“Jenkins! Jenkins! Jenkins! Get in here! Get here, now!” Startled, I get there. It would seem that Professor Wintom has either spotted another spider in the lab or has just made an incredible discovery.
“Jenkins. Come here come here! Look into the microscope! Look! Look!” I looked. What I saw both killed the old me and birthed the new me. This was the exact point in time where I had to believe in almost anything. If I didn’t, then I was playing the fool. Bigfoot? Why not? Chupacabra? Who is to say? Extraterrestrial beings? Probably. From that point on, I had to question my definition of the word, “real”.
“Jenkins….”, Wintom breathed in an almost reverent, hushed tone. “What are you seeing?”, Wintom asked in a way that may have suggested that he did not really want to hear the answer. Any answer. The problem was that I could not answer. I could not talk. I could barely breathe. I had to break away from the spell that my vision was presenting to me. As I looked up and saw Wintom’s undeniably psychotic expression, I felt a certain kinship with him for I realized that I, most likely, was wearing that same face. “Wintom”, I gasped, “Water….water”.
Andrea, Professor Wintom’s suspiciously attractive lab assistant, brought me a bottle of water and backed away as if I were some kind of viper. Or perhaps it was the microscope which filled her with a feeling of foreboding. It did not matter at the moment. I took a sip from the bottle. A little bit of the water went down the wrong pipe. I choked and coughed and sputtered. “What in God’s name is happening here?”, I thought. “I need see again.”, I nonsensically spluttered as I crouched over the microscope to take another look.
It was the same as what I saw the first time. Yep. There it was. I was seeing that with my own eyes.
People. Impossibly tiny people. It was undeniable. I watched in wonder. I ran the emotional gamut of first shock, then disbelief, fear, catatonia, amazement, wonder, and finally cold calculation as I stared at the things my eyes were seeing. What were the implications? How far down does this existence go? How far up, for that matter? Here I was, after all, looking onto the surface of a quark, one of the tiniest known particles in the entire universe…and yet there were living creatures (who, by the way, looked exactly like us) existing there! What if the planet Earth is but a quark in a much larger universe?
I slowly became aware of a sound. It sounded urgent. “What is that?”, I thought. After a few moments the sounds turned into words. Apparently, I had become so flabbergasted that I had forgotten what words were. It was Wintom, I finally realized. He was trying to communicate. He was asking me if he had lost his marbles. He said, “Jenkins, have I lost my marbles?” Automatically, without any thought whatsoever, as if in a dreamlike haze, I began to scan the floor for marbles.
Published on 1 Comment
As the professor and I were searching for our metaphorical marbles, Andrea was becoming more alarmed by the minute. Lab assistant, Andrea Ruchakowski, as I later found out, was no ordinary woman. She was…whatchacallit?…A Triple Threat. She was smart, beautiful, and a Russian spy. I’ve always known about the smart and beautiful, but I didn’t know about the Russian spy thing. Her mission: To keep an eye on Professor Wintom and report to her handlers any curious activity. This erratic behavior by the preeminent authority on microbiology was curious and getting curiouser.
Long ago, the KGB thought she would be the perfect secret agent to report on Wintom’s activities. Surely, he would not be able to resist her feminine wiles. He could. And he did. Because he’s gay. So, the beauty part goes down the drain.
How could the all-great, all-wise KGB not have known that the good professor could not be swayed by the female persuasion? Here’s the way it went down. You see, Wintom has a penchant for cross-dressing men. The KGB did not notice that they were not women. So, what should they have done?…lift up their skirts and take a peek? No. That would cause undue suspicion. So, as far as they were concerned, he liked women. The women were big and rather ugly, but they thought, who can account for taste?
Now that I think about it, the KGB should have, at least, paired him up with an ugly, husky, woman spy instead of Andrea, who practically oozes femininity. But, I digress.
Things looked grim, but all was not lost, though, for the Russians. Even if her physical beauty was useless in this situation, her beautiful brains won the day. Professor Wintom did not fall in love with her body, but her brains! Her beautiful brains! I imagine Wintom musing, “Man, I’d like to stroke her frontal lobes!”, or “Get a load of that neocortex! OmyGod!”. Wintom had a weakness for beautiful brains. Whether that brain was in man, woman, or anything in between, it did not matter. The gray matter did.
“Professor Wintom has been successfully compromised.”, thought Andrea, with a proud and satisfied smile, as she thoroughly assessed the situation.
After an indeterminate amount of time, it became apparent that I was not going to find any marbles, neither the professor’s nor mine. So, I had to ask, “Do you see little people on the surface of a quark, Professor Wintom?” “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”, he asked. I said tentatively, “I suppose so. Perhaps every once in a while?”
After that, we sat still and gazed at Andrea for a bit. I, at her body, and the good professor, at her brains.
Published on Leave a comment
Professor Wintom was often quite stoic. To see him in such a state of agitation was a little bit disconcerting, to say the least. I mean, this was THE GUY. The number one microbiologist, by far, in the world. Perhaps even the universe. If there are alien microbiologists out there somewhere, I still think Wintom would give them a run for their money. He was THE G.O.A.T.
To see him like this scared me, frankly. This was a man I looked up to. Somebody who was solid and capable. To see him fall from a great intellectual giant to a sniveling idiot was not an easy thing to stomach.
Wintom started to shake nervously. He whispered almost sadly, “What do we do, Jenkins?” I slapped him and said, “Get ahold of yourself, man!” After the briefest moment of panic, I said, “I’m sorry I slapped you, sir. But if you were in my shoes, you would have done the same.”
He nodded knowingly while he pulled his phone from his pocket. Then he said, “Thanks for the slap, Jenkins. It was just what I needed. Just what I needed.” With sudden vim, he then spoke these words into the phone, “Get me Dr. Garrett. This is Wintom.”
“Do you suspect CERN had something to do with this?”, I asked. He held up his finger to signal me to be quiet so that he could hear Dr. Garrett on the other side of the phone line.
As he turned away from me for greater concentration, I heard him say, “Yes. Dr. Garrett, how are you? This is Professor Wintom. Yes…yes…haha! I will do that. I will do that. Well, I was calling to ask if any of your guys down there has been doing any, umm… special experiments, lately? You know, with the whole particle- smashing- thing you do down there, and all. Uh huh…yes…well, what I’m asking is…have you guys, you know, accidently opened a portal to another universe? You don’t say? Um hum…well, all I know is we are seeing some weird stuff over here. What? Little people. Yes, little people! No, no, no. Not like your Uncle Ted. Smaller…much, much smaller. About a million times smaller than a grain of salt. No, sir, I have not touched the stuff since 2020! Alright. Yes. Okay. Thanks anyway. We will. Tell Abigail I said Hi. Yes…yes…bye-bye.”
As he pocketed his phone, he turned to me and said, “They have no record of any portal openings, lately.”
“Lately?” I asked with incredulity.
“What?”
“You said, ‘Lately’.
Professor Wintom then became very quiet. The implications hung thick in the air.
