To Infinity and Behind!

Earl Fowler

This wasn’t no disco. No country club either. And here among the vulgar and tempestuous rabble of creeps and bums and ne’er-do-wells, I was whispering sweet nothings to my old friend Jim Beam when the door creaked open at noon on a Tuesday.

As my old drinking buddy Richard Feynman used to say, there’s always room at the bottom.

In stepped a size seven sister with witchy crazy hair in a size five dress, looking for all the world like maybe she’d packed for a weekend in Sheboygan and wound up spending nine months marooned aboard the International Space Station instead.

Wasn’t clear what world. Or why her hair was in a size five dress.

“Don’t get up gentlemen,” she purred. “I’m only passing through. I just flew in from the exosphere and, boy, are my arms tired.”

As soon as I caught a glimpse of her, I could feel my trick knee struggling to adapt to 1g-force gravity.

Or maybe it wasn’t my knee. Still, I could see in an instant that I was plain ugly to her. Introduced myself as William. She wondered if I’d ever had a day of fun in my whole life.

Lately, I’d been wondering the same thing myself. 

“William? I’ll bet it’s Bill or Billy or Mack or Buddy. Anything but Butch. Can’t bear that wretched name,” she said in a smooth silvery voice that had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house. Like maybe we were in a pre-Code Hollywood movie or something, surrounded by black-and-white bootleggers and blackmailers.

Suave as all hell, I motioned to the bar stool across from me. “Take a seat, Toots. What seems to be the trouble?”

“The name’s not Toots,” she said. “It’s Suni. Sunita Williams. And right now I could use something cheap that goes down easy. Maybe I should just lick that Eau de Cologne right off your wrist.”

A surge of virility passed through me as if I were a caged panther, but that sweaty substance wasn’t Eau de Cologne. And it wasn’t on my wrist.

She reminded me of a hat-check girl I used to know in peach-bloom Chinese pyjamas. What I was doing in peach-bloom Chinese pyjamas I’ll never know. Toots reached over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes.

She had eyes like surging seas fondling jagged islets with foam.

“I’m not sure if I’m in the right place,” she intimated, “but I heard you deal with some pretty strange stuff.”

“Strange?” I said. She stared back so intently that I jerked away from her like a startled fawn. “You got something for me, or are you just here to check out my PJs?”

I’d meant to change into something less comfortable before leaving the house that morning. Now it was too late.

She shook her head. “It’s not that simple. You seem to have an issue with comfortable ladies’ sleepwear. Me, I’ve got a problem with the fundamental laws of physics.”

It was a brazenly false equivalence. But to humour her I raised an eyebrow anyway, which suddenly felt as heavy as one of Frida Kahlo’s. Who only had one. Didn’t yet realize that a bar towel had become temporarily affixed to my forehead during my power nap.

Good thing I’d nixed the pecan bowl when Cookie the bartender, a big guy with glasses who couldn’t manage a two-hole outhouse, had offered to shove it in my direction.

They always serve nuts in bars.

“Physics?” I said, feeling the wallet in my pocket instinctively clenching like an endangered edible mollusk in the Salish Sea. Possibly an abalone. “That’s a first. You got a theory or are you just looking for a good space-time continuum?”

She hesitated, then handed me a crumpled piece of paper. I unfolded it, reading a note that might have moved me if I hadn’t become such an immovable inebriate: “I have a new theory on inertia, but it doesn’t seem to be gaining any momentum.”

I snorted. “You’re telling me that you’re in trouble over a cheap gag about inertia? You gotta be kidding me.”

She didn’t laugh. “It’s not just a joke. It’s … it’s part of the bigger picture. The whole shebang. The cosmic egg. The Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End except for that scene from the fourth Indiana Jones movie where he survived an atomic bomb detonation by fitting himself into a lead-filled fridge. Not to mention the disappointing eighth and ninth seasons of Seinfeld.”

I leaned forward and my forehead towel fell off, my interest piqued by a bankroll of American one-dollar bills rolled into a big ball with an elastic. She started peeling them off and snapping them down on the counter in front of me like there was plenty more where that came from.

“All right,” I said, “go on. Hit me.”

Drat. That wasn’t the towel on the floor. In all the excitement, my pyjama bottom string loops must have come loose.

“Try this one on for size,” she said. “Good thing it isn’t everything.

“Dmitri Mendeleev goes to a hockey game. With the home team well ahead late in the third period, he taunts the visitors with a rousing chorus of: Sodium sodium sodium sodium, sodium sodium sodium sodium, helium-yttrium helium-yttrium, gadolinium bismuth!

“What’s it all mean, Sherlock?”

“Elements, my dear Watson,” I said. “Elements. Mendeleev was a Russian chemist known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements.”

“So?”

“So here’s a key to unlocking that one: What type of fish is made out of 2 sodium atoms?

“Um … 2 Na?”

“Right. So put 2 and 2 together and you have a chemist’s take on ‘na na na na, na na na na, he-y he-y, gd-bi.’ ”

That would have gone over like a Pb balloon with your typical barfly, but this one had obviously arrived in a higher state of consciousness.

“Then let me tell you about a photon,” she said, pulling off her big white boots. “It checks into a hotel. When the clerk asks if it needs help with its bags, the photon replies, ‘No thanks, I’m travelling light.’ ”

This time I did the staring with my warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums. “That’s your beef? Someone’s cracking corny groaners to you about light waves?”

She nodded grimly. “That’s just the start. An electron, a proton and a neutron walk into a bar. The proton says, ‘Your round.’ The electron asks, ‘Are you sure?’ “The proton says, ‘Positive.’ ”

I bit. I knew better but I bit. “And the neutron?”

She kind of bit her lip, too. “Geez, I don’t know.”

“But I can guarantee there’ll be no knock on the door,” I said, motioning to Cookie for another round. “I’m a total pro. That’s what I’m here for.”

“OK, but this is where it all starts to unravel for me. The neutron said: ‘Generally I like to stay even-handed on these matters, but make it a bourbon sour.’ ”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Offered her the pecans, but she shook her head: “Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.”

This dame was a bigger mess than her hairdresser. And of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world …

“Suni,” I said, “yesterday my life was filled with rain. You smiled at me and really eased the pain. But sweet Felicity Arkwright! You’re telling me you’ve got a problem with subatomic quirks and cracks?”

She started dancing weightlessly, like a bumblebee at the geraniums. “I loves you Porgy. But these brainless blagues are not harmless. Don’t let them take me. Don’t let them handle me and drive me mad. They’re ... they’re connected to something bigger. A theory, maybe. Einstein was a high initiate into the mysteries of the universe, right?”

“Yeah,” I muttered, “he developed a theory about space. About time, too, considering those unconscionably long lunch breaks he took while working at the patent office.”

She’d come back down from the ceiling and was pacing in front of the bar now, gesticulating like a professor at the front of a lecture hall. “The past, the present, and the future step out of a DeLorean and into a bar …”

“Yeah, I heard,” I said. “It was tense.”

She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother for her.

“Time travel. It’s real, Mack or Billy or Buddy. I’ve seen the protesters chanting on the moon: ‘What do we want? Time travel! When do we want it? No particular urgency!’

“It’s messing with everything. Time goes slower on the ISS, lagging 0.01 seconds for every year spent back on Earth. Now that I’m back on terra firma, I’m … I’m out of synch. Unstuck in time.”

I tapped my cigarette on the ashtray, thinking this might be the wildest case I’d ever taken and yet somehow knowing exactly how she felt from the lost years I’d spent watching the Hockey Night in Canada panel discussing Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner. “You’re saying time travel is real? And it’s messing up the timeline? That’s the issue?”

“Exactly,” she said, her voice now desperate. “You can’t understand what it’s like when time itself is falling apart. When you’ve seen a girl cool to absolute zero like I have and made sure that she’s OK° … you’ll understand the stakes."

I shook my head. “You think the universe is playing with your head? That’s child’s play compared to some of the things I’ve seen. Gritty urban settings. Fast and brief dialogues. Morally compromised protagonists.”

She dropped her voice. “Enough about King of Kensington! I’m telling you that a science lecturer and a student walk into a bar. The lecturer orders H2O, and the student says, ‘I’ll have a glass of H2O too.’ And …”

I cut her off. “The student has misunderstood and …”

“They buried him the next day.”

“All right,” I said, leaning back on my stool. “I think I finally get it. Time travel’s one thing, but you’ve got a time bomb of nerdy jokes ticking away in your head so we’ve got bigger issues.”

She nodded. The morning light when it’s in her face really showed her age, but there was no way of knowing that in the dim murk of the speakeasy. I really should have been back in school but she was making a first-class fool out of me.

“You know, Mack — you don’t mind if I call you Bill or Billy or Buddy, do you? — there are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary numbers and those who don’t. And now that I’m back among the living, I’m running out of time to figure out which kind I am.”

I was about to observe that there were only deadbeats here when she said it. Of course she did. I’d known all along that it was coming but felt powerless to stop it.

Besides, at that exact moment, I was concentrating on peeling the labels from my bottles of Bud, shredding them on the bar, then lighting every match in an oversized pack, letting each one burn down to my thick fingers before blowin’ and cursin’ them out.

“I need help, Billy or Buddy or Mack,” she said, adjusting her oxygen backpack. “I don’t even know where I am anymore. Or when. I’m reading a book on anti-gravity and I can’t put it down.

“Here’s the plot so far: Heisenberg and Schrödinger get pulled over for speeding. The officer asks Heisenberg, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ Heisenberg replies, ‘No, but I know exactly where we are!’

Backfooted by that response, the officer says, ‘You were going 200 kilometres an hour!’ Heisenberg throws his arms up and cries, ‘Great! Now we’re lost!’

Spidey sense tingling, the officer asks Schrödinger if they have anything in the trunk. ‘A cat,’ Schrödinger replies. The officer opens the trunk and yells, ‘Hey! This cat is dead.’ Schrödinger angrily replies, ‘Well, he is now!’ ”

As Suni was relating this old chestnut, it dawned on me where I’d seen her before, and it wasn’t the hat-check counter. She was one of those acid-faced biddies from my childhood who sat behind little desks in public libraries and stamped dates in books!

Through the window bars I fancied I could just make out the contours of a British police box over where the good people of the world were washing their cars on their lunch break, hosin’ and scrubbin’ as best they could in skirts and suits before driving their shiny Datsuns and Buicks back to the phone company and the record store, too, ’cause they’re nothin’ like Suni and me.

“Listen, Mack or Billy or Bob,” she said. “All I want to do is have some fun. And I’ve got a feeling I’m not the only ... say, what’s a record store? What’s a phone company? What’s a Datsun?”

This time I wasn’t having it. “Toots,” I said, “I’ve got one for you. Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?”

“To get to the other side to get to the other side to get to the other side …,” she replied for the rest of time.

Finally free of her spell, I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a pun.

For that was the moment, apropos of nothing, that Argon walked into the bar.

Looking up from his want ads, the bartender yelled: “Keep right on walking, mister! You don’t belong here. We don’t serve noble gases!”

Argon didn’t react.

I’d been sitting on the exact same stool years ago when his father, Protactinium, an unstable character with a short fuse, was blown all the way to kingdom come in this dive after a nasty encounter with some oxygen and a spritz of water vapour.

“He’s looking for the man who shot his Pa,” I said as the sun came up over Santa Monica Boulevard.