Inside Outside

by Michaela Roessner

I'd arrived home from work on Friday to find a summons from Morgan on my answering machine, announcing a meeting of The Worshipful Order at his house on Sunday. Don't get me wrong—I enjoy our get-togethers, but lately Morgan had been putting too much pressure on the rest of us.

No one would deny that he's the Alpha of Alphas of our little group—me and the rest of the guys almost ungrudgingly admit to our status as Beta males. And no one would deny that of all our varied interests, his—miniature golf—is the preemptive obsession, the one drawing the rest of us into its orbit. It's Morgan's interests that tap into our talents, get us to put our collective shoulder to the wheel.

Even the name of our group, "The Worshipful Order of Serendipitous Pursuits, Executed with Fiendish Ingenuity," came from Morgan, deriving from the history of the very first miniature golf course, circa 1916, when one James Barber hired one Edward H. Wiswell to design his course: Wiswell, a man described as "an amateur architect of fiendish ingenuity." Delete the word "architect," and the phrase could equally apply to Morgan.

Morgan's deepest desire is to quit his oppressive-though-well–salaried career as a structural engineer at a Mountain View–based corporation and instead become a full-time freelance miniature golf course designer. No idle boast, no armchair-traveler wishfulness this. Morgan pursues this goal with breathtaking singlemindedness. Online and print news clipping services deliver a slender but steady stream of announcements on proposed theme parks, amusement parks, family entertainment centers, world fairs, national fairs, and state fairs. Morgan submits theme-appropriate miniature golf course ideas to all of them.

This has resulted in some success. Morgan designed a Tiger Balm Gardens Golf Course for a wealthy homesick Chinese businessman. It proved something of a challenge, since it occupies several stories of a narrow office building in San Francisco's Chinatown. By all accounts it's a huge success.

After that came the commission from the Mexican government to commemorate Mexico's claim to fame for the world's first commercial miniature golf course—Briton Thomas McCulloch Fairburn's 1922 putt-putt course on his cotton plantation near Tlahualilo. Morgan embellished this memorial course with a pastiche of Scottish and Olmec-cum-Aztec-cum-Siqueiros-cum-Rivera-cum-Kahlo themes. I should know, because I drew the initial sketches, as I usually do for Morgan's projects, since I'm the graphic artist of the group. Just as Sydney, our physicist, double-checks the basic physics of the layout, and Chris, the landscape designer, mocks-up the landscaping.

Morgan envisions a day when he'll be able to design and build his very own full-scale courses. He wants to build a Rube Goldberg–inspired course, a Dr. Seuss–inspired course, an Antoni Gaudi–inspired course, a Tony Lama Cowboy Boots–inspired course. His ultimate objective is to someday out–Mary Pickford Mary Pickford's Max Ernst–inspired course. But before he can do that, he says he must reach a state of creative maturity that can scale the heights of imagination he aspires to.


 

At the time of the events I'm about to relate, Morgan was working on plans to submit to the "Glory Lands Spiritual Fun Park." The course was to be comprised of nine holes per religion. Morgan had so far completed designs for the Buddhist course (one hole apiece for the eight-fold path, with the ninth hole as satori) and was mocking up the Hindu course and bouncing around ideas for the Roman Catholic course. "Glory Lands" represented a real chance for Morgan to realize his dream. It was a huge enterprise. Besides the three aforementioned courses, there'd also be one course for each of the other religions included in the park: Judaism, Islam, Wiccan/Animism, Jainism, Baptist, Southern Baptist, Lutheran, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Presbyterian, Mormon, Pentecostal, Amish/Mennonite, Christian Science, and even Quaker.

He'd been working our collective tails off setting up the prototype courses in his backyard. Particularly me, since I was in charge of all the garnishing artwork.

Perhaps I shouldn't complain. Whenever Morgan landed a commercial contract, he shared the wealth. Chris and I, especially, took home some nice chunks of cash for our "consultation and design services." Even the members who just helped Morgan set up the working mini-models in his backyard got compensated with pocket change and pizza-and-half-kegger lunches.

Trouble was, it had been eating up almost all of our collective weekends. Nobody else had time to work on their Serendipitous Pursuits. We were at what could be a fatal impasse: The Worshipful Order was in danger of losing its quixotic flavor—of no longer being fun. I'd decided I was going to go along with finishing up the "Glory Lands" project because if it panned out Morgan would achieve his goal and become a professional golf course designer. Then miniature golf would no longer count as his off-hours obsession. The rest of us would be free, and The Worshipful Order would regain its balance.

But in the meantime we still faced months of Morgan monopolizing our time. I was beginning to have doubts that I could go the distance. So I arrived at Morgan's compound that particular Sunday with some trepidation.

The bland front of the long, lean, ranch-style tract home ubiquitous to San Jose's earlier suburbs had been ameliorated by a ground-to-roofline collage of miniature golf memorabilia. Crisp, graphically sparse neon signs from the 1950s overlap art deco signs from the flapper era and gaudy hand-painted signs from small, deep south, family-run, now-bankrupt operations of the 1970s and eighties.

Neighbors had complained until Morgan hired Chris to landscape a ten-foot topiary hedge that effectively hides the strange facade from the street. Now the neighbors pretend not to notice that the dimpled leafy globes protruding from and appearing to rest upon the smooth, perfect surface of the top of the hedge looked exactly like giant golf balls resting on a green.

I ducked around the hedge and meandered down the front walkway, which was designed to represent a classic "wiggler" or snake-shaped hole, complete with artificial turf and a hole at the end just in front of the side gate that leads around the side of the house to the backyard. There's a sign with the house's name over the gate. Way back in 1916, when Edward H. Wiswell finished up that very first mini golf course, Mr. Barber had looked upon it and found it fair. He declared, "This'll do!" His course was forever after known as "Thistle Dhu." The name on Morgan's sign—scorched with a wood-burning kit into a stained, filigreed-along-its-edges knotty pine board—reads "Thatull Dhu."

I opened the gate to the side yard. To my surprise, numerous potted plants were jammed up against the side of the house. This was where Morgan kept them between golf course designs, but as of last weekend Chris had used them all as temporary landscaping for the Hindu course.

I heard voices. Muffled but relaxed, happy voices. Somewhere from deep in the jungle of pots. I began picking my way through the plants.

Then a twangy voice came clear. That would belong to Jesse, the software specialist of the group and originally from Texas. Jesse's serendipitous pursuit is a dedication to Mexican masked wrestling.

"Yeah. Who'd a thunk it?" she was saying. "Tex-Mexers beating the home teams, in Mexico City, no less. Best dang little tag-team in the world. Ain't nobody can whup the likes of Pecos Phil and Sluefoot Stu."

Jesse is a muscular, long, tall drink of a woman. I've always wondered if Jesse's love of Mexican wrestling is based on an attraction to bulky, sweaty masked men, or if she harbors a secret desire to don a disguise and hunker down to some wrestling herself. The guys in the group, Chris and myself in particular, have spent pleasant afternoons speculating that somewhere or other she's got a secret room equipped with her own mat, the walls lined with masks, and skimpy Wonder Woman–type outfits hanging in a closet.

I ducked around some ficus to find Jesse holding forth and sharing a joint with Terry, who teaches American Popular Culture Studies at San Jose State. Terry was sitting on a large upended planter. She grinned when she saw me and stretched out her arm, offering me a hit.

"Hi guys," I said. "What gives with the plants? Did Morgan go out and buy new foliage that's a bit more Indian subcontinent?"

"Hi to you, too, Francis," Terry said in the reedy voice of someone trying to talk through their nasal passages without letting any sumptuous smoke escape. "You'd better take a toke of this before you go out back. You're in for a real 'D'oh!' moment, I'm afraid."

Terry is the only woman I know who can render a perfect Homer Simpson "D'oh!" under any condition. If Morgan is our alpha male, then she's our über-bonding-us-all-together-holistic female. There isn't a single serendipitous pursuit that any of us can come up with that she can't place within context. She makes us feel that we're not merely members of a group rotten with extravagant creative neuroses, but rather that we're totally culturally hooked up. For which we're all grateful. And yet … for all her acuity, I have a sneaking suspicion that Terry got her PhD just so that she'd have an excuse to endlessly watch reruns of The Simpsons.

I shook my head, refusing the joint. "What do you mean?"

Terry replied in the voice of Apu. "My dear Francis, I believe that you will be finding that which is both a release from bondage and a blow to your artistic self-esteem. Please to keep in mind that the rest of us are giddily happy with relaxation and enjoyment."

I shook my head again. "I think you've toked a little too much ganja, Apu."

Now really apprehensive, I finished walking around to the back. The remaining four of the seven members of The Worshipful Order were all there—Terry likes to refer to us as The Real Seven Wonders of the World. But as Terry had hinted, the tension of our last few get-togethers was gone.

And the reason for that tension—the Hindu mock-up—was also gone.

In between projects, Morgan's backyard is your basic stripped-down tabula rasa. Another one of Chris's topiary hedges rings the entire perimeter, secluding it from easily offended neighbors' eyes. To one side some home-hobbyist earth-moving machines sit parked—predominant among them a bright deep-green-with-yellow-logo John Deere crouched next to every attachment imaginable, and some not so imaginable. On the far side of the lot lie stacked rolls of artificial turf and neat piles of white-painted wooden stanchions—in curved, straight, long, and short lengths. Everything else is naked dirt.

During project construction this stark beige desert transforms, bit by bit, into a scale model of one of Morgan's designs—a miniature miniature golf course. The potted plants lining the side of the house provide instant temporary landscaping.

Last weekend, a good half of the Hindu course had been laid out. Now all the greens were gone—stacked with the rest of the rolls of turf. Mounds and berms lay flattened, hollows filled in. I'd put so much time and effort into the gaudily painted cardboard cut-outs meant to represent eventual three-dimensional shapes. They'd vanished, in all their glorious shades of scarlet, gold, blue, saffron, and green: the great serpents Vritra, Vasuki, and Kaliya; Hanuman, the white trickster monkey god; Yama, king of the dead, and his brindled dogs; the Ocean of Milk; Krishna and his maiden cow-herders; Kali and her necklace of skulls; the Garuda bird; Ganesha of the elephant head. Gone, gone, gone, as surely as if Shiva had danced them all out of this universe.

Now the yard lay barren, back to its wasteland default setting. Morgan stood alone out in the middle like John the Baptist in the wilderness. He held a long stick and was sketching out the lines of a new course into the dirt.

I sighed and wrestled with emotions of depression, disappointment, anger, and relief churning away in my stomach. Then I made my way over to where the rest of The Worshipful Order gathered on the back porch.

Chris leaned against the pergola that shaded the half-kegger, acting as barkeep, pumping out a beer for Dale, who was lying in a nearby chaise lounge with his feet kicked up.

Sydney stood in the shade under the back porch awnings, in front of the blackboard with its permanent list of miniature golf synonyms:

And my own personal favorite: Dinky Links

Sydney had come up with some new names and was chalking them onto the board:

Morgan would at some point decide whether any of these were of sufficient merit to become part of the permanent lexicon and get painted on rather than chalked in.

I interrupted Chris and Dale. "What gives?" I asked, nodding my head toward the yard's dusty expanse.

Chris shrugged. "Morgan's dropping the Glory Lands project. Moving on to something else. We spent the morning tearing down the last of what was left."

Dale grinned. "I heard he got his knickers in a twist because he couldn't figure out how to make the Roman Catholic course come out right. I tried to warn him that there was no way to compress the fourteen Stations of the Cross into a nine-hole course. But would he listen? Noooooo."

Dale works as an insurance claims adjustor but in off-hours is a talented musician—adept at many instruments and styles but primarily fixated on Klezmer music. This music so impacted and permeated Dale that it triggered a conversion to Judaism. Since Dale comes from a proto-Celtic Scottish/Irish genetic and cultural background, I've never understood this. Nonetheless, Dale was born, raised, and schooled a Catholic. If anyone knew the Stations of the Cross, it would be him.

"Real bummer for you, though," Chris said sympathetically. "Want a beer?"

"Yup," I said. I chugged it, then held out the empty Dixie Cup Deluxe for a refill. I chugged that, too.

Over the tip end of my cup I caught Chris and Dale exchanging a glance on my behalf.

I glared at them. "Do you know how many fucking days I put in on those forms?"

"No one said you weren't entitled to feeling pissed off," Chris said as he filled my cup for the third time, then tried to discretely hang up the kegger nozzle. "Look at it this way. There's no chance that the next course will be so, well, overextended and complicated. You'll be able to get back to working on your railroads."

Model trains are the serendipitous pursuit that the other Worshipful Orderers know me by, though it isn't my true, secret obsession.

I wasn't ready to let the subject go yet. "Four months, Chris! Four damn months' worth of weekends just down the tubes!"

Dale coughed. Like he always did when he was confronted with someone else's angst, he tugged at his blond earlocks and beard and scratched at his yamulka. Somewhere a dead Catholic schoolteacher nun rolled over in her grave. "Lighten up, gentlemen. Here come the ladies with the food."

Terry and Jesse were walking out the back door of Morgan's house with a couple of extra-large pizzas and one small one.

"Here we go, y'all," Jesse announced, setting the food down on a patio table. "It's delivery, not DiGiorno's." She passed Dale the small pizza. "And here's your kosher three-cheeser." Dale beamed.

I was listening to Terry extolling the merits of the newest entries into the onslaught of reality TV shows (PBS's When Mathematicians Attack and FOX's Impregnated by America) as she divvied up the slices, when somebody tapped my shoulder. It was Morgan.

"I'm glad you got here," he said, "Join me while we eat. There's something I want to talk over with you."

I glumly grabbed some pizza before diverting back to the half-kegger. I pumped what I promised myself would be my last beer. Then I went over to where Morgan sat alone on a pile of something or other wrapped up tightly in opaque plastic. After I sat and felt a certain asymmetrical shiftiness to the seating, I realized that we perched on my stacked-up Hindu pantheon. Damn it—we were sitting on my art!

I choked back my angst and gestured at his backyard. "What's going on? I hear you're giving up on the Glory Lands project." Despite my best efforts, it came out as a half-snarl.

Morgan ignored the heat in my voice. He nodded, his mouth full of pizza.

"Dale said the Stations of the Cross idea didn't pan out." I couldn't resist making it a dig.

Morgan shook his head, chewed, swallowed. "That wasn't it. I could've come up with other ideas, easy. Catholic dogma is chock-full of fun symbology. It was two other things." He stuck a greasy index finger up into the air. "One—the Glory Landers just didn't get it. They wanted all the courses to end up at a single final hole to get across the point that 'all God's children gonna get to heaven.' That's a nice sentiment, but it just won't fly in miniature golf, especially with so many unmonitored courses so close together."

This was sufficient to momentarily distract me out of my pique. I whistled. "You slam right into the Continuing Player Factor. How could they not understand that?"

Anyone who's played miniature golf more than once at a multiple-course facility figures out the Continuing Player Factor without having to be told.

At the end of a course there's a final hole that's usually a double hole. If it's the double-hole type, then you have a chance at shooting a tricky lofting hole-in-one shot. If you make the hole in one, you win another round. If you miss, then the ball rolls down to the regular final hole at the bottom of a pit.

But even if there's no hole-in-one alternative, all courses have that regular final pit hole where, once you putt into the hole, the ball disappears down a pneumatic tunnel that pops it back up at the ticket counter. With your ball gone, your game is over.

But—and this is a big "but"—at crowded and poorly monitored centers, where the courses are all open and adjacent to one another, all one has to do is not play that last pneumatic hole, pick up one's ball, move over to the next course and continue playing, or go back and replay the course you've just played. One can get in any number of free games for the price of one ticket.

Morgan nodded his head mournfully. "Exactly. They insisted that their customers were spiritual enough to resist such secular enticement. They just couldn't understand that miniature golf has its standards, its own unique protocol. So I got into it with them. Tried to point out that no miniature golfer in their right mind would consider it a sin to bypass the final hole with its supposed reward of paradise. To a miniature golfer, to get to pull off a Continuing Player Factor is paradise. And if by some remote chance the Glory Landers did really want to equate this with sin, that it wasn't the Glory Landers' right to put their clientele in temptation's way. I guess they thought I said the last sorta sarcastically, and that was the end of the deal. Though they are going to keep the designs for the Buddhist course. They paid me a nice fat check and said they'd pray for me."

Morgan took another bite of pizza and chewed contemplatively. I sipped at my beer and reflected on the state of a universe where Morgan's devotion to his avocation was purer than a bunch of yahoo religious fanatics' basic sense of ethics.

"Look, Francis, I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate all the work you've been doing." He patted my piled artwork. "This hasn't gone for naught. After we eat, we're going to take these down to the basement to store out of the weather. We'll use it for another project, maybe the one after the next one. I promise."

My feelings about my artwork being taken for granted started to ebb to mere disgruntlement as relief surged in to take its place. I really hadn't wanted to paint mock-ups for fifteen more religions.

"Which leads me to reason number two," Morgan continued, wiping his hands clean on his jeans. "I don't care about the Glory Land job because I got a better gig. A really, really good gig. The best gig yet. It may even be a warm-up for the Ultimate Course."

I cut him off at the pass. Let Morgan build up steam talking about the Ultimate Course and you might as well write off your entire afternoon. "Who is it for? And where is it going to be—Mexico again, San Francisco?"

He beamed. "That's part of the beauty of it. It's totally local. We'll be in on it all the way from the initial designs clear through to the public grand opening. It's for the Rosicrucians."

I groaned. "Morgan—think! Another bunch of spiritual loonies?"

"They're not loonies," he protested. "Well, not completely. They believe that San Jose possesses special properties which make it the psychic center of the world. That's why they built their national center here. Lately they've decided that their teachings and research are weak in a key element to the balance of the universe—humor. They're taking steps to correct that: hosting seminars in comedy, underwriting grants to support stand-up comics, and putting together a family fun center with their own unique twist. I've got the inside track on designing their miniature golf course. I've already floated a main theme idea to them, and they're totally on board. If it flies, they want to build a second center at the base of Mount Shasta, the second-best psychic center of the world."

I hated to ask. "And that theme idea is …?"

Morgan grinned. "Total and absolute weirdness. Think the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot meets the Oregon Vortex. Think carnival fun houses, Houses of Mirrors. Think the Bermuda Triangle … well, maybe not the Bermuda Triangle. Think—a long, skinny green that looks like you're putting downhill, but you're really putting uphill. Greens with bump barriers that you have to hit to get to the hole, instead of shooting around or in between them. A hole inside a walk-in camera obscura. And the greens don't have to be green—they can be anything you want."

Heaven help me, but I was intrigued. My mind started spinning with ideas: Fairways laid out in twisted checkerboard patterns. Undulating bumpy long lanes painted in patterns to make them appear completely flat. The possibilities for a gadzillion optical illusions rendered in three dimensions.

"Okay, I've got to admit the idea has possibilities. It could be fun." Man oh man, I hoped that wasn't the beer talking.

Morgan punched me in the arm (God, I hate it when he does that). "I knew you'd love it! Let me walk you over what I've come up with so far." He waved his arm toward the chicken scratchings he'd drawn in the bare backyard. "Then I want you to get together with Syd."

"Why Sydney?" Morgan always double-checked his course layouts with the physicist, but I didn't see why I, on the artistic side of things, needed to.

"Because this time the visual components have to work not just hand-in-hand with the course, but be completely integrated into the course design and set up. Surely you can see that."

I thought of my optical illusion ideas and had to agree.

"What's the matter? Don't you like Syd?"

"No, she's fine." Now I knew it was the beer talking. "We can get together whenever your ideas have jelled a little more," I said. I stood up, drained the last of the suds from my cup. "Let's go look at what you've got so far."

"Great, then I'll tell Syd to get in touch with you."


 

I didn't dislike Sydney. I didn't particularly like Sydney, either. What I couldn't make myself tell Morgan was that she made me nervous.

Sydney had first showed up one day in tow with one of the others. I can't remember exactly who. Whoever it was hadn't been terrifically attached—no trace of the original alliance remained. But as soon as Sydney started walking over Morgan's course du jour (Morgan's ode-to-the-ancient-poet-Homer course—the first nine holes dealt with the Iliad, the second nine holes with the Odyssey), a new miniature golf mega-fan was born. From that day forth, Sydney became a wan shadow to all of Morgan's putt-putt activities.

Nothing wrong with that. Sydney seemed harmless enough, and Morgan loved having a member of the group who understood the logistics of putting together his courses as well as he did. For a while I wondered if Sydney had a "thing" for Morgan. But that wasn't what bothered me. It was this: Sydney was the only one of us to join the group without a quixotic obsession of one kind or another already in place. And never seemed to have had a personal hobby or fixation. Which just felt odd. Felt wrong. Until I inadvertently provided one.

The company I work for deals with all kinds of concepts and products and a fair amount of advertising. Someone came up with the bright idea for a series of ads for a dot.com company where the visual hook to the World Wide Web would be the image of some children playing Cat's Cradle. Besides putting together the storyboards for the spot, it fell to me to figure out which Cat's Cradle patterns they might want to use. I took to carrying around some string in a pocket so that I could practice on forms whenever I had a spare moment.

At one of The Worshipful Order's soirees I was doing just that. It was winter, and chilly. We'd come indoors after toiling away in the backyard. Morgan had sprung for Chinese take-out instead of pizza. After eating I sat in a corner playing with my loop of gardener's twine. I'd worked my way from Big Star to Bagobo Diamonds to Two Headhunters when I realized that Sydney sat perched on an ottoman nearby, legs squeezed tight together, arms folded and tight together, elbows leaning on knees, chin on palms, staring at me.

"What?" I asked, a little prickly, disconcerted to find I had an audience.

"What's that you're doing? What is it? What's it called?" Sydney almost never spoke, let alone so intensely, so demandingly.

"I'm making Cat's Cradles. You know … didn't you ever do this as a kid?"

"No. I guess I must have heard of them, but my parents home-schooled me. Cat's Cradles never came up."

"What did your folks do? For a living?"

Sydney shook her head with impatience at my questions. "My father worked for JPL. He's an astrophysicist. My mother's a chemical engineer." Sydney reached almost convulsively for the string. "Show me."

Bemused and amused, I borrowed some cord from Morgan, who had a vast supply of all kinds of materials for gluing or binding things together. I began to teach Sydney how to Cat's Cradle. First the opening, looping the string around the hands in first position. Then how you use the fingers of one hand to catch up loops from the other hand, building the pattern. Copying me move for move, Syd caught on surprisingly fast for somebody who'd never done it before. Soon we moved on from one person Cradling to partner Cradling, transferring the string patterns back and forth as we built the webby structures. I felt a bit guilty: Sydney seemed almost more enthralled with this kids' game than with miniature golf. I hoped I hadn't deprived Morgan of a devotee.

Cat's Cradling became Sydney's "thing."

That would have been fine, except that for the longest time afterward I inherited Morgan's shadow. Every time that the group got together, Sydney pounced on me, eager to share newly mastered forms. These included patterns that were the result of incredible amounts of research on her part into obscure and faraway cultures: Cat's Cradles from the Torres Straits to the isle of Yap, to the Navajo nation, to Scotland, and every country in between—you name it, and Sydney could demonstrate a Cat's Cradle from that locale or culture.

This stage only lasted so long. Sydney moved on to a phase of self-discovery and started inventing completely new Cat's Cradles. I began to get calls at all hours of the day and night. I'd answer my phone in a 2 A.M. fog to hear her high-strung flutey voice asking for advice on how to finesse a far thumb double "catch" across an alternating palmar string. At Worshipful Order meetings she cornered me into hours of working on two-person forms. I had to admit that she was taking the art to a whole new level, but I was beginning to feel well and truly stalked. For about a nanosecond I worried that she might be developing a crush on me, but her total focus on the stringing made it clear that I, as a person and an artist, was invisible to her. Although I was somewhat relieved, it still added insult to injury.

Finally enough was enough. I sat Syd down and explained that Cat's Cradling was simply not my thing. That I didn't want to spend companionable hours flogging stringy configurations to death. It was a skill my sisters had taught me as a kid, and that I'd had a very temporary need to revive as an adult. I wished Syd all the luck in the world, but as for me, no más.

Confusion, then shock, then hurt, then blankness passed over those nearsighted hazel eyes. Since then we'd hardly spoken, and there remained a sense of tension between us. I couldn't say that I welcomed Morgan's assignment.


 

A week or so went by. I heard nothing from either Morgan or Sydney. I presumed (hoped) that the Rosicrucian project had fallen through. Then I forgot about it.

One Saturday morning I'd had to bring work home. We'd fallen behind schedule on a contract with a nationwide consortium of Symphony Hall gift shops. So I sat in my studio picking away at a clay maquette for an Esa-Pekka Salonen bobblehead doll. The model would eventually be cast, but to be certain of its final bobbliness, I'd rigged up the head so it connected to the body with a ball joint. Then I had to brace it so it wouldn't jiggle while I sculpted it.

Once I finished with the esteemed Finn, the last of the Great Conductors Alive or Dead bobblehead doll series, I still had to tackle the unfinished Great Cellists Alive or Dead series (Yo-Yo Ma and Casals still to be completed) and the Great Violinists Alive or Dead series. Occasionally I glanced longingly over at the project I'd hoped to be spending time with.

The Worshipful Order believed my qualifying serendipitous pursuit to be constructing and running model railroad set-ups—which is a hobby that I enjoy. But it's not my true obsession.

As a child, movable workable miniature worlds fascinated me. I built and flew model airplanes, built and launched pond yachts. As I grew older, that interest first collided and then merged with a love of film. Particularly those movies that called for complex panoramic takes—the kind that could only be shot by using intricate models. I found out that a number of film model makers also had tandem careers making eerie interactive architectural miniatures that got exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country. So I decided I'd earn a lucrative career in the film industry constructing models, and at the same time make my mark on the world of fine arts with tiny masterpieces.

Alas, by the time I got out of art school, movie technology had already begun to revolve around the developing field of computer-generated effects. Curse you, George Lucas, curse you!

What little model-making gigs remained involved team-built architectural replicas for pyrotechnic effects. Blow up the Parthenon. Blow up the White House (over and over and over again). Blow up the Eiffel Tower. Blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. Blow up Big Ben. Blow up the New York City subway system. Blow up Disneyland (please blow up Disneyland).

The teams consisted of close-knit groups, resistant to newcomers. I sent out resumes, put myself on long waiting lists. In the meantime I worried about rent, food, and a student loan to repay. Finally I gave up and took a local job as a product designer for a company here in San Jose. Some years later I lifted my head from the morass of work and realized that the flint of my imagination no longer struck sparky concepts for personal artwork of incendiary power. I fell in with a club of model railroad enthusiasts, working with interest but no passion, until …

Until one spring when a couple of my older siblings, well-furnished with spouses, suburban homes, and coveys of small children, came to me and said, "You're the artist in the family. Can you do anything with these for Easter?" as they handed me a set of big naked hollow sugar eggs. You know the kind—an oval window hollowed out on one side, the inside usually filled with sentimental, kitschy, pastel-colored scenes, all made out of spun sugar, molded sugar, piped and hardened sugar. My siblings had found these empty vessels at a local arts-and-crafts franchise store and thought they were just the ticket for me to exercise my talents on.

Funny thing—they were right. I sat, contemplating the bright yellow boxes with their see-through plastic windows seeing through to the see-through ovoids inside; the boxes bannered with gaudy lettering proclaiming "EGGO-RAMA" followed by—in a different typeface and font size—"Sugar Egg Diorama. A do-it-yourself food craft for Easter."

I plunged in. Come Easter my nieces and nephews each received a finished Eggo-rama that peeked in upon the happy private lives of blue bunnies and pink chickies. And they've received one apiece every Easter since then.

But it was the other possibilities that piqued my imagination. I explored, acquainting myself with new tools, mastering new techniques. I learned how to spin, blow, pour, pipe, carve, pull, and dye sugar. I adapted glassblowing and torch work to my new medium. I made Murano-style caning out of molten multicolored sweetness instead of glass. I cast my own sugar eggs in molds I made myself—some as small as real hen eggs, others as big as bread boxes

So on this particular Saturday, I yearned to work on my newest project, the finest so far: a football-sized, half-completed sugar-egg diorama depicting Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Because I was alone, I assuaged myself by letting out long, mournful sighs from time to time. Esa-Pekka's completed companions—Seiji Osawa, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Fiedler, Arturo Rubenstein, and the rest—looked down on me from another shelf. They bobbled their heads as if in sympathy, but that was just because my house sits directly on top of a minor fault line. Not a big or deep fault line, but active enough that the place seems continuously aquiver.

The phone rang, snapping me out of my doldrums. I picked it up. The voice on the other end was Sydney's, sounding more than usually nervous. I guessed that my rejection must still rankle, though it had been at least a year and a half.

"Ah, um, it's me. Morgan said I should phone you. About the new course design?"

"It's okay, Sydney," I said. "I told Morgan that it was okay to get in touch with me."

"Oh, good. I've got a few set-ups done. They're ready for artwork implementation. Can you come over to my place today?"

I looked down at the wobbling, gray, incomplete face of the L.A. Philharmonic's conductor. As long as the project hung over me, I wouldn't be able to get back to my sugar eggs. But as long as The Garden of Earthly Delights enticed me, I'd be unable to concentrate on finishing up the bobbleheads. Even hanging out with Sydney would be preferable to moping between the two projects. "Sure, what's your address?"


 

I thought I must have written the directions down wrong. I found myself driving around a newly developed and then newly abandoned office/industrial complex on the outskirts of Sunnyvale—a veritable graveyard to a whole bunch of dot.com enterprises. Very deserted, even for a Sunday, with "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs in window after window. But also quite upscale-looking. The dot.coms had all died young and left good-looking corpses. I wondered if Sydney's place was an old tract home hold-out wedged in between the stylishly deceased.

But no. The address turned out to be an elegant office building. Two stories' worth of Mission Revival meets Bauhaus, rendered in woodgrain-imprinted concrete with spar-varnished redwood detailing and trim. A stanchioned sign rose above a crisp green lawn, announcing the firm's name in an undecipherable combination of emoticons and rebuses.

At the door, the nameplates alongside the two rows of buzz-in buttons were all blank, save one. It simply said, "Sydney Platherblatt." No business titles, no PhDs, just the name.

I pushed the button. An overhead intercom squawked. Sydney rang me in. The place seemed not only Sunday-deserted, but the reception desk lay naked and bereft of even answering pads and phones. Then Sydney popped out of a door down a long hall leading off the reception area and waved me toward her.

Very little actual furniture burdened Sydney's spacious office. There was one long desk with a couple of computer systems on it, several chairs nearby. A bunch of green blackboards covered with equations stood here and there at odd angles to one another, like awkwardly loitering teenagers. A space had been cleared in the middle for the golf course mock-ups—constructed from foam core and poster board, cleaner and simpler than Morgan's artificial turf–covered dirt mounds. And they were about half the size of Morgan's already half-sized greens.

We got right down to it. Sydney had mocked up four of the holes—the fun house, mystery-spot kind of stuff I'd envisioned. Sydney had a good eye for tweaking the surfaces of the playing greens and liked my ideas for adding painted-on optical illusions. We played with the mock-ups a bit. I took photos with my digital camera so I could mess with them back home with my graphics software. We generated a whole bunch of ideas and then called it a day.

Sydney asked if I'd like something to drink. Coffee, tea, soft drink, iced tea? I chose iced tea. Syd left. A moment later I heard the clunkety-clunks of a couple of cans channeling down a soda dispenser. Sydney returned with two canned iced teas.

We drank in silence, though I was dying to find out what Sydney's situation was here.

"I think we've got enough to work on," Sydney said abruptly.

I stood. That seemed to be a cue for me to go.

But then … "Unless you're in a rush, can I show you something else? A little project of my own?" she said shyly. I suddenly realized that Sydney had been gathering the courage to ask. "It's something I've been working on for quite a while. I'd value your input."

"Um …" I wasn't sure whether to sit down again or remain standing. "It's not more Cat's Cradles, is it?"

The physicist smiled painfully. "No, not at all."

I felt ashamed, but I'd had to ask. "Sure then. Bring it on."

"Downstairs," Sydney said. "In the lab."

The stairwell was dimly lit. I entertained a brief thought about innocent artists lured to dank, dark basements by mad scientists.

Then felt secret embarrassment when Sydney reached the heavy, institutional gray-green security door at the bottom, which opened into a well-lit foyer. Satiny hardwood floors; sumptuous cognac-brown leather sofas; professionally framed antique circus posters; mission-style coffee table; another soda machine and, next to it, a high-end refrigerator with a veneer front that matched the hardwood floors.

"Wow!" I said. "Some basement. This may be the best of all Bat Caves."

Against one wall stood a Pottery Barn cabinet, the kind with lots of square drawers. A row of narrow doors were set into the length of the far wall.

Sydney opened a drawer and pulled out a neatly folded bundle. Then pointed to one of the doors. "You can change in there."

My curiosity couldn't have been more piqued. I did as I was told.

Behind the door was a dressing room. It was furnished with a bench seat for sitting and some hooks for hanging up clothing. I unfolded the bundle. It consisted of long argyle socks, corduroy knickers, a long shirt, and a pullover argyle vest (which didn't match the argyle socks). I stripped off my t-shirt and jeans and put on the golf-clown outfit. I had a flashback to the movie Sleuth, where Laurence Olivier had Michael Caine dress up like a clown before setting out to kill him. I laughed at myself nervously. The clothes stretched to fit, but felt oddly stiff, as though the fabric had been interwoven with fine wire mesh.

When I reemerged into the foyer, Sydney was already similarly accoutered. I felt better that we were both going to be clowns. She was rummaging through another, lower set of drawers.

"Try these on. I think they'll fit you."

She handed me a cleatless pair of saddle-shoe–styled golf shoes.

"Now this." She wedged a tam-o-shanter onto my head.

"And these."

I tried on several pairs of herringbone-stitched kid gloves. Soft to the touch, but shot through with that same peculiar stiffness.

"Okay, we're ready. This way." Sydney's nervousness had booted up to an assertive eagerness. We stood before another gray-green security door, the only jarring element in the graceful room.

Sydney pulled two pairs of goggles from a vest pocket. They reminded me of the kind worn by drivers at antique car rallies.

"Put yours on, then push this." A button was inlaid in the bridge in the goggles. "That activates them. They're VR The clothing is wired to template our movements."

She opened the door. On the other side a vast darkness spread before us. It was punctuated by pools of light extending into an inky distance. A miniature golf green—full scale this time—lay within each pool of light. Without counting, I knew there must be a full eighteen holes—a double-niner course. A rack holding putters stood just to my left.

"VR golf. Um, Sydney, it's been done before."

"Not like this, it hasn't."

Sydney shut the door behind us, swung a huge wheel lock around till it clicked. It looked like it should be sealing off an airlock on Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus.

Now I was seriously worried.

"Just a precaution," Syd said, seeing the look on my face. "All of this"—sweeping a hand to encompass the basement's depths—"is like regular VR in that it's interactive, but we do interact with it in real three-dimensions instead of just a 3-D visual field. The actual programming, or workings, that our movements direct via the goggles and our clothing and clubs are down below us in the sub-basement." The physicist tapped one saddle-shoed foot. "I had lead flooring put in."

I was astounded. "Does the company you're renting this space from know that you've done all this?"

Sydney blinked. "I don't rent this space. I own the building. I can do anything I want with it."

My jaw dropped. In my entire life I'd never known anyone rich enough to singlehandedly own an entire office building in Silicon Valley, current economic slump notwithstanding.

Sydney reacted to my reaction a little defensively. "I got it relatively cheap when most of the businesses in the immediate area went under."

I didn't buy that for an instant. "Exactly what kind of physicist are you?"

Sydney stopped looking defensive and went back to blinking. "A quantum physicist. You knew that. In the last few years I've been specializing in topology. Specifically, post-string knot theory. And braiding."

Several shiny thought-orbs spinning in the pinball machine of my mind bounced off high-score paddles then slid into place. Flashing lights strobed. Celebratory bells clanged. Eureka!

"String theory. Knot theory. That's why the affinity for Cat's Cradles. And why you started coming up with patterns on your own."

Sydney nodded. "I didn't know a macro-world model existed for my work. Or that it was such an ancient discipline: a compulsion apparently hardwired into our species.

"That day, when I first saw you stringing patterns, it was an epiphany for me." Were those the beginning of tears welling up in her eyes? "As I gradually found out that cultures all over the world have been constructing Cat's Cradles probably ever since our species evolved enough to develop the ability to make string, I came to the belief that my work is a step up a stairway that humankind started climbing at our very inception." Sydney's glistening eyes dropped. "I never meant to make you feel uncomfortable with my enthusiasm."

Of course I felt terrible. "I'm so sorry. I had no idea. But Sydney, you had to have known that I'm way back there on the Cat's Cradle evolutionary ladder—at least a rung or two below the tribal New Guineans and ancient Scots."

Sydney sighed. "I know. After you blew me off, I realized that you were a seminal yet limited chance information system with no hope of ever becoming an equal participant. I'd just hoped for someone to … I don't know … to exchange ideas with. Keep the enthusiasm alive."

I understood what Sydney couldn't say. All of us within The Worshipful Order consciously or unconsciously yearned for a soulmate. Someone on our own wavelength within our own obsession. A true life partner to live with within our own individual little world. That's why the Order was so successful a group of friends. We didn't share the same passions, but recognized and supported each other's kindred spirit. And that's why though about half of us had been married, none of us could keep a one-on-one relationship going. Why we felt encumbered by our ex-spouses, children, and/or lovers, like perennial travelers forever dragging mobile yet sluggishly heavy wheeled luggage behind us.

There was no way I'd say that out loud, make Sydney directly confront that unspoken loneliness. I looked out at the eerie miniature golf course spread before us. "Sydney, I don't think you need any help in keeping your enthusiasms alive. What does a knot theorist do that can afford all this? What university do you work for?"

The change of subject worked.

Sydney snapped out of it. "No university. After I finished my PhD, I went straight into the private sector. The big tech companies invest heavily in R&D. I work independently from grant to grant. That allows me to negotiate contracts where I share a percentage of the patent on any given project. Some of my work pans out into commercially applicable results, so I've got an income stream between projects. Right now I'm working on sets of Jones polynomials for a quantum computer that works through mathematical knotting, looping, and braiding."

I took a deep breath. "Considering that I couldn't keep up with you even on everyday Cat's Cradles, I don't think I'll ask how any of that turns into a working PC that I could go buy at Compaq."

"No. I guess not," Sydney said, "but I think that now you can better understand my affinity for Cradling. Now that I know how to form them, I use the Cradles to map out small portions of my calculations. To put my hands upon mathematics in a tactile way, get to physically manipulate equations, see them actualized in reality, in at least three of the eleven known dimensions." Sydney's eyes gleamed. "I can't describe how this has changed and elevated my work. I know your introducing me to the art was, well, serendipitous on your part, but I'll always be grateful."

Uh-oh. The eyes were misting over again.

"Glad to be of service. Anytime." Now I really wanted to change the subject. "So, did you use all of that in making this?" I nodded toward the course.

Sydney lit up. "Mostly I used just basic quantum physics. But yes, in places. I'll explain as we go."

We both selected clubs. Sydney took a rather high-tech-looking key and inserted it into a key slot in a tube at the end of the putter rack. A mechanism clicked, then I jumped as a loud "Ah-OOOO-gah" alarm sounded. A small metal door slid open, revealing a switch. Sydney flipped the switch, and a golf ball popped out of the tube. A second flip of the switch for a ball for me. "Each ball is a representative of a Rydberg atom down in the sub-basement," Sydney explained.

"So each ball has its own atom?"

"That's right," Sydney nodded. "Sensors in the clubs determine what happens in the sub-basement, what forces are transmitted to the atoms. Also sensors in the ball. Remember, the ball is one of the mechanisms affecting the play, but we see the ball as a hologram with a one-to-one correspondence with a particle down below."

A quick relock of the mechanism, and we proceeded to the first hole. "A safety precaution," Sydney explained. "It keeps any more golf balls from being put into play after a group starts off on the course—in this case just the two of us—and lets the sub-basement know to mark the beginning of our time parameters."

The first hole was unthemed, with one single large obstacle. I scanned the other holes stretching out before us. They appeared equally stark.

I noticed a subtle, buzzing sort of smell. Like ozone, but not ozone. And a shimmer to the pools of light illuminating the holes. Like a bare hint of black light, but not black light. I felt the edges of my eyeballs vibrating.

I faced hole number one. I placed my ball on its tee. The shape of the course was a huge ovoid. I liked that part of it—working the insides of an egg shape.

The problem was the obstacle. It consisted of a wall that cut across the egg shape, completely barricading the tee from the hole. The wall's surface was featureless, although the top of it curved, wavelike. I estimated its highest point at around six and a half feet. The top's lowest point, at around three feet, was about two-thirds down the length of the wall, to the right.

I looked at Sydney, exasperated. "So … what? I'm supposed to make a yard-high chip shot?"

Sydney's eyes rolled heavenward, all innocence. "If you think you can make it …"

I stroked the ball off the edge of the egg's curve so that it bounced and rolled nicely to line up with the wall's low point.

Sydney followed suit with a similar stroke, but landed even closer to the wall.

Then it was my turn again. The wall lay too close to the tee end of the course to get the necessary distance for that high of a chip shot, but lord knows that I tried. Not surprisingly, I hit about the middle of the wall, well off to the side of the lowest point, and the ball bounced back toward me. I glared at Sydney. "There is absolutely no way," I said.

"Yes, way," she said. She stepped up to her ball, whacked it as hard as she could straight along the ground at the wall. There was a slight sucking sound, and the ball rolled right through the wall, appearing on the other side.

"What the …?"

Sydney looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. "Now you try."

I hit my ball with an equal amount of force. I'm good enough that I smacked the wall at exactly the same spot as Sydney. The ball hit the wall, then ricocheted wildly back to the tee and around the side curves.

"Gee, thanks a lot, Syd," I said, but she was gazing intently at the base of the wall.

"Try again," she said. "For the same spot."

I grumbled, but hit the ball again. This time it slid through the wall.

"Okay, Sydney. Enough of the coy physics. What just happened?"

She smiled. "It's a simple quantum tunnel. Actually, you can hit anywhere along the wall and succeed, though it might take quite a while. But where the wall is shortest is where the probability is strongest for the ball to tunnel through. The taller the wall, the higher the energy barrier, and therefore the more improbable the chance of success. If on your first chip shot you'd hit in perfect alignment with the line of the lowest curve, you very well could have gotten through." She hit her ball the rest of the way into the hole.

I muttered a curse, then also easily finished the hole. We proceeded on to the next hole.

"So, what's with the smell, the quality of light?" I asked.

"Some bleed-through from the underlying mechanisms and energy sources running the whole thing."

"Which are?" I wasn't sure I wanted to ask.

"I use Sheehan square silicon gapped-doughnuts—near-perpetual–motion machines, but for the initial energy of driving the necessary pistons into the gaps. I solved that and the seeming paradox of breaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics by building my own version of a Casimir-force-evoking microelectromechanical system using the random energy fluctuating in the 'empty' space here, and in the sub-basement, which is really huge and even emptier. I get as many evanescent virtual particles as I need popping in and out of that big old vacuum."

I was beginning to understand why Sydney was wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. But that was the total sum of my understanding. I wondered if it was the evanescent virtual particles that were quivering my eyeballs.

The second hole also looked pretty basic, and also featured walls—but at least these walls weren't solid. After the first shot off the tee, the fairway split, with two options for getting to the hole.

The lane on the right looked hard. You had to shoot through a wall sliced with vertical slits not much wider that our golf balls. On the other side of the wall, too close to wedge a club in for a second shot, stood another wall—this one with horizontal slits, which implied one had to make a well-finessed chip shot through the first wall to even have a chance at making it through the second wall.

The lane on the left looked worse. Same set-up, but with the horizontal wall placed further away from the vertical wall. Just far enough to insert a third wall in between—this one perforated with diagonal slits.

"Are the slits an illusion, and you still have to shoot through the solid part of the wall?" I asked suspiciously.

Sydney grinned. "No, this time you have to make it through the gaps in the walls."

"And not to complain, but another chip shot? You know chip shots aren't usual on a normal course. They're even bad etiquette."

"You are complaining. Usual, shmusual. Etiquette, shmetiquette. I told you this was no ordinary course. And remember, your club isn't an ordinary putter. You'll find that it works just as well as any wedged club."

The trick was that the two-wall approach was the sucker lane. It wasn't hard for a skilled putter to stroke through the first wall with its vertical slits—you just had to line up your shot well. Getting it to chip through so that it would bounce up and through a horizontal slit in the next wall looked difficult but not impossible … until I tried it. As my ball lobbed through the vertical wall, it changed shape, lengthening at the ends—the wall was extruding it into an ovoid as it passed through. A vertically aligned ovoid. So that every single time it just slammed into the horizontal slitted wall because it didn't fit. You couldn't get through at all.

But you could get through the three-wall lane. It took a few attempts to achieve the correct velocity and approach, but then our balls slid in. Although they, too, changed shape, they appeared to rotate at an odd angle and passed easily through the gaps in the middle diagonal wall. Then they just sucked on through the last wall's slits, plopping down on the other side, once again as perfectly round as ball bearings.

"Quantum particles reacting within a wave equation," Sydney explained succinctly.

Ooooh-kaaay.

That's sort of how it all went. I can't begin to describe the entire course, but I can tell you that the eighth hole caused me pause.

It started out great: I made my shot down what appeared to be a very long but straightforward fairway. The ball blurred into fast-forward and zoomed off the course. I retrieved it from the far reaches of the basement a number of times.

Finally Sydney took pity on me, explaining that the lane appeared long, but that was an optical illusion of sorts. In the sub-basement controls, the space of this part of this hole had been folded. Like drawing a straight line down a sheet of typing paper, then pleating the paper so it folds up tight. That way the drawn line now on top of the fold measures into a fraction of an inch.

I placed my ball on the tee again, barely tapped it. It zipped down the lane crisply, bumped the curve at the end, and rolled sedately onto the angled continuation of the lane (which thankfully had not been folded).

The next shot was up a steep incline made more difficult by a large bump in the middle of the lane up near the top of rise. A putt straight up the line strong enough to hump the bump would hit the bump with enough velocity to hurl the ball off the course every time. Not wanting to repeat my experience of having to retrieve the ball out in the far reaches of the basement, I tried shooting to the left, then the right. But it was obvious the bump didn't leave enough room to either side for the ball to get through. My ball kept rolling back down to me.

"C'mon. Just try hitting it up the middle," Sydney coached.

So I did. A good, hard, clean shot. Just shy of the bump my golf ball disappeared. Two smaller revolving things which decidedly weren't golf balls sped around the hump on the sides. Then they disappeared and my golf ball reappeared—above the hump and still in the middle. It popped over the top and into the hole. I gave Sydney a dirty look.

"A Feynman diagram with a little time blip," was the explanation.

"A time blip?"

"A tiny little forward-backward-forward in time motion."

"We're time traveling now?" I considered the implications. "Sydney, if something goes wrong here, are we going to split into parallel universes?"

Sydney looked piqued. "Of course not. You read too much science fiction. You can't split off into parallel universes. Even if you could, if you favor the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, the wave function would collapse behind you. So in the end it would still be your same universe—maybe skewed in a different direction a bit, but you wouldn't even know it. If you're an Everett-Wheeler-Graham-Theory fan, and you believe in split-off multiple parallel universes, then your conscious consciousness is pristine in whichever universe you 'find' yourself. Look at it this way—The Principle of Self-Consistency takes care of everything, one way or the other."

My head ached and I was getting a little bit scared.

"I, myself, favor Cramer's Transactional Waves," Sydney was continuing. "The past, present, and future are continuously communicating with each other via offer and echo waves. If they modulate with resonance, then they match, and we end up with perfectly acceptable strong probabilities. The equations come out just as they should."

"Sydney!" I yelled.

Sydney blinked out of her verbal reverie. "You're worried about the Grandfather Paradox, aren't you?" she said kindly. "That won't happen. You can't go back in time and do something small that causes a huge change that will bump things in or out of existence. It simply doesn't equate mathematically to correct a small blip in a calculation by factoring in big blips out of the blue. Again," she tapped her forehead knowingly, "the Principle of Self-Consistency. Look, you can't pull new people wholecloth in out of nowhere. At the very worst, you might end up adding in someone you didn't know before, but who was certainly already in our world—just somewhere else with a slightly different history. It's the same as shuffling around numbers in an equation to make it balance."

I wasn't particularly reassured. "Adding someone … or losing them," I muttered.

She took me by the arm and led me to the next hole. "I'm telling you it can't happen. What we do in topology is mathematically tie the ends of strings together after knots are constructed so the knots don't untie. In a way, I've done the same sort of thing here with basic quantum mechanics. This whole course is a giant wave function.

"Forget the tiny time loop that makes up the 'gimmick' in the previous hole. Each of the eighteen holes constitutes a time loop, with the whole course as a bigger time loop. As long as you finish off the holes, you 'knot off' each incremental loop. Think of pearls strung on a necklace. The way that's done is there's a tiny knot tied in the string after each pearl. Hasp mechanisms perform the function of big knots on either end of the necklace, which keep the necklace together as a whole."

The end of the ninth hole was comprised of a single large graphic that was moving: a rotating circle depicted as a yin-yang symbol. One side was a black comma shape with a white hole in its "fat" end. The other side was a white comma shape containing a black hole.

Hitting onto a revolving surface proved difficult. I finally managed to stroke the ball into the black hole in the white comma. It sank down, then floated eerily up across the way—from the white hole in the black comma. Then it sank back down into the white hole, too. Sydney pointed to the next green. The ball had reappeared at the tee for the beginning of the next course, the tenth hole.

"See," said Sydney, as if that proved anything. "That tied off the end of the ninth hole 'knot.' At the eighteenth hole, the entire knot structure gets tied up. The first 'hasp end' of this course is the mechanism that releases the golf balls at the very start of the course. The second 'hasp end' is at the eighteenth hole when the balls automatically return to the rack of putters, triggering the resolution of the final wave function."

"Like the pneumatic tubes at the last hole at a regular Dinky Links," I said.

"Exactly. One just has to be sure to play the final hole for everything to come out right. And no one can get hold of the balls and start the time loop unless I unlock the dispenser."

I breathed a sigh of relief, but then had a thought. "What happens if you don't play the final hole?"

Sydney's brows furled. "That wouldn't happen, because it's specially designed just for The Worshipful Order. We don't have a single member who isn't an ace, who wouldn't finish simply as a matter of pride. I'd never let just any old Joe or Josephina Blow down here. This isn't a course for amateurs who'd give up and walk off without finishing their play."

I was getting a creepy feeling under my skin. Perhaps it would help to resort to Sydney-speak. "But theoretically speaking, what would happen, say … equationwise and all?"

Sydney frowned. "Well, I constructed my setup in accord with the Time/Energy Uncertainty principle. When the delta-T—meaning time—gets very big, then the delta-E—the energy—gets very small. The course has to be finished within a certain amount of time or the workings in the sub-basement can't extract enough information to nail down delta-E."

I had no idea what she was talking about, except that the course had a time limit. "And not finishing the final hole would leave the time-frame for completion …?" I prompted

"Open-ended." Sydney hesitated. "Potentially infinite. The computer—the sub-basement workings—would strain to gather impossibly vast amounts of information so that it could delineate the precise and ever-tinier energy."

"Which would mean …?" Christ, this was like pulling teeth.

"That it might start sapping quantum information out of a neighboring universe."

"The outside would come inside, to us?" I was trying to wrap my mind around all this.

"And I suppose our insides would bleed out to them," Sydney reflected, unconcerned. "But we're talking strictly theoretical. I'm the only one who can release the golf balls and initiate the process. I've set a generous time parameter for playing the entire course. Mini-golfers like the members of our little troop shouldn't have any trouble getting through in a fraction of that time. And the first time they play through, I'll help them in the same way I'm helping you now. Oh, but look!" She glanced down at her wristwatch. "Time is getting short."

She grinned as I paled. "Just kidding."

She continued to tease me as we finished the second nine holes. Sydney's amusement at my fears went a long way toward allaying them. By the time we returned to the foyer, I felt as though my brain had been turned inside out, but I was no longer anxious.

"What do you think?" Sydney asked anxiously as we stripped off our gloves and goggles.

"I think it's amazing. Indescribable."

"This is just the bare bones. I know it lacks flare, needs art. I was hoping you'd help. Especially with the art. I want the whole package to be perfect when I show it to Morgan and the rest of The Worshipful Order. I've been trying to think what would work for the visual theme. Maybe astronomics: planets and moons, different kinds of nebula …"

"Whoa there, Sydney," I interrupted. "Hang on a minute. You said you wanted my input. Can you take an honest critique?"

Sydney dwindled. "Yes. I can."

"Do you have beers in the fridge?

Sydney nodded.

"Then pop us a couple and let's sit down and talk." I patted the seat of one of the meltingly soft cognac-brown sofas.

When we got settled, I proceeded. "First off, I think you need to do more with the course in a really basic way—the parts that aren't physics-tweaked. Once you get the hang of how to finesse the Mr. Science stuff, they're not all that hard. Throw in some loop-the-loops, a 'windmill' obstacle, some 'puff' holes—that kind of thing. Make the whole course hard. But, um, not so hard that you push your time limits."

Sydney ignored my last comment, pulled a scorecard and pencil out of a vest pocket, and started scribbling notes. "This is good. Very good. I got so wrapped up in the quantum factors that I forgot about basic miniature golf topography."

"Next. Yes, it does need visuals, but not what you think. Astronomy is an excellent idea, but I recommend that you not pick a theme at all. Wait and let Morgan do that."

Sydney blinked, confused. "But why? I built this course because Morgan inspired me. I want him to like it. If it's only half-finished, it'll look half-assed."

How could I explain? I hoped that Sydney possessed a generous-enough spirit. "Sydney, Morgan isn't going to feel pride. He's going to feel defeated. You've already trumped his Ultimate Course before he's even dreamed it up. He could never in a million years come up with something like this. He'll love your course, admire it, but it could break his heart and ruin him."

"That's not what I intended!" Sydney protested.

"I know that. Look, all the stuff that still needs work here—how would you feel about letting Morgan in on it almost as is, letting him take it to the next level for you? It would end up as a collaboration. Hell, let's be honest—Morgan might try to take most of the credit for it, but since this is never going to be a commercial course, and only be accessible to the group, what does that matter, right?"

Sydney nodded. "And the fact that it'll never be commercial … maybe he won't think that it's infringing on his dreams," she said.

Sydney was getting the big picture. "So what do you think? Could you live with that?" I asked.

Looking happy again, Sydney stuck out a hand for the shaking. "It's a deal."

We shook on it.


 

For the next couple of weekends we did some minimal grunt work: toughened up some of the easier holes, and I added a few graphics and color to give players leading clues on how to negotiate some of the more difficult weird-science portions of the course. Instead of using paint, Sydney introduced me to nifty nanoscale particles of semiconductors called quantum dots. They come in every bright color imaginable. In one stroke I mastered pointillism. I programmed them to change color when the balls tracked correctly toward the holes, and laid in a flow of them in the foyer area both to lead the eye toward the entrance to the course and to disguise the depressingly institutional security door.

Besides that, we still had to get the work done on the Rosicrucian job.

Finally, on a bright, balmy Sunday, we unveiled Sydney's masterpiece to Morgan and the rest of The Worshipful Order. We used the excuse that we'd gone as far as we could on our Rosicrucian assignment and were ready to show it and hand it over to Morgan. Which we did.

Then we said that the Rosicrucian gig had percolated a whole bunch of ideas in Sydney's wacky little brain, but that we'd both decided they were too risky to put into a public course. That Sydney had rigged up a full set of holes in the basement to see what Morgan thought of them, if they had any potential.

We descended to the foyer. Sydney was on tenterhooks the entire time, but the rest of the group dove into the spirit of the thing as Sydney and I pulled knickers and tam-o-shanters out of the drawers and helped them dress.

Then on to the greens. When we all stepped through the door and out into the borderless blackness of the course, with the eighteen holes lit up like individual stage sets in a cavernous theater, the only sound was a universal sigh of awe and appreciation. I glanced over to where Sydney and Morgan stood next to each other. Sydney was glowing, transformed by the beauty that infuses any human being when they feel loved and understood and appreciated. As for Morgan … Morgan had a calculating gleam in his eye and was grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

I'd advised Sydney to walk them through all the holes before letting them play, giving them a better sense of the gestalt than I'd had. Not surprisingly, by five holes' worth of Sydney carrying on in high-strung, hyperdrive physics-speak, everyone's eyes were glazing over.

Finally we trotted them back to the first hole. Sydney unlocked the golf ball dispenser and let them loose. It was like letting a bunch of pigs loose in a mud hole—heaven on earth.

Trouble was, Sydney kept dashing back and forth between the players, butting in, kibitzing. I knew it was just happiness, excitement, and overenthusiasm, but it tended to distract everybody. Not to mention that no one was used to this much communication from the usually nearly silent Sydney—it was like having to deal with a verbal Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

At last Morgan marched Sydney over to me, one arm tightly clamped around the physicist's narrow shoulders. "This woman is a genius. Take this genius back to that lovely room for a congratulatory drink. I'll bet the fridge there is filled to bursting with nice cool somethings," Morgan said, thrusting Sydney at me.

I dragged Sydney to the foyer and opened a Red Hook for each of us.

Sydney was distraught at having been ejected.

"Cheer up, Syd. They're not rejecting you."

Sydney morosely accepted the beer. "I so wanted to see them experience it for the first time."

"Me, too. But both of us were driving them crazy." Although I hadn't done anything, it seemed politic to help shoulder the blame. "You wouldn't want to spoil it for them, would you?" I said as I sank into the buttery soft leather of the sofa.

A deep sad sigh from Sydney, sitting down next to me. "No, I suppose not."

For the first time in what seemed like months, I had a long moment of quiet peace. I felt myself nodding off, smiled and let myself go.

But you know how a nodding-off nap goes. Sooner or later you hit a nod that dips too fast. It snaps you awake—stark raving awake. I wiped the back of my hand on a thin layer of sweat beading my forehead, blinked, looked around. Something felt wrong. I looked down at the Heineken in my other hand. Couldn't be that. I'd only drunk half the bottle. The professionally framed antique lithographs of fruit crate labels looked fine. The high-gloss saltillo tiles on the floor were as they should be. I rubbed my moist hands on the teal blue velvet of the sofa.

"Sydney, I feel queasy."

"Me, too."

"Think it's all the stress?"

"Maybe."

"I dozed off. How long have they been in there?"

"Quite a while. But they're still well within the time parameters. I haven't heard anything from the warning system."

We'd installed a PA system with grandfather clock chimes to ring when the time limits grew short.

I still felt nervous. "Maybe we should go check on them?"

Just then they started dribbling out, one at a time. They were all of them high, abuzz with the excitement of the course. I should have felt better, but I didn't.

Something glimmered at the edge of my field of vision. I looked, and realized that the quantum dot pattern designed to lead the eye toward the entrance to the course was moving. It shimmered from the door back out into the foyer. As I watched, the color changed from the peaceful forest green I remembered programming it. It became an icy violet at the door then shifted through every color in the spectrum to end with a deep, bright, hot, angry red that spread out to stain the walls. The hair raised on the back of my neck.

I glanced over at Sydney. She'd pulled out a pocket calculator and was frantically crunching numbers, then every few seconds looking at her wristwatch.

The ceiling started dipping down and then back up, changing from plaster to wood to awful fluffy sparkly stuff. The coffee table kept shifting around the room, but without moving.

Now everybody had returned but Morgan. Things were getting worse. The walls buckled in and out, became eggshell thin. A halogen-strength light was burning through them. The others finally noticed, too. They got really, really quiet. "What's going on?" squeaked somebody. "Is this part of the course?"

All of a sudden there seemed to be too many people in the room. Terry sat down on the floral print chintz-covered sofa, looking nauseous. "This reminds me of a Simpsons episode, but I can't remember which one."

I did remember: the one where Homer keeps going into the time machine in the basement and keeps returning to alternate realities.

I grabbed Sydney's arm. "Syd, could this be a time blip after all?" I whispered in her ear.

I didn't whisper quietly enough.

"A time blip?" someone asked, voice quavering.

"No, it can't be that, because of the Principle of Self-Consistency," I said—I did remember that much of what Sydney had told me. The entire group looked at me blankly. "Or something like that," I added lamely.

"This doesn't make any sense," Sydney muttered, still pounding away on the calculator—I didn't know fingers could punch that hard. "It's acting as though the equipment in the sub-basement is trying to extract too much energy information, but the time limits are nowhere near elapsing. So the delta-E can't be that small."

Just then the door opened, and Morgan stepped through.

"What have you done?" screamed Sydney, leaping at Morgan.

He jumped, startled. "Nothing," he said. I noticed that one of his hands had briefly and automatically covered the argyle vest's pocket. "It's a wonderful course, Syd." He looked around at the now-disintegrating room. "Hey … what the hell is going on out here?"

"Sydney, check his pockets," I said.

Morgan looked shocked, then guilty, then sheepish as Sydney frisked him. Then surprised when all Sydney pulled out was the pencil and scorecard set that was part of everybody's golf outfit. Sydney held them up and stared at me with a "what gives?" expression.

"Morgan, what did you have in that pocket? Or what did you think you had?" I asked.

Morgan went back to looking sheepish. "I could tell that the balls were part of the setup. I thought I'd take one home and try to work out some ideas with it in my backyard. I put it in my pocket—I didn't think it would be a big deal. It must have fallen out."

"Morgan, it's a hologram. I told you it was a hologram," Sydney snarled.

"But I could feel it. I could pick it up to carry it from one hole to the next. I thought it was more like a waldo setup."

I thought Sydney would strangle him. "That's what the gloves are for—VR equipment that allows you to feel as well as manipulate the sub-basement atoms."

All of a sudden, the full implication of Morgan picking up and pocketing the ball hit Sydney. "You didn't play the last hole? You. Didn't. Play. The. Last. Hole!" Sydney turned whiter than an egg, whiter than a golf ball. She whispered, "The outside is in."

I felt the blood draining from my face as well. "That means the inside is out."

Sydney looked at me, stricken. We both snapped our goggles on in unison.

Morgan is a lot bigger than either of us, but we bum's-rushed him onto the course. "Put your goggles and hats back on and get in here," I screamed over my shoulder to the rest of the group as we ran. "It'll be safer in here … I think."

Morgan's ball sat on the ground just inside the door. The course was still in place. It hadn't bled away yet into a different universe.

The eighteenth hole resembled the first hole in that the main obstacle consisted of a single wall that blocked the tee from the final. This wall, however, was transparent. Right smack dab in the middle, the wall angled out into a wedge shape. Supposedly mercifully, there was one hole apiece in both the right and left sides of the wall—holes plenty large enough to chip shot a golf ball through. The holes opened onto transparent chutes that looped downward on the other side of the wall, ostensibly to drop the ball down onto the greens on the far side. But what really happened is that they were return chutes. Hit a ball into one, and it just plopped down through the floor on the far side and then popped back up again at the tee.

"You see, it kept coming back to me. So I figured that I was meant to keep it." Morgan kept trying to excuse himself, even as holes one through five began to glow with bleeding light.

"Shut up and hit the ball!" Sydney screamed. "Hit it at the wedge!"

Morgan swung his club. The ball shot straight as an arrow. Like the bump obstacle on the Feynman diagram on the eighth hole, it hit the wedge and split. Split into two golf balls. One angled off to fly through the hole in the wall on the right, the other through the hole on the left. They bypassed the chutes and rejoined in the middle on the other side, becoming one again, rolled to a stop just short of the final hole. Morgan stroked it in. The ball disappeared like Alice down the rabbit hole. The flare sweeping through the basement subsided. The space dimmed to its customary dark cavernousness. "Just your basic two-slit experiment," Sydney explained to the trembling galley of onlookers.

She went and checked on the storage tube. All golf balls accounted for. We crept into the foyer. Everything seemed solid again. The Worshipful Order members put away their costumes and slunk out. Only Sydney and I remained.

Three beers apiece later, I felt calmed enough to say, "That was a close one."

"You can say that again," said Sydney.

"That was a close one."

We both broke down into hysterical laughter close to tears.

I mentally touched base with my life. My work, my house, my passions. I thought of the Eggo-rama sitting on the shelf of my home studio, not worked on since the day that Sydney had called. I saw it clearly in my mind's eye: a half-finished three-dimensional representation of Michelangelo's Last Judgment.

"Sydney?"

"Uh?"

"Sydney, something is still wrong."

We sat there and thought about it, then looked at each other in horror.

"The Continuing Player Factor," Sydney moaned.

All of the members of The Worshipful Order had eventually completed both of the courses, tying off the knots. But without us there monitoring them, it hadn't been so much like pigs in a mud bath as a pack of foxes loose in a henhouse. Who knew how many times they'd replayed the greens before finally finishing hole eighteen? No wonder things had started going wonky even before Morgan tried to palm his golf ball. They had been very bad boys and girls.

We phoned them up and made them come back.

"This course was designed to be played sequentially," Sydney explained, too weary to sound as piqued as I knew she had to be. "That way there's only one temporal relationship between each pair of holes, and that's what I based the timer on. But if you do the same hole twice before completing the loop, the number of relationships starts going up exponentially."

We made them admit to and try to figure out how many times they'd freebied the holes. We tried to use their score cards as an aid, but they had lied, lied, and lied, so the scorecards were useless. What I didn't mention to Sydney—which I was sure had occurred to her and she was afraid to mention to me—was that I had grave doubts that we were doing the math with the same number of players that we'd originally started with.

Sydney made some calculations, thought we were close. "If it's not our exact earlier reality, it'll be good enough. Besides, we won't know any different anyway."

They had to get back in their costumes. They replayed the holes in the order that Sydney told them—over and over and over. By the time they finished, I felt better.


 

Sydney dismantled the course. Morgan talked her into rebuilding it according to Einsteinian physics instead of quantum mechanics. I'm told the new course is just as strange as the old one, but safe. Among other things, Sydney put the equivalent of a chip in the golf balls so that if you try to go back on any of the course before finishing all the holes, the ball latches down to the tee like a limpet on a rock and starts letting out ear-shattering "Ah-OOO-gahs." Sydney and Morgan have partnered up and plan on taking the course commercial.

I haven't seen the new course. I'm haunted by shadows of partial memories of what might have been my past. I know that shouldn't be possible. If our reality shifted, my memory should have shifted with it, whole and complete. For a while I worried about my sanity. I read obsessively about physics. Eventually I stumbled upon the writings of a physicist—Fred Wolf—who postulated the possibility that visionaries are people who can "marry" counter-time quantum wave streams coming from future time sources. If what Sydney said about time constantly traveling back and forth in small blips is true, then maybe there are visionaries who can "marry" wave streams coming from past time sources, too. And maybe I'm one of them. That's what I like to tell myself.

It took me a while before I could bring myself to attend any "Worshipful Order of Serendipitous Pursuits, Executed With Fiendish Ingenuity" get-togethers again. For a long time I retreated to my studio at home, immersing myself in my own obsessions, not wanting to come out from the beautiful, safe insides of my sugar eggs.

At last I did return. To find, reassuringly, things mostly unchanged. Still beer-and-pizza parties in Morgan's backyard with the same thirteen partners-in-crime as always—what Pat, our supermarket manager member, likes to call "the coven." The big difference was that Morgan's backyard was now a newly planted lawn. No shifting reality there—he and Sydney do all their work now in Sydney's "Bat Cave." And without Morgan's interest dominating, there's more focus on pitching in on other people's serendipitous pursuits—I arrived that first time to find everyone gathered around stapling and collating a program for one of Dale's Klezmer concerts.

I helped for a while, felt myself perking up. The Worshipful Order was fun again. On the lunch break I got a beer and a slice of pizza and sat down next to Jamie, an airport traffic controller, who after Sydney was the quietest member of the group. As I recalled, Jamie's vacation-time passion was to run around the country documenting food art: Spam sculptures at the annual national Spamborree, butter sculptures at county fairs in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Jell-O art shows in Eugene. That kind of thing.

"How's the photography going?" I asked. "Got any good trips planned this year?"

"Yes," Jamie said shyly. She hesitated. "You know, nobody here as ever asked me that before. Once a year I drag in my photo album and set it out for people to look at, but hardly anyone ever takes a peek."

"I do. I have," I protested.

"Yes, I know. Maybe that's because you're the professional artist in the group," Jamie smiled in gratitude.

I blushed.

"I've never told this to anyone here before, but the photography isn't really my big hobby," Jamie continued. "I mean, I love it, but that's just recording something that other people do. My real passion is something else, something that I do. Sort of an art thing."

I'd never noticed before how startlingly green Jamie's eyes were.

"Tell me. I'd love to know."

"I … I do this thing called pysanky. It's …"

My heart stood still in my chest. "Ukrainian egg decorating."

"You know it?"

"It's beautiful stuff. Jamie, I have to make a confession, too. My real avocation isn't model railroads. It's making sugar-egg dioramas."

Jamie clasped my hands. I must be a Wolfian quantum visionary, for suddenly I was visited with images of expanding my prowess into building dioramas within real—not sugar—chicken, geese, turkey, and ostrich eggs. Of Jamie learning how to pipe Ukrainian patterns in sugar paste onto my Easter eggs.

"My insides," I breathed.

"My outsides," Jamie whispered.

Could it be love?

Koo-koo ka-choo.

Author's note: I never would have written this if it hadn't been for Richard Butner. A few years ago he wrote a wonderful short story that he said he'd constructed by stringing together jokes and hilarious anecdotes. It had never occurred to me that one could write that way. Although I didn't follow his lead exactly, it opened my mind to the possibility of assembling things that amused, charmed, or entertained me, and then concocting a narrative out of these various elements. Thanks are also due to all the folks who attended Walter Jon Williams' Rio Hondos writers' workshop this year for their constructive critiquing—especially Ken Wharton, who navigated me across the perilous waters of quantum physics.