Just a Couple of Days (2 page)

Then came Blip's response, despite increased patrols around the bridge. Surprising everyone, he broke with the initial one-word pattern and wrote an entire phrase, taking the time to paint: just a couple of days. He resisted phoning me until the next evening to see what I thought.

“It works,” I said, not wanting to encourage him.

“My ass it works. That phrase has never worked a day in its life. It dances, man, it dances across the side of that bridge.”

Working or dancing, the city was in a mild uproar for the next two days, eager to see what would happen. Strangers shared amiable smirks of solidarity with one another on the street, bars and coffeehouses made record business, and the traffic jams under the bridge took on a festive atmosphere no authority could or would suppress. Vendors set up tents and tables on the median, and picnics and Frisbees soon followed.

Local ad guys were surely incensed. Some sloppy graffiti on a highway overpass was gaining the coveted attention they never received for their flashy billboards. To add insult to injury, a
monkey-wrenching truck driver demolished a billboard near the bridge with a few pounds of dynamite. He was arrested and questioned about the bridge as well, but his travel log, stamped at truck stops around the country, provided a reasonable alibi. In the end, he received a nine-month jail sentence, but
SALE EXTRAVAGANZA
! had still been reduced to
ZA
!

But two days passed, then three, then four, and nothing at all happened. Nevertheless, it was generally agreed that the meaning of couple was not to be taken literally, for if it was, the mysterious scribe would have written two days instead. couple was taken to mean a few, or several, or however long it took for something to happen or for another reply to appear. Granted, the traffic snarls around the bridge were no longer so lighthearted (or frequent, for that matter), but the local population enjoyed the saga too much to let semantics get in the way. Blip was thus granted poetic license. He had been worried when the initial excitement dissipated, fearing he had foolishly ruined all of the fun.

“All right,” Blip breathed a sigh of relief one day in late September, after it was apparent that Graffiti Bridge had not waned in popularity. “It's his turn. But God help him. This dialogue has outgrown us already, and there's no telling where we're headed now.”

 

2
“What if this happened?” Blip halted our heretofore silent stroll across Tynee University, which despite its name was the largest campus in the country. I stopped reluctantly, sensing a stark-raving delusion on the swell. My intuition was confirmed when I turned around and found Blip standing motionless,
staring into his Styrofoam cup of cranberry echinacea tea and muttering under his breath. “They're putting,” he began aloud, “they're putting poison in the teas. Small amounts of a mild toxin, so that anyone who drinks herbal tea for health will only get sicker, see?” He slapped my arm with the back of his hand.

“What?” I looked past him at a small crowd of people gathering nearby in an attempt to hide my irritation at his increasingly fantastic paranoid fantasies.

“Poison!” he emphasized. “Don't you see? Any healing properties are canceled out then!”

“Blip . . . ,” I began.

“Who's gonna drink tea that makes you feel sick, eh?” He heaved the tea out of his cup. The broken mass of liquid flew several feet to his side and splotched onto a squirrel, flattening its tail and making it look more like a rat as it raced madly up the nearest tree.

“Christ, Blip! No one's poisoning your tea!”

“You heard it here first,” he persisted. “They're poisoning the teas.” He shook his head in sorrow, and so did I. Blip was a professor of sociology, but his department was being combined with the Anthropology, Political Science, Psychology, History, English, and Philosophy departments. It was part of Tynee University's downsizing and restructuring plan, combining all these departments into a single Humanities Department, which itself would be smaller than any one of the previous departments. Consequently, a good many Ph.D.s were going to lose their jobs. Blip was one of them, and he was not taking it well. He began spouting bizarre conspiracy theories the morning after the decision was finalized late last spring, calling to tell me that Tynee Industries was disposing of its low-level radioactive waste by
selling it off in minute quantities as staples through its office supplies branch. I, Dr. Flake Fountain, was unaffected by the restructuring. I was a molecular biologist then. Now I'm a threat to national security as well.

“Here's something interesting.” Blip snapped out of his herbal tea despondency and stooped to pluck a mushroom growing in a patch near the walkway. “Do you realize that this mushroom is bigger than the entire Green?”

“You haven't been eating those mushrooms, have you?”

“These are Haymaker's mushrooms. They're only mildly psychotropic, but very poisonous,” he responded matter-of-factly, beginning to tap his foot, as was his way whenever he became excited. “But see, this isn't a separate organism. What's in my hand is only a single part of a much larger whole. Look around, man. You'll notice these little brown bells all over the Green, whenever it's drizzled a lot.” He walked me along the sidewalk, pointing out the peppering of small mushrooms that were scattered everywhere. “See, the mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of a much larger organism that exists underground. Mushroom roots are called mycelium, and the mycelium is actually a huge network of fibers that are entwined and interconnected beneath our feet. It's just like an aspen grove. It looks like a bunch of different trees, but they grow rhizomatically, and are actually only a single tree. Did you know that?”

“Since when are you a botanist?”

“Mycologist,” he corrected. “And you should know the difference, a biologist like yourself. Mushrooms aren't plants. They don't have any chlorophyll.”

“I'm a
molecular
biologist,” I began to explain, then waved him off. Blip already understood the distinction. He was only
hassling me for what he claimed was my excessive knowledge of the minutiae of life and my relative ignorance of the bigger picture. I amended my question. “Since when are you a
mycologist
?”

“I overheard a student talking about a class she was taking. She said there's probably a single mycelial network beneath the entire Green. One organism. Pretty cool, huh?” Before I could nod, he continued, quickening the tap of his foot. “And you know what else? There are more connections in this mycelial network than there are in a human's neural network. That means it's
aware
.

“She said she learned that in her class?”

“Well not the last part. I added that on. But it makes sense, don't you think?” He hopped in front of me. “You think for one minute this humongous fungus under our feet isn't observing us right now? Think about it. There must be more than a hundred billion connections underground here. This thing is humming with awareness. You can even feel it if you pay attention.” He closed his eyes and made a show of feeling the ostensible hum of the mushroom. After a moment he popped them wide open in theatrical excitement. “Man,” he gushed. “People don't even realize they're being scanned by an extraterrestrial as they amble across the Green.” He nodded his head and looked around the ground. “Yeah, it's got us all figured out.”

This last embellishment marked a new direction for Blip's eccentricities. Heretofore, his delusions had been confined to the surface of the planet. “What's this now?” I asked.

“This giant mushroom is an extraterrestrial probe, man. It's called a von Neumann probe, a self-replicating machine. That's what the space cadets at NASA and SETI theorize would be the logical first step in space exploration. The way it works is you
send a few off into space in different directions, and whenever one of them detects a planet with favorable conditions, it lands and collects materials to build a duplicate of itself. The duplicate then takes off to another planet, and the original stays behind to search for life and collect and transmit data. For efficiency, the probes would have to be small, no bigger than a hockey puck, according to the astrophysicists. With a gizmo like that, they say the entire galaxy could be explored for signs of life in no time, relatively speaking of course.

“But here's their mistake: They're right on with the theory, but they're wrong about the size. What they missed was right in front of their faces. The best example of a self-replicating machine is life. An advanced civilization, as a
molecular
biologist like yourself would no doubt agree, would have mastered the appropriate use of biotechnology by the time they engaged in interstellar exploration. So why would they build it out of metal or plastic? And guess what else? Mushroom spores are so small and light they can drift right off the planet. And their shells are so hard they can survive outer space until they meander across another planet. The beautiful part of it is that they'll only self-replicate—reproduce, that is—if there's life on the planet. That's what fungi do. They're really more like animals in that they live off the energy and nutrients of other life-forms. So, the spores won't germinate until and unless there's life on the planet. If there is life on the planet, it germinates and fruits.” He held up his mushroom. “And don't you think the mushroom cap looks suspiciously like some sort of antenna or transmitting device?”

I shook my head more in amusement than necessary
disagreement, although his reasoning was certainly absurd. “It's an interesting theory.”

“It's very interesting,” Blip nodded gravely, scrutinizing the mushroom in his hand. “But it's not a theory.”

I marveled at the internal validity of his figments, and that all of it was inspired by a few stray remarks of some college student. “So do you always eavesdrop on other people's conversations?”

“Of course!” He tossed the mushroom aside. “There's nothing better than walking around catching little snippets of the conversations of others. You wouldn't believe how many different things are being talked about out there, and all at the same time. Hell, I hope someone else heard what I was saying and spreads the word.” He paused, waiting for an approaching student to draw near. “Little snippets of conversation,” Blip spoke to me as the student passed. Blip broke into a smile so broad the corners of his mouth were patting him on the back. “Little snippets of conversation,” he said to me again as an uptight-looking woman walked by. She put on her headphones.

“Come on,” I said, growing irritated with my best friend–cum-lunatic. “Let's see what's going on over there.” I pointed to the crowd, which had grown to be quite large and raucous.

Blip eyed the crowd warily. “Yes, let's do that.” He led the way immediately, as determined as Don Quixote embarking on yet another fool quest. True to form, he stumbled as he strode off the sidewalk onto the grass, then yet again over an exposed root of the tree the squirrel had darted up earlier. The squirrel, sitting on a branch above him fluffing its tail, seemed to laugh at Blip's lack of grace before leaping and skipping along ever smaller boughs and twigs until it was in the limbs of another
tree. There it stopped and turned around, just in time to see me, captivated by this rodent's gymnastic ability, stumble over the very same root.

 

3
“Hearken unto the Lo-ord, all ye fornicating heathens! Jeyzus is coming!” A preacher, wearing a T-shirt with read the bible printed on the front and druid hills baptist church on the back, stood in the middle of the crowd, hollering about hell and gesticulating like an inept stage magician all the while. “Jeyzus hates this copulating campus, all you whoremongers and masturbators!” His ranting canting delivery was constantly interrupted by heckles from the mass of students gathered, but he was nonetheless thoroughly enjoying himself. This was very clear. I had seen him on the Green before, and he seemed to thrive off the ricochets of his damnations and denunciations like any sadist grinning at the blood spattering off his whip.

“Jesus said, Judge not lest you be judged yourself,”
¹
a female student bleated, attempting to argue with the preacher.

“He was not referring to those of us without
sin
!” the preacher boomed back. “
I
, Brother Zebediah, am without sin, ladies and gentlemen.
I
have entered the Kingdom of Heaven, and
I
am here to tell everyone in this infected flock that you are heading straight for the lake of . . .” He rotated his arm as if playing an air guitar.
“Fi-yurrrrr!”

“All right, Brother Zygote! You tell 'em!” A large male student jeered and cheered. The congregation followed his lead.

“You're like a bunch of copulating rabbits! Just spill your seed anywhere you feel like it, governed by your penises!” The
crowd burst into laughter. “Worshipping your penises! Letting your
penises
rule your lives!”

“You just like to say
penis
!” the heckler yelled back, much to the amusement of all assembled. “Say hey, where's the little woman today?”

“At home, of course,” Brother Zebediah snorted.

“She pregnant?” someone else called out.

“Not yet, but the factory's still open. Sister Sally and I are going to repopulate the Earth with people who think like us.”

“
Seig Heil!
” Heckler clicked his heels together and saluted him with an outstretched fist.

“Sir, you're being rude!” Brother Zebediah thundered at him. “I'm trying to preach a message!”

“Sir, you're going to hell! How's that for rude?” Heckler responded. Other members of the herd contributed less belligerent protests. “Tell us again about the time you did acid!” Heckler's voice boomed above the rest.