function sidles away. Across the dimensions.â
Bending down is easy, itâs straightening up thatâs hard. I managed though, and I looked Jack in the eye, with my pulse pounding in my ears. âAcross the dementia?â
Jack laughed in my face. âDimensions! I explained all this to you the other night, Bert. When we were sitting out on the porch watching the cars melt into the night. Did you forget? Or maybe you werenât paying attention.â
âSure I was,â I lied. Jack was a retired professor with a droning voice that made him easy to ignore, like the hum from a bad amp. Plus my hearing is bad. Plus, Iâd been busy counting cars. A retired accountant needs a hobby.
âIâll explain it again,â said Jack. âPay attention this time.â
We poured some Early Times and ensconced ourselves in side by side rockers on the cracked, flaking, concrete slab that served as a London Earl front porch. We could see other condos, dank weeds, vine-covered trees and good old Route 42 that ran from Louisville to Goshen and on to Cincinnati. It had a lot of traffic, now that the interstates were privatized.
It was August, with the locusts shrilling. I always needed to remember that the steady sound wasnât actually inside my head. August. The London Earl didnât have air-conditioning, but thanks to the wandering poles, the Kentucky summer wasnât all that hot anymore.
Jack rolled us two cigarettes from his faithful pack of Bugler tobacco. Only rarely did he lose that. Bugler was illegal, of course, but Jack copped from Hector, paying him with frogs he caught in the London Earlâs green-skimmed pool. Fighting frogs. Hector was deep into the local frogfight scene. The handlers would glue locust thorns to the frogsâ heads and set them loose on one another, like murderous little unicorns. But Iâm getting off the subject.
Jack was still explaining how things disappear. He had his own way of explaining.
âSo there I was,â he said. âWith a PhD in math, by the skin of my teeth, and no job. Luckily I got on at Knowledge College in Next Exit, Indiana. Iâm sure youâve heard of it.â
âWho hasnât?â I said, even though I hadnât.
âTaught there part-time for almost fifty years. Retired as Adjunct Emeritus. Did a lot of research along the way. At one point I teamed up with a physics prof, Chandler something-or-other; string theory dude. I did the math and he pulled the strings, so to speak. Chandler thought there were infinitely many alternate universes. We were hoping we could find one. Chandler figured that if we could, he could snag a Nobel Prize. Me, I was after a Golden Pi.â
âWhat flavor is that?â
âGreek. Golden Pi. The big math award. Iâm sure youâve heard of it.â
âWho hasnât?â I said, even though I hadnât. âRoll me another.â
Jackâs cigarettes were perfect; they had hospital corners. He fired up a strike-anywhere match; he kept a pocket full. I leaned over Jackâs match and took a deep hit of the harsh, calming tobacco smoke. Instant headache, instant calm. They used to give cigarettes to mental patients. But now bluegene was the thing.
âWe were ambitious in those days,â said Jack dreamily. âNow, not so much.â
âSo what happened to this Chandler?â I asked.
âWellâI came up with a mathematical tool for simplifying his theories. A renormalization technique. It turned out thereâs not infinitely many universes at all. They cancel each other out. Like correction terms. And at the end thereâs just two of them left. Oursâand a second one. Itâs kind of an echo. We named it the alsoverse. And then Jack went down the tubes.â
âHe wasnât happy?â
âDidnât like the alsoverse. Didnât like losing all those endless worlds. He went into a depression, and then
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