Episode 2. The Sea Pig And the Sun: Entitled Pricks
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Series Guide: List of All Episodes
Seabright Beach is half a mile long and nearly a hundred yards wide. Vi was hardly able to believe her good fortune when first she saw it, thirty years ago. Wick had landed a job as a professor of mathematical physics at San Jose State. And Vi had a gig as a research librarian at Stanford — with a fatter salary than Wick’s. They had good careers, and they retired last year. To pass the time, Vi helps out at Los Perros public library, just down the hill. And Wick is still writing papers about Stephen Wolfram’s rulial space of all possible computations. And now Wick thinks he’s going there. Or something. He’s losing his shit.
Mounting the stairs, Vi admires the succulent, flowering ice plants on the bluff. Some wasps are feeding on a dead bird. The insects are elegant with their striped abdomens, like slumming fashionistas in a low-down dive.
At the top of the bluff, Wick and Vi stash their stuff in Vi’s car, which is parked on a lane that runs along the edge of the cliff, with a sidewalk and a railing on the ocean side. The wind is dying down, but, yes, here comes the fog. They put on extra coats and sit on a bench beside the car, enjoying the horizon, the wrinkled sea, the misty little sails. Good old Santa Cruz.
“Kind of nice,” goes Vi.
“The beach never disappoints,” says Wick. After a bit, his head droops and he slips back into his nap. Like a dog licking his balls, thinks Vi, exasperated with her husband. But she lets him doze.
Looking along the bluff she notices a woman working on a painting, about fifty yards away — is that Soxx Whitsett? Yes. The clothes, the posture, the motions. Soxx likes to do preliminary paintings en plein air. Back at her studio in Los Perros, she enlarges them, makes them abstract, and sells them for good money. She has a nice career going. Walk over and say hi? Too much trouble.
Vi zones out, loses track of her surroundings, and falls into a nap like Wick. A sense of action around her. An electric aura. Tingly, settling in, erotic. Whoah. Looking down Vi sees a tiny figure fact, creep from the leg of her jeans. A little woman? A little man is coming out of Wick’s cuff as well. Surely this is still the dream. Crazy.
Down on the beach, a cheezoid sci-fi movie monster wallows out of the waves. Huge, eyeless, transparent, slimy as snot, with stubby legs churning at the sand. Somehow female. She labors across the beach, slow but tireless. When she hits the bluff, she goes weightless and drifts up to land near them on the bluff. And becomes — a white car? A deluxe model car that Vi has admired in ads.
Vi snaps out of her trance. She and Wick are still on the bench. A man and woman have in fact parallel-parked a white Mercedes in the space ahead of Wick’s and Vi’s car. The couple sits there with their windows open, looking at their phones, ignoring the view. They’ve left their engine running. Boring, unnecessary noise. The exhaust smell is odd. A smoky scent like tobacco, country ham, and Chanel No 5.
Never mind the scent. Never mind the dream. Vi gets pissed off when people idle their cars. She elbows Wick. He snorts, snaps awake, and peers at the Mercedes — on high alert.
“Hear the engine?” says Vi. “Entitled pricks.” This is a phrase Wick and Vi use. You need it a lot in the Bay Area these days. EPs for short.
“I was talking to my seminar crowd just now,” Wick tells Vi. “The emes. They said it was time.”
“Tell the entitled pricks to turn off their engine,” says Vi, bearing down.
“That’s Qoph and Koral in there!” exclaims Wick. “And the car, yes, it’s Waama the sea pig!”
Vi is troubled by a memory of a big slimy thing crawling out of the ocean. Never mind. “I want that engine noise off,” she repeats, speaking slowly and clearly. Refusing to enter Wick’s mad world.
“I’m shy about talking to them,” says Wick.
“Shy?” cries Vi. “A brick shy of a full load! I’ll do it myself.”
Vi marches over to the Mercedes. The blonde woman passenger is turned slightly away from the window, looking down at her phone. The screen shows something like a super-intricate tribal tattoo.
The woman’s hair has a mussed bed-head look. Vi can see the curve of her cheek, but not the corner of her mouth, nor the tip of her nose. The woman must know Vi is here, but she shows zero sign of noticing her. Bitch.
Vi walks to the other side of the car and glares at the driver. His strong, tan arm rests on the frame of the open window. Naturally he wears a chunky, oversized gold watch.
“Hey!” says Vi, a little louder than polite. The driver turns toward her.
Instead of a face, he has a smooth, undulating patch of skin that follows the contours of his skull. As if his features have been sanded away — and he’s laminated a supple sheet of leather over the holes.
Vi hears a throaty giggle from the EP woman next to the guy. The woman has, Vi now realizes, a face like the man’s: a Zen garden of blank mounds and blind hollows, framed by her ratty blonde do.
Vi’s stomach turns; she tastes acid in her throat. The mannequin-like EPs have their heads cocked at snotty, confrontational angles. And now the mouthless man speaks. He’s humming from his throat, vibrating his skin.
“Take the pod, Vi.” His voice is a damp flutter. “In the back.”
With a machined thunk, the trunk of the idling white Mercedes pops open.
The EP woman is wordlessly throat singing. Her grainy croon rises and falls. The EP man yodels a warped, screwed recitative — too fast to understand.
“Wick!” calls Vi.
Finally in action, Wick is off the bench. He makes his way to the rear of the Mercedes and reaches into the trunk.
“Score!” he calls to Vi, holding up a leathery little ball. He makes his way back and gets into their car. “Let’s go.”
Vi throws herself into the driver’s seat, starts the engine, and begins to pull out. But, clumsy with panic, she presses the gas too hard, and she rear-ends the Mercedes. As if weightless, the vehicle skitters forward, hops the railing, and hangs in the air, thirty yards beyond the edge of the cliff. It’s not really a car. Deep down, Vi already knew that.
The Mercedes-thing grows transparent and takes on a different form. It’s the thing that crawled out of the waves. A large sea cucumber, like clear gelatin. It’s the thing that Wick saw in his dreams. A sea pig. The creature makes a sound like neon bacon in an X-ray pan. The faceless man and woman sit calmly inside her. The sea pig expands, and drifts into the sky, leaving a sense of — exhilaration. Like an ozone gasp of Alpine air.
“A taste of raw mindspace,” babbles Wick, who feels it too. “The primeval quintessence, unmodified. Foof!”
The tingly sensation fades, along with the image of the flying sea pig. Vi is alone with Wick in her cruddy car. Glancing along the bluffs, she notices that a woman has joined Soxx Whitsett by her easel. A third faceless double? Hell with that. It’s past time to go home.
Driving with care, Vi finds her way to Ocean Street — which injects them into Route 17, bound for their house in Los Perros.
“So what happened?” Vi asks Wick.
“It’s because I finally understood the math seminar,” says Wick, quietly exultant. “I found a cascade of homeomorphisms that maps those two emes from there to here. And the sea pig came by herself.”
“Give me an answer with no math.”
“It’s because Koral touched me in my dream. I had a mind flash. An orgasm. How about you, Vi? You had that kind of dream too, didn’t you? Stop lording it over me. Admit it.”
“I, uh, I don’t know. I smelled smoke and perfume. I might have seen Qoph and Koral, creeping out of our pants cuffs. And the giant sea pig that turned into the Mercedes. Did you notice her crawl-marks in the sand?”
Wick is steadily shifting the little ball from one hand to the other. “This is a capsule of smeel. The stuff you smelled. Once it gets out — ” His voice trails off.
“This is a horrible,” says Vi. “A nightmare.”
“A dream come true,” says Wick.
Despite his show of bravado, Wick is afraid. The ball of smeel has an adhesive quality against his palms. Like a barnacle wanting to settle onto a rock. Like a leech that’s ready to dig in.
And he isn’t fully clear what the smeel is supposed to do. Surely the emes and Waama the sea pig explained this at the seminar — but it’s hazy.
According to Wick’s papers, physical space has no preferred size scale. The subatomic level is no different than the inconceivably vast scales where our galaxy is like a particle. Everything is conscious, everything has a mind.
Nobody reads Wick’s papers. Such is the fate of genius. But somehow, via vibes or telepathy, Waama and the emes have sensed Wick’s dreams. And like a fool, he made a deal with them.
Wick feels an overwhelming need for a session of deep meditation — what Vi would call a nap. But he doesn’t dare annoy her more than he already has. Nor, as a matter of fact, does he want to take the risk that the leathery pod’s tissues might, say, grow all over the surface of his body and transform him into a paralyzed stash of living food. Fodder for Waama.
And so, during the half hour drive to Los Perros, Wick offers a stream of cheerful chatter about his theories of mental space. It doesn’t go over.
“Put that sick pod on the charcoal grill and torch it,” says Vi as they pull into their driveway.
“No!” cries Wick. “How can you say that?”
