Free Numbers Don't Lie by Terry Bisson Page A

glass will fly together into windowpanes. Tea will get hot in the cup.”
    â€œSounds interesting,” I said. “Could even be handy. When does all this happen?”
    â€œIt’s already started,” said Wu. “The Anti-Entropic Reversal is going on right now.”
    â€œAre you sure?” I felt my Caffeine-Free Diet Cherry Coke. It was getting warmer, but shouldn’t it be getting colder? Then I looked at the clock. It was almost eleven. “Things aren’t going backward here,” I said.
    â€œOf course not, not yet,” Wu said. “It begins at the Edge of the Universe. It’s like a line of traffic starting up, or the tide turning; first it has to take up the slack, so in the beginning it will seem like nothing is happening. At what point does the tide turn? We may not notice anything for several thousand years. A blink of the eye in cosmic time.”
    I blinked. I couldn’t help thinking of the beaded seat cushion. “But wait. Is it possible that something here could already be going backward,” I asked. “Rewinding?”
    â€œNot very likely,” Wu said. “The Universe is awfully big, and . . .”
    Just then I heard a knock. “Gotta go,” I said. “There’s somebody at the door.”
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    It was Candy, in her trim Parks Department khakis. Instead of giving me, her soon-to-be-fiancé, a kiss, she walked straight to the little kerosene-powered office refrigerator and opened a Caffeine-Free Diet Cherry Coke. I knew right away that something was wrong because Candy loathes and despises Caffeine-Free Diet Cherry Coke.
    â€œAren’t we meeting for lunch?” I asked.
    â€œI got a call a few minutes ago,” she said. “From Squirrel Ridge, the nursing home. Daddy hit Buzzer.”
    I tried to look grave; I tried to hide my guilty smile. In my wishful thinking I thought I had heard “hit the buzzer” (and figured it was a local variant of “kick the bucket”). I crossed the room and took Candy’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” I lied.
    â€œYou’re not half as sorry as Buzzer is,” Candy said, already dragging me toward the door. “He’s the one with the black eye.”
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    Squirrel Ridge, the nursing home, sits in a hollow just north and east of Huntsville, overlooked by Squirrel Ridge, the mountain. It’s a modern, single-story establishment that looks like a grade school or a motel, but smells like—well, like what it is. The smell hits you as soon as you walk in the door: a dismaying mix of ordure and disorder, urine and perfume, soft food and damp towels, new vomit and old sheets, Beech-nut and Lysol pine. Next, the sounds hit you: scuffing slippers, grunts and groans, talk-show applause, the ring of dropping bedpans, the creak of wire-spoke wheels—broken by an occasional panicked shout or soul-chilling scream. It sounds as if a grim struggle is being fought at intervals, while daily life shuffles on around it. And indeed it is. A struggle to the death.
    I followed Candy to the end of a long hall, where we found her father in the dayroom, smiling sweetly, strapped in a chair in front of a TV watching Alan Jackson sing and pretend to play the guitar. “Good morning Mr. Knoydart,” I said; I could never bring myself to call him Whipper Will. In fact, I had never known the Whipper Will who was the terror of trailer parks in four counties. The man I knew, the man before us, was large but soft—beef gone to fat—with no teeth and long, thin white hair (which looked, this morning, a little grayer than usual). His pale blue eyes were fixed on the TV, and his fingers were busy stroking a paper napkin laid across his knee.
    â€œWhat happened, Daddy?” Candy asked, touching the old man’s shoulder tentatively. There was, of course, no answer. Whipper Will Knoydart hadn’t spoken to anyone