Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins Page A

locomotion,” Conch Shell put in, “we believe that we can boost your vibrations.”
    Like all inanimate objects everywhere, the three displaced articles from the Airstream turkey knew instinctively what the seashell was talking about.
     
     
     
    “We need a little while to mull this over,” Can o’ Beans had said.
    “What the hell for?” objected Dirty Sock.
    “ Please , Mr. Sock,” said Can o’ Beans, somewhat exasperated.
    “Very well,” Conch Shell said. “We shall leave you to discuss the matter in private.”
    “But do be quick about it,” snapped Painted Stick.
    Can o’ Beans had stopped the pair as they were leaving the cave. “About this place, Jerusalem,” he said. “You might be interested in knowing that there’s a lot of strife and unrest there nowadays. In fact, I get the idea that it’s a dangerous place to be.”
    “Oh, dear,” said Spoon.
    “Yeah. How ’bout that?” asked Dirty Sock.
    Painted Stick barely paused in his exit. “Jerusalem has always been torn by strife. If the blood in the streets does not reach to my first blue band, then it could not be as dangerous now as it used to be.”
     
     
     
    To Painted Stick’s liking, the election had been fast and favorable: two votes to join in the journey, one abstention. Can o’ Beans was far too curious to turn down an opportunity to see more of the world, perilous or not, while the sock couldn’t see where he had much to lose: anything was preferable to dry rot. Numb with apprehension, Spoon was incapable of decision. While her companions briefly argued the pros and cons, she daydreamed about chocolate pudding soaking up cream, about the spray from the young Jesuit’s trigger-tight mouth, whitecapped inside with eager saliva.
    Once informed of the trio’s compliance, Painted Stick and Conch Shell immediately began preparations for the frequency-raising ritual. It would require intense effort and concentration on the part of everyone involved.
    The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, “dead,” to humans only because of our neuromuscular chauvinism. We are so enamored of our own activity range that we blind ourselves to the fact that most of the action in the universe is unfolding outside our range, occurring at speeds so much slower or faster than our own that it is hidden from us as if by a . . . a veil.
    We regard the objects that polka-dot our daily lives as if they were rigid, totally predictable solids, frozen inferiorly in time and space. Yet, how can we be so sure that we know what things are doing when we aren’t looking at them? When our eyesight is inadequate to truly look at them?
    For example, here is a can of Van Camp’s pork and beans. Familiar? Take a closer look at the label. Forget the ingredients list (including the sugar and corn syrup you may not have guessed this product contains); forget the heating instructions, the declaration of weight (twenty-one ounces or 595 grams, a little heavier than the brain of a horse); forget the modified Old West typeface in which this information is printed, cow-face white and rodeo yellow against a background of bandanna red. Look deeper.
    You’ll require a magnifying glass, which, incidentally, glass being essentially a liquid, is hardly the passive, inactive object we regard it, either: it just drips and flows at rates we normally fail to register. In any case, the label is paper. When seen close up, it is a rough, tangled bog of wood chips, fragments of hemp, linen fibers, asbestos fibers, wool fibers, and clots of ink, oil, and glue. Each of these substances has its own formal characteristics, and if you look more closely (you must switch to an electronic microscope), if you examine the molecular structure of each, the variety in form—pyramids and rings, spirals and stacks and zigzag chains—is dazzling. And that’s the opening act. For the main show, you must look deeper still.
    On the atomic and subatomic levels, weird