The day before the Hypothetics conference, I got a small package in the mail. It was from Gene. The note read, “Consider this a belated birthday gift”—he’d missed it back in February—“and a congratulations on your presentation, which I’m afraid I’m also going to have to miss. About the gift: Whatever you do, don’t point it at your eye. Good luck.” Inside the padded envelope was a small, silvery, pen-shaped cylinder.
“It’s too small to be a vibrator,” I said.
“Get your mind out of the gutter, Sissy,” said Avie, who was reading a textbook for school. “It’s obviously some kind of writing instrument.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “There’s no stylus—only a pocket clip on the side.”
I pressed the button; a red beam of light shot out, projecting a dot in the direction of my sister.
“What the fuck!” she said, practically diving from the sofa to dodge it. “One of your friend’s science-fiction gizmos!”
“But look, it’s harmless,” I said. “It’s not cutting the sofa in two or setting fire to the curtains; it’s just a concentrated beam of light.”
“What use is that?” said Avie, picking herself up from the carpet and recovering her textbook. “You already have the brass buttons of your cape that burn through walls.”
I called Gene on a secret mobile phone number he had given me for when he was on deep undercover assignments; amazingly, he picked up. “What is this thing you sent me?” I asked.
“It’s a prototype Allan picked up in a lab,” Gene explained. It’s a low-intensity laser. We have them affixed to a few or our guns—it makes targeting foolproof.”
“But what am I going to use it for?” I asked. “Besides terrorizing my sister?”
“Well, before we tackle a case, Allan likes to post all his plans on a bulletin board and make giant charts and stuff. He’s taken to using one of those little lasers to point at different things as we go over our plans. I thought maybe it be useful for you in the classroom.”
“That’s all I need during my presentation on Multimensions and megahero universes,” I said. “That’ll be the end of my graduate academic career for sure.”
“It won’t harm anything,” said Gene, chuckling. “Just don’t point it into anyone’s eyeball. It could temporarily blind them and if prolonged, could lead to permanent retinal damage.”
“Great, a non-lethal weapon,” I said. “Thanks, Gene, that’s very thoughtful. I miss you.”
“Sorry I can’t make your conference,” said Gene. “Break a leg. Gotta go.”
***
The morning of the first day of the conference I put on the new pant suit and short heels Mama bought me for the occasion. Dressier than my usual Teaching Fellow apparel, the outfit was comfortable; over the winter months I’d worked out diligently on our basement exercise machines and lost most of the weight gained since moving back to Detroit. I tucked Gene’s laser pointer into my shirt pocket for good luck, even though I had no intention of using it. For one thing, I didn’t have anything to point to. I would just be reading my paper; I didn’t have an accompanying slide show or charts.
I felt supremely confident walking to the Minoru Yamasaki Conference Center of Warren Woodward University with my sister Avie, who was skipping some important production meeting in her theater department to attend my presentation and offer moral support. The heels made me slightly taller than her for a change.
When we got to the main hall, I spotted Trent, Stella, and Simon on the other side; they waved as hundreds of participants took their seats for the opening address.
“Isn’t that Stella’s advisor?” said Avie, pointing to an older gentleman.
It was. Terrell Smyth was a big deal in Hypothetics, a newfangled disciplined that crossed the sciences and humanities. Apparently, he was delivering the keynote address. Although he and I had more than one close encounter in Ann Arbor, I had never actually met him, nor had we been formally introduced.
“I want to welcome you to the Third Annual Hypothetics Studies Conference,” said Smythe from the podium into a microphone. “We has scholars from scores of institutions across the United States and abroad, representing every academic discipline imaginable. Evidence, if any there need be, that Hypothetic Studies is the interdisciplinary wave of the future.”
Avie whispered to me, “What kind of accent is that? Is he from New Zealand or something?”
“You’re right, he does speak with an accent that isn’t quite British,” I said. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Terrell Smythe utter a word before. “Now shush—I want to hear this.”
Smythe continued: “We are quickly moving past the age of the contemporary to a condition of post-contemporaneity—in which the individual finds themselves no longer in lock step with the generation they may have been born into. Even now, each of is living in and among pasts, presents, and futures of our own choosing, selected sometimes by whim, sometimes by fancy, almost at random, from among unlimited possibilities. Thanks to technology, political identity, and a smorgasbord of spiritual practices, we can now affiliate with realities according to affinity rather than geography or temporality. Hypothetics has a term for these potentialities: The Multimensions.”
“Is it true he sleeps with all his female grad students?” whispered Avie. “Do you think he’s sleeping with Stella—right under Trent’s nose?”
“I don’t think so,” I whispered back. “Now, please.”
But I was certain Smythe had tried to bag Stella right off the bat. I had seen him leaving Stella’s Ann Street house with a disappointed expression on his face earlier in the school year. I assumed the four-year-old kid and live-in parenting partner were enough to ward him off for the time being.
I spotted a young, shapely redhead sitting in the front row who was especially attentive to Smyth’s every word. “That must be his ‘western hemisphere’ wife,” I whispered. “The one he takes on each semester in lieu of the real one who raised his already-grown children back in Auckland or wherever.”
“What are her research interests, I wonder?” asked Avie. “Geriatric blowjobs, I gather.”
We both giggled like middle-schoolers. “Stop it,” I whispered. “Really, I want to hear what he has to say.”
“In this exegesis,” Smythe continued, “the Multimensions becomes a potent metaphor for the simultaneity of experiences that are now possible in a world that is inter-, intra-, and inner-connected …”
“Oh, this is bullshit,” said Avie. “Clarissa, these people have never visited another reality—unlike you, who’ve had real adventures there. They’re all just speculating, like virgins wondering what actual sex is really like.”
I could seldom argue with my sister; her incisive, penetrating critiques often cut to the core. Despite her acquaintance with academia and appreciation for learning, she was skeptical of people who were too wordy or overly-intellectual.
“On second thought,” she whispered, looking at her watch, “I think I can still make my boring production meeting after all.” She kissed me on the check and got up to leave. “I’ll see you this afternoon at your presentation.”
***
After the opening address, the crowd spilled out into the lobby for a fifteen-minute break before the multi-tracked presentations began in several smaller conference rooms, and I located Trent, Stella, and Simon mulling by the coffee and doughnuts. Stella already knew which presentations and panels she wanted to attend that morning and they were completely different from mine. “We can still do lunch together before our presentations,” she suggested.
Smythe emerged from the hall with his redheaded grad student, who was more strikingly pretty and shapely than I thought. The unmistakable impression they gave, despite a vast difference in age, was that they were a couple, she looking after his briefcase and holding his coffee while he checked his own schedule.
“Terrell, I’d like you to meet my friend and former housemate, Clarissa James,” Stella said. “She’s giving a presentation on the blending of universes.”
“Ah, yes,” said Smythe. “Quite interesting—although hypothetically impossible, if one is a strict orthodox. Luckily, I am not.” He smiled winningly. “Very pleased to meet you, Ms. James.”
“We almost met before,” I said. “I walked past you on Ann Street one afternoon as you were coming out of Stella’s house.”
Judging from their expressions, this was news to both Trent and Smythe’s nubile redheaded companion.
Stolen story; please report.
“You’re an Arbor State student, then?” asked Smythe, unruffled. “Which department?”
“No, I’m here at Warren Woodward,” I said. “Urban Policy and Social Planning.”
Smythe’s fleeting expression conveyed both a sense of relief that I didn’t live in his neck of the woods to nose around his personal affairs and the certitude that academically I was not his contemporary in any way, shape or form, let alone equal; I was from an altogether different, and lower, reality.
“Well, yes,” he said jovially. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a panel to moderate.”
Stella, Trent, and I agreed to meet back at that spot later for lunch and broke off for our separate lecture rooms. I sat through several panels and presentations throughout the morning by myself. The talks were wordy and jargon-laden and made me feel like I had a left lot to learn, although I almost understood what they were talking about, for the most part. Of course, none of my colleagues had gone through the Dimensional Doorway and traveled to the Forbidden Future, nor had they astrally visited an alternate reality; they didn’t even have a visor that allowed them to peep into universes a vibration away from this one. But they were intelligent and thoughtful, about what you’d expect from the book-learned.
Most of the talks were well attended; the audience, always more knowledgeable about a particular discipline than I asked astute questions, although some questions tended to be speeches designed to show off the fact that the questioner could use big words, too. After a couple hours of this, I realized Avie had made the right call.
I usually sat in the back of the room, taking it all in, clutching my paper which was becoming wrinkled and wavy with perspiration.
Late in the morning, Trent appeared at my side during one of the panels.
“Where’s Simon?” I asked.
“Stella’s watching him,” said Trent. “She picks the most boring panels. A few others on the schedule look more interesting to him, so I thought he’d try them.”
At first, I barely noticed at his hand casually resting on my knee. After a few moments, it began creeping up my pant leg, toward my inner thigh.
“Trent, behave yourself,” I whispered, slapping his hand. “I thought you were here to learn, second-cousin Megaton Man. I have my own presentation to worry about.”
“Sorry,” he replied. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Actually, I wouldn’t have minded him feeling me up; we were in the back of a small, sparsely attended presentation on poetry, diversity, and Multimensional transgression, and it was kind of dark; we probably could have gotten away with it. Besides, Gene had been in the back of my mind all morning, and I was rather horny. But we cooled it.
Later Stella, Trent, Simon, and I walked over a couple blocks to Schnelli Deli for Pastrami sandwiches. Not only was Stella’s presentation scheduled at the same time as mine right after lunch, but Stella informed me they had to get back to Ann Arbor right after for some evening activity for Simon at his preschool—a pageant or play or something. After lunch, we said our goodbyes with hugs and kisses and parted ways.
I dashed back to my department’s building under the pretense of having forgotten something, but really, I needed a moment alone in my cubicle. I was so excited and nervous, I just had to take the edge off. I came quickly, after which I went to the lavatory, washed my hands, straightened my pants suit, and marched back to the conference center, almost forgetting my sweaty paper, which I’d practically memorized.
I arrived at the darkened room in plenty of time for my presentation, since many attendees seemed to be taking a long lunch. Avie was there, as promised. Donna Blank, with her stenographer pad at the ready to take notes; she gave me a big hug. Otherwise, the seats were completely empty.
I went up to the podium and checked my watch. “Well, I guess I should begin.”
I set my sweaty paper on the lectern and tried to smooth it flat with my hand. Just before I began, three people ducked into the room and quickly took their seats.
“Thank goodness, I have a bit of crowd,” I thought.
Then, the newcomers checked their schedules and realized they were in the wrong room. Two of them left immediately; one stayed to endure the first few minutes of my talk. I supposed they had only done so because they didn’t want to appear rude by walking out on a black presenter right away. But they eventually disappeared.
While I was engrossed in my talk, someone else appeared without my notice: It was Imelda, the spooky aging hippie chick who worked alongside Trent at Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore. I had once consulted her in her candle-laden lair for spiritual advice, and was heartened that she had come. After I finished my presentation, her hand immediately shot up.
“What happens to all the extra people?” she asked.
“Come again?”
“Well, you talk about universes combining, right? And all the megaheroes that have grown up in separate Pantheons, so to speak, becoming into one massive team-up crossover universe. But there are also billions of other people—Civilians—in each universe besides, right? Presumably, most of these would be duplicates of one another. What happens to them? Do they explode like matter meeting anti-matter when they meet? Do they combine into one person but then suffer amnesia? Or come down with Alzheimer’s or something?”
“That’s a really good question,” I said. I thought about my mother, Alice James, and Alice Too, the Mod Puma, her Counterpart from another reality; there was also Dr. Joseph Levitch, creator of a few Megaton Men, and his “evil twin,” Julius, who created killer robots. They all existed now in the same reality and didn’t explode. But surely, these were exceptions. “I don’t have ready answer, I’m afraid.”
“Seems like a gaping hole in your argument,” said Imelda. “Your hypothesis could use a bit more work.”
***
After my presentation, I needed a break; I was in no mood to sit through any more presentations or panels. So, Avie, Donna, Imelda and I went across the campus mall to enjoy some truly awful coffee downstairs in the Warren Woodward student union. I thanked everybody for attending my panel, and Imelda for her question. I noticed she was wearing her bookstore name tag on a lanyard with bird feathers and a dreamcatcher.
“You know, Imelda, I don’t think I’ve ever heard your last name,” I remarked.
“That’s right,” she said, clutching her lanyard. “You’ve never heard my last name.”
I mentioned that Trent had put his hand on my knee that morning.
“Men are such creeps,” remarked Avie.
Imelda got a funny look.
“What is it?” Donna prompted.
Imelda went into a long discourse on Trent—about giving him a series of handjobs over the course of their friendship, sometimes right there in the back room of the bookstore; that’s how I came to know so much about it. “Often, Trent wanted to reciprocate,” she said. “But I told him he needed to get over his notions of mutuality. Sex should be an act of generosity, don’t you think?”
Donna took notes.
“Didn’t he ever once go down on you?” asked Avie, outraged. This from the girl who gave her gay male actor friends blowjobs without expecting anything in return.
“I don’t like men touching me,” Imelda explained. “They’re all thumbs.”
I had no idea what that meant, but our coffee was either cold or our cups empty. After that little klatch, Donna declared she had an appointment with a patient at her newly-rented social worker office on Five Mile near Middlebelt. Imelda announced she was off to another obscure presentations at one of the conference tracks.
“I’ll send you a book on occult realities, Clarissa,” Imelda told me before she and Donna split.
Avie, trooper that she was, tagged along with me to the afternoon plenary, the only event on the schedule at that hour. Consequently, the entire conference convened again in the large lecture hall. The president of the national Hypothetics Studies Society, Dr. Patricia Claude of City College University of Manhattan was the speaker; Warren Woodward’s own Berkeley Kornbluth, organizer of the conference, served as moderator and interlocutor.
Patricia evinced the prim, emaciated look of the slightly older, spinster academic who’d advanced her career at the expense of marriage, family, or any personal life whatsoever. She sat, arms folded, legs crossed, with an intense expression.
In response to some question or other on the current state of Hypothetics in academia, she replied, “We need to rethink academia.” Throughout the hall, hundreds of heads nodded, hundreds of mouths murmured in the affirmative.
To another question on the class struggle, she replied, “We need to rethink labor under post-industrialization.” More nods and murmurs.
To another question on multiculturalism: “We need to rethink the linguistic turn; we need to rethink globalization.”
To every question, I swear to God, Dr. Patricia Claude’s every response was the need to rethink something.
“We need to rethink the subaltern and the cultural turn. We need to rethink the metropole and the archipelago of learning.” World hunger, climate and environmental degradation, Marxism—everything needed to be rethought. Nothing more specific and no further elaboration.
“That’s it for me,” Avie had said ten minutes into it. “I’ll see you at home tonight, Sissy.” She kissed me on the cheek and fled.
I stuck it out to the end, a grueling forty-five minutes of, “We need to rethink.” Finally, it was all over except the rethinking, after which more coffee and hobnobbing in the conference center lobby with the visiting scholars. Trent, Stella, and Simon were long gone, as was anyone else I had even remotely recognized. My thesis advisor, Dr. Dolores Finch, who’d recommended I submit a paper for the conference, had never shown up at all. There I was in my pant suit and high heels, without even my sweaty paper, which I must have left in the lecture room. When I compulsively went back to look for it, it was gone. No problem, as I had a copy at home.
I was experiencing a bit of let down as I walked back to my abandoned department building, this time to make a phone call to Gene. I got an answering machine.
“My presentation went great,” I said, fingering the laser pointer I had pulled from my pocket. “I wish more of my megahero colleagues had attended, since it’s a topic of concern them. But at least Donna was there. It’s a topic of concern for everybody, but I guess you can’t share all your interests with all your friends. That’s why we have different sets of friends, I guess. Maybe Ms. Megaton Man has a secret identity after all: Clarissa James, over-educated academic.”
Absent-mindedly, I pointed the red beam at the ceiling tile.
I ended the call by informing Gene I would be dining alone that night in Greektown so I could process the day’s events. “Miss you. Smooch.”
I still had the pointer in my hand as I marched out of the office.
In my hurry down the stairwell, I got off at the wrong floor. In a few steps, I realized I was on the floor where the Womyn’s Studies, Acculturational Studies, and Modern Linguistics programs all had adjacent cubicles; the floor appeared empty as the dinner hour approached.
Before I turned back to the stairs, I heard sounds coming from one of the cubicles.
Stealthily as I could in my high heels, I took a few wary steps to get a better look into the Acculturational Studies cubicle, from which Berkeley Kornbluth administrated the program. Patricia Claude, her back to me, was giving Berke, his eyes closed, a handjob. I kid you not.
I was so shocked I let out an audible gasp and simultaneously squeezed the laser pointer, which fired off in no particular direction. It must have bounced off of a reflective surface, however, at the exact moment Berke opened his eyes, striking him.
“Jesus Christ!” he cried.
But I was already racing, high heels and all, down the stairwell, out the building, and across the campus.
***
Later, at a table in one of my favorite Greek restaurants, I sat sipping a glass of wine, unwinding as I awaited my order of lamb kabob and rice pilaf. While I meditated on the Multimensions and Hypothetics, a bundle of flowers appeared before me. It was Gene.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said, smiling.
A waiter provided him with a menu.
“Thank you,” Gene told him. “What’s good here?” he asked me.
“Everything,” I said, slipping my toe out of my shoe and brushing his ankle.