The Flex of the Thumb

by James Bennett

  During his first two days back on campus, Vano went to classes and spent a little time browsing in the campus book store. Most of his time, though, was spent on the quad in deepest hooommm. For reasons unclear, the primate house experience had precipitated a fiery orange event which was nearly tactile. Molten layers of lava were tiered along the sky, encircling the campus. A deep rumbling seemed to quiver the firmament.

  Occasionally, he was joined by Oboe Meel, but very little conversation passed between them. Once Oboe spoke of his new office and another time he said something about philosophy tests, but Vano was in far too deep to respond. He thought of Dr. Hicks’ words: “This is turning you into a non-entity.” But maybe it was a different entity.

  On the third day, Vano returned to the dorm room where he sat at Arnold Beeker’s desk. He entered some data on Arnold’s computer and watched the words as they formed on the monitor screen:

  The Jane Fonda Workout Book

  Thin Thighs in Thirty Days

  Looking Out for Number One

  The Late, Great Planet Earth

  If You aren’t Worth it, Who Is?

  The Girl Who Fell from her Harness

  How to Pick up Girls

  The Clouds Go Right On

  The Wendy Dilemma

  In deep, Vano stared at the screen. He stared at the monitor against a backdrop of bubbling orange flares. The room began to vibrate, but it wasn’t scary; he sat in utter passivity.

  Then suddenly, the monitor cleared itself, one line at a time, until the screen was blank. It remained blank for 30 seconds. Then, in place of Vano’s entries, a new one appeared, squarely in the center of the screen:

  Evolution

  Vano stared on, thinking of Revuelto’s flexible thumb lecture. He deleted the word evolution, then made another entry of his own, once again taking care to center it:

  The Flexible Thumb

  Still locked down ever so deep on deep, Vano was prepared to wait with ultra patience. After 30 seconds, the monitor cleared again and the evolution entry made another appearance. Vano couldn’t help thinking to himself, we are blended with the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We are the waves and we are the particles. Way on down inside, deepest and sublime, Vano stared at the screen for two hours.

  Then Arnold Beeker entered the room. “I’ve just been over at the union,” he announced. “The spelunking club is organizing its first outing.”

  Vano didn’t reply. He continued staring at the screen.

  Arnold was wearing a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He lay back on his bed and began cleaning chin pimples with a Stridex medicated pad. “I’ve been doing some thinking,” he disclosed. “I think gravity may be the key to the whole thing.”

  It took several seconds before Vano was able to turn his attention in Arnold’s direction. “You’re still fascinated with ultimate hooommm, aren’t you?”

  “Who wouldn’t be? Professor Revuelto wrote a manuscript last year about folds in the earth. It hasn’t been published yet, so if anyone wanted to read it, they’d have to borrow it from him.”

  “How do you know about Professor Revuelto’s manuscript?” asked Vano.

  “It’s the kind of thing I know about, Vano. See, Revuelto has this theory that there are folds in the earth that can possibly lead to different planes of existence. If you pass through one of the folds, you might wake up three days later on the other side of the globe, or even on another planet. But you wouldn’t know how you got there.”

  Vano smiled. “When the book is published, I would enjoy reading it.”

  “If it gets published might be more like it.” Arnold was fidgeting with the blue and gold Rubik’s cube which served him as a paperweight. He said, “I’m afraid Revuelto is on the wrong track, to tell you the truth. What he calls folds in the earth may only be weak spots in the earth’s gravitational field. The fissures are extremely narrow, maybe no wider than a pane of glass.”

  “It’s a real nice theory, Arnold.”

  “That’s what I mean when I say gravity may be the key to everything.”

  It took Vano a considerable while to formulate his response, and even then he wasn’t sure it was on the subject: “Ultimate hooommm may mean particle people existence or belonging to the Federation,” he said. “It might mean becoming blended with the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”

  “That’s just the point,” Arnold continued. “You can’t talk about the electromagnetic spectrum without talking about gravity. If you have a black hole, it means the gravitational force is so strong that not even light can escape from it.”

  Vano didn’t answer. Arnold got up from his bed so he could have a look over his roommate’s shoulder. “Are you running a program?”

  “No.”

  “What’s this entry? How did you make this entry?”

  It took some time. Eventually Vano explained, “I didn’t enter it. The entry I made was just a list of book titles. More or less.”

  “You don’t even have an active program. An entry can’t just appear all by itself.”

  Vano told him, “The book titles just disappeared, like they erased themselves. Then the word evolution took their place.”

  “But I’m telling you this can’t be. This is just the program manager because there’s no active program. This had to come from somewhere.”

  Vano’s long pause came as the preamble to his response: “I think it was the particle people.”

  Arnold sat down on the closest chair. “I’ll say this for you, Vano, when you get a theory you stay with it. I’m going to take some notes, so please don’t go too fast.”

  “I never go fast,” Vano reminded him. “The last thing the particle people told me was that I would not have a complete understanding of existence until I knew ultimate hooommm. When they said it to me, I didn’t understand, but now I do. I think.”

  Even though he was writing furiously, Arnold didn’t welcome the yawning delay which interrupted Vano’s discourse. “Well don’t stop now.”

  Vano needed a deep breath first. “The ego mode is just a stage of evolutionary development. It’s just as primitive to the particle people as apes learning to walk upright and use their hands is to us. The particle mode is a much higher plane of evolution. In a way, it might be the supreme plane of evolution because it more or less completes a circle, back to the atoms and particles the world began with. I’m not sure about that part. But the particle mode and ultimate hooommm are the same thing; that’s the part I’ve got figured out.”

  “Then why didn’t they just tell you that the particle mode was the same thing as ultimate hooommm?”

  This answer too, was a long time coming. “I think they didn’t want to encourage me to strive for ultimate hooommm. If it works on the same principle as regular hooommm, the harder you try to get in it the less success you have. Hooommm is something you just have to let happen to you.”

  Arnold Beeker was trying to grow a mustache. He fingered the few scraggly hairs which bothered his upper lip before saying, “So tell me this. What good does it do to know that the particle mode is a high plane of evolution? It takes millions of years to pass from one evolutionary phase to another.”

  No answer was forthcoming, so Arnold continued, “Let’s say the human race advances to the particle mode four million years from now. We’ll never see it, so what’s the good of knowing it? No offense, Vano, I’m not putting down your theory.”

  Vano smiled. “No offense. I think it would be possible to achieve ultimate hooommm in our lifetime. The reason I think so is because some of the particle people had their origins on planets where the ego mode prevails. I sometimes think even I myself have been at the threshold, those times when the earth seems to wobble on its axis. It would probably take an extremely deep hooommm and a perfect set of conditions.”

  The suddenly-energized Arnold Beeker was on his feet again. “If we’re going to talk conditions, then what we need is data. Are you with me, Vano?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t think so,” Vano replied politely.

  Arnold began pacing while wringing his hands. “I’m talking about the manuscript! If Revuelto’s manuscript locates what he calls folds in the earth, we might be able to plug them into the right computer program and find out if they are really gravitational weak spots. Now do you see what I mean?”

  Vano said quietly, “I think you’re saying they might be points of unusual electromagnetic activity.”

  “Exactly.” This had the feeling of a finer adventure even than exploring caves.

  Vano asked him, “If we had Professor Revuelto’s manuscript, where could we find the computer program we need?”

  “Crevecouer wrote one that surveys gravitational force fields throughout our solar system. That might be too limited, but maybe worth a try.”

  “How do you know about the Crevecouer program?”

  “Vano, that’s the kind of stuff I know about. Revuelto would never loan me his manuscript, though. I told him his theory about folds in the earth was off the track; I don’t think he likes me.”

  “Maybe he would loan it to me,” Vano offered.

  “Well, you could always ask him,” said Arnold.

  “That’s true. I could always ask him.”

  Oboe Meel’s move from his own quarters to the academic dean’s office positioned him to make two pleasant discoveries. To begin with, the office was so spacious that he could mount his dart board effectively. And in the second place, the new office, with floor-to-ceiling glass on the south and the west, provided a ready-made basking ambience.

  It didn’t take Oboe long to learn that he could avail himself of both pleasures at once. Bathing in refracted sunlight, he eased himself into his overstuffed chair. From this semi-recline, he could still launch darts at the target across the room. The only downside was retrieving the darts.

  Today’s target happened to be his new philosophy unit test, which consisted of two questions:

  1. Which is real: the blowfish inflated or deflated?

  2. Let’s say a meteor falls in a forest and crushes a slug to smithereens. What about that?

  He decided to determine the test’s right answers by throwing darts at it. When he threw the first dart, it went straight down to lodge in the carpet, a few inches from his chair leg. “Okay, so it’s been a long time,” he muttered. “All this means is that I’m a little rusty.”

  He threw the second dart, which missed the test but stuck in the wall. Encouraged by this improvement, Oboe stood up so as to try a behind-the-back toss. The dart missed the wall entirely and sailed through the open office doorway. Professor Revuelto happened to be passing in the hall. The dart embedded itself securely in Revuelto’s right temple.

  He winced with pain but continued walking. He went straight to the office of the campus nurse. Nurse Berry was astonished when she got a look at Revuelto and his dart. “How did this ever happen?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  The nurse eyeballed the dart from several angles. “There’s probably a perfect puncture wound there,” she declared. “There isn’t much I can do for you. You’ll need to go to the hospital for a tetanus shot.”

  “Naturally,” said Revuelto irritably.

  He decided to teach his class first, though, even with the dart sticking out of his head. As he spoke to the students he began to feel numb, almost like he was hooked up to an anaesthetic drip. He commenced to conjugate verbs at the blackboard, before he remembered that this was anthropology; he hadn’t taught conversational Spanish in 20 years.

  Adding to his disorientation was the vision of Mary Thorne. Leaning forward and crossing her legs in her front row seat. Her breasts were fairly spilling out of her yellow halter top. Short of breath, Revuelto instructed the class to to open the text to page 104 in order to begin reading the next chapter independently. He moved as carefully as possible in Mary’s direction to ask her if she needed individual help.

  As soon as Revuelto leaned over Mary’s desk, his view inside the halter top was nearly total; his breathing difficulties intensified. For her part, Mary found Revuelto repellent. He was sweating and drooling. His breathing was so labored he sounded like he was trying to blow up a stubborn balloon. And what about that stupid dart in his head?

  Sitting across from Mary was Rita Lieberman. Rita knew that Revuelto had no true educational objective in mind, but was maneuvering for a close-up look at Mary’s melons. This knowledge filled Rita with resentment. Taking the six-inch nail file swiftly from her purse, she prepared to stab Mary with it. She plunged the nail file downward in a powerful backhand arc, but it stabbed into the professor by mistake. It penetrated one and one-half inches into the rhomboideus major muscle next to his shoulder blade.

  Revuelto stood up straight before he turned white. With the dart in his temple and the nail file in his back, he ground his teeth together to keep from screaming.

  Once again, he walked rapidly to Nurse Berry’s office. The pain was excruciating and his head was swimming. Nurse Berry could offer him no new advice. She said, “This doesn’t change a thing. You’ll still have to go to the hospital for a tetanus shot.”

  Revuelto drove to the hospital emergency room. The E. R. nurse, a muscle-bound female with hairy forearms, was named Ms. Greve. Revuelto handed his note from Nurse Berry to her.

  “This tetanus shot will have to be in your rear end,” Nurse Greve informed Revuelto. “Drop your trousers.”

  Revuelto was red in the face and humiliated. “Naturally,” he said, through clenched teeth. He dropped his pants. He stood still, facing the examination table.

  Nurse Greve took a long and searching look at the nail file in his back. “This looks familiar,” she observed. “This looks like the nail file that’s been used to stab Mary Thorne. Is that possible?”

  Humiliated and in intense pain, the professor seethed an answer: “Yes. I’d say it’s even likely.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I am standing here with my pants down, in great pain. Would you please do what it is you have to do?”

  But remembering the well-favored curvature of Mary Thorne’s posterior, Nurse Greve was getting a little vertigo of her own. She licked her lips. “You mean this stabbing was intended for Mary Thorne?” she asked Revuelto.

  Revuelto seethed again, “I assume it was. Yes.”

  “Then maybe she should be the one here getting the tetanus shot.”

  Revuelto was ready to turn and strangle her, but Nurse Greve plunged the needle into his buttocks.

  Then she sat him on the exam table. She removed the dart from his temple and the nail file from his back. As soon as she cleaned both wounds, she bandaged them. She was still thinking fondly of Mary Thorne, all the while. “Maybe it would be a good idea if you sent Mary in for a tetanus shot as well,” she suggested.

  “What for?”

  “It never hurts to be too careful, is all I’m saying.”

  Revuelto went directly back to the campus. His head hurt and his butt ached, but his back was the keenest misery of all. When he reached his office, he found Vano Lucas waiting for him. With supreme effort, the professor squeezed his way behind his desk.

  Vano had never seen an office so cluttered. In addition to the three life-sized statues of naked Aztec warriors, which more or less defined the path to the desk, Revuelto’s office contained the following items: two overstuffed chairs, two filing cabinets, a bronze statue of Simon Bolivar, a bust of Cervantes, a pink plaster-of-paris flamingo, a Looney Tunes train set, a pair of praying hands cast in pewter, a statue of the Blessed Virgin, a portrait of the pope, a portrait of Eva Peron in a two-piece swimsuit, a bronze wall figure of Quetzalcoatl, and a huge stainless steel crucifix.

  Revuelto was terse with him: “What do you want?”

  “I came to ask if I could borrow your book on folds in the earth,” said Vano politely, using the phrasing he had rehearsed.

  Stiff with pain, Revuelto nonetheless discovered an urge to tidy up. He began moving t
hings around. “I know you. You are in my anthropology class. You sit still in your seat in the back row, but never say a word.”

  The depth of Vano’s hooommm predicted a long delay. Revuelto’s observations were accurate, but he couldn’t think of a reason for confirming them. He finally said, “Yes, that’s so.”

  Revuelto was trying to heft the Aztec statues into the office closet. Each of the statues weighed 35 pounds. With much effort, the wounded professor managed to cram one in, but neither the second nor the third would fit. “Why did I buy three of these??” he blurted out.

  If it was a question intended for him, Vano couldn’t think of what the answer might be. He wondered if he ought to be helping with the lifting of the statues.

  “What interest do you have in folds in the earth?” Revuelto asked him.

  Vano replied, “It may be possible to locate ultimate hooommm in this lifetime.”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.” Revuelto struggled some more with the statues. He pushed and pulled, he tugged and swore, but the closet would not accomodate them. “The book is not published yet,” he said.

  “I know it isn’t published yet,” said Vano. “I wonder if you might let me borrow the manuscript.”

  Revuelto was fatigued and hurting. He took out his handkerchief in order to wipe the sweat from the folds which circumscribed his chubby neck. “Now I know you. You are the boyfriend of Mary Thorne. You are the one.”

  It took Vano a few moments to form the reply. “Not exactly, I guess. Mary and I have never had a date, but she does get heat for me.”

  “Madre de Dios!! You are the one!” A return to dizziness intensified Revuelto’s level of discomfort. No one guarded a more febrile lust for Mary Thorne than did he. He wrote fantasies about her, which he kept collected in a loose leaf notebook. He sent her anonymous, amorous sonnets through the mail. He mopped his brow once again while looking Vano over carefully. “Can it be that you are the one?”