Antiphony (14 page)

He turns from her and walks away. He grasps the doorknob and turns it—slowly—and then he is out, the door shut tight behind him. He takes the first few steps carefully, and then, as he turns the corner at the landing, hears the bed in the room behind him creak. He stops to listen. He knows this sound very well: she is up and shuffling to the bathroom. He can hear every step clearly. She is on the toilet now, he can hear the slight tinkling stream hitting the front of the bowl. He could go back to her, tell her about his vivid dream; maybe time for a kiss or something more. But he looks down at his shoes and feels it is too late. He has already primed himself for what he must do today, and this would only delay it—complicate it. Now that it is really possible to speak to her, he doesn't want to have to describe the crazy dream, he doesn't want to avoid telling her about the letter, or tell her about it and have to explain. He takes the next step and feels the world around him loosen its grip and let go of him a little more.

T
HE NEXT DECISION
Theodore must make is easier. Driving to the commuter rail station in the next village over from his own, he sees the parking lot is unusually full for a Tuesday morning—maybe he is running late? No, the digital clock on the dash
stares back at him: 7:14. A good number, seven and twice seven. But the lot
is
full, and he imagines the frustration of circling among the ranks of gleaming machines, hustling to nose his way into a spot just ahead of another harried businessman and decides to flick his left turn signal on and take the freeway instead.

Once he has merged into the flow of traffic building towards the city, he knows he has made the right choice. He can be alone with this thoughts here, without the mirror of another person's face to tell him whether he is doing something wrong.

For the most part, he stays in the right lane and goes along with the slower pace of the cars that must yield and blend with others merging from the entrance ramps every mile or so. He has tried every different method of traveling from his home to the office—commuter rail, freeway, surface streets, even car-pooling with a couple of university professors from the foreign language department briefly—and has found that each route gets him to campus in roughly the same amount of time. It will take him anywhere from forty-eight to fifty-five minutes door to door. The extra effort required to shave a few minutes by hustling to catch an earlier train or weaving in and out among the more dangerous drivers in the leftmost lanes is not worth the aggravation. He allows his mind to wander, landing on whatever happens to catch his eye. A woman in the next lane over is peering into the rearview mirror and applying mascara to her lashes with her right hand as she steers with her left. A minivan coated with a thick layer of salt and winter grime has a heart traced in the dirt of the back windows with what appears to have been a girl's finger. Inside the heart is etched the somewhat startling message I
LOVE
M
EN
. The miles flow by. One
freeway merges with another, and the road becomes even wider, six lanes on each side, with the commuter rail line bisecting the road down the middle, punctuated by stations at every major interchange. The traffic is light; he maintains a steady pace. The freeway emerges from the industrial wasteland of chemical tanks and warehouses that buffers his beloved suburbs from the hardscrabble wood-frame houses of the inner city. Row upon row of these drab two-story homes line the highway, perched above it on either side and giving it the feel of a tunnel. A semitrailer changes lanes in front of him and he draws alongside it for a moment. He can feel the shuddering flanks of its trailer laden with goods, he can sense the vibrations from the pipes and mechanisms that populate the underside of the vehicle as it surges past him. There is a whimsical design on the mudflaps that bounce against the paired rear tires at the back of the truck: an image of an angry-looking semi driven by a crazed, cartoon-like man with a red handlebar mustache and a beat-up cowboy hat holding a pistol in one hand, steering wheel in the other, and the words K
ICKIN
' A
SPHALT
in grubby chrome underneath.

Now the freeway makes a giant looping bend and comes back above ground level to give him his first view of the city skyline. It never fails to impress him, spread across his field of vision like a stack of multi-layered dominoes, some of them catching the first sparks of the sun as it peeks above the horizon. Another long looping turn affords him a glimpse of the gleaming lake to the east. Just a few seconds of this, and then he is back heading north, the buildings lined up again along their
grid, providing the more conventional view of the city favored by the skycams for the lead-in shots to the local evening news.

He has allowed himself not to think, to let his thoughts merely flow along with the traffic. There are only a couple more miles to his exit. He glances up at his rearview mirror for some reason and catches a quick look at his own blue eye, blue surrounded by whiteness and pierced with a black hole in the middle. He sees now what has drawn his eye to the mirror: coming up behind him, a car just behind his, pressing forward, tailgating him, aggressively filling the mirror with two headlights and two bright fog lights below them and a grill that seems designed to intimidate him. In the past, having this person press him from behind like this would have nudged his blood pressure up and elicited a response from him—either speeding up to comply with the driver's insistence that Theodore go faster to accommodate him, or, more likely, slowing down to frustrate and further infuriate the tailgater. Once, when he was quite young, he tapped his brakes and nearly caused a tailgater to slam into him, provoking the enraged driver to zoom around and swerve in front of him, which forced Theodore onto the shoulder of the freeway and very nearly off the road.

Now, Theodore sees this as an opportunity to practice what he has tried to learn about staying calm. He maintains a steady speed, which just happens to be a speed that keeps the driver penned in behind him and a set of cars in the next lane that are also going about the same speed. Why does everyone want to make the world go faster? What will this man accomplish by getting around him and arriving at his office five minutes earlier than he might have? An image of time as a fluid tape measure
gently undulating in a stream of warm water that flows above their heads presents itself to Theodore, the hours and minutes marked by tick marks along one side, each one passing by like the mile markers on the side of the freeway. Then, just as suddenly, the tape measure fades away, and another image draws itself to him—time expanding out from himself and the tailgating driver like a huge box above their heads, a fourth dimension they are moving through.

But this is not right.

He has envisioned time as merely the third dimension, height. He and his new friend the tailgater are traveling in a line along the first dimension, length, and it is possible that the tail-gater could slam into his bumper and send him spinning out along the second dimension at an angle from the first. And the giant clear box that appeared to him is the extension of these two dimensions upwards to create the three dimensions of space. Then, he sees it: His line of sight extends to the far horizon where the road narrows down to a blurred shadow, and for a brief moment his consciousness withdraws to a point somewhere above himself, somewhere that seems to be both further within his head but also at the same moment outside and beyond it. From this new vantage point he can see the freeway in its entirety—not only the entire length of it spanning the miles from the farms beyond the city to the central core with its sky-piercing glass towers—but also the entire existence of it all at once from when the first buildings and homes and streets were torn up to make the right of way, through the bulldozers pushing earth around to dredge out the roadbed and the pouring of the first layers of gravel and cement, and then all the cars and
trucks and the trains and the people milling at the stations all of them buzzing back and forth across the length of it like another layer of liquid life flowing in an ebbing and fading stream unfolding and enfolding with the cycle of every day illuminated by sunlight and then shrouded by darkness with the road lying there in its serenity beneath them, the houses torn down and replaced innumerable times, the road razed and resurfaced time and again, and then at the far end of this buzzing flow, a gradual diminishment of the flowing lights and then a complete stop where the road crumbles to dust, all of this seen as a whole: the road lying there stretched out before him like a kind of vein stripped from someone's leg with the blood of the traffic flowing over it—and the beginning and end of it and all the in between existing there at once. And it is not only that he is imagining this image of the road spread out before him, he is actually experiencing it, for just one instant, all existing there with him at one contemporaneous point. He feels it—here—now—all of it, all the millions of cars and trucks and trains and people who have passed and ever will pass over this point are here with him at this very same
Now
.

The driver behind him presses closer, flashes his brights at him. One now becomes the next.

Clearly, this man is in a hurry. He must get to the next moment in time faster than the other drivers around him. Or, what he is really trying to do, Theodore sees, is extend himself into a greater area of space than the other drivers. He cannot get to the next moment faster—all the moments come to them both at the same equivalent speed. This other man wants to take up
more space in the limited span of his existence than Theodore will.

Theodore complies. The cordon of cars to their left has maintained its speed, so Theodore pushes up to seventy, moves beyond them, opens a gap for the tailgater to slither through. When the opening is just wide enough for the car to change lanes, it darts to the left and plows ahead of him. Theodore does allow himself to glance over and get a look at the tailgater passing by and sees a young woman with flattened red hair glaring at the road ahead, oblivious to Theodore and any other driver on the road, intent on her mission of getting to the next place faster than the rest.

A
T THE OFFICE
he avoids the secretaries and the corridor along the outside of the cubicles and makes it to his desk without encountering anybody. Slings his briefcase with the laptop in it onto the chair his visitors are supposed to use, slumps into the ergonomic chair on wheels, and punches the button that starts his desktop machine. He didn't go to the coffee shop because he didn't want to stand in the long line with the other caffeine fiends and didn't want to have to make small talk with that woman who wears two hats. This is better; alone here in his office no one will bother him.

He stares at the Degas print on the wall across from him and contemplates the dancers. One of them, the stocky, plump
one whose back is reflected in the mirror, his favorite, always in the same pose, stretching her instep, pointing her toes down at the floor in a graceful drop step behind her, her other foot extended and turned at a square angle out to the right. The faint hint of a smile permanently etched on her face as she peers at the floor, lost in her work. A couple of the other dancers watch her from the side, more lithe and graceful, slimmer, they study her moves while others stretch at the bar towards the back of the room. And, what he often overlooks, seated at the bench by the piano, an old man with white hair and a full white mustache holds a violin to the crook of his neck and the bow in his other hand, about to resume playing. In the lower left corner, beneath the piano, a watering can sits, incongruously, the acute angles of the spout and handle perhaps a reference to the splayed and tortioned extension of arms and legs by these perfect human forms. He envies these young women forever captured in a moment of joy, expressing themselves through their bodies—he can almost smell the tang of female sweat and the chalk dust in the room, the late afternoon light evanescent in a dim gray winter rectangle reflected off the larger wall mirrors at the back of the room. He could stand and watch such a scene for hours, not thinking about it, not coming to any conclusions about it, just observing it and letting the sensations of the movement and sounds and smells overtake him and flow through him. He could stare at the dancers without any trace of sexual interest, merely observing the glistening forms and planes of their bodies exhibiting a kind of ever-evolving landscape that his mind could navigate, traverse. He has often looked at the stars in the night sky the same way, wondering about the distances and relationships
between the pinpricks of light suspended above him, speculating about what holds them still in a seemingly-fixed firmament even as he knows they are all rushing away from each other at a speed beyond his limited comprehension. If he could stare at these things and wonder about them without having to come to any conclusions, without having to quantify them and arrange them into a paradigm, a set of mathematical rules, perhaps then he could escape the consequences of what he has done.

Pling!

The email program on his computer notifies him of a new message arriving at his inbox. Or, in this case, more than a dozen which have already been sent by the more industrious colleagues and underlings on staff. There is always a rush of morning emails flying about, Theodore feels, as a way of impressing upon others the amount of work someone is getting done—a kind of office tailgating, pushing the next guy to move a little faster.

Theodore looks at the list of boldfaced messages that have arrived in his box as yet unread. Several messages from Jerry Himmelstein, an aggressive young grad student who just came on board fall semester from Cornell. Jerry must copy him on every message he sends, no matter how trivial. A note from his friend Nick Behar in the foreign language department, one of the guys he briefly carpooled with, reminding him that they have been trying to plan a poker night with some of the other profs that never seems to fit anyone's schedule. It used to be a regular monthly event he looked forward to; now, as several months have passed without it occurring, it seems destined to
slip away from them. And finally, a note marked URGENT that just arrived two minutes ago from Ji-Wan Sing, an up-and-coming Korean string theorist over by the break room. Every email from Ji-Wan is URGENT. Theodore clicks on it and opens it. Though he and Pradeep and Adams Niley are listed as recipients in the T
O
: line, Ji-Wan has copied nearly the entire department, including the two administrative assistants: