CAULDEN'S MAGICAL DAY by ROY L. WEBER For several weeks now Caulden had been in a state of despondency, almost despair. Sometimes he felt like he was trapped under water, gurgling like a ridiculous rubber frogman. Everyone he met seemed to notice a distracted turning away of his eyes. His synchronized life was ticking like a watch with a rusty gear: the daily bells, the route from one class to another, the rhythmic clockwork of each day, the pushing crowd after class. He thought about it now, walking away from his last class. He stood in line and waited to cross the street in front of the book store. The usual mulling crowd waiting for the cars to stop. The traffic director was blowing his shiny silver whistle, waving the cars on. He looked like a Mickey Mouse parody of a highway patrolman with his tin-looking badge and his visored hat. Caulden stood there with everyone else, shuffling his feet and looking at the girls in the store window clothing and the sprayed hair. There was a girl with flowing blond hair who looked like a Swede, and he wanted to say something to her. The warbling whistle blew again, and the restless crowd started moving. Caulden walked across the street, up the grass-carpeted hill, past moldy brick buildings and new metal girded buildings, trees rustling in the breeze, students, many with bright sweaters and ironed shirts and satchels dangling from their hands, leaning forward against the incline and sometimes making springing efforts as they walked up the hill. The leaves were beginning to turn red and crimson and yellow, beginning to wrinkle in the cold chill of autumn's waxen temperature. He remembered how the leaves had shriveled last year. He would walk up this same hill. First they began to turn yellow at the edges, wrinkling and becoming red and orange and purple, shriveling up and turning gray, the red color imperceptibly draining like blood from a flaccid, barely living corpse. Falling, falling like ashes buffeted in the careless draft of an indifferent fire. This premonition of cold, secluded winter days, with whirring heat and irritating black words and endless memorizing, walking between classes with the collar of your coat in front of your face, stopping to let a stranger through the door. He was panting a little, and he stopped to rest, turning and looking down at the lower campus. It was a kind of a plateau, in geology he had been told that it was an alluvial fan, formed by the erosion of silt and gravel from the surrounding hills, piling up for millions of years. Then these intelligent ants came and built on it; they dug holes and built box-like brick nests, and they marked out paths to scurry hither and thither on their prefabricated anthill. At least it seemed that way, this daily wandering, this purposeful clockwork. He thought of the milieu of students clutching their satchels. It was a weird thought, but it made him think of ants swarming over their hill in industrious confusion, each ant hurrying somewhere with his little burden. Sometimes he just wanted to get away from this frantic academic factory, and often he had a picture of a serene idyll where he would go to meditate and to think euphoric thoughts while the sun made him feel warm and significant. It was a secluded ravine in the midst of a sprawling forest and sculptured outcrops, with a small waterfall that splashed and ran in a gurgling stream through the bottom of the ravine. Sometimes there was a girl there too, with a body that was sculptured by an erotic god, with skin that was bronze in the titillaing sunlight and hair that was like flowing gold. Her body would be heliographed in the verdant, plush ravine. There were students walking here and there; it seemed to him that their heads were all slightly downcast, and the distant sound of the clock tower's gong was there with its lugubrious rhythym. He turned and walked up the hill. When he came to the top of the hill and the street that he always had to cross, he had to wait for a truck. It was a big truck with the word "Ford" wrought in iron at the top of the corrugated grillwork. He waited for it to pass, and then he crossed the street. This sidewalk was like an irrelevant part of his increasingly meaningless life, a fixture that had been there every day for all of these busy, empty months. These drab rectangles of gray cement, they were the vignettes of his existence. They were perfect rectangles except for some of the edges where the wet cement had dried into crusted irregularities. It was as if the author had a sense of artistic irony, grinning to himself as he worked with his methodical trowel, purposely leaving some of the cement unsmoothed. By God, he was tired of kow-towing to all the little fetishes that chanted orders in his mind, making him observe his meaningless daily ritual, 23