The Color Over Occam

by Jonathan Thomas

  When he brought my drinks and dinner, he treated me to the same scrutiny, until his eyes lit up with recognition. “Weren’t you and a friend in here before, having a chat about bad fish in the reservoir? You ain’t drinking that water, are you?” I earnestly shook my head. “Good for you. How’s your friend been?” Pretty sick, I reported. “Uh-huh.” He’d only have been dumbfounded, I supposed, had I said Wil was fine. He leaned closer, and continued sotto voce. “I feel like I owe you one for tipping me off. I mean, about the situation with the water. You get a good look at some of these people? Something bad’s in the pipes.” He hurried off to his side of the bar and the rush-hour crush. Hadn’t left me any hot sauce or napkins. That was okay. From sportsjacket pocket I retrieved a bottle of Tabasco from home and a wad of paper towels from the break room at work. Posted a mental note to pump him for more insights under less hectic circumstances.

  Akeley Street lived up to my preconception. Industry had been extinct along its half dozen blocks for forty years, and what survived was a blue-collar counterpart of Ellery Avenue’s salvaged campus. Some of the brick or older fieldstone structures had been repurposed as artists’ studios or offices or discount outlets, and broad, overgrown lots with maple and locust trees on the rise implied the dimensions of buildings flattened in the likely wake of arson for insurance payouts. Thayer had his apartment in Danforth Manor, the furthest cry from “manor” in the dictionary sense, a former textiles operation of the same Danforths who’d bequeathed the Historic Society its HQ, with factory floors now divvied up as subsidized housing, according to a graffiti-laden sign out front.

  Between the sign at the edge of the sidewalk and the flaking white paint of the brick façade was a trashy moat, the vestige of a canal or millrace from the heyday of hydropower, now clogged with weeds, rocks, fast-food wrappers, Styrofoam cups, scrap wood. Spanning the moat was a faux drawbridge of weatherbeaten, splintery beams. Odds were good that it wouldn’t have been able to complete an ascent to 90 degrees in one piece. Railings welded together from black iron pipes bordered it and the millrace as well. A floodlight over the frosted-glass double doors was out, but surplus illumination from the front hall helped me find Thayer’s doorbell. Castro established who I was via the squawkbox and buzzed me into a shabby, downscale variant of Dyer Hall. Hell of a retirement home for a tenured prof.

  As I clambered toward the first landing on my journey to the fourth floor, my feet dragged with the ballast of the IPAs and echoed languidly from the upper reaches. But no, those were someone else’s footfalls, clumping nearer when I paused for breath. Strangers devoid of street smarts were liable to get mugged in here, weren’t they? Would turning tail be smart or ignominious? With telepathic acuity, Castro shouted for me to come on and spare him a trip down the damn stairs and up again.

  I bellowed my okay and shambled ahead. He was standing on the bottom step above the third floor. The wall was supporting him. How could his slight and fragile husk marshal such a heavy tread? His burden of inordinate age was even more arresting. He was hairless and dark and wrinkled as walnut meat, and into his network of creases the years had rubbed a blackness like indelible ashes. Faded flannel shirt and khakis sagged loosely on him, to reinforce his look of desiccation. And in view of his own uncanny person, his next words, especially in that protean accent, were all the more extraordinary. “I had to warn you out of his hearing. Please be careful to control your response when you see him. He is always self-conscious about his appearance.” I promised my utmost discretion, and Castro nodded as if that would simply have to do. He bid me follow, and stomped upstairs with his incongruously leaden feet.

  Thayer’s dull gray door was open a crack. Castro eased it wider with the flat of his hand and ushered me in with a cinematically curt bow. The congestively partitioned room was warm, dusky, and fragrant. Reminiscent of a greenhouse or a funeral parlor? To left and right and before me were bookshelves, packed from floor to ceiling, a mix of hardcovers and paperbacks, but no shiny new spines. Castro glided by. His Oxfords’ leather heels plunked along a central strip of hardwood floor between threadbare geometric hooked rugs.

  He preceded me beyond the bookcases, where LPs and CDs in freestanding and wall units were even more densely stacked than the literary hoardings. In a nook among them was crammed a cushy La-Z-Boy facing an Eisenhower-era hi-fi console, into which a CD player had somehow been wired. Adjoining the recliner was what my grandpa would have dubbed a “radio table,” on which headphones rested beside a German box set of Ernest Tubb CDs from the 1990s and a Charles Ives album from the ’70s on Nonesuch. “Francis, we’re coming in to visit now!” Castro chanted, as if averse to spooking a caged macaw. In an aside to me, with a gesture to encompass everything behind us, he murmured, “Sometimes I read to him, and sometimes I play music.” He didn’t seem to have laid eyes on the green folder under my arm.

  “Whenever you’re ready!” Elderly quaver resonated with offhand disdain for the kid-glove treatment. Castro, I gathered, had been factotum here a long time. His employer was in the alcove ahead, along with the single source of light, obstructed by a curio cabinet of 78s in plain brown sleeves. In the diffuse glow I managed to descry what accounted for the overpowering fragrance. In terracotta pots hanging from the ceiling, crowding a round plastic folding table, and crowning a podium shaped like an Ionic column were tropical plants run riot, among which the only familiar genera were orchids, hibiscus, camellias, and gardenias.

  Castro stood by to let me through the gap between the cabinet and the hindside of an upright piano. I directed my attention toward the brightness of conical glass shade on a brass floor lamp, but nobody occupied the overstuffed burgundy armchair beneath it. The quantity of flowering plants, in effect a library of perfumes to complement the books and music that gratified Thayer’s sense of hearing, became apparent as I glanced left and right. Beyond open doors of dark bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dominating random surfaces, on racks across windows, wanton greenery erupted. Watering must have been a full-time job. Pruning didn’t visibly enter into it. During these seconds of cursory sweep around the room, no art, nothing of solely visual appeal, presented itself. The TV on a buffet table, flanked by exotic succulents, was smaller and crappier than mine. Thayer had not elected to speak again, and unbudging Castro made me think, not to my credit, of a cigar-store Indian.

  At the piano, the bench was pushed under the keyboard, and the dust cover shielded the keys. On the shelf above the keyboard, a token exemplar of sheet music was propped, of my least favorite Hank Williams hit, “Kaw-Liga,” the novelty ballad of a cigar-store Indian. This little arc of synchronicity from my head to the piano was disturbing enough, but as my survey of the room continued, it arrived at another armchair at the edge of the lamplight, and there sat Thayer. The weirdness over “Kaw-Liga” was suddenly trifling.

  I shuddered, and my folder fell to the floor. “Did you drop something?” demanded Thayer, and I stammered a few words about no harm done. In most respects, he fit my image of decrepit gent, from plaid bathrobe over white undershirt that ill-disguised a sunken chest, to open-toe slippers over stocking feet, to white chevron mustache compensating for sparse, comb-over hair. But Thayer’s face held the lamp’s reflection as twin vertical streaks between his brows and cheekbones, and they twitched like flames when his head jiggled slightly on his stubbly neck. For a heartbeat or two I could cling to the illusion he was wearing goggles or coke-bottle glasses, except no strap or bows secured them. What once were corrective lenses, I inferred, had somehow melted, spread, and fused with eyes and flesh, blinding him and displacing the skin around their rims into permanent ripples.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Thayer waved vaguely toward the well-lit armchair. “Castro may want to tarry on his feet for now.” Castro raised no objections, so I retrieved my folder and complied, not without qualms, since the caregiver appeared markedly older and more infirm than his charge. I also had to overcome a vagrant, counterintuitive notion that he shared some
quality of his stance with bodyguards and cutthroats.

  Meanwhile, Thayer had fixed his glassed-in sockets upon me. Did he retain optic nerves to detect brightness, rudimentary shapes, motion? “Guess you could say we’re fans of your program,” he confessed. “We catch more of them than we miss. Castro gives me a running description of the visuals, as necessary.”

  I nodded, realized that was useless, and thanked him aloud.

  “You were soliciting the public for information about what’s in the water. What do you propose it is? What’s your theory?”

  Huh? Was he inflicting Socratic method on me? Why put me on the spot? “I don’t know what I know. That’s why I’m so happy to meet you, Dr. Thayer. To get the benefit of your experience.”

  His burst of laughter was abrasively strident. “I sure as hell didn’t get any benefit out of it.”

  All right then, I did have a theory, and it had been perfectly viable until Thayer’s typescript, whose green cover was growing damp in my clutches, started confusing me with its manifold facts. “Well, maybe you have a better handle than I do on one issue. Did the entity that’s become more active lately originate entirely with the meteor from 1882, or did a portal at the underwater crash site open recently?”

  He digested that, but not for long, and not with good graces. “A portal? How do you come up with a portal? For Chrissakes, you live in the town of Occam. Doesn’t anyone here have any idea what Occam’s razor is? When you have competing hypotheses, go with the least complicated! There never was a portal! There never had to be, to explain all the facts.”

  “My mistake.” Saw no way out of adopting a conciliatory position. Goodbye, with regrets, to my own beloved paradigm. “But for the record, I am aware who William of Occam was.”

  Neither here nor there, said Thayer’s lack of expression. He was on to other topics. “What were you planning to show me?” This, I took it, was an instance of blind man’s irony at my expense.

  “A copy of your article from 1982 about the meteor. Minus the Results and Discussion sections pertaining to your experiment. In case you wanted it back.” The combined excess of heat and fragrance was almost stifling.

  “Want it back? What for? If I had it in my hands, I’d shred it to confetti. Where’d you find it, anyway?”

  “At a rummage sale. At the Historical Society. It was in a pile of sheet music. Was all that yours too?”

  He shrugged. “I donated a lot of junk to those people when I had to squeeze into tighter quarters here. My research must have gotten mixed in. Couldn’t see what I was doing, could I?” He indulged a few dry chuckles. At least it didn’t behoove me to smile politely at his forays into humor. “I sometimes wondered where that folder had gone. One haphazard sample of sheet music I saved, for decorative purposes. The instrument felt naked to me without it. I still play from memory when the spirit moves me.” A discreet cough from behind impinged like a tap on the shoulder. “But I digress, don’t I, Castro?” Thayer began lifting a hand toward his temples, as if obeying nervous habit to adjust his spectacles, then desisted with a quick scowl of self-reproach. “On the other hand, our guest might be grateful for a sketch in broad strokes of what brought me to this pass, though if he can add two and two, the essence of it should have occurred to him.”

  “Irradiating the gray powder?” What else?

  He nodded. “I’d reserved the use of the Chemistry Department’s fluorescence spectrometer for a Sunday evening. Downtime.” Thayer’s flat tone indicated that he’d honed his story, through chronic rumination, into its tersest, least emotive redaction. As if to guard against its potential to gall him, decades later. Exploiting scientific objectivity as a balm for the psyche. “I proceeded conservatively, since I had no guide for the behavior of the powder. I prepared a milligram of it in a suspension of purified water, placed it in the spectrometer’s sample cell, and exposed it to a mere 30-microsievert dose of X-rays. At the low end of what the dentist aims at your jaw. Funny how you can believe yourself wholly innocent of hubris, and then the world tells you differently.

  “For a fraction of a second, the buzz of the X-ray generator was unpleasantly loud, followed by a searing white flash in my face, as a shockwave began pitching me across the room. I blacked out before landing.

  “I woke up screaming deliriously in the dark, flat on my back, and an unbearable burning radiated like ringlets of white phosphorus from my eyes. I couldn’t blink or produce any ocular movements, and a band of viselike pressure tormented me at eye level. The darkness was unduly disorienting because of its suffusion with a marginal, faint light. My hands shook as I raised them to my brows, and instead of wire-rim glasses, I grazed a hard, smooth blindfold of some kind. The slightest touch of my fingertips compounded the throbbing agony in my head, and my consciousness gave way again. Several times I reawakened and passed out after an excruciating minute, with no idea where I was.

  “Finally a state of happy disembodiment told me I must have been hospitalized. The beneficiary of a morphine drip. All too soon, though, the transition to less euphoric painkillers was underway, obliging me to listen and respond when visitors observed me tensing up and groaning as I reentered reality. Campus security, they said, had found me when they chanced to be in earshot during one of my howling fits. The damage around me didn’t seem drastic at first. Most of the big machinery in the lab looked fine, even if the glassware had been reduced to shiny slag in situ or fused as sparkly bits on the walls and floor. And while nothing was superficially wrong with the spectrometer, its rivets and seams, at second glance, had burst loose, and a puff of breath would have collapsed it like a house of cards. Its glass parts had vaporized, of course.

  “In lucid intervals between begging for intravenous relief and my next round of opiate dreams, I pieced together an understanding that my survival had been contingent on the rapid decay of the unknown force I had released. Had the pulse that melted my wire-rims been any less transient, the glass would have remained liquid long enough to flow down my optic canals and cook my brain.” Grim demeanor may have implied lingering amazement at his close call, or lingering regrets about ever being born. “In a literal flash, I had destroyed my eyesight and my career, without a shred of data as compensation, since the spectrometer had been gutted. Moreover, thanks to funding cuts and mismanagement, the university couldn’t afford to repair any of the damage, so if you were to believe certain deans, I singlehandedly crippled the Department of Chemistry and presided over the beginning of the end for the whole school.

  “After my discharge from the hospital, the university decided that early retirement suited a tenured professor better than outright pink slip. Mostly because it better suited the image of an august institution. And when that institution went under, my pension did likewise, which is why I’m living from disability check to disability check in subsidized housing. Well, that was Reagan’s America for you. Not that we have it any nicer nowadays.”

  Castro expelled a more disruptive cough than earlier, indicating to me that his job included deflecting Thayer’s reveries from treacherous downward spirals. For present purposes, he had pushed the reset button on our conversation, and I tried to make the most of it. “But Dr. Thayer, you proved that the gray powder is nowhere near inert. That has to mean something. And you proved radiation is one thing that can annihilate the alien contaminant. Maybe we could neutralize the problem at its source, in the reservoir, with some form of radioactive ammunition.”

  “No, no, forget it!” Just as well for my delicate ego that Thayer couldn’t literally focus his scorn on me. “We’re not up against an organism you can zap like the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Depending on how widely the alien presence has dispersed, and on how differently radiation affects it versus the residual gray powder, any attack at its so-called source might induce a chain reaction throughout its range of penetration. At worst, it’d be like nuking metropolitan Occam. And even if radioactivity in the drinking water didn’t wreak immediate mass destruction or pandemic
cancer in the long run, it might not accomplish anything. An alien sentience somehow arrived here in good working order after putative light-years and eons in the interstellar void. The glossy shell that harbored it while riding the meteor may have conferred protection from cosmic rays, or more tenably, the live entity, unlike its inanimate gray byproduct, may be endowed with some natural defense.”

  “Then what do we do about this?”

  “We?” His nose crinkled as if at fishy change in the wind. “If anyone needs to do anything, you need to do some more thinking. Your broadcast was imprecise about a lot of details. On what dates were the corpse-lights initially sighted? What were the numbers of stillbirths in June and July? How much postnatal mortality occurred in the same periods?” I enlightened him on these scores, but he was only getting started. When did the local news report on the exodus of bees? Of Canada geese? How many weeks postpartum had elapsed before my friend’s wife had to be committed? How soon thereafter did my friend’s mental impairment become manifest? How long ago had I filmed him in the woods? On that occasion, of what approximate width was the swath of dead vegetation by the reservoir? And how wide was the zone of rank, reactive growth? I did my conscientious best to answer, even as it sank in that as far as Thayer was concerned, I was here to be interrogated, that he’d never actually promised to educate me in the first place.

  The humidity and the floral overkill and Thayer’s acerbity had united to dull my wits, but his drift was explicit enough, and I felt he owed me, in the name of simple decency, the knowledge to sidestep oncoming peril. His inquisition had run out of steam and he was wistfully kneading his five o’clock shadow as if to coax forth any stray questions. “Dr. Thayer?”