Visiting Professor (17 page)

In the shadowy light of the bed lamp on the floor, Lemuel slips into a mouth-watering fiction. The Siberian night moth under
Rain’s right breast is fluttering its wings, almost as if it is beating off a swarm of freckles. …

“About the yogurt,” Rain says with that half-defiant, half-defensive smile that Lemuel has come to recognize as her badge
of insecurity, “you could think of it as a midnight snack.”

Which is how Lemuel finally comes face to face with a part of the female body he has not been to before. Which is also how
he comes to savor, he is sure it must have happened before, he only cannot remember when, a getting there as well as a going.

Occasional Fucking Rain!

Freshly shaven, the
usual patch of toilet paper clinging to the usual coagulated cut on his chin, his cheeks reeking from a few dabs of Rain’s
rose-scented toilet water, Lemuel drifts at midmorning down South Main Street, past the post office, the drugstore, the pool
hall, the bookstore. Overnight their facades have been whitewashed and splashed with psychedelic graffiti depicting in lurid
detail the invasion of Backwater by Martians, the theme of this year’s Spring Fest. Bands of Martians, their faces grease-painted
the color of grass, their ears pasted back and pointed, their heads aflutter with rubber antennas glued to the bones above
their eyes, scramble along the narrow paths of the long hill that dominates the village, shrieking unintelligible syllables
of an invented language as they storm dormitories and leap out of ground-floor windows brandishing the spoils of interplanetary
war: panties, brassieres, crinoline slips once the personal property of coed earthlings.

On the lawn in front of the bank across the street from Lemuel, the electronic billboard, instead of time and temperature,
is flashing an inspirational communique: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

Lemuel has no illusions about the universality of the message. As far back as he can remember, it has been too late to have
a childhood, forget happy. Beyond that point, events are veiled in a shifting haze that occasionally dissipates long enough
for him to catch a glimpse of something he does not want to see …

“Golbasto momaren evlame gurdilo shefin mully ully gue!”
a fraternity brother Lemuel remembers seeing at the Delta Delta Phi bash yells to a Martian friend as the two trot past the
billboard.

“Tolgo phonac,”
the boy shouts back.

“Tolgo phonac,”
the first Martian agrees with a horselaugh.

From the carillon tower on the wood line of the hill comes a raucous peal of bells. Beating the air with their wings, dozens
of pigeons nesting in the top of the tower swarm into the sky. Martians have occupied the carillon tower and are belting out
what the
Backwater Sentinel
identified as the Spring Fest’s official anthem, a melody that sounds suspiciously familiar to Lemuel. It hits him where
he has heard it before: Rain has played it on her French horn. “Oh, when the saints, come marching in,” Lemuel sings in time
to the carillon bells, “Oh when the saints come march-ing in, da da da, da da da da-da, when the saints come march-ing in.”

Farther down the street there is a commotion as a cavalcade of convertibles, their horns drowning out the carillon bells,
turns off Sycamore onto South Main. The cars, packed with Martians, proceed in a slow cortege down the white line of the wide
street. A pickup truck with a television crew from a Rochester TV station filming from the back drives parallel to the cortege.
Lining the sidewalks on either side of South Main, Martians cheer on two streakers sandwiched between the cars of the motorcade.
As they jog past, wearing only sneakers, Dwayne, the E-Z Mart manager, and Shirley, his main squeeze, who turns out to have
naturally wavy pubic hair, salute the crowd.

Dwayne, his testicles and enormous penis flapping, catches sight of Lemuel. “Lem, babe, z’up?”

“Yo. Nuch.” Lemuel tries to act as if chatting with a naked man jogging down South Main is an everyday occurrence. “Like I
did not know you went in for jogging.”

“Yeah, babe, I also do t’ai chi. A sound mind in a sound body, that’s my philosophy.”

“It would be mine too,” Lemuel mutters, “if I still had my
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual.”

“So I hear I’ll be seeing you later,” Dwayne calls over his shoulder.

“Rain went and invited us up again for supper,” Shirley shouts in a high-pitched voice.

The TV cameraman calls to her from the back of the pickup truck, “How about a big hello for the folks back home.”

Laughing hysterically, covering her small pointed breasts with one arm, Shirley twists and waves to the television camera
with her free hand. She shouts back at Lemuel, “Whatcha say after supper I teach you how to write your name backwards?”

“Rock ’nnnnn’ roll,” Dwayne yells into the television camera, raising his fist.

An echo comes from the Martians in the open cars. “Rock ’nnnnn’ roll.”

Lemuel meanders into the Kampus Kave. The waitress, whose name is Molly, looks up from her comic book. “Well, if it ain’t
Mr. One With, One Without,” she says. “With ya in a jiffy.”

Lemuel notices the Rebbe in a booth near the back, slides onto the bench across from him. The Rebbe, looking like death warmed
over, is carving
into the tabletop with a small bone-handled penknife.

“So what are you writing?” Lemuel wants to know.

“Yod, he, waw, he. Which spells ‘Yahweh.’ “ The Rebbe raises his bulging eyes heavenward, focuses on the three-blade ventilation
fan hanging from the ceiling directly above him, daring God to strike him dead for pronouncing His sacred name out loud.

Molly sets two cups of coffee in front of Lemuel. “One with, one without,” she says with a straight face. (It has become their
little joke.) She angles her head to get a better look at the Rebbe’s handiwork. “I don’t mind folks carving initials in my
tables, everyone does it, it’s more or less traditional,” she says, “but given the fact we’re in the U.S. of A., it seems
to me it ought to be in English.”

“You’ll maybe make an exception for the name of God?”

“Jesus, born in a manger in Bethlehem, is the name of God.”

“Jesus, who almost certainly wasn’t born in Bethlehem, that story had the rug pulled out from under it by biblical scholars,
is the name of the son of God. I’m carving the name of His Father who art in heaven.”

Molly watches the Rebbe etching the unfamiliar letters into the wood. “My first husband, may he rest in peace, all of a sudden
started in writing backwards after his stroke. I had to hold the paper up to a mirror to see what he wanted.”

“In Hebrew,” the Rebbe says, “right to left is frontward.”

“You’re having me on.”

The Rebbe squints up at her. “Stop me if you’ve heard the old Jewish proverb I am about to invent. It’s the story of a man
who’s agnostic, insomniac and dyslexic. He lies awake nights wondering if there is such a thing as a dog.”

“If that there’s a joke, Rabbi Nachman, I sure don’t get it,” Molly admits.

“ ‘Dog’ spelled backwards is ‘God.’ ”

Molly purses her lips. “I don’t see what a dog has to do with God.”

Shaking her head, she pushes through the swinging doors to the kitchen. Lemuel adds sugar to both cups of coffee, absently
stirs the without as he sips the with. “You look very depressed, Asher. Hey, I hope your yeshiva deal did not fall through.”

The Rebbe, contemplating a tragedy worse than the Holocaust, shakes his head. “It’s much more serious. There’s this passage
in To-rah where Yahweh pulls Abraham outside the tent and points to the night sky. ‘Count the stars,’ He tells him. ‘So shall
thy seed be.’ I’m talking Genesis 15:5. I was re-reading it yesterday when the tragic news hit me over the head like a ton
of books.” The Rebbe, wringing his oversized pink paws in agony, glances up. Lemuel spots tears glistening in his eyes. “Don’t
you see it? The number of stars in the sky is fixed, not endless. Which means Yahweh is telling Abraham he’ll have a fixed,
not an endless, number of descendants. What Yahweh is saying—my God, I could kick myself I didn’t see it before, I could kick
myself harder for seeing it now, who needs this kind of information rattling around in his brain?—is that the Jewish people
will come to an end one day.”

“New stars are forming from primordial gases all the time,” Lemuel says.

The Rebbe perks up. “Are you sure of your information?”

“Sure I am sure. Only last week astronomers published photographs of fifteen embryonic stars in the Orion Nebula. Out in the
infinite reaches of space, stars are dying and being born every day of the week, every hour of the day.”

A sigh of relief bursts from the Rebbe’s lips. “Oy, that was a close call. I feel like a condemned man who just got a last-minute
reprieve.”

The Rebbe folds away his pocketknife, irons the wrinkles out of a dollar bill with his palm, weighs the bill down with the
small metal container filled with toothpicks, swipes some sugar cubes from the bowl. “Lucky for the Jews I ran into you today,”
he tells Lemuel as he slides off the bench and slumps toward the street.

Lemuel has finished the with and is taking his first sip of the lukewarm without when the squat Oriental man who berated him
for arguing with Axinya at the cockroach motel approaches the booth. He
is wearing a three-piece pin-striped suit and carrying an umbrella in one hand and an attaché case in the other.

“Do you mind?” he asks, speaking with a clipped, upper-class British accent.

Lemuel peers up into his Buddha face. “Do I mind what?”

“Do you mind if I join you?”

“Like it depends on what you are selling.”

The Oriental man sits down in the Rebbe’s place, touches the freshly etched Hebrew letters with his fingertips as if he is
reading Braille. “Yah-weh,” he says, sounding them out.

“You speak Hebrew,” Lemuel notes in surprise.

“I read languages at Oxford,” the Oriental man explains. “I speak seven Middle Eastern and Far Eastern tongues and twelve
dialects. You are Lemuel Falk, the celebrated ramdomnist, are you not?”

“Hey, celebrated, I do not know.”

“You are unduly modest,” the Oriental man says in a soothing voice. “I would like to talk to you about the Data Encryption
Standard used by the various agencies and organs of the United States government when they want to communicate with each other
without having someone reading over their shoulders.”

Lemuel starts to squirm out of the booth, but the Oriental man reaches across the table and clamps an iron grip on his wrist.
“The Data Encryption Standard is based on a secret number, called the key, which is used to perform mathematical operations
that scramble the message. Using the same key, the person receiving the message can unscramble it.”

It dawns on Lemuel that the Oriental man has been shadowing him for days. He remembers seeing him at the checkout counter
in the supermarket, he remembers seeing him again in the crowd watching Dwayne and Shirley streak down South Main, and he
rented the cockroach motel room next to Axinya.

“So I do not see what all this has to do with yours truly.”

“Bear with me. To break a cipher, one must run a computer program designed to test every possible key until one of them turns
in the lock and the door clicks open. My masters have been led to believe that you developed for your former employers a near-random
system of enciphering that makes it practically impossible for a computer to stumble across the key. My masters also believe
that having achieved this miracle of near randomness, you could certainly work
backward and develop a computer program that could map intricate statistical variations in large samples of data, which is
the weak link in even near randomness, and thus break any cipher being used in the world today.”

With some effort Lemuel extracts his wrist from the grip of the Oriental man and offers one of his noncommittal grunts.

“To make a long story only slightly shorter,” the Oriental man says, “I am authorized to offer you permanent employment.”

“I have a job.”

“When does your contract at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies expire?”

“Funny how everyone wants to know when my contract expires. End of May.”

“What will you do then? Return to the saintly city of Petersburg and queue five hours a day in order to eat sausages fabricated
out of dead dog?”

“Is there an alternative?”

Buddha’s eyes narrow as he feels the tug on his line and begins to reel it in. “You could live in the lap of luxury not far
from London in a small rural community devoted to theoretical mathematics. You could continue your quest for pure unadulterated
randomness on our supercomputer. In your spare time you could give us the occasional helping hand in making or breaking ciphers.
You could draw on a bank balance that has already been deposited in your name.”

“What bank balance?”

The Oriental man’s lips stretch into a guileless smile. He dials a number on the combination lock, snaps open the attache
case, removes a passport and a bank book from it and sets them down on the table. Lemuel riffles through the passport, British,
filled with entry and exit stamps from various countries. The passport contains a mug shot of him taken years before, and
is made out in the name of Quinbus Flestrin. It occurs to Lemuel that if he owned this passport he would have not only two
signatures, he would have two names. He sets the passport aside and opens the bank book, notices that someone with the unlikely
name of Quinbus Flestrin appears to have £100,000 to his credit in a bank called Lloyds. He makes a quick calculation, realizes
that £100,000 is the equivalent of roughly one hundred and fifty million rubles. Set for life, set for the next one too,
Lemuel, flustered, blows across the surface of his lukewarm coffee to cool it, then to mask his confusion polishes it off
in one long gulp.