by C J Paget
Seeing Frances give him the ‘That’s a crazy idea, but you’re so loveable that I just can’t help but being amused by it’ look that she had honed from years of watching television family sitcoms—one of the many things he loved about her was the effort she put into making the relationship work, especially since his own contributions could generously be described as ‘intermittent at best’—Van der Whall felt it was safe to return to his den to learn more about Maringue Jeff.
The CONCERN home page was not especially helpful: it told him that she had a PhD in astrophysics and that she had been a judge on Australia’s Got Astronomers for two years. Going to the TV show’s home page wasn’t helpful either: she had been a judge on Australia’s Got Astronomers for two years and had a PhD in astrophysics. Frustrated, Van der Whall turned to the tabloids. This is what he found on the Inquiring Eye on the News of the World site:
Brainy Babe Bursts Bothersome Boob’s Bubble
Dr. Maringue Jeff has the brains of a Brahe and the beauty of a Botticelli—a Botticelli who wears glasses so thick they could be used as lenses on a telescope, but a Botticelli nonetheless.
“I could have gotten laser surgery to correct my eyesight, I suppose,” Dr. Jeff allows, “but I wanted to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of high-stakes astrophysics. Goofy glasses seemed to be just the ticket.”
If Dr. Jeff wanted to be taken seriously, why did she spend two years as a judge on Australia’s Got Astronomers? She admits that she was torn. On the one hand, she says she wanted to be a role model for girls. On the other hand, the low-cut dresses and stilettos made her a role model for a completely different profession.
“The day I slapped Simon Cowell,” she admits, “was the happiest day of my life!”
Van der Whall shook his head free of cobWebs. Clearly, a more direct approach was needed. He called CONCERN and eventually spoke to Julliard McFire-Brandt, a member of the office staff.
“Are you a reporter for the Inquiring Eye on the News of the World?” McFire-Brandt asked excitedly.
“Sure,” Van der Whall responded. “I could be.”
“I don’t recognize your name.”
“Well, ah, of course, I don’t use my real name in print,” Van der Whall assured him. “In fact, you can’t be sure that you’re talking to me at this very moment! That’s how we work at the Inquiring Eye.”
“Brilliant!” McFire-Brandt enthused. “So, how can I help you?”
“Can you give me any reason, any reason at all, that Maringue Jeff might have wanted to kill herself?” Van der Whall asked.
“You mean, aside from the fact that her husband was about to leave her?”
“He was?”
“Oh, yeah. It was the worst kept secret at CONCERN. Well, other than that the Director has been letting some of the subatomic particles leave the accelerator on weekends—he has a kind heart but he doesn’t always have the best judgment, you know? Oh, and then there’s the affair between Lucy in shipping and that other physicist, Bartholomew Veldt—you can hear them go at it above the hum of the accelerator! And, now that I think of it, there’s—okay, you know, maybe the divorce isn’t the worst kept secret at CONCERN. But, it sure is high up there!”
“Why—” Van der Whall began, but, even before he could finish the question, McFire-Brandt was eager to supply the answer.
“Some think that it was because the Australian Revenue Office was investigating her husband for tax fraud. Others think it may have something to do with their son Frankfurter being arrested on suspicion of trafficking in illegal Pauly Shore DVDs. Some people think Maringue was having a hard time getting ahead in the male-dominated world of high-stakes astrophysics. All of these things would put a strain on a person. Personally, I think that she and her husband just didn’t get along.”
Van der Whall sighed. People weren’t really his strong suit. “Okay. Well. Thanks for that.”
“When is the article coming out?”
“Article?”
“You know. In the Inquiring Eye on the News of the World?”
“Ah. That’s up to my editors. Bye.” Van der Whall quickly hung up.
Okay, he thought, we’re looking at two dead astrophysicists. Two suicides. Too coincidental?
Maybe it was his academic training, or maybe it was the boredom (the connection between the two has often been uncommented upon) that drove Van der Whall to do a Google search using the term “astrophysicist suicide.” Whatever it was, he got 3,127,000 hits, too many to fruitfully look over. So, employing the Dirk Gently method of holistic fragmentation, Van der Whall chose one of the entries at random: 1,270,364. It turned out to be an obituary of a Swedish cosmologist named Per Olaf Gutierrez. Gutierrez had a paper published three months after he died in the Swedish academic publication Tidningen av Ytterligare Medlemmar (Journal of Extra Members). The paper was entitled: “Resa till de Avslutning av de Universum,” which BabbleFerret translated to “Hello, Sweetie. Care for a Sugar Bum?”
Suspecting that this was not an exact translation, Van der Whall slipped into the QED and found a copy of the journal in a library in Teheran. Because communication in the QED was sub-post-peri-twi-lingual, translation was not required. He asked the pages with the article on them what it was called; the first one responded: “Journey to the End of All That We Love and Hold Dear.” Van der Whall suspected that this wasn’t quite right, either, but, since he had the attention of the full article, he decided to let his need for certitude on this point go a bit.
Van der Whall asked the article what it was about. Grateful that somebody was interested, the article responded, “I am a call to arms, a cri de coeur, an urgent squeak in the darkness of the ignorance of everyday consciousness, an alarm of—”
“Yes, I get it,” Van der Whall interrupted “you’re important. And, what, if I may ask, makes you so important?”
Cosmologists had been getting it all wrong, the article informed him. Hubble? A double bubble of troubled rubble. Infrared scanning? A spread of a dead bed of intellectual retreads in need of planning.
Van der Whall sighed incorporeally to himself. He hated writing that was drunk on language. “So, what was the solution?” he asked.
“Finding particles at the end of the universe and asking them how everything began,” the article responded.
Of course.
Gutierrez had gotten the idea to travel to the end of the universe, by thought, in the QED, he’d written a paper about it, got up the nerve to do it, and killed himself afterwards, but before the paper was published. Other scientists had read the paper, and traveled the same path.
Van der Whall thanked the article for its time, ignoring its pleas to linger just a bit longer because it had some really interesting things to say about Carl Sagan, and started searching through the QED for subatomic particles on the outer edges of the universe. He was mindful of the fact that this journey may well have been responsible for the deaths of three scientists (that he knew of); it was just that if anybody could make the journey safely, he could. No ego there. Nope. Not in the least.
Van der Whall’s consciousness flew out of the solar system. It raced out of the galaxy. It hopped, skipped and jumped past galaxies he didn’t recognize. It got lost and stubbornly refused to ask for directions. (Okay, maybe a little bit of ego there. A smidge. A tad.) It found itself back in the Milky Way. It cursed itself for being so typically you know. It set out on its journey past the galaxies anew. When it found itself lost—as you knew it inevitably would—it asked a nebula in the shape of a horse’s head in a movie studio head’s bed, where it could find the subatomic particles that were believed to be the oldest objects in the universe. With a whinny and a nod, he was told, “Go straight in any direction and follow the musix.”
At first, this didn’t mean anything to Van der Whall, whose thanks to the nebula were, perhaps, less than entirely sincere. However, the further out he went, the more he thought he heard something. Something low and deep. Maybe not music, but,
maybe, just maybe, musix. Van der Whall directed his consciousness to move towards the sound. He thought it would take a long time to reach it, but, before he really knew what was happening, he was surrounded by it.
Oh, woe is us, the song went, Billions of billions of years old, and all we have ever been, and all we ever will be, are the tiniest of particles. Imagine, terakerbillions of protons, electrons, quarks, muons, leptons, fermions and other building blocks of matter that haven’t been assigned an on-ending name lamenting the fact that, unlike their cousins in the inner universe, they would never amount to more than they were. For sub-atomic particles, not being able to join the flux and flow of existence was the saddest thing in the universe. Naturally, the song they sang about it was the saddest song in the universe.
Sadness permeated Van der Whall like cigarette smoke permeates curtains. He could feel it in his heart, his salivary glands, the patella of his right leg. The sadness of knowing that you have spent billions of years not getting what you want, and that you will spend billions more not getting what you want. The sadness ate up Van der Whall from the inside out. He knew, although he didn’t know how, that he would never be able to enjoy an Adam Sandler movie again.
Just as Van der Whall was about to give himself over completely to the sadness, a plate loudly crashed to the ground. Dazed, he pulled himself out of his work room and zombied his way into the kitchen.
“Sorry,” Frances apologized, looking at the shards on their kitchen floor that had fallen around the chainsaw. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to pull you away from your work again. It’s just—”
Van der Whall walked over to her and gave her the deepest hug he had ever given another human being, tears uncontrollably streaming down his face.
“I, uh, know I can be a little clumsy at times,” Frances said awkwardly, “but, really, sweetie, it’s only a plate!” But, of course, as Freud dryly observed (he was always one for the alcohol), a plate is never just a plate. Frances had probably saved Van der Whall’s life. Remember that the next time you criticize bad physical comedy.
Several hours later, Van der Whall’s condition had been upgraded from devastatingly depressed to merely morose. When he felt strong enough, he got in touch with Kurt Vildeburt, current head of UNESCO’s Long Range Scientific Forecasting and Chocolate Cupcakes Directorate, Monique Duplutzie, current head of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Vanilla Spongecake Division, Judge Judy, and anybody else he could think of to let them know that anybody who tried to talk to the sub-atomic particles at the end of the universe would be in mortal danger and should avoid it at all costs. Hang a ‘There Be Monsters’ sign on maps of that area of the universe—it’s done. Oh, he added, and vanilla spongecake is disgusting.
Judge Judy privately agreed with him.
Van der Whall was humbled by his encounter. It was a reminder that space is vast, vaster than he even imagined at the beginning of the story, and that it was filled with things that we couldn’t begin to imagine. As we sent our consciousnesses out to explore what was there, we had to be open to the new experiences that awaited us, willing to accept objects and events that would challenge our understanding of the way things are, our sense of our own importance, our beliefs about our place in the universe.
Yes, Van der Whall was humbled… for almost three and a half days.
No ego there. Nope. Not in the least.
UNDER THE FLOWER POT
by Jocelyn Adams
McKenna stared at the white door, hoping to summon enough courage to go inside. Home. What a crock. Her dad’s house had never been a home, only a breeding place for bad memories and loneliness deep enough to drown in. When she left for college, she swore she’d never return. A lawyer made that resolution impossible when he delivered the deed and keys, along with her dad’s death certificate, to her apartment in the city.
“A brain aneurism,” the spindly man had said. “You should take comfort in his quick passing.”
She didn’t take comfort in anything. A few months into her first accounting job, she didn’t have the time or emotional room deal with any of it.
Unable to make herself open the door, McKenna plodded down the porch steps and took the stone pathway into the overgrown backyard. Dominating the center of the spruce-lined space sat the source of her family’s torment, the greenhouse where Dad’s obsession had taken root and stolen him away from her when she was only eight.
A plexiglass door secured with a lock stood between McKenna and the place she’d wondered about for years. Dad had forbidden her to go inside, and refused to say what he did in there. What could he have loved more than his own daughter?
Please let there be something here.
Her shaking hand dug into the pocket of her denim capris and withdrew the key ring. After flipping through the clinking mass of metal, she found a small key that slid into the lock. It clicked open with a turn, causing a jolt of panic through her core. What if she found nothing more than a bunch of weeds? She shook off the thoughts. It didn’t matter. McKenna had to see what he’d destroyed his family for.
After swallowing the bile rising in her throat, she grasped the handle. She took in a gulp of air, yanked open the door, and struggled to pass through a tangle of flowering vines that acted like a sixties-style beaded curtain. A sweet, floral scent assaulted her nose.
Once inside the humid jungle, she stopped dead. Her heart faltered, stumbling a few beats before it recovered to thump its frustration against her ribs. Three levels of shelves stood on either side of the center aisle, all packed full of every color and size of flowerpots overflowing with life. Some had broad, deep green leaves with red spine-like flowers protruding from their centers. Others had lime-toned foliage with no flowers at all, but instead had wavy vines snaking out of one pot and into the next. One sported a fuchsia bloom bigger than her head that resembled a cross between a tulip and a rose. At the far end, cactus-like plants rose above Asian-style shallow bowls with deadly-looking spines sprouting from their bulbous surfaces.
“This can’t be it.” McKenna’s voice came out half strangled. “There has to be something else.” The room turned to a blur through the waterfall of grief washing down her cheeks as she ran to a wooden work bench at the far end and swept her arms across the pile of junk on it. Clay pots smashed to the floor, spilling black earth and packets of seeds around her sandaled feet. A roar rushed up her throat as she pulled the garden tools from a silver rack on the wall and tossed them everywhere.
“Why?” Her voice rose into a screech. She collapsed onto the ground, her body shaking with sobs that had been building inside her for years. Before her eighth birthday, Dad had inexplicably moved them out to the country.
In the beginning, he’d only spent time in the greenhouse after McKenna went to bed, but it quickly turned into days, and finally weeks. He’d lost his job as Fire Chief and Mom left, certain he’d been having an affair. Either that, or he’d gone insane. How he continued to pay the bills, McKenna had never known. As she gazed around the room, she thought maybe Mom had been right. Dad had been having a fling with a bunch of snap dragons and peonies.
A bitter laugh cut through McKenna’s tears, and the sobs gave way to sporadic hiccups.
Whispers drifted to her ears, so soft she wondered if she’d really heard them. She held her breath and listened.
“Is someone here?” She pushed up to her feet, brushed the dirt from her pants and peered down the empty corridor. Unease wandered along her spine, leaving prickles in its wake. Maybe it was a bird?
Something tumbled from the highest rack on the right, plunked in the middle of the dirt floor and caused her to choke on her heart as it tried to escape her throat. “Who’s there?” The waver in her voice ruined the authority she’d meant to convey. McKenna peered over her shoulder to make sure nobody had snuck up behind her, wiped her sweaty palms against her thighs, and took tentative steps toward the item that had fallen—a small black box with a golden lid. Worn edges sugge
sted age much greater than McKenna’s twenty-one years.
Her eyes darted around the space, lingering on the nearest shelves as if a wild dog would materialize from behind a petunia and tear her to pieces. She knelt beside the item and traced a finger around its lid.
Although her voice of reason told her to leave it alone, curiosity drove her to open the box. Inside, she found a folded paper on top of a cloth bag, the red paisley pattern faded into a rosy shade of gray. McKenna reached her fingers inside the cloth and withdrew an old fashioned wooden spinning top, the kind she’d seen in black and white photographs, usually carved and painted by hand.
Her pulse sped to a gallop at the memory of Dad twiddling the item in his fingers, usually right before he went out to his greenhouse to work. He always looked happiest when he held it.
After setting the box back on the floor, she positioned the point of the top in one palm and twirled it slowly with her fingers. Although it once had a pattern of red and blue stripes and stars along the bulbous part of the toy, it had mostly worn off, and a crack ran down its middle.
Attention turned to the note, McKenna lowered herself to the floor in case her knees wouldn’t hold her. A tiny thread of hope weaved its way through her doubt. Did Dad leave something behind for her to find?
Her shaking fingers unfolded the paper and found Dad’s scratchy handwriting in uneven rows across the page:
My dearest McKenna,
Now that I sit down to write this, I’m not sure where to start. I know you’re angry with me, and you have every right to be. I’ll do my best to explain.
The bag fell out of the sky one night while we were still at the old house. Inside, I found the toy and seeds. Please don’t think I’m crazy, but something compelled me to find a safe place to plant them, so that’s why we moved.