The Man Who Hated Chocolate Chip Cookies

I

2009-07-19T22:44:00.008-07:00

If you ever go in the kind of bookstore that has a coffee bar and someone playing jazz harp you will notice that near the door, right next to the remainder tables, is the magazine section. The front, most visible shelving is, of course, reserved for the better selling serious news journals. “People,” “US,” “Cosmopolitan” and other purveyors of Truth the American Way. But further back, usually near the cooking and gardening section, you will find those pricey, little periodicals with names like “Humping Turtle Review” and “Nebraskan Zen Poetry Semi-Quarterly” that are filled with the meaningless stories currently fashionable among the graduates of the more exclusive writing workshops.

You know the type of story I’m talking about. They take place in some quaint (i.e., paint peeling off the walls and no plumbing) little side street (i.e., back alley) named Rue d’Elitist or Via Pretencion; dwell for pages on the film left in the basin after she washes under her arms; take three hours and two cups of very strong coffee to read; and in the end leave you screaming, “So bloody what!” and wanting to slap the main character, the author, and the publisher if you could find him—or her. Of course, to cover up for the fact that you wasted eight dollars on an occasional quarterly printed on paper more at home in the seedier former Eastern Bloc restrooms you tell everyone it was a powerful, minimalist portrayal of neo-urban sexual tension and negative regrowth in a semi-gendered society reminiscent of Kafka if he had written that way instead of the way he did.

The readership of these journals is pretty much limited to a few graduate students trying to suck up to the chair of their doctoral committee by reading his…or her…latest seventy-three line ode to a torn candy bar wrapper seen while crossing the street once in Gdansk; MFA students preparing for this summer’s Post-Blog Indigenous Mythos writing workshop; and a few seriously intellectual types given to wearing pieces of metal in body parts most of us don't even like to touch all that often.

The management would like to give you fair warning now. This story has no meaning and will fight to keep it that way.

Over the years several, if not the majority, of the stories published by these journals have tried, with wildly varying degrees of failure, to describe the mind. Not, however, the actual workings and/or contents. Let’s face it, the workings and/or contents of the mind are by long-standing tradition the stomping grounds of psychologists, mothers (often in-law), priests and other club-footed busybodies. Anyway they are usually too bizarre for words, at least in polite company, and even Poe stayed away from most of that mire, which is why the aforementioned groups enjoy mucking about in it so much. There is nothing like a little filth and degradation in others to put the fun back into being self-righteous. This isn’t one of those stories. It could be, but I don’t have the energy or the right medication.

Neither is this a story about the space all that other junk is thrown into. At various times, corrected to and uninvaded by E.S.T., this space has been described as a lumber room, corridor, series of closets, file cabinet, movie reel, filthy stinking cesspool, and the only place in the known universe to contain a true vacuum. (The last two were expressed during the rather passionate divorce trial of the couple formerly known as Mr and Mrs Avery Bodet. As it turns out they were both right, but for the wrong reasons.)

Needless to say, but if you are paid by the word you tend to say more than is really necessary, a condition known technically as doing a Pynchon, all of these attempts have somehow failed. The reasons for their failure are almost as varied as the actual attempts, but are mostly concerned with the fact that the few individuals actually out of their minds far enough to be able to make a disinterested description are usually too full of chemicals to hold a pencil.

Philosophers, unwilling to let any debate go unmuddled, especially one so patently pending no final solution, have tried to measure the dimensions of this troublesome space, but when they find their results getting dangerously close to agreeing they sidestep the question by arguing about the proper length of the ruler; seeking new philosophical positions with one of their more attractive, and reasonable, students; or diverting public attention by blaming the whole mess on some poor, innocent by-stander. Usually God.

In other words, they also failed. They just covered up their failings a little more cleverly than the rest of us by being so condescending that we were convinced we had asked the wrong question, or were too stupid to appreciate the more than obvious answer. (The French have used a similar technique to convince the world they know how to cook.) Kant, on the other hand, used the more direct approach of simply being incomprehensible, if not purely reasonable.

They failed primarily because they fell victim to that old wives' tale (which, oddly enough, is usually most actively supported by old husbands) that if Truth, Beauty, and Reality aren’t actually the same thing they have enough in common to make no difference. This insidious concept was given a big publicity boost by Plato, the third most evil man in the history of mankind. Or womankind for that matter.

Guys like Attila the Hun might come through the village raping, burning and killing you in no particular order, but after an afternoon of plundering and pillaging they left your remains pretty much alone. Plato, on the other hand, was not quite so benevolent. He comes along and the first thing he does is separate your soul and your body. Now, before Plato muddled things up, separating your soul from your body had been one of the side effects of a visit by someone like Attila, or an executioner; but Plato, with no regard to how your soul or body might feel about it, or how it might complicate an already problematic relationship, just yanks them apart for no adequately explained reason. Then he sticks you—he’s a bit vague about which bit—in a cave with your back to the door. At least Attila left your remains in familiar surroundings.

The first and second most evil men in the history of the world are, of course, the composer Richard Wagner and the man who invented conference calls. Recently there have been some calls to replace the number two spot with the person who invented webinars, but that concept is so fiendishly useless that it could only have been developed by a committee.

The truth, as any poet could tell you if he or she wasn’t too busy with poetry slams and other forms of verbal mediocrity, is that describing that squalid little place we somewhat pretentiously call our mind can’t be done.

II

2009-06-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

This particular story starts about two thousand years after a relatively small, but smugly vocal proportion of the world’s population believes a nice Jewish boy was nailed up on a rather seedy cross, and concerns, or at least occasionally mentions a certain Thomas D Milton III. How and why he came by this rather awkward name has been chronicled elsewhere, and frankly I don’t feel like retyping thirty odd, and one or two downright strange, pages just to bring you up to date.

Anyway, it should be noted, that Thomas had dropped the old family name of Wordsworth on the grounds that the first three initials said it all, and tacking Wordsworth on the end was just needlessly redundant. Where the “III” came from was always a mystery to Thomas, but his mother would get this wistful look in her eyes and fidget awkwardly with her handkerchief for a few seconds, and then change the subject whenever he asked her about it. Similarly, if you ask Thomas why he kept the III when he dropped the Wordsworth portion of his old name he will just fumble with the change in his pocket for a few seconds and stare out the window.

No one knows where the D came from.

Over the course of these two millennia the planet Earth had had a few volcanoes—the geologic equivalent of a mild case of acne—and made a few rather minor adjustments in the position of its continents. Lately, however, Earth had begun to notice that some of the life infesting its surface had started blowing stuff up with things that did rather more damage than was really necessary. Normally a planet will barely notice the tiny things scuttling around on it in much the same way you don’t notice the mites living in your eyebrows, but this latest development was downright bothersome. Granted it wasn’t as bad as having a major asteroid run into you, but it did leave visible scars and was causing some rather hurtful speculation about Earth’s personal hygiene.

Otherwise the ages plodded on pretty much as usual.

Humans, on the other hand, were strutting around feeling pretty damned important, thank you. They had, as far as they were concerned, invented some really amazing things, including bombs that did rather more damage than was really necessary, along with pick-up trucks, grain futures, country music, French cooking, conference calls and telemarketing. That all of these things had been invented and discarded as useless, if not criminal, by the life forms on countless other planets didn’t bother humans in the least because they didn’t know about those other planets and wouldn't believe you if you told them.

This doesn’t mean that humans think they are alone in the Universe. Quite the contrary. The human ego demands that there must be other beings in the Universe if only to look in awe at what they, humans that is, have accomplished. Currently the theories concerning the population of the universe break down to:

Those who think that we are being visited all the time, but aliens are just so shy they can only work up the nerve to land in front of one or two people at a time and so far have been unable to catch any of the world’s leaders in an Arkansas swamp. Although, they did come close in the 1990s.
Those who believe that while we are the only mortals inhabiting the cosmos, there is also some sort of all powerful Being out there who created us to have someone to talk to, and occasionally smite. The fact that this Being hasn’t really had anything to say for two thousand years, discounting the dubious reports of a few individuals with obvious hair gel addictions, hasn’t seemed to stop them from believing we are his special friends.
And finally, those who think we are the equivalent of frogs in some sort of galactic pond, and every once in a while the junior high students come around to collect a few of us to have a try at dissection.

There are those who believe there are simply oodles of civilizations zipping around the galaxy, but space is just so huge that we haven’t bumped into each other yet.

The other consideration, which humans never think of because it doesn’t fit in with their view of their own cleverness, is that the other life forms living on this side of the galaxy know we are here, but avoid us in much the same way you avoid that cousin who thinks professional wrestling is for real and has those disturbing stains on his pants.

Now one of the more interesting, if not useful, inventions we humans managed to come up with over the two thousand years we have been talking about was printing. It seems that for most of the long, mostly forgotten history of humankind either you or your mate actually had to remember everything you needed to know to survive. I mean everything. Stuff like:

How to find and catch dinner without doing too much damage to yourself.
How to keep the neighborhood lion from feeding her family with yours.
What the exact procedures were when someone had coveted your ass (or worse yet, your wife’s ass).
Where to find water when the rainy season ended.
How to build a shelter, a fire and a baby carrier.
Which day was the first day of spring.
Which mushrooms were safe to eat, which ones would cause you to see strange things, and which ones would kill you.
Which oak tree marked the southern limit of your clan’s hunting territory.
Which way was South.
Where it was safe to cross the river, and where to suggest strangers cross it when they came by trying to sell you some kind of god.
How to keep the kids amused in the evening.

And that’s just for starters.

Some villages had old people (thirty-five, maybe even forty years old) whose job it was to remember stuff. Stuff like:

• It was the winter the wolves killed Pluug One Hand’s white bull that Ragnar took Brindula for a wife.
• Lief Wind Blown is the son of Lief the elder, son of Herb who was Ragnar’s brother, son of Smelt who was the son of Quail Bushbane.
• Briknal, Brindula’s oldest brother, was given the hovel of Blister, his father, and the field of muck next to the fen the same year Klink died.

Then when someone came along and claimed Briknal was living in a hovel that was really theirs the village elders would get together, and one or these old people would say something like, “It was the winter Klink died, which was just two winters after Ragnar took Brindula for a wife, when Blister, Briknal and Brindula’s father, gave Briknal that hovel along with the field of muck next to the fen,” and the case would be thrown out.

Then someone figured out that marks left on a convenient rock or leaf or piece of skin (a real breakthrough was made when someone thought of using the side without the hair) could be used to represent things like the number of goats the family had that morning, or how many days had passed since the river flooded, or the number of days since the sun was exactly over the big oak tree; and all of a sudden a person didn't need to remember all those pesky little facts anymore. Now they could look up that morning’s goat inventory whenever someone like a tax collector came around asking. This eventually led to people using these marks to represent other things—like the color blue and how it made them feel.

Taking the quite unheard of step of accepting an advancement in knowledge the Church decided this new writing thing was just what they needed to help spread the Word, as it were. Eventually quite an industry of transcribing the Holy Word developed. Well, actually lots of Holy Words—there wasn’t just The One. God was quite old even then and had begun repeating himself with embarrassing regularity, and He had this maddening habit of mixing the details up just a bit each time He told the story. Did He create animals first and then Man, or did Man come first? That kind of thing. It was a muddle, and each time it got written down it got a little more muddled. You would almost think the whole thing was being made up as it went along.

The one thing He never wavered on, however, was that The Word came first. He was sometimes a little iffy about which Word it was, but it was definitely a Word. If pressed He would often just thunder, “It was The Word.” Then he would show you a picture of Lot’s wife and a recipe for Salted Herring He’d been thinking of trying. His hints are not what you would call subtle—or tasteful—especially the Salted Herring. Actually, I have it on good authority that the Word was Kumquat. No particular reason. He just liked it.

And so generations of monks went blind copying sacred texts for the greater glory of God, and the continuing comfort of their abbot, bishop and pope. Day after day they would sit next to an unglazed window sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter so they could have enough light to work. This was long before those fancy monasteries of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries were built. We’re talking little wattle and daub hovels with a dirt floor whose main function was to define the tiny bit of muck you were allowed to sleep on; and if you were extremely lucky there would be a bit of straw and a blanket.

Of course every now and again the Vikings would come calling in that amusing little way they had—usually on the first day it was warm enough you weren’t freezing those bits of your body the Church had told you not to touch. Leif and Company would spend a delightful afternoon pillaging and slaughtering. Eventually, perhaps after a picnic and a friendly round of target practice with your second cousin, now permanently removed, they would leave and the survivors would make sure the bits of you they could find got a decent burial. Then someone else would move into what was left of your hut and take up where you had left off.

Writing still, however, had the disadvantage of being just a tad bit slow at reproducing the longer attempts at describing the color blue and the more profound emotions it created in you, and when your publishing house is only cranking out a single copy of the Omnibus Edition of Aristotle every four months or so, you tend to charge just a bit more than the average serf has at hand. For this reason, and a few others having to do with control and domination, writing and reading became specialized knowledge that was reserved for a few unfortunate monks busy dodging Vikings; and some quite well fed scribes keeping track of the king’s stuff and all of the decrees kings are apt to make. This way when you were caught wearing the exact wrong shade of blue they could point to a piece of parchment that neither you nor the king could read, and declare that you must give up your estate, or head, for the heinous crime of wearing the Azure Royale.

Eventually, someone figured out that you could carve a picture of, say, a Saint into a piece of wood or soft stone, smear some ink on it and then press it against a piece of parchment or vellum, and right there before your very eyes would be a picture of your favorite Saint, suitable for framing. And the really neat thing was you could have as many pictures of that saint as you wanted without having to draw it each time. There was, of course, some grumbling by the Saint drawing monks about being put out of work, and poor quality reproductions, but they were soon quelled when it was pointed out that this would now allow them the time to move on to some of the more fun saints like those with arrows sticking out of them with strangely disturbing connotations.

Stumble forward several generations, and finally someone figures out movable type. (Meanwhile the Chinese are wondering what took us so long. Then they remembered we couldn’t even figure out how to make noodles, and things started to make a little more sense.)

At last, printing was getting cheap enough that pretty much everything you needed to know could be looked up in a book. As printing became less and less expensive and more and more stuff could be looked up, people naturally began remembering less and less about their world until a fair number of them couldn’t find the Atlantic Ocean from a Miami Beach hotel without two maps and a fairly lucky guess as to direction.

What all this has to do with the story is still being debated.

III

2009-05-07T00:48:00.000-07:00

Now Thomas, you do remember Thomas don’t you? Middle-aged, tending toward a paunch, the kind of hair that has made Germanic types throughout history envy corn silk for its body. I told you about him a few, perhaps several, pages back. Anyway, Thomas was in a bit of a funk. It wasn’t anything you would really be likely to notice like your rainy day, curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea and the occasional heavy sigh kind of funk. This was more of a less than friendly attitude that seemed to say, “I’m really pissed off and I think you are the reason.”

That was on the surface. If you were to delve just a little deeper you would come to those murky little layers of psyche that enable so many psychologists, priests, and other forms of witch-doctor to live so comfortably. Here you would find that what we are talking about is a full blown hang ‘em first and then maybe slap their maiden aunt around a bit kind of funk.

To find the cause of Thomas’s irritation would require delving deeper into his mind than he, or any vaguely sane person, would wish to go. If, however, you were to have enough courage, and maybe the psychiatric department of a major hospital to back you up, you might decide, like a sewer worker counting the days until his retirement, to take the plunge. Down passed the current dreams involving the various ways a certain department chair becomes suddenly unemployed among other, more messy accidents.

Then you would have to wade through some rather lurid fantasies about a certain red headed young lady, some of them involving whipped cream and a feather duster. After a quick shower and a change of clothes you would come to all of the adolescent fantasies of super-powers and daring-do that no male ever really gives up. (Your average one hundred twelve year old man will, on his death bed, be daydreaming in some hidden corner of his mind about how he saves the nurse from the unwanted attentions of that smug orderly with a few simple, but amazingly effective, punches and she then decides to show her gratitude in a way that just might utilize whipped cream and perhaps a feather duster.)

Finally, after several dead ends and one or two tantalizing but completely misleading paths that left you checking the bottom of your shoes to find the source of a very bad odor, you would come to that place where primal screams are considered unnecessarily wordy. Looking about you would decide that this was where things start getting truly nasty, and Thomas was definitely out of sorts. In fact it would probably be more accurate to say he was as pissed off as a man can get without involving the government.

The cause of these deeply hidden levels of rage, indeed they are so deep and so hidden that Thomas is only sometimes vaguely aware that they exist, are many and complex but mostly have to do with the fact that he is middle aged and still doesn’t have a clue as to why he is here or what he is supposed to be doing. It is the kind of despair that affects most males around the ages of fourteen and forty-five. (Interestingly enough, the cure at both ages is often the acquisition of a red sports car and a not too bright playmate—usually blonde. Whatever curative power this has is, of course, due to the placebo effect.) Now, while this despair can cause a person to spend many nights staring into the darkness, or a glass of scotch, Thomas had to admit it was not as existentially disconcerting as his friend Garrideb’s conviction that he was the product of a strange joke being played by some guy in Illinois.

Now Thomas is an average man. This, of course, means that his life is as totally devoid of meaning as anything can be and not be the subject of a Sylvester Stallon movie. On the other hand, its very meaninglessness makes it the perfect subject for our story, which, you may remember is militantly meaningless. To most of the universe this is exactly as it should be. “Let Humans and other spoiled little twits worry about things like existential angst. I’ve got better things to do,” is pretty much the general attitude. But to Humans, alone among all the different forms of living things in the universe, this lack of Meaning is an outrage. For them to be as important as they have decided they are to the universe there must be some kind of meaning to their existence to make them that important. The fact that it is not glaringly apparent is clearly a case of incompetence, questionable management, or at the very least is very, very impolite on somebody’s part; and this indignation has led, given the nature of the species, to the creation of the world’s oldest profession.

It is a popular belief, fostered primarily by less than sympathetic wives and one or two Biblical references, that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. This is not quite true. Even if you include the subcategory of politics, prostitution is a relatively recent, albeit climactic, specialization within the oldest profession which over the centuries has gone by the various titles of witchcraft, psychology, philosophy, religion, astrology, and, more recently, life style coach and televangelist. For when faced with the yawning reply of “So what?” to the proudly primal scream of “I exist!” mankind, with the full co-operation if not insistence of womankind, promptly set about creating the business of inventing a Meaning for Life; and from the beginning there have been countless individuals more than willing to make a rather indecent living, usually tax free, by selling one of the currently fashionable One, True Answers.

The second, unrecorded inventing of a One, True Answer took place several eons ago while mankind was still hanging about the savanna wondering why the baboons got all the breaks. Baboons could run really, really fast; they had really big, sharp, pointy teeth that would come in handy when the neighborhood lion was acting out her hunger; and on top of it all, they had those really cool blue and red rumps. All the poor almost-humans had was the vague beginnings of a forehead and a sort of chin; and if they needed anything sharp and pointy they had to find the right kind of stick and rub it on a rock.

Then one day Snoog, who up to that time had somehow managed to never contribute anything to the clan’s well being, came to the leaders of the clan with a truly amazing offer. He would, he said, with very little regard for his own safety, personally intervene with the Great and Terrible Hhragch on the clan’s behalf and obtain His blessing and protection for said clan. This, he said, would guarantee good hunting, warmer nights, the clan next door being swept away in a flood, docile lions, lots of sweet fruit and honey, and co-operative wives (wink, wink). All the clan had to do was give the Great and Terrible Hhragch, through his agent Snoog, a small, almost unnoticeable portion of everything the clan ever owned, say ten per cent, and follow a few hundred simple rules the Great and Terrible Hhragch would occasionally issue—again through his agent Snoog.

The clan mulled it over and said it was a swell offer and thanks awfully, but they’d just as soon give it a miss. Nothing against the Great and Terrible Hhragch—they were sure he was a great guy and all (pity about the name though)—but they preferred to make their bargains with things they could see, hear, talk to directly and—and this was the vitally important part—poke sharp sticks into if need be. After reflecting on Snoog’s past contribution to the clan, which when they came to think of it was pretty much nothing; and how Snoog spent an awful lot of time eating those over-ripe berries that made the bears act so funny; and how he always did those disgusting winks when he mentioned their wives, they decided that Snoog might like trying to introduce the Great and Terrible Hhragch to some of the other clans on the savanna.

A few of the more likely directions he could try were pointed out to him with some of the sharper sticks the clan had at the moment, and Snoog became the Earth’s second itinerate preacher. The Earth’s first itinerate preacher made the mistake of starting with grazing animals and a herd of wildebeest stampeded over him before he could finish explaining how the Really Neat Thloydd would lead them to grass that had never been shit on if they would only make a few tiny, little sacrifices.

It should be pointed out that while One, True Answers have usually had a market value of anywhere between a dime a dozen and your entire life savings as a love offering; Questions, especially those having to do with the validity of the currently fashionable One, True Answer, have almost always gone for something a bit over prime rate. Being tied to a soon to be burning stake being the norm.

This is why if you ask a passing wildebeest, “What is your purpose in the universe?” he, or she, will snort the wildebeest equivalent to “Push off,” and get back to the truly relevant business of eating grass and dodging lions. If you persist in badgering the poor animal to justify its existence he, or she, will eventually call the authorities and have you removed—or stampede the herd over you. Having several thousand wildebeest stomp you into the savanna is a fairly effective way of ending pointless debates. This is why you rarely see Jehovah Witnesses bothering wildebeest.

If, however, you asked the next human being that comes your way, “Why are you here,” that person will have five or six answers ready and waiting. After all, they are so amazingly wonderful there must be a pretty damned good reason, and if they can’t come up with a reason right away they’ll tell you there is one, and it’s a really good one, but with aerobics, breaking in the new secretary, and other pressing matters they seem to have forgotten it. The reader should remember, however, that if you ask this question late at night in a major metropolitan alley or side street you stand a very good chance of finding out that your interviewee’s reason for being is, “To relieve fecal-cephalics,” or words to that effect, “of all their money.”

Other, even more dangerous types will tell you it’s the other way ‘round, and their existence gives meaning to the universe; but they soon go into life-style consulting, advertising, politics, or fashion design and cease to be of any concern to anyone. Those with truly swollen egos will often be found on the faculty at the local community college.

IV

2009-04-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

Now Thomas—please try to keep T.D.M. in mind—he is, after all, one of the central elements of this story, if not, as some would have it, life itself. As I was saying, Thomas was under the weather. Normally he considered this a good thing, but on this particular day it was not weather he particularly wanted to be under. It was one of those marrow freezing, soul draining early spring rains you get in the Mid-West that brings not a promise of growth or renewal, but a sense of the slimy decay of the grave. The kind of day that would make Tiny Tim say, “God help us, everyone. What’s the fucking use?” When the local PBS station broadcast a work by Mahler that afternoon the suicide hotline had to bring in extra help. The world was cold, wet and gray, and not only was Thomas being rained on, he felt like hell.

His umbrella seemed especially designed to direct the maximum amount of water down the back of his neck, and as he walked along the reflection that kept pace with him in the shop windows was a lot pudgier than he remembered. He had remarked to a friend just the other day that he was sure shopkeepers were using a new type of magnifying glass in their windows that made him look like a fat, old man. She had been less than impressed with his theory. “So, you’re saying that all of the city’s merchants have gotten together and secretly installed new windows just to make you look fat?”

“Well, it sounds silly when you put it that way, and I didn’t say the entire city. I only shop on the east side. I doubt if they did it over on the west side.”

“There’s nothing over there. It’s all residential.

“See! It’s just like I said. I don’t shop on the west side of town, and there are no stores with magnifying windows there. Tell me it’s not a coincidence.”

“You’re a twit,” had been her thoughtful reply to his ironclad logic. “You’ll be wearing tinfoil in your hats next.”

Thomas’s umbrella chose that particular moment in his reverie to dump what seemed like a quart of water it had been saving down the back of his neck. His breath came out all in a rush, “Whoa!” and he kind of danced/skipped a couple of steps. “Bloody designer probably graduated from here,” he muttered. A woman walking toward him wondered when the state would start providing decent care for those unfortunate people and decided to cross the street.

“The problem,” he muttered, “is life. It’s a concept that needs a bit more thinking through before being shoved off on someone with no training.”

The way people were edging away from him reminded him that he was muttering again and he clamped his teeth firmly shut. Unfortunately, his left cheek was not paying attention and he bit into it, which caused him to exclaim, “Shit!” with enough force to cause people to edge even further away from him. This irritated him because he was, by all accounts, a fairly nice guy—he was just under some particularly ugly weather at the moment—and he glared at them for edging away. Which, of course, made them edge even further away.

“At least the sidewalk’s not crowded,” he muttered.

It was at this precise moment that a very large, and seemingly perfect stranger ran into Thomas knocking him off the sidewalk into the gutter. The man had just jumped out of the blue, or perhaps a hat shop—Thomas was a bit confused by the blow—and the passersby who had looked out from under their umbrellas, there are always one or two, could never quite agree if the stranger had come out of the blue, a hat shop or a Starbucks. When he had recovered his breath Thomas stammered a quiet, and totally insincere, “Pardon me,” while in his mind he screamed questions that, if said out loud would have gotten him arrested—or an Emmy award winning series on HBO—or both.

By this time Thomas had collected himself sufficiently to observe that the man was, thankfully, a complete stranger and not one missing any obvious parts. He was, after all, not quite sure what the proper response should be if, for example, a one legged man had knocked him off the curb. Do you apologize and pretend it was your fault; or do you try to be cool and say something like, “Nice hopping, Man”; or do you act like having a person hopping wildly about and crashing into you and almost putting you under the number 3 bus is so routine you don’t even notice it anymore?

Now while this was, as I said, a total stranger, he was not quite a perfect stranger. For one thing he seemed prone to knocking people into rain-swollen gutters. He did, however, take firm control of the situation, not to mention Thomas’s upper arm, and in a demanding voice asked, “What are you doing here?”

There are those who contend that this was a purely rhetorical, or at best situational question, and could have been answered with a simple, “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you coming;” but this was an ugly, early spring day in the Mid-West and Thomas was middle-aged so he took a more existential view of the question. He made a stab at a couple of answers, missed, and tried a couple more, one of which he wounded; but they had trouble convincing him let alone strangers out of the blue—or a hat shop.

"I'm not sure."

"You're not sure?" The stranger's voice was dripping with scorn; or, since he didn't have an umbrella, it could have just been the rain.

"No." Desperately Thomas groped for the wounded answer, but it escaped by hiding under some old dreams in one of the darker corners of his mind. "Should I be?"

"Christ. You're even dumber than a wildebeest," and the stranger jumped back into the blue, knocking two Stetsons off a shelf in the process, one of which he had to pay for.

Now this exchange hurt Thomas very much. Partly because he had twisted his ankle when he fell off the curb, and partly because his ego wasn't quite up to unfair comparisons to wildebeests at the moment.

V

2009-03-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

Thomas’s ankle was quite sore, and each time he took a step a little white-hot flash of pain would shoot through it so he decided he would stop and have a cup of tea and rest a bit. It turned out that this was one of the three times this century (the Twenty-First, according to some) that it has been verified that a Starbucks was not the closest place to Thomas’s current location. The first time had been in Murdo, South Dakota. When asked why he had gone to Murdo he will just say that Presho doesn’t have enough wind, and he’s already seen the Corn Palace. The second time was on an overnight stay in Orem, Utah. Reports about that trip vary widely, and so far have never been substantiated. His analyst, however, now owns a thirty-two foot yawl named ‘Orem,’ and the Orem city council has passed a law banning the sale of mango-coconut gelatin and feather dusters. Nobody knows why.

Looking around, he considered his options.

CJ’s was too far away, and anyway Thomas very seldom went there. Its frequent problems with health department inspectors was only part of the reason. He had learned when he was an undergrad that there were very few restaurant kitchens you wanted to look into closely, if at all. The real reason he avoided CJ’s was that he never really enjoyed their famous loose meat sandwiches. “You just never developed a taste for mutt,” had been one friend’s explanation.

“You mean mutton?”

“If it makes you feel better.”

The Division Street Diner was also too far away. The cooks at the Division Street Diner—holdovers from life styles two or three decades in the past—all have doctorates in some obscure field, usually their father’s south forty, but are taking a few years off to like get it touch with themselves. The food at the Division Street is generally very good if you avoid the suspiciously damp pecan rolls, but if the line cook doesn’t agree with your interpretation of Vladolov’s Third Theory of Interdependent Apathy they are apt to over cook your eggs. The wait staff, on the other hand, are usually practitioners of lifestyles as yet undiscovered by either Oprah or Dr Phil, or even the Bravo Network or HBO.

That left Gander’s.

Now, ever since Socrates dusted off a few steps along one side of the forum, and began giving lectures on the knowledge of geometry in the servant classes, every school vaguely worth its tuition has had at least one place like Gander’s somewhere along the borders of its campus. It might be famous for its hamburgers or its pizza or its breakfasts or its liver and cantaloupe sandwiches (the rye bread is what really brings out the flavor), but it is a certifiable Campus Institution and every visitor to the school is taken there to experience the true wonders of whatever it is they make. Gander’s claim to fame is its ice cream.

At one time the ice cream was made in the basement, but rising labor costs and some pesky laws concerning how food was handled had put an end to that a couple of generations ago. For the last thirty years they have acquired their ice cream from the same distributor that supplies the local supermarkets. Of course everyone still raves about how wonderful Gander’s ice cream is, and how nothing else compares to it, but if it has a creamier texture and richer taste it is because you paid at least ten times more for it than you would have at the supermarket.

The waitresses’ uniforms have thin, lime green stripes, and were designed when women’s stockings still came in actual pairs. The ages of the waitresses ranged from forty-something to Neolithic, and as Thomas eased himself onto a stool he wondered if this was the same waitress that had served Truman when he had made his famous stop at the campus. There was a picture above the malt mixers of “Give ‘em hell, Harry” sitting at the counter grinning like he just got a refund on his daughter’s piano lessons as he dug into a dish of butter pecan. He had wanted chocolate, but even though she had refused to leave Independence Bess had decided he would eat butter pecan and like it. Thomas decided this was not the same waitress however because, even though her back was to the camera, the woman in the picture was obviously far too young to be the same woman facing him now. Either that or she had led a far more, shall we say, active life than Thomas had ever dreamed of; and considering the quality of his dreams this is highly unlikely.

Thomas placed his order, and watched for signs the rain was letting up. Just as the waitress brought his tea, Thomas saw Geoffrey Spenser duck under Gander’s awning. He quickly turned his back to the window, but had not quite been quick enough. Spenser waved and then came in shaking his umbrella.

“There you are, Milton, old man!” Spenser had a way of saying things that gave them several connotations which were almost always incorrect. For example, you might think “old man” had been an attempt to sound vaguely British, or he might have been using it as a euphemism for “old fart,” and you would have been wrong. The true interpretation was, of course, the one that gave him the political advantage at the moment. He was also famous for never quite listening to anything said to him, and giving answers unrelated to anything you might have asked. Naturally, he taught communication.

“Yes, I think I’m here. I’m not too sure about other places, but I am fairly sure I am here.”

“What?”

“I said that I was fairly sure I am here, but I could be wrong. It might be wise to check with the wildebeests.”

Spenser was never quite sure if Thomas was completely stoned, being humorous, deeply profound, trying to live up to his initials or just obtuse. “Um, yeah. Anyway, I tried to call you earlier, but it just went straight to voicemail. So, when you get my message tomorrow you can just ignore it.” Thomas was just about to say that he always ignored Spenser’s messages when Spenser plunged on. “Tried to leave Twila—do you know Twila in the Art Department? Tried to leave her a message the other day, but couldn’t. Her mailbox was completely full. Can you believe it? Completely full. Had to send her an email.”

“Mind you,” he continued, “she’s a marvelous artist. Does amazing things with a bit of clay and a few twigs, but it’s all a bit too much ‘Mother Goddess’ fecundity of nature kind of stuff for me. Guess I’m getting old, but if you want to talk fecund just give me an old Vargas drawing. Those were something. Still kind of miss garters.”

Spenser’s eyes had an introspective look to them that Thomas had not thought he was capable of. Then he decided that it was just the brightness of a flickering light that was making him squint that way. “Yes, I know Twila. I had lunch with her just the other day.” Thomas neglected to add that Twila spent an afternoon every few weeks making sure her voicemail box was full by playing music into it. “What was it you wanted, Geoffrey?”

“I wanted to see if she was for us or agin us, as they say, on the president’s proposal that tenured faculty be required to teach at least twelve hours each semester.”

Thomas carefully refrained from pointing out that that had been his proposal, and that he had initially thought fifteen hours not too excessive. “Not quite what I meant. I was asking what you wanted with me today.”

“Oh, coffee would be fine.”

“Still not quite what I meant. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“When?”

“When you left me the voicemail message this afternoon.”

“Oh, you got it? Great! So tell me, what do you think?”

“Have you ever considered how lucky Gracie was George Burns didn’t own a gun?” For a second Spenser’s brain groped wildly for a reference it could hang onto, but he had not made it this far in the academic world by letting the relevance of a statement slow him down, and then Thomas continued, “I didn’t get your message. You just told me you left me a message. Now I am asking you what you wanted to know when you left the message this afternoon that I haven’t listened to yet.” The unspoken portion of Thomas’s answer has been lost to history, but is thought to have involved a biological act that is technically impossible, and definitely on Sister Rose’s list of things you should never, ever do even if you could.

It took Spenser a few seconds to work that out. “Um, yeah. Well, you see, I have an idea for a new class, but I’m not sure it would be in my department’s domain, so to speak.” He looked expectantly at Thomas like a small puppy looking at a person who might be holding something good to eat. The image was spoiled, however, when the waitress startled him by setting a cup of coffee in front of him.

Against his better judgment, Thomas pressed on. “And this new class is?”

“I got the idea the other day when I was clearing out some of Ed’s old books and things. Do you ever wonder where kids get all that shit? I mean there’s probably a kid over in China or Uganda or something that’s just got a stick and couple of small rocks and he’s having a hell of a good time. My kid’s got enough crap to stock a fair sized toy store, and he’s whining about being bored.”

Twenty-some years of departmental meetings had given Thomas the necessary skills to deal with situations like this. “And this new class is?”

“What new class?”

“Geoffrey, today is not the day for this. I am under some particularly shitty weather today—you might have noticed it before you came in; I just twisted my ankle while getting shoved off the sidewalk by some semi-perfect stranger who insisted on sharing an existential crisis; and in some hidden part of my soul my Being is being compared unfavorably with a wildebeest.” Spenser looked at Thomas with an expression of total incomprehension. “So why don’t you come to my office next week, and we’ll talk about your proposal?”

“Um, sure. Sorry about your ankle. Twisted my elbow once—hurt like hell for a week. How does Thursday sound?”

“Rather Nordic.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Tuesday would be better. I’m in San Diego on Tuesday.”

“Great. I’ll see you then.”

Spenser was not totally stupid, and after a few seconds certain facts started lining themselves up in ways that certainly would not please the school’s famous Marching Band Director. They were also slightly puzzling to Spenser. “ Umm, Thomas.”

“Two o’clock is best. I’ll be totally unavailable then.” Thomas limped out of Ganders vaguely comforted by the fact that a couple of thousand miles would separate him from Geoffrey on Tuesday, and that he had stuck Geoffrey with the bill for his tea.

VI

2009-02-10T00:38:00.000-07:00

This being the Twenty-first Century, the one that the Mickey Mouse Club had said he, and some others, would lead, Thomas had bought his tickets to San Diego online. This isn’t relevant to anything, but I thought you might like to know. It also makes the next sentence possible. Why he needed more than one ticket was something he could never adequately explain. Perhaps it was a typographical error.

Whenever Thomas thought about it being the Twenty-first Century he was always slightly let down. As the picture of Mickey flashed across the screen along with pictures of the Mousekateers tap dancing and jumping around in pantomime horses for Wild West Day, the announcer had been so emphatic. This show was for the leaders of the Twenty-first Century. Now that he was actually mired in the bloody thing he was finding out that he was anything but a leader. At least not a leader of centuries. He did lead several committees, but the thrill of ruling that mimeographed handouts were no longer approved for graduate classes soon wears off. Still, one committee was getting him three days at Pacific Beach, and that was ample compensation for whatever the topic of the conference was.

The next Monday at 4:30 in the morning Thomas was standing on the sidewalk. He could have driven to the airport, but then he would have had to wait out in the hinterlands of the economy parking lot at 4:30 in the morning for the shuttle to the terminal instead of in front of his home waiting for the WeDrive Shuttle. This way, at least, he could use a bathroom if he needed, and might actually be a bit closer to the airport. It was at times like this he wished he smoked because it would give him something to do.

After about ten minutes a van turned the corner onto his street and parked. Thomas started dragging his suitcase toward it, but then a slightly overweight blonde woman jumped out of the passenger door and ran half way down the next block. At the same time a paunchy man jumped out of the driver’s side and ran down the other side of the street. Then they turned around and started trotting back toward Thomas and their van throwing newspapers in the general direction of various front doors. The blond woman had a fairly strong arm and Thomas had to duck the paper she threw at him as she passed. The man had fewer papers to get rid of and jumped into the van when he got back to it, and then drove to the next corner where he picked up the blond woman.

Thomas’s first plane trip had, in ways totally unlike this morning, also involved quite a bit of waiting. It was in the mid 60s after his freshman year. A young lady with improbably auburn hair he had met in a freshman literature class had sent him a note suggesting he come visit for a few days. Having a New Jersey postmark that was about thirty minutes from Manhattan made the note a done deal. Her improbably auburn hair and pert, perky…smile that made you think…things had nothing to do with it. His intentions were completely honorable. Completely. His hopes were an entirely different matter.

Early the next Friday morning one of Thomas’s roommates, having been subjected to techniques Thomas had learned from an older sister, found himself parking his car at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and helping Thomas carry his suitcase into the terminal. Once inside they scanned the boards and found the next flight to Newark, New Jersey, that being the airport most easily accessed by the young lady with the…smile. Stepping briskly up to the ticket counter Thomas purchased a one-way, student standby ticket to Newark, collected it and the change from his $20 bill, and said good-bye to his suitcase. In later years, when in a nostalgic mood, he often spoke fondly of that suitcase and the fairly new Rooster tie that had been in it. He was, however, less kind to the argyle socks, and seemed to hold them partly responsible.

The plane took off exactly on time, leaving Thomas inside the terminal watching it. He had been bumped off the flight by a couple of servicemen. Thomas’s roommate had stuck around to watch the planes (this was the mid-60s and people still did that kind of thing), and after Thomas found out that his ticket was good on any flight to Newark on any airline, and his luggage, which had made the cut, would be waiting for him when he got there, they (Thomas and his roommate, not the airlines or luggage) got some coffee and a roll and waited for the next flight.

Now-a-days, of course, if you tried to use your United ticket to get on a Southwest flight they would look at you with much the same expression used when looking at a rabid mongoose; and then they would have airport security interview you for a few hours while they tried to guess how many Arabic words you recognized. This, however, was, as I keep saying, the mid-60s and the airlines had not yet been deregulated which meant that they had to charge the same amount for tickets going to the same place. This meant they didn’t give a wet mongoose, rabid or not, whose ticket you had because more than likely someone else was riding on your original airline with some other airline’s ticket and the bookkeepers would sort it all out later.

It also meant that the airlines had to compete by giving excellent service and being on time, which I’m sure you’ll agree is no way to run a business. It would be years before they were deregulated and could more efficiently and economically charge seventeen different prices for seats on the same overbooked flights, which would be delayed because the pilot wanted to linger over his coffee.

It seems that three sailors and an off duty stewardess also had reasons to go to Newark, and Thomas and his roommate watched that plane climb into the sky from the relative comfort of the terminal. The next flight from Metro to Newark was at 7:20 that evening. There were, however, several (meaning, according to the dictionary, at least three) flights leaving early that afternoon from Willow Run Airport, and in those amazingly inefficient, regulated days his ticket was equally good there.

Thomas’s roommate obligingly drove him the to Willow Run, and then suddenly remembered he had other things in life he needed to do and left Thomas wondering why there was such a run on Newark, New Jersey. He had just heard of the place when the young lady with the improbably auburn hair and pert…smile told him to fly there, and now suddenly everyone and his/her/their sister had to go to Newark for a fun filled summer holiday. (When he finally got to Newark he decided ‘fun filled summer holiday’ was probably not on their list of reasons.)

He almost got onto the first of the Willow Run flights, but just as he was about to make the phone call signaling he was taking off, a pilot who needed to get to Newark so he could fly some other plane back to Detroit got the seat. Finally, after three hours at Detroit Metro and another two hours hanging about the Red and Blue Concourses at Willow Run Thomas was able to place a person to person collect phone call to himself which was the signal that barring accident, or an invasion by a tardy Marine, he would be landing in Newark in a little over an hour which would give his friend and her…smile ample time to get there and be waiting eagerly at the gate. It had taken several hours, but he had saved twenty dollars, which was about half a week’s wages.

The first thing that struck him about air travel was that the atmosphere was just a bit thick. This doesn’t mean he had suddenly become aware of the density of air at about 1000 feet above sea level even though it was quite humid that afternoon. It meant he had been seated in the smoking section. During the mid-60's, which I'm sure even the least attentive reader will by now have figured out is the time period of this flash back, the smoking section was separated from the non-smoking section by ten inches of empty space and a wall of moral outrage. Moral outrage may be very good at some things—none come to mind at the moment, but I'm sure there is something they're good at—but it is a lousy air purifier; and the air in the non-smoking section would have set off even the most stubborn smoke alarm if the plane had had them. Which it didn't. Not even in the bathroom.

The second thing that struck him was a piece of make-up that had flaked off of the stewardess. This was the middle of the Twentieth Century and the airline’s management were damn well going to keep their female employees looking like the tart next door, except a bit more plastic, and serving refreshments.

Thomas fastened his seat belt, sat back and looked around. This was going to be good. He was going to an exciting place to meet up with an exciting young lady and his intentions were to do exciting things in an honorable way. You could break him on the wheel and roast his joints over a mound of blazing coals and that would be his story. As usual his hopes kept their own council and divulged their plans to no one—especially Thomas.

Back in the present, which will be the past when you read this but, just the same, still has not happened to Thomas yet, or at least it will have just happened when you read it, but until then it hasn’t occurred in the version of Thomas’s universe you know. In the version of Thomas’s universe I know Thomas and a young lady with improbably auburn hair are doing things guaranteed to get a stern lecture from Sister Rose; but I’m not going to tell you or Thomas about that. As far as Thomas knows it is just a very…interesting dream he thinks he might have had, and he has enough problems without my muddling up an already shaky metaphysical construct.

Anyway, meanwhile back on the sidewalk, Thomas checked his watch and tried to look nonchalant as a police car slowly cruised passed.

The police car turned the corner at the end of the block and stopped. Perhaps because he had been raised in a small town where everybody took great pride in knowing what everybody else was doing at every moment, and where the Puritan ethic made you permanently Guilty by virtue of having existed, Thomas always got nervous in the presence of the police. And at the moment he was sure they were calling in his description to find out if there had been any reports of a middle-aged man in a business suit doing something he shouldn’t have. In reality, if not actuality, that particular police car stopped at that particular corner every morning at about this particular time because the young lady in #18 of the apartment building around the corner from Thomas's home was not very particular about closing her blinds.

Finally, much to Thomas’s relief, the WeDrive Shuttle turned the corner, stopped in front of him, backed up about thirty feet, came back to Thomas, stopped briefly and then drove halfway up the block, stopped and honked its horn. Thomas dragged his bag to the rear door of the van, and when it started to pull away he yelled and just managed to pound on the door before it got out of range. Then he had to jump out of the way as it backed up suddenly.

The driver waved at Thomas and got out of the van. Thomas waited until the driver was actually behind the van before stepping off the curb again.

“There you are. I was just about to call you in as a no show.”

Judging that logic and reason would never win this argument Thomas just replied, “Sorry about that. I was probably pretty hard to see under that street light,” and got into the van trying to avoid something suspiciously sticky on the edge of the seat which he fairly sure was not pecan roll. As they drove around the corner Thomas happened to glance at the window of a particular apartment, which just happened to be #18, and remembered why he had always liked that particular shade of red hair.

VII

2009-01-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

There was a time when traveling by plane was an event. You dressed for it, and were given a seat that was both comfortable and spacious. Even if you were traveling ‘Student Stand By’ everyone treated you with respect, and you expected to arrive at your destination within a few minutes of the moment indicated on the ticket.

These are not those times.

Even though they had boarded the plane only forty-five minutes late they hadn’t actually taken off until twenty minutes after the scheduled arrival time. They had spent those fun filled hours sitting off to the side of the taxiway while other planes went around them and the flight attendants walked briskly up and down the aisle. Occasionally they would fuss with a small door to a compartment that wouldn’t close completely, and then make heated calls on a phone near the door.

After an hour or so Thomas got the attention of one of the flight attendants and asked her, “I was just wondering. We aren't by any chance waiting for a supply of small, lemon soaked napkins are we?”

The flight attendant lifted her left eyebrow a quarter of an inch higher than you would normally think possible, or prudent, and replied in a tone of voice that had all the warmth of the dark side of Mercury, “No, sir. A compartment door won’t close completely creating an unsafe condition in the case of an emergency.”

“Um, just a thought, you know, and speaking as a layman with just a vague understanding of the consequences of falling out of the sky from a few thousand feet; but if—and this is strictly hypothetical, I’m not suggesting in any way we might actually do this—but just on the off chance we were to crash I would think the collateral damage, as it were, would be of sufficient severity to occupy most, if not all of my attention. I don’t think bumping my elbow on a small closet door would be especially high on my list of concerns.”

“Do you always talk like that?”

“No, not always. I’ve been told that on occasion I can be a bit obtuse.”

She thanked him for his feedback, and indicated that if he had any more concerns or suggestions Security would be happy to take him off the plane and discuss them for several hours. She could assure him that this was just the kind of smart assed remark that would allow them to release a lot of pent up hostility they had been saving for just such an occasion.

Eventually the door was kept closed by wedging a piece of folded napkin next to the latch. From there on the flight went as well as one has come to expect. The flight attendant, however, very pointedly gave Thomas only one packet of complimentary pretzel. (After a protracted trial the Airline agreed to cease using the plural as it was found to be misleading.)

Later there was a bit of a scene with an unfortunate man in first class who, when they finally landed, could not get his sport coat back because the little closet it had been hung in was wedged shut with some folded napkin. Hardly anybody noticed however because Airport Security had him trussed up and taken to a holding cell in less time than it took the woman blocking the aisle at row seven to take everything out of her purse; remember she had put her phone in her overnight bag, and empty it out; make a phone call to Rupert and tell him to get the trapeze ready; and repack everything. The man (the one in first class, not Rupert) later sued the airline for the cost of the sport coat and the emotional damage its loss had caused, but the airline refused to pay on the grounds that it was not a very attractive coat, and was completely wrong for that shirt and tie.

Rupert was later admitted to the hospital for unspecified lower back injuries.

On a subsequent flight the door unexpectedly sprang open during boarding when the folded napkin fell out and gave a passenger a rather nasty crack across the knuckles. That is, the door gave the passenger a rather nasty crack across the knuckles, not the napkin. The napkin just fell quietly to the floor and tried to disassociate itself from the scene that followed. The pretrial motions are currently entering their third year.

On the second day of the conference Thomas sent Spenser an email regretting his presence in San Diego during their meeting, and praising what he knew had been a productive exchange and the many excellent proposals he was sure Spenser would have made. He then promised to set up a follow up meeting to discuss the details as soon as he was sure of his travel schedule.

That afternoon was a busy one for Thomas.

From 1:30 to 3:00 he was attending a presentation explaining the fiscal benefits of what was being called the ‘Walmart Model.’ It was becoming popular in many smaller universities and in the increasingly cutthroat world of community colleges, especially those who included profit among their educational goals. You continually reminded staff (Here the old fashioned distinction between staff and faculty must be discarded because they are all, after all, simply employees.) that they are your most valuable asset. Then, to ensure the financial success of the institution, and more importantly your bonus, you keep every one that hasn't been unionized on semester to semester contracts, teaching just under a full load and paying at a rate that has been carefully calculated to be $20 dollars a unit lower than insulting.

You then end every budgeting, scheduling, and curriculum meeting; or any other meeting where someone might be tempted to inquire about something like health insurance or a livable salary by pointing out that staff is also your greatest, but most easily controlled, expense.

From 3:30 to 5:30 was a seminar exploring the reasons for the growing trend of faculty, especially adjunct, to have little or no loyalty to the schools that employed them. Thomas had privately worked out a theory that staff’s loyalty to their employer was intrinsically bound up with, and proportional to, their employer’s loyalty to them, but he had learned to keep that kind of thinking to himself. University and community college administrators, along with just about every other form of management, tend to feel they have stretched altruism to its breaking point just by hiring the grubby little bastards, and said grubby little bastards should show their eternal gratitude by doing as they are told when they are told. Plus, managers are very touchy about things like their bottom lines and bonuses and do not take kindly to the sort of seditious talk that might reduce either one—especially the later. In fact they are much more comfortable with you making a quite thorough examination of their spouse’s bottom and its lines than casually glancing at their school’s bottom line. It’s one thing to spread, and perhaps crumple, a couple sheets; it’s quite another to tinker with one’s spreadsheet.

VIII

2008-12-03T17:35:00.000-07:00

At the window stood a young girl. Well, actually, she wasn’t exactly a young girl as we know them, but we’ll get to that in a moment. She had her back to the room and the lights were out because it is much easier to sulk petulantly that way. The day had been simply awful.

First, the sky had been that wonderfully bright shade of crimson that announces, perhaps almost too forcefully, that Spring is well and truly sprung; and the delicate perfumes of the spring flowers with their blossoms of almost painfully pure shades of orange and yellow had been unbearably sweet and delicious. On the far side of the meadow our young nearly girl was glowering at was a stream clear and cold with the bright green snow melt from the Crystal Mountains as it gamboled its way to the sea.

There are those—particularly young, virginal males who spend an unusual amount of time worrying about these kinds of things and attending gatherings called ‘something-con,’—who will, at this point, start yammering about how if the sky was crimson it must have a high concentration of carbon dioxide, and therefore the planet must be suffering from the greenhouse effect and be too hot for life. The mature, if not scientific, response to this—indeed, the only response—is, of course, “Go away.”

Followed quickly by, “And stop touching yourself there when watching those Puffy Ami Yumi videos.”

In the first place, the predominant color for plant life on this planet is orange, so a greenhouse effect would be unheard of. Secondly, the sky could very well be crimson because the things living there see it that way.

As the evening advanced the sky had darkened gradually through shades of wine to a black with dark red highlights that stirred the soul of anything more animate than a granite paper weight to thoughts that kept the fathers of this particular young sort of girl at levels of alert just short of, but not excluding, a preemptive nuclear strike. They knew exactly what those roving, unaligned paternal teams wanted. They had been a young, unmarried squad once themselves, and they were damned if their little girl was going to get caught in one of those kinds of committee meeting.

The wisps of dark, forest green clouds had been highlighted with emerald along their edges by the sinking suns, and the way the clouds drifted lazily by certainly didn’t help the fathers’ mood, or efforts, either. In fact it had become difficult for a platinum feathered dreamdove to find a bush to roost in that had not already been occupied by couples or groups, depending on species, who had gazed too long at the sky and breathed too deeply of the spring flowers.

Now there was just enough light from a distant moon to allow you to see those clouds against the black and deep red sky as they drifted over the Crystal Mountains. The Crystal Mountains were, of course, lighted from within by the fires raging deep within the planet, and the spires and columns glowed with a shade of blue that . . . .

There is no word for it. Suffice it to say that in one or two dimensions only a hallucination or so removed from this one, that shade of blue is worshiped as a god by some fairly intelligent races with prismatic eyes. In our universe it has only been approached once or twice by the light show for some of the pricier rock concerts, and even then the likeness was that of a guppy to a whale. Or more properly, a Jerry Falwell or Osama bin Laden to a kind and benevolent God. A hint of the glimmerings of the concept was there, but they truly and utterly failed to get a grip of any kind on the reality.

Still, if you had been to, say, a Genesis concert when their version of the blue came up you would have dropped your arms, and possibly your lower jaw, depending on your species anatomy and concepts of acceptable behavior, and just stood there for a few seconds struggling mightily with seven years of college and an honors degree in writing trying to come up with the only possible description of the intensity of the color and your primal response to it, and finally succeed in describing it to you companion with, “that is really, really blue”. Then the lights melt into a black with dark red that gives you a mere smattering of a hint of what those poor fathers so far away were up against.

Between the impossibly blue Crystal Mountains and the wall with the window our petulantly sulking young lady is looking through, were the scattered sapphire and not-quite-ultraviolet flashes of the night blooming glow flowers as they expelled puffs of the perfumes that would soon bring the skysnakes. The skysnakes, which nested in the dark orange groves at the base of the Crystal Mountains, would do their sinuous aerial dances as they made their way from flower to flower. These dances are difficult to describe, but suffice it to say that they are the major reason a preemptive nuclear strike was still an option for our sulking, young lady’s fathers.

Kimberly—the cause is as unknown as the phenomenon, but on all the planets in all the galaxies in all the universes in all the dimensions that have petulant, sulking young girls or their equivalent, a fair number of them are named Kimberly—let out the three thousand four hundred fifty-third exasperated sigh for the day and declared, “This has got to be the ugliest, most boring place ever!” and dreamed of a world where everything was beige.

But, again I digress. Try to take comfort in the belief that it will all make sense later. That’s what I’m doing.

IX

2008-11-03T17:41:00.000-07:00

The afternoon had been even less fun than Thomas had anticipated, and after a lifetime spent in the madcap world of academic administration his standards were pretty low. As a reward to himself for having endured two rather accurate samplings of hell he skipped the buffet and dance being held that evening, and was walking along the edge of the beach watching the surf and an occasional surfer. He brushed the sand off a bit of the wall that separated the beach from the man made parts of town, and sat down staring out at the waves, but naturally what he was really looking at was his seemingly empty past and an equally meaningless future as it seemed to be shaping up at the moment.

There is something about a fluid in motion—it could be water or methane or lava or whatever it is that spills and splashes on your world—that makes any species that can remember its past and understand its mortality ponder its place, and lack of ultimate importance, in time and space if they watch it for very long. It can be the surf rolling in, or the swells as they pass your boat out at sea, a river or the minute currents surrounding the ice as it melts into your scotch. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s a fluid and it’s in motion.

If, for example, you sit at the edge of the edge of Niagara Falls (preferably on the Canadian side—you get a better view of the edge of the falls, and it’s usually cleaner) you can see the lip of the rock ledge through the water as it flows endlessly over. Eventually you start wondering where all of that water is coming from. How can it just keep pouring past without end? Then you start thinking of it as Time. An unending flow that as soon as you see it, it’s gone, never to be again. And then a fish will flit by and go over the edge, and you realize that’s you. A flash, a brief memory, then gone and nothing to show you ever were.

This is why all of the really good, old fashioned, get a drink on a slightly depressed Thursday afternoon and stare into the mirror with your thoughts kind of bars always face inland.

“Thomas?”

It took a few seconds for the sound of his name to shoulder its way through the several layers of self-pity he had built up by then, and when it did finally arrive at a bit of consciousness that would pay attention he started, and said, “What?”

“Thomas Milton, is that you?”

“I thought so, but perhaps I should check.” Thomas looked up to see who was challenging his existence this time, but instead of some nearly perfect, complete stranger it was a woman who at one time had been a classmate with improbably auburn hair who had ended up rejecting Thomas because of his lack of commitment. Thomas always had to sleep on things before committing himself, and she had absolutely refused to participate in his decision making process.

Right about now I can hear, or imagine I would hear, one or two of the more careful readers saying something like, “Hey, a couple pages back you said he was doing things with this girl that would displease Sister Rose.” My answer is, of course: yeah, so what’s your point. What I intimated was that in my universe he might be doing things which might cause Sister Rose to become distressed and wish to remind him of the proper way to conduct himself with a young lady, no matter how bloody improbable her hair is, by beating him senseless with a wooden ruler. That doesn’t mean it happened, or that it had happened already. Reality is a tricky thing, and it’s to best make sure you have a steady viewpoint before making any rash pronouncements.

It’s also at this point that I would like to tell Microsoft’s grammar Nazi to take a flying leap.

She was wearing an unbleached linen, sleeveless, peasant dress that hung in nearly graceful folds a few inches below her knees. That is the bottom hem hung a few inches below her knees. The dress itself hung from her shoulders in a close approximation to the usual way. When the sun was behind her, which was rather more frequently than Thomas was comfortable with, the dress seemed to disappear revealing the almost, but not quite youthful curves of her organically fed body. She was still an extremely attractive woman, but her…smile was perhaps a bit more softly comforting than perky. Her hair, which was now more nearly improbably white than auburn, was done up in two frizzy pigtails, and her complexion had that over-scrubbed, slightly broken-out look so dear to health food store shoppers.

“Clarissa?”

They went through the usual “Is that you? It’s been so long I hardly recognize you! You haven’t changed a bit!” absurdities such occasions require, and then spent the rest of the evening catching up on each other’s lives, or at least the portions they would tell someone who may or may not have become a stranger, over a couple of bracing glasses of organically grown, and squeezed (a process it is better to imagine than observe), carrot juice. Locally grown, of course.

“What brings you to San Diego? I thought you were still holed up somewhere in the Mid-west.”

Thomas glanced up and for two or three infinitely long seconds looked at her eyes, then quickly looked back down at his juice glass and watched the carrot squeezings as they flowed around a celery stock. “Oh, you know. Another conference on how best to exploit the starving student and keep the faculty downtrodden.”

“You make it sound so romantic. Whatever happened to the ivy covered towers of learning?”

“Ivy covered towers? I think the towers are ivory, and it’s the halls that are ivy covered. We bring them out on Parents’ Days and such. You know, when we want to impress someone who might make an endowment.”

“Don’t be such a shit.”

Thomas quickly looked up again. Her eyes were smiling, which is very hard to do without lips. As the conversation progressed he found himself looking more and more frequently at her eyes, which, like a fluid in motion, seemed very capable of showing him his place in the universe and his relative importance, only in a way that didn’t make him want to order another scotch. Years later he could still remember exactly how her eyes looked that night, and her smile. Not the euphemism, her actual smile which he found more stimulating than the…smile of her youth.

X

2008-10-03T17:52:00.000-07:00

One of the more popular plot lines in science fiction involves the hero going back in time, and preventing something from happening so that in the future he, or she, came from some, even more terrible, thing will not happen. For some reason, probably one best explored while watching the currents created by the ice melting in a glass of scotch, the even more terrible thing very often is the birth of some individual. The argument goes something like this: the world, as we know it, is crap. The reason it is crap can be traced directly back to this exact person. Therefore, if that exact person is never born then, ipso facto, the world will not be crap.

Now, if you were to take a poll you would most likely discover that in the private thoughts of most people, the person usually blamed for causing this scatological condition of the world is either a spouse, in-law, or, more and more frequently these days, middle management. These, of course, are the people most capable of making one’s life a living hell, and the most likely reason one would be sitting in a gloomy bar on a Thursday afternoon watching ice melt in some amber colored liquid. We understand the anger, and the need to stop these people before they can do their harm; but for time travel to be involved in a novel or a movie the person has to be doing some serious, global, genocidal crap making. They have to be a Hitler or Pohl Pot or Stalin or someone equally evil like the guy who invented conference calls. Otherwise it’s just a family squabble or workplace grievance.

The only thing wrong is that it can’t happen.

The reason it can’t happen is: the past is fixed. You can’t change it because if you did then it wouldn’t be the past. That is, whatever you did to change the past already happened to make the past you are trying to change the past that it is. Now to balance things out the future is always a crapshoot. Any conceivable variation of an event that could possibly happen has, at any moment right up until the moment happens, a more than fighting chance of occurring and you cannot be sure of what will actually happen until it has. But once it has happened it is frozen, and the only thing that can change is how it’s remembered.

For example, you pick a date—preferably one you wish had come out just a bit differently. For Thomas he, or we, could very likely pick 14 June 1981. That was one of the days he got married. In the next several years he spent a great many nights watching ice melt, and thinking. Thinking he could have gotten a flat tire. A cop could have stopped him for speeding, and then locked him up for having an expired registration. A plane could have crashed into the wedding hall. The psychology student who had started dating the girl with improbably auburn hair and the…smile could have tracked him down and beaten him unconscious for no really valid reason.

Maybe he could go back to 4 October 1979 and say, “I don’t think so,” instead of “Sure, why not?” Or perhaps he could go back to that meeting with her family on 17 April 1981 and set them straight about just what kind of nameless hell he was willing to put up with. Or on another fateful day he could have driven to the airport, flown to Zanzibar, and gotten arrested for being drunk and disorderly instead of walking up to that attractive young lady and saying, “Hi. My name is Thomas, but some people call me TDM.”

So many things could have happened.

In his blacker moments, when he remembers some of the finer agonies, he tends to daydream about fiddling with the brakes on her maternal great aunt’s car. If only he had a way of getting back to, say March of 1965, and spending five minutes in her garage, life would have been so much nicer.

But like I keep saying, even if you can go back, you can’t change what happened. You can have twenty, thirty, a hundred time travelers all doing their best to prevent something. Let say they want to stop the bombing of Hiroshima. One team of time traveling heros go back to some heavy water plants in Norway hell bent on blowing them up. Another bunch get some jobs up in Redmond, Washington with the aim of creating some mischief in the production of U235. Still others are in Los Alamos hoping to sabotage the test firing of the first atomic bomb.

Our intrepid heros work assiduously for many days, adding this, changing that, totally wrecking the other. All things that no one knew would happen until fifty years after they happened, so no prior steps could have been taken to prevent the changes. And still, the future very definitely has this past you are trying so hard to prevent.

That’s because, like it or not, each moment in the past is made up of the cumulative effects of all the stuff going on at the very instant of their happening. This includes the guys in Norway getting completely pissed the night before and sleeping two hours too long. It also includes the team sent back to keep the first team sober having an altercation with a local constable which kept them from joining the first team in time. And includes a team sent from two hundred years further in the future that all got arrested as drunk and disorderly because no one could understand their accents.

I will try to explain it a bit more cogently.

Somewhere around 20 April 1889, Adolf Hitler was born. A great many people quite rightly would like to see that not happen. So, in the year 2030 an intrepid hero volunteers to take on the job of stopping this birth. He’s seen all the old “Terminator” films, and has worked out assiduously to make sure he looks good during the nude scene. He is sent back to July, 1888, and begins making sure Herr und Frau Hitler never get a moment together to do some canoodling. But on 20 April 1889’s only appearance, in this dimension at least, baby Adolf was certainly born, which means that for one night, or afternoon, or coffee break, our intrepid hero was asleep, so to speak, at the switch.

The problem is that if you are a time traveler from the future, you have to go back to a time that has already happened; and you were there when it happened even though you only decided to go back then last Thursday because, in our dimension at least, time only happens once. (I said that already just a couple sentences back, but it bears repeating.) So, no matter how many time travelers go back to July (or August) of 1888, Adolf Hitler’s mother and father will still manage to have that one, all important connubial moment because you can’t undo what’s done.

“What,” I can imagine you asking, “has any of this have to do with Thomas? And can I have the last five minutes of my life back?”

The answers are: a lot, and no.

XI

2008-09-03T16:03:00.001-07:00

The next day Thomas skipped the presentation on effective speaking and met Clarissa for lunch. After about forty-five minutes of fairly aimless walking they eventually decided on a little Chinese place with no name that was very effectively hidden down an alley just off a rather dubious side street. Actually it had a name, but Thomas could not read Chinese. That the owners’ did not feel the need to put up a name in English, or even a close approximation, was considered by many to be a hint.

Inside it was clear that the decorator was making a very strong statement about having other, more important, things to do. The tables were an assortment of the folding, banquet tables seen at hotel functions everywhere, except these had obviously been retired by the hotel that had originally owned them, and perhaps even a subsequent owner. Thomas had never realized that the height of banquet tables varied so much. Off to one side, for more intimate, or perhaps unsocial parties, were a couple of rickety card tables. The chairs were an even odder collection. They ranged from old café chairs to wooden kitchen chairs to folding chairs of unknown strength. Out of the several dozen furniture legs on display in the room, Thomas was willing to wager that no two were of an equal length. This gave the room a festive, what the hell, we’re all going to end up on the floor anyway atmosphere that made complaining that the duct tape holding your seat cushion together was now more firmly attached to your designer silk and wool blend slacks seem a bit petty.

The walls had been painted a garish yellow that screamed “Close Out Sale At the Paint Store,” and along the wall opposite the card tables was a small counter with a couple napkin dispensers, some plastic forks and spoons, chopsticks, and several bottles of various condiments, some of which seemed menacing.

At the back of the room was a counter. A piece of notebook paper with the crudely lettered words “order Here” had been pinned to a post at the end of the counter, and a kitchen could be seen in the darkness beyond. Above the counter was a large sign with many lines of Chinese characters, under some of which were the English names of Chinese dishes of varying degrees of familiarity. All in all, the atmosphere at first glance seemed to sum up the attitude of the management fairly succinctly. They had heard of ambiance, and it irritated them.

Thomas looked at Clarissa with an expression that didn’t so much plead with her to leave, but groveled pathetically in the most embarrassing way. Clarissa, on the other hand, thought things were working out nicely. She had done a quick head count, and the Asian to round-eye ratio was nearly perfect. There were about twenty people scattered around the various tables, hunched over their bowls, showing a single minded determination to think only about the food they were eating. Only one person was not of Asian ancestry, and he had the look of someone who had spent several of the last years roaming about the parts of China, Viet Nam, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia that don’t usually get put on the guided tours. What that look was exactly is up to you.

“Looks alright to me. Let’s give it a try.”

When they got up to the counter they could see that an elderly woman sat behind it. She was old. Very old. Workers taking a break from building the Great Wall had probably given her their orders. After a second or two she gave a start and then carefully stood up. Once she was standing she made all the chairs and tables seem stable and solid. It wasn’t that she teetered or wobbled. You just felt that at any moment she could or would collapse into a pile of dust and threadbare woolens. “You ready order?”

Clarissa eyed the menu board again, and said, “Is the fried tofu made with hot chili paste or sweet?”

“It come either way. You like spicy?”

“Yes. And some tea, please.”

“You got it. And for you?”

Thomas got the distinct feeling that some how, on some frequency only females could receive, he was being mocked. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Clarissa grin and pointedly look somewhere else. He didn’t know what the joke was, but assumed he was the punch line. “Um, is the Mongolian beef very spicy?”

“Don’t worry. I tell cook to make it special extra bland for you.”

This was a level of abuse he was accustomed to. “Ah, that’s very kind of you. And I would like lemonade to drink.”

“What this look like? Trader Vic’s? We got tea, water and soda.” With the word ‘soda’ she gestured vaguely in the direction of the drink dispenser next to the condiment counter. I would have mentioned it when describing the room, but I just noticed it myself.

“Just a regular soda, please.”

“They all regular. All same except some orange, some clear and some brown. I not sure I trust orange one.”

Thomas paid for the food, and the old woman started screaming something in what he took to be Chinese at the darkness behind her. From amid the crashes of what sounded like a particularly violent talempong orchestra someone screamed back. For the next five minutes the two voices, or more—it was hard to tell—screamed at each other with a vehemence rivaled only by a large scale battle between approximately twenty-three cats. This, of course, is how it sounds to Occidental ears. In reality, if not actuality, they were making rather pointed, and possibly obscene, remarks about Thomas’s taste buds, and worrying about the lateness of their daughter.

Thomas and Clarissa took seats, but then they didn't know what to do with them so they put them back and sat down at one of the card tables. As he sat down the table wobbled violently and spilled half his soda. After a couple trips across the room to get napkins, the table was dry again and Thomas sat down. Clarissa seemed to be laughing at some private joke again. “What?”

“Didn’t that seem strange to you?”

Thomas looked around the room. The tables’ tops made a surprisingly accurate topographical depiction of northern Arizona except with the seismic stability of Japan. At the back a feline war of untold dimensions continued. And across the room he was sure smoke was coming out of one of the condiment bottles. “You’re going to have to narrow it down a little.”

“The lady’s accent. It didn’t make any sense. She was mispronouncing both her ‘L’s and her ‘R’s. It was like she was trying to be Chinese and Japanese at the same time.”

“Maybe she’s just an over-achiever.”

Do not be alarmed.

Like Thomas, you didn’t notice that the old woman was mixing her ‘L’s and ‘R’s with reckless abandon because it wasn’t written that way. In a perfect, or at least different, world a much better or much worse writer would have written something like “Don’ wolly. I teww cook make it specioh extla bran’ foh you.” Then again, that writer would probably have been hunted down by the ghost of Joel Chandler Harris and forced to read the dialect passages of Dorothy L Sayers until he, or she, repented fully and completely his, or her, transgressions.

Just then a middle-aged man in a t-shirt, dark blue work pants, and an apron brought out their food. He had the smile of someone who enjoys what he does, and is content with life in general. “Spicy fried tofu,” and he sat a large bowl down in front of Clarissa. As he set Thomas's dish down he said, “Mongolian beef—American style.”

Thomas had to admit the food looked far better than the Chinese food he was accustomed to, and the aroma was wonderful. The smell was savory and spicy without being heavy—and just a bit different than any Chinese food Thomas had had before.

The man set a bowl of rice down between them, said, “Enjoy,” and beamed with pride as he looked at his creations.

Just then a girl came in the door. She was about junior high school age, and wore the plaid skirt and white shirt of many private, parochial schools, not to mention the more hopeless and private, parochial fantasies of many older men. The cook/server beamed even more and said something to her, which she answered by rolling her eyes in exasperation, and sighing heavily. As she walked passed them to the back she seemed to carry the weight of the entire universe’s woes on her sensitive, martyred shoulders. The man beamed even more, which Thomas thought was impossible, and said, “That’s our daughter, Kimberly. She thinks everything boring, and should be beige.” With that he beamed himself back to the kitchen, and the old woman and Kimberly started a conversation that would have made the rangiest alley cat back off in fear.

As they had been talking to the cook/server another man started wiping down some of the tables near the back counter. Even given the mish-mash of castoffs they had for furniture the one thing you could say about the place was that it was clean. Squeaky clean. Very wobbly, but very clean. The man bussing the tables looked almost, but not quite exactly like the cook/server, and when Thomas looked very hard he could see another almost identical but completely different man cleaning vegetables.

For a few minutes Thomas and Clarissa concentrated on their meals. There was a reason everyone was hunched over their bowls at this little restaurant. The food demanded your full attention, and you instinctively tried to contain the aroma with your entire body. With each mouthful you discovered some new, subtle layer of flavor and aroma that made you want to savor that bite as long as possible, and at the same time eager to take the next. Eventually Thomas looked up, surprised that the surroundings were indeed as shabby as he remembered. For a second or two a lingering aftertaste that hinted of soy, garlic and something undefined—red skies and dark orange forests perhaps—floated around his mouth.

“That,” he said with religious conviction, “was good.”

“Amazing.” Clarissa had the look of a woman in love. Thomas decided he really liked that look, but was surprised to find he was suddenly a bit jealous of some bean curd. “Try a bite,” she said.

Now Thomas had been raised in the Midwest in a very small farm town far from those culinary hotbeds of the suburbs. His mother was the product of generations of Midwestern farm wives’ cooking traditions. This meant that all food except vegetables were either brown, tan or white. Vegetables were greenish gray. During the week meat was breaded and fried, and on Sunday it was roasted until it formed a quarter inch crust that was impervious to knives and small arms fire. He was in his twenties before he tasted anything spicier than catsup.

“Um, I don’t know…”

“Oh, come on. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted.”

“Ah, well, you’ve obviously never been to Orem, Utah.”

“What?” People who knew Thomas tended to say “What?” a lot. In fact they said it with such regularity that he often waited until he had heard a somewhat baffled “What?” before continuing the discussion. Clarissa, however, was not going to distracted by logical discontinuity. “Here, just a little taste.”

For a brief, frightening second Thomas remembered how his highchair used to wobble unsteadily, and he opened his mouth. The taste was unlike anything he had ever known. There was a smokiness that barbecue pit bosses across the nation would kill to achieve. There was a savory sweetness that seemed to slide around and across the fringes of his soul like two luminescent snakes dancing in the air, and would haunt
his memories for years to come.

And there was fire.

A lot of fire.

Sweat beaded on his forehead. His nose ran. His eyes teared. His nose teared, his forehead ran and his eyes beaded. It was the most intense sensation he had ever had that did not involve a dentist’s drill. And somewhere beyond the heat shimmer of his vision the old woman was laughing.