Engineering Infinity (23 page)

“That’s what I’m trying to find
out, my good-natured offspring. Okay, look, I’ll send you a tinyurl. The orphan’s
short.”

“What?”

“Just let me know what you think.
Okay? This is really important to me, Mandy.”

“Whatever.” She clicked off.

I fiddled about with my notes for
the next day’s lecture, thoughts skittering everywhere, and finally abandoned
that as a really pointless exercise. Manfully, I kept away from the Jack
Daniels. My daughter didn’t call back or email me or text me or instant message
me or tweet me, hardly to my surprise, but it was a bit disheartening. My Tivo
was showing me a light, so I watched the ep of
Californication
it had grabbed while I wasn’t paying attention (“Mr Bad Example,” which seemed
somehow oracular), then had a shower, took a sleeping pill, and went to bed. At
five in the morning I woke up with a headache and a woman standing in my dark
bedroom. She said something.

“Hmngh?”

“She put it on the web.”

I climbed out of bed naked,
clawing for my trousers. The woman didn’t shift her gaze from my face. “Who the
hell are you and how did you get -”

“Went viral.”

I clapped my hands and the
bedside lamp came on. The woman was medium height, with a dark razor-brush ‘do,
and looked incontestably Bulgarian: long elegant nose, broad brow, widely spaced
eyes. I had fancied to discern the creature in the immature features of the
boys Wolf and Chris, but now I found the other half of the taller kid’s genome,
if not his half-brothers’s. Good god, was the creature devoted to spreading his
seed across the world? I said, “You’ll be the time-slut, then.”

She said, “
Beg
pardon?” All the women I’d met recently appeared to have formed a secret club
dedicated to taking umbrage at everything I said to them. Except Lissa, I
thought muzzily, and rubbed grit out of my eyes.

“I apologize, Mrs Toshtenov.
Having a hard time lately, not thinking all that clearly. Forgive me for being
naked in my own bedroom.”

“Is nothing haven’t seen before.”

“No doubt.”

She clucked her tongue. “Radka.
Not married. Am mother to Ivaylo.”

I nodded. “Wolf.”

“Means ‘wolf,’ yes.”

“You sent me a message,” I said,
and finished getting dressed. “Then my bad-tempered daughter put it on YouTube,
I take it. If that was your intention, why not just do it yourself? I thought
it was fake, but now I -”

“Not much time,” Radka told me.
She bounced on her toes, almost vibrated with tension. “Listen. Am professor
theoretical physics, Sofia. Not yet, soon. Listen, listen, keep mouth shut.
Bohr wrong, of course. Bohm, wrong. Heisenberg not even wrong. QBists, half
right.” She went out like a light. I hadn’t clapped my hands. A young woman in
her early twenties stood several inches to the right of Radka’s last jitter.
Her hair was cropped close, a sort of tie-dyed version of the Bulgarian fashion
statement. I recognized her at once.

“Mandy,” I yelped, and took a
hesitant step, afraid to embrace her. The ghost of Christmas Future.

She stayed still, also vibrating.
“Amanda. Hello, Dad. No, stay there. Everyone’s observing this, see, that’s the
point. Everyone. Everything. Forever, probably. Well, near enough.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed
again and put my head in my hands. “I hope you’re not going to tell me the
Reverend Willard sent you.”

“What?”

“Oh my god, are we back to that
again?” I peeked through my fingers. Amanda sent me a wry grin.

“That was then. See, I do
remember. Oh, I suppose it’s now, too, if you look at it that -” She cleared
her throat. “It’s an entanglement excursion,” Amanda told me. “Probability
waves bouncing around an attractor, making the droplets walk, you know? We’re
just walls of flesh, Daddy, wrapped around bars of bone. And tangled.”

A fragment of an old Bob Dylan
song twanged in the back of my defeated skull. “Tangled up in blue.” I let some
words slip out, out of key but maybe that’s how you have to sing Dylan: “
All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now
.”

For a moment I thought my
daughter was going to say “What?” again, but she caught herself and grinned
again, more broadly this time. “Some are mathematicians,” she said. It made me
happy. Mandy the teen brat despised Dylan. “Tzvetan, for one. Go and talk to
him.”

“I thought he’s a phys -” I
started and she winked away. The creature of science stood in my bedroom,
regarding me from a superior vantage. I couldn’t quite keep my eyes on him.
After-images flickered around the man. Christ, that’s all I need, I told
myself. Epilepsy. Or migraine, was it? Auras, battlements, fortification
figures on the retina or, rather, deep inside the screwed-up brain. Jerry
Lehman’s chapter had something on the topic. I couldn’t recall what. I’m so
slack, I thought. And I used to be the boy wonder of psychoanalytic semiotics,
back when that was the sexy thing to be a boy wonder in. “Can I help you, Dr
Toshtenov? It’s rather early, a mug of coffee? Heart starter? I was just
talking to your...” Your what? I trailed off.

“Radka,” he said. “Yes. No
coffee. Sit down, Dr Watson. I can’t stay long, and we have a lot to cover.”
Tzvetan Toshtenov, with surprising levity (of a rather heavy-handed kind, I
supposed, although I had no notion what it meant), wore a tee-shirt urging me
to
Please adjust your priors before leaving the QBicle.
“What do you know about quantum entanglement and Bayesian probability theory?”

I gave him a sour look. “If we’re
going to play one-upmanship, Schrödinger, what do
you
know about, oh, the imbricated relationship between the Real, the Symbolic and
the Imaginary?”

He looked at me suspiciously. “As
in imaginary time? The
teh
dimension? Yes, that’s
relevant.”

“As in the Lacanian orders of -
oh, never mind. Think of them as the three rings of a Borromean knot. That’s
three tangled rings that fall apart if one of them is cut. Like the middle
rings in the Olympic symbol, but more so, or maybe not quite.” I knew I was
babbling, but I could see where that item of gibberish had popped up from: the
entanglement Mandy mentioned. Future Amanda. And Bob Dylan.

“Chain. Borromean topological
chain,” the creature said, looking mildly astonished. “That’s exceptionally
astute, Watson, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“No, it’s a knot.” He looked
pained, as if once again I’d fallen in his estimation, and I quickly babbled: “Lacan
argued that psychosis is what happens when the Borromean knot unravels, unless
it’s held in place by a fourth ring.”

“A sinthome,” Tzvetan the
mathematician-physicist-smartass said. “Exactly. An extra link to the ring
chain, a double curve. One ring to rule them all, as my boys would put it.” He
smiled fondly. “A bond through
teh
supertime. That’s
what holds the chain together. Holds everything. Do you see, Watson?
Every
thing is
no
thing but
uncertainties, latencies, probability pilot waves perhaps, vapors threaded in
fog - until it is observed into definiteness and clarity.”

“They teach you this stuff in
Bulgaria, do they?”

He was gone. “Ha ha,” I said
weakly. “I unobserved you.” I lay down and covered my eyes with one sweating
forearm. Obviously I was ripe for the laughing academy. My Borromean chain had
been pulled, and I was sliding down the cloaca maxima. I just wanted to go back
to sleep, but when I made a feeble attempt to clap the light off there was
already too much morning illumination coming in through the blinds. A voice
said, from the centre of the room, “Watson, come here, I need you.” Bev’s
voice. Our old joke, and thank you, Alexander Graham Bell. She wasn’t there. I
put my socks and loafers on and started for the front door and my bike.
Everything happened at once.

It wasn’t the Rapture, and it
wasn’t the Cloud of Unknowing. This was the Cloud of Knowing Too Much, the
silver lining of the dark night of the soul blazing like a thousand suns, like
the Buddhist ten thousand things, the unity and diversity of everything bonded
into its clasp, and I stood at the middle of it all but that was also at the edge,
and at every point in between. Walls of flesh, bars of bone, gates of light,
opening.

Mandy in my trembling arms, so
tiny, so ugly, so incomprehensibly beautiful, eyes squeezed shut, head still
slightly deformed by the terrible passage through her mother’s body to this
cold, brilliantly lit place. Sheila, holding up her arms for the baby, her own
face shiny with sweat, exhausted, exultant. I bent to kiss her, Mandy cradled -
an old lady with frosted hair and a look of synthetic peace on her harsh face,
stretched in an open coffin. I bent and could not bring my lips to touch hers.
The eyes of a hundred students locked to mine or skittering away or dully
drooped to their laptops as I stood at the fulcrum of the lecture theatre
teasing them with text and context. “There is no outside-the-text,” I said. “So
we are told inside a text by Derrida:
Il n’y a pas de
hors-texte.
So we carry that meaning outside, away from his text,
reading it, observing it from as many angles as we can, remake it as our text,
or discard it as waste, order into ordure, or vice versa, as supplement, so
that it becomes, paradoxically -” With Beverley, young love redividus, I stood,
I stand, I will stand before paintings, etchings, constructs, texts that are
all at once or seem to be, even as the eye skips and snacks and rebuilds,
Picasso’s wonderful African contortions,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
,
his cubism, his late hideous, marvellous
Nude Woman with a
Necklace,
and of course the once-fashionable distortions and visual
paradoxa of Dali, Escher, Magritte, the decompressions into art that denied
itself as art, Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, the comic antics of Warhol
and Koons and a thousand others, Dadaists,
Fauves
,
frauds, Freudians, unpeelers of pretence and its practitioners, and through it
all the slowly ebbing passion, the curdling of my cynical eye observing
everything into nothing... All of this a millionfold, birth, copulation, and
death.

“Bev,” I said, “help me,” and
tears flooded down my face. I took a step and stood in the morning kitchen of
our old house, our renovated house, the Edenic garden from which I’d exiled
myself. Two little boys looked up from their bowls of cereal. Observing my
manifestation from nowhere, the younger let out a piercing scream. The older
yelled, “Tátko, that man has come back,” and flung a spoonful of milk-soaked
Rice Krispies at me, splashing my pants, like Luther hurling his ink bottle at
the Devil. If it had been ink, a text
in potentia,
a
zany part of my mind thought,
it could have written
a long bill of particulars, my crimes, every one. “Hush,” I said. I held out my
open, tear-wet hands. “Your daddy invited me here for breakfast, boys. Look,
here he is now.”

I am seated at the table, Bev’s
table, now his table. The boys have been driven to school. Tzvetan is saying, “I
have to thank you most humbly, Dr Watson. I couldn’t have done it without your
tip. And the boys, of course. But that’s later.” Nobody is in the room to look
at us, but we are observed. The very air hums with the intensity of their gaze.
Their gaze contributes, their gaze elicits, their gaze is the terrible look of
a million million angels, more, vastly more, without judgment or pity, it seems
to me. They do not act beyond the activity of their
Tat
tvam asi,
their spectatorship. This is just the blather of my
discipline, which I hardly credit any longer, but that is the function,
obviously, of my own reciprocal gaze, and the mirror that is... well, the
universe, the specular everything. And -

Appalling compression, emphatic
dark clarity, in the infinitely protracted nothingness that awaits a first
crystalline instant of precipitation. It is an eye in utter darkness. Something
breaks, ruptures, breaches, raptures, bursts forth into its going and coming,
fecund, a spray of light flung into the endless sphere of eyes gazing from
within and without, making manifest, tumbling faster than light into categories
that render themselves under that impossible gaze from the far ends of itself,
from everywhere, forever. The sky foams with explosions boiling with a froth of
stuff that swirls and settles and catches new light, a heaventree of galaxies,
photonic dust etching their eidolons upon the eyes that watch and select and
shape and build. My own eyes are there also, watching the lights redden and
dissipate and fall away into night unendurably cold and empty. But that is the
way of the thing, that is the story, all the eyes can do is witness until they
are folded back into the great silence and void. Tzvetan is murmuring in my
ear. “My experiment with single particle self-interference proved that a
macroscopic extended object can be made to deviate through an instability
threshold and surf its own pilot wave. But it can only do that because
we
chose to place it in that apparatus. We
observe
it from our own Bayesian priors, and its activity
is objectively determined by the interaction between us and the particle. This
is
not
mystical, Watson, stop curling your lip. It
is the basis for everything that ever happens, to eternity and infinity.”

I am aghast at the hubris. “So we’re...
engineering infinity?”

“No,” he tells me, sharply. “Precisely
not. We are nothing until we are observed
by the universe
.
Infinity is engineering
us
.”

Amanda handed me an old musty
suit and a cloth cap. Of course I had seen them before. The world shimmered
slightly, as if it were uncertain of itself. Two youngsters came into the
studio - oh,
that’s
where I was - dressed in
Depression era knickerbockers suitable for urchins. The younger boy pushed a
flat, flexible machine under his grey shirt, and winked at me.