The Whole Mess
The kid in the duck-hunting hat reached across my desk with a folded sheet of yellow graph paper in his fingers. “I think you will find this interesting, Professor Dunn.”
I took the paper and opened it. A mathematical equation, meticulously printed in black pencil, marched across the sheet. It began: {C-cosmo} + {C-astro} and at first glance appeared to be headed towards Gleiser’s multiverse modification of the Drake equation. But it diverged wildly and without resolution.
“What is it, Mr. Whitfield?” I asked, not quite looking at him.
“Something I believe only you can finish.”
“I see. Stump the prof. I’m not a cosmologist, you know.”
He shook his head, rejecting my rejection. Daniel Whitfield was big as a linebacker though nothing about him suggested athleticism. Freshman-aged but not a freshman, he had been auditing my combinatorial topology class at the University of Washington, and he was becoming a distraction. Each day he showed up in his absurd red and black duck-hunting hat with the ear flaps turned down, sat in the front row, and stared at me. Whitfield never removed his hat or his camel hair coat. A silver ballpoint pen protruded from the outside breast pocket, and feathery gray streaks stained the lapels of the coat. Cigarette ash, I guessed, smelling tobacco now that he was sitting so near.
“I’m not trying to stump you,” he said. “You’re looking at the most important work you will ever do.”
“Is that right?”
“You want to know what it is?”
“Not especially.” I resumed placing folders into my briefcase, which is what I’d been doing when Whitfield entered.
“It’s an incantation,” he said.
“A what?” I met his eyes briefly and looked away.
“You concede Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis?”
“No.”
“You don’t concede it? That’s in direct contradiction to what you’ve—”
“I concede the MUH, but I don’t agree to this discussion.”
“I risked my life to bring this to you.”
“Mr. Whitfield, please.”
Whitfield pointed at the paper. “It’s ancient. When they found it, the final expression was missing, deliberately removed. Once that expression is restored, the world changes. I’m confident it won’t defeat you, Professor Dunn. I’ve studied everything you’ve published since your student days at Harvard. Very unorthodox. This problem requires a particular genius.”
I was inclined to laugh, but Whitfield’s intense and utterly humorless stare “defeated” me, as he might have put it. Genius. I hated that word.
“Very interesting,” I said. “In any case, I’m late for class.”
I tried to hand the paper back but he waved it away. “That’s yours.” He stood, almost knocking his chair over. “Goodbye,” he said, hunching his shoulders and turning away. His brown Oxfords, so big they were almost clown shoes, scuffed across the carpet. He left the door open on his way out. A certain percentage of my students fell within the Asperger’s spectrum, a common affliction found in the narrow population of mathematical obsessives, prodigies, and, especially, “geniuses.” Whitfield’s apparent insanity made him an outlier, though. I started to crumple his silly paper but stopped, gave it another look, and slipped it into my briefcase.
Daniel Whitfield did not return to class. But his equation, or as he called it, his incantation, became my hobby and then my obsession. And of course Whitfield had known it would happen that way. Night after night I sat up late in my West Seattle townhouse drinking endless cups of lemon tea (I’d long ago put aside the single malt Scotch that had led me astray in my university days and afterwards) while scribbling out my attempts to solve the Whitfield equation. At every impasse, and there were many, I reached for the guitar I kept leaning against the bookcase next to my desk. Music, like everything else, is mathematical. Fingering random scale variations sometimes loosened that part of my mind seeking non-linear solutions.
My obsession became relentless. For the first time in my experience I saw more than the purity of mathematics. The equation was trying to tell me something, a story, almost in the manner of ancient hieroglyphs.
In a dream I found myself standing before a blackboard, my back to the classroom. My hand worked furiously, the nub of chalk clicking against the slate. As always, the final expression eluded me, and I threw the chalk down in disgust. An odor of brine and corruption, half sea and half sewer, filled the classroom. I felt a looming presence and became afraid to turn around and face my student. Instead I picked up the chalk and resumed work. That was the message of the dream: Finish.
The next day I was crossing the lower campus with my briefcase and coffee, walking quickly to make my first class. Lisa, a young woman whom I liked but knew only slightly, an administrative assistant in the dean’s office, was walking toward me on the otherwise deserted path. A brisk October wind swept maple leaves into the air between us. “Hello, professor,” Lisa said. I met her eyes glancingly, started to reply, and the solution to Whitfield’s equation appeared in my mind with all the urgency of a fire alarm. It happened that way sometimes. I stopped, put my briefcase down, and fumbled for a notepad and mechanical pencil. The solution felt tenuous and I didn’t want to lose it.
Lisa said, “Are you all right, professor? Here, give me that.”
She took the coffee from my hand. I mumbled something, my head down. Printing quickly, I transcribed the completed equation in tightly crabbed symbols and numbers then reviewed the result, moving my lips and thus speaking the incantation. It was solid.
The wind dropped as if a plug had been pulled. I looked up. A maple leaf sea-sawed out of the air and landed on the others. The atmosphere became electric. Lisa looked at me. I saw fear in her eyes before I quickly glanced away. Behind her on the path a ragged hole opened like a rough doorway or the mouth of a tunnel. Its face rippled with an oily iridescent sheen. The hole expanded and acquired depth. An elephant could have passed through it.
For a moment I couldn’t credit what I was seeing. The brine-and-sewer stench familiar from my dream wafted out of the tunnel. Instinctively, I took Lisa’s arm and pulled her back, only to stumble over my own briefcase. She grabbed my arm to keep me from falling, and we ended in an awkward embrace.
A shape moved inside the tunnel, something huge, dragging itself towards us. My flight response seized me but I couldn’t move. Lisa and I held onto to each other like children. The ground shifted then, like an elevator that stops too sharply inches below the next floor. The sensation was so startling I looked at our feet, expecting to find us standing in a sinkhole. But we stood on the ordinary path, and the air was moving again. When I looked up, the tunnel and whatever had been about to emerge was gone.
“What was that?” Lisa said.
I shook my head. A monumental change had occurred but I couldn’t identify it.
Lisa patted my sleeve. “You can let go of me now.”
“What? Oh—”
She handed me the coffee. My hand was shaking, and I hoped she didn’t notice. I looked at my watch and received another shock. The watch I had strapped around my wrist that morning had been a simple drugstore Timex. Now I wore a stainless steel Mont Blanc with Arabic numerals and three sub dials. I had never seen the thing before—except that I had seen it before. Of course I had. It had been a gift from, from . . .
“Professor?”
“Something strange is happening.”
She laughed shortly, a response I couldn’t interpret. But I never was good at decoding human beings, looking into their eyes, unraveling human motivations. Only the reliability of numbers had ever made sense to me.
“Do you feel all right?” I asked.
She thought about it. “All right, but different.”
“Different how?”
“This is going to sound odd.”
“Go ahead, please.”
“I feel like I don’t know whether I should tell my insurance company about the scrape I put on the fender of my Fiat in the parking garage this morning.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Professor Dunn, I don’t own a car.”
Now I made myself look into her eyes. “I’m sorry?”
“I don’t own a car.”
I looked away again, my mind trying to bend around oblique corners. It failed. “I’m going to my class.”
“What about what just happened?”
“I don’t know.” I walked away, disoriented and more frightened than I would have liked to admit. Lisa came after me.
“I’m staying with you,” she said.
Teaching was out of the question. My students would be elated when I dismissed them. Lisa hovered at my elbow when I entered the lecture hall. It was a large class, almost a hundred undergraduates—and they were all listening to a man I did not recognize lecture from the podium. He noticed me in the back and lifted his chin, as if to ask my business. I thought I must be in the wrong place. But when I withdrew to the corridor I saw that I’d opened the correct door.
“What’s wrong?” Lisa said.
“I’m not sure.”
I slipped on my glasses and read the schedule attached to the wall. It was my number theory class at my hour, but someone named Ethan Kriegel was teaching it.
I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.
“Professor Dunn?”
“I have to think.”
The door to the lecture hall opened. Ethan Kriegel, I presumed, stepped out and addressed me. “Dr. Dunn, did you need to speak with me?”
“No. Yes. Why are you teaching my class?”
“Your class? But you assigned it to me.”
“I don’t assign classes. What are you talking about?”
Kriegel smiled uncertainly. “I’m sorry, Dr. Dunn, but—”
“I want to know what the hell is happening,” I said, my fear translating to anger. Kriegel stepped back.
Lisa touched my shoulder and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait.”
An identity began to surface on Kriegel’s features, like a face slowly floating to the surface of a murky pond. Of course I knew Ethan Kriegel. I was head of the math department and he was one of my best people. This was his class to teach. I ought to know, since I had assigned it to him myself. I lightly touched my forehead with my fingertips, as if the answer to this mystery might be written there in braille. Somehow I had moved into a different life, one that still belonged to me but diverged significantly from the one I’d known.
“I apologize, Professor Kriegel. Please return to your class.”
Feeling nauseous, I turned and walked away before he could reply. Lisa stayed with me and I was glad of it. Outside I sat on the steps and took deep breaths. Lisa sat beside me.
“I feel sick to my stomach,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“It’s like a different life happening to me,” she said. “I’m remembering all kinds of stuff that I know isn’t true, but somehow it is true. The car thing is just one of them. What’s happening to us?”
“I don’t know but I think he’s going to tell us.” I pointed at a man crossing the quad and heading straight for us. It was Daniel Whitfield, still wearing his duck-hunting hat and camel hair coat. He was grinning like a demon. Maybe he was a demon.
Whitfield climbed the steps and stood before us. “You did it,” he said. “Congratulations.”
“He did what?” Lisa said.
“Unlocked eternity. The New Age of the Masters is already spreading across the infinite.”
“Your damn equation,” I said.
“I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist it. And once the incantation is expressed there is no un-expressing it.”
“All we want is to get back to the place we started,” I said.
“Oh, you wouldn’t like that one anymore. It’s already very much transformed. There’s been a regime change. But don’t worry, it will catch up with you here soon enough. In fact . . .”
He swept his arm toward the quad. A dozen or so students crossed on their way to or from class, backpacks slung over shoulders and cell phones in hand. The air became still as the air inside a sealed tomb. An oily black oval rippled into existence above the bricks. It acquired depth, became a tunnel. Lisa and I stood up. A purple and pink tentacle unrolled from the tunnel, picked up a co-ed in a red sweater, and flung her screaming into the air. The other students scattered, screaming and shouting. Lisa said, “Oh my God, oh my God,” and ran back into Maier Hall.
Daniel Whitfield climbed the last steps and stood before me, unconcerned by the chaos. “It’s pointless to run. The Masters will appear in every iteration, eventually. You’ve provided the access that was lost for so long.”
I was barely listening. A nightmare had dragged itself out of the tunnel and into the light. More of its kind crowded the tunnel’s mouth. The first to emerge made directly for me, using its tentacles to pull and hump forward at surprising speed. I stumbled back, terrified, and seemed to step into a depression that hadn’t been there a moment before. I flung my arms out for balance. And with the abruptness of a channel change, the quad resumed its mundane aspect. A dozen students crossed the bricks with backpacks and cell phones—including the co-ed in the red sweater whom I’d seen die only moments before.
Daniel Whitfield had vanished. I stood alone at the top of the stairs.
And I didn’t belong there. The University of Washington had been my home (some would have called it my hideout) for fifteen years. Yet now I felt like an intruder, and I knew I had side-slipped into another “iteration,” one very far from the world I was used to. My Timex was back, but this time my clothes had changed. Instead of my customary tweed jacket I wore a brown leather coat over a gray hooded sweatshirt. I reached up and removed the baseball cap I hadn’t been wearing a moment ago and stared at the Seahawks logo. I touched my face and discovered I now wore a full beard.
After a moment I replaced the hat and descended the steps in a daze, my dirty white sneakers feeling strange after years of loafers. This iteration’s identity slowly rose to the surface. By the time I reached University Avenue and the six-year-old Ford Focus I’d left parked there, I knew perfectly well that I didn’t belong on campus, except as the slightly sad figure I now inhabited, a man well past thirty ignorantly in search of entry into the higher-education structure. My appointment with the admissions counselor hadn’t gone well. I was woefully under-qualified, and my paltry community college credits were non-transferable.
The whole thing was an ironic counterpoint to my original arrival, a decade and a few iterations ago, when I was the over-qualified applicant for a teaching position that would ensure insulation from the cries of Genius! that had hectored me since grade school. Now I fell short even as an aging freshman looking for validation in the form of a degree in the humanities.
Yes, the humanities.
In this sorry version of myself I no longer possessed (or was possessed by, as I used to think) the special aptitude for mathematics that had defined my expectations and my misery for as long as I could remember.
I still lived in West Seattle, but no longer in a townhouse with a view of Puget Sound. The Ford took me home, like a dog who finds his way back from the wilderness. My body knew where it lived, even if my migrant identity remained largely lost. Presently I found myself parked before a tan building with three cracked concrete steps leading to the lobby door. Flaking gold letters on the glass spelled Franklin Apartments. I turned the engine off and held the little bundle of keys in my open hand, waiting to recognize the proper one. Eventually I did.
The deeper I penetrated this iteration the more familiar it became. The studio apartment enclosed me like the arms of a sisterly spouse in a sexless marriage. The trestle kitchen with its old-fashioned appliances and stale odors refreshed memories of countless Campbell and Totino’s feasts. The unmade sofa bed told its story of grim bachelorhood. I’d lived alone in my townhouse, too, but those rooms had been neatly (obsessively so) maintained, and my rich intellectual life acted as counter-balance to my inevitable loneliness.
When I saw the computer I had to wonder whether I’d time traveled as well as side-slipped. Instead of the sleek Macbook Pro I was used to, a boxy anachronism sat on my Ikea desk. The CRT monitor alone must have weighed forty pounds. I reached for my cell phone but it wasn’t in my pocket. A Swedish Health Cooperative calendar on the kitchen wall informed me I still occupied the year 2017. Looking at it, I remembered why I had the calendar. SHCC employed me as a phlebotomist. That is, I spent my workdays drawing blood from the arms of patients sent to the lab by their physicians. I shuddered at the thought, while simultaneously feeling cranky gratitude for the job. After all, I’d gone to school for the certification (my untransferable credits) and was lucky to be making $17 an hour. Never mind the periodic panic that I was wasting my life, the kind of panic that had sent me to the UW campus that morning.
The land line began ringing, startling me with its piercing electronic trill. I lifted the handset from its wall-mounted cradle.
“Please, God,” Lisa said, “tell me this is Professor Dunn.”
For a moment, I almost couldn’t breathe. Emotion compressed the air out of my lungs.
“Hello?” Lisa said.
I swallowed. “It’s Dunn,” I said, “but I’m not a professor anymore.”
Lisa sat on my sofa. The bed, with its dirty bachelor sheets, was folded inside and hidden under swaybacked cushions.
“My i-Phone is gone,” she said, staring at me as if I had stolen it (which, in a way, I suppose, I had). “Everybody’s phone is gone. I’m back to not having a car, and there’s a student discount Metro Pass in my wallet. Get this, I don’t work in the dean’s office anymore. I’m a freshman and I’ve got loans and Pell grants up my ass. And there’s this.” She pushed up her sleeve. A tattoo of a winged serpent, red forked tongue wickedly extended, wrapped around her forearm.
I cleared my throat. “That’s . . . new?”
She laughed shortly, and this time I didn’t have any trouble interpreting her meaning. “New? I used to ride the dragon. You don’t know what that means? Heroin. Dragons are kind of like flying serpents, and serpents symbolize the devil. So okay it sounds dumb saying it out loud. Every idiot wants to tell the story of her tattoo. But this serpent on my arm is a reminder. The dragon is patient. It’s always waiting for the needle. I got the tat a month after I should have been dead. It cost three hundred dollars. The money was in a paper bag, which had been in the lap of my boyfriend, who had passed out next to me in his car. Only he wasn’t passed out. We were sitting there because we were going to buy drugs in the parking lot of a Tukwila strip mall. I thought my boyfriend passed out, but he was dead. That was my big turning point, right? I grabbed the bag and ran. Sweated out detox, joined NA, and got the serpent—as a reminder. That’s my story. There’s only one problem. None of it happened to me—I mean, none of it happened to the real me. But in this nutty place it’s exactly what happened. I got clean, and I got motivated, and I went back to school. Professor Dunn, what the hell is going on?”
I sighed, rubbed my eyes. “You probably won’t believe this.”
“Are you kidding? Did you hear what I just said?”
“I heard you. All right, listen.”
I told her the whole thing, Whitfield and his equation that was really an incantation, the parallel iterations.
“I don’t understand what you mean when you say ‘iteration.’”
“That’s Whitfield’s term. Substitute bubble universe, if you prefer. The theory is every decision creates a bubble universe of its own. Big decisions, little decisions—it doesn’t matter. If space and time are infinite, then the variety of alternate realities is also infinite. When I expressed the completed Whitfield equation, it acted as a key to let through what Whitfield called the ‘The Masters.’ According to him, these things will populate across all realities. But I think the equation did something else, too. It opened pathways between the parallel universes, between these bubble worlds. Chutes and ladders. Escape routes. Of course, according to Mr. Whitfield, escape is ultimately impossible.”
“You mean everybody goes into alternate lives, like what we’re doing?”
I shook my head. “No. Probably just me, since I solved the equation. And maybe you get carried along because we were together, holding onto each other, at the exact moment the key turned.”
After a long pause, Lisa said, “What are we going to do?”
I found myself wanting with everything I had to give her a hopeful answer, but I didn’t have one.
“I don’t know. Maybe if I could find Daniel Whitfield, he could tell us.”
“Is there a way to get us back to where we started?”
“We wouldn’t want to go back to our first world. It’s already overrun by the Masters. And from what I saw, they do not promise a benevolent dictatorship.”
Lisa’s shoulders slumped. “Can I have a glass of water?”
“Of course.”
I held a water glass under the kitchen tap, then remembered I kept a bottle of cold spring water in the refrigerator. I opened the door. Beer bottles rattled. The spring water was there—next to an economy-sized bottle of Smirnoff. I stared at the vodka for a long moment, then reached for the spring water and closed the door.
“Thanks,” Lisa said when I handed her the bottle. She drank half the water then looked around my apartment, which was just this side of shabby. “I didn’t think a professor would live in such a . . . small place.”
“I told you. I’m not a professor in this bubble. I’m a med tech at Swedish.”
“Why?”
“Why? I told you, every decision creates a different—”
“But do you know what decision you made to go from full professor to medical tech?”
I blushed, acutely and illogically embarrassed. “I think different aptitudes dictated different choices. In this world I’ve lost my talent for mathematics. It’s odd, really. My whole life people called me a genius because of what I could do. At Harvard they expected me to shine like a new star. I resented it, to be honest. Resented the expectations. That’s how I wound up at UW. I wanted to be normal. I didn’t like the pressure. Besides, I like teaching. I had an aptitude for that, too. Maybe even a little genius for it.”
“That’s nutty,” Lisa said.
“What is?”
“Resenting an incredible gift because you want to be limited like everyone else. It’s even kind of insulting, when you think about it.”
“Don’t forget, it’s my ‘incredible gift’ that let the Masters in and exiled us from our lives.”
“Well, maybe if you still had the gift you could fix things.”
“I doubt it.”
“How would you know, now that you’re one of us?” She stood up and went to the window. It had started to rain. “Professor Dunn?”
“Yes?” I didn’t bother to correct her again.
“I don’t want to be alone. Can I stay here? Just for tonight? I know I’m supposed to be a different me, but I still feel a lot like the old me. I don’t belong here yet.”
I knew the feeling. “Of course you can stay.”
She turned away from the window. “I don’t mean I want to sleep with you. That’s not what I’m saying.”
Ridiculously, I blushed again. “I understand.”
“I just don’t want to go home yet.”
“Absolutely.”
I cooked a frozen pizza. We talked about our lives in the previous and present iterations, locating the points of commonality and tracing where the iterations diverged. The process of investigation, analysis, and revelation was similar to what I used to do with numbers and equations, only here I was exploring a human equation, and it was exhilarating. For me, a whole new field of discovery.
Lisa fell asleep on the sofa. I spread a blanket over her and settled back in my lounger with my feet up on the coffee table and a blanket of my own pulled to my chin. Rain ticked against the window. My thoughts followed divergent paths. During our long conversation I had frequently found myself looking directly into Lisa’s expressive eyes, responding to personality cues. Losing the curse of my so-called genius seemed also to have relieved me of my social awkwardness. Except for the End Of Humanity In All Worlds, it felt almost like an decent tradeoff.
As I drifted further toward sleep, I entered the realm of intuitive fantasy and insight, of auditory and visual hallucination rising from the borderland of consciousness. I quite distinctly heard Lisa say Maybe if you still had it you could fix things, and I startled out of near-sleep, knocking the empty pizza box off the coffee table. I stood up and paced around the room, feeling the kind of excitement I’d only ever felt when the solution to a particularly difficult problem presented itself. Too excited to keep the insight to myself, I shook Lisa awake.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just—I think I can fix it.”
She squinted, still groggy. “Fix—?”
“The Masters, all of it. Listen to me. Every time the tunnel opens it’s right in front of me, and the first Master comes straight at me. Add to that, Whitfield went out of his way to assure me there was nothing I could do to cancel the incantation, and what does that tell you?”
She blinked. “I don’t know?”
“It tells me there is a way to cancel the equation, and I’m the only one who can do it. Makes perfect sense, if you let it. The fact that the incantation existed in the first place means it must have been used—used and then canceled by an equation of equal but opposing power. Otherwise we would already have been living in a world dominated by the Masters, correct?”
“Oh my God.”
“There is just one problem.”
She fell back on the sofa cushion. “You can’t fix it, because now you’re one of us instead of a genius.”
“Yes.”
“I wish you hadn’t woken me up.”
“No, it’s still good. The Masters are going to appear in every iteration, every bubble world, including this one. So all we have to do is wait until they come. Their arrival will trigger my flight response, and we’ll shuffle across to a bubble where I’ve retained my special aptitude.”
“Your genius.”
“If that’s what you prefer.”
“How long for that to happen?”
I lifted my empty hands. “I have no idea.”
In the morning Lisa went home to face her life and I reported to the Swedish Clinic on California Avenue, only a few blocks from my apartment. Throughout that first morning I was on edge, expecting at any moment to be confronted by the tunnel and the questing tentacles of a Master intent on crushing me.
But it didn’t happen.
Instead, I changed into my blue scrubs, greeted my co-workers, collected the day’s first blood-draw orders, and started work. I looked at the top sheet and thought, as I always did: It’s show time, and called into the waiting room, “Jonas Beckwith?” A large man with wispy white hair and a potato nose stood up. I led him to Room 3 and asked him to roll up his sleeve.
By lunch I was as much my new self as my former self. The routines and habits of my circumscribed life asserted themselves. Memories long ago formed in the current bubble pushed aside memories I’d carried over in side-slip flight. My ten years teaching at the University of Washington appeared almost as the structure of a life lived not by me but by a particularly adept memoirist whose journals I’d read.
The last patient of the day, a young blonde woman named Jo Kaye, stood up when I called her name. She was wearing a red and black Pendleton coat. The sight of it sent a disorienting wave through my head, and I had to lean against the wall. The Pendleton reminded me of Daniel Whitfield’s duck-hunting hat; it reminded me of who I had been, and I realized my ‘Professor Dunn’ identity, in one short day, had submerged into the memory pond and stranded me in a life that already felt comfortably lived-in. It was a startling realization, though perhaps no more startling than the knowledge that I might find contentment here. Could the fleeting panic of a ‘wasted’ life be nothing more than a ripple from a lost iteration?
As if I were sleepwalking, I brought Jo Kaye to an unoccupied phlebotomy room, drew three tubes of her blood, properly capped and labeled them, and told Jo to have a nice day.
Have a nice day.
The minute my shift ended I ran back to my apartment, frightened and cursing the current iteration, a world where personal computing and cell phone technology lagged twenty years behind what I had been used to. What if I forgot who I was before I could reach the phone in my kitchen and call Lisa, the only person in the world who could anchor me to my former identity? I’d written her number down but didn’t bring it with me.
I came winded and anxious onto my street. Lisa was sitting on the steps leading to the lobby of the Franklin Apartments. I halted on the sidewalk, breathing hard. She saw me and stood up. The moment suspended between us, almost dropped, then she said, “Professor Dunn,” and her voice cracked. I went to her. And this time I did hold and comfort her, though I still had no legitimate comfort to offer.
“I started forgetting, disappearing,” she sobbed into my shoulder.
“Me, too.”
“Why haven’t they come? You said they would come and then you could fix everything.”
“They’ll come. But. . .”
“But what?”
“It might not be like I said.”
She drew back, wiped her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“The other two times, the tunnel opened right in front of us and a Master came for me immediately. I think it’s because I was a treat—as long as I possessed the potential, at least, of expressing the counter equation and slamming the door shut on them again. But in this bubble I’m—”
“One of us.”
“Yes. Not a priority target.”
“So it’s hopeless.”
“Not as long as I remember my first iteration.”
“What good does remembering it do us? We’re better off forgetting.” She started to turn away.
“No,” I said, “we’re not.” I touched her shoulder. She wouldn’t look at me, but she was listening. “When the Masters arrive, however long that takes, I have to be ready. I have to remember how it all started and my part in it. Their arrival might still trigger the side-slip flight reaction, even if I’m not the primary target anymore. But moving to a different bubble, even one where my ability is intact, won’t help if I don’t remember who I was and what I have to do.”
She looked at me. “My day has been a nightmare. I have roommates and I don’t like them. We’re all college girls, even though I’ve got five years on both of them. There are all these little microaggressions. Even that word, “microaggression”? I’d never normally use a buzz word like that. Now it comes naturally. All day, since I left here, I’ve felt myself rising into this life and fading out of the one I came from.”
“We need a constant reminder, like your serpent tattoo.”
I looked into her eyes, that simple act that had eluded me in my so-called genius life, and she returned my gaze. This was communication on a wordless level, a level that maybe other people, normal people, took for granted but which I hadn’t previously known. Now the words didn’t even have to be said, but Lisa said them anyway.
“Professor Dunn? I’m moving in with you.”
That night I said, “You can have the bed.”
“No. This is your apartment. I’ll make do with the sofa.”
“Okay. But, Lisa? The sofa is the bed.”
“Oh, jeez. Look, I’ll go home.”
“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll buy a trundle bed tomorrow. If it goes on very long, we could rent a bigger place. Tonight I’ll sleep in the bathtub.”
“In the bathtub?”
“You know, padded with blankets and pillows. One night isn’t going to kill me.”
She looked doubtful.
“Honestly,” I said.
She nodded slowly. “So, this is one of those sofas that opens up?”
“Yeah.”
I showed her how it opened up. As soon as it was a bed, I hastily stripped off the dirty sheets.
“I’ll get you fresh,” I said.
Except my only other set of sheets were already in the laundry hamper.
“I’ll wash them,” I said.
“Where’s the washer and dryer?”
“In the building’s basement.”
Later, while the sheets tumbled in the dryer and I sat in a hard plastic chair reading a book under fluorescent light, Lisa came down the steps with a couple of white paper bags.
“Cheeseburgers,” she said. “We forgot to eat.”
“I didn’t forget. There just wasn’t anything in the apartment.”
“Well. Burgers.”
We sat next to each other, ate our cheeseburgers, and watched the laundry tumble. It was nice.
“This is more domestic than I like to get,” Lisa said.
“Oh, yes?”
“I don’t mean it’s bad or anything.”
“No?”
“No.”
The bathtub made a lousy bed. A lousy bed. It was too short, or I was too long. And no amount of cushioning made it any more comfortable, and I didn’t have much to cushion it with anyway. But my shift at Swedish started early, so I tried to make the best of it, pulling my elbows in and my knees up. I dozed fitfully, then opened my eyes. I’d left the bathroom door open, in case blood-thirsty Masters from the fifth dimension made an appearance and I had to get out fast. Lamp light shone out in the main room, and I could hear the saggy springs of the sofa bed squeak and groan under Lisa’s restless body. I cleared my throat and called out softly, “Are you all right?”
The bed stopped making noise. After a few moments Lisa replied. “Yes. I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? I can’t sleep.”
“You didn’t wake me up.”
“I keep thinking about them.”
“Them who?”
“You know. Them.”
“The Masters.”
“Whatever they are. Do you have any Ambien?”
“No. Wait a minute, I don’t know if I have any or not. Let me look.”
“Don’t get up.”
“I want to get out of this stupid bathtub anyway.”
In the process, I bumped the cold-water handle with my knee. The faucet gushed before I could crank it off. “God damn it.”
“What’s happening?”
“Just flooded my blankets with cold water.”
Lisa stood in the doorway, looking frowzy in her misbuttoned shirt and uncombed hair. I felt ridiculous and exposed in my boxers and T-shirt.
“Let’s see what I’ve got.” I opened the medicine cabinet. “No Ambien, but here’s Lunesta.”
“That works.”
I opened the box. It was mostly empty. Then I remembered I took one almost every night and that it was a habit that had begun to worry me but which I was not yet prepared to break. Pretty often I washed the Lunesta down with vodka and spring water.
“What’s wrong?” Lisa said.
“Nothing. Those early shifts are hard. I just remembered I’ve been taking pills for months. Maybe that’s why I’m having so much trouble getting to sleep tonight.”
“Or else it’s being all scrunched up in a bathtub.”
“Or that, yes.”
I tore a pill off the foil template and handed it to her.
“Professor?”
“You’re going to have to stop calling me that.”
“I don’t want to. It helps me remember.”
“Good. Don’t stop.”
“Professor Dunn, would you mind sitting next to me until this pill knocks me out? I’m really spooked and I feel massively insecure. Is it okay?”
“Of course.”
I pulled on a pair of pants and sat in a chair next to the sofa bed. Lisa lay on the bed under her covers. She looked over at me and after a while said:
“What I really need is a little human contact.”
Without moving a muscle I turned into a gawky thirteen-year-old boy.
“Could you come over here?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t mean sex.”
“The answer is still yes.”
I stretched out beside her and put my arm around her. She rested her head on my chest.
“What if they come and we can’t slip away to another bubble?”
“That won’t happen.”
“I can’t believe any of this is real.”
The Lunasta turned out her lights in a matter of minutes, but I didn’t return to my soggy bathtub bed. I held Lisa for what remained of the night, and once in a while I kissed the soft wave of her hair.
The building shook violently. One moment I was standing in the kitchen filling the kettle with water for coffee, the next I was flat on my back. The cupboard flew open and a stack of dishes crashed onto the counter, shattering. I rolled away and covered my face. Sharp fragments bounced off my shoulder, rained onto the floor around me. The shaking paused. I held my breath. Lisa cried out from the other room. I gained my feet and stumbled out of the kitchen. She stood at the west-facing window, hands braced on the frame, her body rigid. There was a long gash on her right calf.
“Earthquake,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”
She turned and gave me the look a cement wall gives a speeding car. I knew what she was going to say before she said it: “No. It’s them. And we’re still here. Look at the sky, Professor Dunn. Look at it.”
I approached the window. The sky boiled with sulfurous yellow clouds. Wind-smudged pillars of smoke rose from fires too numerous to count. Already the invasion was well under way, and the Masters had taken no notice of me.
“Damn it.”
I turned around. In the kitchen doorway Lisa stood holding the phone. “It’s dead.” She dropped the handset and it dangled at the end of its cord. She pulled on her pants and jammed her feet into flats. She was halfway out the door when I said, “Where are you going?”
“My parents live in Northgate. I want to see them before it ends.”
“Lisa—”
She waited.
I lifted my empty hands. “I’m sorry.”
“Goodbye, professor.”
I stood there in shock. Then I forced myself to move, to go after her. We might still survive this. At the least I could help her reach her parents. I ran into the hall. She was just turning the corner for the stairs. Another violent jolt hit the building. I bounced off the wall like a pinball. The lights flickered out and plaster dust sifted from the ceiling. I rubbed it out of my eyes. Lisa was gone. It was my fault. Completing the equation was what my mind had been designed to do. When Whitfield handed me the paper the solution was as good as accomplished. Because I had to keep proving to myself that I really was the genius I continually told myself I didn’t want to be.
I staggered out of the building. The air was thick with that brine-and-death stink of the Masters. I stood on the sidewalk, looking for Lisa. She didn’t own a car. It was mad to think she could make it to Northgate alone on foot, more than ten miles through a devastated urban landscape. Smoke rose above the townhouses and apartment buildings. A woman screamed on the next block. Gunfire popped rapidly. I ran toward the sound.
A tunnel opened above the main intersection of Alaska and California. A cop stood before it, fumbling with his handgun, trying to reload. I saw Lisa. She cowered in the doorway of Cupcake Royale. A three-story brick facade loomed above her. A Master emerged from the tunnel, its pink and black tentacles flailing excitedly. One seized the cop in a boa-coil grip. His gun clattered to the street. The Master lofted him into the air, shook him violently, and dashed him down, his head bursting like a melon. The Master unleashed a piercing ululation, something between a siren and a wolf howl. Other Masters came humping out of the tunnel. One casually whipped a tentacle as thick as a fire hose into the face of the building Lisa cowered against. I yelled “No!” as the bricks tumbled in a deafening avalanche that buried her. One naked foot extended from the rubble, hazed in cloud of masonry dust.
My throat burned. I couldn’t breathe. The flight response fluttered in my chest. But it wasn’t self-preservation, escape from the Masters. I simply couldn’t absorb what I’d done, my responsibility for the whole mess. I took a step toward Lisa, as if I could do anything for her, and the ground seemed to fall away. Not a crack in the pavement but that elevator-drop feeling of a side-slip across worlds.
And found myself on California Avenue pushing a shopping cart loaded with hobo possessions (musty cloth sleeping bag; a collection of empty soda cans rattling tinnily against the cart’s wire frame; a lamp shade pointlessly salvaged out of the garbage, and, most importantly, a broken guitar). My alcohol-saturated brain seethed with numbers. In this iteration I was a drunk, and a madman, and, once again, a mathematical savant, albeit who had no knowledge of the Whitfield equation.
But I remembered. And I remembered what I owed.
Night fell. I drew the guitar from my shopping cart. On the headstock, faded and chipped gold letters spelled YAMAHA. The high e string was missing, and a ragged hole gaped in the body, where someone had put their boot through it.
I arranged myself in the doorway of Cupcake Royale, the spot where, in another world, Lisa had died, and began fingering the strings of the Yamaha. A few people dropped coins into my Starbucks begging cup. Notes picked on the remaining five strings of the guitar teased order from the maelstrom inside my head. I listened for Whitfield’s equation and finally began to see it. A long string of numbers and symbols unwound before my interior vision. Now that I’d recovered the equation that had opened the door to the Masters, what incantatory solution sealed it shut again?
Someone kicked the bottom of my shoe. I opened my eyes and blinked at Daniel Whitfield. He stood over me, still wearing his camel hair coat and ear-flapped duck-hunting hat. A cigarette jutted from his lips. He removed it.
“We meet again,” Whitfield said.
“Keep away from me,” I said. My fingers continued to pick significant patterns up and down the fretboard. I was close.
“Stop that and pay attention.” Whitfield yanked the guitar out of my hands.
“Don’t—”
“I’m sorry, Professor Dunn, but you suck on this thing.”
The closing equation was right there, its completion just out of sight. I needed my strings. But when I started to get up and reach for the guitar, Whitfield easily shoved me down.
“Let’s wait for the Masters together, shall we, professor?”
“I don’t understand why you want them,” I said.
He spread his hands. Ash dropped from the tip of his cigarette into my begging cup. “I am a humble servant of the New Order.”
On cue, a tunnel drilled open behind him. Shortly the involuntary mechanism buried within me would side-slip me to another bubble. If I lost my genius again it would be a meaningless reprieve. And I was so close to solving the closing equation.
I got on my feet and fought Whitfield for the guitar. He laughed. “You’re just a pathetic drunk.” He pushed me away, took the Yamaha by the neck with both hands, and swung it at the sidewalk. The body burst apart with an outraged twang of strings and crack of wood. He dropped the pieces.
The stink of brine and corruption rolled out of the tunnel. I thought, madly enough, One equation to rule them all. But the closing equation wasn’t to rule anything. All I wanted was to shut the door. I had momentum. Maybe I could finish it without the guitar. A ballpoint pen stuck out of Whitfield’s outside breast pocket. I grabbed it, then with both hands I shoved Whitfield in the chest, knocking him backwards into the tunnel. His surprised cry skirled away as if down a well. I turned and hunkered in the doorway. No paper, so I ripped my shirt sleeve open, clicked the pen, and began printing out the closing equation on the inside of my forearm. I’d had most of it before Whitfield ripped the guitar out of my hands. Now came the rest in a smeary blue intaglio. Something fluttered in my chest, and I fought against the flight response. The brine-and-death stink became overpowering.
A chain of numbers and mathematical symbols stretched from the crux of my elbow to the branching blue veins at my wrist. A tentacle slipped around my ribs, coiled tight, and jerked me off my feet even as I completed the final expression. My ribs snapped like branches. Blood gurgled up my throat . . . and then I felt the elevator drop. The unbearable pressure ceased. Briefly, I hovered in the dark, the closing equation repeating across my mind.
And like that, it was over.
The kid in the duck-hunting hat reached across my desk with a folded sheet of yellow graph paper in his fingers. “I think you will find this interesting.”
I ignored the paper and looked into Daniel Whitfield’s eyes. “Thank you, Mr. Whitfield. I did.”
A deep vertical crease appeared between his eyes. I finished packing my briefcase and closed it, smartly snapping the latches. Whitfield placed the paper on my desk blotter.
“This is intended for you.”
“Of course it is. Meanwhile, I’m late for class.”
Whitfield stood up and walked out of my office. I waited a minute, then picked up the paper, unfolded it without looking directly at what was written on it, and fed the thing into my document shredder.
In the hall, I pulled the door shut behind me, giving the knob a brisk shake to make sure it was securely locked. Then I headed not to class but to the Dean’s office.
I had to know how much Lisa remembered.