Antiphony (2 page)

“If you don't have them, they must be in the room.” Ilene releases a heavy sigh that seems to enfold all the exasperation of living with someone as willfully impractical as her husband over the years. “Want me to run up and get them?”

“No, I'll go.” He does not want to ruin her trip, even if it means ruining his. She has had her heart set on this class, the massage, an afternoon of indulgence. “I have plenty of time. I think I know where I left them.” Yet even as he says this, a slippery feeling of dread starts to build within the pit of his stomach. He has no idea where the notes are, and without them he must rely on his own very shaky memory to supply the details necessary to fill an hour and twenty-five minutes of empty time in front of an audience of his peers. He has never liked talking to more than a couple of people at once, so he clings to the memory of what an undergrad professor of his once said upon completing a very brief fifteen minute lecture and letting the class out early to enjoy the remainder of the spring day: “Tell them what you're going to say, say it, then tell them what you said.” It seems like a sound method of public speaking, one he has intended to follow during his preparation for the meeting, but without his notes it may be impossible for him to do.

He casts his eyes at Ilene, hoping she might somehow supply a resolution to his predicament, as she has done so many times before. Her green eyes look past him, over his shoulder, towards the street outside the hotel. She is taller than he is by several inches, and that has always been in his mind an indicator of the underlying basis of their relationship: He is always looking
up at the sky towards her, and she is always looking down at the earth towards him. While he has been lost in contemplation of the intricate workings of interstellar space, she has raised the children, cooked the meals, and paid the bills. Today, her hair is flipped out at the ends in a style he has never seen before. In anticipation of this trip, she must have splurged on a new haircut as well as the outfit she is wearing, a gauzy blouse overlaid with rhomboidal patterns of green and yellow that remind him of the arabesque on the back of a playing card. If he delays her, she will be all dressed up with no place to go. Once she made the decision to join him on the trip, she must have been looking forward to it very much, planning what she would wear each day and selecting, after much deliberation, this particular outfit in anticipation of this afternoon. He does not want the trip to be a disappointment to her—one more in a series of disappointments.

After they married, Ilene wondered if it might be better for him to take a job at a large corporation, an aerospace firm perhaps, doing practical, applied science and getting paid handsomely for it. But he had been determined to carry on with his dream of uncovering the inner workings of the universe, peeling back, layer by layer, the laws of time and space and gravity that hold everything together and make it all work the way it does. He had a feeling, as had so many other young physicists of his day, that they were ninety-eight percent of the way to a final solution, a grand unifying theory that could boil everything down to a handful of equations, or even one very simple, eloquent equation, that sums it all up in a kind of primal algebraic ju-jitsu, like one of those children's toys that start out as a colorful
geodesic sphere of interlocking plastic rods and can collapse upon itself into a single, unitary ball. So, he insisted on chasing the dream as a pure scientist and ended up at the Institute for Cosmological Physics on a research fellowship, earning less than many high school teachers, locking Ilene in to a life of making ends meet, cutting coupons and shopping for specials at the wholesale club, and trying to enjoy a trip to a physics conference now and then as if it were a real family vacation. Even though they are now well past the financial struggles of raising their two children, who have been comfortably launched into well-paying careers of their own, this intimation of the life he has inflicted on her magnifies the feeling he has of an impending doom. He reaches his hand out and touches the filmy fabric of her sleeve.

“Have fun at the class. This won't take long.”

She brings her eyes back to him and grants him a smile. Though she has thickened at the waist in her middle age and her small-boned angel's face has acquired the puffiness of an extra chin when she looks down at him, the individual features he fell in love with, the pursed rosebud lips, the nose tipped up like a miniature ski jump, the startling green eyes, are still there. “You'll knock their socks off.”

As he steps away from her, he glimpses the boys on the opposite side of the lobby, tossing the football once more in a semblance of a play they must be reenacting, and he remembers another number that brings him back to the problem of the photons. To know how many photons can fit into a cubic centimeter, you would have to put a time parameter around the answer, because photons are not static objects—a photon never
stands still and it can only go at the speed of light. Like all other particles in the universe, photons have both wave-like and particle-like properties. He imagines his mythical cubic centimeter of space as a small transparent box being inundated from every direction by a series of waves of light, from a myriad of sources, like ripples in a pond, and so he would have to limit the duration of the thought-problem to some arbitrary amount of time, such as one second. And then he would be able to say that the wavelength of one photon is equal to the Planck length, which is the smallest possible length in the universe: 1.6 × 10
^--35
meters. The Planck length is the distance a photon travels in a Planck time, which is the shortest possible time in the universe. So, from here he can simply divide a cubic centimeter by the Planck length and divide a second by the Planck time, multiply those two numbers together, and voilà, he has his answer. The calculations would only take a couple of minutes to set up on a laptop computer.

Having reduced this problem to a set of easily knowable computations, he sets forth down the corridor that leads to the elevator that will lift him to his hotel room and his notes. He is reassured by the fact that everything is knowable—everything can be found.

This hallway is much dimmer than the main lobby, and it takes his eyes a moment to adjust. There is a quiet, muffled air here, away from the hubbub of people checking in or checking out and bellmen hoisting luggage onto their gleaming brass carts.

Then, as his pupils widen to allow a few more particles of light in, the problem of his little transparent cubic centimeter
box comes at him again from another, more philosophical angle. The thought that enters his head is disturbing enough that he mentally holds it away from himself for a moment, a horrifying sight he must avoid seeing. Is it not true, according to quantum theory, that the probability wave of each photon fills the entire universe? So, when he looks at it from that perspective, the answer to the problem jumps from a certain discrete, knowable number all the way to infinity.

How many photons can fit in a cubic centimeter?

The answer is… all of them.

This is the kind of maddening thought that keeps him awake at night. The job of the physicist must have been so easy in the days before relativity and quantum theory were conjured up to wrestle with each other at opposite ends of the physical scale of the universe. Every time he feels he has an answer to a problem like this he is toying with, it seems to flip around on itself and turn into something entirely different, depending on which way he is looking at it, like the snake that circles around to eat its own tail. The thought of all the photons in the universe crowding into his little see-through box has released a slippery sensation in his abdomen; a set of heavy, wet washrags, it seems, are sliding against one another in his gut, and he is suddenly seized by a tremendous urge to defecate, just as the bell sounds its beckoning tone and the doors to the elevator slither open. Perhaps he can get in and make it up to his room. He calculates a moment and decides against it. He really does have to go—now.

Fearing the worst, Theodore looks around for a bathroom, there must be one nearby. There, just down the hall. He strides
quickly towards the paired doors and charges into the bright, tiled room, grateful to find that all the stalls are empty. He slides the bolt into place and drops his trousers to the floor, twisting his boxers around the dark socks on his ankles as he falls back upon the toilet seat with not a moment to spare, the contents of his bowels spilling into the echoing bowl full of water with a thundering sound loud enough that he wonders whether anyone outside the bathroom can hear it.

Lately, he has found himself to be ravenous, eating a huge meal for dinner, like the steak he had last night, and following it up with another big meal for breakfast—two eggs over easy, sausage links, bacon, toast, juice and coffee—and he wonders where it all goes. He hasn't gained an ounce. He has always had a tight-knit, wiry sort of body, but he's been eating twice as much as usual. Then, after these huge meals, he will find himself at an inopportune moment such as this, strapped in to an airplane or in the middle of a meeting in a conference room, with a sudden and undeniable need to go.

Now that he is situated on the hard narrow seat, he takes a look at his surroundings. This is the kind of tight, confining space he never feels he will make it out of alive; the sharp smell of urine and trace of blue sanitized water from the toilet cause his nostrils to pinch. He has to shift his knees at an awkward angle so that his legs will fit between the jutting stainless steel paper dispenser and the opposite wall of the stall.

Theodore often finds himself in situations such as this, in the wrong place at the wrong time, slightly out of phase with the world around him. He should be at the ballroom where his esteemed colleagues are gathering to hear him speak. But instead
he is here, contemplating his hairy kneecaps and wondering where in the world his notes might be.

Ilene said she saw them in the room—they must be there. Everything is okay, he will finish here and calmly go upstairs and find them. He envisions them lying on the bedside table next to the clock radio, or perhaps on the desk next to the room service menu and the cunning futuristic lamp. He sees the sheets of paper engulfed in a kind of glow that makes them stand out against the objects around them. They are there, they must be. They contain, in a mere pair of handwritten pages, the accumulated wisdom of the past seven years of his life's work, the most comprehensive and elegant summary of Perturbation Theory imaginable.

A surprisingly rich scent of coffee emanates from the bolus of digested food he has released into the ceramic basin beneath him. Against his doctor's orders, he has once again taken up drinking coffee for breakfast, and he has begun to notice that his excrement somehow retains the smell of it, overpowering all the other ingredients that go into producing this concentrated distillate of his self. This is finished. He wipes himself, stands and pulls up his pants. These furtive movements initiate a startling sudden whoosh behind him. He turns to watch the waste recede into the plumbing on a cascade of fresh blue water and as he does, a series of words that has been etched into the stall catches his eye.

T
HE
W
ORD
I
S A
L
IE

Or, maybe it is T
HE
W
ORLD
I
S A
L
IE
, it is hard to tell—there may be an “l” there, squeezed between the “r” and the “d.” The graffiti has been casually sketched onto the metal wall
with a pen or a knife—or both. There is clearly blue ink in the outlines of the letters, but there is an indistinct mark between the “r” and “d” that makes the message ambiguous.

T
HE
W
ORD
I
S A
L
IE
. What does that mean? He looks in the mirror as he washes his hands and considers the face that stares back at him. Dark hair and blue eyes that pale into gray when the weather turns grim. Narrow cheekbones that frame his nose and mouth, and a goatee speckled with blond that Ilene has never really liked, his attempt to look professorial. He would never lie—has never lied. It is outside the realm of possibility for him. His entire life has been dedicated to finding truth, to peeling back layers upon layers of obfuscation and going directly to the most basic reality of human existence. Perhaps he has been set upon this course, this life of fitful lurching in the direction of truth, by an incident that occurred when he was only six years old. He was in first grade, and they had seen fit in his primary school to organize the desks of the students in clusters of four, so that instead of having ranks of students facing straight ahead towards the teacher dispensing her wisdom at the front of the class, the students paid attention mostly to each other. An educator somewhere must have thought this arrangement would lead to a more democratic form of scholarship, students learning from each other, through teamwork and collaboration, but, as Theodore has discovered through his decades in academia since, nearly all knowledge must either be handed down from a more experienced source or painstakingly discovered on one's own. Nearly every committee he has ever been entangled with only served to produce confusion, delay, or outright lies.

Because his desk happened to be the one in the cluster facing the rear of the class, away from the chalkboard and the teacher's desk, he spent nearly the entire first year of school twisted around in his chair, trying to see what the teacher might have to tell him. This arrangement also afforded him the opportunity to stare unabashed at the studious girl with the curly light brown hair whose desk was directly across from him in the cluster. He cannot remember her name. She never spoke a word to him, nor he to her. But she seemed to have something indefinable that he wanted. Then, shortly before Christmas break—they still called it that then—she came to school one day with a milk truck calendar. Now he knew precisely what she had that he wanted. The calendar was fashioned out of creamy beige cardboard, with the name of a local dairy on it, propped upright by a tongue of coarse brown cardboard, and the small rectangular pages of the calendar itself attached to the truck where the milk would have been stored. One day, he found himself in the classroom alone, back from lunch or recess early, and he seized the opportunity to take the calendar into his hands, lift the top of his desk, and stow the calendar in it. It was his now. Then, when the girl came back and discovered that the calendar had gone missing and the kindly teacher asked the classroom full of students if anyone had seen it, he had been forced to confront the fact that he must either confess to taking it or sit there, his face burning with the effort of not saying anything, knowing that the milk truck was parked snugly in his desk, hidden beneath his reading books, erasers, and pencils.