Night of the Jaguar (11 page)

“That’s a good rose,” he said to his daughter, “but you need to slice the petals thinner so they’ll flop over and be more like a real flower. Look, watch me.” With which he picked up a parer and an icy, crisp radish from the pan and in eight seconds whipped it into a blossom.

Amelia looked coldly at the proffered garnish. “I prefer it the way
I
do it,” she said, showing yet again how close to the tree fell the fruit among the tribe of Paz.

Some hours later, Paz was again sweating over a grill, but now he had taken on a load of his own banana daiquiri and was feeling pretty fine. The grill stood on his own patio, and on it sizzled and smoked several racks of Cuban-style barbecued pork ribs, marinated in lime juice, cumin, oregano, and sherry. Amelia had set the picnic table for five, a seafood and endive salad had been prepped and was now cooling in the refrigerator, in company with two magnums of fairly drinkable Spanish white and a dozen little pots of flan. He had a tape going,
guajira
music, Arsenio Rodriguez, that floated out through the windows of the Florida room and mixed with the sweet smoke from the grill. Paz before marriage had hardly ever cooked at home, and his social life had consisted of presex activities only. Lola had become more social since the M.D. came through, and they had people over almost every week. He didn’t mind cooking for these events, nor did he mind Lola’s friends. She did not hang out with people apt to patronize him. Before his marriage, Paz had acquired virtually all his knowledge of the intellectual world from pillow talk. He dated bright women only, showed them a good time, provided plenty of athletic sex, and afterward sucked out their brains, for although he was natively bright, he had no patience for sitting in a classroom listening to the professorial drone, or for poring over texts, or for being tested. He had an extraordinarily retentive memory, which was fed only via the audio channel, and could
produce, during these dinner parties, remarks that were surprising from the mouth of a high school grad cook and former cop. He was inordinately pleased when this occurred, as was his wife, the intellectual snob. At such times he could see it on her face: look, he’s not just a stud.

He heard the clicking of a coasting bicycle, and Lola rolled into view in the driveway. Amelia came shouting up to show off the garland of yellow allamanda blossoms she had constructed and also the dollar earned at the restaurant. Then a kiss for Paz. She looked around, sniffed luxuriously.

“That smells great. You’re being the perfect husband again.”

“Not perfect. I grabbed Yolanda’s butt in the reefer before lunch.”

“Oh, I totally understand about that,” she said. “I know how men are—you haven’t had a piece of ass in what, seven hours?”

“Seven hours and thirty-two minutes,” said Paz, “but who’s counting?” She laughed and went off to shower and change her clothes. Paz drank some more daiquiri and painted more sauce on his meat.

Bob Zwick was a blocky, confident man with a Jewish Afro of some length and an unrepentant New York accent that in social situations he rarely let rest. He had graduated from MIT at sixteen and thereafter had spent five years working on M-theory with Edward Witten at Princeton. Having plumbed the secrets of subatomic structure as far as he wanted, he had surprised everyone by switching fields to molecular biology, had picked up another Ph.D. (Stanford) in that, and then, feeling the need for a little break, had come down to Miami to work on his tan and get an M.D. at the university. There he had met Lola, had hit on her instantly, as he did on very nearly every woman who crossed his path, been laughingly rejected, and become her friend. Zwick, it had to be said, neither pressed his suit beyond the first no, nor held a grudge. Paz would not have picked him off a menu as a pal, but he got along with him, had even taken him out on the boat to fish a time or two. He found Zwick entertaining in a headachy sort of way, like daiquiris.

Dressed this evening in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt that said
PRINCETON COSMOLOGICAL CO
.
INC
.
CUSTOM UNIVERSES
,
WE DELIVER
, he strode in, embraced and kissed the hostess, snatched up Amelia and whirled her around to the giggle point, shook hands with Paz, and introduced his current girl, a leggy blonde with a bony sardonic face. She was wearing a sleeveless top and a long skirt of some nubbly clinging stuff, in lavender. Paz felt a little flutter in his belly, but she didn’t bat an eye.

“Beth Morgensen,” she said, extending a cool hand. “You must be Jimmy Paz.”

“I am,” he said and wondered if she had told Zwick, and more important, whether she would let it out this evening.

“What is that, a banana daiquiri?” said Zwick. “I want one. Beth, this guy makes the best banana daiquiris in the galaxy. These are galactic-level daiquiris.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Morgensen, who had, in fact, consumed any number of them during the months eight years ago when she had been one of Jimmy Paz’s many girlfriends. He produced the drinks, along with a salver of boiled shrimps with small pots of various sauces, and avoided her gaze.

They drank around the picnic table and talked, their shoulders swaying helplessly, their fingers tapping to the music, and Paz rose several times to replenish the blender, helped by Amelia, who liked squeezing limes and breaking bananas into the beaker. On the last of these trips, he ran into Beth Morgensen, coming from the bathroom. Paz sent Amelia out with a full blender. Morgensen watched her trot off.

“Well, Jimmy Paz,” she said, looking him over boldly, “all domesticated with a kid and a wife. Who woulda thunk it? I guess I blew my chance.”

“I didn’t know I was in the running. You were aiming for a full professor, as I recall.”

“Silly me, then. How long have you been married?”

“Seven years, around there.”

“Oh, the danger period.”

“I don’t know. I’m pretty happy.”

“She must be a kaleidoscope of delight, then.” She moved closer, placed her arms on his shoulders, did a little hip grind to the music.
“It’s hard to believe,” she said, “that you’re into fidelity. Not the Jimmy Paz I used to know.”

“People change, although now that I think of it, you were always a cheap date. A couple of scoops and you were slipping out of your panties.”

“True enough. Would you like me to slip out of them now? Only you would know.”

Paz gave her a false little smile, a faked laugh, and eased away.

More drinking. The shrimp peels piled up in the bowl. Zwick was holding forth on the mystery of consciousness and how he intended to penetrate what he called “the last great unanswered question in science.” Paz said, “I thought that was string theory. I thought it was getting relativity and quantum mechanics to work together, quantum gravity, the Theory of Everything stuff.”

Beth screamed in mock horror. “Oh, no! You asked him about string theory! Wake me when it’s over.”

“Yes, theoretically,” said Zwick, and in a Germanic accent, “tee-or-et-ically, but that’s all it’s ever gonna be, these patzers will be crashing gold nuclei into each other forever, and maybe,
maybe,
they’ll get hints of something, and maybe, they’ll get something from the telescopes, peek a little at the big bang a zillion light-years away, but they’ll never be able to deliver the confirming experiment. Not like the quantum work, not like relativity, where you have fucking
thousands
of confirming experiments.” And he went through several of them in detail, a short course in both quantum electrodynamics and general relativity, using shrimps and utensils as particles (or waves) and napkins to model the Calabi-Yau spaces in which the putative seven extra dimensions of space-time were wrapped in the unimaginably small compass of the Planck length. He was a superb teacher, funny and with a consummate grasp of the subject. Even Amelia seemed to be following the spiel before she drifted off to play with the cat.

“Yes, but you haven’t said why none of it makes sense, why no one can actually generate our sensory world out of all that craziness,” said Morgensen. “Instantaneous action at a distance, time stretching, cats being alive and dead at the same time, all of that. I personally think you guys just made it up.”

“Because you’re a primitive creature and not a scientist,” said Zwick. “A lovely though primitive creature.”

“I beg your pardon: I
am
a scientist.”

“No, you’re a pseudoscientist. Sociology is a pseudoscience, using statistical methodology to massage a set of lies. It’s like phrenology. It doesn’t matter how accurate you are with the fucking
calipers
or whatever, the underlying theory is crap, as are the data sets. Science is physics: theory, analysis, experiment. Everything else is dogshit.”

“And see who gets another crack at my milk-white body,” said Morgensen, “probably not Mr. Dogshit here.”

“And yet from another perspective,” said Zwick instantly, “we see that sociology is actually the
queen
of the sciences, profound, illuminating, un-dogshitlike….”

“But according to you, string-theory physics is dogshit, too,” said Lola.

“No,” Zwick replied, “it has the shape of real science, it mathematically predicts stuff we know to be true already, but it’s really unlikely to be anything but a kind of, I don’t know,
theology,
which is why I bailed. It’s gotten absolutely medieval, guys spinning out theory that there’s no hope of ever confirming because there’s not that much energy in the universe, I mean to get down to the strings or the dimensions wrapped up in the Planck length. And the cosmos stuff, yeah, but it’s like looking for a cat in a blacked-out room. Dark matter? Dark energy? Please! But biology, especially neuro, is where physics was a hundred years ago. We’re generating volumes of new, real information just like Rutherford and all of them. We can look inside the brain now, actually watch it thinking, just like they discovered how to look inside the atom. Magnetic resonance imaging technology and the cyclotron are machines of the same order of importance. Plus, we have genomics now, which means we can trace the genetic switching that creates learning, that creates behavior, down to the molecular level. So psychology is out the window. I mean it was always crap, but now we know it’s crap. There’s no psych to ‘ology’ on.”

During all this Paz had been quiet, sucking it in along with a lot of Bacardi, and having obsessive thoughts about Beth Morgensen. He hadn’t thought about her for three minutes in over eight years, but
now she seemed to have moved in and taken a lease on large tracts of his midbrain. What she was like in bed, how different from the Lola, the wife, how light the relationship had been, how much fun, how little like warfare. Although he knew that it was relationships just like that in their many dozens, in their ultimate ennui, that had driven him into matrimony. But still…

More to clear his mind of this garbage than because of any real engagement, he said, “Bullshit. There’s no way you can know that.”

“Well, not now, but we will. The whole field is being systematized, physicalized, which is the characteristic of all real science. We’re moving toward a real understanding of the neural code, the way the brain actually
works,
in exactly the way that we really understand how the underlying properties of quarks establish the qualities of elementary particles, which establish the qualities of chemical elements, then molecules, then life, and so on.”

“Never,” said Paz.

“Why, never? What’s your argument?”

Paz stalled by doing a superfluous check on the grilling meat. A woman’s face and body floated into his mind, long and white, frizzy brown hair, pointy nose, slanted gray wolf eyes, small hard breasts, Silvie the philosophy major and the theory of logical types.

“The theory of logical types,” Paz said, “Alfred North Whitehead.”

Both women were delighted to see Zwick brought up short by this. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” he demanded.

“Because a set can’t be a member of itself,” said Paz, drunkenly confident. “Say that total knowledge we have about any given subject is a set, set A. And say all the things science or people, the culture, knows is another set, set B. Any number of set A’s will fit into set B, by definition. We know everything possible about how to make flan, about the mass of the particles, about the number of barbers in Cincinnati, right? But the set ‘understanding consciousness’ is a set of a different type. It’s not another set A. It’s larger than set B, which is actually made up of all human minds. For the human mind to understand consciousness would be a violation of the theory. That particular A just won’t ever fit into the B, ever.”

Zwick stared for a moment, rolled his eyes, and said, “That is complete and utter horseshit.”

“Plus,” said Paz, “the mind is not necessarily a product of the brain. You can’t disprove dualism, and if you deny it, it’s just another belief. It’s not science.”

“‘The mind is not a product’…what is this, the Middle Ages? There
is
no mind. What we interpret as consciousness is an epiphenomenon of an instantaneous electrochemical state generated by a piece of meat. It’s an illusion devised by evolution to organize and coordinate sensory data with actions.”

“Then who am I talking to, and why should I believe you any more than you believe in spirits?”

“Hey, the proof is let me go into your skull and make a couple of tiny cuts and there won’t be a you anymore. Trust me on this, pal.”

“I do trust you, but it don’t mean shit. I could go in there and shoot my radio while it’s tuned to Radio Mambí. The radio won’t make noise anymore; does that mean that Radio Mambí just ceased to exist? Not that that would be a bad thing.”

“What, you think that there’s a substance called ‘mind’ that’s somehow floating in the ether and our brains just pick it up?”

“Not necessarily, but it’s just as logical as saying that mind is determined by the meat. And it would account for demons and dreams and clairvoyance better than your way.”

“Jesus! This
is
the Middle Ages. Where to begin? Okay, first of all, any dualism falls before Occam’s razor—that is, it adds an unnecessary level of complexity to a phenomenon that can be fully explained—”