Mad Professor Read online

  “We have to stop her!” I tell Jerome, picking up my purse.

  “What?” he says. He sounds tired.

  “We have to run after Harna.”

  Jerome looks at me for a long time. And then he smiles. “If you say so, Glenda. Being with you is interesting.”

  The two of us run down the apartment stairs and right away I can see that things are seriously weird. The cars across the street are two-thirds as big as the cars on my side.

  “Hurry,” I tell Jerome, and we run around the corner to the next block. The houses on that next street are half the size of the houses on my street. We run another block, which takes only a couple of seconds, as each block is way smaller than the one before. The houses are only waist high. We go just a little farther and now we’re stepping right over the houses, striding across a block at a time.

  Another step takes us all the way across Route 101, the step after that across east San Jose. The further from Jerome’s picture we get, the smaller things are.

  “Perspective!” exclaims Jerome. “The world has shrunk to perspective!”

  We hop over the foothills. And now it gets really crazy. With one last push of our legs, we leap past the moon. It’s a pale yellow golf ball near our knees. We’re launched into space, man. The stars rush past, all of them, denser and denser—zow—and then we’re past everything, beyond the vanishing point, out at infinity.

  Clear white light, firm as Jell-O, and you can stand wherever you like. Up where it’s the brightest, I see a throne and a bearded man in it, just like in Jerome’s paintings. It’s God, with Jesus beside Him, and between them is the Dove, which I never did get. Right below the Trinity is my own Virgin of Guadalupe, with wiggly yellow lines all around her. And up above them all are my secret guardians, the Powerpuff Girls from my favorite Saturday morning cartoon. Jerome sees them, too. We clasp hands. I know deep inside myself that now forever we two are married. I’m crying my head off.

  But somebody jostles me, it’s Harna right next to us, pushing and grunting, trying to wrestle our whole universe into a brown sack. She’s the shape of a green Bosch-goblin with a slit mouth.

  I turn off the waterworks and whack Harna up the side of the head with my purse. Jerome crouches down and butts her in the stomach. Passing the vanishing point has made us about as strong as our enemy, the demonic universe-collector. While she’s reeling back, I quick get hold of her sack and shake its edges free of our stars.

  Harna comes at me hot and heavy, with smells and electric shocks and thumps on my butt. Jerome goes toe-to-toe with her, shoving her around, but she’s starting to hammer on his head pretty good. Just then I notice a brush and tubes of white and blue paint in my purse. I hand them to Jerome, and while I use some Extreme Wrestling moves from TV on Harna, Jerome quick paints a translucent blue sphere around her with a cross on top a spirit trap.

  I shove the last free piece of Harna fully inside the ball and, presto, she’s neutralized. With a hissing, farting sound she dwindles from our view, disappearing in a direction different from any that we can see. I wave one time to the Trinity, the Virgin, and the Powerpuff Girls, and, how awesome, they wave back. And then we’re outta there.

  The walk home is a little tricky—that first step in particular, where you go from infinity back into normal space, is a tough one. But we make it.

  As soon as we’re in my apartment, I help Jerome slap some house-paint over his big mural. And when we go outside to check on things, everything is back to being its own right size. We’ve saved our universe.

  To celebrate, we get some Olde Antwerpen forty-ouncers at the 7-11 and hop onto my bed, cuddling together at one end leaning against the wall. I’m kind of hoping Jerome will want to get it on, but right now he seems a little tired. Not too tired to check out my boobs though.

  Just when it might start to get interesting, here comes Harna’s last gasp. I can’t see her anymore, but I can hear her voice, and so can Jerome.

  “Have it your way,” intones the prissy universe-collector. “Keep your petty world. But the restoration must be in full. Before I leave for good, Hieronymus must go home.”

  “Think I’ll stay here,” says Jerome, who’s holding a tit in one hand and a beer in the other.

  “Back,” says Harna, and her presence disappears for good.

  As she leaves, the living breathing man next to me turns into—oh hell—an art book.

  “No way,” I sob. “I need him.” I quick say the Hail Mary three times, like the sisters taught me. But the Bosch book just sits there. I pour some of the microhomies onto it. Nothing doing. I squeeze red paint onto the book cover and stick a split Oreo cookie to it. Still no good. And then in desperation, I pray to my special protectors, the Powerpuff Girls. And the day’s last miracle begins.

  The book twitches in my hands, throbs, splits in two, and the two copies move apart, making a, like, hyperdimensional man-hole.

  And, yes, pushing his way out of the hole, here comes my Hieronymus Bosch, his hair flopping, his eyes sharp, his mouth thin with concentration.

  He’s in my bed—and the dumb book is gone. Screw art history. Jerome will make even better paintings than before. And if that doesn’t work out, there’s reality TV.

  You know anybody who can help with my show?

  SIX THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

  CONCERNING THE NATURE OF

  COMPUTATION

  EXPERIMENT I. LUCKY NUMBER

  The first Sunday in October, Doug Cardano drove in for an extra day’s work at Giga Games. Crunch time. The nimrods in marketing had committed to shipping a virtual reality golf game in time for the holiday season. NuGolf. It was supposed to have five eighteen-hole courses, all of them new, all of them landscaped by Doug.

  He exited Route 101 and crossed the low overpass over the train tracks, heading toward the gleaming Giga Games complex beside the San Francisco Bay. A long freight train was passing. Growing up, Doug had always liked trains, in fact he’d dreamed of being a hobo. Or an artist for a game company. He hadn’t known about crunch time.

  Just to postpone the start of his long, beige workday, he pulled over and got out to watch the cars clank past: boxcars, tankers, reefers, flatcars. Many of them bore graffiti. Doug lit a cigarette, his first of the day, always the best one, and spotted a row of twelve spray-painted numbers on a dusty red boxcar, the digits arranged in pairs.

  11 35 17 03 21 18

  SuperLotto, thought Doug, and wrote them on his cardboard box of cigarettes. Five numbers between 1 and 47, and one number between 1 and 27.

  Next stop was the minimarket down the road. Even though Doug knew the odds were bogus, he’d been buying a lot of SuperLotto tickets lately. The grand prize was hella big. If he won, he’d never have to crunch again.

  The rest of the team trickled in about the same time as Doug. A new bug had broken one of the overnight builds, and Van the lead coder had to fix that. Meanwhile Doug got down to the trees and bushes for course number four.

  Since the player could mouse all around the NuGolf world and even wander into the rough, Doug couldn’t use background bitmaps. He had to create three-dimensional models of the plants. NuGolf was meant to be wacky and fantastic, so he had a lot of leeway: on the first course he’d used cartoony saguaro cactuses, he’d set the second links underwater with sea fans and kelp, the third had been on “Venus” with man-eating plants, and for the fourth, which he was starting today‒well, he wasn’t sure what to do.

  He had a vague plan of trying to get some inspirations from BlobScape, a three-dimensional cellular automata package he’d found on the web. Cellular automata grew organic-looking objects on the fly. Depending what number you seeded BlobScape with, it could grow almost anything. The guy who’d written BlobScape claimed that theoretically the computation could simulate the whole universe, if only you gave it the right seed.

  When he started up BlobScape today, it was in a lava lamp mode, with big wobbly droplets pulsing around. A click of the Randomize button
turned the blobs into mushroom caps, pulsing through the simulation space like jellyfish. Another click produced interlocking pyramids a bit like trees, but not pretty enough to use.

  Doug pressed the Rule button so he could enter some code numbers of his own. He’d done this a few times before, every now and then it did something really cool. It reminded him of the Magic Rocks kit he’d had as boy, where the right kind of gray pebble in a glass of liquid could grow green and purple stalagmites. Maybe today was his lucky day. Come to think of it, his SuperLotto ticket happened to be lying on his desk, so, what the hey, he entered 11 35 17 03 21 18.

  Bingo. The block of simulated space misted over, churned and congealed into—a primeval jungle inhabited by dinosaurs. And it kept going from there. Apemen moved from the trees into caves. Egyptians built the Sphinx and the pyramids. A mob crucified Christ. Galileo dropped two balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Soldiers massacred the Indians of the Great Plains. Flappers and bootleggers danced the jitterbug. Hippies handed out daisies. Computers multiplied like bacilli.

  Doug had keyed in the Holy Grail, the one true rule, the code number for the universe. Sitting there grinning, it occurred to him that if you wrote those twelve lucky digits in reverse order they’d work as a phone number plus extension. (811) 230-7153 x11. The number seemed exceedingly familiar, but without stopping to think he went ahead and dialed it.

  His own voice answered.

  “Game over.”

  The phone in Doug’s hand turned into pixels. He and the phone and the universe dissolved.

  EXPERIMENT 2. THE MILLION CHAKRAS

  Teaching her third yoga class of the day, Amy Hendrix felt lightheaded and rubbery. She walked around, correcting people’s poses, encouraging them to hold their positions longer than they usually did. Her mind kept wandering to the room she was hoping to rent. New to San Francisco, she’d been sleeping on couches for six weeks. But she still dreamed of becoming a force to be reckoned with in the city scene.

  It was time for Savasana, the Corpse Pose, with everyone lying on their backs. Amy turned off her Tabla Beat CD and guided the closing meditation.

  “Feel a slow wave of softness moving up your legs,” she began. “Feet, calves, knees, thighs.” Long pause. “Now focus on your perineum. Chakra one. Release any tension hiding there. Melt with the in-breath, bloom with the out. Almost like you’re going to wet your pants.” Amy occasionally added an earthy touch—which her mostly white clients readily accepted from their coffee-colored teacher.

  “Gather the energy into a ball of light between your legs,” continued Amy, pausing between each sentence, trying not to talk too much. “Slowly, slowly it passes upward, tracking your spine like a trolley. Now the light is in your sex chakra. Let it tingle, savor it, let it move on. The warmth flows though your belly and into your solar plexus. Your breath is waves on a beach.”

  She was sitting cross-legged at one end of the darkly lit room. The meditation was getting good to her. “Energy in, darkness out. The light comes into your chest. You’re in the grass, looking at the leaves in a high summer tree. The sun shines through. Your heart is basking. You love the world. You love the practice. You love yourself. The light moves through your neck like toothpaste out a tube. Chakra five. The light is balancing your hormones, it’s washing away your angry unsaid words.” Pause. “And now your tape loops are gone.”

  She gave a tiny tap to her Tibetan cymbal. Bonnng. “Your head is an empty dome of light. Feel the space. You’re here. No plans. You’re now.” She got to her feet. “Light seeps through your scalp and trickles down your face. Your cheeks are soft. Your mouth. Your shoulders melt. Your arms. I’ll call you back.”

  She moved around the room pressing down on people’s shoulders. She had a brief, odd feeling of leaning over each separate customer at once. And then her wristwatch drew her back. She had twenty minutes to get from here to Telegraph Hill to try and rent that perfect room.

  She rang the gong and saw the customers out. The last one was Sueli, a lonely wrinkled lady who liked to talk. Sueli was only one in the class as dark-skinned as Amy. Amy enjoyed her, she seemed like a fairy godmother.

  “How many chakras do you say there are?” asked Sueli. Clearly she had some theory of her own in mind. She was very well spoken.

  “Seven,” said Amy, putting on her sweats. “Why not?” She imagined she might look like Sueli when she was old.

  “The Hindus say seven, and the Buddhists say nine,” said Sueli, leaning close. “But I know the real answer. I learned it years ago in Sri Lanka. This is the last of your classes I’ll be able to come to, so I’m going to share the secret with you.”

  “Yes?” This sounded interesting. Amy turned out the lights, locked the door, and stepped outside with Sueli. The autumn sky was a luminous California blue. The bay breeze vibrated the sun-bleached cardboard election signs on the lampposts—San Francisco was in the throes of a wide-open mayoral election.

  “Some of us have millions of chakras,” continued Sueli in her quiet tone. “One for each branch of time. Opening the chakras opens the doors to your other selves.”

  “You can do that?” asked Amy.

  “You have the power too,” said Sueli. “I saw it in class. For an instant there were seven of you. Yes indeed.”

  “And you—you have selves in different worlds?”

  “I come and go. There’s not so many of me left. I’m here because I was drawn to you. I have a gift.” Sueli removed a leather thong from around her neck. Dangling from the strand was a brilliant crystal. The late afternoon sunlight bounced off it, fracturing into jagged rays. The sparkling flashes were like sand in Amy’s eyes. She felt like she was breaking apart.

  “Only let the sun hit it when you want to split,” said Sueli, quickly putting the rawhide strand over Amy’s head and tucking the crystal under her sweatshirt. “Good luck.” Sueli gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek as the bus pulled up.

  Amy hopped aboard. When she looked back to wave at the old woman she was gone.

  The room was three blocks off Columbus Avenue with a private entrance and a view of both bridges. It was everything Amy had hoped. But the rent was ten times higher than she’d understood. In her eagerness, she’d read one less zero than was on the number in the paper. She felt like such a dope. Covering her embarrassment, she asked the owner if she could have a moment alone.

  “Make yourself at home,” said the heavyset Italian lady. “Drink it in.” She was under the mistaken impression that Amy was rich. “I like your looks, miss. If you’re ready to sign, I got the papers downstairs in the kitchen. I know the market’s slow, but I’m not dropping the price. First, last, and one month’s damage deposit. You said on the phone the rent’s no problem?”

  “That’s what I said,” murmured Amy.

  Alone in the airy room, she wandered over to the long window, fiddling with the amulet around her neck. The low, hot sun reached out to the crystal. Shattered rays flew about the room, settling here and here and here.

  Nine brown-skinned women smiled at each other. Amy was all of them at the same time. Her overlapping minds saw through each pair of eyes.

  “We’ll get separate jobs and share the rent,” said one of her mouths. “And when we come back to the room we’ll merge together,” said another. “We’ll work in parallel worlds, but we’ll deposit our checks and pay the rent in just in this one.”

  “Great,” said Amy, not quite sure this was real. As she tucked away the crystal, her nine bodies folded back into one.

  Walking down the stairs to sign the papers, her mind was racing. She’d split into nine—but Sueli had said that, with the crystal, she could split into a million.

  Out the window she glimpsed another election poster—and the big thought hit her.

  With a million votes, she could be the next mayor.

  EXPERIMENT 3. AINT PAINT

  Although Shirley Nguyen spoke good English and studied with a crowd of boys in the chemical engineering prog
ram at U.C. Berkeley, she had no success in getting dates. Not that she was ugly. But she hadn’t been able to shed the old-country habits of covering her mouth when she smiled, and of sticking out her tongue when she was embarrassed. She knew how uncool these moves were, and she tried to fight them—but without any lasting success. The problem was maybe that she spent so much more time thinking about engineering than she did in thinking about her appearance.

  In short, to Westerners and assimilated Asians, Shirley came across as a geek, so much so that she ended up spending every weekend night studying in her parents’ apartment on Shattuck Street, while the rest of her family worked downstairs in the pho noodle parlor they ran. Of course Shirley’s mother Binh had some ideas about lining up matches for her daughter—sometimes she’d even step out into the street, holding a big serving chop-stick like a magic wand and calling for Shirley to come downstairs to meet someone. But Shirley wasn’t interested in the recently immigrated Vietnamese men that Binh always seemed to have in mind. Yes, those guys might be raw enough to find Shirley sophisticated—but for sure they had no clue about women’s rights. Shirley wasn’t struggling through the hardest major at Berkeley just to be a sexist’s slave.

  Graduation rolled around, and Shirley considered job offers from local oil and pharma refineries. On the get-acquainted plant tours, she was disturbed to note that several of the senior chemical engineers had body parts missing. A hand here, an ear there, a limp that betokened a wooden leg—Shirley hadn’t quite realized how dangerous it was to work in the bowels of an immense industrial plant. Like being a beetle in the middle of a car’s engine. The thought of being maimed before she’d ever really known a man filled her with self-pity and rebelliousness.

  Seeking a less intense job at a smaller, safer company, she came across Pflaumbaum Kustom Kolors of Fremont. PKK manufactured small lots of fancy paints for customized vehicles. The owner was fat and bearded like the motorcyclists and hot-rodders who made up the larger part of his clientele. Shirley found Stuart Pflaumbaum’s appearance pleasantly comical, even though his personality was more edgy than jovial.