by Adam Felber
A plume of smoke wafting next to his head looks briefly like a pouncing cat, back arched. Before it can say “meow,” it rises and breaks into smaller strands, a litter of pouncing kittens.
We feel a little bit remorseful. There, across the room, Professor Schrödinger is introducing himself. Exuding the cool, diffident charm of a very, very desperate man. Still, the three youngsters look up at him and appear to be at least momentarily amused.
There is a President in Montana and a truck outside of Ames. There’s a plastic bag buried deep in a stack of its fellows in a convenience store. There’s a lot of carbon in the world. There’s a bird, asleep, in a tree on the Cambridge Common. There’s a girl serving frozen desserts, a homeless woman buying yet another notebook, an egg in a carton, and a rat skulking beneath a city’s streets.
None of these things have any particular connection to one another, apart from whatever you believe might connect all things. But beyond that, nothing. Nothing.
But keep track of them all anyway.
Grant entered the Abbey depressed, looking forward to a drink. What a healthy habit for later life, he thought. Immediately he saw Johnny, Arlene, and Deb—the little knot of humanity to which he belonged in a way that seemed to go beyond friendship. Grant made it a point not to let this always welcome sight please him, though. Depression didn’t come very naturally to Grant, or at least sadness didn’t. It had to be nurtured. Fortunately, there was an opportunity for this—the table had an extra occupant, some older guy, and Grant was going to have to pull up a chair. He realized that this was an extremely small thing as far as annoyances go, but when you’re cultivating a sulk, every little bit helps.
“Grant!”
“Siddown, buddy!”
“Hey, lover …”
“Grant, this is Dr. Schrödinger. He’s a physicist.”
Grant pulled up a chair and surveyed the table, smiling weakly. Amazing thing about people, he thought, we’re all outside of each other. All I have to do is sit down and smile, and not even one of them has a clue about my inner torment.
“Grant, what’s wrong, man?”
“Yeah, you look like you been hit by a semi.”
Whatever.
“Kinda,” Grant conceded. “I just found out that the chick I’ve been dating online was lying to me.”
“She’s married?” asked Arlene.
“She’s got a dick?” asked Deb.
“Both.”
“Harsh.”
“My deepest apologies, young man. It is an inevitable fact of life that things are not always what they seem. Take photon beams, for example—”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Grant, staring into his drink. “Particle and wave, all depends on how you measure it. Subatomic indeterminacy. Yadda yadda yadda. Cat in a box.”
Everyone stared silently at Grant for a moment. Now that he was more comfortable, it would have surprised Grant how truly disparate his companions’ thoughts really were at this moment:
Arlene: “‘Cat.’ Poor Furble …”
Dr. S.: “He knows my work. Does he know he knows my work?”
Deb: “We have to get him laid…. Arlene, maybe?”
Johnny: “Amber light and beautiful smoke. Grant’s mourning his own liberation. Lungs fill and deflate like trained balloons.”
Deb broke the silence. “I know just how it is, Grant. My lover just walked out the door.”
Arlene: “You kicked him out!”
“Yeah, so that means it doesn’t hurt?”
“He had these totally amazing eyebrows. Independent eyebrows,” said Johnny, a little wistfully.
Grant said, “I gotta side with Arlene on this one, Deb. You look like you’re fine.”
“So it was a quick healing process….”
Laughter all around. The four of them laughing in their usual polyrhythmic harmony. Grant thought the sound was perfect, gorgeous. They’d spent over a year practicing it at this table, working the unique acoustics of the Abbey, ever since they first came together in the orbit around Men’s Nipples. Only tonight there was an odd, overly robust timbre to Johnny’s laugh, and there was a hacking, gasping noise in Grant’s left ear.
He turned to the older man and realized that the hacking gasp was likely an awkward and self-conscious attempt at laughter. The sound cut off abruptly, so that the man was able to speak long before the others had caught their breath.
“‘Healing process’ indeed, quite good, quite good …” began Dr. Schrödinger. “You know, the actual human healing process, a kind of guided mitosis, is remarkably similar to the self-replication of certain silicate crystal structures or clay. Now, while some might point to this as a possible starting point for carbon-based replicators, or ‘life,’ I’ve always rather thought that it …”
As Grant listened to the strange old man tell him things he already knew, his gaze slid around the table. He briefly touched eyes with Arlene, whose tiny smirk told him that their guest was beginning to get tedious. Happened all the time at the Abbey. He saw Deb smiling indulgently; Deb had some time; Deb didn’t want to hurt the old man’s feelings; Deb was willing to wait it out for his sake; Deb’s spherical breasts were resting comfortably on the table, just enough to make them noticeably oblate. For the seventy-five-thousandth time in recent memory, Grant made himself look away from Deb …
… and looked right at Johnny, who was just weird tonight. Johnny was staring right at him, and his eyes were … naked, somehow. When their eyes met, Johnny Felix Decaté broke into a startlingly angelic smile, so bright, so joyful, so full of love and recognition that Grant felt himself falling toward feelings that he didn’t remember how to feel. He felt a heartbeat that was bigger than his own, and he felt safe and accepted and thought that he must be having a stroke, he must be dying.
And then the feeling passed and Grant was fine and Johnny Felix Decaté was on his feet and headed toward the men’s room.
Chapter 3
SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT IS IN HEAT. But it’s not a sexual thing—it’s just the blind, overwhelming urge to reproduce. It paces nervously around and around in Schrödinger’s brain. It can smell fertile minds nearby. All at once its powerful haunches contract, it freezes for one tense moment, the end of its tail twitching slightly, and then it springs, propelling itself cleanly out of Dr. Schrödinger’s mouth.
No ordinary cat, Schrödinger’s Cat leaps on all three of its targets at once, desperately, blindly trying to replicate itself.
In Deborah Johnstone the Cat finds fertile ground. The Cat scampers around the inside of Deborah’s head and manages to construct a decent likeness of itself. A bit short on details perhaps, the fur looks a little cartoony rather than finely drawn, but a decent job, all in all. Schrödinger’s Cat gently recedes, leaving its progeny behind.
In Grant, the Cat is surprised to come face to face with itself. Obviously, it’s been here before (though it doesn’t, in fact couldn’t remember it; can’t possibly remember anything, really). It inspects its doppelgänger closely, ready to plug any gaps, heal any wounds, but Grant’s resident Cat is more or less perfect, and Schrödinger’s feline emissary withdraws.
In Arlene the Cat encounters a few problems. Familiar problems, as far as Dr. Schrödinger is concerned. The Cat moves in, begins building a model of itself, and immediately gets tangled up inside all sorts of knotty strands in Arlene’s mind. Strands of “Cat” and “Death” and “Love,” and there’s just not enough “Hard Science” around to help untangle the knots. Bruised, defeated, Schrödinger’s Cat retreats, leaving behind a ridiculous stuffed-animal version of itself dangling from the sticky web-work.
Arlene leans forward, staring intently at Dr. Schrödinger’s leathery face. “You mean,” she asks, incredulous, “that if I hadn’t gone home after work and opened my door, then Furble might still be alive?” Dr. Schrödinger stares at her, speechless, a familiar reddening feeling spreading across the back of his neck and creeping into his cheeks. Inside his head, Schrödinger’s Cat sl
aps its forehead with one paw, shakes its head sadly, and curls up, sighing, in a well-lit corner.
The bathroom was a bonanza for Johnny Felix Decaté. All the beauty that he’d rushed by in the past had waited patiently for him, and he was grateful. The shiny angles, the brisk zzip! of his jeans, the feeling of unfolding, the glorious sparkling golden arc (much like the beer, it was the beer) which wavered and trickled and was heard no more. The King Cobra sink, the rush of water, the mirror.
Nothing in his life could have prepared him for the sight that waited for him in the mirror.
Slowly, carefully, his fingers traced the outlines of his image. Long, lank blond hair, the cheekbones and chin, the wide gray eyes and amazed mouth. It was all familiar, but it was very different. Something wrong. A strange sentimentality overtook him, as though he were gazing at a snapshot of himself taken long ago. The entire emotional history of Johnny Felix Decaté flooded his mind and commandeered his senses. His cheeks tingled with the Talking Heads’ song “Heaven,” which was not playing in the bar, but the way he’d heard it the first time, as a kid. He smelled his first girlfriend, Cathy’s goodbye note, shocking and enormous in the hand of Suddenly Tiny Johnny. On the back of his tongue he tasted the last day of summer camp, and somewhere in the pit of his stomach rumbled and echoed the voice of his aunt as she lay dying slowly in a hospital bed.
Just as he’d made the decision to throw himself on the floor and writhe and scream, all the pain went away. The sensations and the memories remained, but they just hung there in plain view, for some reason no longer hard-wired to pain and shame and remorse.
Johnny’s reflection laughed, and Johnny waved goodbye to it as he bounded for the door. The door opened and shut.
The bathroom remained empty.
By the time the last Cabinet members arrive, the President of Montana is still pointedly finishing his cornflakes. He’s sure that one of those “assassins” last week was the milkman, and that’s going to get them all in trouble, so he’d sent Dixon himself out to buy some milk. No questions, no accusations, just a request to go out there and get the President some milk. It was brave, the President of Montana tells himself, a brave thing. Leaderly. Much more leaderly than actually confronting Dix point-blank. Yeah, give him room to mend his ways. Tomorrow I’ll send him out for a newspaper.
“All right, we’re as here as we’re ever gonna get,” says the President of Montana, pushing his bowl forcefully aside. Sorta toward Dix, too, who acts like he doesn’t notice. “Let’s do the roundup. Jimmy?”
“We got another wall up,” says the Secretary of Housing brightly.
“Yeah, I saw,” says the President. “Now we got five plots, with one wall apiece. We may not have any place to put our families, but we got five really nice handball courts.” Most everyone laughs, and the President feels good. He bears down on the SoH. “What the hell are ya doin’, Jimmy?”
Jimmy’s looking all mumble-mouthed, but Dix cuts in.
“That was my call, sir,” Dix says crisply. “I figured that, while the houses are still being built, five strategically placed walls could provide us cover in case we’re attacked.”
“In case we’re attacked,” repeats the President carefully.
The Secretary of Housing turns his little rat eyes on the President. “I told him, sir! I told him that buildin’ the walls separate would mean that no one could move outa your house till February, but he made me do it anyhow.”
“Security’s a higher priority,” says Dix.
The President knows he’s gotta do something. He looks at Dix, still seeing the sandy-haired boy who used to ride that rusty old bicycle. Sorta. “You wanna run those little ‘overrides’ by me next time, Dix?”
“’Course, sir. Oversight. Sorry.”
The President of Montana is about to do the hard thing. The Confrontation. But then he has another thought.
I’ll give Dix the last house that gets finished, thinks the President of Montana. That’ll send the message loud and clear.
The good doctor’s alone again, and he’s obviously gathering his strength before seeking out fresh company. We watched him moments ago, as the long-haired young man returned to the table and muttered some quick words to his companions. Dr. Schrödinger gamely unleashed a flurry of concepts and scientific anecdotes, but his targets had become vaporous—the quartet of youngsters flowed easily around him and out the door, intent on some new mission.
Which leaves our insatiable doctor alone. We get up quietly from our table and sidle toward the door, embarrassed at our own cowardly furtiveness. Dr. Schrödinger is still facing the far wall, and our getaway is clean as we slip out of the bar.
But the key is hardly in the lock of our car door when a chillingly friendly voice behind us intones, “You know, the continued predominance of the internal-combustion engine is more an artifact of business than one of science or efficiency.” We don’t need to look to know who it is. We assure the aging Ph.D. that we are aware of this unfortunate fact, but no force on earth can stop Dr. Schrödinger from magically transforming this sorry excuse for a conversation into a ride home.
Of course, no sooner does he crowd into the car with us than Dr. Schrödinger falls deeply into a slightly drunken sleep. At first we’re grateful, but we soon find that the doctor can’t be roused at all, not even to give us his address. A grim terror grips us as even the most violent nudges and loudest throat-clearings only make Dr. Schrödinger snore louder.
We’re pretty sure he’s faking it, but we’ve got no choice but to drive home. With the good doctor. Who, naturally, wakes up as soon as we pull into our driveway.
He’s far too good at this to take any note of our heavy sighs and disdainful grimaces as we offer him our couch once again. He trots gamely ahead of us to our door, for all the world like an overexcited puppy.
God preserve us from physicists. It’s going to be a long night.
“… and then he just burned up!”
Grant was having some processing problems. In his ear Arlene urgently whispered a mad tale about Johnny’s demise. His eyes, forward, were fixed on the backs of Johnny and Deborah, who were leading them down a quiet semi-urban street toward Harvard Square. Well, to be honest, his eyes were mainly fixed on the lower part of Deb’s back, where everything seemed to slope gracefully inward on its way down, compacting, gathering its energies, before it exploded into the most glorious hips and buttocks that Grant had ever known. Despite the dissonance between the inputs of his ears and his eyes, Grant’s mind was even further afield. He was thinking about the silence that existed right in front of him between Deb and Johnny. It was the easy, casual silence that seemed to belong exclusively to the very, very cool, and seemed forever denied to Grant. He was half tempted to accelerate, catch up to Johnny and Deb, join their silence, and become part of it. But he knew he’d start talking right away, or even if he didn’t Johnny or Deb would make some conversation, locking him out of their silence as they tried to make him comfortable. He couldn’t get in there without altering it. Damn. Damn.
His ear demanded attention. Arlene had stopped talking, but this was the kind of silence that meant he was expected to say something. His mind dutifully replayed the last few seconds of what his ears had gathered up and advised his mouth on the best course of action.
“So, uh, it was close, huh?” he asked.
“No. It happened.”
“What are you talking about?” Not a brilliant thing to say, but Grant was backpedaling. Arlene had turned really interesting, and his mind had to channel more power into the conversation.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you! We stopped at this café and he leaned into this tiki torch or whatever to get a better look at the flame and he just … went up!” Her “whisper” would have made any Shakespearean actor envious at this point, but Johnny and Deb had pulled pretty far ahead. “So he’s burning, and I mean really burning, like hair on fire and skin crackling—and it actually looked kind of cool if you can be
lieve that—and then somebody like tackled him and I poured my water bottle on him and it smelled, Grant. It smelled like hair and meat.”
“He looks okay….”
“I know. After we douse him, he gets up and he’s totally fine! And—What? What? You don’t believe me?”
“Well … it’s like when two of your friends break up, isn’t it?”
“Being on fire?”
“No, I mean like when two of your friends break up and they both tell you stories about the other one and you don’t know who to believe between the two….”
“Grant, Johnny’s not denying what happened! He’s just not talking about it much. It’s not like you have to choose between Johnny and me.”
“No,” said Grant, “but I do have to choose between you and Reality, seeing as you’ve broken up and all….”
“Thanks a lot.”
Floyd slouches through Harvard Square toward the Coop, guitar case in hand. Everyone’s out tonight. Shitloads of kids. As he crosses Brattle, he sees a mini-army clustering around that creepy magician guy in the little Swiss hat who everybody loves being insulted by. Past him another newbie tie-dyed kid without a voice trying to tune up as two lethargic neo-hippie chicks paint each other’s faces and sway as though the music has already started. If Floyd had a spare million, he’d bet it on the kid opening with either “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” or “Dark Side of the Moon.” The universal call of that unrare bird, the Common Street-Busking Hack. Floyd smiles and waves as he passes, thinking, Give it up, you little shit.
Floyd’s mood is ugly, and he knows that it will stay that way until he starts playing.
Most everyone is out; Floyd’s free arm is getting tired just from waving. Fact: Even though Harvard Square sucks and everyone cool will be in Central Square by eleven, every major night all summer long begins in Harvard Square. And Floyd, and Floyd alone, knows why this is.
Central Square’s got every bar and club worth shit, Harvard Square has diddly: tourists and undergrads and overpriced everything. But, still, those hip enough to know better start every summer night over here, for a reason they can’t even admit to themselves. But Floyd can. Floyd sees: Nights start here because the ice cream is way better.