A. A. Attanasio - In Other Worlds

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In Other WorldsIn Other Worlds

by A.A.Attanasio

version 1.0

Contents

Eating the Strange 18

Alfred Omega . 88

The Decomposition Notebook 146

He who looks does not find,

but he who does not look is found.

-KAFKA

Carl Schirmer's last day as a human was filled with

portents of his strange life to come. As he completed

his morning ablutions, he saw in the bathroom mirror

his hair, what little of it there was, standing straight up.

He smoothed it back and tucked it behind his ears with

his damp hands, but it sprang back. Even the few

strands left at the cope of his shining pate wavered

upright. His hair was a rusty gossamer, and it stuck out

from the sides of his large head like a clown's wig.

With his usual complaisance, he shrugged and

commenced to shave his broad face. Today, he sensed,

was going to be an unusual day. His sleep had been

fitful, and he had awoken to a breed of headache he had

never encountered before. His .head was not actually

aching-it was buzzing, as though overnight a swarm of

gnats had molted to maturity in the folds of his brain.

After completing his morning cleansing ritual and checking

the coat of his tongue and the blood-brightness under

his lids, he put his glasses on, took two acetaminophen,

and dressed for work.

Carl was not a stylish or a careful dresser, yet even

he noticed that his clothes, which he had ironed two

nights before for a dinner his date had canceled and

which had looked fine hanging in his closet, hung

particularly rumpled on him that day. When he tried to brush the

wrinkles out, static sparked along his fingers. The morning was

already old,- so he didn't bother to change. He hurried through

breakfast despite the fact that his usually trustworthy toaster

charred his toast, and he skipped his coffee when he saw that no

amount of wire jiggling was going to get his electric percolator to

work. Not until he had left his apartment and had jogged down the

four floors to the street did he realize that his headbuzz had tingled

through the cords of his neck and into his shoulders. He was not

feeling right at all, and yet in another sense, a perceptive and ease-

ful sense, he was feeling sharper than ever.

Carl lived in a low-rent apartment building on West 'Twenty-

fourth Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, and he was not used

to smelling the river, though he was only a few blocks away from

the Hudson. This morning the air for him was kelpy with the

sweetand-sour smell of the Hudson. Immense cauliflower clouds

bunched over the city, and the blue of- the sky seemed clear as an

idea.

He strolled down Twenty-third Street with an atypically loose

stride, his face uplifted to the path of heaven. Spring's promise-

haunted presence drifted through the tumult of clouds, which was

odd, since this was November. The rainbow-haired punks that

loitered about the Chelsea Hotel looked childbright and friendly

today, and Carl knew then that the ferment of a mood was indeed

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altering him. But he didn't care. Though his blood felt carbonated, it

was wondrous to see the city looking benevolent, and he went with

the illusion.

At the corner of Seventh Avenue, a drunk approached him,,

and he handed over a dollar, appreciating the serene desuetude of

the woman's face. Nothing could depress him this morning. And the

sight of the place where he worked sparked a smile in him. The

Blue

Apple at Twenty-second and Seventh was a bar and restaurant that

he managed. Except for the neon sign in the vine-trellised window,

the structure was antiquated and looked smoky with age. Until Carl

had come along, the narrow building had been an Irish bar with the

inspired name the Shamrock, run and owned by Caitlin Sweeney, an

alcoholic widow supporting her thirst and a daughter with the

faithful patronage of a few aged locals. A year ago, after losing his

midtown brokerage job to the recession and his own lack of

aggression, Carl had let a newspaper ad lead him here.. He had been

looking for something to keep him alive and not too busy. And then

he had met Sheelagh and wound up working harder than ever.

Caitlin's daughter had been sixteen then, tall and lean-limbed,

with green, youthless eyes and a lispy smile. Carl was twice her age,

and he lost his heart to her that first day, which was no common

event with him. He had experienced his share of crooked romance

and casual affairs in college, and for the last ten years he had lived

alone out of choice sprung from disappointment. No woman whom

he had found attractive had ever found him likewise. He was

gangly, nearsighted, and bald, not ugly but lumpy-featured and

devoid of the conversational charm that sometimes redeemed men

of his mien. - So instead of contenting himself with the love of a

good but not quite striking woman, he had lived alone and close to

his indulgences: an occasional spleef of marijuana, a semiannual

cocaine binge, and a sizable pornography collection stretching back

through the kinky Seventies to the body-painting orgies of the

Sixties. Sheelagh made all the years of his aloneness seem

worthwhile, for she was indeed striking-a tall, lyrical body with

auburn tresses that fell to the roundness of her loose hips-and, most

exciting of all, she needed him.

When Carl had arrived, the Shamrock was brinking on

bankruptcy. He would never have had anything to do with a

business as tattered as the one riven-faced Caitlin had revealed

to him were Sheelagh not there. She was a smart kid, finishing

high school a year ahead of her class and sharp enough with

figures and deferredpayment planning to keep the Shamrock

floating long after her besotted mother would have lost it.

Sheelagh was the one, in her. defiant-child's manner, who had

shown him' that the business could be saved. The

neighborhood was growing with the artistic overflow from

Greenwich Village, and there was hope, if they could find the

money and the imagination, to draw a new, more affluent

clientele. After talking with the girl, Carl had flared with ideas,

and he had backed them up with the few thousand dollars he

had saved. The debts were paid off, old Caitlin reluctantly

became the house chef, and Carl took over the bartending, the

books, and the refurbishing. A year later, the Shamrock had

almost broken even as the Blue Apple, a name Carl had

compressed from the Big Apple and the certain melancholy of

his hopeless love for Sheelagh. That love had recently increased

in both ardor and hopelessness now that Sheelagh had

finished high school and had come to work full-time in the

Blue Apple while she saved for college..

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On Carl Schirmer's last day as a human, when he entered

,the restaurant with his collar of red hair sticking out from his

head, his clothes knotted with static, and his eyes shining with

the beauty of the day, Sheelagh was glad to see him. The new

tables they had ordered had come in and were stacked around

the bar, legs up like a bamboo forest. "Aren''t they fine?"

Sheelagh asked.

In the year since they had first met, she had filled out to

the full dimensions of a woman, and Carl was not

addressing the tables when he answered: "Beautiful. just

beautiful."

With his help, she moved aside the old Formicatop table

from the choice position beside the window and placed the

new wooden one there. Sunlight smeared its top like warm

butter. She sighed with satisfaction, turned to Carl, and put her

arms about him in a jubilant hug. "It's happening, Carl. The

Blue Apple is beginning to shine." She pulled back, startled.

"You smell wonderful. What are you wearing?"

He sniffed his shoulder and caught the cool fragrance

misting off him, a scent kindred to a mountain slope. "I don't

know," he mumbled.

"Long night on the town, huh?" She smiled slyly. She

truly liked Carl. He was the most honest man she'd ever

known, a bald, boy-faced pal, soft around the middle but with

a quiet heart and an inward certainty. His experience as an

account exec had earned him managerial skills that to Sheelagh

seemed a dazzling ease with the world of things.. For the first

year he ran the entire business on the phone, shuffling loans

and debts until they. burst into the black. He was a solid guy,

yet he pulled no sexual feeling from her whatever. And for that

reason, he had become in a short time closer to her than a

brother. She had confided all her adolescent choices to him, and

he had counseled her wisely through two high school romances

and the lyric expectation of going to college someday. He knew

her dreams, even her antic fantasy of a handsome, Persianeyed

lover. "From the looks of your clothes," she went on, "your

date must have been quite an athlete." Her lubricious grin

widened.

Carl pridefully buffed the thought with a smile and went

about his business. The redolence of open space spun like

magnetism about him all day, a day like most others: After

getting the espresso machine and the

coffeemaker going at the bar, he brought the first hot cup to a

hungover Caitlin in the kitchen.

The old woman looked as wasted as ever, her white hair

tattering about her shoulders and her seamed face crumpled-looking

from last night's drinking. Grief and bad luck had aged her more

harshly than time, and she wore a perpetual scowl. But that

morning when she saw Carl back through the swinging door of the

kitchen, his hair feathering from his head and his clothes clinging

like plastic wrap, a bemused grin hoisted her features. "Don't you

look a sight, darlin'. Now, I know you don't drink, and you smell

too pretty to have been rolledso, mercy of God, it must be a

woman! Do I know her?"

He placed the black coffee on the wooden counter before her,

and she quaffed it though the brew was ply boiling in the cup. "It's

not a woman, Caity."

"Ah, good, then there's still a chance for my Sheelagh" -she

winked one liver-smoked eye-"when she's older and your hard work

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and bright ideas have made us all rich, of course."

Carl took down the inventory clipboard from its nail on the

pantry door. "Sheelagh's too young, and too smart to be interested

in a bald coot like me."

"Hat That's what you think. And she too probably. But you're

both wrong." Caitlin sat back from her slump, refreshed by the

steaming coffee. "Baldness is a sign of virility, you know. My

Edward was bald, too. It's a distinguishing feature in a man. As for

being too young, you're right. She's young with ideas of going off to

college. But what's college for a woman? Just a place to meet a

roan."

"You know better than that, Caity," Carl told her as he

prepared the reorder checklist. "Your daughter's smart enough to

be anything she wants to be."

"And does she know what she wants to be? No. So why run

off to college when she could be making her fortune here with a

clever businessman like yourself? She should be thinking of the

Sham-of the Blue Apple, and the lifetime her father gave to this

place. before the Lord called him and his weak liver answered.

What's going to come of all this recent fortune and long hard work

if she goes away? I'm not going to live forever."

"Not the way you drink, Caity. Have the ketchup and mayo

we ordered gotten here yet?"

"They're in the cooler downstairs. I'm too old to stop drinking

now, Carl. I haven't long to go. I can feel it. Old folk are that way.

We know. But I'm not scared now that the Blue Apple has come

around. Forty years Edward and I put into this tavern. And only the

first ten were any good-but that was back when Chelsea was Irish. I

would have sold out when it all changed after the war, but Edward

had been brought up here, you know, and he had his dreams, like

you have yours, only he wasn't near as handy at making them real.

And then Sheelagh was born." She laughed, making a sound like

radio noise. "I was forty-five when she was born. Is she God-sent or

not, I ask you? Edward blamed the devil. No children for twenty-

five years, and then a girl. I think that's what finally killed him, not

the drink. If only he could have lived to meet you and see this: the

house jammed every night-and eating my food, no less. Take off

your glasses."

Carl peered over the rim of his wire glasses as he arranged the

dry goods on the counter for that day's dinner menu.

"Why don't you get contact lenses?" Caitlin asked him. "Those

glasses bend your face and make you look like a cartoon. And brush

back your hair. If you're going to be bald, at least keep what you've

got neat."

Carl was well acquainted with Caitlin's ramblings and

admonitions, and he grinned away her jibes and checked the potato-

and-leek soup she had prepared yesterday far this day's lunch. The

old woman was an excellent cook. During the Forties she had

worked as a sous chef in the Algonquin, and her dishes were savory

and accomplished. She made all of the restaurant's fare with the

help of _a Chinese assistant who came in the afternoon for the

dinner crowd. When Carl saw that the menu for the day was ready,

he patted Caitlin on the shoulder and went out to set up the tables

for lunch.

Caitlin Sweeney watched him go with a throb of heartbruise

that the airy, springstrong scent he trailed only sharpened. She

loved that man with a tenderness learned from a lifetime of hurting.

She recognized the beauty in his gentleness that a younger woman

like her daughter could only see as meekness. Like a lightning rod,

Carl was strong in what he could draw to himselfas he had drawn

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more fortune to them in one year than her Edward for all his

brawny good looks had drawn in forty years. Carl had the prize of

luck only God could give. She saw that.- And she saw, too, that

Sheelagh, like herself in her hungry youth, yearned for the luckless

arrogance of beauty. She sighed like the warmth of a dying fire

leaking into the space-cold of night and put her attention on that

day's cooking chores.

Carl was pleased that Caitlin encouraged his passion for

Sheelagh, believing that the old woman was only teasing his interest

in her daughter to keep him happy and hopeful. Carl's loneliness was

the only lack Caitlin could pretend to complete in return for all he

had done for* them. Besides, Sheelagh was too self-willed for her

mother's opinions to influence her even if the crone had really

thought he was right for her. Carl spent little time pondering it that

last day lie lived as a man, for he was kept busy with his own

strangeness.

Lightbulbs blinked out around him faster than he could replace

them. And as he worked the bar for the afternoon business lunches,

the reverie he had experienced that morning spaced out and

became moony and distracted.

"You look pretty harried, sucker," a friendly, gravelly voice

said as the blender he was trying to run for a banana daiquiri

sputtered and stalled. He looked up into the swart-bearded face of

Zeke Zhdarnov, his oldest friend. Zee was a free-lance science

writer and parttime instructor of chemistry at NYU. He was a

thickset man with a penchant for glenurquhart plaid suits and

meerschaum pipes. Carl and Zee had been friends since their

adolescence in a boys' home in Newark, New Jersey. They had

nothing in common.

At St. Timothy's Boys' Home, Zee had been a husky, athletic

ruffian and Carl a chubby, spectacled math demon. A mutual love

for comic books brought them together and defied their differences.

St. Tim's was a state house, and the place was haunted with

dispirited, vicious youths-from criminal homes. Zee offered

protection from the roughs, and Carl did his best to carry Zee's

classwork. At eighteen, Zee graduated to the Marines and Nam.

Carl sought personal freedom by applying his math skills to finance

at Rutgers University. A Manhattan brokerage drafted him straight

out of the dorms. Meanwhile in Nam, Zee was learning all there

was to know about the smallness of life. He paid for that education

cheaply with the patella of his right knee, and he came back

determined to invent a new life for himself. He studied science,

wanting to understand something of the technology that had

become his kennel. When that became too abstract, he went to

work for a New Jersey drug company and married, wanting to find

a feeling equal to the numbness that surrounded him. During his

divorce, he had sought

out Carl, and the pain and rectification of that time had

brought them together again, closer than they had ever

been. Carl had done poorly at the brokerage, stultified

by the anomie that had poisoned him from childhood

but only oozed out- of him after he had found enough

security to stop his mad scramble from St. Tim's and

catch the scent of himself. He had smelled sour, and

not until he had met Sheelagh and developed the Blue

Apple did he begin to feel good about himself. That was

a year ago when Zee had reappeared. Now Zee came

by often with a crowd of students to fill the Blue Apple

up, and Carl was always happy to see him. They shook

hands, and a loud spark snapped between their palms.

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"Wow!" Zee yelled. "Are you charged! You look like you're

being electrocuted-very slowly." He shifted his dark, slim eyes

toward the table Sheelagh was clearing, her pendulous breasts

swaying with her effort-. "She's overloading you?"

"Today's an unusual day for me, buddy, but not that unusual.

What'll you have?"

"Give me a Harp."

Carl took out a bottle of Harp lager from the ice cooler and

poured it into a frosted mug. "The wiring's shot around the bar. I

can't get this blender or even the damn lightbulbs to work right."

Zee reached over, and the blender purred under his touch.

"It's the same way with women and me. The touch must be light

yet assertive. I think you've got a lot of backed-up orgone in there."

He stabbed Carl's midriff with a swizzle stick. "How about a run

with me tomorrow? We'll follow the Westway down to the twin

towers. I'll go easy on ya."

Carl agreed, and they chatted amiably about their usual

subjects-slow running and fast women-while Carl tended to

business. Later, as he was leaving, Zee leaned close and whispered:

"No sense wearing that

expensive cologne if you're going to dress like that." He

reached out to shake, thought better of it, saluted, and left.

The rest of the day was a bumbling of small accidents for Carl.

The bar's electrical system gave-out entirely, and he had to mix

drinks by hand and repeatedly go down to the basement cooler for

ice. The tiny screws in his eyeglasses popped out; and he lost a lens

down an open drain. Napkins clung tenaciously to his fingers, no

matter how dry he kept them, and he spilled several drinks before

he got used to the paper coasters coming away with his hand.

Midway through the dinner shift, with the house jammed, the lights

began dimming. When he left; the bar to check the fuse box, the

light came up, only to fade again on his return. "This is weird," Carl

at last acknowledged, running both hands through his startled hair.

Sparks crackled between his fingers. "I'm going home." He went

over to the pay phone to call a neighborhood friend to cover for

him, but he couldn't get a dial tone. Moments later a customer used

the same phone without difficulty.

Carl waited until Sheelagh came to the bar with drink orders,

then signed her toward a vacant corner. "What's wrong with me

tonight, Sheelagh?"

"Your glasses are missing a lens. Your clothes need ironing.

And you really should comb your hair."

"No--I mean, look at this." He touched her arm, and a large

spark volted between them.

"Hey! Cut that out. That hurts."

"I can't stop it. I've been electrocuting customers all day.

Look." He passed his hand over a stack of napkins, and the paper

rose like drowsy leaves and clung to his fingers.

"It's some kind of static electricity," Sheelagh explained.

"I'll say. What can I do about it?"

"Keep your hands to yourself."

Spark surges thudded through him whenever he reached for

metal, and after another hour .of stiffening jolts, he sat on a stool at

the far end of the bar and cradled his head in his hands.

"Is it that bad, darlin'?" A gentle hand touched his bald head,

and another spark jumped.

Carl looked up into Caitlin's whiskey-bright eyes. A -feeling of

bloated peacefulness buoyed him at the sight of her time-snarled

face. "Hi, Caity. Everything's wrong for me tonight. And I don't

even know why."

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"Just your luck taking a rest. Don't mind it. Have a drink."

"Nah-but I'd better get back to work."

"Wait." She took his hand, and another knot of electricity

unraveled sharply with her touch. "I have to tell you." The

marmalade-light in her stare dangled above him, and he could see

the whiskey burning in her. "If only I could tell you what I've been

humbled to. She doesn't know." She glanced toward where

Sheelagh was serving a table, her sinewy elegance shining in the dim

light. "You're a special man, Carl. Luck splits through you like light

through a crystal. I see that. I see it because I'm old, and pain and

mistakes have taught me how to see. You're a beautiful man, Carl

Schirmer." Her scowl softened, and she turned away and went back

to the kitchen. A customer called from the bar, and Carl rose like a

lark into a smoky sunrise.

Caitlin's kind words fueled Carl for the rest of his last day, but

by closing time he was feeling wrong again. He felt tingly as a

glowworm, and all the tiny hairs on his body were standing straight

up. He left Caitlin and Sheelagh to shut down the Blue Apple and

walked home. An icy zero was widening in his chest, and he

thought for sure he was going to be sick. Nonetheless, the beauty he

had felt that morning was still there. Above the city lights, a chain

of stars twined against the

darkness, and the fabric of midnight shimmered like wet fur. Only

the bizarre emptiness deepening inside him kept him from leaping

with joy.

So self-absorbed was he with the bubble of vacancy

expanding within him that he didn't notice the befuddled look on

the face of the kid whose huge radio fuzzed out and in as Carl

passed. Nor did he see the streetlights winking out above him and

then flaring back brightly in his wake. The midnight traffic slowed

to watch the neon lights in the stores along Twentythird Street

warble to darkness in his presence. Not until he had stumbled up

the blacked-out stairs of his own building and had fumbled to get

his key in the lock by the light of the sparks leaping from his fingers

did he notice that a thin ghostfire was burning coolly over his hands

and arms. He left the door unlocked behind him, afraid that

something awful was happening to him. His apartment lights, like

all the lights in the building; were browned out. The filaments in

the bulbs glowed dark red but cast no radiance. The TV worked bat

gave no picture, only a prickly sound. He wheeled the TV to the

door of the bathroom, and by its pulsing blue glow 'he had enough

light to take a cold shower. The chilled water invigorated him, and

when he looked down at his arms, he saw that the shimmering was

gone, if it had been there at all. Relief widened in him, and he

washed the one lens of his glasses and put them on to examine

himself more closely.

The air was a vibration of luminance, and the wavering static

of the TV seemed louder and more reverberant. He slid open the

glass door to the shower, and his heart gulped panic. The TV was

blacked out. The illumination and the sound were coming out of

the air!

He jumped out of the shower stall and nearly collapsed. The

bathroom was refulgent with frenzied

light; waterdrops hung in the air like chips of crystal. Through the

glare in the mirror, through an anvil. of ripping-metal noise, he saw

that his head was blazing with swirls of silvergreen flames.

Dumbstruck, he watched the terror in his brilliantly oiled face as

green fire fumed from his body in an incandescent rush.

A white-hot shriek cut through him, and his body went glassy,

shot through with violet sparks and flurries of black light. Silence

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froze the room to a cube of crackling light. And the last thing Carl

Schirmer saw was the glass of his own horrified face shatter into

impossible colors. '

Zee was the first to see Carl's apartment when he came by the

next morning for their planned run. His knock went unanswered,

but he heard the TV, so he tried the door. And it opened. The

apartment smelled windshaken, bright as a mountaintop. Zee went

over to the TV, which had been wheeled across the room to face

the bathroom door and was blaring a morning soap. He turned it

off.

"Oh sweet Jesus!" The words escaped him before he knew

what he was seeing. Ile bathroom was a charred socket. The

mirrors were purpled from exposure to an intense heat, burned

imageless. Zee entered, and the tiles crushed to ash beneath his

sneakers. He stood- numb in the scorched and shrunken room. The

seat of the fire-glossed toilet had curled to the shape of a black

butterfly, and the sink counter that had held toothbrush and

shaving implements was reduced to twisted clinkers.

The police, later, would classify the fare as unclassifiable. No

human remains were found, and Carl was recorded as a missing

person.

Caitlin and Sheelagh came by late in the afternoon

to see the mess themselves, and they found Zee still there.

"What do you think happened?" Caitlin asked after she had

surveyed a blasted room.

Zee was sittin on the couch in the living area where he could

see to the bathroom, staring as though he had not heard h r. He

tugged at his beard, twisting at the braid that had formed from his

daylong tugging. "Spontaneous human combustion," he whispered

without looking at her.

"What?" The old woman looked to her daughter, who just

shook her tear-streaked face.

"No one knows why," Zee answered in a trance, "but it

happens all the time-usually to old ladies who drink too much."

Caitlin gave him a fierce, reproving look.

"I'm not joking," he shot back. ."That's the statistic. Men burn

up, too. And I guess that's what's happened to Carl."

"You mean, he just caught fire?" Caitlin sat down beside him

and peered into his face incredulously. "How can that be?"

"I don't know. Nobody, knows. I read about it once. The best

theory they have is that imbibed alcohol ignites some kind of

chemical reaction in the body."

"But Carl never drinks," Sheelagh pointed out, and then

straightened with the rise of a memory. "The police came by the

tavern. I told them he was feeling odd yesterday. Paper stuck to him

and sparks kept jumping from his. fingers."

"Yeah, I remember that," Zee muttered. He stood up. He

went back to the bathroom for another look at the mystery. He

was a rational man, and he felt, muscularly felt, that there was a

reason for this.

The blue, wide-sky fragrance was almost gone. Sunlight

slanted through the apartment window and

laid a diagonal bar across the purpled bathroom mirror. In the

brilliant yellow shaft, a shadow showed within the heat-varnish of

the mirror.

"Hey!" he called to the two women. "Do you see this? Or am

I losing my mind?"

Caitlin and Sheelagh entered the bathroom with trepid

alertness and peered where Zee was pointing. In the violet-black

sheen of the mirror, where the sunlight crawled, was the vaguest

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shadow.

"It looks like a tree crown to me," Caitlin said.

"No-it's the outline of a head, neck, and shoulders," Zee

insisted, his finger frantically outlining the image.

"Could be," Sheelagh conceded. "But it could also just be our

imagination."

"I'm a science writer," Zee said impatiently, pressing his face

to the mirror. "I don't have an imagination. Get me a screwdriver.

Come on."

Zee dismantled the mirror and took it to his studio office in

Union Square. For a while he experimented with it himself,

illuminating the surface with sunlight, arc light, UV light. Nothing

more than' the dimmest semblance of a human head appeared. And

the rorschached shape could really have been anything. But Zee

recognized the square of Carl's head, the familiar silhouette so oft-

seen in the darkness of lights-out at St. Tim's, too well remembered

from those lonely first years when a friend was the closest he got to

family. Hard as he tried, though, his amplifications distinguished

little more than an amorphous shadow.

Then a friend of his who worked at IBM's

imageintensification lab in Jersey took pity on his feeble but

relentless efforts and decided to prove once and for all that the

mirror was a random fire pattern. A week later, the friend, pastier

and meeker-looking, presented him with a computer-enhanced

photograph. The five-by

seven-inch unglossed image showed a starburst of puissant radiance,

most of it blank with an unsealed intensity Daggered at the very

center, a clot of darkness resolved with a stabbing clarity to Carl

Schirmer's

horror-crazed features.

Eating the Strange

Nothing-the blankest word in the language. A year ago,

Carl Schirmer vanished into nothing. How? I've come to

believe that the microevents in the atoms of Carl's body are the

key. I'm not a physicist, but I know enough science to guess

what happened to him. Here's what I figure:

The very big and the very small-general relativity and

quantum mechanics--come together, at a fundamental unit of

length called Planck's length, which is the geometrical mean of

Compton's wavelength and Einstein's gravitational radius of a

particle. It looks like this:

1= h

It's equivalent to about 10'3 centimeter. The edge of

nothingness. just beyond that smallness, spacetime

itself loses the flat, continuous shape we take for granted and

becomes a fantastic seething of wormholes and microbridges,

the tiniest webs and bubblings. Any part of this ceaseless

ferment lasts no more than the sheerest fraction of a -second.

It is the texture of Nothing. Like sponge. Or suds. Each

bubble is a solitary region of space: The surface of the bubble is

the farthest distance the center of the bubble can know about

in its brief lifespan because that's as far as light can travel in so

short a time. It's a universe in itself, existing only for that

fraction of time and during that fraction connecting our

universe with the ubiquitous Field that connects all universes.

To see how this fact connects with Carl Schirmer, we have

to go back to Planck. At the end of the nineteenth century, he

was trying to explain why radiation varies with temperature. As

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an object is heated, first it gets red-hot, then white-hot. It only

gets bluehot if the temperature increases. The higher

frequencies of blue require more energy-which was news in the

nineteenth century. Greater energy for shorter wavelengthsl

Not what common sense had learned from sound and water

waves, which need more energy the longer they are. The now

classic formula that predicts this phenomenon is E = hF where

h = Planck's constant:

Since frequency is the inverse of time, the formula can be

written this way: E x T = Constant (h). Energy, as everybody

knows, equals mc2, mass times the speed of light squared.

What, after all, is the speed of light but a length of space

covered in a period of time. So, h actually equals Mass times

Length2/Time. ML2/T is called angular momentum.

What is it? Basically, it's linear momentum times the

radius around which it spins, MIA x L = ML2/T, like a rock in

a sling. The amazing thing is that this

angular momentum, alias Planck's constant, can hold any

amount of energy at all! Like the skater who spins faster by

pulling in his arms, the frequency of a photon increases as its

radius, in this case wavelength, decreases. Fantastically, there is

no limit to this increase of energy, either. The smaller the

photon, the more energy it containsl

Somehow, Carl turned into light. And that light did not

wholly irradiate away. If it had, a large part of Manhattan would

have been vaporized. Instead, the photons that made up Carl

increased in energy and shrank. The energy flux was so great

that Carl's body of light shrank smaller than the fine structure

of spacetime itself--and he fell through the fabric of our reality

into the seething superspace of quantal-tunnels, spume, and

foam-perhaps to expand again in another universe. This is the

ghost hole theory. A saner phrase than Nothing. But really, it's

just as senseless.

I'm writing a science fiction novel. Shards of Time. It's

about Carl, of course, and the ghost hole that swallowed him.

Just now it's seeming that's all there is between me anti insanity-

this fabulous story of a man who turns into light, a man whose

fate I'd always taken for granted. Why are stories so long? The

text is already there, in the true history of accidents that brought

Carl and me together and then separated us. If I can just write it

before -my funds dry up, I may be able to sell it 'and not have

to move. I don't want to move-: There's been enough erasure

lately. I've barely the stamina left to imagine the lies that can

carry the ideas coming at me. The moment goes everywhere at

once. Unfortunately, the muscle of my memory is numb, and

my line of concentration has been wavering. I must rest.

Actually, I must restructure myself inside out. Perhaps I'll fast.

That's one way to restructure and save money at the same time.

Caitlin Sweeney came to see me . The old lady was

surprised at this mess. She didn't know I'd lost my teaching

post. I think she was drunk. She wanted to see the mirror and

the photo again, and she sat for a long time by the window

looking at them. She wanted to know what they meant. I was

five or six gins into forgetting that day, and I told her

everything I've guessed about the ghost hole. When I was

done, she asked why other scientists weren't studying what had

happened to Carl. I tried to tell her that the mirror had become

scientifically inadmissible after I took it off the wall, but I

cracked up-laughing as much as cryingand that scared her o$:

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