they had to start over and try something different. The amnesia helmet had worked twice. That ought to be enough, she thought.
Late that night after Marlena and Johnny went to bed—they still shared a room, which annoyed Marlena no end, which her mother said was “not fit for almost a young lady,” but which her father insisted would stay as it was as long as he “wasn’t made of gold”—Marlena woke up and heard her mother crying. Then she heard her father say something that at first sounded like her mother sounded when she was trying to get Marlena to do something for her own good but then sounded like her father always sounded when he was complaining. Then they both started making the kind of sounds Marlena had heard before, as if they were both trying to lift something that was just barely too heavy for the two of them to lift, and by the time they finished moving the heavy object wherever it was supposed to go Marlena was almost asleep, thinking that scientists probably did their experiments more than twice.
The next afternoon, after her father had returned to work and Johnny was off on his pirate ship and before her mother could get situated with the radio and her toddy, Marlena asked her if she would play Beauty Parlor with her. Her mother had never been much for games and especially not for the last couple of years, but Marlena knew if she called it “Beauty Parlor” her mother would be so glad Marlena was showing an interest in something ladylike that she would agree to play.
Marlena ran to the garage, got the amnesia helmet, ran back a bit more slowly—Johnny was right, it was awfully heavy—and set it on the kitchen table. “I’ll be the beautician and you be the customer,” she said. She hurriedly gave her mother a pretend shampoo and then told her, “Now put the helm—the dryer on.”
Her mother obliged, and Marlena waited for her face to go blank like Johnny’s and Pete’s had done. At first she was afraid the experiment had failed, and then she realized there wasn’t that much difference between her mother’s normal face and a helmet face. “Go stand by the sink,” she said.
Her mother stood up and went over to the sink.
“Now come back and sit down.”
Her mother returned to her chair and sat.
“Now,” Marlena began, and stopped. Now what? What should she tell her? She tried to think of what she might want her mother to forget, and then she thought of Pete and how he was when he asked to forget his Uncle Baxter, and nothing she could think of seemed all that important. Then she tried to think of what her mother might want to forget, and after a minute or two she found herself wondering just how big a command she could give. She began to say, “Forget whatever makes you sad,” but before she could get the first word out, she felt a hand on her shoulder. The hand whirled her around and she was looking up at her father, who looked not angry but utterly confused, the way Marlena felt when the teacher tried to make her read poetry.
She didn’t know why he had come home so soon after lunch, but he had been standing there long enough to see her order her mother to stand and sit, and to see her mother obey. He asked her over and over again what they were doing, and at first all Marlena could say was, “Pretending,” but when his voice got louder and he started saying “Pretending what? Pretending what?” over and over again, she did something she had never done before: raised her voice to her own father.
“It’s an amnesia helmet! I made it! Like in Buck Rogers! Like the radio you wouldn’t let me work on! It made Johnny forget, and Pete too! And it’s going to make Mama forget everything that makes her sad!”
She knew she had gone too far but the only thing she could think of to try to make amends was to say, “It can make you forget, too. I can do that. Is there anything you want to forget?”
Her father stood there looking past her at her mother. He reached down and unbuckled his belt and started to pull it through the loops. Marlena flinched and then tensed, waiting for what was coming. But then her father stopped and refastened his belt. He walked over to her mother, lifted the amnesia helmet off her head, and put it in Marlena’s hands. She almost dropped it but managed to hold on.
Then her father said, “I want you to take that thing outside and put it in the trash can.”
Before she could stop herself Marlena did something else she had never done: she looked at her father and said, “No!”
“Marlena—”
“I won’t!”
Her father hooked his right thumb into the waist of his trousers and patted his belt. “Are you defying me?”
The moment of determination she had felt vanished, and suddenly she knew how this would end, and knew that there was nothing she could do about it. “Please, Daddy . . .”
He walked over to the door and pulled it open. “Outside.”
Marlena looked over at her mother, who was still sitting at the table. “Do what your father says, dear,” she said, her voice sounding as if she still had the helmet on.
“Now,” her father said.
Marlena held the helmet close against her chest and walked outside without looking at her father. She heard the screen door slam shut behind her, and her father’s footsteps. He followed her and stood behind her as she placed the helmet gently in the trash can. Then she shouted as loud as she could, “Damn it to hell!” and ran back inside before her father could do anything else. Her mother was on the couch with the radio on and her toddy on the table beside her. Marlena ran up to her room and waited for her father to come upstairs and whip her for cussing but after a few minutes she heard the car pull out of the drive and all the energy drained right out of her. She wondered if she would ever get off the bed. She was amazed she was able to breathe.
When her father came home that night he acted as if nothing had happened. Johnny complained over dinner that the other pirates had made him walk the plank again. Her mother told them that Pete’s mother had called just before dinner to say that the doctor could find nothing wrong with Pete and that her boy was acting fine. Just one of those silly games the children play. She also said that when she had gone to the garage apartment to ask Uncle Baxter yet again why he thought Pete had been acting like that she found a note saying he had been called out of town and didn’t know exactly when he would be back.
Over the next week Marlena’s father cleaned out their garage. He removed all the things that had stacked up over the years and locked up all his tools in the same cabinet where he had locked up the revolver.
By then the Buck Rogers serial had reached its final installment. It was a grand finale, with Buck saving the day just as they all knew he would. Killer Kane was forced to wear the amnesia helmet, but everyone else was freed. On the way home from the theater Johnny wanted to be Buddy and do the final scene where Buddy makes a big deal about leaving Buck and Wilma alone but Marlena and Pete both told him to shut up. So Johnny went off to his pirate friends, and Pete said he had to go home and help his mother with something. Marlena didn’t want to go home just yet so she started walking toward the edge of town until she found herself at the empty lot where Mr. Delmore was going to put his zeppelin tower. There was someone standing at the edge of the lot, and when she got closer she realized it was Mr. Delmore. He was just standing there looking at nothing in particular.
Marlena walked over to him. “Hi, Mr. Delmore.”
He looked down at her, at first with no recognition at all, but then he said, “You’re John Cantrell’s daughter, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How are your parents.” He didn’t say it like a question and Marlena realized he didn’t care how her parents were. So they had something in common. “Fine, thank you.”
“That’s good,” he said. He was wearing a coat and tie even though it was Saturday, and he was thinner than he had been back when he had been planning the zeppelin tower.
He started to turn away from her, and Marlena said, “It was a grand idea, Mr. Delmore.”
He stopped but did not look back at her. “What?”
“The zeppelin tower, Mr. Delmore. It was a grand idea. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
He turned around and looked down at her, and at first Marlena thought he looked like her father had in the kitchen, but before she could back away his face relaxed, and he almost smiled. “Me, too,” he said. “But there’s more than one grand idea.” Then he went back to looking at the empty lot.
Marlena never made anything in the garage again. But when she finished high school her teacher made such a fuss about how a bright girl like Marlena needed to continue her education that her parents let the teacher find a way to get Marlena a scholarship to a big university in New England, a scholarship her mother called “a great honor” and her father called “charity.” She graduated at the head of her class and went on to be one of the first women at that particular school to get a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. She was recruited by several government agencies but went to work for Bell Labs instead. She invented half a dozen remarkable things, three of which she received partial credit for and three of which her employers decided should not be released to the public. She retired early and became a teacher at her old university.
A year after the summer when they all watched Buck Rogers, Pete’s father got a new job that didn’t require him to travel so much, and Pete’s mother took him back to Chicago for good. He and Marlena wrote faithfully for about two months, and then not so faithfully, and, eventually, not at all.
Johnny, to his father’s pride and relief, grew up to be a successful businessman. He never lost his interest in games, however, and when, many years later, he was looking for an investment opportunity, he heard about a new board game where the players pretended to be dragons and wizards and knights. He put some money into the new game, and it paid off handsomely.
Johnny prided himself on seizing the moment and not dwelling on the past, so he never thought too much about his childhood with Marlena back in Clarksburg, Illinois. But every once in a while he thought about something that happened when they were kids that he never understood. It was a few years after the summer they watched the Buck Rogers serial. They went to a horror movie that was a sequel to another movie they had really liked about a woman who turned into a panther. The sequel was very different, much quieter—in fact, to Johnny, there didn’t seem to be much going on at all. But Marlena was utterly engrossed until the part where the little girl tried to tell her father about an encounter with a witch, and her father thought she was lying and took her upstairs to punish her. When that happened, Marlena jumped up and ran out of the theater so abruptly that Johnny thought that something was really wrong—plus, the movie wasn’t that interesting anyway—so he went after her. He found her a block down the street crying. Sobbing, crying so hard he was afraid she would choke. Eventually she calmed down, but he had never seen her cry that hard before, and he never saw her cry that hard again, not even when their parents died.