a fifty third story...'quantum immortality'

Billy was a no hoper.  Right from the start he was the runt of the litter.  Had he been a pig he would have been shot point blank in the forehead with an air gun before his first birthday.  Fortunately for Billy he was born into the master race – Billy was a human being.

On September 5, 1984 at the Robert Wood Johnson hospital, New Brunswick, in the state of New Jersey, Billy entered the world.  He had two arms (with hands), two legs (with feet), a small head (with the usual appendages), and as it turned out, a small brain, small enough to fit inside his small cranium.  He weighed only 5lb 7oz.

Rather than shoot him with an air gun, drown him in a well, give him a lethal injection, or any other of the sometimes cruel, sometimes ingenious ways the human race has come up with to extinguish life, Billy was saved.  It was the 1980s and mercy killing was no longer sanctioned among the medical profession, however much doctors, surgeons etcetera wanted to play God, or thought themselves on a par with their creator.

Along with Billy, and on the very same day, from Billy’s mother’s birth tunnel there emerged Cassandra and Cleo.  They were Billy’s twins.  Cassandra weighed 7lb 8oz; Cleo 9lbs 4oz.  Cleo had an appetite even as a foetus.

Father of the new born triplets was Raymond.  Raymond would later cite September 5, 1984 as the greatest day of his life; save the three occasions he would remarry in the following 21 years, and the two occasions the Baltimore (Indianapolis) Colts won Superbowl (his subsequent marriages were childless).  Raymond was a tall man, with big hands, thick forearms, a broad chest and a chin like a car bumper.  He lost his hair at nineteen and wore a Baltimore (Indianapolis) Colts baseball cap to conceal his shiny bald pate.

As for Billy’s mother, she was a darling: patient and loving, trusting (gullible) and beautiful (after a fashion).  Evyette, for that was her name, had first met Raymond at college.  Raymond was a line back for the college football team and not renowned for a great deal else; Evyette was the Prom Queen, also not renowned for a great deal else.  They dated for two years before Raymond summoned the courage to ask Evyette’s father, a straight up ex-US airman, for her pretty lil’ hand in marriage.  ‘Yew won’t be able to find a ring to fit, mah fingers ah so small and dainty’, Evyette gushed on learning of their engagement.

And when they were eventually married, and the reception had passed in an emotional whirl, Raymond carried his princess to the conjugal bed, impregnated Evyette with his semen.  Three of Raymond’s sperm had the stamina of cross channel swimmers.

~

Anyhow, fast forward back to the delivery room at the Robert Wood Johnson hospital on September 5, 1984, and the midwife in charge of overseeing the arrival of little Cleo, Cassandra and the even littler Billy, a stout matronly woman with a large bosom and froglike chin by the name of Gladys decided the even littler Billy would be best off in an incubation ward.  The world was such a mighty big place, and Billy was such a teeny tiny visitor.  So it came to pass that Billy’s first four weeks on planet earth were spent in a ventilated chamber roughly the size of a kitty carrier while outside the white washed walls of the hospital life for ordinary, decent people went on as normal and stuff happened: a new Canadian prime minister was elected, a man crossed the Atlantic ocean in a hot air balloon and the US Embassy in Beirut was car bombed, killing twenty two people.

An upside down world of hot air, indiscriminate murder and misfortune, the world Billy was exposed to on leaving the Robert Wood Johnson hospital at the beginning of October, 1984.

~

New Brunswick is a medium sized urban conurbation in Middlesex County, NJ.  It is known as ‘Healthcare City’ because of the number of medical centres in the area. Among it’s famous sons, daughters are actor Michael Douglas, Wheeler Winston Dixon, filmmaker, critic, author, and the aforementioned Robert Wood Johnson.  Robert Wood Johnson by the way was a successful industrialist, he succumbed to chronic renal insufficiency before his home town had acquired the moniker: ‘Healthcare City’, and before the hospital which today bears his name was built.

For Billy childhood in Healthcare City was, ironically, plagued with illness.  His slight frame coupled with a pre-disposition to various ailments meant that before his fifth birthday he had suffered mumps, measles, chicken pox, diphtheria, viral meningitis, pneumonia, head lice and a broken arm.  The doctors told Billy’s mother Billy had amazing powers of recovery, which in sense was true and just as well. 

On the occasion of his fifth birthday little Billy had some of his little friends around for tea.  They had cocktail sausages, cheese and pineapple sticks, sugar rings, chocolate fingers and cran-apple.  After tea there were games of pin the tail on the donkey, blind man’s buff, and musical chairs.  As an adult Billy would remember the occasion for two reasons: it was the first time he was allowed to fire party streamers (the bang echoed in his ears for days later), second, it was one of the last times he saw his father.  Raymond left Billy’s mother, Evyette, a week after Billy’s fifth birthday for a seventeen year old cheer leader.  It came as a nothing less than a colossal surprise.

Billy never forgave his father.  Evyette did, but then she was still in love with Raymond and would remain so. 

~

In part due to the complications surrounding Billy’s birth, growing up was something young Billy found difficult.  At the age of six he was put on a programme of growth steroids by his doctor in the hope he would spurt skyward like Jack and or the beanstalk.  Alas for Billy he didn’t and his twin brother Cleo inherited his father’s muscular physique and (one and only) gift for sports, becoming the footballer in the family; Billy, meanwhile, found himself faced with the unenviable choice of becoming team mascot or water boy.  He chose neither.

As part of this extra curricular schooling Billy instead went to embroidery class.  He was good with his fingers, found he could thread a needle etcetera, and it was at embroidery class that Billy met Sabrina.  Sabrina was by any measure an unusual teenage girl.  She dressed head to toe in black, wore black woollen skirts, black woollen cardigans.  She didn’t wear make-up, had her hair in a stern bob.  Sabrina also claimed she could talk to the prophets and among other things that she was two thousand years old.  Billy learned from Sabrina human beings could in fact live for centuries using various bodies as conduits for the Self and for their souls! 

One afternoon during embroidery class when Billy was putting the finishing touches to a cross stitch of the Stars and Stripes, a cross stitch he would present to his mother, Evyette, for Thanksgiving, Sabrina leaned over and whispered in Billy’s ear.  ‘Come with me’, she said.  ‘Now?’, asked Billy, ever so slightly taken aback.  ‘Now!’, Sabrina replied.

~

In front of Billy and Sabrina was the imposing post-colonial façade of Queen’s College on the distinguished campus of Rutgers University, New Brunswick.  It looked like the kind of all American civic building where the Declaration of Independence might otherwise have been signed back on July 4, 1776 (Sabrina, at this historic juncture, was apparently living inside the body of Thomas Jefferson’s maid, sometime mistress).  The autumnal afternoon was drawing to a close and the old, low light filtered through the golden leaves of the beech trees bordering the manicured lawn where they stood.  Billy shifted from one foot to another. ‘Aren’t we going in?’, he asked presently.  Sabrina seemed to think about this for a moment before taking Billy’s hand and together they walked up the marble steps leading to the college entrance hall.

‘Where are we going?’, Billy wondered aloud as they entered the atrium opening out onto a long corridor, the pervasive and institutional aroma of wood varnish and brass polish filling his nostrils.  Sabrina’s nose twitched, she pressed Billy’s hand.  ‘We’re going to see the Proficient’, she replied, ‘you’ll see’. 

~

Billy’s first meeting with the Proficient took place on the 278^th day of the Gregorian calendar year, October 4, 1996: almost exactly twelve years and a month after Billy’s arrival into the universe.  On the very same day the BPAA US Bowling Open was won by Mr Dave Husted of Milwaukie, Oregon.  As a noteworthy aside, Husted has earned well over a million dollars routinely knocking over ten medium sized skittles, rolling a 2lb spherical object down a polyurethane lane flanked by two semi-cylindrical channels.  Sound like a complicated way to earn a living!?

Yes and no. 

Although Husted would have counted himself fortunate in comparison with the Proficient, professional ten pin bowling being an honest and, for those blessed with Husted’s unerring accuracy, relatively straightforward means of bringing home the bacon; the Proficient on the other hand often had to fall back on hoola hoola.

Hoola hoola is essentially the same thing as shilling the rubes, the same thing as conning the suckers.  Sabrina was a two thousand year old sucker, Billy needed to be careful what he wished for.. 

 ..Because Sabrina could not possibly be two thousand years old, after all she was in Billy’s class at school and not even Noah (of Ark fame) made it into his twentieth century.  Then again if the rules that govern common perception or ‘reality’ are, through the medium of Science among other disciplines, continually evolving for good and bad, there remains the possibility Sabrina could have been as old as the desert fathers. 

Indeed, the Proficient made his living professing the eternality of the human soul, the elasticity of Time, the tendency for history to replicate itself and quantum immorality.  He lived in a six bedroom town house with his beautiful and trusting wife, was an emeritus professor at the university by day, a serial womaniser by night.  Apropos, The Proficient was fifty four (and he knew it only too well).

When Billy met the Proficient, the Proficient was still developing his theories on all four of the aforementioned tenets, and how using the alchemy of finance they could be best capitalised upon.   While neither Billy or Sabrina had a great deal of pocket money, the Proficient nevertheless realised in his proteges he would need unquestioning loyalty, and by his reckoning children and women (and film actors) were the most obsequious.  Moreover, he was aware that to actually get his theories to develop any kind of liquidity in future he would need a publisher.  The first five publishers the Proficient approached turned him down on the spot, and he told anyone who would listen that the publishing industry was full of ex-Decca records executives.  The sixth publisher, however, took him on.

~

Halverson & Miller Inc. had been around for fifty one years.  It was one of the few remaining independent publishers, and it had a reputation for maverick output.  The history of Halverson & Miller Inc. was assorted:  the company had published everything and anything from gardening books to political treatises, soft core pornography to coffee table presentations on catholic iconography.  Around about the time when the Proficient, writing under the pseudonym Arthur C Bojangles, submitted his book proposal, Halverson & Miller Inc. were starting afresh for what seemed the umpteenth time with yet another influx of editorial staff.  Among the new members of the editorial team was Milo Grinder.  Milo was twenty six, young and relentlessly ambitious.  He, like Billy, had also been the runt of the litter (he was one of six) and was badly bullied throughout school.  Milo, therefore, took solace in books of all kinds – including, as Milo mentioned at interview with the company, some Halverson & Miller Inc. publications, namely their relatively successful soft core pornography series, a cross between Willard Price and Mills and Boon.

One morning Milo was sitting at his desk nibbling his fingernails when the post arrived.  There was a letter from his mother, who wrote to him at his company address weekly to tell him she was still alive and that she hoped he was too, and also a strange maroon coloured A4 envelope, sealed with..a seal.  Milo’s curiosity was aroused.

The maroon coloured A4 envelope was of course from the Proficient, or Arthur C Bojangles.  Inside Milo found a one hundred and twenty page manuscript entitled ‘Earthling Popular Culture: from Pharaoh to the Present Day, a personal introduction’.  Milo turned over the first leaf, read the first sentence: ‘You are two thousand years old!  We have met before, you and I, on the sand banks of the Nile delta’. 

~

As it so happened the Proficient also told Billy they had met before, a long, long time ago, again on the sand banks of the Nile delta.  Sitting in the Proficient’s oak paneled office, Queens college, Rutgers University on October 4, 1996, Billy was bemused, but nevertheless felt the courage to ask what it was he was doing on the Nile delta, some twenty centuries previous.  The Proficient swept back his thinning hair, and fixed Billy with a benevolent gaze.  ‘Billy,you and I were being born, dear boy!’

It was something of a revelation to Billy that he was far more senior than recent memory suggested.  However, life in the drab surroundings of New Brunswick led Billy to the easily reached conclusion that the Proficient’s claim he and Billy were in essence ancient brothers was probably worth entertaining for the general lack of entertainment in Billy’s life if nothing else.  Moreover, his friend Sabrina said she was two thousand years old, and had bedded Thomas Jefferson. 

Meanwhile, for Milo Grinder, the Proficient, Arthur C Bonjangles’ proclamation at least invited Milo to read the next sentence of the one hundred and twenty page manuscript, and then the one after that and so on. 

~

Milo Grinder was a lonely child, even with five siblings for company.  Milo’s father worked in a factory seemingly all hours making component parts for washing machines; Milo’s mother also worked long hours in an industrial laundry – the laundry largely dealt with hospital bed wear: Milo’s mother had found all manner of things in the sorting station where items ready to be washed were delivered, including a human ear and a severed ring finger with fake diamond encrusted engagement ring still attached.

Like Billy, Milo found growing up in Healthcare City, New Brunswick tedious and not without difficulty.  His school years passed in a state of abject misery, and although he made it into Rutgers university, he quit after two terms for the simple and eloquent reason that he hated it.  Various menial jobs followed, including pizza delivery (Corleone’s Pizza), photographic equipment sales (B&H), and telephone operation (Amtrak).  Then his father died of a heart attack and his mother followed him to the grave shortly afterwards as a result of a machine accident at work. 

Tragedy!

But behind the black cloud of family tragedy there was a silver lining; Billy’s inheritance, while not a princely sum, enabled him to at last do something he genuinely wanted with his life – he chose to train for a career in publishing.

~

It will be obvious to the observant reader Billy and Milo shared certain similarities: they were both small for their age, bored and unhappy with their existence, minus a father, in need of a fatherly figure, while Billy was a dreamer and Milo was a fantasist, i.e. a dreamer with corporeal ambition!

The Proficient or Arthur C Bojangles wasn’t too dissimilar himself, except that he was in a position to play Dad, or there on the sand banks of the Nile delta in the year 4BC, older brother and leader.

His first book - ‘Earthling Popular Culture: from Pharaoh to the Present Day, a personal introduction’ – was released by Halverson & Miller Inc. in 1998.  Somehow, Milo succeeded in persuading the editorial board it was worth publishing and would sell.   ‘But where do you see the market?’, queried the Sales and Marketing director, (who had read the opening sentence and did not feel any kinship whatsoever with the Proficient) to which Milo smiled and announced it didn’t matter since Arthur C Bojangles had agreed to take two thousand copies himself on publication, thereby ensuring the project break even and earn a little profit on top.  The general consensus was: how could we refuse?

Billy was fourteen when the Proficient’s first book was published, and quickly becoming politicised in the doctrine which had earlier so taken Sabrina.  Indeed, Billy came across as a fervent believer in the eternality of the human soul, the elasticity of Time, the tendency for history to replicate itself and quantum immorality, in part because he didn’t really understand, in part because there was very little to understand, in part because he felt vulnerable in his new found belief – he had never roomed with the founder of American independence, seen the pyramids let alone the great sphinx at Giza.  Still, as the Proficient told him, just because you round a bend in a river and cannot see it anymore, it does not mean it never existed. 

Milo was twenty eight when Arthur C Bojangles first book was published, and quickly becoming aware of the realities of the publishing industry; he was already starkly aware of the reality of living in an upside down world of hot air, indiscriminate murder and misfortune.  In truth he had found the Proficient (Milo noticed with wry amusement this was Bojangles’ email signature) a pain in the backside to project manage, but he knew the book would be a relative success, especially with a serial fantasist, and an expert in hoola hoola promoting the thing.

The Proficient was fifty six when he received two thousand copies of what he hoped would be, and considered anyway, his seminal debut.  Using his connections and a little assistance (albeit typically reluctant assistance from  Halverson & Miller Inc.) he managed to engineer a book launch at Queen’s College, Rutgers University.  His wife, who worked conveniently enough in the film industry as an editor, excelled her obsequious self and persuaded two prominent film actors (Trip Babbitt and Trina Houses), soon to appear in the film she was in the process of editing, not only to attend the launch, but also spread the word about her husband’s work among their film star friends.   

~

Trip Babbitt and Trina Houses’ film star friends had many of the same childhood issues as Billy and Milo, and like Billy, many of them were not very bright, or like Billy’s mother, were too trusting.  Unlike Billy, or indeed Milo, Trip Babbitt, Trina Houses and their film star friends had also spent most of their lives, in a professional capacity or otherwise, attention seeking or playing make believe; consequently their concept of reality was unsteady at best and as with any stage set, could easily be taken down and rebuilt.  The Proficient’s idea that they had all met before on the sand banks of the Nile delta two thousand years ago was attractive to Trip, Trina and their friends, because it enabled them to have something to talk about in interviews and have something else to pretend.  In time, Trip and Trina would claim they were in fact the modern day incarnations of Anthony and Cleopatra respectively.

So before long the Proficient was BIG in Hollywood, and Billy (as well as Sabrina) was his little campaigner; Trip and Trina along with their film star friends professed their allegiance to the Proficient (‘call me Arthur..’) whenever they saw an opportunity (for themselves) and Milo signed up the Proficient’s second book for Halverson & Miller Inc. – the first sold seven thousand copies in it’s first year; a healthy return.

With a little sleight of hand, Arthur C Bojangles was on his way to quantum immortality, and little Billy, who if he had been born on the sand banks of the Nile Delta, or even a hundred years previous, would have been drowned in a well, or shot in the forehead with an air gun before his first birthday, hoped he was on the way toward it too.