Einstein's Monsters (6 page)

Now I must have blinked, or shut my eyes, or ducked (or fainted). I heard three blows on a regular second beat, clean, direct, and atrocious, each one like an ax splitting frozen wood. When I looked up, Pat and one of his friends were lying on the steps; the other guys were backing away, backing away from the site of this incident, this demonstration. Expressionlessly Bujak knelt to do something extra to Pat on the floor. As I watched, he tugged back the hair and carefully poked a neutronium fist into Pat’s upturned face. I had to go and lie down after that. But a couple of weeks later I saw Pat sitting alone in the London Apprentice; he was shivering remorsefully in the corner behind the jukebox; the pleated welt on his cheek bore all the colors of flame, and he was drinking his beer through a straw. In that one blow he had taken payment for everything he had given Leokadia.

With Bujak, I was always edging into friendship. I don’t know if I ever really made it. Differences of age aren’t easy. Differences of strength aren’t easy. Friendship isn’t easy. When Bujak’s own holocaust came calling, I was some help to him; I was better than nothing. I went to the court. I went to the cemetery. I took my share of the strong force, what little I could take.… Perhaps a dozen times during that summer, before the catastrophe came (it was heading toward him slowly, gathering speed), I sat up late on his back porch when all the women had gone to bed. Bujak stargazed. He talked and drank his tea. “Traveling at the speed of light,” he said one time, “you could cross the whole universe in less than a second. Time and distance would be annihilated, and all futures possible.” No shit? I thought. Or again: “If you could linger on the brink of a singularity, time would be so slow that a night would pass in forty-five seconds, and there would be three American elections in the space of seven days.” Three American elections, I said to myself. Whew, what a boring week. And why is
he
the dreamer, while I am bound to the low earth? Feeling mean, I often despised the dreaming Bujak, but I entertained late-night warmth for him too, for the accretions of experience (time having worked on his face like a sculptor, awful slow), and I feared him—I feared the energy coiled, seized, and locked in Bujak. Staring up at our little disk of stars (and perhaps there are better residential galaxies than our own: cleaner, safer, more gentrified), I sensed only the false stillness of the black nightmap, its beauty concealing great and routine violence, the fleeing universe, with matter racing apart, exploding to the limits of space and time, all tugs and curves, all hubble and doppler, infinitely and eternally hostile.… This evening, as I write, the New York sky is also full of stars—the same stars. There. There is Michiko coming down the street, hand in hand with our little girl. They made it. Home at last. Above them the gods shoot crap with their black dice: threes and fives and ones. The Plough has just rolled a four and a two. But who throws the six, the six, the six?

All peculiarly modern ills, all fresh distortions and distempers, Bujak attributed to one thing: Einsteinian knowledge, knowledge of the strong force. It was his central paradox that the greatest—the purest, the most magical—genius of our time should have introduced the earth to such squalor, profanity, and panic. “But how very like the twentieth century,” he said: this was always going to be the age when irony really came into its own. I have cousins and uncles who speak of Einstein as if he were some hero ballplayer captaining a team called the Jews (“the mind on him,” “look at the mind on the guy”). Bujak spoke of Einstein as if he were God’s literary critic, God being a poet. I, more stolidly, tend to suspect that God is a novelist—a garrulous and deeply unwholesome one too.… Actually Bujak’s theory had a lot of appeal for me. It was, at least, holistic. It answered the big question. You know the question I mean, and its cumulative disquiet, its compound interest. You ask yourself the question every time you open a newspaper or switch on the TV or walk the streets among sons of thunder. New formations, deformations. You know the question. It reads:
Just what the hell is going on around here?

The world looks worse every day. Is it worse, or does it just look it? The world gets older. The world has seen and done it all. Boy, is it beat. It’s suicidal. Like Leokadia, the world has done too many things too many times with too many people, done it this way, that way, with him, with him. The world has been to so many parties, been in so many fights, lost its keys, had its handbag stolen, drunk too much. It all adds up. A tab is presented. Our ironic destiny. Look at the modern infamies, the twentieth-century sins. Some are strange, some banal, but they all offend the eye, covered in their newborn vernix. Gratuitous or recreational crimes of violence, the ever-less-tacit totalitarianism of money (money—what
is
this shit anyway?), the pornographic proliferation, the nuclear collapse of the family (with the breeders all going critical, and now the children running too), the sappings and distortions of a mediated reality, the sexual abuse of the very old and the very young (of the weak, the weak): what is the hidden denominator here, and what could explain it
all?

To paraphrase Bujak, as I understood him. We live in a shameful shadowland. Quietly, our idea of human life has changed, thinned out. We can’t help but think less of it now. The human race has declassed itself. It does not live anymore; it just survives, like an animal. We endure the suicide’s shame, the shame of the murderer, the shame of the victim. Death is all we have in common. And what does that do to life? Such, at any rate, was Bujak’s damage check. If the world disarmed tomorrow, he believed, the species would still need at least a century of recuperation, after its entanglement, its flirtation, after its thing with the strong force.

Academic in any case, since Bujak was insuperably convinced that the end was on its way. How could man (that dangerous creature—I mean, look at his
record
), how could man resist the intoxication of the Perfect Crime, one that destroys all evidence, all redress, all pasts, all futures? I was enough of a peacenik, optimist, and funker to take the other view. A dedicated follower of fear, I always thought that the fat brute and the big bastard would maintain their standoff: they know that if one fist is raised then the whole pub comes down anyway. Not a masterpiece of reassurance, I agree—not at ten fifty-five on a Saturday night, with the drink still coming.

“Deterrence theory,” said Bujak, with his grin. “It’s not just a bad theory. It’s not even a theory. It’s an insanity.”

“That’s why you have to go further.”

“You are a unilateralist?”

“Well yeah,” I said. “Someone’s got to make a start sometime. Make a start. England is historically well placed to give it a try. So the Russians take Europe, maybe. But that risk must be smaller than the other risk, which is infinite.”

“This changes nothing. The risk is unaltered. All you do here is make life easier to part with.”

“Well, I just think you have to make a start.”

Our arguments always ended on the same side street. I maintained that the victim of a first strike would have no reason to retaliate, and would probably not do so.

“Oh?” said Bujak.

“What would be the point? You’d have nothing to protect. No country, no people. You’d gain nothing. Why add to it all?”

“Revenge.”

“Oh yeah. The heat of the battle. But that’s not a
reason
.”

“In war, revenge is a reason. Revenge is as reasonable as anything. They say nuclear war will not be really
war
but something else. True, but it will feel like war to those who fight it.”

On the other hand, he added, nobody could guess how people would react under the strong force. Having crossed that line the whole world would be crazy or animal and certainly no longer human.

One day in the fall of 1980 Bujak traveled north. I never knew why. I saw him on the street that morning, a formidable sight in the edifice of his dark blue suit. Something about his air of courtly gaiety, his cap, his tie, suggested to me that he was off to investigate an old ladyfriend. The sky was gray and gristly, with interesting bruises, the street damp and stickered with leaves. Bujak pointed a tight umbrella at his own front door. “I come back tomorrow night,” he said. “Keep an eye on them.”

“Me? Well, sure. Okay.”

“Leokadia, I learn, is pregnant. Two months. Pat. Oh, Pat—he really was too bad.” Then he shrugged powerfully and said, “But I’m pleased. Look at Boguslawa. Her father was an animal too. But look at her. A flower. An angel from heaven.”

And off he went, pacing out the street, content, if necessary, to walk the whole way. That afternoon I looked in on the girls and drank a cup of tea with old Roza. Christ, I remember thinking, what is it with these Polacks? Roza was seventy-eight. By that age
my
mother had been dead for twenty years. (Cancer. Cancer is the
other
thing—the third thing. Cancer will come for me too, I guess. Sometimes I feel it right in front of me, fizzing like television inches from my face.) I sat there and wondered how the quality of wildness was distributed among the Bujak ladies. With pious eyes and hair like antique silver, Roza was nonetheless the sort of old woman who still enjoyed laughing at the odd salacious joke—and she laughed very musically, one hand raised in gentle propitiation. “Hey, Roza,” I would say: “I got one for you.” And she would start laughing before I began. Little Boguslawa—seven, silent, sensitive—lay reading by the fire, her eyes lit by the page. Even the brawny beauty Leokadia seemed steadier, her eyes more easily containing their glow. She spoke to me now as levelly as she used to before we had that awkward tangle in my apartment. You know, I think the reason she put out for the boys so much was the usual thing about trying to accumulate approval. Approval is funny stuff, and some people need a lot more of it than others. Also she was obviously very rich in her female properties and essences; being prudent isn’t so easy for girls kitted out like that. Now she sat there equably doing nothing. The red flag was down. All was calm with her dangerous floods and tides. A moony peace—Michi was like that herself sometimes, when our child was on the way. Our little one. Expecting. I stuck around for an hour or so and then crossed the road again, back to my study and its small life. I sat and read
Mosby’s Memoirs
for the rest of the evening; and through my window I did indeed keep an eye on the Bujak front door. The next day was Friday. I looked in on the ladies to drop off a key before heading north myself—to Manchester and to Michiko. Meanwhile, energetic actors, vivid representatives of the twentieth century—Einstein’s monsters—were on their way south.

At midnight on Saturday Bujak returned. All I know about what he found I got from the newspapers and the police, together with a couple of stray details that Bujak let slip. In any event I will add nothing; I will add nothing to what Bujak found.… He had no premonition until he placed his key in the lock and saw that the door was open and gave softly to his touch. He proceeded in deep silence. The hall had an odd smell to it, the smell of cigarette smoke and jam. Bujak tipped open the living-room door. The room looked like half of something torn in two. On the floor an empty vodka bottle seemed to tip slightly on its axis. Leokadia lay naked in the corner. One leg was bent at an impossible angle. Bujak moved through the terrible rooms. Roza and Boguslawa lay on their beds, naked, contorted, frozen, like Leokadia. In Leokadia’s room two strange men were sleeping. Bujak closed the bedroom door behind him and removed his cap. He came closer. He leaned forward to seize them. Just before he did so he flexed his arms and felt the rustle of the strong force.

This happened five years ago. Yes, I’m here to tell you that the world is still around, in 1985. We live in New York now. I teach. The students come to me, and then they leave. There are gaps, spaces in between things big enough for me to glimpse the study life and know again that I can’t take it. My daughter is four years old. I was present at the birth, or I tried to be. First I was sick; then I hid; then I fainted. Yeah, I did real good. Found and revived, I was led back to the delivery room. They placed the blood-fringed bundle in my arms. I thought then and I think now: How will the poor little bitch make it? How will she
make
it? But I’m learning to live with her, with the worry bomb, the love bomb. Last summer we took her to England. The pound was weak and the dollar was strong—the bold, the swaggering dollar, plunderer of Europe. We took her to London, London West, carnival country with its sons of thunder.Bujak country. I’d called my landlady and established that Bujak, too, was still around, in 1984. There was a question I needed to ask him. And Michi and I wanted to show Bujak our girl, little Roza, named for the old woman.

It was old Roza whom I had thought of most fixedly, during the worst car journey of my life, as we drove from Manchester to London, from fair weather into foul, into Sunday weather. That morning, over coffee and yogurt in her cubicle, Michi handed me the smudged and mangling tabloid. “Sam?” she said. I stared at the story, at the name, and realized that the rat life is not somewhere else anymore, is not on the other side but touches your life, my life.… Cars are terrible things and no wonder Bujak hated them. Cars are cruel creatures, vicious bastards, pitiless and inexorable, with only this one idea, this A-to-B-idea. They made no allowances. Down we slid through the motorway wheel-squirt. Neighbors gathered as we parked, the men bearing umbrellas, the women with their arms folded, shaking their heads. I crossed the street and rang the bell. And again. And for what? I tried the back door, the kitchen porch. Then Michiko called me. Together we stared through the living-room window. Bujak sat at the table, hunched forward as if he needed all the power of his back and shoulders just to hold position, just to keep his rest energy seized, skewered. Several times I knocked on the glass. He never moved. There was a noise in my ear and the seconds fussed and fussed, slower than a fuse. The street felt like a cave. I turned to Michi and her four-lidded eyes. We stood and watched each other through the heavy rain.