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—With thanks to Susan Orrett and Zoe King

Chuck’s Bucket

By CHRIS OFFUTT

Sometimes a man makes such a hash of his life that his only

recourse is to bend the temporal fabric of reality itself!

I pumped air into my bicycle tire and rode slowly across town, stop-ping twice to adjust my glasses. The cheap tape on the arms was giving out. To make matters worse, I could not see through the left lens, which naturally was my better eye. Such diminished capacity a year ago would have embarrassed me, but I am now undergoing what appears to be a midlife crisis of severe parameters. I recently broke all contact with my family except being cc’ed by e-mail betwixt my siblings. Next I left my wife but only managed to move a few blocks away. To top things off, my new place has a ghost that has begun to haunt me nightly.

At the University of Iowa campus, I leaned my bike beside the Van Allen building, named for the physics professor who’d discovered the Van Allen belt in the night sky, and also inventor of the roc-coon—half rocket, half balloon. Several years ago, a Chinese grad student went on a rampage and murdered several physics professors here. Now the security is tight, but I’d recently taught fiction writing as an adjunct professor at UI and still had a faculty ID to show the guard. I waited half an hour for Professor Charles Andrews to emerge from his lab.

I’d met Chuck in a local low-stakes poker game that had gone on for many years in Iowa City. He was the fish, the absolute worst player at the table, but charming and affable because he truly didn’t care about winning. He was there to study chance itself. He’d played cards with John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Richard Feynman. Chuck was impressed that I knew the work of all three men. Since the game, we met periodically for lunch and talked about my writing and his research.

Last night the ghost had woken me several times, and at dawn I stepped on my glasses, which had fallen from the nightstand. Then my car wouldn’t start. I could get by on a single-speed bicycle and duct-taped spectacles, but the lens kept popping free of the twisted frame. I tried to glue the lens in place and only managed to smear the glass until it was translucent. I sat at my computer to work on a short story. It was about a guy who got himself cloned but the clone died and started haunting him every night. For two weeks I’d been unable to get past the opening.

After half an hour of self-torture, I called Chuck, seeking information about clones.

“Clones suck,” he had said on the phone. “The ultimate goal of clone research is to produce an army of Swoffies.”

“What’s that?”

“They cloned the most elite military specimen—a marine scout-sniper named Swofford—and now they just crank out Swoffies like a Xerox machine.”

“Well, maybe I can use them in my story.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “It’s classified information just to know the term ‘Swoffie.’ You do and they’ll come after you.”

“Well, it’s really a ghost story anyhow.”

His diffident tone changed to sharp interest.

“Why ghosts, Chris?”

“It’s kind of complicated.”

“So’s quantum physics, but I manage to stay afloat.”

“It’s personal,” I said.

“Try me.”

“I think my place is haunted.”

“Was it always?”

“No, since about a month.”

“Come to my lab as soon as you can.”

I agreed and hung up the phone, surprised by Chuck’s curiosity about something as absurd as a ghost. Any excuse not to write was sadly welcome, and I rode my bike to his office.

He came striding down the hall, his white lab coat billowing like an old-time cloak. He vouched for me at the first guard booth, then guided me through a series of security points to what was obviously his working office, an unbelievably cluttered mess reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s studio. A narrow aisle led through the knee-high debris of paper, books, drawings, empty pop cans, and candy bar wrappers. The walls held chalkboards filled with equations. There was no tech equipment in sight, no machines, not even a computer. Chuck became visibly relaxed in the disarray,