Bellwether (24 page)

“A library—?” Management said, looking apoplectic.

“I’m not threatening you,” I said. “Why would I? I didn’t get rid of any rats
or
find out what causes hair-bobbing. I couldn’t even locate a piper.”

I stopped, thinking about that, and just like the night before, standing in line at Target with the late Romantic Bride Barbie, I felt like I was on the verge of something significant.

“Are you calling HiTek a rat?” Management said, and I waved him away impatiently, trying to focus on my elusive thought. A piper.

“Are you saying—” Management bellowed, and it was gone.

“I’m saying you hired me for the wrong reason. You shouldn’t be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that’s what science is all about. And because the next fad may be the dangerous one, and you’ll find it out with the rest of the flock on your way over the cliff. And no, I don’t need a security escort back to my lab,” I said, opening my purse so he could see inside. “I’m leaving. ‘Up the Hill-side yonder, through the morning,’” and I squished my way back across the carpet “Bye, Shirl,” I called to her, “you can come smoke at my house anytime,” and I went out to my car and drove to the library.

rubik’s cube (1980—81)—–
Game fad involving a cube made up of smaller cubes of different colors that could be rotated to form different combinations. The object of the game (which more than a hundred million people tried to solve) was to twist the sides of the cube until each side was a solid color. The fad’s skill threshold was somewhat too high—as witness the dozens of puzzle-help books published—and the fad died out with many people never having solved it even once.

Lorraine was back. “Do you want
Your Guardian Angel Can Change Your Life?”
she asked me. She was wearing a fairy godmother sweatshirt and sparkly magic wand earrings. “It came in, and so did your book on hair-bobbing.”

“I don’t want it,” I said. “I don’t know what caused it, and I don’t care.”

“We found that book on Browning. You had checked it in after all. Our media organization assistant shelved it with the cookbooks.”

See, I told myself—walking over to Kepler’s Quark and giving my first name to a waitress with chopped-off hair and a waitress uniform that probably wasn’t a uniform—things are looking up already. They found Browning, you never have to read the personals again, and Flip can’t slouch in here to ruin your day and stick you with the check.

The waitress seated me at a table by the window. See, I told myself again, she didn’t seat you at the communal table. She isn’t wearing duct tape. Definitely looking up.

But it didn’t feel like it. It felt like I was out of a job. It felt like I was in love with somebody who didn’t love me back.

He’s totally fashion-impaired, I told myself. Look on the bright side. You no longer have to worry about what caused hair-bobbing. Which was a good thing, because I was pretty much out of ideas.

“Hi,” Ben said, sitting down across from me.

“What are you doing here?” I said as soon as I was able to. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I quit,” he said.

“You quit? Why? I thought you were going to work on Dr. Turnbull’s project.”

“You mean Alicia’s statistically-thought-out, science-on-demand, sure-to-win-the-Niebnitz-Grant project? It’s too late. The Niebnitz Grant has already been awarded.”

He didn’t look upset about it. He didn’t look like somebody who’d just quit his job. He looked containedly excited, his eyes jubilant behind the Coke bottles. He’s going to tell me he’s engaged to Alicia, I thought.

“Who won it?” I said, to stop him. “The Niebnitz Grant. A thirty-eight-year-old designed experimenter from west of the Mississippi?”

Ben motioned the waitress over and said, “What have you got to drink that’s not coffee?”

The waitress rolled her eyes. “There’s our new drink. The Chinatasse. It’s the latest thing.”

“Two Chinatasses,” he said, and I waited for the waitress to quiz him on whole vs. skim, white vs. brown, Beijing vs. Guangzhou, but Chinatasses apparently had a lower skill threshold than caffe latte. The waitress slouched off, and Ben said, “This came for you,” and handed me a letter.

“How did you know where to find me?” I said, looking at the envelope. It was blank except for my name.

“Flip told me,” he said.

“I thought she was gone.”

“She told me a while back. She said you hung out here a lot. I came here three or four times, hoping I’d run into you, but I never did. She said you came here looking for guys in the personals.”

“Flip,” I said, shaking my head. “I was reading them for trends research. I wasn’t trying … you did?”

He nodded, no longer jubilant. His gray eyes were serious behind the Coke-bottle glasses. “I stopped coming a couple of weeks ago because Flip told me you were engaged to the sheep guy.”

“Ostrich,” I said. “Flip told me you were crazy about Alicia, that that’s why you wanted to work with her.”

“Well, at least now we know what the
i
on her forehead stands for.
Interfering.
I don’t want to work with Alicia. I want to work with you.”

“I’m not engaged to the sheep guy,” I said. I thought of something.
“Why
did you buy that Cerenkhov blue tie?”

“To
impress you. Flip told me you’d never go out with me unless I got some new clothes, and this awful blue was the only thing I could find in the stores.” He looked sheepish. “I also took out an ad in the personals.”

“You did? What did it say?”

“Insecure, ill-dressed chaos theorist desires intelligent, insightful, incandescent trends researcher. Must be SC.” “SC?”

“Scientifically compatible.” He grinned. “People do crazy things when they’re in love.”

“Like borrow a flock of sheep to keep somebody from losing their grant?”

The waitress plunked down two glasses in front of us, spilling Chinatasse everywhere.

“We need those to go,” Ben said.

The waitress sighed loudly and stomped off with them.

“If we’re going to be working together,” Ben said to me, “we’d better get started.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We both quit, remember?”

“Well, the thing is, HiTek wants us back.”

“They do?”

“All is forgiven.” He nodded. “They say we can have anything we need—lab space, assistants, computers.”

“But what about the sheep and the secondhand smoke?”

“Open the letter.”

I did.

“Read it.”

I did. “I don’t understand,” I said.

I turned the letter over. There wasn’t anything on the back. I looked at the envelope again. It still only had my name on it. I looked at Ben, who looked jubilant again. “I don’t understand,” I said again.

“Me neither,” he said. “Alicia was there when I opened mine. She had to recalculate all her percentages.”

I read the letter again. “We won the Niebnitz Grant?”

“We won the Niebnitz Grant.”

“But … we aren’t … we don’t …”

“Well, that’s the thing,” he said, leaning across the table and, finally, taking my hand. “I had this idea. You know how I told you chaotic systems could be predicted by measuring all the variables and calculating the iteration? Well, I think Verhoest was right after all. There
is
another factor at work. But it’s not an outside factor. It’s something already in the system. Remember how Shirl said the bellwether was the same as the other sheep, only a little greedier, a little faster, a little ahead? What if—”

“—instead of butterflies, there’s a bellwether in chaotic systems?” I said.

“Exactly.” He was holding both my hands now. “And it doesn’t look any different from the other variables in the system, but it’s the trigger for the iteration, it’s the catalyst, it’s—”

“Pippa,” I said, clutching his hands. “There’s this poem,
Pippa Passes
, by—”

“Browning,” he said. “She sings at people’s windows—”

“And changes their lives, and they never even see her. If you were making a computer model of the village of Asolo, you wouldn’t even put her in it, but she’s—”

“—the variable that sets the butterfly’s wings in motion, the force behind the iteration, the trigger behind the trigger, the factor that causes—”

“—women to bob their hair in Hong Kong.”

“Exactly. The trigger that causes your fads. The—”

“—source of the Nile.”

The waitress came back with the same two glasses. “We don’t have cups to go. It pollutes the environment.” She set the glasses down and stomped off again.

“Like Flip,” Ben said, thinking about it. “She misdelivered the package, and that’s how I met you.”

“Among other things,” I said, and felt that feeling again of being on the verge of something, of the Rubik’s cube starting to turn.

“Let’s go,” Ben said. “I want to see what happens when I add the bellwether into my chaos theory data.”

“Wait—I want to drink my Chinatasse, in case it’s the next fad. And there’s something else … You didn’t give HiTek our decision yet, did you, about staying?”

He shook his head. “I thought you’d want to be there.”

“Good,” I said. “Don’t tell them no yet. There’s something I want to check on.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you back at HiTek in a few minutes then,” he said. “Okay?” and went out.

“Umm,” I said, trying to catch the thought I’d had before. Something about trains, or was it buses? And something the waitress had said.

I took a thoughtful sip of the Chinatasse, and if I needed a sign that chaos was reattaining equilibrium at a new and higher level, this was it. It was the Earth Mother’s wonderful spiced iced tea.

Which should inspire me if anything could. But I couldn’t capture the thought The idea that I should have gone back with Ben kept intruding, and that, except for that sensitivity exercise, and some incidental hand-holding, he had never touched me.

And apparently there was some kind of feedback loop operating in our system because he was back and pushing past the waitress, who wanted to write his name down, and through the tables and pulling me to my feet. And kissing me.

“Okay,” he said, when we pulled apart.

“Okay,” I said breathlessly.

“Wow!” the waitress said. “Did you meet him in the personals?”

“No,” I said, wishing she would shut up and that Ben would kiss me again. “Through Flip.”

“We were introduced by a bellwether,” Ben said, putting his arms around me again.

“Wow!” the waitress said.

couéism (1923)—–
Psychology fad inspired by Dr. Emile Coué, a French psychologist and the author of
Self-Mastery by Auto-Suggestion.
Coué’s method of self-improvement consisted of knotting a piece of string and reciting over and over, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.” Died out when it became apparent no one was.

Scientific breakthroughs have been triggered by the most minor of events: the sight of bathwater rising, the movement of a breeze, the pressure of a foot on a step. I had never heard of one being triggered by a kiss, though.

But it was a kiss that had the full weight of five weeks of chaotic turbulence behind it, shifting patterns of thought out of their accustomed positions, stirring up the variables, separating and mixing them again into new conjunctions, new possibilities. And when Ben had put his arms around me, it had been like the discovery of penicillin and the benzene ring and the Big Bang all rolled into one. Eureka to the tenth power. Like coming to the source of the Nile.

“This FLIP thing, where you met him,” the waitress was saying, “is it like a recovery group?”

“Discovery,” I said, staring transfixed after Ben, wondering how I could have been so blind. It was all so clear: what triggered fads and how scientific breakthroughs happen and why we had won the Niebnitz Grant.

“Can anybody join this FLIP?” the waitress said. “I’m already in a latte recovery group, but there aren’t any cute guys in it.”

“I need my check,” I said, fishing a twenty out of my purse and handing it to her so I could go back to HiTek and get all this on the computer.

“He already paid,” she said, trying to hand me back the twenty.

“Keep it,” I said, and grinned at her as something else hit me. “We’re rich. We won the Niebnitz Grant!”

I hurried back to HiTek and up to the stats lab, and called up my hair-bobbing model.

Suppose fads were a form of self-organized criticality arising out of the chaotic system of the popular culture. And suppose that, like other chaotic systems, they were influenced by a bellwether. The independence of women, Irene Castle, outdoor sports, rebellion against the war, all of those would simply be variables in the system. They would require a catalyst, a butterfly to set them in motion.

I focused in on the bump in Marydale, Ohio. Suppose that wasn’t a statistical anomaly. Suppose there’d been a girl in Marydale, Ohio, a girl just like everybody else, with flapping galoshes and rouged knees, indistinguishable from the rest of the flock, only a little greedier, a little faster, a little hungrier. A little ahead of the flock. A girl who had had a crush on a dentist on the other side of town and had walked into the barbershop and, with no idea she was starting a fad, that she was crystallizing chaos into criticality, told the barber to cut off her hair.

I called up the rest of the twenties data and asked for geographical breakdowns, and there was the anomaly again, for rolled-down stockings and the crossword puzzle, right over Marydale. And for the shimmy, even though the dance had originated in New York. But it hadn’t become a fad until a bobbed-haired girl in Marydale, Ohio, had picked it up. A girl like Flip. A butterfly. A bellwether. The source of the Nile.