Chasing Schrödinger’s Cat - A Steampunk Novel (2 page)

Chapter V:

A Seduction
–
My Too Perfect Sons

I
was
sitting on a couch in the basement lounge of the graduate students’ residence
later that evening making half-hearted attempts to undo Hope Buchan’s
blouse.
 
We had the place to ourselves
because the television was stuck on the multicultural channel and was now showing
a subtitled Korean drama called ‘
My Too
Perfect Sons’ about a mother’s attempts to find a wife for her son who cannot
forget his first love.

To be quite honest, I had little expectation I would be successful in exposing
Hope’s angular torso but it seemed only gentlemanly to try.
 
I had just finished telling her about my
dream and was half listening to her analysis while watching the TV out of the
corner of my eye.

“The prostitutes and the
suffragette obviously represent your ambivalent feelings toward women,” she
said, slapping my hand away from her breasts.
 
“You should listen to the suffragette.
 
Women were not put on this earth to serve as men’s playthings.”

“What was that?” I said, bringing
my attention back from a scene where pharmacy owner Jin-
pung
imagines stealing his first love Kim
Hye
-rim from her
husband Brutus by carrying her away on a motorcycle to find a “paradise of our
own.”
 
The Jin-
pung
character reminded me a lot of Moe
Szyslak
on the
Simpsons.
 
“Oh playthings,” I said.
 
“No.
 
Right.
 
We wouldn’t want that.”

You might be wondering how I came
to be involved with a humorless termagant like Hope Buchan.
 
Me too.
 
Like most other things in my life, it was something I had drifted
into.
 
We had coffee a couple of times
and the next thing you know, I became the guy she was ‘going around with.’

It wasn’t that I didn’t like
her.
 
I enjoyed her company in small
doses but I was uncomfortably aware that she felt we were becoming
‘serious.’
 
I had thought of breaking it
off more than once but let’s face it, women weren’t exactly knocking down my
door.

My worry was I might end up sleep
walking my way into marrying her.
 
I knew
I should be looking for someone ‘more compatible’ but where was I likely find
anyone with standards so undemanding they could put up with the likes of me?

I was busy trying to think up ways
to escape when the lounge door opened and a girl named Amy Kim came in.

“Hey Amy,” I said.

“
,”
she said.
 
“I love this show!
 
What’s happened so far?”

“Maybe Hope can fill you
in,” I said, getting up.
 
“I have to be
on my way.”

But the low-humor
portion of my evening was not yet over.
 
On the way out, I ran into one of those yellow wet floor signs.
 
I didn’t slip on the floor, but I did manage
to kick the sign over, earning myself a glare from the janitor.
 
I mention the incident only because silent
comedy mishaps have been a constant throughout my life.
 
If there’s a banana peel, I’ll slip on
it.
 
If there is a puddle on the street, a
car will drive by and drench me.
 
I have
never been hit in the face with a cream pie but I’m sure it will come.

That being said, things
had been pretty quiet on the slapstick front of late.
 
Whether it was because I had learned to be
more careful or the Universe was tired of
persecuting me I couldn’t say, but I was grateful for the breathing space.

Chapter
VI:

A
cluttered storeroom – Parallel Dimensions

“I
f you ever
did get to second base with her, you’d probably cut yourself on her ribs,” Bill
Fowler said when I told him about my failed seduction attempt later that evening.

Bill and I were getting pleasantly
drunk in what I call Bill’s
boneyard
, a cluttered
storeroom in the basement of the Electrical Engineering department filled with
outdated equipment of no earthly use to anyone but much too good to throw
out.
 
Bill was lying on a worn sofa next
to a shelf filled with ancient vacuum tubes, obsolete computer parts and other arcane
electrical paraphernalia.

“Anyway,” he continued, “we both
know she’s just keeping you around until someone better comes along.”
 
He looked at me through the brown glass of a Rainier bottle before draining the rest of its contents.

Going back to my classification
system, Bill is definitely one of the mole people.
 
He’s a big pear-shaped guy with a pony tail
and two days’ growth of stubble whose idea of formal wear is his prized Warren
Moon Seahawks jersey, but don’t let appearances fool you.
 
If you want to know the value of Planck’s
constant in Joule-seconds (6.62606896(33)x10
^-34
) or the words to the
Monty Python Philosopher’s Song, Bill’s your man.

You might wonder how a sloth like
me became friends with a mole person like Bill.
 
It turns out we’re both into pistol shooting.
 
Even so, we would never have met under normal
circumstances.
 
Bill is an old-fashioned,
dueling stance shooter.
 
Breath control,
proper sight picture, gentle trigger squeeze, all that Zen stuff.
 
Bill is really good.
 
He gets mad at himself if there is more than
one large hole in his target.
 
Me, I like
cowboy shooting.
 
Draw from a holster,
cock the hammer and fire.
  
I’m OK but still
have a tendency to rush my shots.

If you aren’t into handguns, the
differences between Bill’s interests and mine probably don’t seem like much,
but to the range warden who makes up the schedule, we’re as far apart as
Episcopalians and Southern Baptists.
 
As
a result, Bill and I never shoot at the same time.

But this one day, I was going to
the range and I saw this big, bewildered-looking guy surrounded by a pack of
feminazis
- sorry, progressive, socially-conscious young women.
 
He looked for all the world like a fat
raccoon that’s been treed by a pack of dogs.

Did I mention the range is attached
to the ROTC building?
 
The result is that
you sometimes have to run a gauntlet of protesters to get inside.
 
Usually they ignore the civilians and wait to
hassle someone in uniform but I guess they were on a tight schedule this
particular day and had to settle for Bill.

I could hear all the usual taunts.
‘Big gun, small penis, NRA flunky, gun
culture buffoon.’
 
You get used to
that holier-than-thou stuff from non-believers.

But as I got closer I could see
that one of Bill’s most vocal persecutors was none other than Mary Lou
Bernstein, the fellatio queen.
 
I was
offended.
 
People with trust funds have
no business lecturing others on social responsibilities.

“Well blow me down,” I said, “If it
isn’t Mary Lou Bernstein.
 
You ought to
be more careful of that nice Hermes scarf.
 
Looks like you’ve got a couple of spots on it.”
 
I made a coughing noise and wiped my hand
over my mouth.
 
“Sorry,” I
continued.
 
“I seem to have something
stuck in my throat.”

Mary Lou’s face went beet red and
she muttered something about ‘not wasting any more time with these morons’
before scurrying off down the street.
 
Her companions exchanged looks of confusion and followed her.

I saw Mary Lou being interviewed on
TV a couple of weeks later.
 
It was
during the Pacific Rim Leaders’ Conference and she was acting as the spokesperson
for a group calling themselves ‘The Black Brigade’ with her face covered like
an old-west train robber.

“We did it to draw the Fascist
police away so that our brothers and sisters could expose the hypocrisy of this
so-called conference,” she said, to explain why she and her black-clad chums
had just broken the front windows of a Seattle Starbucks.
 
“We contend that property destruction is not
a violent activity unless it destroys lives or causes pain in the process.”
 
How did I know it was her?
 
Her bandit bandanna was that same Hermes
scarf.
 
It’s not every day you see an
anarchist wearing a three hundred and fifty dollar fashion accessory.

It would be an understatement to
say Bill was grateful.
 
He shook my hand
like he was trying to see if it would come off and invited me for a beer back at
the aforementioned
boneyard
.
 
There we began the first of a series of
discussions on the nature of truth and the relative merits of domestic and
foreign beers.

Bill was a romantic, like so many
men with rough exteriors.
 
His views on
women were particularly idealistic.
 
For
example, he had jumped to Mary Lou Bernstein’s defense when I criticized her
for getting in his face outside the range.

“She’s probably just lonely,” he
said.
 
“It’s her way of connecting with
other people.
 
Anyhow, it was nice having
a pretty girl pay attention to me, even if she was getting spittle on my
shirt.”

“Would you go out with her?”

“As if she’d look twice at me.”

I had been about to tell him about
Mary Lou’s ongoing affair with Ross Percival but held off.
 
It would have been like that scene in
Cultural
Learnings
Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan
 
where the frat boys show Pamela Anderson’s sex
tape to Borat.

There was one topic on which Bill’s
ideas were strictly practical.
 
Beer.
  
“Some beer is better than others,” was his
view, “but as long as it’s not warm, there is no such thing as bad beer.”
 
Right now he was demonstrating the principle
by quick cooling another
Ranier
in a flask of liquid
nitrogen.

“And I’ll tell you something else,”
he said, when the beer had chilled to his satisfaction.
 
“Hope Buchan is totally out to lunch on dream
analysis.
 
Dreams have nothing to do with
the subconscious.”

“So what are they?”

“Doorways to parallel universes,”
he said, as he examined the glass object I had inadvertently brought back from
my last sleep session.
 
“You say this
glass thing was attached to a cat’s collar?
 
If you really did enter a parallel dimension it might have properties we
cannot even imagine.”

“Or it could just be an ornament.”

“To me it looks like a miniature
vacuum tube.
 
Too bad the glass is
cracked or we could test it out.
 
Bring
back another one next time you’re there.”

“I’m not sure there’ll be a next
time.
 
This cat business really has me
spooked.”

“Or bring back the cat,” Bill
said.
 
“A genetic freak like that would
go a long way to proving Everett’s contention that parallel worlds may be
governed by different physical laws.”

“Oh please don’t start talking
about string theory,” I said.
 
“I’m sorry
I brought it up.”

Bill said nothing but I could tell
he was offended.
 
I should know better
than to make fun of quantum physics.

“So you think dreams are real?” I
said, trying to make amends.

“As real as we are.”

“How real is that?”

“As real as
Niels
Bohr, as real as Hugh Everett.
 
Dreams
are how ideas spread themselves from one dimension to another.”

“Ideas don’t spread themselves.
 
They need humans for that.”

Bill looked at me with
condescension.
 
“Did you ever study
electricity and
 
magnetism
 
before you decided to waste your life?” he
asked.

“High school physics with Mister
Sanderson.”

“What happens when an electric
current flows through a wire?”

“It creates a circular magnetic
field around the wire.”

“And that is what Mister Sanderson
taught you?”

“It was.”

“Well Mister Sanderson should have
his pension confiscated.
 
Magnetic fields
and electrical currents are like conjoined twins.
 
You could just as easily claim that the
magnetic field around the conductor causes the current to flow.”

“What’s your point, aside from
slandering a dedicated teacher you
 
never
even met?”

“People and ideas are like
electricity and magnetism.
 
Each develops
the other.
 
Instead of saying that people
develop ideas, you could argue that ideas have developed people as a
transmission medium.”

I took a moment to digest this
thought and to open another
Ranier
.
 
“Well, if that’s so, I wish ideas would pay
me a fee for carriage.” I said, wiping beer foam from
 
my mouth.
 
“Mrs.
Gridestone
is going to throw my ass out
onto the street if I don’t come up with my rent soon.”

Bill pulled out his wallet and
peered into it myopically.
 
“Best I can
do is forty bucks,” he said.

“Keep your money.
 
You can’t spare it and it wouldn’t be enough
anyway.”

“You don’t have any rich relatives
you never mentioned?”

“As if.
 
We
Liddels
have
never been noted for financial wizardry.
 
And besides, we mostly can’t stand each another.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Bill
said.
 
“If you are really strapped, I have
a gig as a waiter at the Chancellor’s reception tomorrow.
 
I hear they might be looking for extra help.”

Which is how I found myself in
Wallace Hall the following night, looking and feeling absolutely ridiculous in
a starched white shirt and black bow tie.