The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  It was all a bit ego-squashing. I wasn’t particularly swollen-headed or anything, but I wasn’t immune to wanting to feel special…at least as far as my mom and dad were concerned.

  I watched my mother watch Udo and a thought flew into my mind that immediately filled me with horror. Could the very man who had almost run me over and was even now delivering a hackneyed speech actually be my father?

  I shook the idea away as being ridiculous and cleared my throat in an effort to forestall an emerging coughing fit. Speaking of Dad, there he was too, sitting in a chair across the room. He was in a tie-dye shirt and jeans, looking very young and in need of a good haircut and a shave under his large-framed glasses. He kept reaching for his handkerchief (fall was allergy season for Dad—ragweed—and the smoke probably wasn’t helping.) He occasionally glanced at my mother, then quickly away, as if he didn’t want to be caught staring. At one point his eyes shot to the broad-shouldered man sitting at the foot of the couch next to my mother. It was the man I’d seen her with in the cafeteria, the one with the strong-jawed profile and dark hair.

  I tried to focus on what Udo was saying (“Every great novel is not about a single character, but Character…”) but my eyes kept returning to my mother. She and the student next to her occasionally rubbed shoulders as they passed a cigarette back and forth in a familiar fashion. A good buddy of hers…or someone more important? My father certainly seemed to think so.

  As did the student on the other side of the guy with Mom. The body language of the dark-complexioned woman in a sari revealed that she felt she should be on the receiving end of the man’s attention, not my mother. She was pretending to read a book, testily turning its pages in the dim light.

  Dad tried to stifle a sneeze and received a look of irritation from Udo, which I was proud to see he ignored. At least I knew the story had a happy ending. For Dad, not the other guy. I knew that all would turn out well and that he and my mother would end up together. Still, I wanted him to stand up, offer an arm to my mother, and lead her into their future life together.

  As I tried hard not to keep my gaze fixed on Missy’s belly—somehow I was very sure that Dad did not yet know that she was pregnant—I thought fondly of my previous time travels, which had flung me into life-threatening ghost zones but hadn’t taken me anywhere near my family members. I was seeing potential fathers everywhere—first Udo, now the mystery man next to my mother. At least I knew that History wouldn’t send me back, since I had successfully managed to blend in three days from now, on November 1. So, though I was starting to get a little light-headed, I figured History wasn’t the culprit. Rather it was probably all the smoke. The dark-haired man passed his cigarette again to my mother. The strong line of the jaw, the somewhat large ears—who did he remind me of?

  I felt a sudden sense of unease, like all of this was more than I wanted to know. I wasn’t one for ignoring problems, preferring to deal with things head-on, grabbing a pint of ice cream or a glass of wine later if needed. I crossed my arms over my chest and locked my gaze on Udo and Udo only. I was here to do a job. Sabina needed me at my best, undistracted, single-mindedly focused on the task of finding her. That person by the couch—that person who was younger than me!—was not my mother, not yet…She was just Missy Donovan, a senior enjoying a literary Saturday night out. She was entitled to her privacy and it was far from fair for me to judge her actions. I wasn’t likely to have offspring (kids just aren’t my thing), but I certainly wouldn’t have appreciated them spying on me in my youth and weighing my every move.

  “We need to explore our souls in our writing,” Udo was saying rather grandiosely. “Mine, yours, his, hers.” He pointed from one member of his audience to the next and included me in his flock. “To seek goodness, wisdom, truth.”

  Get to it, I thought to myself. I don’t want to spend any more time here than strictly necessary. Where does the tree come in, and where are you going to look for it, Udo? I considered raising a hand to ask the question but doubted it would work.

  With a flourish, Udo pulled out a small stack of typewritten pages from a back pocket. He unfolded them, shuffled them a bit, and offered to share what he had been working on with the crowd. The idea was well received, and he launched into a story set in a dystopian future in which townspeople refused to throw anything out, down to the very skeletons of their late relatives, all because they valued material possessions so much. Udo was a good reader, lending emphasis where it was needed and holding back when that was the right way to go. It was an interesting tale, I had to admit despite myself—the skeletons had the power of speech and were starting to outnumber the living to the point where they were threatening to take over Eden, the town. Things were looking bleak for the townspeople…and then Udo stopped, for there were no more pages to read. He bowed theatrically, and hearty applause and whistles rang throughout the room. Calls for more erupted. Udo paused and said, “The rest is…not yet written. It requires inspiration, investigation, involvement. I must embark on my voyage of discovery to finish it.”

  “Not without us, Udo?” someone in the audience asked, and I sat up. It sounded like a discussion they’d had before, at an earlier meeting.

  “Everyone’s invited.” He was not their teacher, of course, and he said it not as a natural educator might, with his students and what they might learn in mind, but as a performer who needed an audience. The monthly reading list aside, this wasn’t so much of a book club as an Udo Leland fan club. The energy of the crowd was what kept him going, the feeling of importance and credibility it lent to his novel-writing aspirations. Or at least that’s the way it struck me.

  He continued the performance by saying, “The sooner we go, the better. Give me a moment.” As if alone in the room, he closed his eyes and stood still for perhaps half a minute. Finally, he heaved a deep sigh, opened his eyes, and switched to practical mode. “Midterm week is done with, so it’s a good time for a break. We will leave early Monday morning”—he was giving them only a few days’ notice, but no one protested—“to seek the chrono-synclastic infundibulum.”

  His audience seemed to know exactly what he was talking about.

  Was that a kind of a tree—the botanical name for it? No, that was dumb. I raised my hand. “I’m sorry, the what?”

  Udo sent a glance of literary disdain in my direction. “You’re new. Welcome.”

  “Thanks.”

  He repeated the term carefully, as if speaking to a child. “The chrono-SYN-clas-tic in-fundi-bulum.”

  “Uh, right, thanks.”

  I wished Abigail and Dr. Little, who would possibly recognize the scientific-sounding term, were with me. All I could do was try and remember the term by repeating it over and over in my head as people started getting to their feet and the book club meeting broke up. Chrono-synclastic infundibulum, chrono-synclastic infundibulum, chrono-synclastic infundibulum…

  15

  I rejoined the others behind the shrubbery. The book club attendees had lingered to chat with Udo and each other—and to, presumably, finalize their Monday travel plans.

  “Well?” Abigail demanded. “Did they say where they are going?”

  “Sort of. It sounds like they are on a quest to find the—what was it?—the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Udo wants to use it as the setting for his book or whatever. Tell me you know what that is and where it is. Is it a tree, like Xave said?”

  I saw Dr. Little wrinkle his brow in the soft light reaching us from the nearest streetlamp. It was still drizzling, and he wiped a drop off his nose. “Chrono implies that it has to do with time, of course. And synclastic denotes a positive Gaussian curvature.”

  “Say what?” I said.

  “A surface that’s curved toward the same side in all directions, like a beach ball.”

  “Infundibulum is funnel in Latin,” said Abigail, whose working knowledge of that language had been enriched by her guardianship of Sabina.

  “All righty,” I said. “So not a tree but a time-
related, precisely shaped funnel? It sounds oddly similar to our own spacetime warper, only more wormhole-ish.”

  Abigail tilted her head to one side. “Hmm…It does sound familiar—where have I heard it before?…How did people find answers to random questions before the Internet?”

  I pointed across Sunniva Lake, dark and serene in the light rain. A well-lit building beckoned in the night on the other side. “They went to the library.”

  We circled the lake to the stone steps of the compact Crane Library, the predecessor to the as-yet-unbuilt Coffee Library. It wasn’t named after a person, I knew, but rather the large bird. And there was no History Museum next to it, not yet, just a facilities building. Even though it was past ten, the library was still open—according to the sign on the front door, eleven was the closing hour on Fridays. It didn’t surprise me. Most academic libraries keep extended hours to provide students with a quiet study space and access to research materials, a policy particularly needed in the pre-Internet era, I supposed.

  We passed a couple of students getting their cigarette fixes out front and went inside. Dr. Little made a beeline for the science shelves. I explained to Abigail the purpose of the library catalog cabinet, with its drawerfuls of index cards, and left her rifling through them randomly as she tried to remember where she’d heard the term chrono-synclastic infundibulum before. I headed to the reference section to thumb through encyclopedias under the letter C.

  The familiar scent that libraries always have of leather, must, and carpet deodorizer hung over the place. The library was sparsely filled with the more studious of St. Sunniva’s students, those not out celebrating the end of midterms but taking this opportunity to catch up on projects or reading. I spotted a small sign showing a cigarette with an X through it on one wall; cigarettes and a flammable and valuable collection of books did not mix, which explained the smokers outside.

  Having had no luck finding chrono-synclastic infundibulum in any of the encyclopedias under C, I gave up and went to the catalog cabinet, where Abigail was still thumbing through the index cards. Not slowly and haphazardly like before, but energetically now. “Julia, there you are. I’ve just remembered! V-a…V-o…Here it is, yes.” She zeroed in on an index card, then grabbed a pencil from the cup that held a bunch of them and jotted the call number down on one of the paper scraps available for that purpose. “We need to find section 813,” she informed me, holding up the paper scrap triumphantly, clearly proud to have figured out how to use the outdated (to the three of us, at least) library search system.

  We pulled Dr. Little away from the physics shelves—he had been looking in the indices of a variety of textbooks—and over to section 813. I was surprised to see that the section held fiction. American literature from the twentieth century, to be precise. But perhaps it wasn’t so surprising after all—I had heard the term at a book club, so the fact that we were now standing in front of a literary shelf was a good sign.

  “I’ve remembered what it is—it’s from one of Kurt Vonnegut’s early novels,” Abigail explained breathlessly, squatting down by a low shelf, where the V’s were. “Here, let’s see—Breakfast of Champions, not that one…Cat’s Cradle, no…Slaughterhouse-Five…Wait, I skipped over it. Here.” She slid the book out of its spot and held it out like a prize. “It’s this one. The Sirens of Titan.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said, taking the book. “Is it science fiction?”

  “The title makes it sound like a lighthearted, sexy romp through space. It isn’t, not really. This one guy pops in and out of time and place, and this other guy gets sent to Mars against his will…Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the ending, in case you decide to read it sometime.”

  “Abigail, this is no time to be worrying about spoiler alerts.”

  Dr. Little agreed. “I’m more of a nonfiction reader, anyway. Give me a nice solid book about the history of computing or code breaking, and I’ll be happy for hours.”

  “So, the infundibulum?” I prompted Abigail.

  “It’s a term Vonnegut came up with. It’s how one of the characters and his dog pop in and out of places.”

  A librarian was approaching, pulling a cart piled high with volumes that needed shelving, and we left section 813 to find a quiet corner. As we slid into an isolated table located directly under the No Smoking sign, I allowed myself a brief internal gripe. Why did STEWie incidents never involve matters on which I was an expert? I had read Slaughterhouse-Five in college, but I’d never even heard of The Sirens of Titan. I would have been a good person to consult on, say, seventies music—just yesterday I had been listening to a Carpenters album while trying to keep up with Nate’s spaniel, Wanda, on a walk. At least this current STEWie problem didn’t involve academic misbehavior bordering on criminal—or crossing into it—like the previous ones. The more we unraveled the situation, the more I realized it was unlikely anyone had given Sabina the security code for the lab door with evil intentions. And no one could really blame her for what she had done, not even Dean Braga.

  There was one copy of the book and three of us. “I don’t think I’ll be of any use here, anyway. Let me know what you find,” Dr. Little said, and went off to explore the library. Abigail and I settled in to figure out why Kurt Vonnegut’s book had caught the attention of Udo Leland.

  Abigail leafed through the first few pages and explained, “I read this one as a teen during my goth stage, when I was into being dramatic and mopey. Then one morning I got up, looked in the mirror, and decided that I needed to lighten up. And read some books in which women get to make decisions and stuff. Let’s see now…Yup…yup…” She pushed the book, open to a beginning set of pages, across the table toward me. “Here, Julia. It’s in the first chapter.”

  I took a moment to look the book over, as if its appearance might provide a clue as to the fascination it held for Udo. The book was hardcover and of medium thickness—319 pages. If there had been a book jacket once, it was long gone, leaving behind a matte black cover which carried the relevant information on the spine and a library sticker on the back. On the inside title page, the author’s name was given in large letters over three lines—Kurt Vonnegut Jr., with the downstroke of the g pulled into service as the j in Jr. A smallish black circle listed the book’s title. The original publication year was 1959, I saw, but the book in my hands was a 1970 reprint, according to its Library of Congress Catalog Card Number, which I knew how to interpret, since all the books written by our professors had them.

  Of course, none of the physical details would have mattered to Udo. What was within did.

  I leafed past the contents page, with its twelve chapters and one epilogue, to Chapter 1. Vonnegut’s futuristic story opened in Newport, Rhode Island and flowed quickly, with snappy and somewhat cynical descriptions of characters. I learned that the person caught in the chrono-synclastic infundibulum for nine years was Winston Niles Rumfoord, a wealthy socialite who ended up there along with his dog, Kazak, like a fictional and more edgy version of Sabina and Celer. With Abigail patiently looking on, I skimmed some more…There! A definition, exactly what we needed, like she had said. It was several paragraphs long, but it seemed to boil down to this: there was more than one infundibulum—many of them, in fact, scattered throughout space—and they were places where “all the different kinds of truths fit together.” I reread the passage to make sure I gleaned everything I could from it. They were places where you went to understand and be understood, it seemed; where people accepted each other’s points of view instead of arguing, though I wasn’t sure what the concept had to do with traveling though space and time. They also sounded a bit hazardous and somewhat like ghost zones in that you could get trapped in one.

  I looked up from my reading. “The chrono-synclastic infund— Can we just call it the CSI for short? The CSI in the book is between Earth and Mars.”

  “Yeah.” Abigail wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think that’s the one Udo meant.”

  “Let’s hope not. So where, then
? It could be anywhere really, depending on where Udo thinks truths fit together…” I set the book down and started to speculate widely. “People with different points of view coming together…let’s see…the United Nations? The Olympics?…Or, to go in a completely different direction, Hollywood or Las Vegas? All right, that’s dumb. Where does someone of a literary bent think various truths come together?”

  Abigail gestured around us. “The library.”

  “Perhaps not just any library. How about the Library of Congress? That’s sort of near the ocean, if you don’t mind driving a couple of hours from Washington DC to the nearest beach. Or does Udo maybe have a place from Vonnegut’s own life in mind? I wonder where he lives. Not Udo, Vonnegut.”

  “Not a clue.”

  There wasn’t a biography included in the book—perhaps it had been on the missing book jacket. I got up to ask the librarian at the help desk. She was tidying up, as the library would be closing soon, but didn’t seem to mind the interruption.

  “You’re wondering where Mr. Vonnegut lives?”

  “Yes, for, uh…a book project I’m working on.”

  “Well, then. I did read a news article not too long ago—now where would that have been? Oh, yes. It was about Mr. Vonnegut’s speech at the dedication of the new library at Connecticut College. They said that he suggested the name ‘The Noodle Factory’ for it.” She chuckled. “They didn’t accept his kind suggestion. But to answer your question, the article gave Mr. Vonnegut’s residence as New York City.”