The Syndrome by John Case

malfunction as apparent as a burglar’s sneeze at midnight.
    It wasn’t a particularly useful trait, and he didn’t know how he’d acquired it. But that it was real was certain. Kicking the door closed behind him, he sensed a kind of tension in the room as soon as he entered it. For a moment, he stood there,frozen, just inside the doorway, listening to the air. Then, he stepped toward the phone.
    And it rang.
    It was uncanny, and unquantifiable. If anything, it suggested that he was more in tune with his appliances, with refrigerators and phones, than he was with people—an unfortunate characteristic in a therapist. Still, he thought, reaching for the receiver, there was no mistaking a room in which the telephone was about to ring. The air trembled with expectation, like an auditorium on the brink of thunderous applause.
    “Hello!”
    “Jeff?”
    He didn’t recognize the voice. And the question—no one really called him that. He was always
Duran
, or
Doctor Duran.
    “Hel-lo-oh?
Anyone there?”
    “Yeah! Sorry, I—this is Jeff.”
    “Well, hi-iii! It’s Bunny Kaufman Winkleman? I’m so glad I got you! Mostly, I get machines.”
    “Really …”
    “Almost always, but … I didn’t really know you? At Sidwell? We were in the same class. Not English or anything, but—the class of ’87? I was just plain Bunny Kaufman then.” She paused, then hurried on. “You must have been one of those quiet guys.”
    Duran thought about it. Had he been? Maybe. And Bunny? Who was
she?
A face didn’t come to mind—but then he hadn’t kept in touch. High school was ancient history. “Yeah, I guess,” Duran replied. “So … what’s up? What can I do for you, Bunny?”
    “Two things. You can promise me you’ll respond to the query I’m sending. You know, one of those ‘where-are-they-now’ things?”
    “Okay.”
    “And the second thing is: you could come to the reunion. Reunion
avec
homecoming, you know. You got the alumninewsletter, right? I’m calling to remind you—we need every
body
we can get.”
    “Well …” He picked up a matchbook—de Groot had left his cigarettes behind at their last session—and rotated it through his fingers. The matchbook was embossed with concentric silver and black circles. An eye stared out at him from the center of the design. He flipped the matchbook over. The back showed the same concentric silver and black circles but instead of the eye, the center held the words:
    trance klub
davos platz
    He opened the cover to see that the matches inside were European, made of thin flexible wood instead of paper, with bright green tips.
    “Jehh-eff?” said the voice on the telephone. “You still there?”
    Pay attention.
“Absolutely.”
    “Well how about it?” Bunny said in her wheedling voice. “Come
on.
Just
do
it!
Come.
It isn’t just
our
class—there are two others. And there’s a sort of competition to see who has the best turn out. It’s dumb, but—can I count on you?”
    “I’ll try.”
    “Well, I guess I’ll have to
settle
for that. ‘I’ll try’ is better than ‘I’ll think about it’ (which, as we all know, means, ‘No way.’)
So, put it on your calendar
, okay?”
    “Will do.”
    “October 23rd.”
    “Got it.”
    “Great. And, Jeff?”
    “Yeah?”
    “If you
can’t
come to the reunion? I
will not
understand!”
    When they’d hung up, he repeated her name aloud, turning it over in his mind as he put away the groceries, half expecting a face to well up in his memory. But there was nothing. Not an image or an anecdote.
    High school was a long time ago, he reflected, putting the lemons into the vegetable bin. Even so: his class was only a hundred strong, half boys, half girls. So you’d think he’d remember
something
about her.
    He emptied the ground coffee into the Starbucks canister and pushed his thumb down on the metal clip to close it. Bunny Kaufman. When he shut his eyes and thought about it, he imagined a short, blond, featureless girl. And