American Innovations: Stories (4 page)

Frankly, I was surprised that Ilan—if it was Ilan—was any good at math. He hadn’t seemed the type.

Maybe I was also surprised that I spent so many days trying to understand that note. I had other things to do. Laundry. Work. I was auditing an extra course in Materials. I can’t pretend I didn’t harbor the hope that eventually—on my own—I’d prove that page some sort of important discovery. I don’t know how literally I thought this would bring Ilan back to me. But the image that came to me was that of digging up a grave.

I kind of wanted to call Jacob just to say that he hadn’t hurt my feelings by standing me up, that I didn’t need his help, or his company, or anything.

*   *   *

Time passed. Then one Thursday—it was August—I came across two (searingly dismissive) reviews of a book Jacob had written called
Times and Misdemeanors.
I was amazed that he had completed anything at all. And frustrated that “grandfather paradox” didn’t appear in the index. It seemed to me implied by the title, even though that meant reading the title wrongly, as literature. Though obviously the title invited that kind of “wrongness.” Which I thought was annoying and ambiguous in precisely a Jacob kind of way. I bought the book, but in some small attempt at dignity, I didn’t read it.

The following Monday, for the first time in his life, Jacob called me up. He said he was hoping to discuss something rather delicate with me, something he’d rather not mention over the phone. “What is it?” I asked.

“Can you meet me?” he asked.

“But what is it?”

“What time should we meet?”

I refused the first three meeting times he proposed, because I could. Eventually Jacob suggested we meet at the Moroccan place at whatever time I wanted, that day or the next, but urgently, not farther in the future, please.

“You mean the place where I first met Ilan?” This just slipped out.

“And me. Yes. There.”

In preparation for our meeting, I reread the negative reviews of Jacob’s book.

And I felt so happy.

*   *   *

Predictably, the coffee shop was the same but somehow not quite the same. Someone, not me, was reading the
New York Post
. Someone, not Ilan, was reading Deleuze. The fashion had made for shorter shorts on many of the women, and my lemonade came with slushy, rather than cubed, ice. But the chairs were still trimmed with chipping red paint, and the floor tile seemed, as ever, to fall just short of exhibiting a regular pattern. Jacob walked in only a few minutes late, his gaze detained by one after another set of bare legs. With an expression like someone sucking on an unpleasant cough drop, he made his way over to me.

I offered my sincerest consolations on the poor reviews of his work.

“Oh, time will tell,” he said. He looked uncomfortable; he didn’t even touch the green leaf cookies I’d ordered for him. Sighing, wrapping his hand tightly around the edge of the table and looking away, he said, “You know what Augustine says about time? Augustine describes time as a symptom of the world being out of order, a symptom of things in the world not being themselves, having to make their way back to themselves, by moving through time—”

Somehow I had already ceded control of the conversation. No billiard ball diagrams. No Ilan. No reviews. Almost as if I weren’t there, Jacob went on with his unencouraged ruminations: “There’s a paradox there, of course, since what can things be but themselves? In Augustine’s view, we live in what he calls the region of unlikeness, and what we’re unlike is God. We are apart from God, who is pure being, who is himself, who is outside of time. Time is our tragedy, the substance we have to wade through as we try to move closer to God. Rivers flowing to the sea, a flame reaching upward, a bird homing: these movements are things yearning to reach their true state. As humans, our motion reflects our yearning for God, and everything we do through time comes from moving, or at least trying to move, toward God. So that we can be”—someone at a nearby table cleared his throat judgmentally, which made me think of Ilan’s also being there—“our true selves. So there’s a paradox there again, that we must submit to God, which feels deceptively like
not
being ourselves, in order to become ourselves. We might call this yearning love, and it’s just that we often mistake
what
we love. We think we love sensuality. Or admiration. Or, say, another person. But loving another person is just a confusion, an error. Even if it is the kind of error that a nice, reasonable person might make—”

It struck me that Jacob might be manically depressed and that in addition to his career, his marriage might not be going so well, either.

“I mean,” Jacob amended, “it’s all bullshit, of course, but aren’t I a great guy? Isn’t talking to me great? I can tell you about time and you learn all about Western civilization. Augustine’s ideas are beautiful, no? I love this thought that motion is
about
something, that things have a place to get to, and a person has something to become, and that thing she must become is herself. Isn’t that nice?”

Jacob had never sounded more like Ilan. It was getting on my nerves. Maybe Jacob could read my very heart and was trying to insult, or cure, me. “You’ve never called me before,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do, you know.”

“Nonsense,” he said, without making it clear which statement of mine he was dismissing.

“You said that you wanted to discuss something ‘delicate.’”

Jacob returned to the topic of Augustine; I returned to the question of why the two of us had come to sit together right then, right there. We ping-ponged in this way, until eventually Jacob said, “Well, it’s about Ilan, so you’ll like that.”

“About the grandfather paradox?” I said, too quickly.

“Or it could be called the father paradox. Or even the mother paradox.”

“I guess I’ve never thought of it that way, but sure.” My happiness had dissipated; I felt angry and manipulated.

“Not only about Ilan but about my work as well.” Jacob then began to whisper. “The thing is, I’m going to ask you to try to kill me. Don’t worry, I can assure you that you won’t succeed. But in attempting, you’ll prove a glorious, shunned truth that touches on the nature of time, free will, causal loops, and quantum theory. You’ll also probably work out some aggression you feel toward me.”

Truth be told, through the thin haze of my disdain, I had always been envious of Jacob’s intellect; I had privately believed—despite what those reviews said, or maybe partly because of what those reviews said—that Jacob was a rare genius. Now I realized that he was just crazy.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jacob said. “Unfortunately, I can’t explain everything to you right here, right now. It’s too psychologically trying. For you, I mean. Listen, come over to my apartment on Saturday. My family will be away for the weekend, and I’ll explain everything to you then. Don’t be alarmed. You probably know that I’ve lost my job”—I hadn’t known that, but I should have been able to guess it—“but those morons, trust me, their falseness will become obvious. They’ll be flies at the horse’s ass. My ideas will bestride the world like a colossus. And you, too: you’ll be essential.”

I promised to attend, fully intending not to.

“Please,” he said.

“Of course,” I said.

All the rest of that week I tried to think through my decision carefully, but the more I tried to organize my thoughts, the more ludicrous I felt for thinking them at all. I thought: As a friend, isn’t it my responsibility to find out if Jacob has gone crazy? But really we’re not friends. And if I come to know too much about his madness, he may destroy me in order to preserve his psychotic worldview. But maybe I should take that risk because in drawing closer to Jacob—mad or not—I’ll learn something more of Ilan. But why do I need to know anything? And do my propositions really follow one from the other? Maybe my
not going
will entail Jacob’s having to destroy me in order to preserve his worldview. Or maybe Jacob is utterly levelheaded and just bored enough to play an elaborate joke on me. Or maybe, despite there never having been the least spark of sexual attraction between us, despite the fact that we could have been locked in a closet for seven hours and nothing would have happened, maybe, for some reason, Jacob is trying to seduce me. Out of nostalgia for Ilan. Or as consolation for the turn in his career. Was I really up for dealing with a desperate man?

Or was I, in my dusty way, passing up the opportunity to be part of an idea that would, as Jacob had said, “bestride the world like a colossus”?

*   *   *

Early Saturday morning I found myself knocking on Jacob’s half-open door; this was when my world began to grow strange to me—strange and yet also familiar, as if my destiny had once been known to me and I had forgotten it incompletely. Jacob’s voice invited me in.

I’d never been to his apartment before. It was tiny, and smelled of orange rinds, and had, incongruously, behind a futon, a chalkboard; also so many piles of papers and books that the apartment seemed more like the movie set for an intellectual’s rooms than like the real McCoy. I had once visited a ninety-one-year-old great-uncle who was still conducting research on fruit flies, and his apartment was cluttered with countless hand-stoppered jars of cloned fruit flies and also hot plates for preparing some sort of agar; that apartment was what Jacob’s brought to mind. I found myself doubting that Jacob truly had a wife and child, as he had so often claimed.

“Thank God you’ve come,” Jacob said, emerging from what appeared to be a galley kitchen but may have been simply a closet. “I knew you’d be reliable, that at least.” And then, as if reading my mind: “Natasha sleeps in the loft we built. My wife and I sleep on the futon. Although yes, it’s not much for entertaining. But can I get you something? I have this tea that one of my students gave me, exceptional stuff from Japan, harvested at high altitude—”

“Tea, great, yes,” I said. To my surprise, I was relieved that Jacob’s ego seemed to weather his miserable surroundings just fine. Also to my surprise I felt tenderly toward him. And toward the scent of old citrus.

On the main table I noticed what looked like the ragtag remains of some Physics 101 lab experiments: rusted silver balls on different inclines, distressed balloons, a stained funnel, a markered flask, a calcium-speckled Bunsen burner, iron filings and sandpaper, large magnets, and yellow batteries likely bought from a Chinese immigrant on the subway. Did I have the vague feeling that “a strange traveler” might show up and tell “extravagant stories” over a meal of fresh rabbit? I did. I also considered that Jacob’s asking me to murder him had just been an old-fashioned suicidal plea for help.

“Here, here.” Jacob brought me tea in a cracked porcelain cup.

I thought, somewhat fondly, of Ilan’s old inscrutable poisoning jokes. “Thanks so much,” I said. I moved away from that table of hodgepodge and sat on Jacob’s futon.

“Well,” Jacob said gently, also sitting down.

“Yes, well.”

“Well, well.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m not going to hit on you,” Jacob said.

“Of course not. You’re not going to kiss my hand.”

“No.”

The tea tasted like damp cotton.

Jacob rose and walked over to the table, spoke to me from across the compressed distance. “I presume that you learned what you could. From those scribblings of Ilan. Yes?”

I conceded. Both that I had learned something and that I had not learned everything. That much was still a mystery to me.

“But you understand, at least, that in situations approaching grandfather paradoxes very strange things can become the norm. Just as if someone running begins to approach the speed of light, he grows unfathomably heavy.” He paused. “Didn’t you find it odd that you found yourself lounging so much with me and Ilan? Didn’t it seem to beg explanation, how happy the three of us—”

“It wasn’t strange,” I insisted. I was right almost by definition. It wasn’t strange because it had already happened and so it was conceivable. Or maybe that was wrong. “I think he loved us both,” I said, confused for no reason. “And we both loved him.”

Jacob sighed. “Yes, OK. I hope you’ll appreciate the elaborate calculations I’ve done in order to set up these demonstrations of extraordinarily unlikely events. Come over here. Please. You’ll see that we’re in a region of, well, not exactly a region of unlikeness, that would be a cheap association—very Ilan-like, though, a fitting tribute—but we’ll enter a region where things seem not to behave as themselves. In other words, a zone where events, teetering toward interfering”—I briefly felt that I was a child again, falling asleep on our scratchy blue sofa while my coughing father watched reruns of
Twilight Zone
—“with a fixed future, are pressured into revealing their hidden essences.”

I felt years or miles away.

Then this happened, which is not the crux of the story, or even the center of what was strange to me: Jacob tapped one of the silver balls and it rolled up the inclined plane; he set a flask of water on the Bunsen burner and marked the rising level of the fluid; a balloon distended unevenly; a magnet under sandpaper moved iron filings so as to spell the word “egregious.”

Jacob turned to me, raised his eyebrows. “Astonishing, no?”

I felt like I’d seen him wearing a dress or going to the bathroom. What he had shown me were children’s magic tricks.

“I remember those science magic shows from childhood,” I said gently. I wasn’t
not
afraid. “I always loved those spooky caves they advertised on highway billboards.” Cousin or no cousin, Ilan had clearly run away from Jacob, not from me.

“I can see you’re resistant,” Jacob said. “Which I understand, and even respect. Maybe I scared you, with that killing me talk, which you weren’t ready for. We’ll return to it. I’ll order us in some food. We’ll eat, we’ll drink, we’ll talk, and I’ll let you absorb the news slowly. You’re an engineer, for God’s sake. You’ll put the pieces together. Sometimes sleep helps, sometimes spearmint—just little ways of sharpening a mind’s ability to synthesize. You take your time.”