by Tom Hourie
“Couple of weeks maybe. I’ve got a TA check coming at the end of the month.
“Well that sort of works out because I blew one of the seals on the vacuum chamber and it’ll take a few days to get a new one.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Fixing the crack is no problem,” Bill said. “But if I’m right and the oscillator is some kind of vacuum tube, I’ll have to do it in the vacuum chamber.”
“So where do I stay in the meantime?”
“I’ve got a cot in the back. You’re welcome to use it.”
“It’s going to play hell with my love life.”
“You wish. But talking about love life, you missed a great scene at the reception after you left. Percival snuck off with Hannah Snider from Women’s Studies. Didn’t even leave Hope with cab fare. I’ve never seen anyone so pissed. She was twitching like a tasered rat.”
Chapter XXXXX:
Back In The Saddle – Hell In A Handcart –Going Through The Garbage
I was bored stiff after only a day of hiding out in Bill’s back room so I tried to get back to my regular routine of holding tutorials, grading undergraduate papers and putting up with Ross Percival. You never know what might happen so why burn bridges?
Still, it was difficult to take matters seriously when I expected to be gone soon. Dealing with Percival was especially difficult. It was all I could do not to verbalize my opinion that the man was a self-important little twerp with the intellectual capacity of a stump, so I adopted a policy of Dilbert-like passive aggression. My work was made easier by the fact that the man is a computer illiterate who tries to hide his ignorance.
“Bob,” he asked, during our next session, “How are you coming along with the proofs of my article on The Relationship between Allergic Rhinitis and Sleep Apnea?”
“I’ve been checking its paradigms against multiplatform online sources.”
“And how is that working out?”
“I still have to collate the firewall data.”
Have you ever read your hometown newspaper during an extended trip overseas? Issues you once might have considered important now seem trivial, as though you were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. That’s how it was for me during the time I was back. Everything felt unreal and distorted, like something you’d see in a Fellini retrospective.
F The day after I got back the Seahawks’ quarterback got a ten million dollar contract extension, even though the team had gone two and fourteen the previous season.
F The day after that, the Pakistani army arrested one of their key scientists while he was attempting to smuggle a suitcase nuke through the Swat valley. The President hailed the arrest as an example of our Pakistani ally’s commitment to maintaining peace on the Indian subcontinent. Reliable sources reported that the scientist had failed to bribe the army colonel whose regiment had made the arrest.
F Osama bin Laden denounced the arresting colonel as an apostate whose treachery would set back only temporarily Al-Qaeda ‘s goal of establishing a world-wide Muslim state adhering to the teachings of the first Caliphs, the last of whom died in 661 A.D.
F And Hope Buchan kept pestering me to “sit down and have a serious discussion about our relationship.”
“Hope, you know what, I’m kind of busy just now.”
“You can’t spend the rest of your life avoiding responsibility. It isn’t fair to either of us.”
I took her advice about being responsible seriously in at least one respect, when I tried to call my sister to say goodbye. As luck would have it, I got her schnorrer of a husband instead.
“Hey, Bobbo! How you doing there bro?”
“Not so bad Lenny. Is Rachael around?”
“Out shopping my man. You know women. They spend it faster than you can make it.”
I almost choked on that one. Clinton was president the last time Lenny brought home a paycheck.
“Could you tell her I called?”
“Sure thing, but before you go, let me tell you about this great deal I can get you on a new water softener…”
My teaching assistant check finally showed up at Mrs. Gridestone’s but it was all I could do to pry it loose from her. Talk about dim witted. How did the woman think I was going to pay her if she held on to my check?
I finally convinced her that withholding mail is a federal crime and came back an hour later with her money.
“Here you are Mrs. G. Seven hundred and forty dollars.”
“And sixty-seven cents.”
“Now can I have the stuff that was on my night table?”
She came back a few moments later holding a green garbage bag. “All of your miscellaneous articles are in here,” she said. “Please collect your large items as soon as possible.”
“Give them to the Salvation Army,” I said. I was out on the street heading for Bill’s basement two minutes later.
“I love your luggage,” Bill said, when I dropped the garbage bag in front of him. “Louis Vuitton?”
“Just give me a beer and help me sort through it,” I said.
“What are we looking for?”
“The oscillator.”
We spent the next few minutes sorting through the debris of what I now thought of as my ‘old’ life. I finally spotted the oscillator poking out from beneath a book of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. “Here,” I said, handing it to Bill.
Bill examined the small glass object beneath the fluorescent glow of a magnifying lamp. “Not as bad as I remembered,” he said finally.
“How soon can you fix it?”
“The new seal is supposed to be here tomorrow afternoon. How about tomorrow night?”
“That works out perfectly.”
“How so?”
“I’ll have been back here two weeks tomorrow. Babbage is going to be watching for my signal tomorrow afternoon at four.”
Chapter XXXXXI:
Student Outrage – Bill To The Rescue
So everything was all set right? Fix the oscillator, go the sleep center, get back to Sarah. Wrong.
It turned out that a former British Member of Parliament named George McGillivray had been booked to speak at the Students’ Union on the afternoon of the next day. McGillivray was best known for his contention that “Hezbollah are a legitimate part of the Lebanese national resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation of their land.”
The results were predictable. Opposing crowds of demonstrators began gathering in front of the Students’ Union the day before. Cries of "Viva, viva, Palestina!" elicited louder chants of, "Go away, McGillivray!" Fearing a full-scale battle, the local authorities called for reinforcements from the Seattle Police Department whose riot squad are always glad of a chance to don their Kevlar® body armor and LexanTM face shields.
The air was reeking of pepper spray and tear gas by the time I got to the street clock whose glass had been cracked by a rubber bullet. Fortunately the clock was still running but I was faced with the problem of how to make myself seen among the milling demonstrators. Help came in the form of Bill Fowler who somehow materialized beside me holding a metal folding chair.
“I thought you might need to something to lift yourself over the crowd,” he said.
“It’s not exactly a staircase to heaven, but I guess it will do.”
We had just put the chair by the clock when a five-man snatch squad rushed out from police lines. A wave of panic surged through the crowd and the ensuing crush almost knocked me over. Bill pulled me to the clock and we sheltered behind it as a river of fleeing humanity passed around us. A masked demonstrator fell heavily against me saying “Oh Jesus,” in a panicky female voice. I instinctively held on to the neck of her black coveralls to keep her from being swept away and it was only when the commotion had died down that I realized I had rescued Mary Lou Bernstein.
“Oh my God, I think my ankle is broken,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to straighten up.
Why was nothing ever easy? Mary Lou needed medic
al attention but it was five minutes to four and I needed to stay at the clock. Then I noticed the expression of concern on Bill’s face and the solution was obvious.
“Mary Lou, I have some things to look after but I Bill here would be happy to take you to the first aid station.”
Bill looked at me with gratitude, picked her up like a small child and carried her off down the street with her arm around his neck and her head resting against his shoulder.
Chapter XXXXXII:
More Activism - Back At The Boneyard – Strange Bedfellows
I felt ridiculously exposed standing on the folding chair next to the clock. The last thing I wanted was to get sent packing by campus security. True, they had their hands full coping with the demonstrators whose slogan-chanting voices could still be heard receding in the distance but who knew how long that would last?
I decided the best thing to do would be to make like a demonstrator myself and hope the first amendment would protect me so I tried coming up with some chants of my own. My first effort got me nothing but funny looks.
Truth
Justice
The American Way
All means All
Let’s start today!
I decided the problem was the slogan was too generic. I needed something students care about. Learning? The Asians maybe, but they never demonstrate. I finally settled on money.
(One, two, three, four)
Higher fees will make us poor
(Five, six, seven, eight)
Budget cuts are what we hate
That one struck a nerve. A crowd began to gather and murmured its agreement. Encouraged, I segued into my next effort.
Board of regents rich and rude!
We don’t like your attitude!
Fee increases are a crime
Board of regents must resign!
A red-haired man who looked just like Willie Fitzgerald stepped out of the crowd holding a megaphone. At first I thought maybe he was Willie Fitzgerald but when he spoke, his accent was pure Puget Sound.
“Use this brother,” he said, holding out the megaphone. “Your message needs to be heard.”
My half-hour was almost up so I refused. “Why don’t you take over?” I said. I’ll even contribute my folding chair.”
The Willie clone needed no encouragement and stepped onto the chair the moment I was on the ground. I could hear a new chant starting as I walked back to the Boneyard.
No more lies and no more pain,
They’re just fooling us again
The first thing I saw when I got back to Bill’s place was a trail of clothing starting at the door and leading toward the back room. Bill’s Converse high tops were followed by a pair of dainty combat boots which in turn led to a pair of jeans followed by black coveralls and a pile of underclothing. The end of the path was marked by the now-familiar Hermes scarf.
I could see a pair of bare feet showing below the open door of Bill’s beer fridge and I knew they weren’t Bill’s because his toes are hairier than a Hobbit’s.
“Hey Mary Lou,” I called. “How’s the ankle?”
The refrigerator door closed slowly and Mary Lou Bernstein emerged from her hiding place wearing Bill’s Seattle Seahawks jersey.
“Much better thank you. It was just a sprain” she said, as she began to retrieve her clothes from the floor. “Please don’t tell anyone about this. It’ll probably never happen again.”
“Why not?”
“I never have any luck with men.”
“Well you might have luck with this one. He really likes you.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“Aside from the fact he’s told me so, he’s letting you wear his Seahawks jersey.”
“This old thing?” she said, looking down at the garment. “What’s so special about it?”
“Trust me. It’s his most cherished possession.”
“Oh. Well then.” She fingered the jersey with a pleased look on her face and dropped her clothes back onto the floor. I guess she decided the jersey was warm enough after all.
“Is Bill around?”
“He’s in the clean room fussing over a vacuum something or other.”
Chapter XXXXXIII:
Fixing The Oscillator – Bill Stays Put
Bill was making final adjustments to the new vacuum seal when I got to the clean room.
“Everything go Ok at the clock?” he asked.
“No way to tell. I’ll find out at midnight.”
“Hand me that UV curing wand would you?” Bill said. “I’m almost ready.” He sealed the wand, along with the oscillator and a syringe of UV adhesive inside the chamber.
“Hold up for a second before you get going,” I said. “I wanted to throw an idea at you.”
“Throw away.”
“Have you ever thought about coming with me? Not at the same time but you could use my goggles after I’m gone. I could videotape my routine so you’d know how to do it.”
“Thanks, but my place is here. Who knows, maybe I’ll be the first researcher to perfect cold fusion. Anyhow, I want to see where things go with Mary Lou. I mean would you go back if it wasn’t for Sarah?”
“I sure would.”
“Why?”
“Because I feel alive there. Here I’m just sleep walking, going through the motions. Anyhow, I think this world is a dead end. Terrorist nukes, energy shortages, climate change. If one of them doesn’t get us, another one will. In the other world, they still have a chance. Maybe I can help them avoid some of the mistakes we’ve made here.”
“You might be right, but even if I wanted to follow you, I doubt if I could. I think there’s something special in your personal circuitry that makes dimensional travel possible for you and nobody else.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Me too.” There was an awkward silence and Bill turned back to the vacuum chamber. “You mentioned that Nikola Tesla had a hand in developing the dimensional translator,” he said, as he started the vacuum pump. “That’s interesting.”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“I’m a physicist. That’s like asking the Pope if he’s heard of St. Peter.”
“Tesla was a physicist?”
“He was everything. Physicist, engineer, inventor, Nobel Prize nominee, you name it. He was as famous as Edison in his day.”
“So why have I never heard of him?”
“Aside from the fact you are an ignoramus? Tesla became seriously unglued in his later years. Kept making outrageous claims he couldn’t back up. The scientific community was embarrassed and tried to forget he ever existed.”
“What kind of claims?”
“Said he could transmit electricity without wires, claimed to have invented a device for contacting other planets. When he died he was trying to sell The Defense Department on some kind of a death ray called a Particle Beam Generator but he could never raise the money to get the thing built.”
“You know what?” I said. “I think he might have.” But Bill didn’t hear me. His attention had turned to the vacuum chamber where a buzzer had just gone off.
“Ok,” Bill said. “Let’s do this.” He began manipulating the external controls of a pair of robot arms inside the chamber. First he laid a bead of adhesive along the crack in the glass. Then he got me to shut off the room lights and turned on the UV curing wand. For a few moments the only thing I could see was Bill’s face haloed by the ghostly blue light emanating from the vacuum chamber viewport as he ran the curing wand back and forth over the surface of the repair. For a big, sloppy guy, Bill can be awfully delicate when he wants to be. “I think that’s got it,” he said finally.
Chapter XXXXXIV:
A Farewell - An Offer I Could Refuse – Back At The Sleep Lab
“Handle this with gloves from now on,” Bill said. “The adhesive is sensitive to skin oils.” There was a painful silence as he sealed the oscillator into a Ziploc baggie and gave it to me. “Am I ever going to see you again?” he
asked.
“Probably not,” I said.
We did the man hug with three backslaps instead of two. Tough guys.
I still had some time to kill before midnight so I went over to the graduate students’ lounge and watched another episode of My Too Perfect Sons. In this one Dae-pung was trying to break up with his girlfriend by telling her he’s married with three kids. Not to be deterred, the girlfriend vowed to challenge his wife to a duel. It had been a long day and the combination of stuffy air and a comfortable sofa made me fall asleep. When I woke up it was almost half past eleven. I rushed out the door and started jogging toward the sleep center. I was relieved to see the lights still on when I got there. Sometimes George locks up early.
My cardiac efficiency sucks so I had to stop outside to catch my breath. I was just about to go in when a short figure emerged from the shadows of a Hemlock tree by the walkway. It was Hope Buchan, wearing the same black cocktail dress she had worn at the Chancellor’s reception.
“I have been waiting for you Robert,” she said. The night was chilly and her bare arms were covered in goose bumps.