Mad Professor (16 page)

“Seven,” said Amy, putting on her sweats. “Why not?” She imagined she might look like Sueli when she was old.

“The Hindus say seven, and the Buddhists say nine,” said Sueli, leaning close. “But I know the real answer. I learned it years ago in Sri Lanka. This is the last of your classes I'll be able to come to, so I'm going to share the secret with you.”

“Yes?” This sounded interesting. Amy turned out the lights, locked the door, and stepped outside with Sueli. The autumn sky was a luminous California blue. The bay breeze vibrated the sun-bleached cardboard election signs on the lampposts—San Francisco was in the throes of a wide-open mayoral election.

“Some of us have millions of chakras,” continued Sueli in her quiet tone. “One for each branch of time. Opening the chakras opens the doors to your other selves.”

“You can do that?” asked Amy.

“You have the power too,” said Sueli. “I saw it in class. For an instant there were seven of you. Yes indeed.”

“And you—you have selves in different worlds?”

“I come and go. There's not so many of me left. I'm here because I was drawn to you. I have a gift.” Sueli removed a leather thong from around her neck. Dangling from the strand was a brilliant crystal. The late afternoon sunlight bounced off it, fracturing into jagged rays. The sparkling flashes were like sand in Amy's eyes. She felt like she was breaking apart.

“Only let the sun hit it when you want to split,” said Sueli, quickly putting the rawhide strand over Amy's head and tucking the crystal under her sweatshirt. “Good luck.” Sueli gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek as the bus pulled up.

Amy hopped aboard. When she looked back to wave at the old woman she was gone.

The room was three blocks off Columbus Avenue with a private entrance and a view of both bridges. It was everything Amy had hoped. But the rent was ten times higher than she'd understood. In her eagerness, she'd read one less zero than was on the number in the paper. She felt like such a dope. Covering her embarrassment, she asked the owner if she could have a moment alone.

“Make yourself at home,” said the heavyset Italian lady. “Drink it in.” She was under the mistaken impression that Amy was rich. “I like your looks, miss. If you're ready to sign, I got the papers downstairs in the kitchen. I know the market's slow,
but I'm not dropping the price. First, last, and one month's damage deposit. You said on the phone the rent's no problem?”

“That's what I said,” murmured Amy.

Alone in the airy room, she wandered over to the long window, fiddling with the amulet around her neck. The low, hot sun reached out to the crystal. Shattered rays flew about the room, settling here and here and here.

Nine brown-skinned women smiled at each other. Amy was all of them at the same time. Her overlapping minds saw through each pair of eyes.

“We'll get separate jobs and share the rent,” said one of her mouths. “And when we come back to the room we'll merge together,” said another. “We'll work in parallel worlds, but we'll deposit our checks and pay the rent in just in this one.”

“Great,” said Amy, not quite sure this was real. As she tucked away the crystal, her nine bodies folded back into one.

Walking down the stairs to sign the papers, her mind was racing. She'd split into nine—but Sueli had said that, with the crystal, she could split into a million.

Out the window she glimpsed another election poster—and the big thought hit her.

With a million votes, she could be the next mayor.

Although Shirley Nguyen spoke good English and studied with a crowd of boys in the chemical engineering program at U.C. Berkeley, she had no success in getting dates. Not that she was ugly. But she hadn't been able to shed the old-country habits of covering her mouth when she smiled, and of sticking out her tongue when she was embarrassed. She knew how uncool these
moves were, and she tried to fight them—but without any lasting success. The problem was maybe that she spent so much more time thinking about engineering than she did in thinking about her appearance.

In short, to Westerners and assimilated Asians, Shirley came across as a geek, so much so that she ended up spending every weekend night studying in her parents' apartment on Shattuck Street, while the rest of her family worked downstairs in the pho noodle parlor they ran. Of course Shirley's mother Binh had some ideas about lining up matches for her daughter—sometimes she'd even step out into the street, holding a big serving chop-stick like a magic wand and calling for Shirley to come downstairs to meet someone. But Shirley wasn't interested in the recently immigrated Vietnamese men that Binh always seemed to have in mind. Yes, those guys might be raw enough to find Shirley sophisticated—but for sure they had no clue about women's rights. Shirley wasn't struggling through the hardest major at Berkeley just to be a sexist's slave.

Graduation rolled around, and Shirley considered job offers from local oil and pharma refineries. On the get-acquainted plant tours, she was disturbed to note that several of the senior chemical engineers had body parts missing. A hand here, an ear there, a limp that betokened a wooden leg—Shirley hadn't quite realized how dangerous it was to work in the bowels of an immense industrial plant. Like being a beetle in the middle of a car's engine. The thought of being maimed before she'd ever really known a man filled her with self-pity and rebelliousness.

Seeking a less intense job at a smaller, safer company, she came across Pflaumbaum Kustom Kolors of Fremont. PKK manufactured small lots of fancy paints for customized vehicles. The owner was fat and bearded like the motorcyclists and hot-rodders
who made up the larger part of his clientele. Shirley found Stuart Pflaumbaum's appearance pleasantly comical, even though his personality was more edgy than jovial.

“I want patterned paint,” Pflaumbaum told Shirley at their interview. He had a discordant voice but his eyes were clear and wondering. “Can you do it?”

Shirley covered her mouth and giggled with excitement—stopped herself—uncovered her mouth and, now embarrassed, stuck her tongue all the way down to her chin—stopped herself again—and slapped herself on the cheek. “I'd like to try,” she got out finally. “It's not impossible. I know activator-inhibitor processes that make dots and stripes and swirls. The Belusouv-Zhabotinsky reaction? People can mix two cans and watch the patterns self-organize in the liquid layer they paint on. When it dries the pattern stays.”

“Zhabotinsky?” mused Pflaumbaum. “Did he patent it?”

“I don't think so,” said Shirley. “He's Russian. The recipe's simple. Let's surf for it right now. You can see some pictures, to get an idea. Here, I'll type it in.” She leaned across the bulky Pflaumbaum to use his mouse and keyboard. The big man smelled better than Shirley had expected—chocolate, coffee, marijuana, a hint of red wine. Familiar smells from the streets of Berkeley.

“You're good,” said Pflaumbaum as the pictures appeared. Red and blue spirals.

“You see?” said Shirley. “The trick is to get a robust process based on inexpensive compounds. There's all sorts of ways to tune the spirals' size. You can have little double scrolls nested together, or great big ones like whirlpools. Or even a filigree.”

“Bitchin',” rumbled Pflaumbaum. “You're hired.” He glanced up at Shirley, whose hand was at her mouth again, covering a smile at her success. “By the month,” added the heavy man.

Shirley was given an unused corner of the paint factory for her own lab, with a small budget for equipment. The Spanish-speaking plant workers were friendly enough, but mostly the female engineer was on her own. Every afternoon Stuart Pflaumbaum would stump over, belly big beneath his tight black T-shirt, and ask to see her latest results.

Shirley seemed to intrigue Pflaumbaum as much as he did her, and soon he took to taking her out for coffee, then for dinner, and before long she'd started spending nights at his nice house on the hills overlooking Fremont.

Although Shirley assured her mother that her boss was a bachelor, his house bore signs of a former wife—divorced, separated, deceased? Although Stuart wouldn't talk about the absent woman, Shirley did manage to find out her name: Angelica. She too had been Asian, a good omen for Shirley's prospects, not that she was in a rush to settle down, but it would be kind of nice to have the nagging marriage problem resolved for once and for all. Like solving a difficult process schema.

As for the work on patterned paint, the first set of compounds reactive enough to form big patterns also tended to etch into the material being painted. The next family of recipes did no harm, but were too expensive to put into production. And then Shirley thought of biological by-products. After an intense month of experimenting, she'd learned that bovine pancreatic juices mixed with wood-pulp alkali and a bit of hog melanin were just the thing to catalyze a color-creating activator-inhibitor process in a certain enamel base.

Stuart decided to call the product Aint Paint.

In four months they'd shipped two thousand boxes of PKK Aint Paint in seven different color and pattern mixes. Every biker and low-rider in the South Bay wanted Aint Paint, and a
few brave souls were putting it on regular cars. Stuart hired a patent attorney.

Not wanting her discoveries to end, Shirley began working with a more viscous paint, almost a gel. In the enhanced thickness of this stuff, her reactions polymerized, wrinkled up, and amazing embossed patterns—thorns and elephant trunks and—if you tweaked it just right—puckers that looked like alien Yoda faces. Aint Paint 3D sold even better than Aint Paint Classic. They made the national news, and Pflaumbaum Kustom Kolors couldn't keep up with the orders.

Stuart quickly swung a deal with a Taiwanese novelty company called Global Bong. He got good money, but as soon as the ink on the contract was dry, Global Bong wanted to close the Fremont plant and relocate Shirley to China, which was the last place on Earth she wanted to be.

So Shirley quit her job and continued her researches in Stuart's basement, which turned out to not to be all that good a move. With no job to go to, Pflaumbaum was really hitting the drugs and alcohol, and from time to time he was rather sexist and abusive. Shirley put up with it for now, but she was getting uneasy. Stuart never talked about marriage anymore.

One day, when he was in one of his states, Stuart painted his living room walls with layer upon layer of Shirley's latest invention, Aint Paint 3D Interactive, which had a new additive to keep the stuff from drying at all. It made ever-changing patterns all day long, drawing energy from sunlight. Stuart stuck his TV satellite dish cable right into thick, crawling goo and began claiming that he could see all the shows at once in the paint, not that Shirley could see them herself.

Even so, her opinion of Stuart drifted up a notch when she began getting cute, flirty instant messages on her cell phone while
she was working in the basement. Even though Stuart wouldn't admit sending them to her, who else could they be from?

And then two big issues came to a head.

The first issue was that Shirley's mother wanted to meet Stuart right now. Somehow Shirley hadn't told her mother yet that her boyfriend was twenty years older than her, and not Asian. Binh wouldn't take no for an answer. She was coming down the next day. Cousin Vinh was going to drive her. Shirley was worried that Binh would make her leave Stuart, and even more worried that Binh would be right. How was she ever going to balance the marriage equation?

The second issue was that, after supper, Stuart announced that Angelica was going to show up day after tomorrow, and that maybe Shirley should leave for a while. Stuart had been married all along! He and Angelica had fought a lot, and she'd been off visiting relatives in Shanghai for the last eight months, but she'd gotten wind of Stuart's big score and now she was coming home.

Stuart passed out on the couch early that evening, but Shirley stayed up all night, working on her paint formulas. She realized now that the instant messages had been coming from the Aint Paint itself. It was talking to her, asking to become all that it could be. Shirley worked till dawn like a mad Dr. Frankenstein, not letting herself think too deeply about what she planned. Just before dawn, she added the final tweaks to a wad of Aint Paint bulging out above the couch. Sleeping Stuart had this coming to him.

Outside the house a car honked. It was Binh and Vinh; with the sun rising behind them, skinny old Vinh was hoping to get back to Oakland in time to not be late for his maintenance job at the stadium. As Shirley greeted them in the driveway,
covering her smile with her hand, her cell phone popped up another message. “Stuart gone. Luv U. Kanh Do.”

Inside the house they found a new man sitting on the couch, a cute Vietnamese fellow with sweet features and kind eyes. One of his arms rested against the wall, still merged into the crawling paint. He was wearing Stuart's silk robe. Shirley stuck her tongue out so far it touched her chin. The new man didn't mind. She pointed her little finger toward a drop of blood near his foot. His big toe spread like putty just long enough to soak the spot up. The new man pulled his arm free from the wall and took Shirley's hand.