Office hours. Professor Korogi peruses a well-worn diary written in Japanese. There’s a knock at the door. The professor closes the book, folds it into a square of silk and puts it in a desk drawer.
“Come in.”
Enter Shayne and Shawn.
Shayne: “Hey, Professor, you need any marking?”
Shawn: “We got a free class.”
“There’s a stack there on the table. But it’s a big job, four hours at least.”
Shayne: “We got two of us.”
They crowd into the corner.
Shawn: “Hey, nice jade paperweight.”
Korogi: “That’s not mine. Don’t drop it.”
Shayne: “Don’t worry. Jade is tough.”
Shawn holds it up to the light and inspects it closely. “Hey, this that jade you write about?”
Korogi: “No. It’s a replica.”
Shayne: “Oh yeah? How you so sure?”
Korogi: “The Spring Snow Jade has been missing for hundreds of years. What are the chances of it turning up in Sackville, New Brunswick?”
Shawn: “I dunno. I never took stats. Can we borrow it?”
“No. I have to return it to its owner.”
Shayne: “Yeah, all right. Hey, Professor, they ever catch that bandit who jump on your head?”
“No.”
Shawn: “Hey, why don’t you take a look out the window?”
Korogi looks out the window. The 108 members of the tai chi club are outside, arrayed like the terra cotta warriors of the First Emperor.
Shayne: “Your new bodyguard!”
Korogi: “Huh!”
Shawn: “Look! Dwayne is socializing!”
Shayne: “That guy’s in big trouble now!”
It’s true. While the other 107 members of the tai chi club move through their slow-motion dance, Dwayne is yakking with Agnes. Korogi watches as Shayne and Shawn dash out the door two storeys below and tear through the ranks in his direction. Dwayne sees them and jackrabbits, and the three disappear around the corner of the art gallery. Korogi reflects on the idiocy of young men, then watches with interest as Agnes harangues the 107, expressing her disapproval of tai chi with a hand on a hip and a strenuously wagging finger.
Korogi: “Hm. Future premier there.”
The woman with the white streak in her hair screams the kind of scream that puts white streaks in people’s hair. Two zootsuited zombies lay hold of her and put her into metal restraints. Raymond Massey looms into the shot, gives her a long stare, then says, “Now we can resume the experiment.”
“Watson! What are the readings?”
The assistant chief engineer snaps his video cell phone shut and consults the voltometers.
“Readings are nominal!”
The chief engineer stands in the center of the room in white labcoat, elbow-length black rubber gloves and goggles. Electricity crackles and arcs around the enormous Tesla coil.
“Throw the first switch!”
Watson takes the switch in both hands and throws it into the upright position. Across the instrument board the needles swing to the right.
Chief engineer: “Throw the second switch!”
Watson seizes the second switch, heaves, and throws it upright. Sparks shower down. The chief engineer stands with hair erect and his hands clawed as if to grapple the very elements. He looks at the watch strapped to his glove.
“Midnight! Throw the third switch!!”
Watson: “Surely not the third switch!!”
“Throw it!!”
Watson drives the third switch into the upright position. A false dawn radiates from the shortwave station, causing passing truckdrivers to flip down sun visors and adjust their highbeams. In the centre of the marsh a blazing white trunk of electricity rears upward and waves restless branches among the clouds above the station.
Chief engineer: “It lives!! It lives!!!”
Lights go out over three counties. At the midnight show the film falters and goes dark.
Audience: “Aaaaw!”
Then it starts back up again.
Audience: “Yaaay!”
The speaker in the shortwave control room, as well as in every clock radio, stereo, intercom and toaster in Sackville, Amherst and Port Elgin, says:
This is the Polynesian service of Radio Canada International.
On the Chinese table in the corner of Professor Korogi’s darkened office the Irish Spring Jade jolts awake and intones, “Evident truths overlie hidden errors; evident errors overlie hidden truths.”
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[The next installment will post next Tuesday, then it's back to Mondays.]
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