Engineering Infinity (22 page)

But that was the point, it
wasn’t
a 1931 movie, of course, it was a bricolaged fake.
Well, maybe not the whole thing. Mostly it looked highly authentic to my
well-seasoned eye. They’d rendered my face into the image of the young man, and
somehow worked in that iPad thing for a few frames. Maybe in the original the
kid had waved a newspaper headline, or a cloth cap. So why the hell bother? Who
was trying to tell me something, and what? A disgruntled student? A
post-postmodern gag to piss me off, get my goat? One of Bev’s sardonic tame “artists”?

I shut the machine down,
carefully backing everything up first to the university cloud, and biked over
to the other side of town to see Bev. Virta and Crump and impending divorce be
damned. I just couldn’t cope with this shit by myself, and besides I was
developing a suspicion or two.

When I first met Bev Peacock
during my guest lectures at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, her father
owned a small chain of health food stores with corporate headquarters in
Sacramento. Bev took a couple of summer courses at UC Davis, including my
sessions on Julia Kristeva and other psychoanalytic deep thinkers on their way
to superannuation. During her last two years in Chicago, emails fled between
us; we talked on the phone at least twice a day. By then, I was separated from
Sheila, and visited Chicago when I could, strolling with Bev in Lincoln Park,
visiting the art museum where I spent more time looking at her than at the
daubings. Everyone could see we were in love; for the first two years, anyway.
As I sank ever deeper into gloom at the gibberish I was required to teach, Bev
discarded her dreams of great art. The renunciation changed her, bit by bit.
She built her separate life, embarrassed to be seen with me: my moods, my
drinking, the way I dressed.

Barry Peacock sold the health
food store chain six months after Bev and I married, netting $6.2 million.
Barry and Ruth wanted their daughter to enjoy at least part of her inheritance
while they were still around, so they bought the house in Davis for a little
over a million dollars. The house remains owned by the Beverly Peacock Watson
Separate Property Trust, but I had no claim to it under California’s community
property law. And now I was doubly alienated: evicted, replaced by the
atom-tweaker from Bulgaria.

I leaned my Koga StreetLiner
against a pillar of the porch and dropped my helmet into the saddlebag. I felt
queasy about leaving the Koga unlocked, even in this neighbourhood, but one of
the reasons Bev threw me out was my habit of parking bicycles in the house. The
creature opened the door and gazed down at me benignly. He drew in a deep,
energizing breath, then wrinkled his patrician nostrils at the
eau d’Jack
.

“Lee. I see the flesh seems a
little weak today, but the spirit smells strong.”

I winced. I hadn’t drunk
that
much, although I’d weaved a little on my ride; it was
probably just as well no cop had pulled me over to check my
sang froid.
My
sang réal.
I
sniggered. “And how’s your cat today, Schrödinger? Alive or dead?”

Tsvetan Toshtenov, D.Sc. (Ruse)
blocked the doorway. “Both, of course. As a matter of fact, we’ve just done
a...” He shook his head. “Of course you don’t want to know. What do you want,
Lee? I assumed Bev had a restraining order.”

“Ha ha, very droll.” I made
myself small and went under his arm, then galumphed down the hallway. Two small
boys glanced up from their Playstation 4 and gazed at me impassively. So now
she’d moved in the entire family. Those faces. Something went
ping
in a buried part of my brain but I was too aerated to
catch it, although I half-stumbled for an instant. It would come back to me. I
jinked through our bright metal-clad kitchen warm with the odours of Bulgarian
fare, and made for the studio out back. “Honey, I’m ho-o-o-ome,” I yodelled.

It wasn’t a studio, of course,
despite the artfully placed and prepped canvas on its easel awaiting the first
lick of oil. It had been waiting for years. When I’d married Beverley and moved
in here with her, she was in the last drawn-out ebbings of her passion to be a
painter, heading step by inexorable step toward curatorship and a safe
doctorate in Mapplethorpe and de Kooning (Elaine, naturally, not Willem). These
days she organized elegant or bizarre installations, events, displays, online
video performances. If anyone was likely to know a scamp capable of torturing
me with a fake orphan movie, at her instigation, it was Bev. She of all people
knew my own passion for orphan footage. Yet it seemed a bit beneath her, and
perhaps beyond Bev’s currently limited quotient of whimsy.

“Drunk! For heaven’s sake, Lee.”
My wife rose from her persuasive replica somethingth century oak Chateau
Something credenza and advanced in her forceful and menacing way toward me. “What
are you doing here?”

“Hardly drunk,” I said without
conviction. “The sun’s well and truly over the yardarm, Bev.”

“I had a call from Hattie
Patterson several hours ago. She wondered if I knew where you’d got to.”

“Why would she expect you to
know?”

“We
are
still married, Lee. Have you signed the documents yet? Hattie said you didn’t
show up at the faculty meeting convened to consider your candidacy, and it had
something to do with your daughter. Is Mandy okay? Oh, wait, of course she is -
I should have taken it for granted you were lying.”

The spring, such as it was, had
quite left my step. I looked for somewhere to sit, and found a deck chair
rather ruined by splashes of house paint leaning against one wall. As I started
to open it, Bev gave a strangled cry.

“Not
that,
you
idiot. Good god, man, it’s an early Rauschenberg.”

I backed away smartly. So it was,
or could be. How the hell did Beverley get her hands on something like that?
She was loaded, but not
that
loaded, or Virta and
Crump, P.C. were lying through their teeth. Of course that was the specialty of
divorce attorneys. Or maybe she’d brought it home from some exhibition for a
couple of weeks of private gloating. I opened my mouth to ask, an instant too
late.

“Come on, inside the house with
you, and then please leave. I don’t want the children to see a drunkard
shambling about.” She shepherded me out of the studio and along the small
vegetable garden and ample green lawn where we had once rolled naked. Her
creature was waiting in the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. He passed it to me and
I burned my mouth.

“That place is the death of the
soul, Bev,” I told her. “You know that much yourself. I mean, it’s not as if
you stayed around to build your academic...” I trailed off, blowing across the
top of the mug. A teabagging time-slut? I couldn’t imagine Bev and the creature
from Bulgaria engaging in reckless sports of that kind. Not that she and I hadn’t
enjoyed, when we were first together, our share of -

The two little boys crouched in
the next room noisily killing aliens and cavorting in three-dimensional havoc
with imaginary super-weapons were not her children, not ours, but Tsvetan’s,
and nobody of my acquaintance had ever seen their mother, save the creature
himself. Beverley had met him at a soiree of daubers and their hangers-on. He’d
pronounced himself a cubist. No doubt Bev raised an eyebrow. Hardly
au courant.
No, no. Forgiving urbane laughter over a
simple error. A QBist. A Quantum Bayesian. Whatever that was, I’d never
bothered to ask. As for his prior woman, the mother of his brats, maybe
she
was
a time-slut. Whatever
that
might be. After all, how else - ridiculous, I told
myself, slurping and blowing. I’m delusional. This is worse than the DTs. Those
kids can’t be older than five and seven. I couldn’t remember their names.
Something eastern European. Ivaylo and Krastio? But the little one did look
horribly familiar. I could all too easily imagine him whipping out an advanced
display unit from under his shirt. In five or six years from now. Christ.

“I’m sure you’d like a drink,”
the creature said, and handed me a large glass not quite brimming with a deep,
rich pinot noir. I remembered those glasses; they’d been a wedding gift from my
aunt Hilda. I considered quaffing it in one hit and then flinging it into the
fireplace, but that doesn’t really work with a top of the line gas cooking
range. I sipped in a gentlemanly manner, sat at the new kitchen table, and told
them in a not especially accusatory tone about the Rev. Willard D. Havard and
his unusual sidewalk congregation.

“You can access this video,
presumably?”

“If I’d brought my laptop with
me, Bev, I’d be delighted to show it to you.”

The creature was gone; he was
back almost instantly with a gleaming titanium-shelled Apple. He pushed it in
front of me. The university log-in box was displayed.

“Oh hell, why not?” I pulled my
orphan out of the cloud and ran it as they stood behind me, watching with a
blend of avidity (Tzvetan) and amused contempt (my faithless wife). At the end
of the three minutes I said, “Again?” and reran it. Then I found the screen
capture and blew it up on the rather nice large display.

“Well. That’s obviously ket
quantum notation. Dirac didn’t invent it until 1939, so clearly this film isn’t
from 1931, did you say?”

“Sweetheart,” Bev said in a
strangled voice, “didn’t you notice? Those were Wolf and Chris.” I looked up;
her face was totally pale, and her eyes were fixed on Sweetheart. “Those were
your boys, grown up.”

“Distant relatives, perhaps.”
Tsvetan was doubtful, but I trusted Bev’s curatorial eye, and I imagine my own
face was as bloodless as hers. “In 1939, my own parents and their siblings were
still under Hitler’s boot.” Or working for the Gestapo, I didn’t quite mutter
aloud. I had no reason to think badly of the man’s antecedents. For all I knew
they had indeed been subjected to the banality of evil. “Show me that equation
again, I thought I recognized it.”

“I found it here.” I opened the
arXiv paper.

“I’ve heard of Arjen,” the QBist
said thoughtfully. “Young Dutch theorist with an interest in the foundations of
physics, lives near Paris. He’s a serious scholar, wouldn’t have anything to do
with a silly game like this, I assure you. Here, let me find his number.” He
had his iPhone out, with a finger sweeping.

“Please don’t,” I said. “I’m sure
you’re right. It’s a prank by one of Bev’s students.”

My wife’s jaw dropped. “Excuse
me
?”

“Who else has the skills to paste
my head on some ancient young geezer’s body, let alone do something to the
appearance of the boys? Age shifting or whatever the forensic cops call it.”

“Anyone over the age of 10,” Bev
said frostily. “Mandy, for that matter, or one of her friends. Have you been
upsetting your daughter, Lee?”

“Oh for god’s sake, I wasn’t
making it a personal accusation. My point was -”

“No, that’s right, she’s made it
clear she doesn’t want you in her life any longer. Sensible child.”

I shoved the chair back with a
nasty screeching sound. That wouldn’t have helped the parquet floor. Tsvetan
slipped into its seat like a large muscular eel and started pounding the
keyboard. I noticed that he used only four fingers, but his typing was faster
than I could manage with ten. Then again, scientists don’t have to stop and
think what they’re about to be writing, it’s all formulae and algorithms and
canned knowledge, isn’t it. Unless they’re Einstein. Or Dirac, whoever he was.
Dirac, I thought. Diracula.

“We’re hungry.” Two little boys
with the same face as their father and no resemblance to Bev stood at the open
door between the kitchen and the hall. They were amazingly well-behaved,
nothing like the scapegraces they’d been in 1931. But it was them, they, I knew
it, on the orphan footage. Had been. Would be. No question. Time was out of
joint big time. I thought I was going to throw up.

“In a moment, darlings. This man
was just leaving.”

I shook my head sadly at the perfidy
of women, children and creatures, swigged down the last of the red in my glass
(
my
glass!), put the glass, stem first, in my jacket
pocket, and walked in a dignified fashion to the front door, pursued by
imprecations.

I warmed up some refried beans, which
I suppose made them re-refried, and googled quantum theory, grinding my teeth
from time to time. It was the sort of thing I’d have expected Carl Jung to get
excited about, and of course he had been involved in a sterile collaboration
with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli before Pauli came to his senses and decided
synchronicity was a lot of hogwash. Bohr thought nothing
was
until it was
observed
, which might not have appealed
to Freud, who thought all sort of unobserved items got up to no end of
mischief. Granted, the way to eradicate and heal the mischief was to haul out
the unobserved into the open, but then Bohr and Heisenberg (it said on my
screen) insisted that you couldn’t really get away with that, or only a bit at
a time. I gave up, washed my plate, made some coffee, and called Mandy. That
meant dealing with her mother first, but somehow I got through that ordeal and
onto my sweet daughter.

“What do you want?”

“Don’t you mean, ‘What the fuck
do
you
want, Daddy dearest?’ Don’t answer that. Can’t
a man call his own -”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Mandy, did you or one of your
friends make that video of me? And the Toshtenov boys?”

In the background I heard someone
incredibly famous and fatuous, someone observed at every moment of the day and
night by hundreds of millions if not billions, of whom I knew nothing beyond
their unlikely names. Beyoncé, or Lady Gaga, or Rihanna, or Bran’Nu. (I try. It
makes my brain itch, but I do try. Fourteen year olds are feral.) Talk about
quantum observers and ontological status. If anyone existed on the planet
because of being observed, they were it. Talk about the evil of banality. After
a long moment, my daughter said: “What?” Another silence. I waited. Then, with
acid adolescent contempt: “Who would make a vid of
you
?”