Zig Zag (14 page)

Elisa
sat there, speechless.

They
were black-and-white drawings, old-fashioned looking. She guessed the
style dated from the early twentieth century. They were all pretty
similar: nude men and women, with other nude men and women sitting
astride them, riding them. Beneath each one, in red capital letters,
the question "Do You
Like
It?"

She
watched the little parade of images, unable to do anything to stop
it. Her keyboard wasn't responding; the computer seemed to have a
will of its own.

Bastards.
She
was sure that, somehow, despite all her precautions, it was a virus.
Then she froze.

The
slide show ended, and the screen now showed a black background with
big red capital letters that resembled bloody claw marks. She saw the
sentence before another electronic flicker made it disappear, and
then her regular e-mail page came back up.

The
message was gone. As if it had never existed.

She
contemplated the words and shook her head.

That
can't have referred to me. That was some random ad.

What
it said was:

THEY'RE
WATCHING YOU

07

THE
following
Tuesday, she again heard from "mercury-friend." Configuring
her e-mail software to block the address did nothing. She turned off
her computer, but when she rebooted, the message opened automatically
and filled her screen with similar drawings and identical words,
though this time rather than early twentieth-century artworks, they
appeared to be modern graphic art: airbrushed bodies and
three-dimensional computer-generated reproductions. They were still
all men and women, this time walking or running, wearing boots and
harnesses and carrying other people on their shoulders. Elisa stopped
looking.

She
had an idea. She searched the Web for
mercuryfriend.net
and
was not surprised to find that it had unrestricted access and she
could get onto the page with no trouble. Tons of banners for bars and
clubs with bizarre names flashed on a hideously loud purple
background. Abbadon, Euclid, Gobbledygook, Mister X, Scorpio—they
all seemed to be very colorful places offering live shows,
opportunities for swingers, and outrageous "hosts" and
"hostesses." So, that was it, then. Just as she'd
suspected, it was some sort of ad. Somehow she had inadvertently
given those pigs her address, and now they were bombarding her with
spam. She'd have to find a way to deal with it; maybe she'd have to
change her e-mail address. But she was relieved to know that there
was nothing personal in the messages.

She'd
made her peace with the Mustache Mob, too. She'd hardly even thought
about them since Maldonado had calmed her fears. Hardly. A couple of
times she'd seen gray-haired men with mustaches on the street and
felt a little shiver run through her. Sometimes she could spot them
from a long way off. But she understood that, subconsciously, her
brain searched them out. None of them seemed to be spying on her or
following her, and by the time the weekend rolled around again she'd
even forgotten about them. Or at least stopped thinking they were
somehow meaningful.

She
had other things on her mind.

ON
Friday,
she decided it was time to take a different tack in Blanes's class.

"How
do you think we might solve this?"

Blanes
pointed to one of his equations, scribbled on the board in his tiny
chicken scrawl. Elisa and the rest of the class were more than used
to his writing, though, and they could read those symbols as easily
as if they'd been written as words and not numbers. They expressed
the fundamental question of the theory: How can we identify and
isolate finite time strings if they have only one end?

It
was a mind-blowing concept. Mathematically, it could be proven that
time strings only came to an end on one side. To use a simile, Blanes
drew a line on the blackboard and asked them to imagine that it was a
loose thread on a table: one end would be the "future" and
the other the "past." The thread would move in the
direction of the future, which he indicated with an arrow. He
couldn't do it any other way, since according to the equations, the
"end" of the past, that is, the left-hand end of the
thread, simply didn't exist (this was the famous proof of why time
moved only in one direction, which had brought Blanes so much fame).
He represented this fact by drawing a question mark. There was no
loose end that could be identified as "past."

The
most incredible thing about it, however, the thing that defied logic,
was that despite the fact that the string had only one end,
it
was not infinite.

The
"past" side ended, but that end wasn't an end.

That
paradox made Elisa's head spin. She loved it. She always got that
feeling when she had insights into how weird and wonderful the world
was. How was it possible that all of reality, the most personal
things in our lives, could be made up of something as crazy as tiny
little strings whose ends
weren't
ends?

At
any rate, she was convinced she knew the answer to the question
Blanes was asking. She didn't even have to write it down. She'd
worked it out at home, and she had the answer in her head.

Swallowing
hard, yet sure of herself, she decided to take a chance.

Twenty
pairs of eyes were glued to the board, but only one hand shot up.

Valente
Sharpe's.

"Tell
us, Valente," Blanes smiled.

"If
there were curls in the middle of each string, we could identify
them, even isolate them using discrete quantities of energy, if that
energy were enough to separate the curls. What I mean is..."
There followed a torrent of mathematical language.

No
one said a word. The whole class, including Blanes, was left
speechless.

Valente,
however, wasn't the one who had answered. As if he were a
ventriloquist's dummy, he'd opened his mouth, but another voice two
seats to his left had interrupted him and stolen the show.

Everyone
stared at Elisa. She looked only at Blanes. She could hear her heart
beating and feel her cheeks burning, as if she'd whispered sweet
nothings rather than math equations. She awaited the consequences of
her actions, feeling his half-closed eyes on her (it was a typical
Blanes look that reminded her of Robert Mitchum) and yet managing to
remain unbelievably calm all the same. Her hotheadedness, which under
normal circumstances she thought of as her number one defect, now
worked to her advantage: she was sure she was right and was prepared
to fight for it, regardless of who her opponent was.

"I
don't recall having called on you, Miss...," Blanes said in a
tone as inexpressive as his face, though she felt a hard edge to his
comment. The silence grew thick.

"Robledo,"
Elisa replied. "And you didn't see me raise my hand because I
didn't. I've been trying every day for over a week and you never seem
to see me, so this time I decided to speak."

Everyone
turned to watch Blanes and Elisa, as if they were tennis pros in a
match that had come down to the final seconds of the deciding set.
Then Blanes turned back to Valente and smiled.

"Please,
go ahead, Valente," he asked again.

Valente,
sitting there primly, with his thin lanky body and white skin, looked
like an ice sculpture seated at a desk. He answered immediately, in a
loud, clear voice.

As
she watched his emaciated profile, Elisa had to admire one simple
detail: even though Valente gave
the
same reply
as
her, he did it in his own way, using his own words, somehow making it
seem as if that was what he'd been thinking all along, before he'd
even heard her, even making a slight mistake with his variables that
Blanes quickly corrected.
Defending
his territory, like me,
she
thought, pleasantly surprised.
So
now we're tied, Valente Sharpe.

When
Valente finished his elucidation, Blanes said, "Very good. Thank
you." Then he looked down and stared at a spot between his feet.

"This
course is for theoretical physics graduates," he proceeded
quietly, his voice hoarse. "For adults. If any more of you are
planning to have childish outbursts, I would kindly ask you to leave
the room first. Please keep that in mind." Then, looking up
again, this time neither at Valente nor Elisa but at the whole class,
he added in the same hushed tone, "Aside from that, Ms.
Robledo's solution is brilliant."

She
felt a chill.
He's
naming me because I was the first one to say it.
She
recalled something one of her optics professors used to say: "In
science, you're allowed to be a complete asshole; just make sure
you're the
first
asshole."
She didn't, however, feel any great pleasure, or even glee. In fact,
a wave of shame swept over her.

Out
of the corner of her eye, she watched Valente Sharpe's inexpressive
profile.
Congratulations,
Elisa. Today you were the first asshole.

She
looked down and shielded her eyes with her hand to hide her tears.

WHEN
Elisa
got home, she was so flustered by the morning's events that she
didn't even care about the new e-mail from mercuryfriend in her
inbox. Since she knew the attachment would kick into action and fill
her screen no matter what she did, she just went ahead and opened it.
The slide show began.

She
was about to look away when she noticed a difference.

Mixed
in among the erotic drawings were others: a man walking, hunched over
under the weight of a stone on his shoulders; a World War
I
soldier
carrying a girl in a little chair on his back; a male dancer on
another man's shoulders ... Finally, in the same red letters on black
background, appeared a new, enigmatic proclamation: "
I
f
You
A
re
W
ho
Y
ou
T
hink
Y
ou
A
re,
Y
ou'll
K
now."