Bellwether Read online

  “That sounds like Flip,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was looking at him.

  When you spend as much time as I do analyzing fads and fashions, you get so you can spot them at first sight: ecohippie, jogger, Wall Street M.B.A., urban terrorist. Dr. O’Reilly wasn’t any of them. He was about my age and about my height. He was wearing a lab coat and corduroy pants that had been washed so often the wale was completely worn off on the knees. They’d shrunk, too, halfway up his ankles, and there was a pale line where they’d been let down.

  The effect, especially with the Coke-bottle glasses, should have been science geek, but it wasn’t. For one thing, there were the freckles. For another, he was wearing a pair of once-white canvas sneakers with holes in the toes and frayed seams. Science geeks wear black shoes and white socks. He wasn’t even wearing a pocket protector, though he should have been. There were two splotches of ballpoint ink and a puddle of Magic Marker on the breast pocket of the lab coat, and one of the patch pockets was out at the bottom. And there was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on, that made it impossible for me to categorize him.

  I squinted at him, trying to figure out exactly what it was, so long he looked at me curiously. “I took the box to Dr. Turnbull’s office,” I said hastily, “but she’s gone home.”

  “She had a grant meeting today,” he said. “She’s very good at getting grants.”

  “The most important quality for a scientist these days,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling wryly. “Wish I had it”

  “I’m Sandra Foster,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Sociology.”

  He wiped his hand on his corduroys and shook my hand. “Bennett O’Reilly.”

  And that was odd, too. He was my age. His name should be Matt or Mike or, God forbid, Troy. Bennett.

  I was staring again. I said, “And you’re a biologist?”

  “Chaos theory.”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I said.

  He grinned. “The way I did it, yes. Which is why my project lost its funding and I had to come to work for HiTek.”

  Maybe that accounted for the oddness, and corduroys and canvas sneakers were what chaos theorists were wearing these days. No, Dr. Applegate, over in Chem, had been in chaos, and he dressed like everybody else in R&D: flannel shirt, baseball cap, jeans, Nikes.

  And nearly everybody at HiTek’s working out of their field. Science has its fads and crazes, like anything else: string theory, eugenics, mesmerism. Chaos theory had been big for a couple of years, in spite of Utah and cold fusion, or maybe because of it, but both of them had been replaced by genetic engineering. If Dr. O’Reilly wanted grant money, he needed to give up chaos and build a better mouse.

  He was stooping over the box. “I don’t have a refrigerator. I’ll have to set it outside on the porch.” He picked it up, grunting a little. “Jeez, it’s heavy. Flip probably delivered it to you on purpose so she wouldn’t have to carry it all the way down here.” He boosted it up with his corduroy knee. “Well, on behalf of Dr. Turnbull and all of Flip’s other victims, thanks,” he said, and headed into the tangle of equipment.

  A clear exit line, and, speaking of grants, I still had half those hair-bobbing clippings to sort into piles before I went home. But I was still trying to put my finger on what it was that was so unusual about him. I followed him through the maze of stuff.

  “Is Flip responsible for this?” I said, squeezing between two stacks of boxes.

  “No,” he said. “I’m setting up my new project.” He stepped over a tangle of cords.

  “Which is?” I brushed aside a hanging plastic net.

  “Information diffusion.” He opened a door and stepped outside onto a porch. “It should keep cold enough out here,” he said, setting it down.

  “Definitely,” I said, hugging my arms against a chilly October wind. The porch faced a large, enclosed paddock, fenced in on all sides by high walls and overhead with wire netting. There was a gate at the back.

  “It’s used for large-animal experiments,” Dr. O’Reilly said. “I’d hoped I’d have the monkeys by July so they could be outside, but the paperwork’s taken longer than I expected.”

  “Monkeys?”

  “The project’s studying information diffusion patterns in a troop of macaques. You teach a new skill to one of the macaques and then document its spread through the troop. I’m working with the rate of utilitarian versus nonutilitarian skills. I teach one of the macaques a nonutilitarian skill with a low ability threshold and multiple skill levels—”

  “Like the Hula Hoop,” I said.

  He set the box down just outside the door and stood up. “The Hula Hoop?”

  “The Hula Hoop, miniature golf, the twist. All fads have a low ability threshold. That’s why you never see speed chess becoming a fad. Or fencing.”

  He pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up on his nose.

  “I’m working on a project on fads. What causes them and where they come from,” I said.

  “Where do they come from?”

  “I have no idea. And if I don’t get back to work, I never will.” I stuck out my hand again. “Nice to have met you, Dr. O’Reilly.” I started back through the maze.

  He followed me, saying thoughtfully, “I never thought of teaching them to do a Hula Hoop.”

  I was going to say I didn’t think there’d be room in here, but it was almost six, and I at least had to get my piles up off the floor and into file folders before I went home.

  I told Dr. O’Reilly goodbye and went back up to Sociology. Flip was standing in the hall, her hands on the hips of her leather skirt.

  “I came back and you’d left” she said, making it sound like I’d left her sinking in quicksand. “I was down in Bio,” I said.

  “I had to come all the way back from Personnel,” she said, tossing her hair. “You said to come back.”

  “I gave up on you and delivered the package myself,” I said, waiting for her to protest and say delivering the mail was her job. I should have known better. That would have meant admitting she was actually responsible for something.

  “I looked all over your office for it,” she said virtuously. “While I was waiting for you, I picked up all that stuff you left on the floor and threw it in the trash.”

  the old curiosity shop (1840—41)—–Book fad caused by serialization of Dickens’s story about a little girl and her hapless grandfather, who are thrown out of their shop and forced to wander through England. Interest in the book was so great that people in America thronged the pier waiting for the ship from England to bring the next installment and, unable to wait for the ship to dock, shouted to the passengers aboard, “Did Little Nell die?” She did, and her death reduced readers of all ages, sexes, and degrees of toughness to agonies of grief. Cowboys and miners in the West sobbed openly over the last pages and an Irish member of Parliament threw the book out of a train and burst into tears.

  The source of the Thames doesn’t look like it. It looks like a pasture, and not even a soggy pasture. Not a single water plant grows there. If it weren’t for an old well, filled up with stones, it would be impossible to even locate the spot. Cows, not being interested in stones, wander lazily across and around the source, munching buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace, unaware that anything significant is beginning beneath their feet.

  Science is even less obvious. It starts with an apple falling, a teakettle boiling. Alex Fleming, taking a last glance around his lab as he left for a long weekend, wouldn’t have seen anything significant in the window left half open, in the sooty air from Paddington Station drifting in. Getting ready to gather up his notes, to tell his assistant to leave everything alone, to lock the door, he wouldn’t have noticed that one of the petri dishes’ lids had slid a fraction of an inch to the side. His mind would have already been on his vacation, on the errands he had to run, on going home.

  So was mine. The only thing I was aware of was that Flip had thoughtfully crump
led each clipping into a wad before stuffing them into the trash can, and that there was no way I could get them all smoothed out tonight, and, as a result, I was not only oblivious to the first event in a chain of events that was going to lead to a scientific discovery, but I was about to miss the second one, too. And the third.

  I set the trash can on the lab table on top of my jitterbug research, sealed the top with duct tape, stuck on a sign that said “Do not touch. This means you, Flip,” and went out to my car. Halfway out of the parking lot I thought about Flip’s ability to read, turned around, and went back to my office to get the trash can.

  The phone was ringing when I opened the door. “Howdy,” Billy Ray said when I picked it up. “Guess where I am.”

  “In Wyoming?” I said. Billy Ray was a rancher from Laramie I’d gone out with a while back when I was researching line dancing.

  “In Montana,” he said. “Halfway between Lodge Grass and Billings.” Which meant he was calling me on his cellular phone. “I’m on my way to look at some Targhees,” he said. “They’re the hottest thing going.”

  I assumed they were also cows. During my line dancing phase, the hottest thing going had been Aberdeen Longhorns. Billy Ray is a very nice guy and a walking compendium of country-western fads. Two birds with one stone.

  “I’m going to be in Denver this Saturday,” he said through the stutter that meant his cellular phone was starting to get out of range. “For a seminar on computerized ranching.” I wondered idly what its acronym would be. Computerized Operational Wrangling?

  “So I wondered if we could grab us some dinner. There’s a new prairie place in Boulder.”

  And prairie was the latest thing in cuisine. “Sorry,” I said, looking at the trash can on my lab table. “I’ve had a setback. I’m going to have to work this weekend.”

  “You should just feed everything onto your computer and let it do the work. I’ve got my whole ranch on my PC.”

  “I know,” I said, wishing it were that simple.

  “You need to get yourself one of those text scanners,” Billy Ray said, the hum becoming more insistent. “That way you don’t even have to type it in.”

  I wondered if a text scanner could read crumpled.

  The hum was becoming a crackle. “Well, maybe next time,” he sort of said, and passed into cellular oblivion.

  I put down my noncellular phone and picked up the trash can. Under it, half buried in my jitterbug research, were the library books I should have taken back two days ago. I piled them on top of the stretched duct tape, which held, and carried them and the trash can out to the car and drove to the library.

  Since I spend my working days studying trends, many of which are downright disgusting, I feel it’s my duty after work to encourage the trends I’d like to see catch on, like signaling before you change lanes, and chocolate cheesecake. And reading.

  Also, libraries are great places to observe trends in bestsellers, and library management. And librarian attire.

  “What’s on the reserve list this week, Lorraine?” I asked the librarian at the desk. She was wearing a black-and-white-mottled sweatshirt with the logo UDDERLY FANTASTIC on it, and a pair of black-and-white Holstein cow earrings.

  “Led On by Fate,” she said. “Still. The reserve list’s a foot long. You are”—she counted down her computer screen—“fifth in line. You were sixth, but Mrs. Roxbury canceled.”

  “Really?” I said, interested. Book fads don’t usually die out until the sequel comes out, at which point the readers realize they’ve been had. Witness Oliver’s Story and Slow Waltz at Cedar Bend. Which is why the Gone with the Wind trend managed to last nearly six years, resulting in thousands of unhappy little boys having to live down the name of Rhett, or even worse, Ashley. If Margaret Mitchell’d come out with Slow Waltz at Tara Bend it would have been all over. Which reminded me, I should check to see if there’d been any drop-off in Gone with the Wind’s popularity since the publication of Scarlett.

  “Don’t get your hopes up about Fate,” Lorraine said. “Mrs. Roxbury only canceled because she said she couldn’t bear to wait for it and bought her own copy.” She shook her head, and her cows swung back and forth. “What do people see in it?”

  Yes, well, and what did they see in Little Lord Fauntleroy back in the 1890s, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s sickly sweet tale of a little boy with long curls who inherited an English castle? Whatever it was, it made the novel into a best-seller and then a hit play and a movie starring Mary Pickford (she already had the long curls), started a style of velvet suits, and became the bane of an earlier generation of little boys whose mothers inflicted lace collars, curlers, and the name Cedric on them and who would have been delighted to have only been named Ashley.

  “What else is on the reserve list?”

  “The new John Grisham, the new Stephen King, Angels from Above, Brushed by an Angel’s Wing, Heavenly Encounters of the Third Kind, Angels Beside You, Angels, Angels Everywhere, Putting Your Guardian Angel to Work for You, and Angels in the Boardroom.”

  None of those counted. The Grisham and the Stephen King were only best-sellers, and the angel fad had been around for over a year.

  “Do you want me to put you on the list for any of those?” Lorraine asked. “Angels in the Boardroom is great.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “Nothing new, huh?”

  She frowned. “I thought there was something …” She checked her computer screen. “The novelization of Little Women,” she said, “but that wasn’t it.”

  I thanked her and went over to the stacks. I picked out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and a couple of mysteries, which always have simple, solvable problems like “How did the murderer get into the locked room?” instead of hard ones like “What causes trends?” and “What did I do to deserve Flip?” and then went over to the eight hundreds.

  One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be “responsive to their patrons.” This means having dozens of copies of The Bridges of Madison County and Danielle Steel, and a consequent shortage of shelf space, to cope with which librarians have taken to purging books that haven’t been checked out lately.

  “Why are you throwing out Dickens?” I’d asked Lorraine last year at the library book sale, brandishing a copy of Bleak House at her. “You can’t throw out Dickens.”

  “Nobody checked it out,” she’d said. “If no one checks a book out for a year, it gets taken off the shelves.” She had been wearing a sweatshirt that said A TEDDY BEAR IS FOREVER, and a pair of plush teddy bear earrings. “Obviously nobody read it.”

  “And nobody ever will because it won’t be there for them to check out,” I’d said. “Bleak House is a wonderful book.”

  “Then this is your chance to buy it,” she’d said.

  Well, and this was a trend like any other, and as a sociologist I should note it with interest and try to determine its origins. I didn’t. Instead, I started checking out books. All my favorites, which I’d never checked out because I had copies at home, and all the classics, and everything with an old cloth binding that somebody might want to read someday when the current trends of sentimentality and schlock are over.

  Today I checked out The Wrong Box, in honor of the day’s events, and since I’d first seen Dr. O’Reilly with his legs sticking out from under a large object, The Wizard of Oz, and then went over to the Bs to look for Bennett. The Old Wives’ Tale wasn’t there (it had probably ended up in the book sale already), but right next to Beckett was Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which meant The Old Wives’ Tale might just be misshelved.

  I started down the shelves, looking for something chubby, clothbound, and untouched. Borges; Wuthering Heights, which I had already checked out this year; Rupert Brooke. And Robert Browning. The Complete Works. It wasn’t Arnold Bennett, but it was both clothbound and fat, and it still had an old-fashioned pocket and checkout card in it. I grabbed it and the Borges and took them to th
e checkout desk.

  “I remembered what else was on the reserve list,” Lorraine said. “New book. Guide to the Fairies.”

  “What is it, a children’s book?”

  “No.” She took it off the reserve shelf. “It’s about the presence of fairies in our daily lives.”

  She handed it to me. It had a picture of a fairy peeking out from behind a computer on the cover, and it fit one of the criteria for a book fad: It was only 80 pages long. The Bridges of Madison County was Jonathan Livingston Seagull was 93, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a huge fad back in 1934, was only 84.

  It was also drivel. The chapter titles were “How to Get in Touch with Your Inner Fairy,” “How Fairies Can Help Us Get Ahead in the Corporate World,” and “Why You Shouldn’t Pay Attention to Unbelievers.”

  “You’d better put me on the list,” I said. I handed her the Browning.

  “This hasn’t been checked out in nearly a year,” she said.

  “Really?” I said. “Well, it is now.” And took my Borges, Browning, and Baum and went to get some dinner at the Earth Mother.

  poulaines (1350—1480)—–Soft leather or cloth shoes with elongated points. Originating in Poland (hence poulaine; the English called them crackowes after Cracow), or more logically brought back from the Middle East by Crusaders, they became the craze at all the European courts. The pointed toes became more elaborate, stuffed with moss and shaped into lions’ claws or eagles’ beaks, and progressively longer, to the point that it was impossible to walk without tripping over them and completely impossible to kneel, and gold and silver chains had to be attached to the knees to hold up the ends. Translated into armor, the poulaine fad became downright dangerous: Austrian knights at the battle of Sempach in 1386 were riveted to the spot by their elongated iron shoes and were forced to strike off the points with their swords or be caught flat-footed, so to speak. Supplanted by the square-toed, ankle-strapped duck’s-bill shoe, which promptly became ridiculously wide.