Enza with an A

By Luca Nobleman

“Yo, Enzo! Is it done yet?” The beleaguered customer yelled down through the grate. The man’s week-old musk permeated every inch of his grimy home—even saturating into the floorboards.

“It’s Enza,” Joe Enza whispered under his breath.

Everyone always confuses it.  Joe screwed the cap back on the tritium diffuser as he squatted in front of the micro-particulator. His back ached from the cramped subfloor he had worked in for most of the evening.

Quickly changing to his usual upbeat tone, Joe called back up, attempting to finish the story he had restarted numerous times since his arrival. “Yessir! It’s almost ready, and as I said, Xavier Tuttle first invented the quantum coding and stuff for the receiving port in your transducer model in 2048. It’s actually a pretty funny story. He—”

“Yeah, yeah, Enzo, just fix it. It’s been like six hours already. I’ve missed the first half of the water polo championship.”

Water polo? Joe tapped his current probe tips together, ensuring they detected properly, and then placed them on the solenoid. I wouldn’t have pegged him as a water polo kind of guy.

“It’s Enza, with an A,” Joe corrected a little louder and then continued. “I’d say, sir, that six hours is mighty fast for fixing a xenon particle entanglement blister. Even the most qualified technicians take nine to twelve hours to repair such a defect and stuff.” Joe called back up through the vent.

“Well, most repairmen don’t work until two in the morning,” the man rebutted condescendingly.

Joe soldered the remaining niobium-plated aluminum conductors to the xenon conduit in record time, hoping to finish his story about the inventor Xavier Tuttle despite the homeowner’s odor. Reaching down to adjust the last frequency modulator on his efflux box, Joe’s head suddenly and painfully scraped against something jutting out from one of the floorboards. A warm liquid trickled down his forehead. Joe reached up and touched it. An acrid-smelling black liquid smeared across his glove. Huh. Quickly rubbing his throbbing, bald head to assess further, he found no actual wound.

Tastefully swearing under his breath, he grabbed his flashlight and searched for the source of the liquid. A small pipe hung askew and dripped copious amounts of the substance on his glove and head. The black goo had now seeped through what long strands of hair still remained along the sides of his head and made its way into his ear canals, muffling the sounds of the creaking floorboards above as the homeowner made his way to the bathroom for the nineteenth time since Joe had arrived.

Joe retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket and quickly shoved the corner of the cloth into the pipe to stop the flow. He would definitely need to flush out his ears when he got home. It wasn’t the first time a mysterious goo had leaked in them—like last week’s mishap with a client’s kvass collection. It took his otolaryngologist an hour to remove the liquid-fermented Russian rye bread from his ears. Weekly things like poison ivy in the lungs, a termite nest in his right sinus, and a cobra toxin facial were all just part of the job. Probably.

Joe bent down to assess how much fluid he would have to clean from the concrete floor: a lot. He retrieved his chemical analyzer, scooped a glob of the liquid into its port, and set it aside. He would have an answer in minutes.

Now on his hands and knees, Joe began scrubbing the floor with his work jacket—he could wash it out when he got home. Just as he finished scouring the last remnant from the concrete onto the fabric of his coat, a chirp echoed through the muck lining his ear canals.

Joe stopped scrubbing and looked around the dark subfloor, attempting to find the sound’s source. It chirped again. It wasn’t a mechanically produced noise but rather an organic vocalization.

He whipped out his flashlight and shined it beneath the flux generator. There, staring back at him, were the beady eyes of a mouse. The wiring he had just spent the past six hours repairing was within its paws and mouth.

Why? Joe cried in his mind. Why is it always a mouse?

“Shoo!” Joe hissed at the mouse. “Leave it!”

“What’s going on down there, Enzo?” The homeowner yelled from the bathroom, his voice half muffled by the chips he currently snacked on and the rest muffled by the liquid in Joe’s ears.

“It’s Enza with an A, and um… nothing, sir. I’m just singing to myself and stuff.” Joe began throwing tools and whispering at the mouse, trying to stop its incessant chewing on the wire. “That wiring is worth more than my mortgage!”

“Well, hurry up! The second half of the water polo game is about to start!” The homeowner flushed, sending gurgling water through the pipes over Joe’s head.

Distraught over the rodent’s destruction, Joe reached for the creature. The mouse flinched and dropped the wire.

Joe didn’t notice that while he tried to scare off the rodent, the black liquid had dripped from atop his head toward the mouse. The mouse dropped the wire, and a spark ignited the liquid, just as the analyzer pinged with its results: GNA, otherwise known as Gamma Neutrinic Acid, or generically as “Liquid Antimatter.”

Joe had no idea why this filthy homeowner had a pipe containing liquid antimatter in the subfloor of his house. What he did know was that he suddenly appeared on the doorstep of the man’s house once again, his watch reading 20:01. Joe was a minute late to fix his client’s flux generator.

A familiar man in a bathrobe with curlers in his beard opened the door. “Are you Enzo the repairman?” Chips fell from his lips as he spoke.

Was it all a dream? Bewildered, Joe stammered, yet played along, “Uh, Joe Enza, with an A. You called about a faulty code read in your main line?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luca Nobleman is an author, surgeon, and nerd. To what nerdiness level? Pikachu? He crocheted his own once. Magic the Gathering? His wife rents a storage unit for all his cards. Star Wars action figures? His desk could maybe fit one more K2SO. But it’s okay, because his four children sure like having an extra grown kid in the house. Luca is the author and audiobook/podcast voice for the Dreaming Machines novel series.

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