Skippy Dies: A Novel

Skippy and the telescope have become almost inseparable. Mornings, lunchtimes, at the end of every schoolday he dashes upstairs and attaches himself to the eyepiece, and for the hours that follow he will either be euphorically happy or speechless with despair, depending on whether or not he has caught a glimpse of Frisbee Girl. In less than a week, Ruprecht has seen him transformed from his usual amiable Ruprecht-helping self to a mooneyed somnambulant who doesn’t want to do anything except look out the window and ask over and over whether Ruprecht, or whoever else happens to be in the room, thinks this girl, whom he has never spoken to, will be at the Hop or not.

Ruprecht might have found all this quite annoying, but by a strange coincidence, he too has a new fascination. For the last five nights, he has been pulled deeper and deeper into its mysterious involutions; the more he investigates it, the more shadowy it becomes, and the more shadowy, the deeper it draws him in.

‘They call it M-theory.’ Monday evening: outside, a damasked sunset is crashing tremulously through a pale blue sky, gilding church steeples and phone masts, the tiled roofs of houses and the scaffolding of new apartments.

‘What does the M stand for, Ruprecht?’

‘No one knows.’

‘No one knows?’

‘The theory’s so complicated that they’re only beginning to understand it. So no one can agree what the M is for.’ This, for Ruprecht, is one of its chief attractions. Who could resist a theory so obscure they don’t even understand the name of it? ‘Some people say it’s for Multiverse. Others say it’s for Magic. Matrix. Mystery. Mother.’

‘Wow,’ Victor Hero says huskily.

‘It’s all at a very early stage, obviously,’ Ruprecht says, ‘but what they think is that everything is made up of membranes. There are different kinds of membrane. Some are tiny particles. Others are huge universes. All of them floating around in eleven dimensions.’

‘Eleven?’ Geoff says.

‘That’s right,’ says Ruprecht. Geoff does some counting on his fingers and looks confused.

‘I know what you’re thinking. Where are these seven extra dimensions? Good question. The answer is, all around us. You see –’ Ruprecht takes off his glasses, getting into his stride now ‘– cosmologists believe that in our universe’s original state, at the moment of creation, it existed as one pure, symmetrical, ten-dimensional structure. All stuff, all forces, were united as one into this structure. However, with the Big Bang, this “higher” universe, as we might call it, broke down. “Our” universe, that is, the dimensions we can see, expanded into spacetime. The higher dimensions, meanwhile, curled up to become very, very tiny. But although we can’t see them, they’re still here. In fact, the extra dimensions exist at every single point in space.’

Head-scratching from Geoff and Victor.

‘It’s a tricky idea to grasp,’ Ruprecht says. ‘By way of illustration, try thinking of a very narrow cylinder.’

‘A hair,’ Victor says.

‘Mario’s dick,’ Dennis says, from Ruprecht’s bed.

‘Hey!’ Mario exclaims.

‘Okay –’ Ruprecht determined not to be steered off-course ‘– to us, the very narrow cylinder of Mario’s dick looks like a line, that is to say it looks one-dimensional. But to a very small creature, say an ant, that’s walking along Mario’s dick, he’ll realize that as well as going lengthways he can go in a circular direction too. Even though we might not be able to perceive it, that very small ant is aware that Mario’s dick has two dimensions, i.e. girth as well as length.’

‘You’re damn right it has girth!’ Mario shouts. ‘I don’t need an ant to tell me it has girth!’

‘According to string theory, which Professor Tamashi and other scientists have been using to try to solve the Big Bang, in addition to the four dimensions of spacetime we know, there are six of these very small, curled-up dimensions, making ten all told. And the strings, which are little strands of energy, wiggle around vibrating in these ten dimensions.’

‘Like Dennis’s mother,’ Mario, seeking vengeance for the ant slur, interjects, ‘wiggling around vibrating with her vibrator, because she is a famous slut, and also, she has ten dimensions because she is a fat bitch.’

‘That about sums her up,’ Dennis says coolly; gah, Mario’s forgotten that Dennis hates his stepmother and so is immune to insults on that front –

‘Wait, what are these strings again?’ Geoff asks.

Ruprecht’s eyebrow beginning to twitch just a little – ‘Well, if you remember, I told you about it two minutes ago.’

‘Oh, right, they’re little bits of energy that everything’s made out of?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘But, uh, Ruprecht, things aren’t made out of strings, they’re made out of atoms. We did that in science class.’

‘Yes, but what are atoms made out of?’

‘How should I know what they’re made out of?’

‘Well, I’m telling you, they’re made out of these little strings.’

‘But didn’t you say the strings were in another dimension?’

‘Yeah, Ruprecht, how can they be here if they’re actually in another dimension?’

Ruprecht coughs loudly. ‘They exist in ten dimensions. Because ten is the number required mathematically for the theory to make sense. They vibrate at different frequencies, and according to the frequency they vibrate at, you get different kinds of particle. The same way that if you pluck a violin string you can get different notes, C, D, E –’

‘F,’ contributes Geoff.

‘F, yes –’

‘G –’

‘Similarly, a string vibrating at one frequency will give you a quark, say, and a string vibrating at another frequency will give you a photon. That’s a particle of light. Nature is made of all the musical notes that are played on this superstring, so the universe is like a kind of a symphony.’

‘Wow…’ Geoff looks in wonderment at his own arm, as if half-expecting it, now its cover’s blown, to start chiming and tootling.

‘But didn’t you say there were eleven dimensions?’ Victor Hero remembers.

‘That’s right. The major stumbling block of string theory was the Big Bang. Like all the other theories before it, string theory broke down when it came to the first moments of the universe. What use is a new theory if it can’t solve the old problems?’

Geoff and Victor agree, not much use.

‘When they added the eleventh dimension, though, everything changed. The theory didn’t break down any more. But instead of just giving an account of our universe, scientists found themselves looking at a model of a whole sea of universes.’

‘Holy smoke,’ Geoff says.

‘I wish I was in the eleventh dimension,’ Dennis comments dolefully. ‘With some porn.’

‘Describe her to me again?’ Skippy, meanwhile, is at the telescope with Titch Fitzpatrick. As Ruprecht makes his exposition, Skippy reels off the vast treasure of detail he has garnered from his few brief sightings of Frisbee Girl. Detaching himself from the eyepiece, Titch looks off to the left, one finger on his jaw, frowning and nodding. ‘Hmm…’

When it comes to the ladies, Titch is the undisputed expert. He has got off with more or less every girl worth getting off with in the Seabrook area, his strike rate dwarfing even that of sporting stars like Calvin Fleet and Beauregard ‘The Panzer’ Fanning; it is widely held that at the end of last summer, at a party in Adam O’Brien’s house, he had full actual sex with KellyAnn Doheny, a second-year from St Brigid’s. Non-teenagers might find his appeal difficult to understand, as he isn’t especially handsome, or big, or even funny; his features are striking only in their regularity, the overall effect being one of solidity, steadiness, the quiet self-assurance one might associate with, for instance, a long-established and successful bank. But that, in fact, is the whole point. One look at Titch, in his regulation Dubarrys, Ireland jersey and freshly topped-up salon tan, and you can see his whole future stretched out before him: you can tell that he will, when he leaves this place, go on to get a good job (banking/ insurance/consultancy), marry a nice girl (probably from the Dublin 18 area), settle down in a decent neighbourhood (see above) and about fifteen years from now produce a Titch Version 2.0 who will think his old man is a bit of a knob sometimes but basically all right. The danger of him ever drastically changing – like some day joining a cult, or having a nervous breakdown, or developing out of nowhere a sudden burning need to express himself and taking up some ruinously expensive and embarrassing-to-all-that-know-him discipline, like modern dance, or interpreting the songs of Joni Mitchell in a voice that, after all these years, is revealed to be disquietingly feminine – is negligible. Titch, in short, is so remarkably unremarkable that he has become a kind of embodiment of his socioeconomic class; a friendship/sexual liaison with Titch has therefore come to be seen as a kind of self-endorsement, a badge of Normality, which at this point in life is a highly prized commodity.

‘All right so,’ he says as Skippy finally, breathlessly, wraps up his paean. ‘Black hair, medium height, wide mouth, pale. That could be a few different people – Yolanda Pringle, maybe, or Mirabelle Zaoum. What’re her kegs like?’

‘Her kegs?’

‘Medium small,’ Dennis says from the bed.

‘I would say about a 30B,’ Mario estimates.

‘Um,’ Skippy says.

‘What she does have is an ass,’ Dennis says.

‘Yes, this is one smoking hot ass,’ Mario says. ‘It is the kind of ass a man will not forget in a hurry.’

‘Hmm,’ Titch muses, and then, relinquishing the telescope, ‘well, I’ll have a think about it. But it doesn’t look like she’s going to show today.’

‘No,’ Skippy says mournfully.

‘Don’t worry about it, T-man,’ Dennis chips in cheerfully from the bed. ‘This girl’s about a trillion miles out of Skippy’s league anyway.’

Titch receives this expressionlessly, then turns back to Skippy. ‘Give me a call next time you see her,’ he says, and wanders out of the room without goodbye, like he’s exiting a lift full of strangers in a department store.

‘The eleventh dimension is infinitely long, but only a very small distance across,’ Ruprecht is telling Geoff and Victor, ‘maybe no more than a trillionth of a millimetre. That means it exists only a trillionth of a millimetre from every point in our three-dimensional world. It’s closer to your body than your own clothes. And on the other side of it – who knows? There could be another universe just one millimetre away, only we can’t see it because it’s in another dimension. There could be an infinite number of them, floating all around us.’ His voice lofts rapturously. ‘Imagine it! An infinite number of universes, whose qualities we can’t even begin to guess at! With totally different laws of physics! Shaped like cylinders or prisms or doughnuts!’

‘Doughnuts?’ The word lights a synapse in Geoff’s brain, which for the last few minutes has been playing a counting game with the clouds ambling by outside.

‘Why not? Or, or shapes that are entirely new –’

‘Or banana-shaped,’ Geoff, who has realized he is feeling a little peckish, suggests.

‘Or shaped like the Formula One track at Silverstone?’ Victor adds.

‘Maybe,’ Ruprecht says. ‘Maybe.’

‘Could there be,’ it suddenly strikes Geoff, ‘a universe that’s full of beer?’

‘Theoretically, I suppose, yes.’

‘And how would you get,’ Geoff says slowly, ‘from this universe, into the one that’s full of beer?’

‘That’s one of the things we’re hoping to find out,’ Ruprecht informs him grandly. ‘Professor Tamashi’s holding an online roundtable on Friday night to discuss that very issue, among others.’

‘Hmm. Uh, Ruprecht, Friday night is the Hop?’

‘The Hop?’ Ruprecht repeats vaguely. ‘Oh yes, that’s right, so it is.’

‘In that case, I have a feeling this online round-table will have to go ahead without Mario,’ Mario says from the bed. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I am planning to score a lot of bitches at this Hop. Probably I will start with one really hot girl, straight sex, no frills. Then I will have a sixty-nine. Then it will be time for a threesome.’

‘Mario –’ Dennis sits up ‘– what makes you think any girl is going to go anywhere near you? Let alone like fifteen different girls.’

Mario hesitates, then says conspiratorially, ‘I have a secret weapon.’

‘You do?’

‘You bet, mister.’ He flips open his wallet. ‘Read it and weep, boys. It is my lucky condom, which never fails.’

A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, ‘Uh, Mario, in what way exactly is there anything lucky about that condom?’

‘Never fails,’ Mario repeats, a little defensively.

‘But –’ Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed ‘– I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn’t you have used it by now?’

‘How long have you had it in there, Mario?’ Geoff says.

‘Three years,’ Mario says.

‘Three years?’

‘Without using it?’

‘Doesn’t that sound more like an unlucky condom?’

Mario looks troubled as his unshakeable faith in the luckiness of the lucky condom begins to show cracks.

‘It was definitely pretty unlucky for the condom, to wind up in your wallet!’

‘Yeah, Mario, your wallet is like the Alcatraz of condoms.’

‘It’s like the condom Bermuda Triangle!’

‘Condoms tell each other stories about your wallet, “Oh, he disappeared into Mario Bianchi’s wallet, and he was never seen again.” ’

‘Yeah, I bet right this very second your lucky condom is in there whistling the theme from The Great Escape and digging a tunnel out of your wallet with a plastic coffee stirrer –’

‘What do you know about it?’ Mario rounds on them. ‘Eh, you silly nerds, all you know about is this foolish business of the theory of many dimensions. Well, I tell you about something that is happening in this dimension, and that is this Friday I will be boning countless ladies. And that, which I call Mario-theory, is something that you can see with your own eyes, and not just some equations that only gays can understand! So don’t come crawling to me looking for one of my many bitches in the sex orgy I am having, after you have struck out with every girl at the Hop!’