White Light (Axoplasm Books)

by Rudy Rucker

  My office-mate’s name was Stuart Levin, and he’d been teaching at SUCAS two years longer than I. We had known each other faintly as undergraduates some eight years earlier – we’d lived in the same dorm at Swarthmore when I was a freshman and he was a senior.

  Stuart was one of the last Zen fans and one of the first Maoists. He said he was going to be a Zen socialist playwright, and actually had a couple of odd pieces produced by the campus players. I remembered one in particular, Thank God for Yubiwaza. Apparently it had been based on a comic book ad for some kind of judo, and had lasted 38 seconds. I’d missed that one by stopping in the Men’s Room on my way into the theater, and had regretted the loss ever since.

  What I had always admired most about Stuart back then were his wall posters of Mao and D.T. Suzuki. The Chairman was tacked to the closet door, and Suzuki was taped to the opposite wall. The fat Chinaman was waving an arm inspirationally, and the skinny old Japanese was wearing a Zen monk’s garb and sitting limply on a rock. Stuart had drawn speech balloons coming out of their mouths. The Chairman was crying, “Did you write today, Stuart?” and the monk was glaring across and muttering, “Today’s pig, tomorrow’s bacon.”

  I found Stuart in our office on the first day of classes. It had been eight years, and he looked middle-aged. Thinner, hair shorter, and a standard-issue assistant professor beard.

  “You’re going to have to watch what you say here, Rayman,” was the first thing he said to me. I stepped into the office and looked around while he continued talking, the words coming out in bursts and jerks. “I just heard this summer that I’m not getting renewed.” He twisted his neck around to look at me…accusingly, I imagined.

  “You mean you already got fired?” I asked, sitting down.

  Stuart nodded vehemently, “But they give you a year to find another job… I’m sending out 1200 letters.” He handed me one from a stack on his desk. There was a misprint in the third line.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” I asked. “Teaching math in upstate New York…where’s that at? What happened to Zen socialism?”

  His smile was like a crack in a boulder. He had the head of a man twice his size. “This was Bernadine’s idea. She said that we should tunnel from within…coopt the System. So I decided to get a Phid in mathematics. When they want to dehumanize you they use numbers instead of names, right? Statistics instead of souls. So I studied statistics, but the only teaching job I could find was up here in cow country. And now I’m losing this job, too.” Levin fell into his chair with a sigh. “I never dreamed it would turn out so fucking poor.”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I only went to grad school to dodge the draft. I almost got drafted anyway. But I really got into math after awhile. It’s beautiful stuff…like really fine abstract art.”

  Levin snorted. “If it’s so beautiful, how come no one ever looks at it. You’ll be lucky if three people ever read your dissertation.” He handed me a math journal. “Look at this. The fruit of five years labor.”

  The magazine was called the Journal of the American Statistical Association. About half-way down the table of contents I saw “Asymptotic Theory of Error Regression in Poisson Processes… Stuart I. Levin.” I flipped to the article. It was about 10 pages long, and bristled with unfamiliar symbols.

  “This looks interesting, Stuart,” I lied. “Of course I’m more oriented to Logic and Set Theory, but when I get the time…” I decided to change the subject. “With a degree in statistics, how come you didn’t get a fat job in the industry? You could really undermine the system there.”

  He took the magazine from me and stared at his article for awhile before answering. “My teachers tricked me into caring about mathematics. When I wrote this, I thought it was going to change the whole field of statistics overnight. I figured it was so good, there was no need for me to bust my hump in a nine-to- five. I thought I’d step into a Professorship at Princeton or Berkeley. Carry the torch. Phaw. I’m going to try once more, and then I’ll go to law school like I should have in the first place.”

  I didn’t see Levin much after the first day. He had a presentiment that not one of his 1200 letters was going to be read with interest or sympathy, and he was spending all his spare time doing the homework for two law courses he was taking in night school.

  I had managed to avoid telling my students where my office was…so most afternoons I could count on an idle peace troubled only by my guilt over April’s unhappiness. When I got home April would always be lying on the couch staring at the TV with the sound off. She would just lie there in silence until I came over and asked how she was. The answer was always the same. She was pissed-off, fed-up, and dead sick of it all. The hick town, the constant baby-care, the shopping in sleazy chain stores, the problems with the car, what the neighbor lady had said today, and so on and on.

  It sounded a lot worse than my life, though of course I could never admit this. Instead I laid great stress on my research (desultory), class-preparations (an hour a week sufficed), and faculty meetings (after my first I had sworn there would be no second). I had no classes Thursday, and usually stayed home with baby Iris that day in order to lessen my burden of guilt somewhat.

  But the guilt was never really that bad when I was in my well-heated office with its soft, waxy floor. My classes were over for the day at noon, and after I had wolfed down my sandwich I would settle down to try to do some mathematics. My chosen field was Set Theory, the exact science of the infinite. I was attempting to work through some important new articles which had appeared. I hoped to get a new slant on Cantor’s Continuum Problem, the question of how big is the infinitude of points in space.

  Off at Bernco I was isolated from other set-theorists, and the papers were very difficult to read alone. Before long a feeling of lassitude and hopelessness would overcome me, and I would lie down on the floor – telling myself it was only to relax so as to better visualize some complex set-theoretic construction.

  By the clock my naps would last two, three or even four hours. But the mental time of these naps could not be measured by any system of gears and levers. My naps lasted light-years, kilograms, quantum jumps, hypervolumes… Space and time were fractured, shuffled, layered and re-interfaced during those fall afternoons alone with the radiator’s hiss and the slow waning of the gray light.

  Do you ever wake up inside your dreams? It’s like the dream is going on as usual, only suddenly you feel yourself to be awake in Dreamland. In ordinary dreams one simply moves through the dreams like a blacked-out drunk. But in rare moments of lucid dreaming one remembers oneself and begins to exercise some conscious control.

  These moments of strange dark clarity rarely last long – for as you move through Dreamland a thousand wrong turnings await, each one leading back to the dream-work, the visionary but mindless manipulation of hopes and fears. As soon as a dream fully engages you, the familiar hypnosis sets in, and the lucidity is over.

  In the course of my naps at Bernco, I had stumbled on a method of prolonging those intervals of lucid dreaming. The trick was not to stare at anything, and to keep glancing down at my hands and body. As long as I could hold together a body in Dreamland, I could stay conscious. Sometimes I was even able to move among the bright shades till I found just the dream I wanted.

  In October a bizarre side-effect began to set in. During the lucid dreaming my spirit had gotten used to moving about Dreamland in a self-generated astral body. But now, more and more often, I was having trouble clicking back into my physical body. I would come to on my office floor, but I’d be unable to open my eyes, unable to move at all. The noises in the hall would warp and loom, and I would lie there paralyzed, struggling to get control of my body.

  Monday, two days before I went on that walk to the graveyard, a new phase set in. I woke up paralyzed, and as I tried to move, my astral arm swung free of my physical arm. I was lying on the floor next to the window, most of me trapped in inert flesh, but the one arm was free. I groped around, and found the
radiator pipe. It was hot, but didn’t hurt. On the back of the pipe I felt a place where the paint had peeled off, a spot shaped like a ragged crescent moon.

  Just then Levin walked in and I woke up. “Come on, Felix, time to go home,” he said as he gathered his books. “You just missed a classic Departmental meeting. We argued for an hour over whether or not to vote to change bylaw 3 of the Departmental constitution. Really stimulating stuff.”

  I stood up with as much difficulty as if I were climbing out of a six-foot grave. It wasn’t till the next day, Tuesday, that I remembered the strange dream. When I tried to feel behind the radiator pipe, it was too hot to touch. But by putting my eye by the wall near the floor I could just make out a chipped crescent of peeled paint. But it seemed to point in a direction opposite to the one I remembered.

  When I napped Tuesday afternoon I had terrible muddled dreams. Finally I woke up, paralyzed again. As before, I pulled one arm loose, then both arms. Carefully I felt my body’s chest and crossed arms. I put the astral arms down on the floor and tried to push the rest of my astral body out of my physical body. There was a giving sensation, and my arms sank through the floor. I felt around a bit…wires, a bent nail…then pulled my arms back and decided to try something else.

  This time I swung my astral arms back and forth to gather momentum, and then in a confused bumpy whirl I rolled free of my flesh. I was lying on the floor facing my sleeping physical body. I was out in my astral body, which was a naked mirror- image of my physical body.

  For a long minute I did nothing. The room looked normal, except for a few doughy blobs which were drifting around near the window. My physical body was still breathing. I relaxed a bit and looked around the room in the hope of making a definite observation which I could check later. I had to know if this was real.

  I remembered that every piece of furniture in the room had a little metal tag with a SUCAS serial number on it. I knew from touch that there was such a tag on the underside of my desk drawer…but I had never looked at it. I resolved to read this number and try to remember it.

  I crawled over towards the desk, keeping an eye on my sleeping form. I had a terrible fear that my body would die without me in it. But I was determined to try and read the number and find out if this was more than just a crazy dream.

  As I put my head under the desk, something happens to my space perceptions. Where I expect to find something like a cubic meter of legspace, I find a dark corridor that stretches through the wall and far beyond. A pair of dim red lights is moving down the corridor towards me, and I can hear labored breathing.

  Quickly I look up at the ceiling, the bottom of my desk drawer. There is the metal tag. With an anxious glance at the approaching red eyes, I stretch my neck up and up to read the tag.

  There are six digits, but every time I read them they change. The contours of the room are flowing, and I know I will die of fear if I see that thing coming towards me. I scrabble across the floor to my body, and somehow roll into it. A black leathery-winged creature is crawling out from under my desk. I try to scream but I’m paralyzed again…

  I woke up with a start. It was 3:30 on Tuesday afternoon. I put my coat on and hurried home through the pouring rain.

  No. 3

  Number of the Beast

  Wednesday morning I stepped out of our rented house in a stare of suicidal depression. Another quarrel with April. Recently she had been complaining that she never got enough sleep, so today I had struggled up from my troubled slumber to feed baby Iris when she began crying at 6:30.

  The baby’s delight at seeing me made getting up worthwhile. Her mouth opened wide in greeting, and I could see her two teeth. She let go of her crib railing to wave her arms in unison, and fell back onto her diaper. Her Trimfit was soaked, and I changed her, softly mimicking her coos and cries all the while.

  When Iris was dressed I stood her on the table in front of her mirror with my head next to hers. I wondered how heads grow. My face surprised me – I hadn’t realized what a zombie I looked like. But Iris didn’t mind. “Ba-ba, Da-da,” she said, giving her fat chuckle.

  She began to cry loudly when I put her in her high chair. I mashed a banana and warmed up some mush. When it was ready, I spooned the paste into her mouth, shaving her cheeks and chin with the tiny spoon after every few bites. Before long she was sucking her bottle, and I could begin to feed myself. I had hardly had any supper the night before, and now I was trembling with hunger.

  As I began to fry an egg, April walked into the kitchen. “I hope you didn’t give her banana in that outfit,” she said. “The spots are impossible to get out.” I clenched my teeth and turned my egg over. The yolk broke. I cursed and dumped it into the garbage.

  “What are you so cranky about?” April asked sharply.

  “Go back to bed,” I snarled, breaking a new egg into the pan.

  “I don’t know why you have to start the day out this way,” April wailed. “This is my kitchen, and if I feel cheerful and like getting up, I can. It wouldn’t kill you to be nice to me for once. Last night you didn’t say a word to me.”

  I almost blurted out that I had fallen out of my body and almost been caught by the Devil, but then the yolk broke again. I scrambled the egg messily, put it on some untoasted bread, and choked the mess down with milk. April’s face had that curdled look it got when she was really unhappy. I thought I was going to say something nice, but what came out was, “I’m going to have to get down to school early today, April.” Suddenly I wanted to be outside more than anything. I began gathering my stuff together.

  “That’s right,” April shouted. “Ruin my morning and leave me alone in this dump. Why can’t you get a real job in the city? You’re so floppy and lazy. If you wouldn’t stay up all night with your pipe and earphones…”

  Iris watched us with mild eyes. I kissed her, wiped my mouth, and hurried out the front door. April was sitting on a chair crying. “Go back to her,” I told myself, “Go on.” But I didn’t.

  Halfway down the block the pain was bearable and by the corner I could see again. It was going to be another rainy day. The gray sky looked like it was only about a hundred meters high. But there was a certain beauty in the shadowless lighting. It looked almost like an oriental water-color, with each tree and leaf and color just so. I decided to take a long walk after lunch. After yesterday I never wanted to nap again.

  I was in my office over an hour before my first class – Mathematics for Elementary Education Majors, at nine o’clock. I was a little nervous putting my feet under my desk, but of course nothing happened. I decided that my experience yesterday had been nothing more than a nightmare.

  I was still not quite able to believe that five years of graduate school had led to SUCAS, and I scanned my morning mail half-hoping for some miraculous last-minute offer from a real university. But today it was just ads for new textbooks, and a nasty, cryptic memo from the Departmental Committee to the Department at large. I wished I could play lead guitar in a rock band.

  I threw the mail in the trash can and picked up a book on Differential Geometry which I had recently checked out of the college library. With a feeling of real comfort I began going over the Frenet formulas for the moving trihedron of a space curve.

  After a few minutes something on my desk caught my eye. It was a triangular scrap of paper with unfamiliar handwriting on it. It must have been under my book. I fought back a sudden conviction that the paper had some connection with my nightmare, and picked it up.

  The paper was thick, almost parchment-like; straight on two edges and ragged on the other. A corner torn from the page of an old book. The ink was a reddish brown. “Dried blood,” I thought despairingly. The writing was precise enough, but seemed to be in another alphabet. Suddenly I realized I was looking at mirror-writing. I tried to decipher it, but I was too jangled by now to reason things out. I ran to my closet and held the scrap up to the mirror on the door.

  “Square my number for the tag,” I read.


  “It’s the fault of guys like you, Rayman,” a voice said rapidly. I started violently and whirled around. It was John Wildon, one of the full professors. He was a shy man, but obnoxious nevertheless. I rarely knew what his compacted witticisms were about. I looked at him blankly, masking my confusion and dislike with a cough.

  “Wage-price guidelines and a book like that costs the library thirty bucks.” He advanced to point at the Differential Geometry book which I had left lying on my desk. Was he complaining that I used the library?

  “It’s a pretty good book,” I said uncertainly, pocketing the mysterious scrap of paper. “The pictures are nice.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t know that Struik is a Red?” Wildon inquired, sipping coffee from his mug. He had a special mug with his name on it along with the names of famous mathematicians. I hoped he would drop it some day. “Giving tax dollars to the Reds, and this county is 90% Republican.” Wildon shook his head. “You’d think even a logician would know better than that.” Suddenly he gave me an intense look. “You’ve registered?”

  “To vote?” I answered, and he nodded. “Sure…” I was still many jumps behind him. Was Struik the author of the book I was reading?

  “Democrat?” Wildon slipped in. I nodded and he raised his mug in a silent toast. “We liberals have to look out for each other.” He started out of the room. At the door he paused, “We’ll get together with the wives and quaff a few.”

  “Fine,” I said. “That would be nice.”

  When Wildon was gone I lit a cigarette and stared out the window for a long time. All you could see out the window was a brick wall, and above it some sky. “Square my number for the tag,” the paper said. Whose number…what tag?

  I thought back on my nightmare of the day before. I had dreamed I had left my body and crawled under my desk to read the number on the SUCAS property tag. I felt under the desk. The tag was still there. With a certain reluctance I got down on the floor and craned up. The number was 44-3556. Square my number to get the tag. What was the square root of 443,556? I took out a pencil and paper.