George was midway between the ages of five and six when the Travelling Salesman paid the Ramone household a visit. Mother was out in the back yard, gardening. It was May; she did a lot of that. Father was still dead, as he had been for the past three years. George must've been watching television, or something similar, when the Salesman rang the bell. Technically George shouldn't have answered the door; Mother was very strict about the 'don't talk to strangers' thing. George wasn't too worried, however; traditionally, kidnappers and child molesters and white slavery rings (George had picked up some very odd ideas from the evening news while growing up) approached one on the street, not at one's front door. So he opened it.

This Salesman stood there with a soulful, kicked-puppy eagerness to please on his face. He looked to be about 35 or 40, tallish, long and drawn out, like taffy. Long face, long arms, long legs, generally long. He had a blocky sort of face, which curved only when it absolutely had to, a blunt nose, wide, thin-lipped mouth, big eyes behind bigger glasses, square and chunky with massive black plastic frames held together with a bit of white tape on one side. He was wearing a battered brown hat like a soggy pork pie slouching back on his head, a rumpled brown suit, brown suspenders, brown tie, a white shirt with a stain on the collar shaped like Norway.

'Good day, sir,' he said with mock solemnity, touching his hat. 'Is the lady of the house in?'

'Why certainly, my good man, wait here just a moment, won't you,' is what George in later years would remember saying, though he had no doubt that in reality it was more like 'Um. Wait here. I'll ask Mommy.'

You must remember, this was 1982. Door-to-door salesmen didn't exist outside of old cartoons. He ran out back to find Mother digging around in what eventually would become a flower bed, and tell her that the man at the door was looking for a lady. She pulled off her stained work gloves and went to see. George followed along, deeply curious about this unexpected intrusion into their lives. The Salesman touched his hat again when she came to the door, brandishing in his other hand a large, scarred and marred brown suitcase covered in a variety of unlikely luggage stamps from long-defunct railways and steamer lines.

'Good afternoon, ma'am,' he beamed, unfolding legs from his case like a card table and popping open the lid. 'I represent the Delphi Encyclopædia Company, and I'm here to make you a very special offer on the finest set of home reference materials money can buy. Highly complete and up-to-date,' he shot out rapid-fire in a flat Midwestern accent, 'they'll give you the power of a major library right in your very own living room. Take a look at this volume.' He pulled a thick brown book from his case, flipping through the pages faster than anyone, himself included, could follow; he obviously had his spiel long since committed to memory. 'Washington state, Washington DC, Washington, George, life of, Wisconsin, primary exports of, wombat, life cycle of--everything you could ever need to know, right here at your fingertips. Such an attractive volume, too. Take a look at the quality of that binding. Be the envy of your neighborhood, and at a low, affordable price, too, payable in easy monthly installments...'

'Really,' Mother finally broke in, head spinning, 'I'm not really interested in encyclopedias right now. Sorry.'

'No?' He didn't seem surprised. 'I notice you have a young son, ma'am, pardon me for intruding; think of what a benefit these books could be to his education. Any question he could ever ask answered for him right in here...'

'No, thank you,' Mother said more resolutely.

'Well, ma'am, since I'm already here,' he said, stuffing the book back in his case, 'I also represent the Bloch-Pfitzer Brush Co., Ltd.,' speaking the abbreviations, 'manufacturer of the finest and most complete set of brushes on the market. Brush your hair, brush your teeth, brush your furniture, brush your pet, even brush your husband's suit.' He wielded a dizzying assortment of brushes, big, small, fine, coarse, stiff, soft. 'Brush a horse, even. Maybe you don't think you need it now, but you never can tell...'

'No, really. I'm not interested.'

It was rather pathetic, even to one of George's few years. He obviously knew he was beaten from the start, yet he kept trying. It was, he would later reflect, like watching the charge of the Light Brigade.

'Fountain pens? Wristwatches? Portable vacuum cleaner, goes wherever you go?' All of these Mother steadfastly refused. 'Yo-yos? Tupperware? Miraculous ever-sharp knives, pure magic in any kitchen? Infinity?' With that he pulled something very, very big and very, very black from his case, which unfolded itself in too many directions at once to fill George's field of vision, a thousand billion years of time and a thousand billion light-years of space crowding in on him, everything somehow showing itself with no regard for size or scale, from the tiniest leptons and quarks, ghostly neutrinos, massless photons up to planets, stars, whole galaxies, great chains of light and matter stretching millions of parsecs through the intergalactic void, the very curvature of space itself perceptible to him like the fabric of his own shirt, supernovæ and quasars and bacteria too, the countless trillions of things ever to have lived in the history of history, up to people, their lives, and rising and falling with them whole civilisations, everything that ever was or ever would be from the greatest to the most miniscule rushing in on him at once. There in the middle of it all--for every point of infinity has an equal claim to centrality--he saw himself, neither greater nor lesser than any other corpuscle the cosmos had ever brought forth, as infinity in turn looked back on him...

Fluid of one sort or another poured from every orifice of George's body as he curled back into the position he'd held in his mother's womb six years previously. Mother, white-faced, sweating and nauseous turned away the stoop-shouldered Salesman, already packing the last of his wares back in his case, a few rogue planets and lazy summer afternoons still hovering around him. They never spoke of what had happened, though Mother went on into alcoholism, graduating eventually into heroin, whence via a dirty needle she contracted AIDS, and George would find himself forever terrified by any number larger than 57.

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©2001 Luke Gutzwiller. I really mean it. Violation may result in the unwanted collapse of your state vector. This is a work of fiction, and as such any resemblance to the music of either the Ramones or David Bowie is purely coincidental.