Random Acts Part 3

"Priscilla said that?"

"Yes. The reason I asked her about Felix is that Felix has a big crush on her, but she said you. She likes you."

"What about you?"

"Her and I have an open relations.h.i.+p. No obligations."

Aaron reenters the room with his refilled drink, catching the last part of this. "You don't have to keep anything secret from me, guys. I'm your lawyer."

"I gave Pris to him," Tom says.

"That's what I thought." Aaron looks at me. "That should make you happy. You're totally in love with her."

I feel my face turn crimson. You a.s.shole, Aaron. I turn and look at Tom, and Tom is looking back with raised eyebrows. "You're in love with Pris?"

"I . . . well, I'm trying not to be, but . . ."

"All this time he's been coveting your girlfriend," Aaron says.

"No. Really?" Tom seems taken aback, as if he's surprised and a little disappointed in himself for not seeing it. d.a.m.n you, I think. How dare you "give" me something I want more than anything in the world.

You've just jinxed any chance I may have had with her. You've made me an accessory to her heartbreak. She really loves you, and you're going to crush her. Tomorrow night she's going to be destroyed, and I'm going to be partially to blame. Thanks Tom. Thanks a lot.

3. PRISCILLA.

The next afternoon, Tuesday, Heather Clarke's birthday, I'm teaching my cla.s.s when Tom comes in silently and taps me on my shoulder.

I swear, every girl in the room goes moon-eyed at the sight of him, as if some popular movie actor has walked in. It's sickening. "You've got to hear this," Tom says, holding up his tiny micro-ca.s.sette recorder.

I look at my students for a moment. They're watching a video tape about the reproductive system in sea turtles, so they'll have plenty to occupy them for a while. "I'll be back in a few minutes," I tell them, and Tom and I leave the cla.s.sroom.

We walk out into the echoing hall and down about four doors to my tiny closet-like office, just big enough for a rinky-d.i.n.k desk, three chairs, and a coat tree. "What is it?" I ask him.

"Our b.u.m." He thinks a moment, editing himself. "Professor Laurel.

He was on the steps when I left this morning, so I interviewed him."

Tom sets the tiny recorder in the middle of my desk and turns it on. For a moment there is only a hissing sound, then there's a pop and I feel myself tense up. It weird, I'm nervous, and nervous in a weird way --- much like when I was a teenager and was about to watch my first X-rated movie. I have no idea what to expect, but from the way Tom is acting I know it's something that will affect my life. I'm not sure I want to hear it, but it's too late. Our b.u.m's halting, dry voice is already crackling out of the tiny speaker, so I brace myself and listen:

LAUREL [excited] . . . you saw it? You saw through?

TOM No, but I think a friend of mine did. He was on LSD and looked at one of your cubes and became very upset.

LAUREL Oh, that'll happen. That'll happen.

TOM So you know what I'm talking about.

LAUREL Yes. Oh, yes. I know.

TOM My problem is that I don't know if I really understand what is going on. I was hoping you could explain it to me.

LAUREL [after long pause] What happened is your friend, he experienced the larger world. We all exist in it, we all travel through it every day, but we're not aware of it.

Your friend saw a seed, a man-made four-dimensional object. It drew his attention into the forth dimension, an area the human brain is not designed to perceive, and he got a glimpse of the bigger world.

TOM Now what do you mean by the "bigger world."

LAUREL The infinite-dimensional reality.

TOM You say we travel though this every day?

LAUREL Exactly! But we are not aware of it. One way to understand it is to think of us as two-dimensional creatures, shadows on the ground. Like this. You see the shadow moving over the b.u.mps and cracks on the surface?

That's two dimensions traveling over a three-dimensional surface. And see, the shadow jumps up the steps? Those are big three-dimensional jumps for a two-dimensional object, and it doesn't even notice.

TOM We're like the shadow of your hand, then.

LAUREL Yes. When you make a big jump like going up the steps, you are actually going into a new plane of the universe, only slightly different than the last, but different anyway. Do you know quantum physics?

TOM Not much, but some.

LAUREL Every time you make a choice, every time you choose between one thing and another, you split the plane into two different planes. One plane the choice went one way, and on the other it went the other way. This happens on even the sub-atomic level. So there are an infinite amount of planes to the universe, or as some look at it, an infinite amount of universes. These are like the b.u.mps on the ground; the smaller the b.u.mp, or step, the smaller the difference; the bigger the b.u.mp, or step, the bigger the difference. And the shadow just glides over them, rising and falling where the surface rises and falls.

TOM This is the way the universe is?

LAUREL Yes. Yes, but in infinite dimensions.

TOM We glide through it? What about the changes between planes of the universe --- we never notice the changes?

LAUREL Oh yes. We notice, but we don't know why. If you put your keys down on a table and then turn around and they're not there, but you find them in your pocket . . .

and you swear you put them on the table, then, you see, you've gone over a big b.u.mp in the plane. The b.u.mp levels back down to the surface you were on before, so nothing else is different. If you go up the steps it's a different thing altogether. A radical set of millions of choices . . . and you only travel in one direction, see.

My hand going this way, my shadow, that's your progress through time----

TOM Time?

LAUREL Yes. See the shadow moving forward, it's moving forward in time. You can't go back, you can only go forward.

You'd have to know the future to know you've gone on to a radically different plane. Every time you're involved in a choice that involves large consequences you are choosing between two distinctly different planes that will differ from that point on----

TOM I think you've lost me. But, go on. Is there any way to determine that you've changed planes once you're on a different one?

LAUREL No, not normally. No. But if you're like me, yes. Since my perception has expanded beyond the three-dimensional limit, I can consciously move myself across multiple dimensions, end up on planes that diverged from my original one in the far distant past. You can also call them different time lines, but not really, since in a infinite-dimensional sense they're all the same time line----

Tom reaches over and pushes the pause b.u.t.ton on the recorder. "This is where he goes totally off the wall. He really had me going up until this point, but then he totally lost me."

"Play the rest," I tell him.

"Oh, it's just nonsense----"

"No, play the rest, I want to hear it."

"You're following this stuff?"

"I think so. Let's hear it."

Tom takes the little recorder off pause, and again Alvin Laurel's dry voice is scratching out of the little speaker.

LAUREL I go back and forth between them at will, though I'm still not sure if I'm traveling physically, or if it's just my flow of consciousness s.h.i.+fting from one version of myself to the next. Sometimes it seems like one, sometimes the other. Who knows, maybe it's both.

TOM What are the differences between these planes?

LAUREL Like I said, it could be as minor as a proton going one way in one, and a proton going another way in the other. As far as major differences, there are some so vast they're beyond your comprehension.

TOM I think we've already done that.

LAUREL There's an vast array of possibilities, and every one of them are real. I've seen hundreds of different societies right here in what we call America. Not all of them were free. In fact, most of them were much more fascist than you'd believe.

TOM Ever see an America where Berkeley was the nation's capital?

LAUREL . . . no.

TOM How about an America where all the men dressed in drag?

LAUREL No, haven't seen those. Have you?