Adrift in the Noösphere (16 page)

Jennifer's smile startles him with its
warmth. She lowers her hairbrush.
“Well, hello, sailor.”

Eddie stands in the doorway,
drinking her unbruised face. Despite
himself he flushes.

“Don't just loiter there with intent,
man. You're the unsung hero of the
moment. It was sensational.” She
frowns. “I hated it with the rabbit, though.”

“Jennifer,” he says in a rush, “I'm
sorry about the party. You know.”

“That. Yeah. You were rather
blunt.”

“You inspire the village idiot in
me.”

“Sailor, that's the sweetest thing
anyone ever. Coming up to poach on the Professorial Entertainment Allow
ance Fund?”

Eddie melts disgustingly within,
wallowing in amnesty. “I happen to
know a place.”

“You've got a fifth of Jack Daniels squirreled in your locker.”

“I've always admired your mind.
Passionately.”

“That wasn't the part you molested in public.”

“I am, “ he tells her, “truly sorry.”
Her hair flows in his fingers and he
puts his face against hers for a mo
ment. Jenny touches his hand.

“While we dally,” she tells him, “Stan is up there screwing you,”

“No argument. He's like that. All scientists are lunatics and swindlers. I
intend to fight. More to the point, are
you screwing Dr. Singh? Oh Christ,
don't answer that.”

“I will not, it's none of your busi
ness. For God's sake, don't get snotty.
Here, let me help you off with your—”

“Shouldn't we shut the door?”

“Kick it, you're closer. Why did it take you so long to get here?”

“Don't ask.”

“Hmm. You know, I thought you
were going to throw a tantrum in the lab.”

Eddie tries to keep his tone light. “Upon my soul, Miss Barton, that'd be
no way for a besotted genius to contest
his rights.” Shortly he asks: “Won't the
printouts get runkled?”

“There's more in the computer, you
fool.”

On the next loop, abandoning his
dazed inertia for an instant, Eddie
glances at Jennifer's wrist watch and
ensures that the flash comes as the
flash comes as the flash comes

Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone

(written with Barbara Lamar)

The question of whether the waves are something “real” or a function to describe and predict phenomena in a convenient way is a matter of taste. I personally like to regard a probability wave, even in 3N-dimensional space, as a real thing, certainly as more than a tool for mathematical calculations.... Quite generally, how could we rely on probability predictions if by this notion we do not refer to something real and objective?

Max Born,
Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance

Hanging onto the desk's edge, I eased myself back, then slumped down again while the floor got itself on an even keel. I'd drooled on the interdisciplinary dissertation I was meant to be assessing. Psychoanalytic cinema theory, always such fun these post-postmodern days.
Ob(Stet)Rick's: A/OB[GYN]jection, Blood and Blocked de(Sire) in CASA[BLANK]A.
I closed my eyes again, feeling ill.

Lissa was shocked. I wasn't all that pleased myself. Slightly reproachful, she said, “Dr. Watson, your appointment with the committee chair.” I squinted at the blur of my watch, did a sweep of the cluttered surface of my desk. No glasses in immediate view. You need to be wearing them in order to see where they are, but if you're wearing them you already know where they are. That was the kind of pseudo-paradox this grad student's dissertation was cluttered with. The inside of my head gonged.

“Yeah.” I tried to clear my throat. “Thanks, Liss.”

“Ten minutes. Shall I bring you a cup of coffee?” Delivering coffee was explicitly not part of Lissa's job description as administrative assistant, but I seemed to bring out the motherly instinct in her, although she is too young by a generation and a half to be my mother.

“Sure. You're a sweetheart.” Inside my head a Hell's Angels convention was thrashing their hogs and tearing the town apart. Probably shouldn't have brought that bottle of Jack Daniels to the office. Only meant to take a swallow to calm my nerves.

I shoved the (th)esis on to the floor, where it landed with a (th)ud, then dug through the random drifts of paperwork on my desk. My reading glasses were three layers down. I jammed them on my face. Where the hell had I put the notes for the meeting? I was stern: Lee, my boy, do this in an orderly manner. Here was the title page from Jerry Lehman's chapter on the effects of adrenergic stimulants on the signification behavior of non-autistic children. I was supposed to be reviewing the damned thing. Two months behind so far but I'd catch up, soon as I got things worked out with Beverley.

Map of Vancouver. Another unfinished dissertation I was supposed to be supervising:
Queer Lear, Queen
. Brochure advertising whole-house entertainment systems. Article from the
Irish Journal of Post-Psychoanalytic Semiotics
I'd been meaning to read.

“Here you go, Dr. Watson. Fresh from the microwave.” Lissa set the cup down on a small bare spot on the credenza behind me. Even before I took the first sip I could tell it was stale, left over from 7:30 in the morning. What the hell, this was medicine.

“Can I help you look?” She glanced at her watch; her voice held a tinge of panic. Funny, I wasn't a bit tense, and it was my career that was on the line. Up for promotion to associate professorship, financial security and independence for the rest of my life. Fat chance.

“I'm looking for the notes I need for the meeting with Patterson. It would be six pages stapled together.”

“Handwritten?” Good girl. Woman. Person. She was already attacking the mounds of papers.

“Printed.” I leaned back in the leather chair Bev had given me three, no, five years ago, sipping my awful coffee. All the time in the world. I'll be okay, I told myself. I'll be fine, soon's the caffeine takes hold.

“I can't find them anywhere, Dr. Watson.” Lissa pushed her hair back from her forehead, sighed. “Are you sure you brought them to the office?”

I goggled my eyes sadly behind my goggles and shook my head. I wasn't sure of anything these days, except that if I let myself think too hard it hurt too much. “It's okay, Lissa. I can wing it.” I stood up and the floor was steadier. “Better get going.”

“Like that?”

I glanced down at my Dept. Of Psychoceramics tee shirt with a pang. A gift from daughter Mandy the year before the dreaded menarche hormones kicked in and she went from adorable to teen werewolf. Lissa was right. It was a little frayed around the edges, and maybe the sentiment wasn't ideal for the inquisition. “Not to worry.” I kept a suit jacket hanging behind the door for emergencies. Buttoned up snug, started out, stepping lively, a man who knows where he's going and what he's doing. But when I got out to the hall, away from the safety of my own office, I stopped short. Professor H. Patterson would expect me to say something at least moderately intelligent. You didn't get to be a committee boss in the Department of Psychosemiosis and Literature at the University of California at Davis without expectations of that sort. And I realized I didn't have anything remotely clever to tell her and the committee. Furthermore, I didn't give a shit. There was a probability of about 0.5 that canceling the meeting now would end my career. On the other hand, if I went in there half crocked
...
oh c'mon Watson, not half, 80% at least
...
truthfully, the probability was close to 1.0 that I'd be out on my ass with no further ado, and so much for tenure, increasingly a dead letter. What the hell.

“Lissa?” I looked over my shoulder, tried for my most pleading, boyish look. “Do me a favor?”

“Call Professor Patterson and tell her you've had a stroke.”

“Something like that, yeah. Um....” Mental wheels turned sluggishly. “Tell her they called from my daughter's school and there's been a crisis and I had to go right away.” Like anyone would call me about anything connected with my child.

“I didn't know you and Bev had kids.”

“One. Not Bev's, from a former
...
marriage.”

“You're a dark horse, Dr. Watson.”

I grabbed my helmet and cantered off for the Department's outer door as fast as I could without tripping over any of my legs, and en passant grabbed a square, flat package from my inbox. No return address. Another orphan film from my mysterious benefactor, had to be. My spirits lifted as I made my escape to a brilliant afternoon that smelled of sage and ripe crabapples.

§

My apartment was dark and empty, though, shades drawn against the afternoon light, as it had been for the five months I sulked in it. My estranged wife Beverley used to find me pathologically optimistic, but that was before she threw me out. I could picture the mocking way she'd raise her eyebrows at me if she could see how eagerly I opened the mailbox and scanned the bills and junk mail for her handwriting. No such luck; instead, there was a letter from Virta and Crump, P.C., Bev's lawyers. I tossed it on the deal-with-it-later pile along with a couple of month's worth of bills and headed for the fridge. Nothing like a cold beer to take the edge off incipient depression.

The package was indeed an orphan film. The label on the slightly rusty metal canister read “#11: Reverend Willard D. Havard, New York City, January 10, 1931.” No accompanying letter or card. Now that I was living on my own, the movie screen and the old Bell & Howell Filmosound projector had become a regular feature of the décor, so there was no need to set up. I took a swig of beer and began threading the film through the machine.

Orphan films are movies that have been abandoned by their owners, sometimes because of copyright problems, more often because they didn't seem worth saving. But films that seemed worthless soon after they were made—old newsreels, for example—are now priceless windows into the past. I'm easily entertained and can spend hours absorbed in some unknown family's home movies from the 1950s. Whoever was sending these mystery films seemed to be a connoisseur with finer tastes than mine. He or she was sending stuff from the earliest days of simultaneously recorded picture and sound.

Film #11 was only a little over 3 minutes long. At the beginning, a tall bearded man with a Santa Claus belly was delivering a sermon on a street corner. The sound was scratchy, and you could hear car engines and horns honking in the background, but still you could make out most of the Reverend's pitch.

“On my way down here today, I saw a little girl, couldn't of been more than five or six. This little child was standing on the sidewalk selling chewing gum and mints. I asked myself, brothers and sisters, why is this little girl standing here selling chewing gum instead of sitting at a desk at school? Is she just trying to get some spending money? Is she helping to support her family?”

He had a certain charisma. It took an effort to redirect my attention from the Rev. Willard to his audience, if you could call eight or ten motley hobo types plus a couple of young boys an audience. One of the kids gave the other a rough shove as I watched; this was returned with compound interest, and soon they were rolling on the sidewalk like a couple of tomcats.

The Reverend reached the climax of his presentation. “As I was telling you earlier my friends, God sends us trials and tribulations to give us a chance to shine in His Light.”

A fellow about my age had passed in front of him, turned his head quickly to the camera and then away. Startled, I blinked, but he was gone. The scuffling boys seemed so intent on their struggle that they'd lost track of where they were. One landed with a thud on an ancient duffle bag. Its elderly owner thwacked both the kids across the shoulders with his cane. Indignant, for a moment they stopped fighting, then the sound track of the film clearly picked up the shorter kid yelling at the taller one, “Your mother's a [something] slut.” And they were rolling on the ground again, just as the Reverend Willard reached for his tambourine, which had been passed from hand to hand. The full weight of both boys slammed against the Reverend's shins; he went down on his massive butt, the tambourine went flying, scattering a few coins across the sidewalk. Instantly the boys stopped their scuffling. The taller kid, closer to the lens, grabbed a couple of coins. The other, grinning, ducked down so his face was visible under an armpit, and did something that flashed white and was gone. Instantly, then, both boys ran swiftly and gleefully out of the frame, their differences apparently forgotten. And that was it. The end of the film.

I rewound a short way and played the last few seconds again. There had been something familiar about that fellow walking past, something that prickled the back of my neck.

No mistaking it, once noticed and reviewed. It gave me the strangest shiver. I watched that segment of the film again, and again, and once more again. He was me. I mean, the guy bore an uncanny resemblance to yours truly. Allowance made for the antique style of his clothing and his cap, the very spittin' image. That was undeniably me in the 1931 movie. The year before my grandmother was born.

I saw something else that creeped the hell out of me: just before the scuffling lads rammed into the Reverend Santa Claus, my double turned his head, caught the eye of the photographer, and winked at him. In effect, through the recording lens, at me.

What the fuck?

My hangover was gone, and my lethargy. Adrenalin can do that. I wanted to look more closely at this fragment of images from the past without risking the fragile orphan footage any further. It took me an hour setting up the old mirror box that reflects the image from screen to camcorder lens (I'd bought it on eBay, they don't make them any more), and then saved the digital feed to my hard drive. Doing this properly would require a bunch of money and a professional transfer house tech, lifting off the dust and other crap from eighty years of careless storage, paying frame by frame attention to brightness and other parameters. Maybe I'd get to that, but my grant money for orphan restoration had just about run dry, and I wanted something quick and fairly easy.

I opened the vid and went straight to the appearance of the guy who looked like me. And the kids, horsing around. I ran it twice, then went to the kitchen cabinet and opened another bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Your mother's a toboggan-time slut,” the smaller kid had yelled, or something like that. And then he reached into his raggedy gray shirt and pulled out a sheet of glistening white paper, except that it looked more like an impossibly thin, flexible iPad, held it up for just thirty frames, jammed the thing back under cover again, and they were away.

The iPad that wasn't an iPad held several...what? Hieroglyphs? No, mostly Roman and Greek letters, upper and lower case, with some other items that might have been Arabic or for all I knew Assyrian. And a few numerals, subscripts and superscripts, and brackets. Equations, okay. The only equations I'm familiar with are the bogus propositions of Jacques Lacan, psychiatrist and Freud-fraud. I did a screen capture of the clearest frame, pushed it up to 400%. Blurry, but I felt sure a mathematician would have no trouble recognizing it. Or a physicist, or cosmologist, or the creature from Bulgaria, whatever.

The trouble with Google is that you can't easily search for equations, or at least I couldn't. I tried to cut and paste the bit-mapped string of symbols and that didn't get me anywhere. I went laboriously into Word, found the symbols one by one, but half of those on the screen were unknown to Microsoft, far as I could tell. I plugged in the fragment of the single equation whose parts I could find and hit “I'm Feeling Lucky.”

This first and simplest equation popped onto the monitor, embedded in an only moderately incomprehensible paper on a site called arXiv, which I assumed was an archive for people from the Other Culture who couldn't spell, like Bev's current creature.

|ψ> = Σ (a
i
exp(jφ
i
) | x
i
,y
i
,z
i
,ν
i
,ω
i
>)