Chapter One (A): Official Hooplah

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter One (A): Official Hooplah

 

“It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend

a little of this mystery every day.”

 

- A. Einstein

 

In which the Universe opens up:

 

Wrong channel.

Daytime talk show. A sleazy, thick-lipped woman dressed all in red, hollering profanities at the host. One bleep-word after another, a long string. Something about fucking. Something about sweaty, groping uncles and giant black cocks, maybe. “Bleeping, bleep, bleep, bleep. And bleep the bleeping whore you rode in on, Maury.”

 

Right channel.

All news, all the time, except during the commercials. The Main-Stream Media, or MSM, as the pinkos, anti-Semites, and lefty nut-jobs liked to call it. Talking heads were going blah, blah, blah, grinning like bright, shining assholes, stupid all the way to the core.

Mud-hole in deep space. Someone got the idea to patch it up, fill it in, like the snowplows used to do on those makeshift winter roads in the north country. Pack it all down so the passing traffic doesn't sink into muskeg, or oblivion, or wherever. There wasn't much cash to spare but the CER, the Commission for Exploration and Research, managed to snag a couple trillion dollars of public money to throw at it. On TV, the Commission's vice-president, Don Apache, tanned bright orange and oozing all kinds of sleaze, assured tax-paying citizens, “Everything we're doing, every dollar spent on this program, is for the benefit of all humanity, from Asia to the Americas to the moon, and beyond.” And never mind that the privatized, profit-driven CER created the mud-hole in the first place—in a terribly misguided attempt to extract yellow antimatter from the sub-space strata—it was going to fall on the common human to pay for the damages.

Watching the news broadcast from the cozy safety of his kitchen, Frank Burczyk wondered aloud, as millions of others, in a million other kitchens, wondered aloud, “How does one fix a hole in space?” Also, “How does one go about making a hole in space, in the first place?” The hairs on Frank's neck went all tingly, but he wasn't exactly sure why. Was there something particularly dreadful about such a situation? Would it affect an ordinary person's daily comings and goings? Of course, he didn't know.

How could he?

For a fleeting moment he thought about the woman in red, from the other channel, bent over the kitchen table like a dog, tits all akimbo, begging for a bleep in her big, perfect bleep.

Dirty creature.

The guy on TV said, “This is merely a precautionary measure. The hole may pose a hazard for CER vehicles, working in that region of space, but there is no correlating danger to the planet Earth. People can breathe easy. There is, in all likelihood, nothing to worry about.” He was an asshole, Frank could tell, the sort of guy who'd swindle his own grandmother out of her pension money. Besides, trillions of dollars wasn't exactly “nothing to worry about.”  Somebody, somewhere, was going to suffer for it. Probably the senior citizens and young, unwed mothers, as usual.

It was the end of days, once again. For months, the nut-jobs and false prophets had been shouting in the streets, “Last gasp,” and, “Game over,” and, “Final act, for real.” The Aztec calendar was running out for the third or fourth time, according to the newspaper. Frank recalled the other deadlines very well—it seemed that Armageddon was constantly asking for an extension, not unlike the cereal and poultry farmers in the Heartland who couldn't make their loan payments on time. Depending on Frank's mood it was always a letdown because, “The world just can't end soon enough, for me.” Mostly hyperbole, since Frank was every bit as afraid of death as the next guy, evidenced by the fact that he was still above-ground and breathing.

It was a gold, green, gorgeous autumn day.

He was eating chicken noodle soup and a corned beef sandwich. He had a two-page list of chores, scribbled and rough around the edges, wet from the soup, lying in front of him. Fix the toilet, repair the doorknob, defrost the 'frig—shit that Gia wanted done long before yesterday. But now there was a gaping tear in the space-time continuum and he wondered if there was any point in doing anything.

Another asshole, this one a scientist, allegedly, appeared on the TV screen and said, “This is not a gaping tear in the space-time continuum, despite what some people might be thinking. This is not a black hole or Twilight Zone-style vortex.” He then went on to reiterate what the other asshole had already said: “This is a mud-hole, nothing more, and not worth getting upset or excited about.  Almost everything about this situation is hypothetical. There is probably no danger, at all. This is not the end of the world.” It seemed to Frank that the CER shouldn't be wasting trillions of dollars plugging a hole that wasn't “worth getting upset or excited about,” but he allowed that private corporations loved nothing more than to dump vast sums of government bail-out money into ridiculous endeavors. At the end of the day, somebody's pockets were being lined with crisp bills, and that was probably all there was to it.

A mud-hole in deep space.

And then a third asshole appeared onscreen to say exactly what the other two had said. “A mud-hole is a theoretical concept, and the consequences of creating one are even more theoretical. The chances are about ninety-nine point seven percent against there being any kind of negative effect. The measures being taken to close the hole are purely precautionary.”

More faces, more voices, more ridiculous bullshit:

“There are always risks. Ask a hard-rock miner about unexpected falls of ground. Ask a chemist about explosions. Ask a geologist about secret volcanoes.”

“Yellow antimatter is a hot, necessary commodity. Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to get to the right chicken.”

“It seems like a lot of money—it's a bail-out of literally astronomical proportions—but when the situation is repaired, when antimatter production hits the ground running and fossil fuels become redundant, and every person on the planet has access to clean, reliable energy, a few trillion dollars is going to seem like nickels.”

“The CER puts the welfare of people first and foremost.”

Frank sighed. If the world wasn't going to end he would have to get around to Gia's list, after all. He would have to go to work in the morning. He would have to keep on keeping on, which wasn't such an easy thing to do, these days, despite the medication.

...

 

 

 

His therapist had told him, “You are a strong, decent person.”

She may have been on drugs.

She may have been deluded.

...

 

Gia called on the telephone. She said, “Frank, baby, I just heard from Mona—she says there's a supernova, or solar flare, or something, and the world is going to end. Are you watching the news? What's going on? Are we going to be okay?”

“I think so,” Frank said, barely stifling a yawn. “It's just a mud-hole, apparently, whatever that is. Some kind of anomaly created by sifting through dark matter. I don't understand, at all, but they say we're not in any trouble. It's a very small thing, no bigger than a semi trailer. They're going to fill it in, somehow. Patch it up.”

“How do you patch up a hole in space?”

“That's exactly what I said!”

“Seriously, Frank, what does the TV say?”

“I don't know—they're going to pack the thing full of plasma, or some damned thing. Fill it up with quarks and neutrinos and whatnot. It's all science. They have a scheme. They showed a diagram and it looked like squeezing a tube of toothpaste into a flat tire.”

“That doesn't sound the least bit scientific.”

“It was just an illustration. It's for the lay people, like us. Gives us an idea.”

“Mona says the thing has knocked us of our axis.”

“The mud-hole is a long way from the Earth, Gia. It's halfway to Mars. That's forty million miles, or maybe more. It's a long way. It's deep space.”

“Halfway to Mars is not deep space.”

“Well, they're calling it deep space, on the news.”

“Forty million miles is nothing in galactic terms. It's an inch. It's less than an inch.”

“Everything is going to be fine, sweetie. Relax. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

...

 

From the Ninety-eighth New World Dictionary:

 

Mud-hole, n. In Schillinger Warp Theory, any static conduit or umbilicus created or already existing between the membranes of the fourth and seventh dimensions of the universe-matrix, along the N-string, and linking the physical plane with the higher, undefined (and possibly binary) realms. First postulated by Derrick Kuiper, PhD D. and Mary Filch, PhD. c. 199_.

syn. star gutter, crease [archaic]

cf. warp junket effect.

...

 

It didn't seem like a very big deal on paper. Seemed to Frank that it was how people travelled around the galaxy in shows like Star Trek. A bunch of science-fiction mumbo-jumbo. And didn't Albert Einstein write a bunch of books about how the heavens were full of such things—mud-holes, worm-holes, slip-gates, and such? If it wasn't Einstein, Frank figured it had to be Stephen Hawking. One or the other. Didn't matter.

He phoned Gia back and said, “I checked it out. It's fine.”

She said, “Mona said the same thing. She called her husband at his workplace. He told her the same thing you told me. I guess it isn't such a big deal. A solar flare, one of those kill-shots everyone's going on about, would have been much worse. That's what I thought it was.”

“If it was one of those, we'd already be dead.”

“I know—I was thinking maybe they were giving us an advance warning.”

“I don't think they can predict those things.”

“I know. Whatever. I just wanted to talk to you about it. I wanted to tell you I love you, which I did. That was why I called in the first place. I wanted you to know, and I wanted you to make me feel better about things, and you tried your best. Thank you.”

“Did Mona's husband mention that Stephen Hawking invented mud-holes?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, he did. Hawking did, I mean. I don't know what Mona's husband said, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Do you feel like pizza for supper? We have a coupon.”

“Ugh.”

...

 

Frank kept thinking of a song—

 

There's a hole, there's a hole,

There's a hole at the bottom of the sea

 

—and it was making him nutty.

...

 

He was thirty-nine. Forty was just around the corner, a few days. On Friday. Five days. This was Sunday. He had his days mixed up because Gia was working today, and Gia usually never worked Sundays. In five days his thirties would be over and life would become a river of steaming shit.

He was trying to remain positive about it.

Gia was working the Sunday shift because two of the cleaning ladies were AWOL and the hotel was filling up with bikers because of an upcoming rally. The place was a nuthouse.

Frank despised the bikers—especially these particular bikers.

Some days his jaw ached. This was one of those days. It was broken, ten years earlier. Bar fight, Christmas party, over in Meskanaw. Not really a fight, at all. He was blind-sided by a raving dope fiend. He barely saw the guy coming. Saw him for all of three minutes, later on, from across the courtroom, when the fucker pleaded guilty to an aggravated assault charge. All these years later, it was difficult to remember his face—probably couldn't pick him out of a police line-up.

He was so terribly distracted, lately.

“There's a hole at the bottom of the sea.”

The front door went clunk but he didn't bother getting up because he knew it was the Idiot, not Gia. The Idiot was back from wherever, probably stinking of stale beer and pot smoke, and would hole up in her bedroom until the next day's sun went down, as was her custom. Sleeping it off. The kid was all the way out of control, over the edge.

He wondered if she knew there was a mud-hole in space.

What would she think about such a thing? She didn't seem to entertain esoteric concepts.

“What's a mud-hole, Uncle Frank? What is space? I'm a goddamn moron.”

If Gia could hear his thoughts, sometimes, she'd blow a rubber gasket.

He went back and checked the news on TV and now everyone was talking like the situation was old hat. “Yes, the mud-hole has been there for the past eleven weeks,” said one of the usual assholes, “and the CER now confirms that they took their collection plate to the Senate in mid-August, when it became evident that the extent of the N-string damage was greater than they originally estimated, and far beyond the resources available to them, at the time.”

Another one, shiny and stupid, grinning like a car salesman, said, “We're sure to see a rise in the base price of antimatter, particularly the coveted yellow variety, which the Japanese are using for god-only-knows, and that's going to make the stockbrokers happy, but the downside, of course, is that the upcoming Mars missions, scheduled for March and June, and all further space exploration, are going to be delayed by years if not decades. You might even see the CER hand the reins of the space program back to NASA or the Europeans.”

And blah, blah, blather.

Frank thought he'd like to relax in a sauna. Maybe a hot tub.

Get the dead out. That sort of thing. A spa day.

Yeah. A thirty-minute vacation from real life.

Ever since Emathios, in Mexico, he'd become a spa junkie.

He could go anytime, even now. The Bithynian facility was just five blocks away.

“Sometime. Maybe soon.”

All this talk about yellow antimatter and warp junkets—it all sounded quite unreal. There were cowboys out there, in the Great Beyond, extracting priceless droplets of liquid gold from the cold side of nothing at all. Like rubbing a balloon on someone's head and receiving a nuclear explosion in return. A quarter-gram of yellow antimatter, it was said, could power the entire state of California for three weeks. However many million kilowatts that worked out to, Frank couldn't guess. Obviously, it was substantial. For all the cash being dumped into the so-called mud-hole, there had to be some kind of walloping payoff down the line somewhere—

A crunching sound from upstairs. A crunch and a slam and seven cuss-words in quick succession. The Idiot had stepped on, stepped in, knocked over, knocked around, bashed, burst, or battered another prized Burczyk possession. Having her around was like keeping a large, mentally retarded animal in the house. She hollered, “Fucking stupid ornament, why were you hanging there?”

“Jezus,” Frank muttered. “Jezus help me.”

He was going to be forty soon.

A matter of days.

...

 

Life had come full circle, kind of like The Lion King. Well, Frank wasn't necessarily dying from lion bites and handing his crown/mane down to his firstborn cub—he wasn't dying at all, as far as he could tell, and there was no cub in the equation—but he had a strong sense that he was back at the starting gate. Been around the block, once or twice. He was three years into a relationship, loaded with debt, working eight to six, Monday through Friday, eating badly, mistreating his organs with beer and pharmaceuticals, not getting enough sleep, and so on, and it felt ridiculously familiar. “How many times have I been at this exact spot, dreading tomorrow, dreading the days after that?” he asked himself. “How long before I throw myself off the Audet bridge?”

Statistically speaking, a fall from the Audet bridge, into the mild current of the Ghost River—an eighteen-foot drop, at this time of year, at the high-water mark—was only slightly more likely to kill him than tumbling down the grassy knoll at Hector Park while playing Frisbee. It was possible, certainly, but not worth betting on. He did know how to swim, after all, and that was half the battle. (Now, if he were to ride a derailed train, doing fifty or sixty miles an hour, over the edge of the span, that would be a different story altogether. Pretty good odds against getting out of that mess.)

Sertraline wasn't doing the trick anymore. Now he was on bupropion.

His sock drawer had been rummaged through, messed up, and his silver lighter, a Zippo, one that his father had given to him, years back, a Christmas gift, was missing.

Swearing again, from upstairs, and Frank entertained notions of murder.

“That rotten pig.”

His jaw throbbed. He needed to rectify that situation immediately.

...

 

Codeine's magic roots were now spreading through the marrow of his bones.

He thought of pigs and cardboard boxes.

Pigs and cardboard boxes.

Two things that really didn't seem to go together...

He chuckled stupidly to himself.

Years back, before meeting Gia, before moving back to Discord, long before the mid-life crisis and sensual Mexican vacations, when life was tidier, simpler, Frank Burczyk had his ass kicked. It was the first time since second grade that he'd lost a fight—though losing implies he was involved in it, even briefly, which he wasn't. He didn't even know there was a fight until well after it was over, which means that it wasn't a fight, at all, but an attack. A sneak attack.

This was Meskanaw, down the highway from Discord.

It was a shit show, as the saying goes.

The big fucker came flying from halfway across the room and his right fist felt like a jagged chunk of concrete, cracking bone as it fell. He was a brute, a dirty fighter, and had it in his mind that Frank had called him a nigger. This came as something of a surprise to Frank—he hadn't used the n-word in a very long time. Years. Maybe not since his late teens. Beyond that, the man didn't look any more Afro-American than he did Arabic or Samoan. Very generic features—difficult to pinpoint—and skin not much darker than coarse sandpaper. If Frank had been inclined to hurl an epithet, if he'd even spoken a word to the man, nigger would have been far, far down the list.

Two local businesses were holding their annual Christmas party at Mudd Brothers Bar & Grill, at the same time. The Blue Sky pork producers had nine tables at the west end, and Champion Cardboard had ten in the north. In between were seven common tables where staff from both companies were mingled together. The owners of both companies were childhood amigos—Oscar Fendiuk with his pigs and Pat Pike with his boxes. Mudd Brothers was nearly full to capacity. A hundred and twenty-one seats filled.

The jukebox was playing an old western song by Freddie Fender: You'll Lose a Good Thing—he was warbling, “If you don't straighten up, I'm gonna walk right out that door.” The waitress, a sow-faced blonde with a stunning body—the only server on the floor, for eleven dozen drinkers (!)—was in the process of transporting twenty shots of black sambuca and nine beers to the booth by the billiard table. In all the ruckus, she lost her tray and the hardwood was drizzled with suds, sticky liqueur and shattered glass.

“You fucking jerks, get out of—”

The fight was short. By the time Frank realized he was being attacked it was virtually over. He was on the floor and the boots were flying. It took six men to subdue the crazed assailant. He was full of cocaine and liquor, cranked all the way up to maximum volume.

“He called me a nigger!”

“He didn't call you shit, pal.”

“He looked me in the face and called me a dumb-shit nigger!”

“No, he didn't even come to your side of the room, asshole.”

Meanwhile, Frank Burczyk was halfway comatose.

The black man was called Coach. Later in life he'd use a different handle, but for now he was Coach. Almost nobody knew him and he certainly didn't work at Blue Sky or Champion. He'd come to the company party as the guest of Romeo Cortes, also called Shakespeare—small Hispanic fella—one of the finishing technicians from the experimental pig facility. It was a new and accepted truth in the various corridors of Champion Cardboard that it took a very specific kind of person to work with swine, at Blue Sky. (Wink, nudge.) Basically, the ones who preferred the company of swine over that of people. (“They fuck the pigs over there, you know.”) Earlier in the evening someone had joked that it was quite a shock to see this strange Romeo character in the company of a hulking ethnic, rather than bringing along one of the sows in heat as his date.

“You knew he was gay, didn't you?” Roger Nelson said.

“Who? What are you talking about?” asked Frank.

“Romeo. Did you know he was gay?”

“I hardly know him, at all.”

“He looks to be gayer than the Jack of diamonds, wouldn't you agree?”

“Just because he brought a male friend along doesn't indicate anything. Who cares?”

“I guess we should just be happy he didn't bring his work home with him. Ha ha.”

Anyway, Roger Nelson was a fucking vodka parasite.

The room was buzzing with faint hostility right from the outset.

The pig farrowers had their own table, near the washrooms. The accountants sat at the table next to them, and then came half of the sales agents and all the truckers, and the warehouse-men. Roger Nelson knew that two of the truckers had recently hauled beef for the XM Company, down in Tromso, and he had the idea that cow-people couldn't be in the same room as pig-people on account of cross-contamination, back at the barns. This was where the real agitation began. But it was quickly pointed out—by Krista Jeans, from accounting, no less—that the real problem was with pig-people commiserating with other pig-people, workers from a separate facility. As she put it, “Influenza jumps from pig to pig, or from pig to people to pig, not from cow to pig. Pig workers from different barns can't even get married. I wouldn't worry about these jokers.” And by referring to Blue Sky's contract truck-drivers as jokers, the air began to hum with animosity.

It doesn't take much to sour a crowd.

The rest of the tables, six of them, along the north wall, were taken up by mainstream production workers, and their dates, and the executives, and the other half of the sales agents.

Early in the evening, one of the owners toasted, “Here's to ranching. Yee haw.”

Blue Sky was all about pigs. Champion was all about cardboard boxes. And now the owners were entering into a partnership to produce the world's strongest corrugated paper by blending the pulp with porcine DNA. The new experimental pig facility, on the south side of town, was all about cultivating enzymes that might strengthen the fabric of the Champion product. It was voodoo and mad science. Pike had heard a story that, in Toronto, Ontario, a few years earlier, one of Big Three textile affiliates had managed to extract spider silk from genetically altered goats. The idiots in the boardroom must have thought that was the best idea since cheese processed from Vulcanized rubber—Blue Sky and Champion Cardboard had been playing around with four-legged beasts ever since. (Eventually this weird genetic folly would destroy Blue Sky and Oscar Fendiuk, and lead Champion's Pat Pike to a dinner date with a shotgun, but the future still seemed rosy on this lovely yuletide evening.)

“Ranching! Hell yeah! All in the name of corrugated paper,” Roger Nelson cheered, clinking his hi-ball glass against the big boss's beer stein. “Fucking A-one! Blue Sky all the way!”

Most employees knew Roger Nelson. He was the shift foreman at the box plant. Three quarters of the people who earned less than 40K a year answered to Roger, or at least paid him lip service. He was the guy you called when you were going to miss a shift due to illness, real or imagined. Two weeks before the party, Frank played a sick-day card. “I can't make it in today. I feel like hell.” And Roger lost his senses on the other end of the line—had a cuss-laden shit attack, or something, as usual—and told Frank he was going to fire him. Next day, of course, everything was fine because Roger Nelson didn't have the authority to directly fire anyone, especially for following company protocol.

By ten the party was roaring, asses were being groped, certain wives were sneaking around with men who weren't their husbands, while their actual husbands were too busy getting shit-faced to notice, and even the executive-types were red-faced and hollering cuss-words over the country music.

“Merry cock-sucking Christmas, everyone!”

Roger Nelson had his dick sucked by Connie Craine, from the Champion accounting department, and right beside the rear fire exit, where anyone using the washroom facilities could, and did, notice. There would be divorce papers served in the following weeks, for certain. Three or four unions fractured that evening, not unlike Frank Burczyk's jaw.

Coach came at him from the right, like a stealth missile. Rudest sucker-punch ever thrown.

“Who the hell are you?”

Whap!

“Call me a nigger again, will you?”

And that was the end of the party for Frank. It was 10:14.

Everything went blurry and Frank slipped into grey-world dreams.

The angel of death, Doom itself, was hovering nearby, he was positive. Stalking, poking, prodding, leering, lording over his thoughts, nattering about good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, triglycerides, the works, keeping him awake. Then came the voice of his mother, saying, “This is exactly how I said it would be. Oh, my precious baby, what have they done to you?”

His whole body jerked. Enough was enough.

It was a whole decade later, and this was his bedroom.

Gia whispered across the darkness, “Water, sweetheart, night. I got the keys to the kingdom, come. Next up, the color blue.” Nothing new. She always talked in her sleep.

He threw his covers off.

...

 

He was distracted.

Disconnected.

His thoughts were fragmented, disjointed.

His jaw was fine, mostly. Healed nice, a long time ago. A bit of discomfort from time to time. Rainy day aches. But there were pills for that. He wasn't supposed to be taking those pills. He liked them too much, sometimes. He kept them secret.

He had a vague notion that things were going to change.

Substantially. Impossibly.

He checked the TV news but nobody was talking about mud-holes at three AM.

...

 

His balls were feeling slightly better.

A couple nights before, Gia ground those fuckers to a squishy paste under her fine ass cheeks.

A complete accident, but still—

...

 

He was thinking of the song, The Man Who Sold the World by David Bowie.

 

It went, “I spoke into his eyes: I thought you died alone, a long, long time ago.”

He'd never understood what the song was about.

Not really.

...