by Curtis Hox
* * *
Towns sat at a desk in his dorm room, digging into the university’s website on his personal computer. He’d run a search and stumbled across a press release concerning cognitive science fellow, Masumi Yoshida, and her Ph.D. work debunking the New Phenomenon of Bleedover. He checked his watch. 9:45 p.m.
Not too late, he thought. The library was open until midnight.
He clicked the e-mail link, then wrote: Masumi, I know you think bleedover’s crap, but I can prove the N.P.B. is real. Meet me in the library at eleven. Spinner wannabe, Towns.
He showered in a deserted men’s university bathroom before putting on a favorite T-shirt: an action shot of Summer Glau as River in all her Firefly glory. He sniffed the shirt once. He smelled presentable, even though he had sweated through it a few days ago. He finished getting dressed, grabbed his book bag, and left, even skipping a little along the way.
* * *
Riodola’s research library was empty, except for a few checkout librarians. Towns sat in one of the reclining chairs that ringed the inside walls of the lobby. He looked up at the dome of exposed, reinforced iron ribs supporting hanging pennants in Riodola silver and gold.
A rubric read: Thirty thousand years ago, the emergence of Homo sapiens.
Towns scanned the images in the pennants: the rise of big-brained primates and their encounter with language, culture, and art; the scribbling of pictographs and wedged marks onto clay tablets; the more sophisticated writing on papyrus, then on parchment. A block of code marked the shift from rolls to bound codices, illuminated manuscripts, the printing press … in the largest, a conflagration of media: wire, radio, film, computer terminals, smart phones. The last pennant ended with: Welcome to Riodola’s irenic depiction of humanity’s manipulation of information through the ages.
He wrote that down in a notebook, underlined irenic twice, and told himself to look it up.
Towns opened Dr. Sterling’s Bleedover and groaned at its three hundred pages. He had read through it once, but didn’t remember much. He scanned to the front. A colleague of hers—Dr. Eliot Brandeis, a biology professor at the university—had written the preface.
Towns sighed and scanned the lobby. He saw a bathroom door open. Masumi emerged.
“I’m early,” she said.
Towns gulped. She was stunning in the bright library lights, and the way she stood riveted as if she might raise her hands and shoot fire from her fingers made his tongue stick to the top of his mouth. He knew he should smile, even though she glowered.
“You have proof bleedover is real?” Masumi asked.
He hesitated. How could he expect her to follow him into the stacks for proof? She would think he’d planted the text.
“I can locate. I can prove it.”
“You brought me all the way down here to tell me that?” She looked at her watch. “I should get back to my lab, Towns, a real one.”
“I can do it.”
“Right now?”
“I can walk into the stacks and within an hour find an example of literary bleedover.”
Masumi eyed the book he was covering with his hands. She recognized the white dust jacket, an exploding sun turned platinum with brilliance. She had thumbed through it enough times to remember the classification system Dr. Sterling had developed for her N.P.B. theory. Masumi had seen a few documentaries, had even gone to a conference where some of these people spoke. (She even now administered a lab for one, she reminded herself.) She had never witnessed a demonstration, though.
“Bleedover’s as unfalsifiable as a psychic reading a room’s energy,” she said.
“Unfalsifiable?”
“Look it up.” Such claims about the N.P.B. usually made Masumi angry, although today she was curious, and even resisted pointing out his display of wrong-headedness. “Besides, I distrust the mystical.” He still looked confused. “Your claim can’t be disproved, Towns. Unfalsifiable.”
“Oh.”
“This is a waste of time,” Masumi said
“What do you have to lose?”
Self respect.
“I guess I don’t have to return to my lab right away,” she said. “I can dedicate some time to this silliness.” She sat next to him and eyed him up and down. “Why do they call you Towns?”
“My mom dated a blues guitar player from Memphis. He called me that as a kid. Better than Ernie.” She refused to lighten the mood with a nod. “Spinner wannabe was meant to be funny.”
“Spinner is an unfortunate term, Towns. Sounds too much like spinster, or sinner. Why not something more respectable?”
“You mean scientific?”
She crossed her arms. “I mean professional.”
Before Towns could respond, his cell phone rang.
“Hold on.” He looked at the display. “It’s Alice.”
“Put her on speaker.”
He hit the button. The little voice inside the phone said, “What’s up with the apple, Ernest?”
“Apple?”
Masumi glared. Her patience meter had about thirty seconds of civility before going red.
“The one you left in the studio. Very funny. How did you know?”
“I didn’t put that apple there,” Towns said.
“Look, Ernest, you just got here. You have no agency to pull this kind of crap. How do you think Dr. Sterling will take it that you discovered what we’ve kept secret from every vocalist, that you conned Masumi into letting you try out—”
“I did not!”
“And that you decided to play a prank and leave an apple in the studio?”
“What’s so special about an apple?”
A long pause punctuated by a controlled breath. “Are you seriously claiming you didn’t put that apple in there?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“I’m in the studio. You better get over here.”
Beep.
Towns stared at the phone, as if it might sprout bat wings and fly away. “Alice thinks I put an apple in the studio as some sort of prank. Who cares about an apple?”
“Right,” Masumi said. “That’s why you called me, to stage this phone call?”
“I called you to explain I can locate bleedover elements in books. Alice is a surprise. I think I’m in trouble.”
Masumi struggled to maintain her insouciant grin. As long as she didn’t show gullibility, she’d be fine.
“You have no idea why?”
“No.”
“Dr. Sterling wrote about what would warrant a credible N.P.B. manipulation, what she calls an instantiation, the holy grail of her project. It’s in that book of yours. More nonsense. As long as all you cult-stud people do is claim to be able to spot, locate, read, whatever, etc., the serious thinking in the scientific community done by people like me has little trouble dismissing you. However, if she produces an object, and this process can be repeated in a lab, she’ll have generated the first falsifiable example of proof the N.P.B. is something more than an imaginative concept. Get the picture? If the tests are validated, she’ll demonstrate information exists in bleedover instead of mere noise. Impossible, of course.”
“I’m in trouble.”
“Let me see that book.” Masumi snatched it from him.
“Hey,” he said.
She remembered reading through Dr. Brandeis’s introduction last year and something about an apple.
She found the paragraph and read: “… the Judeo-Christian tradition of the ‘apple’ in the Garden, as well as Paris and the golden apple. There have been numerous others. But the most important one for modernity is Newton and the proverbial apple falling from a tree—one of the more relevant, thanks to Voltaire, but apocryphal examples of creative fruit use. For Sterling’s project, no better F.G.O. than an apple to shut the mouths of her critics.”
“Oh,” Towns said. “That kind of apple.”
“I’d love to see the Cultural Studies Department bungle a hoax. This should be interesting.”
“No hoax
. You were there.”
“I guess I was.” But Masumi refused to play along. If this were a goof, she thought, he was a damn good actor. “Let’s go see this apple of yours.”
From Bleedover: Culture Science As the New Hermeneutics, by Harriet Sterling, (New Jersey: Riodola UP, p ix):
The unanswered question remains: what is this N.P.B., this New Phenomenon of Bleedover? In this introduction, I have attempted to map my conclusions that bleedover is (1) a real, natural phenomenon that it is (2) as scientifically knowable as any other natural phenomenon (i.e., as knowable as, say, electromagnetism) and (3) that it has surfaced in our cultural artifacts with undeniable proof. This book moves beyond apologetics. We now no longer need such arguments when the Mona Lisa frowns behind its glass in the Louvre, when one out of two published versions of Hamlet reads “To be or not to be: that is the question/At least I think that is the question,” or when we watch our beloved The Wizard of Oz and see Dorothy wearing silver slippers. I will not comment on the cynics and skeptics who argue that the N.P.B. is a massive hoax. This book seeks to move beyond the fact of a world in which the narratives we create somehow speak back to us through our texts; instead, it suggests we need a new science, a ‘culture science,’ and new cognitive tools with which to understand this New Phenomenon of Bleedover.
CHAPTER TWO
Under low cloud cover, the faint roar of jets circling Newark airport echoed from the other side of the Hackensack River.
The structures at Riodola known as the Spine rose up above Masumi and Towns in a central stretch of science complexes that ran the entire length of campus. They separated Riodola’s academic side from the residential and administrative. Some of the most impressive structures reached twenty stories, towering above the other buildings in faux, collegiate neo-gothic.
In the cool night air, Masumi stopped to admire the buildings. “Up there, that’s where I work. In the Spine you can find the labs and classrooms of the hard sciences, as well as their libraries, research foundations, and experimental facilities. But you guys are in the basement. You’re lucky to be in the Spine at all. Come on. Let’s go slumming.”
When they reached the entrance, the complex was locked down, but Masumi had access. She led him through the various corridors and wings until they came to a buried corner where Cultural Studies had its studio. They pushed open the door and saw Alice Reynolds brandishing her phone.
To Masumi, Alice looked like she’d skipped whatever late-evening rituals she used to unwind. Hair akimbo and face fully flushed, Alice was nearly a foot taller than Masumi and, at least in the studio, always seemed to be bumping into things.
Masumi glanced around like a drill sergeant ready for trouble. “What’s this about an apple?”
Alice glared at Towns as if he were a criminal. “A foolish trick.” She nodded toward the recording booth.
Towns and Masumi peered through the glass. Sure enough, they both saw an apple in the corner.
“That was there when I went in … oh, wait,” Towns said.
“What?” Alice asked.
“I can’t actually say it was there when I went in. I just remember seeing it at some point—”
“Bull-fucking-shit!”
“Calm down,” Towns said.
“Calm down?” Alice said. “I was about to take a shower, then go to bed when I remembered I left my favorite visor in the studio. So don’t tell me to calm down.” A quick look at Masumi. “I need the visor for my early morning run, Masumi, so quit smirking. I threw on some sweats and ran through the dark to the Spine. The light was still on in the recording booth. I went inside to turn it off and spotted the apple. That’s when I called Towns. I thought about calling Dr. Sterling, but changed my mind. No one else but security has access to the rooms. Only four people. Besides me and Dr. Sterling, there’s Masumi and Dr. Brandeis, and he wouldn’t do such a thing, ever.” Again, at Masumi. “Are you in on this?”
“Are you, Alice? This isn’t some sort of joke to lure me in to watch you reveal a fake F.G.O.?” Alice shook her head. Towns knit his brow, signaling he didn’t know what a Full Generated Object was. Masumi took a few seconds to consider his part in this. “When you said you had proof, Towns, it had nothing to do with this apple?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“I call bullshit as well, Alice. You know our departments are both presenting articles. This is probably a ploy to demonstrate how hard-boiled Baconians like me are human beings willing to get wrapped up in dubious social networks of false interpretation. Well, I don’t buy it. All I’m observing is a bunch of well-acted scripts concerning a piece of fruit. I bet you left the sticker on; probably says A&P.”
Alice rushed into the recording booth and returned with the apple.
She held it up. “No sticker.”
Masumi grabbed the fruit, then tossed it up and down. “Let’s see the log.”
She moved to a monitor that displayed her custom-built software running all the day’s activities. She saw entries for each day’s vocal recording and spotted Towns’s session.
“R.D.A. 1.1.2.,” Masumi said. “We were playing around with that.”
“Shit,” Alice said. “The entire stitch?”
“I thought I’d see what he could do.”
“That’s a full stitch.”
“Full stitch?” Towns asked.
“The full incantation,” Masumi said. “It has the bleedover interpolation, plus a few of Dr. Sterling’s mysterious enactment elements that supposedly allow it to instantiate.”
“Oh, right. The beginning and ending phonemes you added,” he said. “Big deal.”
“Exactly,” Masumi said to Alice. “Big deal.”
“The interpolation resonates,” Alice said. “Dr. Sterling told me.”
Masumi pointed at the monitor. “Let me guess the meaning: three words beginning with the letters, R.D.A.”
“Yes.”
Masumi faced Towns and tossed the apple at him.
He almost dropped it. “What?”
“Red Delicious apple.”
He set it down as if it might explode in his hands.
Masumi had spoken the words matter-of-factly, as if they might reveal what had happened. She glanced at the log. A few rows were in green, while most were highlighted in red.
“Green is a success,” she said to no one in particular. Alice nodded. Masumi pointed to fifteen columns that organized the data. Only one green row had cells highlighted from all fifteen columns. “Towns, was that the time this afternoon you noticed the fruit?”
She watched him perusing the time stamp as if it answered the riddle of the universe. “Yeah, around then. Maybe a bit later.”
Masumi scanned a few more, all failures. She focused on a cell in green where she’d placed her comments.
She read to herself, Crazy growl. “I remember that.”
“Remember what?” Alice asked
“This.” Masumi pressed a button on the keyboard.
A cleanly recorded digital .wav of Towns’s voice barked through the audio system. Masumi smirked as Alice cringed. The horrific beat sounded as if the muse of William Peter Blatty had suddenly erupted in the speakers.
“I was spelling out Red Delicious apple,” Towns said.
“You replaced the vowels with that noise?” Alice asked.
When it ended, he nodded in embarrassment. “I was just playing around.”
“Let’s see you do it again,” Masumi said.
Towns pointed to himself. “Me? Right now?”
Masumi opened the door to the recording booth and scanned the room to make sure it was empty. She gestured for him to go inside and sit.
“Take the board,” she said to Alice
Alice moved into position.
Towns returned to his place on the stool and straightened.
Alice tapped the glass and pointed to the headphones. Towns put them on. She leaned into the engineer’s mic. “Need to hear it a few times?”
&nbs
p; He nodded.
“Give him new beginning and ending elements,” Masumi said. “They’re in that list over there—”
“I know where they are.”
Alice punched the keyboard, then said into the mic, “These framing elements will be slightly different than before.”
Towns listened for a few minutes, then raised his hand, signaling he’d go the next iteration.
Masumi walked into the recording booth to watch, as if she were a warden inspecting a prisoner. She closed the door.
“Just the two of us now.”
He began like before.
Masumi felt jolted by the sudden force of each growl. When his eyes focused on the corner, she and Alice both said “what?” simultaneously.
Alice swung the door open. “No way!” She bent over and grabbed a new apple, then raised it in the air. “See, we’re not fucking with you.”
“How the hell?” Masumi asked
“I have no idea,” Towns replied. “I know I can locate. But this is different.”
Masumi stood in the middle of the recording booth and raised her hands for quiet. She squatted in front of the corner where Alice had picked up the apple, looked around, and tried to find any hidden compartments. She sat yoga style and stared at the corner.
“Did I really just do that?” Towns asked.
“Again,” Masumi commanded.
Masumi focused on the corner, while Alice added new beginning and ending elements. Masumi listened to the audio track and heard the strange concoction of sounds that Dr. Sterling called an incantation. They possessed a fleshy, analog quality—especially the aspirations. Masumi stilled her thoughts as she focused on the little corner of the room. Towns filled the beats again with his signature low-registered growls. The incantation neared its end. Masumi felt a moment of triumph. Nothing happened.
Then Towns finished, and she stared at another Red Delicious apple. It hadn’t appeared. It was just there.