Every Anxious Wave Page 3

  “No. I’m a bartender and a musician but I need some physics help. Could you meet me for a drink so we could talk about this? I don’t feel comfortable talking about it over the phone. It’s a serious problem and I’m willing to pay you for your time.”

  I started to panic. I was placing trust in a person because she was wearing a Melvins T-shirt, because her bangs were blue, and because she seemed like the kind of chick who could use a trip back in time to see a band. She was a real scientist who could realistically take over my wormhole, or destroy it, or report me to some scientific police agency, even if she did hold dear some punk, fuck-the-cops politics, which I couldn’t be sure of from just a picture.

  She was silent for a bit. “That sounds ominous. You say you’re a bartender?”

  “I don’t mean to sound ominous. I just need some help and you seem, based on your photo on the Northwestern Web site—”

  “Based on that shitty picture you want to talk to me?”

  “I like the picture.”

  “Why? I look disgusting.”

  “It’s not disgusting at all. You look like the only person in your department with a personality.”

  “Wow. A personality. Thanks for noticing, dude. No one has paid me a compliment like that in a while.”

  “Absolutely. And you obviously have great taste in music.”

  “Oh god. The Melvins shirt? Right. Physics and bands. The only two things men want to talk to me about.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Um … meet me at my bar? Drinks on me.”

  “You’re not going to ask me your question over the phone? I have to drag my ass out to some unknown corner of Chicago to meet some strange man who found my punk-ass physics bitch picture on the Northwestern Web site? How is this not shady?”

  “I swear it’s not shady. I’m sorry if it seems that way. I’d go to Evanston to meet with you but I have to work every night this week, and this is urgent. If you get here and I or my bar freak you out, I’ll pay for you to take a taxi home.” Then I added, “The Dictator’s Club. Bucktown.”

  “You own the Dictator’s Club?”

  “You know it?”

  “Uh … yeah, kind of.” Her statement lingered unacknowledged for a few seconds too long. I guessed she didn’t think too highly of my bar.

  “Blue Line, right?” she asked, and I felt slightly, vaguely relieved. “I guess I can be out there around six.”

  “Blue Line to Western. Thank you, Lena. I look forward to working with you.”

  “I carry pepper spray,” she said, and hung up.

  Lena Geduldig had already been camped out at one of my tables for an hour before I arrived at the Dick to meet her. Beneath the Old Style neon and the velvet Elvis Costello painting that my friend Susannah made for my thirty-eighth birthday, sat the girl from the Northwestern physics department Web site. Two empty pint glasses, a laptop, a stack of books and papers, and behind that, the wizened face of the smartest girl I’d ever had the pleasure of ordering from the Internet. Lena Geduldig looked like she’d learned to cover up her big brainy-brain with a considerable amount of urban costumery: magenta-streaked hair pulled into pigtails that jutted from the back of her head, green and white striped kneesocks, and a black Hüsker Dü T-shirt with the neck cut off, revealing the red and black swirls of an indecipherable tattoo drawn between her collarbone and her heavy breasts. Lena was a thick girl, with a mound of belly pressing up against the table and plump calves beneath where her homemade-looking skull-and-crossbones skirt ended. Her dark brown eyes were hidden behind her Buddy Holly glasses, and even though she was probably around thirty, she was still into black nail polish and writing notes on the back of her hand in different colors of ink. Lena Geduldig, PhD candidate in astrophysics, looked up from her laptop and said my name.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Is that your real name?” she asked.

  I am accustomed to the females of the species smiling at me when they meet me for the first time, schooled as they are in flirting as a means of gaining approval, but Lena Geduldig did no such thing. She maintained her baseline frown. Number of shits given by Lena: zero.

  “It is.”

  Lena snorted. “I thought maybe it was a pseudonym. Like you’re hiding something. It seems too perfect. Like, if I were writing a sci-fi novel about a guy who could time travel, I’d never name the guy Karl Bender. It’s too much like Carl Sagan and the robot from Futurama.”

  “It’s my real name.” I usually want to smack people who like to pun off my name. But Lena Geduldig, in her stripy socks and her pigtails, complete with choppy toddler bangs, was probably one of those girls who play at being tough to cover up the fact that they’re about to cry.

  “Let me ask you, Karl: Do you let teenagers drink at your bar? You’ve got what appears to be a minor sitting over there by the jukebox.” Lena Geduldig pointed to a girl with a long black ponytail, wearing a white lab coat made of a shiny white papery Tyvek-like material. The girl was fiddling around with something on her wrist.

  “That’s weird,” I said, and as I was about to walk over to speak to the too-young-to-be-in-my-bar girl, she looked up at me, yelled “Sorry,” and disappeared.

  “Did she just disappear? What the hell?” I asked.

  “That was weird,” Lena said.

  “I don’t let teenagers drink here.”

  “Your bar is weird. Why do you keep it so dark?” Lena asked, and that kind of hurt my feelings. The Dictator’s Club rejects abject illumination. It’s lit only with the orange glow of various beer neons and the regulation exit signs. The restroom walls are a gnarled poem of sex slogans scrawled in drunk Sharpie. The jukebox is curated by yours truly, featuring Iggy, Bruce, some Elvis (Costello, not the other one), Melvins, Siouxsie, Pixies, Kate Bush. Eighties Kate Bush. The Cure in the winter, Sebadoh in the fall, Unrest in the spring, the Replacements if I want to make the honeys cry. Wilco, only because this is Chicago, and the Clash, only because I am not a complete failure in life. My bar was in no way weird. My bar was a temple. I told Lena this, and she made a huffy snort out of her nose.

  “Speaking of, your bartender? Clyde? He loves you. He foamed at the mouth about how cool you are. He also told me that you were in the Axis? I’d heard a rumor that a guy from the Axis owned a bar in Chicago, and I guess this means it’s true. I loved the Axis. I had all your albums. Dreams of Complicated Sorrow. Look, Mom, I Found a Ditch. And Big, Bigger Love? I drove all the way to Portland from Missoula, Montana, to see you guys play that album in its entirety. Milo Kildare. Shit. Big, Bigger Love is flippin’ genius. ‘Pin Cushion’ was my personal early-twenties anthem.”

  “I hear that a lot,” I told her.

  I admit that I hired Clyde because on his application he wrote, “I seriously love the Axis. Not kissing your ass, just saying.” Clyde told me he played my old band regularly on his college radio show, years after effete front man Milo Kildare and I mothballed our instruments and sold the tour van to a similar act that hadn’t been worn down like a pencil eraser over years of exhaustion, lost wages, and petty late-night arguments over whether Milo should be allowed to put a clothesline up in the van to dry his socks and underwear after he washed them in a rest stop men’s room sink, or whether Milo had the right to force me to wax my chest, because he found the tufts of fur that poke upward from the collar of my T-shirt “distracting.” It should be mentioned here that Milo wore cravats and deliberately high-water jeans and had a black ink tattoo of a cheese grater on his wrist, which he’d rub on my face whenever I said something he didn’t want to hear. (“I’m grating your face, Bendo!”) Clyde was maybe thirteen years old when Milo and I parted company: me for the cold, damp peace of Chicago and the Dictator’s Club; Milo for Portland, Oregon, where he designs Web sites and treats raising his kids like just another thing that’s no fun without an audience. His wife, Jodie, e-mails me pictures of little Edgar and Viola running around in the frilly steampunk costumes she and Milo design and sell at the farmers’ mark
et. I haven’t spoken to Milo since the last time he breezed through Chicago on tour with his now-defunct Japanese-y freak-folk act, which was five years ago. I called to tell him I couldn’t make the show. Our exchange went exactly like this:

  KARL: Hey, Milo, it’s Karl.

  MILO: You coming to my show tonight?

  KARL: Sorry, dude, I couldn’t find anyone to cover me at the bar tonight, but if you want to come by for drinks afterwards, I’d love to see you.

  MILO: [Long pause] If God appeared before you and touched your cheek, you’d, what, say you had to work? [Hang up]

  Lena sang Milo’s lyrics in full voice, banging out the introductory guitar riff on the table: “This is the start of a revolution! I’m the pin and you’re my cushion! Soft hips soft lips beneath my fingertips! Round like I found you. Round like I want you. Round how I love you. Don’t let them teach you, just let me reach you, don’t let them teach you, so much to love. This is the start of a revolution, shake that belly proud.…”

  Of course she was a Milo fan. Every feminist chick that went to college in the nineties loved Milo. Those girls who shook their bellies proud in his direction when he stormed the crowd during one of his performances were our primary fan base during the later years.

  “That one was all Milo. I had nothing to do with that one.”

  “Milo rubbed his crotch on the microphone stand during that show so much, I bet his dick was always chafed. That, and I’m sure he slept with every plus-sized girl in the western United States. I bet you have some stories.”

  I tried not to look disappointed that my astrophysicist wanted to wax nostalgic about Milo Kildare’s chafed dick. Milo had many fans, and they were all big-boned, educated, fashionably “alternative,” brunette, wrote long feminist screeds on the Internet about things that angered them, and looked like they were about to kick your ass or burst into tears or both.

  “Can I get you another drink?”

  “Sure. This was Goose Island something. Clyde picked it. He said it was on the house.”

  “If you help me you can drink at my bar for free for the rest of your life.”

  Lena slammed her laptop shut. It had a yellow Teen-Beat Records sticker stuck on the front. “What do you need from the wonderful world of astrophysics? Asteroids? Black holes? String theory? I’m a string theory girl, which is more mathematics than anything. I’m not really, like, a NASA-type physicist. I just write formulas that my PI tells me to do over because they suck.”

  I took a deep breath and leaned across the table, lowering my voice to share my secret. “Do you believe in the possibility of time travel?”

  Lena snorted. “No. Sorry. Can’t happen. Thanks for the beer, though.”

  “What about wormholes?”

  She raised her eyebrows at me, making sure I got the message that she thought I was an idiot. “What about wormholes?”

  “What do you know about wormholes?”

  “Theoretical stuff. The Einstein–Rosen Bridge?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh god. Really?” She made that snarl face, like in her picture. “Let me guess. You’re writing a novel?”

  “No. I’m not writing a novel. I’m talking about a real wormhole. A portal to the past. A highway, if you will, to the rock shows of yesterday.” I braced myself for a blasting.

  “Sounds sexy. Sci-fi sexy.”

  “It is.”

  Lena took a sheet of paper from the stack on the table and began to sketch a diagram with her purple pen. “Theoretically, we can time travel. To the future. Not backwards. It would involve launching yourself into space, your body not aging very much, and landing back down on Earth in the future. Theoretically. No one has actually accomplished this. This is the basic formula, which I know looks like a bunch of lines and figures, but there it is.” She turned around the sheet of paper to show me her lines and figures, and a drawing that looked like a funnel.

  “But that’s not a wormhole.”

  “It’s a theoretical wormhole, and wormholes are only theory anyway. One could theoretically build an artificial negative-mass black hole and use it for time travel, but that involves matter with negative mass with the power to curve space-time like a Pringles potato chip. How much do you know about Euclidian geometry?”

  “Uh, nothing?”

  “I mean, if you can travel through time and then come back to the present, that pretty much kills Schwarzchild’s topology, and that leads me to some questionable rethinkings of the laws of quantum gravity. Hmm. Frankly, I think time-traveling to the future is stupid, because when you come back all your friends will be old or dead and you’ll have missed out on a lot. I mean, even if it’s crappy, it’s still your life. Maybe medicine in the future will improve. But the environment will be shot to shit. I’d say stay right where you are.”

  “I have a wormhole,” I said. “In my apartment.”

  I could tell by the way she cocked her eyebrows at me that Lena was used to talking about physics with people she deemed to be beneath her level of intelligence. “My years of scientific training tell me you don’t.”

  “Well. You’d be wrong, then. Isn’t science, like, constantly changing?”

  “No.” Her tone was snotty. “I don’t even know where to start with that.”

  “What I mean is, don’t new things get proven? Isn’t science a constant quest for the truth about the world?”

  Lena picked up her stack of papers from the table and started to put them in her bag, an old, beat-up army surplus model covered in band patches.

  She pointed her index finger around my bar and raised her voice. “Everything around us? You, me, this bar, Chicago? Is temporary. It’s not like you can hit rewind and all the old cars and houses are suddenly new, and dead people come back to life. It doesn’t exist anywhere in the universe. It’s dead matter. It’s all gone.”

  “You’re not going to like this, but you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not, but okay. Let’s say I’m wrong. Where did you go in your wormhole?”

  “1990.”

  “How did you know it was 1990? How do you know you actually, physically, went back in time?” Lena’s voice grew louder and her cheeks grew redder. I almost felt bad for involving her.

  “I fell through the floor of my bedroom closet and landed at a show at T.T. the Bear’s Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I knew it was 1990 from the posters on the wall. The cars, too. When was the last time you saw a Pinto, an AMC Gremlin, and three really old, angular Subarus parked next to each other on the street?”

  “So you fell through your floor and ended up in a magical parking lot with some ugly cars from the seventies. Anything else?”

  “The passage. It was freezing cold, with blinding lights the whole time.”

  “How long did it take for you to get to the magical parking lot?”

  “About a minute.”

  “You know, there’s a salvage lot on the West Side. You can see it from the Green Line train. Maybe you were there. Certainly there is a place that still exists on earth that you just, you know, happened to be at.”

  “I wasn’t in Chicago. I saw Galaxie 500 play a show. It was at T.T. the Bear’s Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1990.”

  “I love Galaxie 500. Did they play ‘Tugboat’?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lena blushed. It was nice to see her drop her guard for a bit. “I really love Galaxie 500.”

  I gave Lena a thumbs up and said I loved Galaxie, too. “Okay, so let me ask you. Purely hypothetical. It’s a game I like to play with people I’ve just met. If you could go back in time and see any band perform, who would you pick?”

  “‘Hypothetical’ meaning I don’t get to go for a ride in your wormhole?”

  “Okay. Yes. You really do get to go back in time and see whatever band you want.”

  I racked my mind for a guess as to whom Lena would want to see. She looked like she would pull a fast one and pick someone unexpected, like Merle Haggard or Tupac Shaku
r. She did know Galaxie 500, even though she was probably a little on the young side to remember them during their time. She wore a Hüsker Dü shirt and had a Fugazi patch on her bag. Her attire and demeanor suggested an appreciation for Sleater-Kinney and other Pacific Northwest riot grrrl bands, but that she might also be more into hard-core stuff, judging from her Melvins T-shirt in that photograph on the Northwestern Web site.

  “Thinking Fellers Union Local 282.” She didn’t even have to think about it, was so bursting with the need to say it. Thinking Fellers. It was on the tip of her tongue.

  Didn’t see that one coming.

  “Not the Smiths?”

  She clicked her tongue at me. “Do I look like I give a shit about the Smiths?”

  “No. You appear to have lived a full, productive life without any help from Morrissey.”

  “Damn right I have.”

  Thinking Fellers. Early nineties San Francisco weirdo band, spoken of in the same sentence as Ed’s Redeeming Qualities. Clearly she deejayed college radio.

  “Did you deejay college radio?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “So how do you know the Thinking Fellers?”

  “Why do you think only college radio deejays know the Thinking Fellers?” Lena Geduldig was excellent at making an old bartender feel like a complete idiot. I decided to never tell her that I dropped out of college.

  “I don’t.” Talking to Lena felt like carrying ten boxes of records up ten flights of stairs. “Well, yeah. Okay. You win, sister.”

  She took a long swig from her glass of beer. “The college radio station in the bumblefuck town in Montana where I grew up used to play the Thinking Fellers. When I was a kid, I used to call the deejays there and ask them to play They Might Be Giants. The one guy, Mark, he was sick of TMBG, so he told me to listen to the Thinking Fellers instead. I liked them.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re a rock ’n’ roll kind of guy. Not all bookish and vintage-clad like the standard Axis fan. Sleeve tattoos. Goatee. I remember you, kind of. You had long hair. You clearly have an opinion about a lot of bands.”