“He been sick like this before, Doctor. When I find him first time on beach, he sick like this very bad three day and three night. My father cure him, but that medicine is all gone.”
“Well, let’s have a look at him. What’s his name?”
“We call him Filbert. You sure you ready to see? Let me get gold coin right now be fair.”
“Yes.”
Bei-na spoke to her children in sliding slangy phonemes. The boy on the couch got up, turned off the TV, and herded his small sisters to the kitchen. The girl at the sink gave me a sudden amused smile. Her gums were bright red. I wondered how a girl like that would smell, wet red and dirty ivory, so unlike her tired yellow popcorn fart mother who now pressed into my hand the smallest disk that I have ever heard called a “coin.” It was the size of one of those paper circles that a hole-puncher makes. I pocketed it, wondering if I would be able to get it home without losing it. Bei-na opened the bedroom door.
There is a drawing by M. C. Escher called
Rind
. It shows a rind, or ribbon, that curls around and around in a roughly helical pattern. The rind is bumpy, and its bumps sketch the surface of a human head. The wrappy rind is a helix head with spaces in it. One can see clouds and sky through the spaces.
Filbert Id was designed along similar lines. Each part of his body was a tight-wrapped spindle of dirty white fiber, as if he were a Michelin Man mummy with swathing-cloths of narrow narrow skin. There were no spaces between the successive loops of cosmic string. No spaces, that is, until I made my first error.
Leaning over Filbert Id’s dimly lit bed, my initial impression was that his skin was very wrinkled. His hissing grew louder the closer I got. The noise was fretful and intricate. Bei-na, seeming to extract sense from it, spoke softly to Filbert in her own tongue, but to no avail. He seemed terrified of me, and he held up his axially grooved arms as if to push me away. If I say that the grooves were
axial
, rather than annular or longitudinal, I mean that they went around and around his head, neck, fingers, arms, chest, etc., like latitude lines.
I leaned closer.
Although Filbert’s face contained the appearance of lips, his mouth did not open.
Yet how loudly he hissed!
I was medically curious about his means for producing the noise without opening his mouth. Could it be that he had a punctured lung? A cancer in the passages of his sinus? A missing tympanum and a hypertrophic Eustachian tube?
I felt a fine scientific impatience with Filbert’s panic. I pushed his arms out of the way and leaned very close to his face. I was struck by three things. His face held a strong electric charge (a spark jumped between us); his face did not radiate warmth; he was not breathing. Indeed—I peered closer—his nostrils were but molded dents, entirely occluded by what seemed to be flaps of Filbert’s dirty, fibrous skin. The man was suffocating!
I set my black metal box on the bedside table and took out swab, tongue depressor and rubbing alcohol. Clearly my first task was to clean out Filbert’s buccal and nasal cavities. Filbert’s eyes, I have omitted to mention, were matte black slits; I had thought they were closed. Yet as I opened my kit, laying out my syringe as well, Filbert moved his head as if he were looking things over. At the sight of the needle, he redoubled his hissings and his gesticulations. Fortunately he was in no condition to rise from his bed.
“Tell him to calm down,” I ordered Bei-na.
She made some bell noises; he hissed the harder.
“He very scared you break him.”
“He needs to breathe, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know. “
“I’ll give him a sedative.”
Sedative. Lovely calm word. I myself was ready for my evening injection of morphine, for some morphine and for some fine classical music. This Chaotiskani nonsense was taking entirely too long.
I filled a syringe with morphine solution and stood back like a matador awaiting the moment of truth. I kept one hand in front of my upright syringe, so as not to alarm the patient. He thrashed and hissed…to no avail. I came in over his left forearm and pushed my needle into his chest.
It was only last week that I happened on a popular article about cosmic strings. Till then I had no language for what happened after I stuck the needle in Filbert Id.
At a certain large scale, our universe is structured like a foam of soap-bubbles. All ordinary matter is confined to the “soap films;” the galaxies are specks of color on mathematical sheets surrounding huge voids.
Why are the bubbles empty? Because each of these space voids has at its center a huge, tangled loop of cosmic string.
What is a cosmic string? A line-like spacetime flaw analogous to the point-like flaws called black holes.
How do the cosmic strings empty the bubbles? Each void’s central string is a closed, superconducting loop. Vast energies surge along each loop, and the endless eddying stirs up waves that push us all away.
The strings are probably talking to each other, even if they don’t know it. Even if they don’t care.
One theory I have is that they’re larvae, and that Filbert hatched when I poked him open. My image is this: Think of the stars as pollen on the surface of a quiet pond. There are eggs on the surface, too, and the eggs turn into larvae that are the cosmic strings. The larvae wiggle and jerk, and their waves push the star pollen back, forming it into a honeycomb of 2-D cells.
Either Filbert fell from the sky, which I doubt, or the strings are working at a new level, our level, yours and mine.
When I stuck my needle in Filbert Id, the man who was a cosmic string, his tight pattern came unsprung. Radiation surged out of his hollow inside, knocking me back and blowing the ceiling off the Ids’ bedroom.
I was briefly blinded. I am not sure what I really saw, in the shock and confusion and lack of words. “Loony Loop,” is the phrase I caught first. Loony Loop is a puzzle where you try to untangle a loop of blue nylon string from a multiple-looped pattern of chromesteel wire. Filbert Id came unsprung and turned into an enormous Loony Loop. I saw him doing it, and it made me radiation-sick. The loop hissed and buzzed, and then it tumbled rapidly upwards into the night sky.
Filbert Id hatched and flew away, leaving me with a loaded morphine syringe in my hand. With practiced speed, I injected the morphine intravenously. This was my second error.
How strong was the radiation? Bei-na died in my arms a half-hour later. Her children’s hair fell out, but they are on the mend. We left the ruined house together that night. Bei-na’s daughter, Wu-wei, has become my lover, which has eased the pain of these my last two weeks.
If this be my last will and testament, I bequeath all to dear Wu-wei, to her wet red, to her dirty ivory, to her brother Bo, and to her sisters Li and Le.
Cosmic string, larvae, Loony Loop, Wu-wei. These are the words that synchronistic Providence puts in my pen. My race is run beneath this sun.
With morphine, and only with morphine, the radiation-sickness has been bearable. But radiation-sickness is not the issue anymore. What is going to kill me—and quite soon—is something that I noticed this morning. My skin is grooved in axial rings, as skritchy as the surface of an Alva Edison cylindrical LP.
I shared a needle with Filbert two weeks ago, and what took him is ready to take me. I forbore the noon injection, but now it’s dusk and I’m hissing.
It’s time for the needle’s last prick. I’ll kiss Wu-wei goodbye and go outside to do it, to unspring and fall into the sky, a cosmic string.
============
Written in Spring, 1987.
The Universe
, Bantam Books, 1987.
This was the first story I wrote after moving to California in the summer of 1986. The character is obliquely modeled on the science-fiction writer Michael Blumlein, who is indeed a doctor, though with none of the bad habits that the story character has. Blumlein has a very calm, serene way of expressing himself; this was the aspect of him that I tried to capture in this story.
I met Michael at a party in the apartment of Richard Kadrey and Pat Murphy in San Francisco. Marc Laidlaw was there as well. It was thrill to fall into so literary a scene. Right at this time I was helping Peter Lamborn Wilson edit the science-fiction anthology called
Semiotext[e] SF
, and we ended up including stories by Kadrey, Laidlaw and Blumlein. Michael sent us “Shed His Grace,” a story about a man who castrates himself while watching videos of Ronald and Nancy Reagan! The anthology sold out its first printing in a few weeks.
I got the name “Filbert Id” from a dream that Marc Laidlaw told me.
The trouble started in Surf City, and it ended in another dimension.
Delbert was loud and spidery; Zep was tall and absent and a year older. Being in different grades, they didn’t see each other much in the winters, but in the summers they were best friends on and off the beach. When Zep graduated, he spent a year at UC Santa Cruz before drugging out—he said he’d overfed his head. Delbert didn’t like drugs, so when he graduated he didn’t bother going to college at all. Now it was summer all year long.
It was November in Surf City and the pipeline was coming in steady. For the last few weeks they’d been without a surfboard, though these days the word was “stick,” not “board,” meaning Del and Zep were stickless. The way this particular bummer had come down was that Del had been bragging about his escape from a great white shark, and no one had believed him, so maximum Zep had cut a big sharkbite shape out of the dinged longboard he and Delbert shared, and still no one had believed. Basically Zep had thrashed the board for nothing, but at least Delbert was able to sell it to the Pup-Tent, a surfer snack shop where his girl Jen worked—not that Jen was really Delbert’s
girl
in any intense physical sense of the word, and not that the Pup-Tent had actually
paid
anything for the shark-bit board that Delbert had mounted on the wall over the cash register. But it looked rad up there.
Often, in the mid-morning, when things were slow at the Pup-Tent, Jen would grill Zep and Delbert some burgers, and the three of them would sit on the bench out in front of the Pup-Tent, staring through their shades at the bright, perfect sky, or at the cars and people going by, or across the street at the cliffs and the beach and the endlessly various Pacific ocean, dotted with wet-suited surfers. Zep sat on the left, Jen on the right, and Delbert in the middle; Delbert usually talking, either rapping off what he saw or telling one of his long, bogus stories, like about the time when he’d been flying a kite on the beach and a Coast Guard plane had swooped down low enough to suck his kite into its jet and he’d been pulled out to sea about half a mile, dangling twenty feet above the water until he’d flashed to let loose of the string.
One particular day that November, Delbert was telling Jen about a book on hypnotism he’d read the day before, and how last night he’d tried to activate Zep’s thrashed genius by putting Zep in a trance and telling him he was a great scientist and asking him to invent invisibility.
“He did that, Zep?” asked Jen, briefly interested. “Did it work?”
“I, uh, I…thought of peroxide,” said Zep. Peroxide was a big thing with Zep; he’d stripped his hair so often that its color was faintly ultraviolet. When Zep felt like somebody might understand him, he’d talk a lot about the weird science stuff he’d learned at Santa Cruz, but just now he wasn’t quite
on
.
“We put seven coats of it on a sheet of paper,” said Delbert, “and for a second we thought it was working, but it was really just the paper falling apart.”
“Oxo wow,” said Jen, suddenly pointing out at the horizon. “Outsider.” That was the traditional word for a big wave. “Far outsider…and ohmigod!…like …” Jen often ended her sentences that way, with a “like” and a gesture. This time it was her Vanna White move: both hands held out to the left side of her body, left hand high and right hand low, both hands palms up. She was watching one of the Stoke Pilgrims out there carve the outsider.
It was Lex Loach—Delbert could recognize him from the red-and-white checkerboard pattern on his wet suit. Loach executed a last nifty vertical snap, shot up off the face of the ripped outsider, and flew through the air, his wing squash turbo board glued to his feet by the suction cups on his neoprene booties.
Jen sighed and slowly turned her hands palms down. The Vanna White move, if done with the hands palms down, was known as Egyptian Style. Jen gave Delbert a sarcastic little neck-chop with her stiff left hand. “I wish you could ride, Delbert. I wish you had a stick.”
“This surf’s mush, Jen. Dig it, I saw a tidal wave when I was a kid. I was with my dad on Hawaii, and this volcano blew up, and the next minute all the water went out to sea and formed a gigantic—” He held out his arms as if to embrace a weather balloon.
“You saw that in a movie,” said Zep.
“Did not!” yelled Delbert. He was always yelling, and consequently he was always hoarse.
“Yo, dude.
Krakatoa East of Java
.”
“I never saw that movie, it really happened! We got stranded on the edge of the volcano and they had to come get us in a hot air balloon. Listen up, dude, my dad—”
Delbert jabbered on, trying to distract Jen from Lex Loach’s awesomely stoked breakouts. By the time a customer showed up, she seemed glad to go inside.
“Do you think she likes me?” Delbert asked Zep.
“No. You should have gone to college.” Zep’s voice was slow and even.
“What about you, brain-death?” challenged Del.
“I’m doing my detox, dude.” Zep got a tense, distant look when people questioned his sanity. But his voice stayed calm and disengaged. “The programs are in place, dude. All I need is run time. Chaos, fractals, dynamics, cellular automata. I did ten years’ research in two weeks last spring, dude. It’s just a matter of working out the applications!”
“Like to what?”
“You name it, bro.”
“Waves,” said Del. “Surfing. The new stick I need to bang Jen.”