Spaceland Read online

  “I’ve always liked them,” I said. “We didn’t have a zoo anywhere near Matthewsboro, but I saw them in the circus. That’s where I grew up, a small town in Colorado.”

  “What are you talking about, Joe?”

  “Elephants?”

  “Do you expect every Indian to discuss elephants?” said Tulip, frowning a little. A loose hank of hair escaped her barrette and fell across her cheek. “I was talking about testing out new elements. For doping the chips at our fab. I was trying to tell you about my job.”

  “Reset,” I said. “You don’t like elephants?”

  “Not really. My mother had statues and paintings of Ganesh all over the house. He’s a god who looks like an elephant. He’s also the god of rats. Very fleshy, he’s kind of disgusting.” A sour twitch at the corner of her mouth.

  “You said you’re Catholic?”

  “I went to Holy Names Academy in San Jose. You’re new to the area, you probably don’t know about it. It’s a very good Catholic preparatory school. Yes, I’ve come to prefer monotheism. It’s more rational. I was president of the Cardinal Newman club at Stanford.”

  “Stanford? I’m impressed.” I glanced down at my menu. All the entrées were thirty bucks. “This is on Mophone, Incorporated, Tulip. Order whatever you want.”

  “Even caviar?” she said, a little teasingly.

  “Whatever it takes to float your boat. We’re in heavy recruiting mode at Mophone.”

  The waitress showed up and we ordered stuff, starting with caviar. Tulip gave me an amused look.

  “When you say we, Joe—who else is at Mophone besides you?”

  I offered my impression of a cocky Tom Cruise smile. It was a look I’d practiced in the mirror back in college. “Just me,” I said. “But I’ve got a new technology you’re not going to believe.” I handed her a business card.

  I saw a flash of pity in Tulip’s eyes as she glanced at the card and put it away. “Maybe we should just call this a date, Joe,” she said. “Not everything has to be a big business deal. What were Spazz and Jena doing when you saw them this afternoon?”

  “They were lying down naked and kissing each other,” I said. “In what used to be my bedroom.”

  “Oh,” said Tulip, staring down at her glass. The skin below her eyes looked almost black. “What does he see in her, I wonder?”

  “She’s sexy,” I said. “And she’s new. I think that’s the main thing for Spazz, isn’t it? Another conquest. He’s so into himself I don’t think he looks any deeper than that. Jena’s hot, and she wants him, and that’s enough.”

  “And Jena?” said Tulip in a brittle tone. She wasn’t liking this. “Why does she want Spazz? I’d peg Jena for picking someone—” She paused to choose the right word. “Someone more conventional.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Someone like me. A weak, conventional person that she can dominate. But—you know what, Tulip? I’m changing. I’ve been through some heavy stuff recently.”

  “I still don’t get why Jena wants Spazz,” repeated Tulip, seemingly unwilling to talk about me. “She’s a goody-goody little junior exec.”

  “That’s how she likes to present herself these days,” I said. “But she’s more chaotic than you realize. Spazz validates her chaos.” Usually I didn’t think this much about relationships. Maybe my subtle vision had opened my mind to more than just the fourth dimension. “Jena going to Spazz is like a flip-flop,” I said. “I guess I can tell you that Jena had some major problems with her stepfather growing up. Sex became this power thing for her. always about master and slave. I—I let her be the master, and I think now she’s ready to be Spazz’s slave.” Was this me talking? “I don’t really blame her,” I concluded. “I wish her well.”

  “I’d like to wring her scrawny neck,” said Tulip in a matter-offact tone. And then she raised her voice to imitate Jena. “Oooh Spazz, you’re so smart. Oooh Spazz, I like your big bad motorcycle.”

  “Spazz is the one I want to kill,” I said. “But maybe we should be talking about us. Truth be told, Tulip, you’re much sexier than Jena.”

  “Thanks,” said Tulip, accepting the compliment but not passing one hack. She didn’t seem too interested in me. The waitress brought the caviar and we had some fun with that. It was in a bowl on a plate of ice with little dishes of minced onion and hard-boiled egg. I’d ordered champagne to go with it.

  “What was all that about offering me a job?” said Tulip after we toasted each other. “Were you serious? What is Mophone, anyway?”

  “I’ve gotten hold of about ten thousand special cell-phone antenna crystals,” I said. For the moment I wasn’t going to try explaining where they came from. “They’re very small, and they pipe the signals out into—oh, call it a superchannel. There’s no other signals in the superchannel, and no interference. You can use whatever frequencies you like.”

  “I’ve never heard of any superchannel,” said Tulip. “And where would you be getting cell phone hardware anyway? I hope you’re not buying chips on eBay. Some of the scuzzier fabs are dumping their defectives there. They’re not good for much besides really lightweight apps. Things like musical greeting cards.”

  “These aren’t chips,” I said. “They’re antennas. They stick out into the superchannel. Here, look,” I handed Tulip an antenna crystal that I’d brought along. Her face looked happy and confident as she took it. Hardware was her thing. She gave the crystal a onceover and then pulled a magnifying glass out of her purse.

  “I always carry this in case I find a beetle,” said Tulip, gesturing with the lens and not really looking at my crystal yet. Once again I noticed the dark acne scars on her cheeks. “You never know when one will turn up. Have you ever heard the story about what the biologist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane said to the clergyman?”

  “Can’t say as I have,” I said, putting on a bit of a cowboy accent.

  “The clergyman goes, ‘Professor Haldane, as a naturalist, you have an exceptional familiarity with the Creation. Might you draw any conclusions about the Maker?’” Tulip paused, raised her finger, and delivered Haldane’s answer in a drawling, upper-crust tone. “‘He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.’”

  “Shucks howdy,” I said, slapping my thigh to get a smile out of her. I was really enjoying Tulip.

  Now she turned her attention to the antenna crystal. “No number on it,” she said. “Was this highjacked from some fab by a Vietnamese gang?”

  “Stop worrying about where I got it,” I said. “Can you see what it does?”

  “I don’t think it does much,” said Tulip after a bit. “There’s nothing to it. These two wires just go in and disappear in the middle. The chip looks like plain silicon. It’s a square of glass with two wires in it.”

  “Ah, but the wires don’t really disappear,” I said. “They make a right-angle bend out into the superchannel. There’s a connecting loop that you can’t see.”

  “You’re not technical at all, are you?” said Tulip, handing the antenna crystal back to me. “I hope you didn’t pay much for these.”

  “Just trust me on this,” I told Tulip. She seemed so competent and practical that I was hesitant to tell her my crazy story about the fourth dimension. She’d think I was nuts. It would be better to tell her after she’d seen the crystals in action. “This is an antenna,” I said, tapping the crystal. “And it uses a non-standard transmission channel. I’m ready to pay whatever it takes for you to spend a day or two making a pair of prototype Mophones for me. Once you see that I’m right—well, we can take it from there.”

  “I could do it,” said Tulip, twisting the stray rope of hair that hung across her cheek. “It would be easy. Would you pay me—oh, four thousand dollars a day? Even if your antennas don’t work?”

  “Done,” I said, happy to play the big shot. We were finishing off our main courses now. “I can pay you cash in advance for your first day, if you like.”

  Tulip looked up from her plate. “Pay me right now?”


  “Sure,” I said. I used my third eye to look around to see if anyone was watching us, but everyone was into their own personal dinner dramas. I counted forty hundreds out of my wallet and forked them over. Tulip tucked them into her purse. Finally she looked impressed.

  “Can you do it tomorrow?” I asked her.

  “The first Monday of the new Millennium?” said Tulip. “Oh, I guess I could. It’s just going to be stupid Y2K meetings. Nothing will get done. I’ll call in sick.” The corners of her mouth looked determined.

  Over dessert I asked her again if she wanted to sublet a room.

  “We can talk about it tomorrow,” said Tulip, glancing at her watch. She tossed her head, making her earrings jangle. “I’ve got to get back to my sister’s. She and her husband want to go to a midnight concert by Turbans Over Memphis and I promised to baby-sit. The Turbans are playing at the Naz, that Indian movie theater I told you about, with a Satyajit Ray film in the background. Very retro. All the cool Indian engineers will be there.”

  I paid the check and we went outside. “It was nice to have dinner with you,” I told Tulip.

  “You bet it was nice,” said Tulip with a big smile, her cheeks shining. “You really cheered me up. I’ll come by around ten tomorrow morning? To the address on your card?”

  “Beautiful,” I said. As she walked off, I peeked into her fine body. Was her heart beating just a little bit fast?

  The wind was blowing harder than ever, like it was trying to rain. When I got back to my house I was too excited to go to bed. For some reason it struck me that this might be a good time to get some more money from Wells Fargo. Go ahead and get enough cash to pay Tulip for her second day. Wackle hadn’t showed up again; maybe Momo was keeping him away.

  The blue velvetlike sack was floating next to my new butterfly chair, slowly changing its shape as it drifted vinn and vout. I’d tied its shiny gold-colored rope to the chair’s leg to keep it from floating off into the All. I untethered the sack and peeled myself vinnwards. Once again all my clothes stayed behind. Going into the fourth dimension was like jumping right out of my socks. I wrapped the sack’s cord around my waist and started to flap.

  Even though it was nighttime in Spaceland, the higher light of the All filled Dronia and bounced off the objects of our hyperflat world. I could see fine. I wondered if Momo was still over on the Klupper side, trying to watch over me. I’d forgotten to check on her before taking off into Dronia. And now that I was over here, Spaceland blocked the view of the Kluppers’ half of the Cave Between Worlds.

  Flying alongside the village to Wells Fargo seemed like more work than it had before, and by the time I got there I was too tired to think very hard. I just went to the same stuffed safe-deposit box and cleaned it the hell out, not bothering to count how many bundles I took. Maybe half a million bucks, all stuffed into the hyper sack tied to my waist.

  I backed off from Spaceland. And then something thumped me in the middle of my spine, pressing from my vinner side. I shrieked at the top of my lungs, twisting and flapping as hard as I could. I swung around towards Dronia to see what had touched me and—oh God, it was a red devil-shaped monster. I knew at once that it was Wackle.

  He was red and rubbery and constantly changing his shape. He had quite a few arms, or legs, and he had a tail that led vinn and vinn—a miles-long tail vanishing off towards the writhing anemones on the reefy Dronian cliffs. The horns on his head were soft and flexible, like snail horns. Eyestalks. He didn’t have any regular eyes in his face, but he had a mouth and a nose.

  “The pig fat Kluppers are anti than you know,” said Wackle. He didn’t talk at all like Momo. While Momo sounded Victorian, Wackle came across like an overexcited nut. “Momo’s freezeminded, Joe Cube, anti life and anti free. Listen to my tentacle of me. I’m red as your heart, true blue. Stop helping the Kluppers—or else what? A Wackle cackle!” And then he did cackle, long and loud, trying to scare me. His mouth resembled a giant clam shell, with rows of teeth inside.

  “Get away!” I yelled. “Don’t steal my money again!”

  “I make cosmic cause against Joe’s filthy paws,” said Wackle, coming towards me, his mouth opening right up around his head, and a new face coming out of his throat. “No no dough dough Joe Joe,” he said, catching hold of my bag of bills. A third face came out the mouth of his second face. His head was continually turning inside out.

  “Help!” I hollered and pulled back on the bag. I needed Momo. But she couldn’t help me here in Dronia. I had to get back into Spaceland where she could see me. Even though I was pointed away from Spaceland, I knew it was right behind me. I twitched like a crawfish backing under a rock and then, bingo, I felt myself locking back into Spaceland. I was standing naked on the lit-up sidewalk outside Wells Fargo. It must have been a little past midnight; nobody much was around, other than a few smokers in front of the Black Knight bar down the street.

  Things looked somehow weird, but before I could figure out why, two of Wackle’s hands were there in Spaceland with me, still grappling at my bag of bills. I yanked the bag, Wackle tugged back, I pulled some more, and now the bag opened and all the money fell out, the packets coming undone, and the bills swirling off down the street in the cold, damp gusts of wind. Damn!

  More of Wackle appeared in front of me, standing there like an over-the-top Halloween monster. He came for me, still talking in that jabbery way he had, and I screamed again, and then, all of a sudden, there was a big flash of light, like the biggest camera flashbulb you ever saw. Yet there was no sound of an explosion. Just this immense H-bomb of a flash, brighter than white, more like pale purple. It blinded me for a second, and while I was blind, something smacked into me and slid down my leg.

  When my vision slowly faded back in, I saw I’d been struck by a bloody chunk of Wackle. The jiggling glob drifted off through the pavement and disappeared. Wackle was gone. But my troubles weren’t over.

  There were sirens in the distance and shouts from down the street. The people outside the Black Knight—three men and two women—were running towards me, running towards the naked guy next to where the big flash had happened. And more people were coming out of the bar.

  Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of dollars were blowing down the sidewalk like fallen leaves. Of course when the barflies noticed this, they forgot about me and started gathering up the bills as fast as they could, shouting with excitement.

  “There’s money all over the place! Hundred dollar bills!”

  “Grab some, dude! Before the cops get here!”

  “Yeeee-haw!”

  Flashing police lights were coming up the street. I needed to get away. But this was no time to go back into hyperspace. I thought I knew a good combination of back streets and pedestrian walkways to get me home. I ran down into an alley beside the bank—and instantly got lost. Instead of being on my left, the parking lot I was expecting was on my right.

  “This isn’t real money,” came a shout from Santa Ynez Avenue. “It’s all backwards!”

  “Where’d the naked guy go?” shouted someone else. It seemed like they hadn’t noticed me going into the alley.

  I crouched down and ran through the parking lot, keeping myself behind the cars. I knew there was a bike path back here—but it, too, was in the wrong position, off on my right when it should have been on my left. I took it anyway, running with all my might. So far so good. Nobody was on my tail.

  A minute later I was on a pedestrian bridge over Route 17. I glanced down at the traffic—what the hell? The cars were all driving on the wrong side of the road. And the sign over the freeway that said Los Perros Next Exit was on my left instead of on my right. And—the writing on the sign was backwards. Somehow the world had turned into its mirror-image.

  My new house was close enough to the pedestrian bridge that I was able to find it. I just went from landmark to landmark, still wondering why left and right had changed places.

  All the doors to my house were locked, of course. A little hop in
to the fourth dimension would have gotten me in easily enough, but I still wasn’t ready to try that again. But then I remembered I’d left my bedroom window open. I scampered onto the back porch, with the window on the wrong side now, and climbed in.

  I’d sort of hoped my room wouldn’t be backwards, but it was. Everything the opposite of how I remembered it. The business books by my bed were in mirror-writing. I unfastened the tattered blue velvet hypersack from my waist, and, as I did, a few stray bills fell out of it. Unlike all the other writing around me, the bills looked normal. They weren’t reversed.

  That last shout I’d heard came back to me. “This isn’t real money. It’s backwards.” But the money was the only thing that wasn’t backwards. It didn’t make any sense.

  I crawled into my bed and pulled up rhe covers, trying to imagine I was safe. But of course I wasn’t. Every nook and cranny of Spaceland was completely open—to the Kluppers on the vout side and to the Dronners on the vinn side. They could come for me anytime. A creepy feeling. I focused in on my third eye to see what I could see out in the All. But where I expected to see Momo and the soldiers, my third eye was instead aimed towards the cliffs of Dronia. I could almost grasp what had happened, but not quite. Hell with it. I was too tired to think about dimensions.

  Lord, it had been a long day. I’d moved, traveled to Grollyton, robbed a bank, started a company, hired Tulip, been attacked by a monster from the fourth dimension, and seen the world turn into its mirror-image. I wondered what Jena was up to. Cautiously I tested my feelings. My new resolve was still holding up. I was okay without Jena. I was really going to be okay.

  I fell asleep smiling.

  9

  Mophone, Inc.

  The next morning I got out of the wrong side of bed—or started to, but then I slammed my elbow into the wall. Damn. The world was still backwards. I used my third eye to peer out at the highway and, yes, all gazillion Monday-morning cars were driving on the wrong side. As long as I was using my third eye, I glanced into the All, hoping to catch sight of Momo. I’d forgotten that my third eye was sticking vinn towards Dronia, with its distant, writhing anemones. I definitely didn’t want to go there again.