The Outlier #1: Beepers
Page 4
comforter which covered it somehow made the size seem absolutely right. There was only one window he could see, behind the kitchen, facing an endless set of brick buildings identical to the one they were currently inside of, but at least there were pretty curtains set about it, a light blue cloth depicting children in black outline flying kites and jumping into waves.
“Can I offer you anything?” Bermuda asked, as she guided him to a seat at the table. Dillon shook his head, but relented when she mentioned coffee. He had intended only to ask her to point out the location of the beeping, but as she sat across from him he remembered his other plan, and thought again that he might have been correct in his initial hunch about her.
“Do you have the matchbook?”
“Right here,” she replied, and handed it to him. As he had requested, she had removed all the matches, and written the phrase “tremulous quaking” in a very neat script. He smiled.
“I wonder if you would do something for me,” he said, pulling out a stack of printed papers from his jacket pocket and placing them on the table.
“Would you mind reading these?”
Bermuda picked them up and began to sort through them, and as she did she saw the first one contained a check in the amount of five thousand dollars made out in her name. She looked up and gave him a quizzical glance.
“For your time,” he replied. “You are holding twenty-five requests that I've recently received. I would like to know what you think of them. Take your time. Oh, but first, your beeping?”
“It's from right over there,” Bermuda stood and walked over to the stove. “Right up here, about two inches above the back burner.”
“Ah, so you noticed,” Dillon nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I know it's nothing you can see.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I'd like to take a look in any case,” and he got up and found his magnifying glass and began to scrutinize the spot. Bermuda sat back down and began reading through the correspondence. Dillon pretended to be engaged in his investigation long after he'd actually completed it, to give her enough time to finish. When he sat back down again she looked at him and said,
“You get a lot of this stuff?”
“Tons,” he smiled. “Every single day. I've got a heap at home I haven't even seen yet. What do you think?”
“Most of it is nonsense,” she said, riffling through the papers, “except for this one here.” She plucked one paper out of the stack and handed it to him. Dillon gave it a glance and set it on the table.
“Was it that obvious?” she asked him.
“Not at all,” he shook his head, “but I suppose you knew there had to be one.”
“It was like a test,” she said.
“But it was not the most peculiar case.”
“Her boyfriend had three names.”
“Or did she had three boyfriends?”
“No. It was something that happened to the one. Something strange.”
“What do you think it was?”
“For no one to know but for you to find out?” she smiled.
“What I want to find out now is how soon can you move to California and work for me.”
Bermuda burst out laughing.
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely,” he said, “I need someone to help me sort through all this. It has to be the right person, and I think it's you.”
“I don't know why you'd say that,” she said but he only shrugged and replied,
“Your answer? You'll have a much nicer place to live in and I will pay you very, very well.”
“And I won't be woken up every night by some god damn invisible beeping? Oh, yes. Yes I will.”
And that was all Dillon needed to know. The Commander arrived and as always was ready to take care of everything. Nothing surprised the Commander anymore. By the time they were airborne she had already arranged Bermuda's new home on the same floor as herself, hired the moving company, bought her plane ticket, and practically had her luggage checked in. Dillon spent the long flight studying hypothetical sub-atomic particles and their theoretical points of resonance. There was a lot of math involved and by the time they got home he had quite a headache.
Dillon spent the next hour on the elliptical machine trying to sweat it all out. It was good to be back on his own balcony once again, and the city looked as beautiful as ever that night. The fog was only just beginning to spill over Twin Peaks, and the lights of the houses up there twinkled and shone in turn, reminding him of the comings and goings of the molecules in the particles of dust. It was all a matter of scale, he thought, replicated from the macro to the micro, all the way up and all the way down. The visible world is a veil, but it reveals the same patterns. No doubt if you could get all the way out into the vast Milky Way and looked back, you would see in the swirling of the planets and stars the same movements and vibrations as the bubbles on the foam on a half-caf skinny flat white. And then it hit him.
Hand-made toast?
How could toast be hand-made?
“Tablet,” he commanded, and its screen came to life. “Tell me all about this allegedly hand-made toast.”
“A fad begun late last year, originating in Berkley, California but quickly migrating to other trendentious cities, including New York, Boston, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Austin, Miami ...”
“That's quite enough of that,” Dillon said, “Tell me about the process.”
“Allegedly hand-made, but actually fabricated, the so-called hand-made toast process begins with the Lumpy Kneader, an electro-mechanical device invented by Patterson Ridgeway and Sons.”
“Simulation, please.”
“One moment,” the tablet replied. Dillon stepped off the exercise machine and paced up and down the balcony, impatiently grasping the tablet, which was producing a mechanical sketch of a small bread-making machine. Soon the simulation began and as Dillon observed its activity he fashioned queries for details about its operation. All became clear in a matter of moments. There was no doubt. The Lumpy Kneader was the source of the atmospheric disturbance which under certain nocturnal and urban conditions resulted in the resonant vibration of until-then merely theoretical subatomic particles, causing them them to emit a short-lived but regular tone at a displacement of zero point six five kilometers north by north west horizontal and thirty seven meters vertical. He didn't even need to look up the addresses of the artisanal toast factories in New York, Boston, or Texas. He was just that good.