KATACLYSM: A Space-Time Comedy (4 page)

Madame S gestured to her plate of tea biscuits.  “Cookie for the road?”

The tiny desert moon of Vineteh slowly orbits the planet Mamaliga VI just on the outskirts of the Milky Way.  Only one species inhabits the desolate surface of Vineteh.  The members of this peculiar race are no more than ten inches tall and if any humans ever had the privilege of seeing a Vinetan they would be struck by its remarkable resemblance to an oversized house key.  The astute human observer, however, would recognize that not all of the keys look alike.  You see, baby Vinetans emerge from the womb as blank keys, raw and naïve.  When the females hit puberty, they notice that some unusual physical changes are taking place.  First, they tend to smell a lot.  Very few species across the universe are lucky enough to avoid this stage of young adulthood.  Each girl also notices that her long key proboscis is developing a strange pattern of bumps and jagged edges.  As it turns out, when puberty is complete she is easily able to use her body to unlock the door to a brand new studio apartment set aside for her by her father.  With his work complete, the father key can happily go hang himself at which time the mating season can begin.

In a moonlight ceremony that dates back many thousands of years, all of the eligible male Vinetans form a long, winding line which meanders around the sand dunes in front of the newly developed adult females.  When the parade is complete, the female onlookers make their way to the chain of blank keys and each selects the one that she most fancies.  At this point, there is usually much grumbling among the male rejectees who can’t make much sense of their situation.

“We’re all blank,” moan many of the men.  “What’s he got that I don’t have?”

As these dispirited fellows head off to indulge in a host of mind-dulling beverages, they miss one of the most beautiful mating rituals to be glimpsed anywhere in the universe.  As the moonlight sparkles across the dunes, each female Vinetan performs a seductive dance during which she secretes a special saliva all along the length of her partner.  As he swoons, she gyrates rhythmically upon his body.  When the dance reaches its climax, a special salivary enzyme, present only on this evening, digests some of the man’s torso allowing the female to cut him into exactly her shape.  After several hours, they are both exhausted but she is pregnant and he can get into the apartment.

The complex and remarkable biology of the Vinetan pair bond has shaped a culture that has been thriving for millennia.  They are a truly carefree people, although moving to a new apartment has always presented a real challenge.  On the moon of Vineteh, there are no spare sets of keys, unless of course someone is being unfaithful.  By way of contrast, Jude had no spare key because he was just too lazy to go out and get one made.  As a consequence, there was a real possibility that he would be unable to get back into his apartment in the immediate future.  Ah well, he thought.  I’ll think of something.

As for his appointment book, the truth was that Jude didn’t really mind losing that at all.  It was more of a badge of honour than anything else, Jude’s way of constantly reminding himself that he had nothing important to do and that there was nothing anyone could do about it.  Every morning he would open the book up and mindfully stare at its blank pages as though to cleanse his indolent spirit.  That is, of course, until today.  Just last week, Jude remembered that he had scheduled his first appointment of the year for February 10th.  He had meticulously penciled it into his book in tiny letters so that it wouldn’t startle him when he saw it.  But with all of the morning’s craziness, for the life of him Jude couldn’t recall what the appointment was for.  He knew that he had a highly important piece of business to attend to, but he wasn’t used to having highly important business and it was throwing him off.

Jude had been wandering around, trying to figure out what he was supposed to be doing when his train of thought was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of Donald Trump’s voice saying “My fellow Americans, diversity and respect for others makes us all winners!”.  Trump was on TV in a shop window flashing a peace sign.  Glancing back to the sidewalk, Jude saw a slick business-type dressed in a pinstriped Tommy Hilfiger suit stop to raise two fingers at the TV and say “Peace to president Trump!”  Several other pedestrians followed suit.  It wasn’t the first time on this day that Jude had a peculiar feeling and it wouldn’t be the last.  Indeed, as he looked away from the businessman, a large sign on a nearby billboard caught his eye.  There was something about it that seemed terribly wrong.

The National Bank of Myanmar is Proud to Sponsor your Superbowl Champion New France Patriots!

Jude scratched his head.  He needed a coffee very badly and, mercifully, as he looked ahead he could see four Starbucks within the next two blocks.  At least this had a ring of familiarity.  Jude ducked into the nearest one.  Leaning over the counter he signaled to the pimply redheaded boy who was arranging cakes in the display case.

“Hi there.  If it isn’t too much trouble, I’d like a grande uh…half Arabian Mocha Java…half Aged Sumatra with non-fat milk and whipped cream on top.  Actually…don’t worry about the milk but I’d like extra whipped cream.”

The boy stood up. 

“I’m sorry sir but we’ve run out of coffee.  How about some tea?”

Eric Silver awoke to the rhythmic humming of a floor buffing machine at 4:30 a.m. that morning.  An elderly Hispanic member of the hospital’s cleaning staff, whom Eric knew as Marta, entered the lounge and was slowly pushing her buffer past the ATM where Paroophoron had stood just two hours earlier.  Eric was still propped up against his locker when she appeared in the doorway to the locker room. Her shriveled old face scrunched up as she squinted to see who was inside.  Eric often saw Marta passing through the wards during his many late nights on call and he made a point of always saying hello to her.  For her part, Marta never said a word to the resident, forever maintaining a stony scowl.  On this occasion, however, Marta removed her headphones when she saw Eric and gave him a curious kind of half-smile.  She began running her fingers up and down her upper lip in a gesture that Eric didn’t understand until he heard what Marta had to say next in her thickly accented English.

“Nose…bleed,” she exclaimed with a little giggle.  “Nose bleed,” she repeated now laughing and shaking her head.  Eric was at a loss.  It seemed that news got around more quickly at Massachusetts General than he could have ever imagined.  The resident looked on in a pose that had become his trademark on this night.  The expression he wore befitted a man who had just watched his dream house get obliterated by a hurricane that had been named after his ex-wife.  It was all just a simple mistake.  Couldn’t people just forget about it?  Would it be so terrible, Eric mused, if someone did something nice for me today instead of treating me like a ratty doormat?  He quickly gave up this thought and returned to simply wanting to be left alone.  Apparently, deciding she had amused herself sufficiently, Marta mercifully replaced her headphones and leisurely moved on.

Eric turned drowsily towards his locker and let his eyes lose focus for a moment.  Desperate as he was to get home, he was not sure his legs had the strength for the six block trek.  He reached into his locker and pulled out a knapsack.  Absently, he began stuffing things into it.  He shoved in some clothes, a CD and his respirology homework, a book entitled “Great Expectorations: Everything you Ever Wanted to Know about Sputum and More” by Dr. Fritz Meinheim.  Eric sincerely hoped that Dr. Meinheim’s clinical skills were better than his sense of humour as he crammed it in.  Finally, with his left arm Eric reached along the top shelf of his locker to retrieve his house keys.  As he grasped the keys, a strange sensation passed over his hand.  It felt as though several of his fingers had just rubbed up against a glob of Jell-O.  Immediately, he withdrew his hand and the keys with it.  Neither showed any sign of having touched a piece of Jell-O.  Eric knew for a fact that there was no Jell-O in his locker.  Indeed, as he stood on his toes and peered above the top shelf, he saw that it contained nothing at all.

It had been a long shift and Eric was tired, but as a doctor he was trained to have a healthy curiosity especially when something seemed amiss.  So he thrust his hand straight back into the recesses of the top shelf.  This time, it plunged through the Jell-O-like substance which seemed to be suspended in midair and then emerged perfectly clean on the other side of it.  Not only was his hand clean but it felt as though it had slipped into a warm glove.  The hospital was generally kept at a cool temperature but in comparison, his hand could have been sitting in a sauna.  This was all a bit too creepy for Eric and he was about to pull his hand out when the tip of his ring finger touched something that was not wholly unlike the side of an envelope.  He examined the object more carefully while trying to decide whether pulling it out would be overly impetuous.  In the end, Eric figured that it was his locker and he had a right to know what was hanging around inside of it even if it was hiding behind an invisible wall of Jell-O.  Slowly, he grasped the object between his index and middle fingers and withdrew it.  As he pulled it through the Jell-O, Eric felt very tired.  He was forced to sit down on the locker room bench and close his eyes for a few seconds.  When he opened them, he noticed two things.  First, he was fairly certain that his locker had been a dull grey only seconds before, whereas at the moment, it was coloured a bright flamingo pink.  In fact, all of the lockers in the room now appeared to be that rather hideous pink that is usually exclusively reserved for condominiums in Palm Beach.  The second thing Eric noticed was that he was indeed holding a very tiny envelope in his left hand.  It was orange with no markings on it.  Cautiously, he opened it and emptied its contents into his hand.  He was surprised to note that he was now holding a single, round object about three inches in diameter which was, unmistakably, a teabag.  He smelled it.

“Mmm…orange pekoe.  My favorite.”  Eric had felt like having a cup of tea for several hours and he was tempted to use the teabag, but he found it unsettling that he would find the very thing he had been yearning for under such bizarre circumstances.  He decided to perform a silly experiment.  Replacing the teabag in its envelope, he stood up and once again pushed his hand deep along the upper shelf of his locker leaving the tea where he had found it.  Again, he felt exhausted and closed his eyes.  Upon opening them, his suspicions were confirmed.  The lockers had reverted to their usual, dull grey.  Eric was now convinced of what was going on.  He was hallucinating.  As is true with all residents, Eric had an encyclopedia’s worth of symptoms and diagnoses swimming in his mind and he was always more than happy to apply them to himself.

“OK doctor,” he half-joked.  “A 27 year old male resident presents with fatigue and a two minute history of Jell-O and teabag-related hallucinations.  Let’s see.  I could have schizophrenia, psychotic depression, renal failure or a brain tumor, there’s a happy thought.  Maybe I have some unique form of acute onset dementia at 27.  I could be famous.  Maybe I could even get a publication out of this.”  He allowed himself a little chuckle.  “But let’s be realistic.  In all likelihood we’re either dealing with posttraumatic stress disorder…or dehydration.”  After the events of this evening, PTSD was a possibility, but perhaps it was still unlikely.  If he really was dehydrated, it would be a sin to pass on the tea, Eric thought.  The fact was that he was in no condition to go home anyway.  He expected that he would need to crash in a call room for at least a few more hours before even attempting to leave.  While Eric didn’t particularly care for the pink lockers, he really did want the tea.  Besides, he figured that if he was hallucinating, he might as well make the most of it.  One final time, he reached into his locker and yanked out the orange envelope.  Now accustomed to the accompanying drowsiness, he watched the lockers change color in a psychedelic display that would have blown away even the most seasoned acid junkie.  A minute later it was all over and Marta the cleaner was startled to see an uncharacteristically disheveled looking Dr. Silver with a strange twinkle in his eye dashing through the ward in search of hot water.

Jude felt uneasy perched atop a barstool sipping his tea in the eerily empty Starbucks.  Even the redheaded kid working the counter had apparently lost interest in his task of trying to achieve the perfect cake display and had disappeared into a back room.  Jude was left alone to ponder the deep psychological block that was preventing him from figuring out what he was supposed to be doing. But his brain was not cooperating.  His thoughts drifted to Freud.  What would he think?  An old quotation reverberated in his mind: “America is a mistake, a giant mistake.”

Surveying the barren yet tacky Starbucks environment around him, Jude couldn’t help but sympathize.  Nonetheless, it was not obvious to him how this feeling was going to help him solve his problem.  Jude had never really cared much for Freud which was unfortunate because if he had, perhaps he might have settled on one of the psychoanalyst’s more pertinent sayings.  Freud had been known to accost various grocery baggers in Vienna with the truly bold maxim:

“A man’s complexes are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.”

This behavior was not popular with the Viennese grocery baggers or the people waiting in line behind Freud.  For his part, the grocery bagger was usually taken aback and spent a lot of time wondering whether he had just been insulted while absently shoving far too many items into one paper bag.  As a consequence, Freud most often opened his parcels to find all of his food crushed into an inedible puree.  Strangely, this worked very much to his advantage as he remained a slim man all of his life.

Freud was right, though.  A man is a slave to his complexes or, in the case of Jude, his complex.  For there was one thing, one massive overriding unhealthy fixation that overshadowed the life of this otherwise unusually gifted human being.  He hated his parents.

Jude’s childhood had been strange to say the least.  On the surface, it seemed that he had been born into an idyllic household.  Jude’s father George, an Irish expatriate who had immigrated to Washington in his early twenties, was a wealthy entrepreneur and a gifted sculptor.  His mother Sally was the daughter of a prominent Democratic senator who spent most of her adult life lobbying politicians on behalf of various trendy causes that mostly involved cuddly animals from the ends of the Earth.  Jude’s parents had the time and the means to shower their only child with wealth and affection the likes of which most children can only dream.  They were just too self-involved to bother.

When Sally was pregnant with Jude she, unlike any sane person, went on no fewer than four week-long hunger strikes to raise awareness for the plight of the Liberian Mongoose.  As a result, Jude was born a thin, sickly looking baby.  His name came from his father’s favorite Thomas Hardy novel “Jude the Obscure”.  Given the disastrous plot of the book, Jude thought he might as well have been named Job.  He spent most of his first five years amusing himself with art supplies he found lying around in his gargantuan suburban mansion.  When Jude was a toddler, his father became overwhelmed by the pressures of sculpting and suffered a nervous breakdown.  George spent the next two years in a mental hospital during which time Sally immersed herself in a world of gala luncheons and self-medication.  Jude was generally asked to sit quietly.  One spring day when Jude was four, his mother dressed him in his finest clothes and whisked the boy off to see his father.  Apparently, someone had convinced Queen Elizabeth II that George Conlan had made an indelible mark on the British sculpting community and, as a result, he was to receive a knighthood.  Needless to say, the staff at the psychiatric hospital were incredulous.  After all, they spent most of their careers in the pursuit of convincing people that they did not, in fact, have appointments with the Queen of England.  Eventually, Jude and his mother did manage to leave with Sir George, as he came to be known, but not before one of the doctors had taken Jude aside and apologetically explained that his mother was not thinking clearly and had to be hospitalized as well.  For a few brief seconds, Jude believed that his parents were going to be permanently committed together and that he would have to live with another family.  The nurses and orderlies gave him pitying looks.  It was the happiest moment of Jude’s life.

In school, Jude was a brilliant student and athlete.  His parents failed to notice when he was elected class president as a sophomore in high school.  They had become increasingly concerned with waning interest in George’s art and the alarming improvement in governmental attention towards endangered animals that had all but eliminated the need for Sally’s lobbying.

In Jude’s junior year he was sitting with his parents at the dinner table and texting while his father stared vacantly at his soup and his mother worked on a crossword.

“I feel empty Sally.  Like there’s nothing keeping me going,” said George.

“We’ll find you a new project.  Don’t worry,” Sally replied, erasing an incorrect answer.

After several minutes of silence, Jude took the unusual step of sharing about his day.

“I got my SAT scores back this afternoon.”

“That’s nice sweetie,” said Sally without looking up from her crossword.

“I got 2400,” Jude continued.

“Mmm,” said his father into his soup.

“That’s a really good score…the best actually,” Jude said, unsuccessfully trying to make eye contact with either of his parents.  “Only a few hundred people every year…”

“What’s a small spiny mammal?  Eight letters, starts with ‘H’?” interrupted his mother.

Jude sighed.  “Hedgehog,” he said returning his attention back to his phone.

The silence that followed felt different to Jude.  After a minute, he looked up to find both of his parents staring at him hungrily.  He was fairly certain it was the first time in his life both of his parents had looked at him at the same time.

“What?”

From that moment on, George and Sally’s stifling neglect of their son was replaced by suffocating attention.  As retired socialites, their identities came to depend on the ability to brag about Jude’s accomplishments.

“Jude has gotten into Harvard for physics...He’s finished summa cum laude…He’s a Rhodes Scholar…” 

This made Jude increasingly angry. Sitting in the Christ Church quadrangle at Oxford one day, he resolved to make it impossible for his parents to take any pleasure or benefit from his activities whatsoever.  So when he came home and settled in Boston, Jude vowed to choose a profession that no one in his right mind could respect, a profession so stupid that his parents would have to hide it from their friends at all costs.  He was a man obsessed.

As Jude swung open the glass door and exited the Starbucks, he nearly beheaded a stray cat that was prowling outside.  The cat leapt away just in time turning its head to hiss at him.  “Stupid cat,” he muttered absently.  Then, he tilted his head slightly in thought.  A smile crossed his lips for the first time on this day and in an instant he set off down the street.

Flower snatched the stilettos from off of her feet and, with them in hand, raced down the rickety staircase.  What rubbish that woman was talking, she thought to herself.  Too many biscuits had gotten to her brain.  To think that Flower had almost taken Madame S’s prediction seriously, but African Hedgehogs?  That’s it, she thought.  Enough of these loony psychics.

At the bottom of the stairwell, she came upon a man who had just come in from the outside.  He wore a dapper business suit and, as she passed, he spoke some words that she couldn’t quite hear.  Flower turned towards him and was momentarily struck by a startlingly wild look in his hazel eyes.

“Pardon me?” she stammered.

The man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a leaflet that had a large black shadow depicted on the cover.

“The End of Days is coming to this planet…would you care to read about it?”

She looked at him skeptically for a moment.  Had the world gone mad this morning, or was it just Americans.

“No thank you.  If it’s not here by Tuesday night, I won’t be around to see it anyway,” she said flinging her blond hair to one side and turning to leave.  The man reached after her and grabbed her arm.

“It may be here before then miss,” he said raising his eyebrows.  She stared at the hand holding her arm until the man removed it.

“I see.  Well, I’m still not interested.  I’ve already had my maximum of one apocalyptic prophecy today.  Perhaps tomorrow.”

Flower left the building without another word.  Fishing in her purse for a stick of gum, she came across Jude’s keys.  Absently, she tossed them into a nearby garbage can.

Boy, thought Flower.  I could really go for a massage.