Fractal Paisleys

by Paul Di Filippo

Bonnie and Chuck were a real pair—had been since high school, where Chuck had been a star on the basketball team and Bonnie had swept the school’s field hockey squad to the state championships. His buzzcut, chinos and sports shirt from The Put On Shop at Sears, combined with an aggressive expression on a broad face, caused Chuck to resemble a young H. R. “Bob” Haldeman—a likeness which had provoked many jokes at his expense during the recent Watergate trials.

  Blue-eyed Bonnie—her blonde hair styled rather like Gregg Allman’s—wore today a white blouse with a smiley pin on its Peter-Pan collar, and a plaid skirt that showed off her hockey-stick-scarred calves. Usually to be found hanging adoringly on Chuck’s arm, she reminded Ken of a cross between Tricia Nixon and Karen Carpenter.

  The two had been engaged for four years. They were postponing their marriage until Chuck’s long-delayed promotion at the Merchants’ Bank should finally materialize, bringing them the income they deemed necessary for their married lifestyle. Chuck’s father, Charles Senior, was president at the Merchants’, and only that connection had secured Chuck a job there at all. His performance in the loan department was mediocre at best and abysmal at worst. The bank was still reeling from the loan he had approved for the local farmer who planned to raise coffee beans despite Rockville’s bone-rattling winters, and Chuck’s promotion seemed a distant prospect at best. This had tended over the past year or so, Ken had noticed, to render the relationship between the two ex-sports stars rather strained, at times even acrimonious.

  Swaggering toward Mona J. and Ken, with Bonnie close behind, Chuck now spoke.

  “Yeah, there’s nothing I like better’n visiting my old buddy the grease monkey. How’s it hanging, Greasy? And as for detouring halfway to hell and back, wasting most of my Friday evening just to haul out some bra-burning hippie broad who thought she was too good for Rockville until she got her tail kicked and came running back—why, I don’t know how come I didn’t think of such goddamn major fun myself before now.”

  “Oh, keep quiet, Chuck,” said Bonnie. “I think it’s cute that Mona J. was so anxious to see Ken again. Just think how we’d feel if we’d been separated for years.”

  Chuck rolled his eyes toward the clear summer sky. “I sure as fucking hell wouldn’t’ve mooned around like old numbnuts here. You can bet your damn eyeteeth that I would’ve wet my wick in the next available bush without so much as one goddamn tear, probably starting the day after you split.”

  “Charles Upton Fairleigh, how could you say such a thing!”

  Ken and Mona J. ignored the squabbling pair.

  “Where have you been all this time, Mona J.?”

  “California, mostly.”

  “That’s a pretty big mostly.”

  “Well, Hollywood, if you really want to know.”

  “Oh. Did you get to be an actress, like you always talked about in school?”

  Mona J. looked chagrined. “Sort of. Did you ever see White Lightning? Burt Reynolds as Gator McClusky?”

  “I don’t get to the movies much.…”

  Mona J. appeared relieved. “Well, I had a small part in that—”

  “Shit!” interrupted Chuck. “You were the chick dancing topless on the bar!” He whistled lasciviously. “That wasn’t no small part! Hoo-whee!”

  Ken suppressed an angry retort. “Anything else?” he asked Mona J. gently.

  “I, um, exuded a similar presence in Nicholson’s The Last Detail. Another bar scene.”

  “But you kinda felt these limited roles didn’t, ah, fully exploit your acting potential,” prompted Ken.

  “Right! I knew you’d understand, Ken.”

  “And now you’re back in Rockville. How long do you plan to stay?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Whatcha gonna do?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What do you know, Mona J.?”

  She spread her arms wide. “I’m here!”

  Ken was forced to smile. “I guess that’s enough.”

  “Awww,” snarled Chuck, “how sweet! I’m so happy for you two noodle-brains. Now if you’ll excuse us, me ’n’ Bonnie’re gonna lay rubber in reverse down the yellow brick road straight outa this goddamn salvage-yard Oz and back to the real world!”

  Chuck hustled Bonnie back into the Fury. He turned the key in the ignition and raced the engine.

  The fan belt snapped with a noise like a giant’s barber’s strop descending on a galvanized tin roof.

  Chuck hastily shut off the motor. He stuck his head out the window.

  “Hey, Monkey! Fix whatever’s wrong, and make it snappy! I don’t wanna waste any more time here. C’mon, c’mon, I’ll pay you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Unhurriedly, Ken went into the ramshackle garage which stood like a battered wooden knight amid the sprawling wreckage of the hundreds of weed-curtained cars laid out like defeated warriors around it. (The oldest vehicle immediately visible was a 1949 Kaiser Victoria; the newest, a 1974 Pinto totalled when Mrs. Stubblefield, dizzy after one Mai-tai too many at the Bridge Club, had failed to negotiate Wapner’s Curve.) He emerged shortly with a new fan belt and a wrench. In a minute or so, the repair was done.

  Chuck re-started his car, put it in gear, and kept his foot on the brake. Reaching into his back pocket, he took out his wallet. From this, he extracted a few singles.

  “Here you go, kiddo! Keep the change. Put it toward your retirement fund. You’ll need it, the way you’re going. You’ll be stuck in this nowhere job till you’re as old as fucking Reese. Unless, of course, you get your head crushed first!”

  With this Chuck threw the money out, where it drifted to the ground, and raced off in a cloud of fumes and dust, his swinish laughter diminishing with the distance.

  Ken wished silently that there could be a world where Chuck and his kind did not exist.

  Then he nervously caught himself.

  Such wishes, in his case, were dangerous.

  Very dangerous.

  Mona J. spat disgustedly in the direction of the retreating car. “Nothing’s changed in Rockville, I see.”

  “Not true. You’re back.”

  “That’s so,” chuckled Mona J. She walked in a funny manner over to the money and picked it up. “It’s dirty, but no sense letting it go to waste. We’ll need it.”

  Ken liked the way she said “we.”

  As Mona J. walked back toward him, Ken could restrain his curiosity no longer.

  “Mona J., did something happen to cripple you up in Hollywood? Too many stunts or something?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s the way you walk.…”

  Mona J. laughed. “Oh, that’s just my earth shoes.”

  “‘Earth shoes?’”

  “Sure. Look!”

  Much to Kens amazement, Mona J. did not, as he had expected, lift her leg to reveal what lay beneath her elephant bells. Instead, she swiftly undid her pants, dropped them, and stepped out of the pooled denim.

  Her panties were printed with peace signs.

  Ken forced his eyes down to her feet. “Those are ‘earth shoes’?”

  “Yes. They were designed by a Danish yoga instructor. Anne Kalso. She noticed how healthy it was to walk in soft soil, where your heel sinks deeper than the ball of your foot, and realized how great it would be to have a shoe that allowed such a stance.”

  “Uh-huh. You look like you’re gonna topple over backwards any minute.”

  “I just might.”

  Ken got nervous. The peace signs suggested a neutral topic. “Uh, what do you think about the war being over?”

  Mona J. grinned. “I guess that makes my panties old hat.”

  And so she took them off too.

  2. The Mood Ring

  The calendar in Ken’s shabby kitchen featured a bare-breasted model in black leather hotpants and glitter-flecked platform shoes cozying up to an enormous driveshaft, against a red satin backdrop. There was an artful smear of grease on her forehead, calculated
to increase her allure, mechanic-wise. The copy for the calendar read:

  GOFFART’S TRUCK PARTS

  “FOR TUFF PARTS—BUY GOFFART’S!”

  Below the pinup was displayed the page for August, 1974.

  One year ago to the month. The month when Ken had returned home from his hitch to learn of Reese’s death. The very month Nixon had been forced from office. The month Paul Anka’s “You’re Having My Baby” had gone to Number One.

  In a curious way time seemed to have stopped that month. On a personal level, Ken had felt his life was at a standstill, that he was just marking time by trying to pick up Reese’s business. On a national level, Nixon’s resignation seemed to have put the country into a state of post-politico-orgasmic lassitude. True, many events had happened since then, but none of them seemed to matter. Or rather, they all seemed anticlimactic somehow, even the end of the war. Nixon’s forced departure had definitely put an end to an era. But the new period—whatever shape it might assume—appeared reluctant to be born. There seemed no clear sense of what the future would bring. Everyone seemed to be floundering. It was as if the entire nation was waiting by the phone for a potential date with an unknown suitor.

  It was after midnight. The kitchen was illuminated by a caged utility light hanging from a hook set in a ceiling beam. (In the next room Mona J. lay sleeping, earth shoes tumbled in the corner where she had kicked them before pulling Ken into bed for a sexual reunion as exciting and delightful as any of their hasty high school trysts.) The sound of the peepfrogs who lived in a marshy corner of the car lot formed a one-note symphony.

  Ken was having a snack. The snack consisted of Fish Stix and Tater Tots. He kept a freezer full of these handy prepackaged near-edibles, and they formed the major part of his spartan bachelors diet.

  As he ate, Ken ruminated on a single question.

  Was Mona J.’s return a sign that his life was bestirring itself again, entering into a new phase?

  Perhaps now was the time to use the STP.

  Assuming that he even believed in it.

  Ken thought back to the last time he had seen Reese Hawrot alive, in 1972

  The cranky and grizzled master mechanic had been lying on a dolly beneath a ’58 Rambler Classic owned by Walt Whiteman, Rockville’s parsimonious pharmacist. Ken had been standing on the far side of the garage bay balancing off a tire.

  “Bring me my socket set, will you, boy,” came Reese’s muffled voice.

  Ken did so. Then Reese said the uncanny thing that was to spark their dramatic falling-out.

  “Mighty handy to have a helper like you around to spare these old bones, Ken. I’m sure glad I dreamed you up.”

  Ken had frozen. A feeling of unreality washed over him.

  “What—what are you talking about?”

  Reese scooted himself out from under the car. His wrinkled face wore a sober look. He got arthritically to his feet.

  “Well, son, I’m afraid that remark just kinda slipped out. I didn’t mean to say anything to you quite yet about what brought us together, but I guess now I’ll have to.

  “You remember ten years ago, back in 1962, when you was just a tad come here with your father for that windshield…? Well, it wasn’t chance that brought you here, nor made you fall in love with me and this old scrapheap. No, it was something known as STP.”

  “The gasoline additive?”

  Reese exploded. “Not your common STP, goddamn it!” He forced himself to calm down. “But that’s right, I forget. You don’t know nothing about the miracle STP.

  “It all come about like this.

  “T’was the fall of ’54 and I was just stepping out my door one fine morning when I seen a trio of city slickers pushing their car up the drive. A big government-style Caddy it was. I went down to give them a hand. They intra-duced theirselves as three professors. Kurt, Johnny and Albert was their names. On their way to Princeton, they was, when their old jalopy broke down. For all their book learning, they didn’t know squat about autos, and were as helpless in the face of their troubles as three kittens in a carwash.

  “Well, I fixed up the old crate they was driving quick as could be. Then they started shilly-shallying about how to pay me.

  “ ‘Who’s got some cash?’ says Johnny.

  “ ‘I’m relatively broke,’ says Al.

  “ ‘It’s impossible for me to decide,’ goes Kurt.

  “‘Hell, ain’t this great,’ sneers Johnny. ‘How we gonna recompense this kindly fellow? I’d do it myself, except I lost every cent at the roulette table.’

  “They shuffled from foot to foot for a while, until Al seemed to remember something. He reached into his pocket and took out a bottle. There was like two drops of queer liquid in it.

  “ ‘This is some crazy stuff Dirac sent me, trying to get me to accept his ridiculous nondeterministic quantum physics. He claims it is pure distilled essence of Heisenberg observation waves, or some such thing. He calls it—’”

  Here Reese paused. Utterly bemused, Ken watched his boss as the old man walked to a shelf and removed from its hiding place what had to be the very bottle, along with a dirty scrap of paper.

  “I made Al write this down for me,” explained Reese. “This stuff is called ‘Synchronistic Temporal Potentiator.’ STP.”

  “What’s it do?” asked Ken.

  “My exact question, boy. Here’s what Al said, near as I can recall.

  “‘Dirac claims this liquid, when applied to any observer, will allow them to influence the macroscopic world just as the fate of an atom is influenced by a measurement. The observer brings the world onto an alternate time line of his own devising.’

  “‘Are you saying this is some kinda magic wishing potion?’ I asked.

  “‘That’s more or less what Dirac claims. But since I know the physics of such a thing is impossible, I have not even tried it.’

  “‘And you’re giving it to me?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “Well, since it was all they was offering, I took it. But because I was basically happy with my life, I put it on a shelf and forgot about it for years, till one day, feeling the pain in my joints more than usual, I took the bottle down, poured a drop on my head—I figured that’s where my observing powers was—and wished for a helper. Within minutes, you and your Dad came along.”

  “You’re claiming you wished me into existence?” demanded Ken, feeling anger swelling up inside.

  “Not exactly. Just that I kinda bent reality a bit to get you here and make you stay.”

  Ken blew up. “That’s ridiculous! I’ve got free will! I’m not here because you wished for someone to help you!”

  Reese was unmoved. “Believe what you will. I’m only telling you what those professors said, and what I did and what happened. Maybe it was all just a big coincidence.…”

  This was not good enough for Ken. “Admit that you’re making all this up.”

  “Sorry, boy, but I can’t do that. Every word is true.”

  Ken threw down the socket wrenches. “That does it. I can’t work here if you believe that. I’m leaving. If you want me back, you’ll have to call me up and apologize.”

  Reese made no move to stop him.

  When, in the next few weeks, his elderly ex-mentor had failed to contact him, Ken had joined the Army.

  And then a falling engine block had put an end to any possibility of reconciliation. Apparently, Reese had failed with his arthritic grip to secure the lifted engine safely, and it had fallen directly onto his head.

  Quite evidently, the STP—if it worked at all—granted neither omniscience nor omnipotence nor invulnerability. Or perhaps the single drop Reese had applied had worn off.

  One of the first things Ken had done upon inheriting the junkyard had been to look for the bottle of magical fluid.

  It was still in its original hiding place, along with the scrap of paper with the writing in what Ken had come to realize was Albert Einstein’s own penmanship.

  Now, licking k
etchup from his fingers, Ken pushed the remainder of his midnight snack away from him and arose. He went out to fetch the bottle of STP and quickly returned.

  The single remaining drop of liquid lay like a black pearl in the innocuous bottle.

  For a year, Ken had debated using the magical fluid. Not that he believed in it. But still, it was worth a try. The only problem was, he didn’t know what to wish for. Like Reese, he was basically content with his life. (Whether that life had been imposed on him or freely chosen, he avoided thinking about.) As long as he had cars to work on, he was happy. From time to time, he had wished for companionship. But look at what had happened today. Mona J. had returned on her own initiative, without any magical intervention. Now he had nothing left to desire.

  Mona J. She seemed like a sensible, happy girl. Yet Ken could sense that underneath her bouncy exterior was a core of dissatisfaction, stemming mainly from her failed stab at acting.

  He would let her have the last drop of STP.

  Ken walked into the bedroom. Mona J. lay on her back with the sheets tangled around her from the waist down. Somewhere in her travels she had acquired a tattoo of the Zig-Zag man on her upper left breast.

  With the unstoppered bottle poised over her sleeping form, Ken hesitated.

  What if something should go wrong? The STP could have been responsible for Reese’s death! Wouldn’t it be good to make the application reversible somehow…?

  Ken’s gaze fell on the odd ring on Mona J.’s finger.

  She had told him it was called “a mood ring.” A liquid crystal center reacted with the wearer’s body, supposedly indicating his or her emotional state. Right now, Mona J. was a blissful blue.

  Without hesitating, Ken instinctively decanted the droplet of STP onto the mood ring.

  The liquid exhibited a startling affinity for the artificial stone, being instantly absorbed.

  Ken held his breath and waited.

  When nothing unusual happened, he undressed, lay down beside Mona J., and went to sleep.

  That is why he did not witness the change.

  3. Saturday Night Fever

  Ken awoke without feeling an overwhelming need to piss. This was highly abnormal. His intemperate bladder usually filled to bursting overnight, no matter how little liquid he drank before sleep. Oh, well, maybe a renewed sex life had something to do with it. Engine design, not human physiology, was his forte.…