He raised his eyebrows at me and puffed at his pipe. “And that’s when they become Zobes?”
“Yes, when they’re nothing.”
“But they weren’t Zobes just before you began?”
I blew air between my lips, flapping them noisily, exasperated at the man’s lack of understanding.
“Of course not. They were sand. They’re only Zobes when they’re nothing.”
He nodded, puffed again, and, scratching the top of his head, wandered out of the yard murmuring, “Yes, yes, hmm. This suggests a model of a travel hole opposite to our current hypothesis. Intriguing. Our physical universe as the interior of a travel hole passing between two unknowns. Hmm. Plus, if repeated, an entire universe being reborn poses the possibility of particle residue from non-existence. Ah ha, I wonder if multiples of nothing would leave conceivable evidence...” His voice trailed off as he struck another match, noticed his pipe was already lit, and shook out the flame.
He paused at the gate and smiled kindly. “Young man, don’t forget to complete the three Zobes.”
“Okay. Why am I building three?”
He tapped the mouthpiece of his pipe against his lips. “Just to stir the imagination into the possibility of the existence of more than one area of Zobe nothingness. But here is my dilemma.” He paused, puffing his pipe and tangling his fingers in his hair as they rasped along his scalp. “If you built a second Zobe in the same place as a completed one, would it be considered a true Zobe? You see, you would be building nothing from the first nothing, instead of from the original materials, whatever they might have been. So, do you think when you begin the process a second time, a completely different result would be obtained?”
He had me a bit confused. I scratched the top of my head, imitating his habit, sand trickling into my hair.
“Don’t know.”
“Me neither.” He shuffled off, sporadic wisps of smoke sifting through his unmanageable hair.
About a year later, I saw a picture of Albert Einstein on a magazine cover and told my parents the story of how I had met him while I was playing in a sandbox. They were incredulous and tried to convince me I had never been left alone and shouldn’t talk to strangers anyway. Over the years they came to just laugh it off as one of my wild imaginary tales.
Chapter 20
My family sat down, chattering and laughing, to our annual feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, casseroles, and creamy mixed vegetables. Mom hustled the food into place while Dad began sawing slices of the meat. My younger sister, Stephanie, poured water into glasses while I made sure Aunt Maddie and Uncle Ted had refills of wine.
I noticed that cousin Richard’s girlfriend, Betsy, bowed her head slightly in silent grace while the volume of racket from the table’s chaotic multiple conversations increased. Saucers and plates zigzagged, passing over or around each other in every direction. Uncle Ted made his yearly toast, “Let’s gobble the gobbler.” Laughter rang out like we had never heard him say it every Thanksgiving for the last ten years.
Aunt Maddie was getting noticeably tipsy. I could sense my mother was uncomfortable with her drinking too much in front of a non-family guest.
“Betsy, Richard tells me you’re a junior at Radcliffe. What’s your major?” Mom double-covered her distraction ruse by gesturing for me to pass Betsy the cranberry sauce.
“Physics. And yes, I’m at Radcliffe.” Betsy accepted the dish with a smile in my direction.
“And Richard’s right there at Boston College. Do you still have your mind set on law, Richard?” Mom scooped some gravy onto her potatoes.
“Well, I think it’s a necessity for what I want to do,” Richard responded.
“What were you planning on specializing in?” My dad asked between sips from his glass.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about joining the CIA when I graduate.”
I burst out laughing. “What kind of spy tells everybody they plan to be a spy?”
Betsy giggled. My Dad guffawed, quickly slapping a napkin to his lips in time to contain a mouthful of wine about to be spit across the table.
Aunt Maddie said, “Bill, don’t waste your drink.” She nudged Ted playfully, but he ignored her as he spooned himself a second helping of stuffing and grunted at me disapprovingly.
“What are you doing these days, Deets? I heard you were mixed up with some communists in New York.”
Uncle Ted had never forgiven me for demolishing and throwing away Richard’s rifle ten years before. The incident had set off a series of arguments and finger-pointing that still erupted at family gatherings.
Mother jumped in again to steer away unpleasantness.
“Richard, I imagine you would study international law as your major.”
“I would have thought you’d have to switch to sneaking and snooping.” I poured myself some wine as Mother frowned at my words and consumption of alcohol.
Aunt Maddie clinked her glass against mine and toasted me with a wink. “To snooping.” Everyone chuckled a bit, even Richard.
Stephanie yelled excitedly, “If Deets is a commie, then maybe Richard’s going to have to follow him and catch him leaving secret messages in a pumpkin or newspaper or something.”
Uncle Ted pointed a fork with a slab of turkey on it at me. “I heard about that photograph of you in the Times. You had no business protesting the war.”
“Sure he did, Dad. If someone can’t speak his opposition to the war then our bill of rights doesn’t mean a thing,” Richard said confidently.
“Where would we be if this country didn’t go to war when we had to? I’ll tell you we surely wouldn’t be having Thanksgiving in a free country.”
Stephanie said, “Lots of Indians aren’t. They got killed by soldiers.”
Uncle Ted swung the turkey slice in eleven-year-old Stephanie’s direction. “What does that have to do with America?”
Richard groaned, exasperated. “Indians, Dad. Remember what the first Thanksgiving was about?”
I continued my sister’s observation, “Uncle Ted, she’s pointing out the hypocrisy of portraying an image of benevolence to disguise, either intentionally or through ignorance, the use of war to accomplish America’s goals.” Ted’s face grew grim as he started to say something, but I talked right on without a pause. “We celebrate a holiday that started out with a group of Indians who helped our ancestors gain a foothold on this continent, and then we proceeded to chase them down and kill them from one shore to the other. Some thanks they got.”
“You’re attacking Thanksgiving now? We give thanks to God and America. You’d better straighten out. Go get a job or join the army so you learn that this country gives back to those who work for it. Vietnam would teach you how to be a man.”
Aunt Maddie took a gulp of her white wine. “Ted, you watched the news this week. Oh, I can’t get those terrible images of those young soldiers out of my mind.”
“They’ll come back stronger for it.” Uncle Ted finally bit off the turkey piece he had been flailing around accusingly.
“Yeah, maybe, the ones that do make it back,” I snapped.
Richard and I shared a look that revealed the common bond of being a young male during wartime. At that moment, the riverside altercation ten years earlier seemed a petty issue.
After dinner, the family spread out—women to the kitchen to clean up, men to the den to watch football. Eventually, I meandered into the living room and sat cross-legged in front of the fireplace. Entranced, I stared at the graceful dance of flames as they blackened and consumed the logs. Betsy joined me, kicking off her shoes. She stretched her legs out in front of her.
“I got chased out of the kitchen.”
“There’s a good fire here. I won’t chase you away.”
She caught my flirtatious tone and laughed, then whispered, “I’d go watch football
, but I’m afraid I’d be rooting for the wrong team, and your Uncle Ted would let me know it. He sounded just like some of my relatives.”
“Man, we haven’t gotten along in a long time.”
“Doesn’t it seem to you that the world is turning inside out?” She wiggled her toes, enjoying the warmth of the fire.
“Is that a philosophical observation or a theoretical concept by a physicist?”
“Don’t get me started.”
“All I know about physics is e equals m c squared, and I don’t even know what that means. Something about energy and matter.” I stuck a poker beneath a log and shifted it.
“Well, matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. Matter can be turned into energy and energy into matter. The mass of matter is lazy compared to energy, whose particles are pretty zippy. Einstein’s formula tells us the amount of energy that would be released if the lazy mass were to be suddenly transformed into the zippy energy. To understand this amount you multiply the mass by the square of the speed of light.”
“I can’t see how anyone can turn something like this fire burning into a mathematical formula.”
“Well, the famous formula is really used for what’s happening in the sun and nuclear explosions.” She pointed at a short stick, its bark flickering, that had fallen into a pile of soft ash near the front of the fire. “Ooh, watch out. Get that one.”
I tucked it under a section of wood that wasn’t being consumed by the blaze and piled some embers against it. “Come on, c-square that log. Doesn’t seem to want to follow the laws of the universe.”
Betsy lifted the stubborn log with the tongs. “The energy in this fire is stored chemical energy being released as heat and light. Even the sounds of crackling are energies being released. When the tree grew, it turned sunlight energy into chemicals, and now you could say it’s releasing that sunlight back to us. But only a portion. Matter that wasn’t converted to energy goes up the chimney as smoke or gas or becomes ash.”
“Sounds so simple the way you explain it. You should get an A-plus with honors. Did you ever read Einstein’s Theoretical Analysis of Zobes?”
She answered cautiously, “Nooo, what are Zobes?”
I told her the story of the sandbox, Zobe theory, and my memories of the old man.
“Oh, did this really happen?” She was smiling, playing along, but unsure if I was joking.
“Well, nobody ever believes me. And from what I know, it must’ve stumped Einstein.”
“Are you sure you remember right? Sounds like he was thinking about antimatter.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s not an everyday dinner time topic. Think of it as an object similar to another, but its atoms...” She paused in thought. “Well, just think of it as an opposite mirror image of matter.”
“That’s how I normally do think,” I joked.
She shook her head slowly back and forth, staring at the fire, grinning.
We watched the flames quietly for a minute or so before I continued, “No, I think Einstein couldn’t come up with a formula for nothingness.”
She laughed, then said seriously, “No one can if it doesn’t exist.”
“Not in science, but science doesn’t explain everything. In this universe we would interpret it as the opposite of something concrete or measurable, but what if nothing is a universe all its own. I’m not talking about a void, or vacuum, or an empty glass. I’m talking about some thing or place that we don’t have a clue of its properties, never even glimpsed it, or have a vocabulary for it. It’s not even non-existence as we understand that to be. To us, it’s nothing, yet it isn’t to itself.”
She grinned. “I think you got too much sand in your ears that day, and it clogged your brain.”
“And I think you may end up flunking out of college.” I teased her by mirroring her smile. I pulled out a pack of Kools and lit up. “Smoke?”
“Kools? How can you smoke those things? Menthol is like the antimatter of tobacco. No thanks, I’ll get my Camels. They’re in my purse. Be right back.”
A few minutes later I saw her with her coat on, going out the front door with my cousin. She waved a cigarette at me, then wrapped her arm around Richard.
At about one in the morning, the house was dark and quiet. I was laying in bed reading when Betsy slipped into the room, shutting the door behind her. She wore flannel pajamas with a pattern of tiny pink roses sprinkled all over them. Holding up a joint, she whispered, “Care to share a nightcap?”
We sat on the edge of the bed and smoked ourselves goofy.
“What are you reading?”
“The Third Eye by Lobsang Rampa.”
She flipped through some pages, looked at the cover. “What’s it about? A monk?”
“Yeah, I just started it. So, what do you read for fun? I mean, besides mathematical equations and the element chart.”
She snickered. “I’ve been reading about new developments in the study of black holes.”
“Wait, you have to explain what those are to me with a German accent.”
Snorting back outbursts of laughter, she lowered her voice into a guttural imitation of a Hollywood German general. “No light is allowed to escape this place. It is verboten. No one leaves. Its gravity is so strong we all get sucked into it and squished flat. That is an order.” She collapsed backwards onto the mattress, chuckling.
“Sounds more powerful than a sandbox Zobe.”
“Zobes. Oh my god. Deets, you’re crazy.” She smothered her face with a pillow to drown out her giggling. Her body convulsed with mirth-filled spasms. She continued to talk with the pillow over her face. “I can see Zobe nothing to nothing theory as a kind-of antimatter version of a wormhole. A wormhole is a hypothetical jump through space and time, envisioned like a tube. You enter one area and poof.” She threw the pillow off her head and popped her fingers at me, directly in front of my eyes. My mind exploded into a dizzying oblivion with the sudden flash of her hand. “Just like that, you’re in another time and place in the universe.”
“I hope I don’t land in a black hole.”
“Oh, what am I going to do about you?” She moaned and placed the pillow back over her face.
Able to gaze at her body without the fear of being caught staring, my eyes roamed over the rise of her breasts, then lingered between her legs where her pajamas had pulled tight. The stretched fabric tucked neatly along the crack of her cunt.
I could feel myself getting hard. And nervous. “You know what happens when you pass through that wormhole?”
“What?”
I reached for her quickly and started tickling her, jumping my hands all over, darting and wiggling, trying to find where she was most susceptible.
“All your atoms break up and they feel like this.”
I jabbed and plummeted at her armpits, ribs and butt cheeks, mercilessly twittering my fingers against her skin wherever I could.
She bashed me with the pillow and squirmed defensively, blocking me with her elbows, pulling up her knees, thrashing playfully. After she let out a loud howl, we both froze, listening for any signs of movement in the house. She muffled her laughter, then attacked me with a frenzy of light pinching and tickling.
While retaliating, my fingers flicked across her bare nipple, which surprised us both. “Oh, no. Verboten, verboten.” She rolled sideways, curling up in a fetal position, gasping for breath between shrieks of hilarity.
“I saw no sign that said achtung nipple.”
“No, Deets, stop, you’re making me laugh too much. I’m going to pee myself.”
We lay back, catching our breath, chortling and sighing.
“I’d better get back to my room.”
“I’m going to sit here in my wormhole.”
She paused with one hand on the doorknob. “You thought we were going
to have sex together, didn’t you?”
“Me?” I feigned innocence.
“You were really scoping me out when I had the pillow over my face, weren’t you?”
“I had to figure out where that nipple was.”
She opened the door and peered out. Her back was to me and suddenly she dropped her pajama pants and wiggled her ass at me. “Whoops, dropped me knickers.” Without bothering to look back at me, she pulled her jammies back up and stepped out the door, closing it behind her. I could tell she was moving quickly down the hall by the sound of her footsteps. She didn’t succeed in holding back her giggling.
A few minutes later, I heard Dad moving around. By his leg’s slight drag, I guessed he stopped at the top of the landing, then moved towards my room. He tapped at the door before peeking in.
“You still up?”
“I’m reading.”
“Okay, get some sleep. See you in the morning.”
For about an hour, I couldn’t get past the same sentence about Lobsang Rampa trying to learn how to ride a pony. Instead, I kept visualizing Betsy’s ass and trying to relive that quick moment when she had leaned forward a bit too far, and I thought I had caught a glimpse of her cunt. My imagination and desire battled with uncertainty, making it impossible to concentrate on the words in the book.
Another woman with a boyfriend, another woman who I had a good time in a bed with, another woman I couldn’t fuck. It seemed to be my normal pattern.
The next morning, Richard told me that he and Betsy were driving to her parents’ house in New Hampshire for another Thanksgiving meal. He asked me if I wanted a ride back to New York.
Before we got into the car, Betsy took me aside and said, “Not a word about last night, not even about the weed. Richard doesn’t smoke it very much. And please, no jokes about full moons. Remember, nothing serious happened. Sure was good fun though.” She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.
I fell asleep in the back seat and awoke to Richard yelling.
Mayhem (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 1) Page 10