The Last Chip

No business majors. I should have said “no business majors” on my housing form instead of “no smokers.” My clothes would smell like an ashtray, but I wouldn’t be watching my housemate direct a giant U-Haul the wrong way down our street to double-park in front of our house. 

“Montez! What did you buy?” I yelled, scanning the street for campus police. The truck driver was large and scowling. I was pretty sure if parking enforcement saw him, he would make us pay the resulting extortionate fine. 

          “A tortilla machine!” Montez said happily. “It was the fourth auction lot and nobody wanted it!” 

“Why do you need a tortilla machine? You can buy tortillas at the grocery store. They have a tortilla machine.” Visible from anywhere in the bakery section, it plopped balls of dough onto a short conveyer belt, then flattened them, and ran them through what looked like a small pizza oven. I had never seen anything like it back home, where people only ate tortillas in restaurants. 

“I have a plan!” Montez said. “Tariq is taking printmaking for his Fine Art credit. I’m going to get him to make me the face of Jesús.” 

“Which one? Gonzalez the chem TA or Chapa from the tennis team?” 

“Nooooo,” Montez said. He pointed at the sky. I looked up. “Jesus,” he said, pronouncing it the English way, and letting horrifying comprehension dawn. 

“Montez!” I hissed. “You cannot imprint Jesus’ face on tortillas!” 

“Right, I’m not in printmaking. That’s why Tariq can do it.”

“Are you going to unload this or not?” the driver called. “I’m getting paid by the hour, so I’m good either way.” 

Tariq got home and helped us unload the machine, which was good because even though it was in pieces, they all weighed a ton. He refused to help with the print job. “Jesus is a prophet in Islam,” he said. “There are a lot of verses about him in the Quran. And we’re not supposed to make pictures of the prophets. And you’re talking about cheating people.” 

“I’m not!” Montez said, and he actually looked hurt. “If I were telling people the tortillas had Jesus’ face on them and they didn’t, that would be cheating. But I’m not telling them anything.” 

“What’s the point?” I asked. We were sitting on crates of tortilla-machine parts. They filled up the kitchen, the entry, and part of the living room. “I know that people who see Jesus in a tortilla, or toast, or a pancake or whatever, sell the things for lots of money. But it won’t work if you flood the market. Plus, it’s the person who sees the face that makes the money off the toast, not the person who sold them the bread.” 

“Is this normal?” Tariq asked seriously. “Seeing Jesus, peace be upon him, in bread?” 

“Across many cultures, all of which end up on the news,” I said. “Montez, how does it make you money if someone else sells a tortilla with Jesus on it?” 

“It’s like a convenience store that sells a winning lottery ticket,” Montez said earnestly. “People go there to buy tickets because they think it’s lucky. If some of our tortillas have Jesus on them, word will get around and people will buy our tortillas hoping they get one.”

“Your tortillas,” Tariq said. “Leave me out of this.” 

“Me too,” I said. “Look, Montez, you’re still talking about cheating people. The reason people think signs like that are meaningful is that they happen—” Miraculously? I didn’t believe that exactly. “On their own,” I finished. “It’s the odds against it that make it meaningful. If you make it happen and let people think you didn’t, you’re still cheating them.” 

He looked crestfallen. “I don’t want to do that,” he said. “Really, I’m not trying to be disrespectful or cheat anybody. Don’t worry. I’ll think of a new plan.” 

I had classes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. the following day with barely a break for lunch, and I was hoping that Montez’s new plan would involve selling the tortilla machine to someone else before I got home. Instead, when I got home, the tortilla machine was stretched through the kitchen and living room and Tariq was doing something to the power cord. “What are you doing?” I asked. 

“Making sure this thing can run without tripping the breaker,” Tariq said. “Alternatively, making sure the breaker will trip and the house won’t burn down.” 

“I thought you were against the Jesus-tortilla plan,” I said. 

“I am,” Tariq said. “Montez has given up the Jesus-tortilla plan. He’s buying a fryer.” This didn’t sound enough like giving up to me. “To do what?”

“I pointed out that his market is college students, who buy beer and snacks, not groceries,” Tariq said. “Montez is going to make chips.” 

I still had grave misgivings about Montez’s plan, but at least now they were grave misgivings about going broke instead of grave misgivings about getting arrested for fraud or being excommunicated. Within a few days, Tariq got the tortilla machine working, with no help from the instruction manual, which had black-and-white photos and was written in a language none of us could identify, much less read. Montez got a tortilla recipe from his abuela and bags of cornmeal from a wholesale grocer. He set up a propane fryer in our tiny backyard and convinced me to cut tortillas into triangles and ferry them from the house to the fryer. 

When our first batch of chips was frying, the whole block smelled like tortilla chips. People came over to see what was going on. Most of them pulled out their phones to text their friends. We sold out. 

We sold out the next day too, and the next two weekends after that. Montez’s abuela’s tortillas were really good. It also helped that we kept college-student hours, selling fresh chips to partygoers long after the stores had closed. I had enough money to pay off my credit card. And I was slightly famous. 

“Hey, you’re the chip guy,” Jasmine Toussaint said one day outside our 17th-century Lit class. The secretary had just come to say class was cancelled because the professor was sick, and everyone was milling around in the hallway. “Pretty smart. My parents are always asking me what kind of job I’m going to get with an English major. You already have one.”

I clutched my textbook, ready to take back every bad thing I had thought about Montez. “You could come see how the chip-making works,” I squeaked. “Not today, because rain.” Because rain? What was I saying? Belatedly, it occurred to me that Jasmine might not actually know my name. But that was okay, because everyone knew where the chips were. 

While I dithered, Jasmine smiled and said, “I’d like that.” 

Soon we were rolling in chip money, and Tariq and I told Montez we needed a break to study for midterms. Tariq was taking several tough engineering classes, and all the English majors in my class looked terrible, walking around pale and stressed and complaining of eye strain. Montez announced that we were having a party with free chips to tide everyone over until our business reopened. Everyone knew we didn’t have alcohol because of Tariq, so it was a relaxed, late-afternoon hangout in the yard after the last class on Friday. Music was playing. People were chatting. Chips were being eaten. 

Annalise Stellemach came up to me and said, “How did you get this on my chip? Some kind of stamp?” 

I looked at Montez, horrified, but Annalise did not look like someone experiencing a religious revelation, even a fake one, and she was only holding one chip. Was it a Jesus mosaic and she only had one piece? 

I looked at the chip. Printed neatly on it in Times New Roman font was “6.02214076.” ”I …” I said.

“Avogadro’s number,” Annalise said. “Pretty cool.” 

“Excuse me,” I said, and grabbed Montez and Tariq. “There’s an avocado number printed on Annalise’s chip.” I said. “Printed.” 

“What’s an avocado number?” Montez asked. 

“Six point zero two something,” I said. “I don’t know anything about math! That’s what she called it!” 

“Avogadro’s number,” Tariq said. “It’s a constant that relates the molar volume of a substance to the volume of one molecule of the substance.” 

“Why is it on a chip?” I asked. In fairness, it made no sense that I was asking Tariq, who couldn’t possibly know. But he said, “Let’s look at some other chips. If something in the machine is printing on the tortillas, it’s probably printing on all of them.” 

Annalise was ahead of us. She had shown her chip to people and they were all examining chips of their own. Most were blank, but Peter Vonn had a chip with the bull from the cave paintings of Lascaux and Xiaoming Hu had a chip with what she informed us was the opening of Sibelius’ “Violin Concerto in D Minor.” 

Tariq went inside to make test tortillas. Most were normal and blank. One of them had a tiny periodic table on it. “A’udhu billahi min-ash Shaytan-ir-rajim,” he said. 

“What?” I asked.

“I seek refuge in Allah from the accursed Satan.” 

“SATAN is printing things on our chips?” 

“No,” Tariq said. He looked like he wanted to pity me but was too polite. “Take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay.” 

But it was not okay, because at that moment Jasmine Toussaint came in with a chip in her hand. She smiled at me and held the chip out. “Pretty smooth,” she said. “Did you do this?” 

The chip said “If this be error and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” 

“Aaghgghraa,” I said, and told Jasmine everything. 

She looked from me to Tariq, who nodded. I tried not to be disappointed that I had just explained to Jasmine that I had not sent her a flirty Shakespearean tortilla chip. 

“Okay,” she said. “First of all, I think you’re letting Montez’s plan cloud the issue. He had an idea that you talked him out of. That doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on now, unless you think he’s doing this.” 

“No,” I said. “I don’t think Montez is doing this.”

“Even so, I suspect you don’t believe me, but that’s okay; this is a lot to process. But look at this.” She pulled her laptop out of her bag and typed “Jesus’ face in toast.” Dozens of pictures resulted. 

The first thing I noticed was that the faces in the pictures were not obviously Jesus. Sometimes they weren’t obviously faces. “Check this one,” Jasmine said pointing at a light blob with several darker blobs. “I see a pale guy with a dark beard, if I’m trying. Maybe it’s Jesus. Or Abraham Lincoln. Or Karl Marx.” 

“Um,” I said. 

“And also, we know humans are primed to see faces where there aren’t any. Remember that picture of the face on Mars? It’s not a face, just a rock formation.” 

“Okay,” I said. “But Annalise didn’t see Avocado’s number when it wasn’t there.” 

“Well, no,” Jasmine said. “The chips have real information. But they do seem to be tailored to the people who found them.” 

“They do?” I said. 

“Xiaoming plays the violin. Annalise is pre-med. Peter is an anthropology major. And I ….” She paused. 

“… was hoping I would send you a love sonnet on a chip?” I asked hopefully.

“Possibly something like that.” 

“So people aren’t just imagining things, but they are finding things related to their knowledge and interests,” I said. “Messages?” 

“That remains to be seen,” she said. “I have to go. My roommate needs me to pick her up from work.” 

Everyone else left pretty soon after that, impressed with our trick but ready to get on with their evenings. It was a good thing, because Tariq wanted to take the machine apart and I had a pounding headache. “Are people going to talk about this?” I asked. 

“They’ll forget about it by the time midterms are over,” Montez said, and he only sounded slightly disappointed about it. 

That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept wondering where the messages had come from. They were messages, no matter what Jasmine said. Humans could imagine a face out of rocks; we could decide that a face so blurry it could be anyone was clearly a meaningful historical figure. But we couldn’t turn a random arrangement of spots on a chip into a mathematical constant. Or a love poem. 

I got up and walked to the living room. Tariq hadn’t made much progress taking the machine apart; it was mostly intact and still taking up the whole front of the house. I thought about the instruction manual in its unknown language.

“Look,” I said to the machine. “I don’t know if you can understand me. I get that the face thing wasn’t working. Humans see faces in everything, so putting faces on toast or tortillas won’t get our attention. But you’ve gone too far the other way. The things you’re doing now are too impossible. You’ll get people’s attention, but you’ll scare them. Like ‘four-star-generals-on-your-case’ scare them. You don’t want that.” 

The machine, which was definitely unplugged and also did not have any lights on it, blinked twice. I stepped backwards and landed on the couch. “Good talk,” I said. “Really. Thank you.” 

It blinked again. I closed my eyes. 

I woke up on the couch. A blurry Tariq was telling me I had a 102-degree fever and he was taking me to the campus clinic. 

It was jammed with students. Apparently what I thought was midterm stress had been the flu ripping through the English Department like a fraternity’s file of plagiarized research papers. I was in the hospital for a couple of days, and when I got home the tortilla machine was in boxes. Tariq had taken it apart and put it back together, but he couldn’t get it to work again. 

Jasmine had the flu too. I sent her a sonnet on a can of chicken noodle soup. 

Montez had barely sent the tortilla machine to metal recycling when he signed a lease on a commercial kitchen space with his abuela. His new venture was Abuela’s Best University Chips. They had a non-copyright-infringing version of our mascot on them. And nothing else.

“What do I do now?” I asked Jasmine when we were finally both feeling better. We were in Jasmine’s dorm room typing on our laptops. All our midterm exams had been changed to papers with flexible due dates, since people were still recovering from the flu. “I kind of want to tell someone what happened with the tortilla machine. But they either won’t believe it, or they’ll get way too upset.” 

     “You’ll think of something,” Jasmine said. “You just need a nonthreatening medium. That way people entertain the idea that it might be true, if they’re open-minded, but it won’t scare them. Add some funny parts.” She smiled. “And romance. I believe in you.” 

Henry Larsen 

English 204 - Creative Writing 

Midterm Exam 

Any resemblance to actual people or university parking policies is coincidental. Running a business in university housing is not permitted and may result in cancellation of your lease. On the other hand, just for the record, city health department regulations state that baked goods are a low-risk food that can be made for sale legally in a home kitchen.