Engineering Infinity (21 page)

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 full 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
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 cancelling 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.

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

“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 have 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 80 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 grey 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(jφi) | x
_i
,y
_i
,z
_i
,υ
_i
,ω
_i
>)

It was dated 2009. The paper was
titled “Ordinary Analogues for Quantum Mechanics,” by one Arjen Dijksman, and
it began: “Upon pondering over the question ‘What is ultimately possible in
physics?’ various interrogations emerge. How could one interpret ultimately? Is
there an ultimatum, a final statement in physics, after which one could say ‘Physics
is finished’? Are there issues, for instance fundamental principles, beyond
which we could not go past? How can we describe the boundary between the
possible and the impossible in physics? Anyway, does such a boundary exist? And
if so what is at the edge?”

I ran the whole video file again,
and this time the Jack Daniels didn’t keep me warm. The kid hadn’t shouted “toboggan.”
My skin crawled. Jesus Christ. He’d said “teabaggin’.” And the emphasis was
subtle, but it wasn’t “teabaggin’-time slut.” It was “teabaggin’ time-slut.”

Teabaggers in 1931? Give me
strength. Had they even
invented
teabags that long
ago? Back to Google, fingers stiff and clumsy on the keys. Yes, a form of silk
tea-bag was used as early as 1903, but today’s rectangular teabag came along as
late as 1944. Let’s not be too literal, Lee, let’s try a lexical search.

Before the current burst of
radical crazies calling themselves the Tea Party, mocked by their foes as “teabaggers,”
the term had another and more scabrous sense. Urban Dictionary told me “teabagging”
meant “To have a man insert his scrotum into another person’s mouth in the
fashion of a teabag into a mug with an up/down (in/out) motion.” I squeezed my
eyes shut. Oh-kay. Whatever floats your boat. But that had to be a recent
coinage, didn’t it, post-1944 at least? Maybe not. Old slang from society’s
undergrowth tends to seep up again and again, then vanish for a time. But “time-slut.”
And the arXiv abstract. Urchins didn’t know about quantum theory in 1931. Maybe
nobody did. I felt my ignorance yawning at me.

I was in a sort of numb
dissociated state, trying to remain amused at this obvious Photoshopped fake
someone had shoved in my pigeon hole to mess with my peace of mind, but
increasingly angry at whoever treated me with such scorn. Even if, face it, I
was
a barely controlled drunk two or three steps away from
the same skids as those bums in the 1931 movie.