Standard Of Living
1987
Murray Hathaway was a florist. He kept a respectable little shop on 21st Street, just a couple of doors down from the McDonald's. He always managed to be at least a dollar cheaper for a dozen roses than most of his competitors; it helped that his father had managed to pay off the shop before he died and Murray inherited it. At 52, Murray considered himself a sort of ineligible bachelor; his father had always called him a "late bloomer" and chuckled to himself while Murray grimaced. Murray had been interested in girls for about 40 years at this point, but hadn't had the nerve to ask one out until he was 41, when he asked Mrs. Martha Spritely, a widow of about his age, to dinner. She died the next day of food poisoning, and that just about summed it up for Murray's sex life.
So Murray poured his energy into other projects - he'd been an assistant at the city floral show for the last five years, and when the Parks Commission had bid for a contractor to seed new flowers throughout the parks, Murray had come this close to winning the bid. You see, Murray was interested in a lot more than floral arrangements - though he had an excellent contract with Finnister Family Funeral Services a few blocks away (run by Ed "Better Dead Than Red" Finnister, who made sure that all the corpses were blue blooded Americans), Murray was really a botanist. In his spare time, he'd managed to develop several new strains of parsley, which had the added effect that aside from being ugly when used as a garnish on a dinner plate, they were totally inedible. He'd wondered for a long time if it was a sprig of Hathaway Parsley Number 23 that had killed poor Mrs. Spritely.
He still worked his botanical magic in the small laboratory he'd made for himself in his family's house when he was a child. At age 8, he'd created such bizarre vegetable Frankensteins as a head lettuce sewn on top of a carrot which had several radishes grafted to the sides of its root. Murray's childish mind had hoped to get a complete salad out of one plant. Three weeks later he found a better use for his decaying experiment, when he deposited its unrecognizable corpse in the kitchen bread box for his mother to find (God rest her soul, Mrs. Hathaway had died in 1968 in a freak accident when a cantaloupe truck backed up over her car - the truck only squashed the hood of the car, but Mrs. Hathaway drove a convertible and was crushed beyond recognition by the avalanche of cantaloupes from the back of the truck - it took two days to recover her body).
His latest experiments with plants (more properly with fungi rather than vegetables) were in the house's big dark basement. Murray had been experimenting with various kinds of mushrooms and toadstools, using his Time-Life "The Wonderful World of Fungi" book to avoid the poisonous kinds. He'd been down to Chinatown to shiitake mushrooms (which Murray couldn't bring himself to talk about in polite company), and he'd found a variety of interesting specimens up in the forest in the hills just outside of town. Playing with mushrooms reminded Murray of his fourteen days as a hippie back in the sixties. Those were wild times, he'd think to himself as he poured pig dung on
his basement floor.
One evening Murray was sitting down to watch the evening news after dinner. The news was on at 6:30PM, and he always promptly closed up his shop at 5:30. The shop was part of his house; the bedrooms and dining room and kitchen were above the shop - they had once been behind it, but Murray had expanded the refrigeration space into the living room. He sometimes thought about the time there'd been quite a fuss when there was a rush at Finnister's and he had let the mortician store several dead people with the flowers and a customer had stumbled upon a blue naked man covered with daisies. Finding a corpse hadn't disturbed her nearly as much as a certain tattoo mentioning Edgar Sinclair on the man's chest, and his pierced nipples. Murray said "to each his own" and had a policy of not carefully inspecting overflow corpses that Ed Finnister stored in the former living-room. Murray had been surprised when, after all the threats the upset woman had made, she settled for his offer of a lifetime supply of Hathaway Parsley Number 23. The last he'd heard, she was on trial for murdering her husband. She'd never called for any more Parsley after the first batch, even though he'd made sure she had his phone number.
Every morning, before opening the shop and arranging the flowers, Murray would prepare his dinner and leave it in the refrigerator so that he could pop it into the oven promptly at 5:35, after he'd locked up the downstairs and sent his assistant, Lester, home. Lester had once gotten in trouble with the police for molesting an oak tree in the park, whatever that meant, but Murray had never had any problems with him. He seemed to have a passion for plants.
Unless dinner was something that took an unusually long time to cook, Murray usually had his meal heated up, eaten, and the dishes in the dishwasher in time for the news. This evening he finished with five minutes to spare before the day's latest atrocities played by him on the telly.
About a minute into the report on the latest White House scandal, the phone rang, and Murray tried to turn down the TV volume with the remote control, but it was jammed and he had to get up and adjust the buttons before he could answer the phone. "Coming, coming" he muttered, forgetting that the person on the other end couldn't hear him till he picked up the handset. "Hello?"
Well. It was the woman who'd found the Finnister's body in the back room. Apparently Wendy (for her name, he remembered now, was Wendy Sinclair) was in jail now, and working on the cooking staff, and she wanted more Parsley. He asked her how much, and there was a pause while she thought and asked back "How many people do you think this prison holds?". Murray had seen a report on overcrowded prisons a couple of nights before, so he replied quickly, "About six hundred", quite pleased with himself that he could provide such unusual information. The woman then replied that she would like about one thousand two hundred sprigs of Hathaway Parsley Number 23. Murray told her that since she hadn't been back for more since he first gave her some, three years ago, he figured it was a reasonable request, but it would take a few weeks. She said that was fine, thanked him and hung up.
As Murray was putting down the phone, his dog, Rancid, ambled into the room. Murray didn't like to think about the events leading up to the poor pooch getting that name. The dog sat down beside Murray's chair.
"How was your day today?" it asked (Rancid had been turned from a he to an it about three days after the unfortunate events leading up to his naming).
Murray replied, "Pretty good. We sold a lot of roses. Mrs. Atwilder ordered a big flower setting for a party next week. The Mayor is putting up a monument to himself and I got the paperwork to bid on the contract." He frowned and looked at the dog. "A pigeon doo-dooed on me at lunch. I was sitting in the park, over by where Wurdenmeier did the flowers, and a pigeon flew up to me. I had to put on a fresh shirt before I went back to the store. Lester kept laughing at me all afternoon."
"You never ask me how my day was," Rancid sulked.
"Why should I? You're a dog. I imagine you spent your day doing all sorts of doggie things, didn't you? Besides, if I asked you, you couldn't answer. 'How was your day?' 'Woof. Woof woof.' Great conversationalist that you are."
"You don't really care about me, Murray. You've never brought me roses," the dog sobbed. "You take me for granted."
There were times, Murray considered, when living with a dog made him glad he'd never married. He turned back to the TV and thought to himself: "That's odd. Rancid's never talked to me before."
***
When it happened, it was rather sudden. One moment Murray had been sitting in front of the TV having a conversation with his dog, Rancid, who was taking an unusually active part in the conversation. The next moment, Murray realized that something was wrong - he was seeing his living room in the TV picture and the TV picture everywhere else. That was when he fainted. At least, he thought he fainted.
When he woke up - when he opened his eyes again, anyway, he was laying on a bed of cushions in a large room. A very large room. Propped up on an elbow, Murray couldn't see the walls of the room. The walls were light blue, almost like sky blue, but there weren't any walls. There was just this blue, and the bed, and him, and nothing else. Actually, Murray decided, it was more like a powder blue chrysanthemum.
He decided to lie back down and close his eyes.
"Don't just lie back down and close your eyes, Murray", a voice boomed out.
In a flash, he was sitting upright with his eyes wide open.
"What?"
"I said: 'Don't just lie back down and close your eyes, Murray', in a booming voice, much like the one I'm speaking in right now."
"Oh." and then "Uh...uh oh. Am I dead or something?"
"You're 'or something', Murray. Very 'or something'. I'd think that as your world's Inhabitant With The Most Expanded Consciousness you'd be more used to this sort of thing."
"Most Expanded What? What is this, The Wizard of Oz?" The Wizard of Oz had been Murray's favorite film for years, but he'd never seen it all the way through. Every time he saw it, some disaster struck - a fire, a flood, a hurricane, the Vietnam War - it got to the point where Murray didn't dare watch the movie.
"You've got the highest level, most open consciousness of anyone on your world, Murray. Surely you've noticed by now. We almost passed you over - there was a rather interesting Irish chap, caused quite a bit of a stir on your world about 20 years ago, we almost took him. He was very big on chemical assist. Very big. Spread the word to lots of your people. But then we noticed you...you stood out like a nova in a popcorn maker, if I may mix metaphors. You must have had a rather good chemical assist, Murray. Better be careful - that kind of thing can get a man in trouble on your world. Not that it will matter, soon."
Chemical assist? Expanded consciousness? Murray suddenly wondered about the mushrooms he'd put in his dinner salad - but they'd been fresh from his basement experiments.
"You brought me here? Why?"
"Why to see the Council, of course. Do hurry up, Murray. They're waiting. Just go straight ahead a ways, and turn the corner."
Murray walked straight ahead a ways, but failed to see any corners. He turned around looking and saw a group of old men sitting around a white arc of a table. When he gasped and took two steps backward they weren't there anymore. It was probably the steps and not the gasp which did it, he decided triumphantly.
Something pushed him back to where he was, and although he dug in his heels, it managed to get him to the center of the arc.
"Murray Hathaway, welcome to the Multiuniversal Standards Organization!" the voice boomed out. Murray saw one of the old geezers moving his lips in sync with the voice, although it seemed to be coming from all around, not from the old man.
"Is that you?" he asked the old man.
"What? Is what me?" the old man asked back, in a quavering old man voice. He had a nervous tic and the left side of his face kept twitching.
"The voice. That voice that keeps coming out of thin air. Is that you?"
"Why no, it's not me", the old man said, "but it is one of my voices. Rather good for theatrical effects, anyway. I am Umptious Willoughby the Ninth, but you may simply call me Umptious Willoughby."
"Why thank you, please call me Murray." The old men nodded in approval and each one stood and pronounced his name in turn.
Murray stood staring wide-eyed at them, wishing he had something to sit on and realizing he didn't even know where the floor was, and wondering why he was there.
"I imagine you're wondering why you're here," Umptious Willoughby said. This voice sounded quite ancient and sometimes stuttered slightly, or broke.
After waiting for the old man to continue, Murray decided to take the bait. "Why yes...I am. If I may be so forward," he paused, "do you suppose you could tell me?"
The old man leaned forward conspiratorially and started talking to Murray as if he were confiding in him.
"Frankly, Murray, we've got a great problem on our hands. It's your Universe. We've decided we have to recall it." He turned up the palms of his hands in a gesture of defeat. "You're here because some of the council members felt that the intelligent races of your Universe should be brought in on this, since it affects them so greatly. It's a bloody pain, if you ask me.
"You see, there's a fundamental defect in your Universe. We didn't realize it until recently, and we started at work to correct it. But it's a design flaw, and a major one, so we're just going to have to start over from scratch."
"Defect? What?" sputtered Murray.
"Ah, a curious one, aren't you? Well, it won't hurt to tell you. Won't hurt to tell you anything you want, after all.
"Here's what's up: it's well known that any system sufficiently complex to be interesting has to be either incomplete or inconsistent. That's part of what makes it interesting. Well, in the case of your Universe, it's neither, and it's not bloody interesting, either. You see, one of the designers messed up, and I tell you, Murray, it's caused us no end of grief. There's a mathematical statement that most races in your Universe have considered at one time or another. You'd recognize it, if you knew algebra, anyway, as x^n + y^n = z^n, for which there are no integer solutions x, y, z, and n, where x, y and z are positive and n is greater than 2. Well. There you have it. Your Universe was supposed to be incomplete - it was supposed to not be possible to prove this statement true or false. And yet a fourteen cycle old ten-tentacled inhabitant of a purple planet orbiting a blue star (quite a gloomy color scheme, don't you agree?) about twelve thousand light cycles from your planet has proven it true. And - "
But Murray interrupted. "I do! I know it! I do know it. It's Fermat's Last Theorem. I saw it on the news a few nights ago, there was a young man from MIT who'd proven it. They made him a professor. Lot of fuss made over it."
The council collectively groaned. "Not another one! More and more races have been doing it. There. You see our fix, Murray, don't you? We have to repair this, but the problem is a very fundamental flaw in the structure of your Universe. So we can go fix it, but then..." Umptious Willoughby's voice trailed off.
"But then what?" Murray asked.
"But then, it will change your Universe from a physical one to an energy one. All the life forms will be bodiless energy beings. I'm afraid it's quite inconsistent with the requirements of its current inhabitants. So...there. Poof. That's why you're here."
Murray had scrunched up his eyes and was thinking hard. "Umptious Willoughby..." and the old man stared at him. "I'm not much good at math, I have to hire an accountant to do my books - one year I caught the accountant taking money from my safe, so I bashed him over the head with a flower pot and fired him, but..." Umptious Willoughby had a pained look on his face. "But one way to prove a mathematical statement is false is to come up with an example of numbers which it fails for, right?"
"Right."
"Well, if you can't prove something's false, then that means you can't come up with a set of numbers that it fails for, right?"
"Riiight..."
"But that means it's true!" Murray smiled.
The old man's scowl could have deforested the great rainforests of South America, had certain fast food chains not already done so. The Times had an article on that last week that Murray had quite enjoyed. Willoughby boomed out, "The Council will go into recess and resume announcing its final decision to the intelligent inhabitants of this perverse Universe."
***
"Where'd everyone go?" Murray asked out loud after the Council and its table disappeared.
"Lunch break," explained Umptious Willoughby, standing behind him.
"How about the other intelligent beings? I haven't seen any of them at all."
"We're interviewing them all at the same time but in different dimensions, so that they're not interacting at all with one another. All with the exception of the first race that proved the statement. Them..." he paused for dramatic effect, "We turned them into puddles of slime, made their blue sun go nova, and dropped the resulting flash-fried solar system into a black hole." The old man grinned, and his left cheek twitched as he rubbed his hands together happily. At least he wasn't drooling, Murray thought. There was old Mr. Ashford who used to come into the store and drool on the tulips. One day Murray had tried to sell some drooled-on tulips to Mrs. Ranyard, who was 92 at the time. She dropped dead of a heart attack a moment after she touched the slime-soaked tulips. At least Ed Finnister handled the funeral. Murray had made sure there weren't any tulips in the flower arrangements.
Murray turned and looked the old man square in the eye. "Are you God?" he asked. He'd been a so-so Christian and was wondering if he should brush up on it now.
"Well, that's a tough question. First thing is, what do you mean 'you', white man?" he smiled. "That's a joke, son. Laugh.
"It's not so much a joke, really, though. Thing is, is 'you' plural or singular. Do you mean me, or mean and them, or us? You English-speaking humans are one of the few species I can think of that have a language which doesn't distinguish between the second person singular and plural. Half the time I think you're brain-damaged and the other half the time I think you could be on to something. It's probably a little of each.
"Altogether, the Council is what you'd call 'God', yes. Individually we are, too. I don't know...sometime in the distant past, Murray, I think we may have been one being. One mind. But that mind splintered with time. Became old, became schizophrenic. Too many diverging viewpoints.
"Then again, we may have always been separate. We just can't remember anymore. We're God, Murray, but we never asked to be worshipped. We're God because we made the Universe. Lots of them, actually. Looks like we'll be unmaking one, pretty soon, too. You'll hear all about that in a little while, when the Council gets back together.
"I'll tell you, Murray, this has been one heck of a pain to deal with. It's pretty tough getting the Council to agree on anything, these days. Everyone has his own interests, and everyone seems to be looking out to make sure that no one gets what they want, and no one gets ahead of anyone else. When we come up with a set of standards for a new universe, why usually a good set of technical proposals gets laid out, and then they just get changed in stupid little ways so they're not anything like what anyone's prepared to do. That's what happened to yours. In fact, the original version would've worked fine. And if they'd just bothered to test some of the design they made they would've caught the problem. But most of those on the council just sit and think - wouldn't want to dirty their hands with actual creation, you know. So we can't change your Universe back to the original design; we've got to go for the big switch. That's about all they could agree on. That way no one has a head start."
There was a chiming sound.
"That will be the Council. Come along."
***
Umptious Willoughby was back in the middle of the table's arc, surrounded by Council members, and Murray was standing in the middle again.
"So the deal is, Murray, we hate to waste a good species. We're willing to create a small self-contained universe, out of the way, for any species that can meet the requirements we set, and then forget about them and get on with things in your Universe. It ain't much but it's better than nothing."
"Don't I even get a vote?" Murray asked, "I thought that because the intelligent races were summoned, we got a vote."
"And indeed you do. One vote. Split between all the races. We tallied it in, and it didn't help much at all."
"So what is it that I have to do?" he asked.
"Simple. Get everyone in your race who wants to be in the private Universe together, and we'll see this and take them. There's no lower limit, but I'm sure there will be many people. But they have to be directing their thoughts to us about this or we won't notice them. We're very busy, you know."
Well, maybe if he promised them free roses, but Murray didn't think it was too likely he could get lots of people. He hoped he could leave old Mr. Ashford and his projectile drooling habit behind. Then he thought about the mushrooms...if he could open everyone's mind with those mushrooms...well, he'd have to start getting them out to the world when he returned.
"And how much time do I have?" he asked.
"Well," Umptious Willoughby screwed up his face in thought. "It'll take us up to, say, five million years to get the draft multiuniversal standard documents written and approved, then that will have to go up for review to become a final multiuniversal standard, and then there'll be a couple of million years worth of gratuitous changes," the old man shot a glance at the rest of the council, "so, let's say - thirty million years till we get the final spec done for your private universe, and for the revisions for your old one."
Murray exhaled sharply and relaxed. "Well why didn't you say so in the first place!"
"Don't get your hopes up, son," the old man said. "Time is different here, and for us, than it is for you. You have about one week."
Murray was about to protest, but the old man raised his hand, and Murray was gone.
After Murray disappeared back to his own world, Umptious Willoughby suddenly wondered if he shouldn't have thought to warn Murray Hathaway that, in order to appease the faction of the council that didn't want Murray's Universe's intelligent races consulted, each race member would barely remember anything to do with its meeting the council. Oh well...too late now.
***
Murray flopped around in his armchair and then woke up with a start. The room seemed unfamiliar, and then he realized he'd dozed and night had fallen. Rancid was laying next the chair; Murray straightened himself out and petted the dog on the head. Rancid whimpered happily in response.
The clock said it was almost 9PM. Murray turned on the light, closed the shades and looked at the TV schedule. Funny, he felt like there was something he was supposed to do, but he couldn't figure out what. A dream. He thought that if he concentrated on it, he might remember. Then the phone rang. It was Ed Finnister. There'd been a run on the funeral home, and could he please borrow the freezer again? Of course he could, Murray told him.
Hmmm...there was an ad that said The Wizard of Oz was on next week. Maybe then he'd finally get to see it all the way through.
copyright 1987 by John Romkey
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Last modified: Thu Oct 19 12:02:37 EDT 2006
