and twisted off the cap and took a deep gulp.
Jesus, he thought. It has not ever been closer. It has not ever been closer.
Eventually he put the car back into gear and drove south all the way to Pacific Coast Highway and then took Brookhurst up to Westminster. The car leaned perceptibly to the right now, and he wondered what he had done to the suspension and alignment.
"What
seeems
to be the
problem?
" whispered Archimedes Mavranos.
He sat on Scott Crane's porch in the darkness and listened to his own heart. He had read in an Isaac Asimov article that humans averagely got two billion heartbeats, and he calculated that he had used up only one billion.
It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail.
He reached down and took hold of his current can of Coors. He had read that Coors was anti-carcinogenic—it had no nitrosamines, or something—and so he drank it constantly.
God knew why Crane drank Budweiser constantly. Mavranos hadn't heard anything about Budweiser.
Spit in the palm of your hand and then whack it with your other fist, he thought, and watch which way the spit flies. Then you know which way to go.
Mavranos had dropped out of high school when his fiancée had got pregnant, and for nearly twenty years he had made a pretty good living by buying cars from the Huntington Beach police impound yard and fixing them up and selling them for a profit. Only last April had he started studying science and math and myth.
April is the cruellest month,
he thought.
Last April he had gone to a doctor because he was getting tired all the time, and had no appetite anymore, and had a lump under his left ear.
"What seems to be the problem?" the doctor had asked cheerfully.
What had turned out to be the problem was lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system.
The doctor had explained it to some extent, and Mavranos had done a lot of reading on his own. He had learned about the random nature of cancer cells, and had then studied randomness—and he had begun to discern the patterns that underlay true randomness: the branchings, the repeating patterns, the fat man in the complex plane.
A car turned down Main from Seventeenth, but it wasn't Crane's Torino.
If you were to decide to measure the coastline of California, it would be of little use simply to lay a ruler across a page of an atlas and then determine the length of the roughly ten degrees of longitude it spanned. But it would be of even less value to walk the length of the coastline with a one-inch stick, taking into account every open tide pool and shoe-size peninsula; if you measured
too
finely, in fact, your answer could approach infinity. Every little pool, if you measured finely enough, had a virtually infinite coastline.
You had to approach such things differently.
You had to back off just far enough.
Turbulence in a water pipe or disorder in the signals to the nerves of the heart—or the cellular hysteria called cancer—were effects of randomness. And if you could … find the patterns in randomness, maybe you could manipulate them. Change them, restore the order.
Spit in the palm of your hand and whack it, he thought.
And he had found this neighborhood, this house, Scott Crane.
Crane never washed his Torino, and Mavranos had noticed patterns in the dew-streaked dust and the splashing of bird shit on the car body—circles, and straight lines and right angles on a sloping surface, and once a spatter of little wailing faces like that Munch picture—and once, when Crane had been standing on the porch, blearily going through his pocket change for a quarter to buy a newspaper, he had dropped a handful of dimes and quarters and pennies—Mavranos had helped pick them up, and had noticed that every coin had landed heads side up; and any watch Crane wore would run too fast.
And animals died around this house. Mavranos had once noticed dead ants in a line that pointed to a forgotten third of a cheeseburger
Jesus, he thought. It has not ever been closer. It has not ever been closer.
Eventually he put the car back into gear and drove south all the way to Pacific Coast Highway and then took Brookhurst up to Westminster. The car leaned perceptibly to the right now, and he wondered what he had done to the suspension and alignment.
"What
seeems
to be the
problem?
" whispered Archimedes Mavranos.
He sat on Scott Crane's porch in the darkness and listened to his own heart. He had read in an Isaac Asimov article that humans averagely got two billion heartbeats, and he calculated that he had used up only one billion.
It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail.
He reached down and took hold of his current can of Coors. He had read that Coors was anti-carcinogenic—it had no nitrosamines, or something—and so he drank it constantly.
God knew why Crane drank Budweiser constantly. Mavranos hadn't heard anything about Budweiser.
Spit in the palm of your hand and then whack it with your other fist, he thought, and watch which way the spit flies. Then you know which way to go.
Mavranos had dropped out of high school when his fiancée had got pregnant, and for nearly twenty years he had made a pretty good living by buying cars from the Huntington Beach police impound yard and fixing them up and selling them for a profit. Only last April had he started studying science and math and myth.
April is the cruellest month,
he thought.
Last April he had gone to a doctor because he was getting tired all the time, and had no appetite anymore, and had a lump under his left ear.
"What seems to be the problem?" the doctor had asked cheerfully.
What had turned out to be the problem was lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system.
The doctor had explained it to some extent, and Mavranos had done a lot of reading on his own. He had learned about the random nature of cancer cells, and had then studied randomness—and he had begun to discern the patterns that underlay true randomness: the branchings, the repeating patterns, the fat man in the complex plane.
A car turned down Main from Seventeenth, but it wasn't Crane's Torino.
If you were to decide to measure the coastline of California, it would be of little use simply to lay a ruler across a page of an atlas and then determine the length of the roughly ten degrees of longitude it spanned. But it would be of even less value to walk the length of the coastline with a one-inch stick, taking into account every open tide pool and shoe-size peninsula; if you measured
too
finely, in fact, your answer could approach infinity. Every little pool, if you measured finely enough, had a virtually infinite coastline.
You had to approach such things differently.
You had to back off just far enough.
Turbulence in a water pipe or disorder in the signals to the nerves of the heart—or the cellular hysteria called cancer—were effects of randomness. And if you could … find the patterns in randomness, maybe you could manipulate them. Change them, restore the order.
Spit in the palm of your hand and whack it, he thought.
And he had found this neighborhood, this house, Scott Crane.
Crane never washed his Torino, and Mavranos had noticed patterns in the dew-streaked dust and the splashing of bird shit on the car body—circles, and straight lines and right angles on a sloping surface, and once a spatter of little wailing faces like that Munch picture—and once, when Crane had been standing on the porch, blearily going through his pocket change for a quarter to buy a newspaper, he had dropped a handful of dimes and quarters and pennies—Mavranos had helped pick them up, and had noticed that every coin had landed heads side up; and any watch Crane wore would run too fast.
And animals died around this house. Mavranos had once noticed dead ants in a line that pointed to a forgotten third of a cheeseburger
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