The Dance, page 30
The invitation said: “A proper birthday party requires balloons, noisemakers, party hats, ice cream, a karaoke machine, popcorn, chocolate, redheads, chocolate-covered redheads, a bathtub full of lime Jell-O, jellybeans, nachos, guacamole, a disc jockey, a disco ball, a fog machine, lasers, spotlights, a party tent, a bouncy castle, cherry bombs, a police permit, explosives, giraffes, cheese dip, strippers, a Swedish hooker, condoms, watermelons, a catapult, chainsaws, masks, maraschino cherries, flavoured love oils, paramedics, name tags, registration table, insurance waivers, a trapeze, handcuffs, spare batteries, water slide, first-aid kits, chains, hand grenades, Saran Wrap, clowns, a rubber chicken, an Elvis impersonator, a live webcam feed, and a cake.
“I think we can manage the cake and maybe the bouncy castle.”
I mean, who wouldn’t want to attend a party like that? A cake and a bouncy castle! After a certain age, you stop worrying about looking good. It’s about having fun. In my case, the age was six.
Planning the party was easy. A week in advance I ordered pizzas, deli-trays, kegs, and a cake, all to be delivered an hour before the guests were due to arrive. Sodas and balloons and chips took only a few minutes at the nearby grocery. I could pick up the ice the morning of the party. Ordering the bouncy castle needed only five minutes of Googling and a phone call. But it cost $4,000 to rent a giraffe for an afternoon. I did not rent the giraffe. I admit, I was tempted, though.
The day of the party all the food arrived as ordered, so did the bouncy castle. Right on time the guests started showing up—all I had to do was open the door and hug those who weren’t contagious.
Several of my high school friends, my son’s godmother, Holly of Sherman’s Planet, several beautiful TV stars, a couple of actors, one of my favourite comedians, two or three producers, various writers of my acquaintance, and even a few people who pretended to be normal. The writers headed straight for the food, of course. (Have you ever seen a writer eat? They’re worse than actors.)
In the middle of all this, just as the party was shifting from raucous to insane, a woman I didn’t recognize, somebody’s plus-one, came screaming in the front door shouting something about a giraffe. Several of us rushed outside, followed by several more, and eventually everybody.
Yes, there was a giraffe on the front lawn.
And That Pesky Dan Goodman stood next to it, feeding it carrots and looking across at me with a self-satisfied grin. “You said it wouldn’t be a party without a giraffe.”
No good joke goes unpunished.
Okay, in all fairness, the giraffe was the high point of the party.
Her name was Hermione. She wasn’t quite full-size—she was only four years old, the equivalent of a teenager, and a little high-spirited, but she wasn’t freaked out by all the attention. I guess she was used to being gawked at by a crowd—or maybe she was just happy to have all the apples, bananas, carrots, stalks of celery, ears of corn, and the occasional Dorito with guacamole offered to her. She also munched her way through handfuls of oat-crackers that the trainer kept handing up to her, wrapping her gray tongue around them and sucking them appreciatively into her mouth. How much fibre does a giraffe need anyway?
I was a little worried that the rich mix of fruits and vegetables might give her an upset stomach—diarrhoea?—but the trainer said not to worry, it would be good for the lawn.
So even though Peskydang hadn’t been officially invited, after he showed up with the giraffe, I couldn’t very well turn him away, could I?
That was the mistake.
It being a birthday party, most of the guests brought gifts, and most of them knew me well enough to bring chocolate. Dark chocolate only, milk chocolate is for beginners.
But the ones who really knew me—they brought books.
And what books! Graphic novels, rare adventures, autographed editions! Even a marvellous pop-up book! It didn’t matter. I love books.
Every book is a door into adventure. It’s an opportunity to live an extra life. Or to say it another way, you’re lending your brain for someone else to think with. It’s exercise for the mind-muscle. You get to think something you wouldn’t have thought otherwise. You get stretched. That’s why people who read have the advantage.
So people who give me books are… well, I’m not sure there is a word or even an appropriate metaphor. Hero? Wizard? Guru? No, none of those work. Someone who gives you the opportunity to peek at possibilities…? I’ll have to cogitate on this and get back to you.
Pesky’s gift, however…
It was a small wooden box. Deceptively small. Just big enough to hold a cell phone. But heavy enough to be suspicious. In fact, when I unwrapped and opened it, it was a cell phone. Only it wasn’t. It didn’t feel right.
“Um,” I said. “Thank you, Pesky…? Am I missing something here? I already have a phone.”
“It’s not a phone,” Pesky said. “It’s a parallelicon. A quantum resonator. A quawkie-talkie.” He glanced around the room impatiently. Some of the other guests, those who were still vertical, were glancing at him curiously. “Put it away for now. I’ll show you how it works later.”
“All right.” I slipped it into a pocket. My son shoved another package into my hands, “Here, Dad, open this one next,” and I forgot about the odd device. I am easily distracted by any box that smells like cocoa.
By the time the party finally broke up, after the last ambulance had pulled away and the police were satisfied that Ed Green was going to keep his clothes on this time—we told them he was practicing for an upcoming audition (“The Canoga Park Players are planning a revival of Naked Boys Singing…”), which seemed to mollify the officers, though they declined the offer of comped seats for opening night—anyway, after the last of the neighbours stopped making videos and went back into their houses, we passed out shovels, rubber gloves, and trash bags to everyone who didn’t have a ride home and began cleaning up.
It didn’t take as long as expected. Three of the kegs had been emptied, most of the pizza was gone, only a few wilted slices of pastrami remained on the deli trays (Dogzilla took care of those). The only sodas left in the coolers were a dented can of Diet Coke and an A&W Root Beer, so the only leftovers we had to wrap up were the remains of the birthday cake. It had been a custom cake portraying that scene from that episode of that TV series. Harlan Ellison had cheerfully eaten William Shatner’s head.
As the last few guests were trying to find the front door, Pesky came over to thank me for including him, making me aware again that my biggest failure as a human being is that I’m too polite to That Pesky Dan Goodman. He keeps coming back. (Daniel Keys Moran, who plays basketball more than I do, which is never at all, says I’m putting too much backspin on him.)
“I need to explain my gift to you,” Pesky said.
“Oh yeah, I forgot all about it.” I fished through my pockets, pulling out wallet, smartphone (Samsung Galaxy Note II, because it has a larger screen than the S4), music player (A 64GB Zune. And yes, I can hear you rolling your eyes so hard that you can see the bottom of your brain, but I like it, it works for me, so why should I care what you think?), and a wadded-up paper napkin with someone’s phone number on it, I didn’t remember whose, before I finally found Pesky’s device. “Yeah, this is cool. What is it?”
“Well, it depends,” he said. “Have you ever heard of a telegrabitron?”
“A what?”
“A para-dimensional interociter.”
“Uhh… no.”
“Okay, this is going to take some time.” He glanced around, checking the room. Still too many people. “C’mere.” He took me by the forearm and led me outside to the back yard, grabbing the last banana on the way.
“Do you know what a stringshot is?”
“It’s a way to add delta vee to your trajectory by swinging around a—”
“No. That’s a slingshot. Are you sure you write science fiction?”
“Not any more. There’s too much science. I can’t keep up.”
“You and everybody else.” He took the banana—
That Pesky Dan Goodman does not peel a banana like a normal person. Normal people—that’s you and me, an assumption on my part, I don’t know if you’re normal or not, I just like to think so—you and me, we peel the banana from the stem end, and that’s usually a bit of a tussle. Sometimes we even have to bite it to get it started, right? Pesky opens it from the other end—he pinches the tip hard, it splits and peels easily down. (I tried it once, the banana split right down the middle, half stuck to each peel. There must be a trick to it.)
—and he did that same banana thing again. One day I’m going to have to learn how to do it. Either he didn’t notice me watching or he didn’t care.
“Okay,” he said. “You know about quantum entanglement?”
“Uh, yeah, sort of. Two particles are invisibly linked together. If you do something to one, the other reacts. In tandem, right?”
“Close enough for a science-fiction story. The theory is that if the two particles are far enough apart and still remain linked, you can have instantaneous transmission of information. Even across light-years.”
“Ah, the old subspace-radio trick.”
“According to theory, entanglements create a mini-wormhole that keeps them linked, one particle at each end. So all you need to do is create an entanglement and—are you following this?”
“Yeah, go on. This is the necessary exposition. It has to go somewhere.” I say that a lot. It never slows anyone down.
Pesky heard it as permission. He kept talking. “Okay. So, what if we come at it from the other direction? What if every particle was already entangled? But you just didn’t know where the other one was? What if you could grab a particle and track its wormhole through space-time and find its equivalent entangled particle somewhere else? You could have instantaneous communication anywhere you wanted.”
I waved the phone-thing at him. “Are you saying this is a working subspace communicator?”
“If it worked, it would be.”
“It doesn’t work?”
“Well, the guys who built it—they don’t know if it does or not. They don’t know where the entangled particles are.”
“They can’t tell?”
“Nope. It’s a Heisenberg thing. They’re not certain. They think they have entanglements, all the evidence suggests it, but the entanglements all look congruent, so it looks like the particles are entangled to themselves. So, what you’re holding— that’s the most useless communication device in the universe. There’s only one. A telephone doesn’t work unless there’s another one on the other end.”
A sudden suspicion struck me. “How did you get it?”
“I asked for it.”
“And they gave it to you?”
“I said I had an idea. They said, ‘What the hell?’”
“Mmm.” I suspected there was more to it than that. Peskydang’s relationship with the truth was mostly transitory. “Really?”
“Well, I kinda borrowed it. But they’re not going to miss it. Not for a while anyway.”
“Uh-huh. So now I’m guilty of receiving stolen property?” I held the thing away from me.
“No. You are a participant in a scientific experiment. Mine.” He took the device from my hand and held it up so I could see its face. “I think this is something a lot more than they realized. I think this is a reciprocal encabulator.”
“A what?”
“A quantotum.”
“In English, please? Remember what we told you, Pesky. If you’re going to stay on our planet, you have to speak our language.”
“This is your language, monkey boy.” He sighed. “Look. This is a trans-dimensional parallelithonic resonating transceiver. It contains a 64-core multi-fractal array of entangled particles. Call it a quantum empathizer for short.”
“Okay.” I pretended to understand that sentence. “And—?”
“Where do you think the opposing entanglements are?”
“I don’t know. Argentina?”
He gave me a look. “If they’re not in this universe, then they have to be in… wait for it!… another universe. A parallel universe.” He waved the unit under my nose. “This is a Dirac line to an alternate reality.”
“Except it doesn’t work.”
“We don’t know that yet. Here, do a thought experiment—assume an infinite number of parallel universes. This would mean that somewhere in at least one of those infinite alternate worlds, it’s inevitable someone else is holding a device just like this one. Exactly like this one. And maybe that’s what this is really connected to, but we just don’t know it yet. The guys who built it—they think their entanglements are congruent—but what if they’re wrong? What if the entanglements look congruent because the universes are identical? Or almost identical, but not quite. Just in this one respect.” He wiggled the thing in his hand.
I pulled out my phone and checked the time.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking to see if it’s almost breakfast time. You’re asking me to believe six impossible things.”
“Only five. But I haven’t finished yet.”
“You can stop at any time.”
“All I’m asking you to do is play with it for a few days.”
“Why me? Why not you?”
“Because you know how to break things. You’re the best beta-tester I know.”
He had me there.
I built my first computer in 1978. I’ve been aggressive about software ever since. If a program can be crashed, I can do it. If there’s a weird little quirk, an odd behaviour, or even an actual bug—I’m the guy who’s going to stumble over it. I found a programming error in the Fidelity Chess Challenger. (The company denied it for over a month until I sent them a play-by-play description.) I was the guy who found out that Turbo Pascal’s random-number generator wasn’t random, by writing a program to display random patterns on the screen and seeing very orderly patterns occur instead. I crashed every new version of Windows—but hell, everybody did that, so I can’t take any credit for that one.
And before there were computers, there were typewriters. The IBM service department told me that nobody worked a machine as hard as I did—if I’d let them check the wear and tear on my Selectric every three months, they’d give me free service.
It’s because I have a weird streak of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. I have to find out where the limits are. I usually do that by tripping over them.
And Pesky knew me well enough to know which button to push.
“What do you want me to do?”
He put the trans-dimensional parallelithonic resonating-transceiver back into my hand. The quantum empathizer. “Try to see what you can connect to. Dial numbers at random. Well, not numbers—coordinates. IP64 addresses. See what happens. See who answers. Maybe no one. But you have nothing to lose, do you?”
“If the multiverse is truly infinite, then it’s inevitable someone will answer, Pesky. You know that—”
“Yep,” he said. “That’s why you should be the one to do it.”
“I don’t follow your logic—”
“Because I trust you.”
Those were probably the most frightening words that Peskydang ever said to me. I shook my head in resignation, shoved the thing back into my pocket and went in search of a hazmat suit so I could clean the bathroom. It was a mistake to serve pickled-beet, cauliflower, and baked-bean casserole. Thanks, Mo-mo. Don’t ever do that again.
It took me several days to recover from the party. There were the usual thank-yous and apologies to make, plus the inevitable reparations to various neighbours to help them regain their gruntle, a couple of quick interactions with lawyers, and finally a last-resort phone call to my cousin who has connections to the City Council. It was a good thing this was only a small gathering. The doctor said I would not need my meds adjusted, but to take it easy for the next few days.
I hadn’t given any thought to the quantum empathizer. The mourning after—yes, I know what I typed, but that’s how I experience the day after a party—get off life-support, stagger to the shower, mainline some coffee, and finally wake up. In that order. And with some luck, do all this before dusk.
Sorting through the stack of books and chocolate—and the package of Depends one soon-to-be ex-friend had given as a gag gift—I eventually remembered that Pesky had handed me a present, too. I didn’t go looking for it. As the sandstorm behind my eyes began to fade, I realized that the quantum empathizer had to be an elaborate prank—though one in much better taste than a package of adult diapers.
Pesky had found an old cell phone, written a funny little app to make the screen dance on command, and then amused himself at my expense by spouting some wild, incomprehensible jargon just to see how much of it I would believe.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the whole thing had to be another of Pesky’s impractical jokes—like the time he sent my son scrambling all over the San Fernando Valley, from one electronic parts store to the next, looking for a left-handed Moebius wrench. Of course, you don’t fool around with Sean. He actually came back with one.
So, as easily as I remembered the quantum empathizer, that’s how quickly I dismissed it.
By the end of the week, I was back at the keyboard—
Not yet typing, though. First, I spent half an hour cleaning dog hair and guck out from under the keys. A vacuum cleaner is insufficient. You also need a can of compressed air, one of the ones that come with a thin red straw to concentrate the stream—and a business card and a paper clip, and sometimes even some specialized putty that you can press down into the spaces to grab crumbs of all kinds.
This is just one of the things writers do to postpone the actual process of writing—others include removing the cat from the keyboard, making coffee, removing the cat from the keyboard, having a sandwich, removing the cat from the keyboard, doing “research” on the internet, and removing the cat from the keyboard, by which time, you should probably clean the keyboard again to remove the cat hair from under the keys—because the process of writing is mostly staring at a blank screen and thinking, Nope. That’s not it either.
