by Adam Felber
“My cat, or should I say ‘my’ ‘cat,’” said Dr. Schrödinger, making ridiculous “air quotes” with fingers that glistened with butter, “is made of string. Did you know that?”
We didn’t. In fact, we were a bit distracted by the fact that Dr. Schrödinger was willing to talk about “his cat”—we’d thought that he wanted to distance himself from that “easily misinterpreted metaphor.” But now the doctor, looking relaxed and a bit tanned from two days out in the sun, seemed eager to plunge back into these same choppy waters.
“That’s right, made of string. And even though I created him, I didn’t know what he was made of back then.”
He raised an eyebrow meaningfully, successfully drawing us in with his artful riddles. Somehow, the old man’s inner raconteur had been drawn out, and the manic glare in his eye had become what could only be described as a twinkle. We thought, fairly unscientifically, that we wished we were getting laid.
“It turns out that, yes, subatomic particles are the building blocks of atoms, which are the building blocks of matter. But the building blocks of the building blocks of the building blocks of matter … are strings.”
Aha. String theory. We’d heard of it.
“Think of space and time as one pristine fabric, though a fabric without mass in its smoothest state. The fabric ends up with a tiny hairline fold, let’s imagine, and thus a single string comes into existence. Local colonies of strings weave themselves into subatomic particles that in turn find their way into atoms…. So, really, it’s not just my cat that’s made of string—it’s everything. We’re all agglomerations of folds in the fabric of space-time. We’re spatiotemporal origami, if you will.”
We wouldn’t. The metaphors were too horribly mixed. We found ourselves begging the doctor to trim the metaphorical hedges, keep it neat. Perhaps, we suggested, he should give the cat a ball of yarn, which is a bit like string, and leave the origami out of it. Dr. Schrödinger smiled at the idea.
“Very good. But I haven’t the time to develop it. Perhaps I’ll leave that work to you.”
To us? What made the old babbler think that we had any interest in developing his tortured metaphors? And who were we to presume to explain physics to the world at large? Who were we to try to inform a world that would only find a way to creatively misinform itself? Who were we? we asked, perhaps aloud. Who were we?
“Exactly,” said Dr. Schrödinger, his smile disappearing as he fixed us with a piercing stare, “exactly.” We shivered. We changed the subject. We signaled for the waiter.
The very last shred of daylight disappears as Floyd lets the last chord reverberate. The Dave Matthews tune had been pretty tough on his fingers, but Floyd had felt out the audience and had obligingly fed them a steady diet of jam-band material for the past twenty minutes. Along the way he even threw them an original song from five years ago, the last one he’d ever written. He’s never felt so good, so competent, so well liked. At this moment the crowd would do absolutely anything for him, he thinks, and they’re all just hanging out there, waiting for his next note.
So he stops playing and drags his things off the porch. Floyd’s no Johnny and he’s no idiot, and he knows when to cut bait. He’s done great, and this is the moment to leave. If he plays it right from this point, who knows? He’s feeling those long-suppressed feelings of optimism about his musical career. Maybe it’s time to get the band back together, or form a new one, or write some more songs.
It’s definitely time to stop, though. He wends his way through the throng, looking as vague, goofy, and distracted as he possibly can without doing a flat-out Johnny Felix Decaté impression.
Dear Diary,
The egg’s okay. And dinner was a cinch—a wink at Stan over at the potato place. With Stan, who’s tortured by guilt, it’s not “for old times’ sake” It’s a never-ending payment, a plea that his wife never finds out (even though it’s been more than ten years since I hung up my pumps for good). So it feels a little like blackmail. But it was hot, nutritious blackmail with cheese and broccoli, so I’ll take it.
The robots are in a tizzy—walking around like they don’t know what to do next. Strange, but anything that pisses them off has to be good.
But at least this means I can get a table at the Au Bon Paint. One seat for me, one for the worldly possessions, and a ringside seat to the Show, whatever it is.
The four of them are walking the same stretch of road that they took from the Abbey two nights ago, but that was a fundamentally different world. Tonight the pairings are different: Grant and Deb lead the way, with Arlene and Johnny wandering behind.
Grant and Deb are talking about being naked.
“It was comfortable. I’d do it all the time if I could be in situations where I felt safe, y’know, not like I was being molested by people’s eyes.”
“My eyes were molesting you,” Grant points out. Deb’s flattered, though Grant was actually confessing.
“Strangers’ eyes, I mean.”
“You like being sexy, but you want it to be by choice, huh?”
“I think that’s right.”
“And, unlike a naked guy, a naked woman doesn’t have that choice.”
“Slow Deb losing you …”
“What I mean is, naked guys, guys in their underwear, are funny.”
“I didn’t think you looked funny. I thought you looked cute.”
A simple thanks, a smile, anything to show he’s flattered, and Grant might’ve had a chance. But Grant’s an idiot. So his mind won’t process this as a compliment. Which is why he and Deb simply aren’t fated to happen.
Instead, Grant presses on with his point. “The point is—a guy in his underwear, even a good-looking guy, can be funny. A woman in her underwear is either sexy or embarrassing.”
“So, until we sisters can be laughed at in our lingerie, there’s no equality?”
Grant grins back at Deb. “Exactly.”
“Maybe you could teach me to be funny naked sometime. For the good of all women, I mean.”
This time the opening’s a mile wide. There’s almost nothing that Grant (who’s got an IQ of 168) can say right now that won’t move him and the object of all his desires toward a greater intimacy.
“I don’t think I’d make a really good comedy teacher.”
Except that.
Chapter 11
IT’S TIME TO MEET LESTER THE RAT.
Lester’s name is not, of course, really “Lester.” Rats do not have names in any way that you’d recognize. But they do have identities; to other rats they are identified by a smell, a certain signature type of squeak, a generalized shape. And since Lester is indeed an individual rat, and one that is indispensably important to our present concerns, we’ll need to remember him for later. He’s the catalyst, the instigator, the necessary cog—his actions will change the fate of the very world we’ve been exploring. We need to know this rat if we’re going to understand anything at all. So we’ll call him “Lester.”
Lester was a happy rat, as rats go. He was well fed, large, and in the prime of life. His hobbies were eating, mating, and pursuing opportunities to eat and mate. He also liked to fight, though this was not really a hobby; Lester didn’t look for fights, but when they became unavoidable (because someone was interfering with eating, mating, or the free pursuit thereof), his eyes would fill with blood and his lips would peel back and he’d go into another world, a world where all that existed was throats and eyes and blurs of instinctively understood motion. Those were good times, whether the opponent was another rat or a cat or a squirrel or something bigger.
On this particular afternoon, Lester emerged from beneath the street and stepped into one of his favorite alleys, one that almost always had food and rarely required fighting. The alley had easily torn plastic bags, raidable cans, and a really, really great Dumpster that was always filled with food and featured a couple of rat-sized holes on the underside.
On this day, however, the Dumpster was disappointingly e
mpty. Lester, like most of his kind, did not have a calendar, wouldn’t have been able to read one anyway, and so couldn’t have known that the Dumpster had just received its weekly Sunday-afternoon servicing. Lester had therefore arrived about an hour too late for the truly magnificent feast that had been there.
He wandered around the alley, dashing from shadow to shadow, finding the pickings scarce and unsatisfying. He was, naturally, hungry. He was always hungry. But if there’d been other food in the alley, he might not have bothered with the egg.
The egg was just lying there, right near the Dumpster. It didn’t smell quite right, but it was worth a try, Lester supposed. He’d had some eggs in his time, mostly dregs in broken shells, but sometimes all sealed up and requiring an industrious rat to shatter them. This was one of the latter type, and Lester nudged it, nosed it, rolled it, and finally extended one ratty paw to hold it in place while his front teeth bared and lowered toward the egg’s white shell….
Perhaps the shell was weaker than most. Or maybe Lester had put on some weight. Hard to say. But for whatever reason, Lester’s teeth had not yet reached the shiny surface when the egg all of a sudden cracked like, well, an egg, and shattered moistly under his paw. He felt the liquid immediately and bent his head further to begin the tiny feast.
Only a split second later, Lester was whacked by a smell so awful, so noxious, so brain-cloggingly strong, that he actually passed out for a moment. He lurched away, ran in a circle, bared his teeth for a fight, jumped spasmodically, circled again. His best senses were stuck in a hallucinogenic overload, and flames rose in his eyes. Soon he gained just enough composure to settle upon one well-tested strategy: the venerable and unfailing “Run Away.”
Of course, his paw was covered with the horrible smell, the smell that made him flee, so Lester ran for a very, very long time.
Things Arlene said to Johnny during their walk:
“It’s cold.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I mean, for summer.”
“If Furble were alive, he’d have loved this. Furble-friendly weather.”
“What?”
“Oh.”
“Hey, look out—car! What an asshole!”
“You okay?”
“You know, if we were all killed today, there’d be no one alive who’d ever read a single one of my stories. All four of us are together. For the sake of the future of literature, we all have to stop meeting like this.”
“What?”
“You know, I had this dream this morning…. Oh, you did? What was it about?”
“That’s pretty fucked up.”
“Believe me, I had no idea we were ever going to …”
“It was great! I mean, I can barely walk, but it was worth it. You’re … gifted, Johnny Decaté, did you know that? In a lot of ways.”
“No, I’m glad to have you! I mean, not that I ‘have’ you, you know, it was just a, you know, whatever. I’m not gonna go all psycho on you, I promise.”
“No, really, fine, I don’t know, you know, whatever.”
“Right?”
“Oh God, I’m actually blushing….”
“No, it’s just that—I guess I was raised as too much of a lady. I can’t bring myself to say words like ‘fuck’ or ‘pussy’ or anything. I mean, not if I’m actually talking about … fucking and … See, I can’t do it. I’m totally the opposite of Deb.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“What?”
“That’s … Are you okay?”
“No, I mean, really. We’re all a little worried about you, that’s all.”
“No, you seem fine. Really! Totally fine. Just, really … different, that’s all.”
“So you feel okay?”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
“Funny, I wrote a story kind of like that once. I mean, kind of like that.”
“It was about this guy who had these deformed hands, you know, just like two little hooks or something instead of thumbs and fingers. And he gets this job touring with a freak show as the ‘Lobster Boy’—right?—and he makes all these freak friends and he’s doing okay. But he’s really not happy, because he always thought his hands looked more like robot hands, you know, like from Lost in Space, so he really wished he could be the Robot Boy instead of the Lobster Boy. But the guy who runs the freak show won’t listen to him, because, like, every freak show has a Lobster Boy, and there’s no real market for a Robot Boy…. And I guess a lot of stuff happens, some of it I have to rewrite because it just kind of goes off track, you know … but eventually he saves up and saves up and buys the whole freak show and makes conditions better for everyone and builds himself this huge tent that says ‘Robot Man’ and has this huge sci-fi set, and he’s got a great new robot costume and everything. So he’s in the dressing trailer getting ready for his first show as Robot Man, and he looks at his hands and studies them really closely. He realizes that they really do look more like lobster claws after all.”
“No, that’s how it ends. He’s just sitting there, looking at his hands.”
“Fuck you. You can write the sequel if you want. Call it ‘The Return of Lobster Boy’ or something. I don’t care.”
“I’m just kidding.”
“Thanks.”
“What? No …”
“But you’ve read most of them already.”
“Okay, okay … There’s this new one I’m working on. It’s about a girl. She’s like fifteen, right? And her family is driving her nuts. She’s got this mean, retarded brother who can barely form a sentence, and her mom spends all her time doting over this mangy cat of theirs. And the cat is this pathetic thing that can’t even feed itself. What makes things worse is, everybody treats her brother like he’s this incredibly great, smart guy who’s good at everything. Like everybody’s trying to be so kind and PC to this retard that the girl ends up totally ignored.”
“Funny. Do you want to hear the rest?”
“Okay, so one day the girl gets really sick, and she’s lying in bed drinking tea, and she spills it on herself, gets burns like totally all over her body. And she jumps out of bed and gets her legs tangled in the covers and knocks over a lamp and gets a shock, right? So she jumps back from the shock, but her legs are still tangled, so she trips over her chair, crashes through the window, falls out onto the roof above the garage, rolls down the roof like totally mummified in the blanket, hits the driveway, rolls into the street, gets run over by a bicycle, somehow stumbles up, walks two steps, and gets hit by a car.”
“Yeah, it’s a true story. Shut up. So here’s the thing. When she wakes up in the hospital, she’s had a head injury. But it’s like a positive head injury or something. Her mom and brother are there, and suddenly she realizes that the brother’s a totally sweet guy who’s not retarded at all. Right? And she thinks at first that her mom has brought the cat, but now she can see that it’s not a cat at all. It’s her baby sister.”
“That’s all I have so far. You like?”
“That’s … that’s incredibly sweet.”
“Oh, nice segue, pig-boy.”
“No, we’re almost at the Square. There’s better stuff there.”
“Oh, come on, we just ate before we left.”
“Wait—okay! Wait. I’ll tell Grant and … Okay, wait up!”
Dear Diary,
Whatever’s supposed to be happening now isn’t. So:
1613—Michael Romanov becomes Czar, kicking off the whole Romanov thing. Russia’s got everything she’s ever wanted in a ruler: charm, good looks, ruthless brutality. An alien comes down and warns Michael that there’s a comet coming in about three hundred years, but the Czar doesn’t listen. He eats the alien, hoping to gain its “powers.” He ends up with a faint green glow, which he considers almost as good.
1621—Elvis Presley is born in Cairo.
1625—Paquizetl, a Toltec haberdasher, invents the “Kabpzintl,” an early beer helmet. He spends the rest of his career designing headdresses for the ruli
ng class.
1642—Oliver Cromwell takes over England. The English barely notice, unless visitors ask them, “Who’s King now?” When this happens, they get embarrassed and change the subject.
1643—The Egyptian Empire finally collapses in a small hut in Alexandria where it had somehow hung on all those centuries.
In Prussia, a prostitute named Hilda Leibenfroeg invents an extremely efficient engine that runs on semen. Fearing the return of matriarchy, the Freemasons ship her off-world and use the only existing prototype to power their subterranean resort community for the next 140 years.
1644—The Manchus begin their three-century reign in China. When they take over, they assure everyone that they’ll only be in the Palace “for a second—we just have to go in and get this … thing … we left behind at the New Year’s party…” It becomes the single most effective political ploy in history.
In India, a baby named Bibu drowns in the Ganges. His mother is very sad and never forgives herself (even though it’s not her fault). She spends the rest of her life as a vagrant: wandering, writing, tormented by the cries of her lost infant.
“Start by looking from outside of space and time,” said Dr. Schrödinger, “which is of course impossible. I’ll have the apple-glazed pork chop with the herbed couscous but no raisins, and a dinner salad with Roquefort dressing. From outside it all, you might imagine space-time as a smooth and slightly rippling sheet. There are, of course, strings, the little tiny wrinkles we spoke of earlier. But there’s very, very few of them. And another Balvenie Doublewood, neat. They appear in megabunches in otherwise nearly complete smoothness. These bunches are, of course, galaxies, or clusters thereof….”
Dr. Schrödinger had by this time succeeded in confusing both us and the waiter. His hand was fiddling idly with the bottom of the now-empty bread basket. Occasionally, a crumb would attach itself to the pad of one gnarled finger, which would then start a slow journey to the physicist’s lower lip. Perched there, the crumb would await the doctor’s next pause, whereupon his overworked tongue would emerge and claim it.