by Terry Bisson
“Whatever,” I said. “Well, how’s business? Observe any meteors lately?”
“Remember what I told you, Irving?” Wu hardly ever calls me Irving; it usually means he’s irritated. “Meteorology is not about meteors. It’s about weather. My job is scheduling the observatory’s viewings, which depend on the weather.”
“So—how’s the weather, Wu?”
“Great!” Wu dropped his voice. “Which is how come we found what I told you about.” He dropped his voice further. “The Edge of the Universe.”
“Congratulations,” I said. I didn’t know it had been lost. “But why is it such a big secret?”
“Because of the implications. Unexpected, to say the least. Turns out we’ve had it in our sights for almost a month but didn’t realize it because it was the wrong color.”
“The wrong color?”
“The wrong color,” said Wu. “You know about Hubble’s constant, the red shift, the expanding Universe, right?” Wu asked with such confidence that I couldn’t bear to let him down.
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, the Universe has stopped expanding.” After a pause, he added in a whisper: “In fact, according to my calculations, it’s starting to shrink. What’s your fax number? I’ll shoot you the figures.”
Whipper Will had Huntsville’s—maybe even Alabama’s—first fax machine. About the size of an upright piano, and not entirely electrical, it sat in the far corner of the office, against a wall where it was vented to the alley through a system of stovepipe and flex hose. I had always been reluctant to look behind its plywood sides, or under its duralumin hood, but I understood from Hoppy (who had been called in once to fix it) that its various components were powered by an intricate and never since duplicated combination of batteries and 110, clockwork, gravity, water pressure, propane, and charcoal (for the thermal printer). No one knew who had made it, or when. I didn’t even know it worked until, seconds after I gave Wu the number, I heard a relay click, and the upright fax began to groan; it began to whine. It clanked and clattered, it sputtered and roared, it spat cold steam and warm gases, and a paper fell out of the wicker IN bin, onto the floor.
It was smeared with purple stains, which I recognized from grade school as mimeo ink, and it bore a formula in Wu’s hand:
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Just what it looks like. Hubble’s constant inconstant: reversed, confused, confounded,” Wu said. “You’ll note that the red shift has turned to blue, just like in the Elvis song.”
“That’s blue to gold,” I said. “ ‘When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again.’ ”
“Irving, this is more important than any Elvis song!” he said (rather self-righteously, I thought, since it was he who had brought up Elvis in the first place). “It means that the Universe has stopped expanding and started to collapse in on itself.”
“I see,” I lied. “Is that—good or bad?”
“Not good,” Wu said. “It’s the beginning of the end. Or at least the end of the beginning. The period of expansion that began with the Big Bang is over, and we’re on our way to the Big Crunch. It means the end of life as we know it; Hell, of existence as we know it. Everything in the Universe, all the stars, all the planets, all the galaxies—the Earth and everything on it from the Himalayas to the Empire State Building to the Musée d’Orsay—will be squashed into a lump about the size of a tennis ball.”
“That does sound bad,” I said. “When’s this Crunch thing going to happen?”
“It will take a while.”
“What’s ‘a while’?” I couldn’t help thinking of Candy, and our plans to get married (even though I hadn’t yet officially proposed).
“Eleven to fifteen billion years,” said Wu. “By the way, how’s Candy? Are you two engaged yet?”
“Almost,” I said. “We’re going ‘grazing’ tonight. As soon her father’s settled in the nursing home, I get to pop the question.”
“Congratulations,” Wu said. “Or maybe I should say pre-congratula— Whoooops! Here comes my boss. I’m not supposed to be using this line. Give my best to Candy. What’s ‘grazing’ anyway . . . ?”
But before I could answer, he was gone. Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu. He grew up in Queens and studied physics at Bronx Science, pastry in Paris, math at Princeton, herbal medicine in Hong Kong, and law at either Harvard or Yale (I get them confused). He worked for NASA (Grumman, anyway), then Legal Aid. Did I mention that he’s six-foot two and plays guitar? We lived on the same block in Brooklyn where we both owned Volvos and went to the Moon. Then I met Candy and moved to Alabama, and Wu quit Legal Aid and got a degree in meteorology.
Which is not about meteors.
* * *
The Saturn Five SixPlex, in the Apollo Shopping Center on the Huntsville Bypass, with its half-dozen identical theaters half-guarded by bored teens, is perfect for “grazing,” an activity invented by Candy and her friends some fifteen years ago, when the multiplexes first started hitting the suburbs of the bigger Southern towns. The idea, initially, was to make dating more flexible, since teen girls and boys rarely liked the same movies. Later, as Candy and her friends matured and movies continued their decline, the idea was to combine several features into one full-featured (if you will) film. When you go “grazing” you wear several sweaters and hats, using them to stake out seats and to change your appearance as you duck from theater to theater. Dates always sit together when in the same theater, but “grazing” protocol demands that you never pressure your date into staying—or leaving. Boys and girls come and go as they wish, sometimes together, sometimes apart. That Wednesday night there was a teen sex comedy, a tough-love ladies’ weeper, a lawyer-in-jeopardy thriller, a buddy cop romance, a singing animal musical cartoon, and a terror thug “blow-’em-up.” The films didn’t run in the same time continuum, of course, and Candy and I liked to “graze” backward; we began with the car bombs and angled back across the hall (and across Time) for the courtroom confession, then split up for the singing badgers (me) and Whoopi’s teary wisecracks (Candy) before coming together for teens’ nervous first kiss. “Grazing” always reminds me of the old days before movies became an art, when “the picture show” in Brooklyn ran in a continuous loop and no one ever worried about Beginnings or Ends. You stayed till you got to the part where you came in, then it was over. “ ‘Grazing’ is a lot like marriage, don’t you think?” I whispered.
“Marriage?” Candy asked, alarmed. We were together, watching the cops question a landlady. “Are you pressuring me?”
“I’m not proposing,” I said. “I’m making a comment.”
“Comments about movies are allowed. Comments about marriage are considered pressuring.”
“My comment is about ‘grazing,’ ” I said. “It’s about . . .”
“Sssshhhh!” said the people behind us.
I lowered my voice. “ . . . about being together some of the time and apart some of the time. About entering together and leaving together. About being free to follow your own tastes yet always conscious that there is a seat saved for you beside the other.”
I was crazy about her. “I’m crazy about you,” I whispered.
“Sssshhhh!” said the couple behind us.
“Tomorrow night,” Candy whispered, taking my hand. Then she held it up so that it was illuminated by the headlights of a car chase. “What’s this?” She was looking at the number on the back of my hand.
“That’s there to—remind me of how much I love you,” I lied. I didn’t want to tell her what it really was; I didn’t want her to think I was crazy.
“Only six?”
“You’re holding it upside down.”
“That’s better!”
“Ow!”
“Ssssshhhhhh!” said the couple behind us.
We skipped all the titles and credits but caught all the previews. Candy dropped me off at midnight at the Good Gulf men’s room. Walking “home” to Whipper Will’s office across the
corner lot, I looked up at the almost-full Moon and thought of Wu on his Hawaiian mountaintop. There were only a few stars; maybe the Universe was shrinking. Wu’s figures, though I could never understand them, were usually right. What did I care, though? A few billion years can seem like eternity when you’re young, and forty-one isn’t old. A second marriage can be like a second youth. I stepped carefully over my old friend, the beaded seat cushion, who looked better than ever in the moonlight; but then, don’t we all?
* * *
It was almost ten o’clock before I awoke the next morning. I made my way to Hoppy’s Good Gulf, staggering a little in the sunshine. “Whipper Will’s Yank,” Hoppy said from the repair bay where he was replacing the front brake pads on another Taurus.
“Right,” I muttered.
He replied “ ’Nuff said” behind me, as I made my way back outside and started across the corner lot.
I stopped at the beaded seat cushion. It definitely looked better. There seemed to be fewer loose beads scattered in the weeds and on the path. There seemed to be fewer naked, broken neoprene strings and bare spots on the seat cushion.
But I didn’t have to guess. I had evidence.
I checked the number on the back of my hand: 9.
I counted the beads four rows down from the top: eleven.
I checked both again, and again it came out the same.
It was creepy. I looked around in the bushes, half expecting to see giggling boys playing a joke on me. Or even Hoppy. But the bushes were empty. This was downtown on a school day. No kids played in this corner lot anyway.
I spit on my thumb and rubbed out the 9, and walked on back to the office. I was hoping to find another message from Wu, but there was nothing on the machine.
It was only ten-thirty, and I wasn’t going to see Candy until lunch at the Bonny Bag, so I opened a can of Caffeine-Free Diet Cherry Coke and spread out my Corcoran’s. I was just starting to doze off when Whipper Will’s ancient upright fax machine clicked twice and wheezed into life; it sputtered and shuddered, it creaked and it clanked, it hissed and whistled, and then spat a smeared-purple mimeo sheet on the floor, covered with figures:
As soon as it cooled, I picked it up and smoothed it out. I was just about to put it with the other one when the phone rang.
“Well?” It was Wu.
“More Big Crunch?” I was guessing, of course.
“You must be holding it upside down,” Wu said. “The figures I just sent are for the Anti-Entropic Reversal.”
“So I see,” I lied. “Does this reversal mean there won’t be a Big Crunch after all?” I wasn’t surprised; it had always sounded more like a breakfast cereal than a disaster.
“Irving!” Wu said. “Look at the figures more closely. The AER leads up to the Big Crunch; it makes it happen. The Universe doesn’t just shrink, it rewinds. It goes backwards. According to my calculations, everything will be running in reverse for the next eleven to fifteen billion years, from now until the Big Crunch. Trees will grow from ashes to firewood to oak to seed. Broken glass will fly together into windowpanes. Tea will get hot in the cup.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said. “Could even be handy. When does all this happen?”
“It’s already started,” said Wu. “The Anti-Entropic Reversal is going on right now.”
“Are you sure?” I felt my Caffeine-Free Diet Cherry Coke. It was getting warmer, but shouldn’t it be getting colder? Then I looked at the clock. It was almost eleven. “Things aren’t going backward here,” I said.
“Of course not, not yet,” Wu said. “It begins at the Edge of the Universe. It’s like a line of traffic starting up, or the tide turning; first it has to take up the slack, so in the beginning it will seem like nothing is happening. At what point does the tide turn? We may not notice anything for several thousand years. A blink of the eye in cosmic time.”
I blinked. I couldn’t help thinking of the beaded seat cushion. “But wait. Is it possible that something here could already be going backward,” I asked. “Rewinding?”
“Not very likely,” Wu said. “The Universe is awfully big, and . . .”
Just then I heard a knock. “Gotta go,” I said. “There’s somebody at the door.”
* * *
It was Candy, in her trim Parks Department khakis. Instead of giving me, her soon-to-be-fiancé, a kiss, she walked straight to the little kerosene-powered office refrigerator and opened a Caffeine-Free Diet Cherry Coke. I knew right away that something was wrong because Candy loathes and despises Caffeine-Free Diet Cherry Coke.
“Aren’t we meeting for lunch?” I asked.
“I got a call a few minutes ago,” she said. “From Squirrel Ridge, the nursing home. Daddy hit Buzzer.”
I tried to look grave; I tried to hide my guilty smile. In my wishful thinking I thought I had heard “hit the buzzer” (and figured it was a local variant of “kick the bucket”). I crossed the room and took Candy’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” I lied.
“You’re not half as sorry as Buzzer is,” Candy said, already dragging me toward the door. “He’s the one with the black eye.”
* * *
Squirrel Ridge, the nursing home, sits in a hollow just north and east of Huntsville, overlooked by Squirrel Ridge, the mountain. It’s a modern, single-story establishment that looks like a grade school or a motel, but smells like—well, like what it is. The smell hits you as soon as you walk in the door: a dismaying mix of ordure and disorder, urine and perfume, soft food and damp towels, new vomit and old sheets, Beech-nut and Lysol pine. Next, the sounds hit you: scuffing slippers, grunts and groans, talk-show applause, the ring of dropping bedpans, the creak of wire-spoke wheels—broken by an occasional panicked shout or soul-chilling scream. It sounds as if a grim struggle is being fought at intervals, while daily life shuffles on around it. And indeed it is. A struggle to the death.
I followed Candy to the end of a long hall, where we found her father in the dayroom, smiling sweetly, strapped in a chair in front of a TV watching Alan Jackson sing and pretend to play the guitar. “Good morning Mr. Knoydart,” I said; I could never bring myself to call him Whipper Will. In fact, I had never known the Whipper Will who was the terror of trailer parks in four counties. The man I knew, the man before us, was large but soft—beef gone to fat—with no teeth and long, thin white hair (which looked, this morning, a little grayer than usual). His pale blue eyes were fixed on the TV, and his fingers were busy stroking a paper napkin laid across his knee.
“What happened, Daddy?” Candy asked, touching the old man’s shoulder tentatively. There was, of course, no answer. Whipper Will Knoydart hadn’t spoken to anyone since he had been admitted in January, when he had called the Head Nurse, Florence Gaithers, a “stupid motherfucker, a bitch, and a ______,” and threatened to shoot her.
“I was helping him out of his wheelchair to go to the bathroom, and he just up and slugged me.”
I turned and saw a skinny young black man in whites, standing in the doorway. He wore a diamond stud in his nose and he was dabbing at a black eye with a wet rag.
“He got this look in his eye. Called me a ________ (excuse me!), and then he up and hit me. It was almost like the old Whipper Will.”
“Sorry, Buzzer. Thanks for calling me instead of Gaithers.”
“It’s no big deal, Candy. Old folks with Alzheimer’s have incidents.” Buzzer pronounced it with the accent on the dent. “Gaithers would just get all excited.”
“Buzzer,” said Candy. “I want you to meet—” I was hoping she would introduce me as her soon-to-be-fiancé, but I was disappointed. I was introduced as her “friend from New York.”
“Whipper Will’s Yank,” said Buzzer, nodding. “I heard about him.”
“Sorry about your eye,” said Candy. “And I do appreciate your not calling Gaithers. Can I buy you a steak to put on it?”
“I’m a vegetarian,” said Buzzer. “Don’t you worry about it, Candy. Your daddy’s not so bad, except for this one incide
nt. He lets me wash him and walk him around every morning just as sweet as anything; don’t you, Mister Knoydart? And we watch TNN together. He calls me whenever Pam Tillis comes on, don’t you Mr. Knoydart? He wasn’t always so sweet, though. Why, I remember one time he took a shot at my mother, when we lived out at Kyber’s Creek Trailer Park. Called her a ______. Excuse me, but he did.”
* * *
“Buzzer and I are old friends,” Candy explained as we went back out to the car. “He was the first Black kid in my junior high, excuse me, African American, or whatever, and I was Whipper Will’s daughter, so we were outcasts together. I looked after him and he’s still looking after me. Thank God. If Gaithers finds out Daddy’s acting up, she’ll kick him out of Squirrel Ridge for sure, and I won’t have any place to put him, and we’ll be back to square one, and how would that be?”
“Bad,” I said.
“Well, hopefully it’s over. Just an incident.” She said it the same way as Buzzer.
“Hope so,” I said.
“Funny thing is, didn’t you think Daddy looked better?”
“Better?”
“I think Buzzer’s been putting Grecian Formula on his hair. Buzzer always wanted to be a hairdresser. This nursing home thing is just a sideline.”
* * *
We had managed to miss lunch. We made a date for dinner and “a drive” (tonight was to be my night to pop the question), and Candy dropped me at the office. It was only three o’clock, so I opened a Caffeine-Free Diet Cherry Coke and spread out my Corcoran’s on the windowsill, determined to make up for lost time. I was awakened by a rhythmic clacking, jacking, cracking, snorting, cavorting noise, and a faint electrical smell. The floor was shaking. Whipper Will’s upright fax machine was spitting out a sheet of purple-ink-smeared paper, which drifted to the floor.
I picked it up by one corner and studied it while it cooled: