Night Train (10 page)

       Here are two related things I have to set down.

       First is the reason why I love Colonel Tom. Not the reason exactly, but the moment I knew it to be true. There was a high-profile murder up in the Ninety-Nine. A dead baby in a picnic cooler. Talk of drug wars and race riots. Media up the kazoo. I was passing his office and I heard him on the phone. Lieutenant Rockwell, as he then was, on the phone to the Mayor. And I heard him say, very deliberate: 'My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out'. I'd heard him use that parlance before. My Keith Booker.

       My Oltan O'Boye. It was just the way he said it. 'My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out.' I went into the toilet and bawled. Then I went and straightened out the murder in the Ninety-Nine.

       The second thing is this. My father messed with me when I was a child. Out in Moon Park. Yeah he used to fuck me, okay? It started when I was seven and it stopped when I was ten. I made up my mind that after I hit double figures it just wasn't going to happen. To this end I grew the fingernails of my right hand. I sharpened them also, and hardened them with vinegar. This growing, this sharpening, this hardening: This was the reality of my resolve. On the morning after my birthday he came at me in my bedroom. And I almost ripped his fucking face off. I did. I had the fucking thing in my hand like a Halloween mask. I had it by the temple, just above the eye, and I sensed that with one more rip I could find out who my father really was. Then my mother woke up. We were never a model unit, the Hoolihans. By noon that same day we ceased to exist.

       I'm what they call 'state-raised.' I was fostered some, but basically I'm state-raised. And as a child I always tried to love the state the way you'd love a parent, and I gave it a hundred percent. I've never wanted a kid. What I've wanted is a father. So how do we all stand, now that Colonel Tom doesn't have a daughter?

       At 7:45 I called downtown. Johnny Mac: Mr. Whip on the midnights, which would now be falling apart. I asked him to have Silvera or whoever run a make on Arnold Debs.

       I dug out my list: Stressors and Precipitants. Yeah, tell me about it. I crossed out 2 (Money?). And I crossed out 6 '(Deep' Secret? Trauma? Childhood?). This doesn't leave me with much.

       Today I'm doing 3 (Job?). And tonight I'm doing Mr. Seven.

THE EIGHTY-BILLION-YEAR HEARTBEAT

Jennifer Rockwell, to say it all in one go, worked in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems. The Institute lies well north of campus, in the foothills of Mount Lee, where the old observatory looms. What you do is: You take the MIE around CSU, skirting Lawnwood. And spend twenty minutes stuck in the Sutton Bay tailback. The Sutton Bay tailback: Another excellent reason for blowing your brains out.

       Then you park the car and walk toward a low array of wood-clad buildings, expecting to be met by a forest ranger or a Boy Scout or a chipmunk. Here comes Chip. Here comes Dale. Here comes Woody Woodpecker, wearing a reversed baseball cap. The Department of Terrestrial Magnetism has the following words scrolled into the wall of its entrance corridor: ET ERITIS SICVT DEI SCIENTES BONVM ET MALVM. I got a translation from a kid who was passing: 'And you will be like gods, knowing good and evil'. That's Genesis, isn't it? And isn't it what the Serpent says? Whenever I've been out to CSU—for a criminology lecture, an o. d., a student suicide around exam time—I've always had the same feeling. I think: It's a drag, not being young, but at least I don't have to take a test tomorrow morning. Another thing I notice, at the Institute of Physical Problems, is that someone has changed all the rules of attraction. Sexual allure is a physical problem that the students are no longer addressing. In my day, at the Academy, the women were all tits and ass and the men were all dick and bicep. Now the student body has no body. Now it's strictly sloppy-joe.

       I am identified and greeted in the corridor by Jennifer's department head. His name is Bax Denziger and he's big in his discipline. He's big all right: Not a joint-splitter like my Tobe, but your regular bearish, bearded, flame-eyed, slobber-mouthed type with (you can bet) an inch-thick pelt all over his back. Yeah, one of those guys who's basically all bush. The little gap around the nose is the only clearing in the rain forest. He takes me into his office, where I feel I am surrounded by enormous quantities of information, all of it available, summonable, fingertip. He gives me coffee. I imagine asking permission to smoke, and imagine the way he'd say no: Totally relaxed about it. I repeat that I'm conducting an informal inquiry into Jennifer's death, prompted by Colonel and Mrs. Rockwell. Off the record—but is it okay if I use a tape recorder? Yes. He waves a hand in the air.

       Bax Denziger, incidentally, is famous: TV-famous. I know stuff about him. He has a twin-prop airplane and a second home in Aspen. He is a skier and a mountaineer. He used to lift weights for the state. And I don't mean in prison. Three or four years ago he fronted a series on Channel 13 called 'The Evolution of the Universe.' And they have him on the news-magazine shows whenever something gives in his field. Bax here is a skilled 'communicator' who talks in paragraphs as if to camera. And that's pretty much how I'm going to present it. The technical language should be right because I had Tobe run it by his computer.

       I kicked off by asking him what Jennifer did all day. Would he please describe her work?

       Certainly. In a department like ours you have three kinds of people. People in white coats who man the labs and the computers. People like Jennifer—postdocs, maybe assistant professors—who order the people in white coats around. And then people like yours truly. I order everyone around. Each day we have a ton of data coming in which has to be checked and processed. Which has to be 'reduced'. That was Jennifer's job. She was also working on some leads herself. As of last fall she was working on the Milky Way's Virgo-infall velocity.

       I asked him: Could you be more specific?

       I am being specific. Perhaps I should be more general. Like everyone else here she was working on questions having to do with the age of the universe. A highly controversial and competitive field. A cutthroat field. We're looking at the rate of expansion of the universe, the rate of the deceleration of that expansion, and the total mass-density parameter. Respectively, in shorthand: Hubbies constant, q-nought, and dark matter. We're asking if the universe is open or closed... I look at you, Detective, and I see a resident of the naked-eye universe. I'm sure you don't bother too much with this stuff.

       I said, well, no, I seem to make do okay without it. But please.

       What we see out there, the stars, the galaxies, the galaxy clusters and superclusters, that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's just the snowcap on the mountain. At least 90 percent of the universe consists of dark matter, and we don't know what that dark matter is. Nor what it adds up to. If the total mass density is below a certain critical point, the universe will expand forever. The heavens will just go on getting emptier. If the total mass density is above a certain critical point, then gravity will eventually overcome expansion, and the universe will start to contract. From big bang to big crunch. Then—who knows?—big bang. And so on. What has been called the eighty-billion-year heartbeat.

       I'm trying to give you an idea of the kinds of things Jennifer thought about.

       I asked him if Jennifer actually went up in the telescope much. He smiled indulgently.

       Bubble, bubble, Hoyle and Hubble. Allan Sandage needs a bandage. Ah, the cage at midnight, with your flask, your parka, your leather ass and your iron bladder. The seeing! Detective— Excuse me. The what?

       The seeing. The seeing? Actually it's a word we still use. The quality of the image. Having to do with the clarity of the sky. The truth is, Detective, we don't do much 'seeing' anymore. It's all pixels and fiber optics and CCDs. We're down at the business end of it, with the computers.

       I asked him the simple question. I asked him if Jennifer was happy in her work.

       I'll say! Jennifer Rockwell was an inspiration to us all. She had terrific esprit. Persistent, tough, fair. Above all tough. In every respect her intellect was tough. Women... Let me rephrase this. Maybe not at the Nobel level, but cosmology is a field where women have made lasting contributions. Jennifer had a reasonable shot at adding to that.

       I asked if she had an unorthodox side, a mystical side. I said, You guys are scientists, but some of you end up getting religion, right?

       There's something in that. Knowing the mind of God, and so on. You're certainly affected by the incredible grandeur and complexity of revealed creation. But don't lose sight of the fact that it's 'reality' we're investigating here. These things we're studying are very strange and very distant, but they're as real as the ground beneath your feet. The universe is everything religions are supposed to be, and then some, weird, beautiful, terrifying, but the universe 'is the case'. Now, there are people around here who pride themselves on saying, 'All this is just a physics problem. That's all.' But Jennifer was more romantic than that. She was grander than that.

       Romantic how?

       She didn't feel marginalized, as some of us can do. She felt that this was a central human activity. And that her work was... pro bono. She felt that very strongly.

       Excuse me? The study of stars is pro bono?

       Now I'm going to speak with some freedom and optimism here. All set? In broad terms it makes sense to argue that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were partly powered by the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. And Brahe and Kepler and others. You'd think that it would be desolating to learn that the earth was merely a satellite of the sun and that you'd lost your place at the center of the universe. But it wasn't. On the contrary. It was energizing, inspiring, liberating. It felt great to be in possession of a truth denied to each and every one of your ancestors. We don't act like we know it, but we're now on the edge of an equivalent paradigm shift. Or a whole series of them. The universe was still the size of your living room until the big telescopes came along. Now we have an idea of just how fragile and isolated our situation really is. And I believe, as Jennifer did, that when all this kicks in, this information that's only sixty or seventy years old, we'll have a very different view of our place and purpose here. And all this rat-race, turf-war, dog-eat-dog stuff we do all day will be revealed for what it is. The revolution is coming, Detective. And it's a revolution of consciousness. That's what Jennifer believed.

       But you were fucking her, weren't you, Professor. And you wouldn't leave Betty-Jean.

       I didn't actually say that last part. Though I kind of wanted to, by then. One of the things I knew about Bax Denziger: He's a twelve-kids-and-one-wife kind of guy. Still, for all his TV ease and brightness, and his high-saliva enthusiasm, I sensed uneasiness in him, reluctance—qualms. There was something he did and didn't want to reveal. And I too was in difficulty. I was having to relate his universe to mine. Having to, because Jennifer had linked them. And how 'about' my universe, also real, also there, also 'the case', and with all its primitive passions. To him, my average day must look like psychotic soap opera—crazed surface activity. Jennifer Rockwell had moved from one world to the other, from revealed creation to the darkness of her bedroom. I pressed on, hoping that he and I, both, would find the necessary words.

       Professor, were you surprised when you heard?

       Consternated. We all were. Are. Consternated and devastated. Ask anybody here. The cleaning ladies. The Deans. That someone so... that someone of such radiance would choose to extinguish herself. I can't get my head around it. I really can't.

       She ever get depressed that you knew of? Mood swings? Withdrawal?

       No, she was unfailingly cheerful. She got frustrated sometimes. We all do. Because we—we're permanently on the brink of climax. We know so much. But there are holes in our knowledge bigger than the Bootes Void.

       Which is?

       It's more nothing than you could possibly imagine. It's a cavity 300 million light years deep. Where there's zip. The truth is, Detective, the truth is that human beings are not sufficiently evolved to understand the place they're living in. We're all retards. Einstein's a retard. I'm a retard. We live on a planet of retards.

       Jennifer say that?

       Yeah, but she also thought that that was what was so great about it. Beating your head against the lid.

       She talked about death, didn't she. She talk to you about death?

       No. Yes. Well not habitually. But we did have a discussion about death. Quite recently. It's been in my head. I've been playing it back. Like you do. I'm not sure if this thought was original to her. Probably not. But she put it... memorably. Newton, Isaac Newton, used to stare at the sun? He'd blind himself for days, for weeks, staring at the sun. Trying to figure the sun out. Jennifer—she was sitting right there where you're sitting. And she quoted some aphorism. Some French guy. Some duke. Went something like: 'No man can stare at the sun or at death with a, with an unshielded eye.' Now here's the interesting part. Do you know who Stephen Hawking is, Detective?

       He's the... the guy in the wheelchair. Talks like a robot.

       And do you know what a black hole is Detective? Yeah, I think we all have some idea. Jennifer asked me, why was it Hawking who cracked black holes? I mean in the sixties 'everybody' was going at black holes with hammer and tongs. But it was Stephen who gave us some answers. She said, why him? And I gave the physicist's answer: Because he's the smartest guy around. Jennifer wanted me to consider an explanation that was more—romantic. She said: Hawking understood black holes because he could 'stare' at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life Hawking could see.