The Worst Scientist

Monday, May 21 at 11:24pm

I asked some colleagues of mine, via Facebook, who their least favorite scientists were. Familiar names popped up, such as James Watson, Thomas Edison, Dr. Frankenstein, Pythagoras, Bill Nye, Nikola Tesla. Though I didn't and don't pretend to understand the reasons behind each answer, I was relieved to find that only two mentions of my own name appeared on the list. I relayed to my friends the reason for my asking such a question:

A man came to my neighbor's house last night while I was over there bouncing words off the walls. He had a gun. He took us outside and showed us a pitch black abyss in the front yard that my neighbor and I agreed hadn't been there earlier. The gunman forced me to the edge of the abyss and told me to stare into it, and my neighbor cracked a joke about the abyss staring back into me and we both laughed. But the gunman wasn't having it. He yelled, and fired a few rounds. We zipped our lips. The gunman hummed a note I could never hope to hit, and I saw the walls of the abyss light up with faces.

"Those are the faces of the world's least favorite scientists," said the gunman. "Tell me what you see." He held the gun to my neighbor's head, so I did as he said.

"It's Philip Masons all the way down," I said. It was just awful.

The gunman nodded, then he laughed. Then he chanted something in another language, but it was a language neither my neighbor or I recognized. Between us we recognized a total of thirteen languages, so that alludes to the obscurity of the gunman's tongue. He told me to step away from the abyss and I did, because my fear of heights and unfathomable depths was so severe I thought my heart would stop.

The gunman stood by the abyss and stared into it, reciting the same few unintelligible words over and over again before tilting himself forward, tumbling headfirst into the pit. My neighbor and I rushed to the side of the abyss to see the gunman falling through a sea of faces, all my own, as he shouted, "I am the ghost of science! Descending into realms of failure!"

His falling body was visible for quite a few minutes longer. As it fell, time seemed to slow around him, and I suggested to my neighbor that the bottom of the abyss might be a black hole, to try to explain the strangeness we saw. Then the faces of me disappeared and the abyss closed up before us, as if it had never been.

My neighbor must have been able to tell what I was thinking by the look on my face, because she said, "hey, Philip, I'm sure you're a fine scientist. Really."

"You think so?" I asked.

"I actually have no idea. You never told me you were a scientist."
"I am. I just hope I'm not the worst."
"I don't know science, but I bet you're not the worst."

"Only one way to find out," I said.

"What?" she asked.

I pulled out my phone. "Facebook."

So thank you, guys. Thank you for your honesty and your unscathing words.