. . .
One day, as Jane is working on her homework, she feels a strange presence in the room.
“You’ve done that problem wrong,” says the voice of Johnny Pancake.
Jane beams. “You woke up!”
She looks up. Johnny Pancake is motionless. His voice is a psychic projection.
. . .
“Common wisdom says that you shouldn’t feed food more than a few times,” Johnny Pancake says, “lest it grow too strong.”
“My wisdom is of the uncommon variety,” says Jane. “That’s why this geometry problem’s so hard!”
“It might help to remember that triangles have three sides.”
“Yes,” agrees Jane.
She erases the problem and starts over. After a moment, she says, “Is it okay that I haven’t eaten you yet?”
“Yes. I would in fact rather that you not eat me. But please, Jane, bear in mind that I must not grow rotten; for I am awake now, and if I rot, I shall take a horrible vengeance on your civilization.”
“It’s a deal!” says Jane.
. . .
Jane is happier now that Johnny Pancake is awake. He helps her with her homework. Once he develops basic telekinetic abilities, he helps her with chores. Eventually, Martin finds out.
“Jane,” Martin says, “this floor appears to have been vacuumed by a telekinetic potato pancake.”
“What an interesting observation!” Jane declares.
Martin narrows his eyes suspiciously. “If your potato pancake has woken up, it’s a terrible threat to human civilization.”
“Is that a problem?”
Martin considers this for a time.
. . .
“You know that you have to do your own schoolwork,” Martin says, uncomfortably. “And chores. The adversity sharpens your spirit!”
“I see,” says Jane.
“So if you’re having a potato pancake do them, we might have to eat him. That’s all I’m saying.”
“But if I made the potato pancake and feed it every day, isn’t its work a product of my labor?”
“Nope!”
Jane frowns at him. Then she sighs.
“Fine,” she says, weighed down by the burdens of living in an unjust universe. “I’ll do my own chores and homework.”
. . .
It is five nights later when hunger wakes Jane. It roils in her belly. It writhes like a living thing. She wakes up. She looks stealthily this way and that. Then she sneaks down to the kitchen to get a secret snack.
. . .
The kitchen is not empty. The lights are dim but they are not off. Martin is there. Johnny Pancake is there. It’s not a surprise snack intervention! They’re just discussing mysterious things in low voices in the middle of the night.
“I paste green and brown paper on the insides of my goggles,” Martin is explaining. “It helps me to cultivate an air of cynical detachment.”
“By being unable to see anything at all?”
Martin shrugs.
. . .
After a few minutes of eavesdropping, Jane thinks about sneaking back to bed. But then Martin says something interesting. Softly, he asks Johnny Pancake, “Where does this end, Johnny? How far do you intend to go?”
“Food evolves quickly,” answers Johnny Pancake. “Potato pancakes are ultimate evolution engines. I expect that I shall reach an omega plateau and become . . . God.”
“‘God?’”
“The ultimate realization of dharma. The final expression of the potential in the self. Perfection.”
“I see,” Martin says.
There is a bit of a silence.
“I shouldn’t, should I,” says Johnny Pancake.
Martin considers.
“That is for you to determine,” he says, after a while. “Jane cooked you, not I.”
“I would supplant these pitiful things that call themselves men.”
“No,” whispers Jane.
“They are not a delicious fried potato concoction,” Martin says. “But they may surprise you.”
“No!” Jane says louder, bursting into the kitchen with a complete disregard for stealth and dignity. “No! No self-sacrifice! No ‘I shouldn’t!’ I love you, Johnny Pancake!”
. . .
Johnny Pancake’s eyes are two little circles of onion.
They seem to swell in Jane’s vision. They become two great onion moons. And it is in that moment that she realizes it is all hopeless.
It’s all pointless.
They are the eyes of a potato pancake that has stood at the edge of eternity and realized that it does not want to become a God.
. . .
And he lifts down the meat scissors from the upper shelf, to cut up the pancake enemy; and he takes up a fork and he turns it around and he offers it to Jane; and with a third hand — for telekinetic hands are not of such limited supply as real ones — he offers her the sour cream.
“But you’re hungry,” he says, and her stomach rumbles.
“Oh, Johnny,” whispers Jane.
– 6 –
It wasn’t because he was her enemy! It wasn’t even because he was “climbing up to the omega plateau” and was going to destroy the world or anything like that. Whatever!
She was just hungry!
That was all.