by Curtis Hox
“I want more than the move. You know that. I want the creation of an entirely new discipline.”
“Oh, right. Already thinking about that?”
“Am I that transparent?”
“Yes. And it upsets people—”
“A new conception of reality with a new science and a new set of practitioners. Just think of it, Eliot. For it to work, I need credibility beyond the academy. To do that, I need leverage.”
“What kind of leverage?”
Hattie watched her students converge at the water fountain, almost at each other again like little children.
Alice bent over to get a drink and said something brusque that sounded like, “idiot.” Towns wisely backed away.
Hattie clapped her hands to distract them. “If I have my way, you’ll both graduate with degrees in culture science. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Alice spun on her heels, water dripping from her chin. “Culture science!”
“What’s the big deal?” Towns asked. He dropped his book bag on a table and sat in one of the wooden chairs. “Science is cool.”
“Sure it is, Towns,” Alice said. “Do you even know what ‘culture science’ is?”
He looked to the professors for help.
Hattie smiled and raised an eyebrow.
“No, Alice,” he said, “I don’t.”
“Think of it as the science of …”
“Yes, Alice?” Hattie asked from across the chamber.
“I know,” Towns said. “A science of technicians … and scholars.”
“Good,” Hattie replied. “Definitely both.”
“Lucky guess,” Alice said.
“If it’s a science, I guess we can figure it out,” Towns added. Then, “Technology’s cool.”
“Technology’s cool?” Alice asked.
“Yeah.”
“You just waltz into school yesterday for orientation. You put yourself at the center of world-shaking intellectual history after generating one of Dr. Sterling’s bleedover interpolations. Fine. But don’t pretend to know what we’re talking about.”
“I’m not.”
“Enough,” Hattie said. She looked around, surveying the chamber. “What do you think?” She raised her arms. “Imagine we remove these tables, temporarily, of course. A little platform right in the center. This is where we’ll be.” Then she pointed to the entrance. “The press will be over there. A room full of esteemed colleagues. It’ll mark the beginning of a true paradigm shift.”
Towns asked, “The press conference?”
“Not just a press conference; a demonstration.” She began moving in a wide circle around the chamber. “The university will be the center of the academic world’s attention. Luminaries will attend, although the political world will ignore us, for now. That’s fine, and preferable. I’ll also announce the move of my institute and the creation of a new discipline in the academy, even if the regents haven’t accepted it. If they resist, I’ll threaten to leave.”
“Can you do it now, Towns?” Eliot asked him.
“Do what?”
“The instantiation; the apple. Have you tried by yourself?”
“No. I need to practice.”
“We’ll need the equipment,” Alice said.
“When?” Towns asked with a sudden hint of nervousness. “When’s the demonstration?”
Hattie clapped in excitement. “One week, next Monday.”
“Monday?” Towns asked.
“Monday!” Alice said.
As if on cue, five union workers dressed in beige work clothes wandered in. They looked around, surveying the room. They each grabbed a few chairs and started lining them against the wall.
“That soon?” he asked.
“You’re going to be famous, Ernest,” Alice said. “Imagine the implications: broadcast news, YouTube, blogs, message boards, viral mail. You’ll be all over the Internet. Isn’t technology cool?”
He tried to smile.
“Alice, leave him alone,” Hattie said. “He’ll do fine. Won’t you, Towns?”
* * *
Towns snuck out of the atrium while Dr. Sterling hustled across the chamber to direct the placement of the chairs and tables. Alice was punching numbers into her inadequate cell phone, mumbling about bad reception, and didn’t notice.
Doors on each side of the long hall gave access to a stairwell with flights in both directions. Towns ascended, then exited onto the first gallery. A path through the stacks allowed him to walk along the wrought-iron balustrade overlooking the space below. He began to wander, and to follow his urge.
He’d discovered his talent in high school one day when he’d asked for a hall pass to go to the bathroom but, instead, snuck to the small library to hide out. That first time, he found a nook where he could be alone. He sat on soft carpet among stacks between American literature texts, then grabbed an anthology of Mark Twain because he felt compelled to open the book right to a page dominated by a big chunk of senseless typesetting characters. At the time he thought it was a printing error. He still smiled at the idea that some student who found the book would get to skip almost a page of assigned reading.
Later, after Towns found other examples of bleedover he knew Twain had been his first.
He eventually moved to the next gallery, the voices of Alice and Dr. Sterling echoing as they made plans for the demonstration.
A familiar feeling caused him to pause.
Towns felt a weight in his shoes as if his soles had turned to lead. He stopped among the Ns and Ps in the Library of Congress classification system: Fine Arts and Languages and Literature. He stood in the middle of two tall shelves bathed in light from the wide glass ceiling panels over the atrium. They allowed enough illumination to comfortably read the titles. His eyes fell on a few novels by Fitzgerald. He’d read The Great Gatsby as a freshman, but he couldn’t remember much about it.
Then he spotted a misplaced book: René Descartes’ Discourse on Method.
In the American Literature section?
Towns reached for the slim, translated edition. It was wrapped in a red hardback cover. He opened the book and saw an extensive introduction—the actual text didn’t start until nearly halfway through. He thumbed through the introduction and saw information about the importance of Descartes as the father of modern philosophy, then moved onto something called Rationalism, doubt, method. He paused.
Where is it?
Scanning the pages, he saw a break in the text that no galley editor would miss.
The familiar sensation started in the back of his head and ran down his neck to his arms, ending in a rush of adrenaline. He found the interpolation in a part of the text discussing something called res cogitans and res extensa. He had no idea what that meant.
The interpolation began with a series of periods and dashes that lasted for four lines: the brash ones, the brave ones, ever the rethinkers, the seers into the seams, unalterable in the universe. Nature breaks open her secrets. Science’s handmaiden comes of age. No longer a handmaiden. Now, a madam in her own right.
Movement down the aisle caught his eye.
Masumi appeared, and approached. She wore running shorts that barely hung to the middle of her thighs and a tight tank top that revealed small, firm breasts.
“What’re you doing?” she demanded.
“Were you looking for me?”
“Oh God, please.” Of course she’d been looking for him, she admitted to herself. Masumi had spent the last hour walking up and down the galleries. She was surprised to see him just standing there, as if in a trance, holding a book like a hymnal.
She walked past him and stared at the activity below. “What’re they doing down there?”
He followed.
She leaned against the balustrade and watched as union workers hefted the last of the wide tables and placed them against a far wall. Men with mops cleaned the tiled floor. Dr. Sterling stood amid them like a maestro conducting a symphony for a group of well-dressed peop
le who looked like university administrators. Alice helped, as if her involvement were vitally important.
“Getting ready for the demonstration,” Towns said. “Who are those people in the ties?”
“My guess: administration monkeys. They work behind the scenes to make sure my labs have electricity.”
“You were looking for me—”
“Because of your magic apple, yes, I was looking for you. I missed a night’s sleep. I was also awake trying to cope with the fact I compromised my job. My boss hasn’t fired me yet, though. Not even a reprimand beyond demonstrating his disgust that I won’t call it a blatant hoax. I’m so screwed.”
“Sorry.”
“He’ll contact me in the next few days to learn what I plan to do. But when he sees my name as a byline on Dr. Sterling’s article announcing your little apple episode, he probably won’t even fire me. He’ll just remove me from my lead position in his lab. My final Ph.D. project and research will be put on hold.”
All because this odd, skinny boy had done the impossible.
“That sucks,” Towns said.
Masumi glanced at him as she pretended to care what happened below.
“How did you generate that apple? It’s not natural, no, but also not supernatural either. No way. Can’t be. So, I want to know how.” When she saw the book he carried, she snarled. “Really?”
She snatched it from him.
“Jeez,” Towns said.
“What do you know about Descartes?”
“The book … or the …?”
“The book.”
“Not much. French guy. Important philosopher. Difficult name to pronounce. Most important thing is the interpolation.”
“You found one in here?”
“Yeah.”
“You should read the actual book.”
“Why that one?”
Masumi harrumphed. “Because of what’s happening down there, what’s happening to us.” He stood there with a clueless, blank expression. “Dr. Sterling speculates in her most wild moments that with the N.P.B. we perceive something profoundly different from anything seen before. My fear is that it feels supernatural, although she claims this similarity has nothing to do with the superstitious categories found in traditional Western religion, maybe Eastern, sure, with their odd abstractions. But physicists covered that ground years ago with unprovable bravado that equals anything you’ll find in a literature or philosophy department. Quantum theory? It works, but, hello, crazy weird. Still, if she’s right, a new language is needed. If you were a student of philosophy and history, Towns, you’d know that a similar series of events occurred in the seventeenth century with the birth of modern science, with Descartes. Dangerous times.” She handed it back. “What’s this I hear about a new academic discipline?”
“Dr. Sterling calls it culture science.”
Masumi guffawed loud enough to cause an echo. “Those two words shouldn’t go together any more than alchemy science go together in a modern university. Today, no one seriously considers alchemy a real science, for good reason.”
“Times change. People get smarter.”
“That’s not it at all. Look, alchemy was once considered a form of scientia, of knowledge, until chemistry took over and started making real progress. ‘Culture science’ never existed. Dr. Sterling wants the arrow going in the other direction. If she has her way, it will. People will then scoff it wasn’t always around.” Masumi looked around at all the stacks. “You just randomly find a book by Descartes with an interpolation?”
He nodded.
“Real science requires plenty of wrong turns before finding a right one. The odds are against such luck as yours.” And then, “You want to sit?” Masumi started to walk off before he could answer.
“Sure,” Towns said, almost tripping over his feet as he hurried after her.
The gallery ended at a doorway leading into a small, carpeted reading room that dampened their footfalls. The far wall held several turrets with full-mullioned windows overlooking the quad, where a few people had spread blankets to eat on the lawns. A single empty desk and chair sat in each turret.
Masumi sat in one and signaled for him to get a chair.
“So what is it with you?” she asked.
Towns opened his mouth to speak but only managed a gurgle, a few incomprehensible words, and a wince as he bit his tongue. She chuckled. He looked like he might shrivel up into a little pretzel.
“What is it with you?” he managed.
“Sorry.”
She signaled for him to dig out the book. “Let me see it again.”
He rummaged in his bag, then handed it to her.
“I mean, how do you do it?”
“Locate?” He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Masumi thumbed through the book, no longer staring at him as if he were a specimen under a scalpel.
Towns tried to relax, stretching his legs under the desk and crossing his arms over his chest.
She found the interpolation. “You just pulled this off a shelf?”
He nodded. “Like I said: I can locate.”
“You told me.”
“Seriously. I can do it.”
“Right now?”
“Not again so soon, but in a few days. I can walk into the stacks and within an hour find another book with additional text that any scholar, publisher, or knowledgeable reader will tell you never existed before.”
“You should read this—the actual book—instead of wandering around libraries like a crazy person looking for a bathroom.”
“If you say so.”
She snorted. “I find it odd that I’m championing intellectual history when you’re the liberal arts guy. You need to check out another one, as a companion, his Meditations.”
“I’ll get right on that—”
“You’re entering into difficult territory. Others have been at similar crossroads. Could help.”
She handed the book back to him.
Towns stuffed it in his bag and tried to act interested in the view. He kept glancing at her legs, though. “Are you going to help us with the demonstration?”
“I heard about that. Bold. I’ll be there. I guess I have to. You can repeat the apple, right?” He nodded. “If you do that in front of the press, this is going to change your life. Change our lives.”
“I’ve been told.”
“The world will come calling. Can you handle it?”
“Come calling?” Towns asked.
“In the biggest sort of way. Maybe in the worst sort of way.”
“Great.”
Masumi caught him glancing at her legs again.
She usually wore shorts that at least reached her knees. She pretended to ignore his interest, realizing how obvious his attraction was. Like he had a chance. She was annoyed for even considering it.
“I need to be sure, Towns.”
“About what?”
“About you, about this. I can’t stand up there at the demonstration without being sure.”
“Okay. So?”
She stood. “Let’s go talk to Dr. Sterling.”
“Fine. About what?” He banged his knees on the desk, let out a squeal, and cursed himself.
“Smooth,” Masumi said, bowing. “After you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
That evening, Dr. Sterling led Alice, Towns, and Masumi into the bottom subbasement of the Landash Library. They followed the automatic lights through the empty rooms until they arrived at a space in the back: her new office.
A tall bookcase lay flat in the center of the room, as she had requested.
“No chairs,” she said. “Sorry.”
The rest of the room was bare.
Carpeting had just been put in, and all the wiring had been done. The narcotic smell of new paint hung in the air. The room was ready to be furnished as her new office once all her books were moved over. It was a perfect square. Other than the doorway they had just walked through, the other three walls were unado
rned.
Just one more addition, Hattie thought.
Masumi had made her demand that afternoon in the library:
“I want it done again.”
“You’ve seen him in the studio—”
“I want to see something else,” Masumi said.
Towns had stood behind her, almost as if he were hiding.
“Presumptuous.”
“You want me with you during your demonstration.” Masumi said. “I want to be sure.” And then, “Something different from an apple, that’s all.”
They had stared at each other then, neither blinking.
Hattie eventually said, “Okay, tonight then. I’ll prepare the incantation in the studio beforehand. Towns, be there by six to practice. I’ll have Alice there as well. Then we come back here. You’ll get what you want, Masumi.”
“What’ll it be?” Masumi asked.
Hattie had refused to tell, but now everyone would see.
Towns had been practicing in the studio for an hour and claimed he was ready.
“Go ahead, Towns,” she said, staring at the far wall. Alice and Masumi stood to either side of her. “Fill the beats.”
Still, no one asked what Hattie had chosen.
Good. They’re showing restraint.
Towns readied himself. Everyone stepped back, aware they might disturb him. He saw Hattie looking at the far wall. He looked where she looked, and began.
His voice filled the room. After each consonant, he filled the empty beats with his signature guttural howls. This stitch was longer than the apple combination; even a few seconds more of breath meant an exponential rise in difficulty. He shut his eyes. The last phoneme rang. Alice gasped.
Everyone stared at a new doorway in the opposite wall.
Hattie took a step forward as gooseflesh rippled along her arms. “There!”
Standard vinyl siding framed a beige door in the far wall. It was no more distinct than a typical six-panel entry you might find in someone’s home. A small stainless-steel handle meant a turn and pull would do the job.
“I did it again,” Towns said.
“You did,” Hattie said. “Yes indeed, sir.”
