The Constant Heart (7 page)

“Oh, come on,” said my mother. “Drink up. Is this a celebration or not?”

“Yes,” said my father. “Of course it is. Of course. Here, Jake, have a glass of champagne.” He closed his eyes when he had a sip. “And, of course, we have something else to celebrate. You got into Berkeley. That's something. It makes me happy and proud,” he said. “What are you going to study?”

New books came into the library, and one of them must have weighed fifteen pounds. Page after page of equations,
of graphs, of summations. A short history of calculus, lives of Newton, Planck, Einstein. Then a section on integral equations.

New photos from the Hubble Telescope were at the back of the book. One was of a part of the universe where two galaxies collided, the clouds of stars making a glow, bright as gold and more mysterious, the births of stars giving the center of the photograph an elusive gilt coloring. And drifting away from it there was a cloud, dark, misty, filled with an obvious . . . fertility, or something that comes even before fertility: the possibility of new worlds.

I still wonder what those women would have done to me and whether or not I would have gone. I guess maybe that was the test that Sara was setting up, and why she said in her letter to me from the Center for Troubled Girls that her job was going to be to haunt me. For the rest of my life.

Of course, she came back when I least expected it.

I
STUDIED ASTRONOMY AT the University of California at Berkeley, and my Ph.D. committee was made up of Nobel Prize winners.

Of course, I had to write a thesis, and my specialty was a combination of subatomic physics and cosmology, and in particular I was interested and still am for that matter in distortion of gravity in the observable universe. These distortions explained, as far as I was concerned, why objects that should never have been close to one another gathered in clusters, and in defiance of all statistical analysis. My ideas about this had to do with string theory and the existence of the Higgs Boson, still not discovered, but nevertheless a possibility. And, I thought, in the end it would help me understand the Constant and to be able to assign a value to it.

Anyway, when I was writing, I did some scientific jobs. For instance, one of them was to help design an object that would last ten thousand years and would still be, at the end of that time, a warning. This was a marker for a nuclear waste dump. I worked on it with another student, a woman who dyed her
hair green, to match her eyes, and wore clothes from the twenties, such as flapper outfits with spangles, that she got from used-clothes stores, and who insisted that she be called M. Cheryl Bogs. Sort of retro-sultry. So we called her Em. She was a cultural anthropologist, and I kept trying to come up with a cultural item we could use for the marker, something that all people would understand. She told me we couldn't use language, since the half-life of a language is only five hundred years. And so I suggested snake markings, like those on the most poisonous vipers, but she told me that wouldn't work either. No cultural absolutes. For instance, she told me that in a part of Africa, the most socially elite funeral had the dead body buried in a coffin that looked like an enormous green lobster. She used to say, “With a world like that, what's universal?”

We became friends over a tattoo, or the time when she was considering getting a tattoo. She had been studying a tribe in New Zealand, and she thought it would be “cool” to get a tattoo on her face that said she was related to the stars.

“We are all made out of stars,” I said. “Or the stars make everything we are made out of. All the elements. Everything comes from the stars. It's a miracle we don't glow.”

“Ha, ha,” she said.

“So, if you know that, you don't need the tattoo,” I said.

“Hmmmm,” she said. “Give me another reason. I'm only half convinced.”

“Life forces so many final decisions on you,” I said. “I think you want to keep them down to a minimum.”

So Em didn't get a tattoo. The marker for the nuclear waste dump was like something from the National Park Service. Granite, about eight feet tall, with the message cut
into an overhang with a laser (the overhang protected the message from the weather). The message showed, in a cartoon just like the stick figures a kid makes, someone digging and then getting sick. The dating for the marker was done with how the constellations look now. In ten thousand years they'll look different.

Every now and then, when Em and I saw one another, she'd say, “Hey, Starman, thanks for the tip on the tattoo.”

So I finished writing the theory of distortions in gravity, neatly tied, I thought, to string theory. But, as I said, I had to defend it before my committee, a bunch of Nobel Prize winners. And not just from astronomy, but physics, chemistry, math.

None of them made me feel as though their examination of me would be pro forma, but one man left me particularly uneasy. This was Neils Dieckmann, who, of course, had won the Nobel Prize in Physics. In the weeks before I had to defend my thesis, I found myself waking at three in the morning and thinking about Neils Dieckmann. At dawn, I sat up, put my feet on the floor, and turned toward the gray light of sunrise.

Dieckmann stroked his little goatee when he thought he had someone trapped. A story went around about a Japanese graduate student who, in the midst of defending his thesis, had been asked a particularly difficult question by Dieckmann, and that afterward the student had gone up to the Campanile and jumped off. The next day some fraternity boys painted a bull's-eye on the ground where he had landed. The red concentric circles, I supposed, were waiting for me if I let things get too far out of control, or if I couldn't answer the critical question. Or so it seemed in that moment of anxiety.

The woman I was living with, Gloria Truslow, was from California and really did come from the San Fernando Valley, and she stirred uneasily at dawn, her blond hair cut short but still golden in the light that came in the window. She was a medical student, and maybe I'd be able to find a job here, to stay in Berkeley, while she went to school. That is, if I could get by the exam.

“Take it easy,” she said. “You think he's that smart, that guy? What's his name?”

“Dieckmann,” I said.

“Just listen to your voice,” she said. “You're terrified. And you're sweating, too.”

“You want to know how he got the Nobel Prize?” I said.

“It better be good,” said Gloria.

Dieckmann's specialty, or one of them, was to look at evidence that was supposed to support one theory and then he showed that it really revealed something else. This is how he made the case for dark matter, and suggested that it might be what made Einstein uneasy and why the universe is accelerating. He did this on the basis of some mundane photos of the sun, but of course he was only interested in the slightest distortion in the background. It was like seeing a bottle cap at the side of the road and demonstrating at what speed it had hit the ground, where it had been manufactured, and the make of the car from which it had been thrown. Dieckmann had been a graduate student at Oxford, and Richard Feynman had come for a visit, and when Dieckmann came into the restaurant where Feynman was having dinner, Feynman stood up, bowed at the waist, then said, “Is est unus nos exspecto pro.”

“What's that mean?”

“It's Latin. ‘This is the one we waited for.'”

Gloria's eyes got big in that slash of sunlight that lay across the bed.

“Feynman said that?” she said. “Even I know about Feynman.”

“That's only part of it. There's more,” I said. Dieckmann's work had predicted the existence of previously unknown subatomic particles, but the interesting thing was the way he went about this, inferences from some previously discarded observations, which were thought to be erroneous. His mind worked like a TV screen in an airport: a talking head, which was a main idea, but underneath he had the constant running of three or four tickers, all of which he could read at the same time. And understand. He had come up, just for fun, with a way to beat the odds at twenty-one in the casinos in Las Vegas. One of the probes to the outer reaches of the solar system went haywire, but the NASA executives didn't talk to their engineers. They called Dieckmann, who worked out the equations on a cereal box his kids had left on the kitchen table. It took about five minutes. The engineers had been working on it for weeks. He told a biological researcher the best way to sequence DNA.

“Holy god,” she said. “I had heard it had been some physicist.”

So, on the morning when they were going to grill me, the sun fell with an ominous yellow, even by California standards, as I sat on the steps of the building where the examination was going to take place. Frankly, I would have preferred the fog. The sunshine made everything too clear. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes and imagined what a Higgs Boson
would look like. Would that help? Mass, speed, if discovered in a linear accelerator.

“Hey, Starman,” said Em. “What's cooking? You look like you ate a funny oyster or something. Have you ever eaten that sushi that comes from a poisonous fish, and if it isn't prepared right, you die?”

“No.”

“Funny,” Em said. “You look like you just had a piece that wasn't prepared right.”

I nodded to the building behind me.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “You have to defend a thesis? Yours?”

“It's a good day to die,” I said.

“Jesus, Jake, with an attitude like that you are going to get a first-class, top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art fucking.”

That sunshine fell around us. Down below, in Sproul Plaza, the undergraduates walked around like an experiment of random distribution.

“Here,” said Em. “Among the Adimi, a tribe in South America, before an initiation ritual the young men do this. It calms them down.”

She put her hands behind her head and touched the thumbs and fingers of one hand to the other. Then she breathed deeply. Closed her eyes.

“Try it,” she said. “Nothing like it. A sort of quick massage.”

It actually felt pretty good.

I went into the room where the members of the committee sat, dowdy and with bits of toilet paper stuck to the places where they had nicked themselves when they had shaved in a hurry. Rolls of Tums on the table. Calculations on the back of a receipt from a gas pump. Little tufts of beard here and
there and hair sticking out of their ears, except, of course, Dieckmann, who dressed with the air of the European he was and who had trimmed his goatee for the occasion. He sat there, with that eye patch over his blind eye, stroking his little beard. His stare was constant as he weighed each small bit of information as regards to its objective truth and how it could produce infinite vulnerability for the person who was mistaken about what it meant.

Each one asked a question in turn, and as they went, it became clear to me that I knew more than anyone in the room about the relation between undiscovered but probable particles and distortion of gravity. They asked questions, and I answered, my voice seeming more clear and certain as the time went along. That is, until we got to Dieckmann.

“Well,” he said. “I have a little something I'd like to ask.”

He stroked his beard.

One of the mathematicians, Jerry Stern, started to giggle.

George Praccio, a chemist, said, “Neils, you aren't going to do it again, are you?”

“I don't know what you are talking about,” said Dieckmann. He stroked his beard. “I just want to ask a little something. What harm can there be in that?”

Praccio reached out for the roll of Tums on the table and peeled away the silver paper, which he rolled into a small, tight ball. He took three of the tablets.

“You don't mind, do you?” Dieckmann said to me.

“No,” I said. “I'd be glad to answer your question.”

“Would you?” he said. He said to Praccio without looking at him. “See? He wants to answer.”

“All right,” Praccio said. “If you have to be a fuck, go ahead.”

Dieckmann stroked his beard, and, for an instant, I thought he pursed his lips as though remembering something tasty.

“Go on and ask,” I said. I put my hands behind my head and touched the tips of the fingers and thumbs. The flow of something, a sort of electric charge, went back and forth and reminded me of times when I had swung on a swing as a kid, each time getting a little higher, the sky seemingly closer. But of course, this was dangerous. Was this the time to be relaxed?

“He's got balls,” said Praccio. “You've got to say that for him.”

Dieckmann's one eye lingered over my face.