Wormholes (12 page)

G
erald switched on the light and Dacey found herself profoundly surprised. His house exhibited none of the mess she had expected after seeing his van. The wall of bookshelves held books that had been carefully arranged, it seemed by size and color. The large window by the front door of the stone house held some carefully tended house plants and a handsome bonsai tree of considerable age and beauty. From the hall she could see into a large living room with a stone fireplace and furniture that included a light gray overstuffed couch and a matching chair, as well as a large comfortable easy chair and ottoman. Beside the chair was a table with scientific journals fanned out neatly.

The walls held framed abstract prints that seemed to have been chosen with great care to complement one another. Dacey admired them; her practice was to hang stuff on her walls using whatever hooks the previous tenants had left behind. The floors were gently creaking polished oak, covered with what looked like expensive antique oriental rugs.

“I guess for some reason I thought this might look like the back of that van. This doesn’t look like you.”

Gerald smiled as he brought in his duffle bag and set it down.

“Well, it’s not really. Mother has somebody come in when I leave and straighten up. She lives down the road.”

A mama’s boy? thought Dacey. He didn’t seem it, but it might explain his diffident way with her. She set down her own bag, which he immediately grabbed and lugged along with his up the stairs. He invited her to look for some wine or beer. He guessed there was some in the house, since his mother restocked the place when he was gone, too.

“I’m always coming home and finding new kinds of food in the refrigerator,” he shouted down. “The guest room’s on the left here.”

She had already begun to wander about and explore. She passed the living room and entered a formal dining room, which held a large antique oak table with carved chairs and an antique sideboard. Behind the dining room she found a large well-appointed kitchen with a pantry that had a fair selection of pastas, sauces, spices and high-quality canned goods. Dacey checked it, because she believed that pantries told much about a person — in this case probably Gerald’s mother. Dacey’s pantry was filled, too, but with makings for cornbread, chili, and barbecue.

The kitchen also included a small eating nook surrounded by large windows that looked out over a garden in the back, although it was too dark to tell what the garden was like.

She was surveying the kitchen utensils when he returned, his dark hair slicked back from washing up. He had on a fresh plaid sport shirt and jeans and white socks. He seemed far more relaxed in his own environment. He rummaged around looking for wine and glasses, and she excused herself to wash up. She found the guest bedroom as tidy as the rest of the house, with an old four-poster double bed covered with a down comforter. The bed made her remember how tired she was, and she thought she might make it an early night. But a shower perked her up, and she arrived back in the kitchen, padding in on stockinged feet, smiling and fresh, with her hair still damp and wearing blue jeans and a beige blouse. Gerald had filled two wine glasses with a red wine and offered her one.

“Listen, I’m a pretty fair cook,” she said taking a sip and reviewing the larder in her mind. “How about I pay my rent by fixing dinner? I think you’ve got some good fixin’s here.”

“Sure, fine. I don’t cook much. Mother usually sends something down and leaves it in the refrigerator. I sort of let her do these things; gives her something to do.”

“Some mother you’ve got there. I’ll have to meet her.”

“Maybe tomorrow. She’s just down the road.”

“You said that already, Gerald.” Dacey smiled.

“Oh, right, I did.”

Gerald seemed a little nervous being alone with her. Well, she actually felt a little
something-or-other
being alone with him. Maybe she sensed an atmosphere of potentialities between them. But no, she finally decided, they’d have to remain friends. Just colleagues.

As she set about developing a menu from what she found frozen or canned, they talked.

“I forgot to ask. You rented a car at Logan. Where’s the van?”

“Left it in Missouri. Well, actually I gave it to some kids.”

“But that was your home, Gerald. Whatta nice guy!”

Gerald shrugged and smiled deprecatingly. “Well, they were kind of freaked. They’d seen an arm fall from the sky.” He proceeded to tell her about his encounter with Voigt and the mystery of the arm. Voigt had emailed him with his final report, which found that the arm had, indeed, been sliced with an infinite smoothness.

“They identified the victim,” said Gerald. “Turns out he was a pilot who was flying over the area at the time. The plane disappeared off radar after there was an incredibly loud noise in the sky. Searchers found parts of it scattered around the area. But only parts.”

“Parts?” asked Dacey fetching pasta and the makings of spaghetti sauce from the pantry.

“No engine, no fuselage. Only parts of wings and tail. Sliced off.
Cleanly
sliced off. And no body. The National Transportation Safety Board has started an investigation.”

Gerald began to set the table in the dining room, finding with some difficulty the necessary plates and utensils in his own kitchen.

“So, is this another of your disappearances?” asked Dacey.

“Both. Something appeared that made the noise. Then something disappeared. The plane and the pilot — or most of him.”

It took considerable small talk and two glasses of wine each for them to recover from the vision of what must have taken place in the skies over the small Missouri town. He sat in the kitchen with her, as she produced a bowl of linguini with meat sauce and a dish of steamed frozen vegetables.

“Not bad for spur of the moment, eh?” she said as they returned to the dining room. “You got a candle? Let’s do this right. I always like candles.”

He stopped and seemed to lapse into deep thought. He wandered toward the kitchen and there were the sounds of rummaging. He arrived back with a white emergency candle.

“Matches?”

He disappeared into the kitchen again. More rummaging. He emerged and went into the living room, reappearing with fireplace matches. He lit the candle and dripped wax on a dessert plate, set the candle on it and set it on the table.

As they ate, they talked, and the sharing grew as the candle burned down.

He said, “I went to this high school in Chicago for science and math. I started doing physics, but I was finished with all the textbooks by the third week of class. So, they sent me off to the University of Chicago. I sort of went into a shell. Young kid with older people. Maybe if I’d had brothers or sisters, it wouldn’t have been that way, but I’m an only child. Took me until I got to Harvard for graduate school to think about coming out of it.”

She said, “I loved rocks. Always have. Used to stuff my jeans with rocks until the pockets tore and ask my dad about them. My sister hated it, because by the time she got my hand-me-downs they were wrecked. My dad joked that I was so interested in rocks because of our last name. He took me to the library, and we got all kinds of books. I’ve always wanted to find out how rocks got where I found them. What kinds of stories they’d tell. Y’know volcanoes, floods, winds. They almost seem like they’re alive, but with a different kind of lifetime.”

He said, “I felt the same way about physics. There always seemed to be these invisible forces that were almost magical. I just wanted to understand them. I had one girlfriend who kind of got me, but mostly they thought I was … well … sometimes imagining things, I guess.”

She said, “I married my first year of college. I was basically this kid from the boonies of Oklahoma. He’d graduated already. The marriage was … well … not good. He didn’t want me to finish college. He was …” She took a bite of linguini and didn’t finish the sentence. “Anyway, the divorce went through eight years ago.”

He said, “I almost got married. But deep down I didn’t want to. I just had things I had to do. Like this thing with the things appearing and disappearing.”

She said, “I guess if I used all my names, I would be Candace Kane Livingstone Schaumberg Robertson. Candace was Mom’s idea, y’know
Candy
Kane. But as soon as I realized that, I changed my nickname to Dacey. My middle name’s Kane after my grandmother’s maiden name. My dad’s name was Livingstone, but he died when I was twelve. He was sick for a long time with multiple sclerosis and I took care of him. My mother remarried my step-father, named Schaumberg. I married Robertson. How about your father?”

He said, “divorced” with such an utter finality, such a coldness and ensuing silence, that she knew the subject was permanently closed. They talked on for a bit, finishing their meal and doing the dishes, and went to the couch. He lit the fire and the flickering light and the wine seemed to soften the evening again, to lighten the mood. He sat down at the other end of the couch, propping his white-socked feet on the edge of the glass-topped coffee table.

She took the other end of the couch, stretching out her own legs on the coffee table. “Okay, so let’s talk about this ‘thing with the things appearing and disappearing’ as you call it, that you haven’t figured out.”

“Well, I think really I’m getting there. I’ll tell you my theory, but you can’t laugh.”

“Of course I can, but I’ll make it just chuckles. How about that?”

“I think it has something to do with space-time dimensions.”

“Go ahead. I’m not laughing yet.”

“Well, all this matter and energy just totally appears and disappears … like the house that disappeared. And the hole in San Francisco. And like the heat that melted the tanker. And the plane. Stuff had to go away into somewhere — or come from somewhere — beyond our ordinary environment. I think somehow it comes and goes through another dimension. That’s the only way I can figure that stuff just totally disappears or appears.”

“Okay, c’mon now, I’m getting ready to laugh. There aren’t other dimensions. That’s like
Star Trek
stuff.”

“Well, there are. It’s really solid, well-established physics. Every physicist knows there are other dimensions.”

“Where?”

“Here?”

Dacey looked around the room doubtfully. “You mean like really here?”

“Yeah, like, think of the three dimensions in our space — length, height, width. Call ’em X, Y, and Z.”

Dacey noticed that Gerald gestured eloquently with his hands to explain his concepts, holding them flat and cocking them at different angles to show the different dimensions. He was really into his work; really loved it. She understood that feeling. She poured herself another glass of wine and took a healthy sip. The wine was taking her into another dimension of mellow, so she guessed she was ready for some weird physics. “Yeah, I know about X, Y, and Z. I took geometry. Aced it.”

“Okay, now what if another universe had dimensions in X, Y, and P? It would be just as real as ours, but we couldn’t see it. It just wouldn’t be available to us.”

“How about all the other letters? Do they get to be used?” She pulled her legs up beneath her and leaned back on the couch, peering into her wine, trying to visualize other universes right next to this one.

“All the letters and more.” Gerald smiled, pleased that she was interested in his ideas. He was a bit tipsy, too. “There could be universes with dimensions X, Y, and R. Or Y, Z, and G.”

“A, B, C? D, O, G?”

“Yeah. Even with more than three dimensions. Like D, A, C, E, Y.” Gerald squinted his eyes in slightly self-mocking seriousness. “I can visualize five dimensions … six on a good day. But the universes that don’t share any dimensions with ours aren’t next to us. It’s like soap suds. Our universe is like a bubble in soap suds. It’s got lots of other universes next to us. Other bubbles. Maybe an infinite number.” He wiggled his fingers to signify soap suds.

“Cool!” Dacey laughed, but then the memory of the Gillard hole intruded. This was serious. “So, you’re saying that somehow one of our dimensions opened up to a dimension in another universe. How?”

Gerald’s brow furrowed. He took a sip of wine and his slightly wavering gaze became distant. “Don’t know, exactly. Only things that maybe could link dimensions are maybe black holes. But that couldn’t be.”

“And black holes are … ?”

“Well, when a big star, like ten times bigger than the sun, dies and collapses down, it squeezes all its mass into a point.” Again, his expressive hands clasped together into a ball. “That’s a black hole. It has such huge gravity that it makes a deep dent in the fabric of space-time. Like a dent in a rubber sheet if we were thinking in only two dimensions. Only we’ve got three. Some people think black holes actually poke a hole into another universe. But black holes are so powerful they tear matter apart when it falls in. If a black hole somehow appeared on earth, it would suck up earth in an instant. Whatever we’re dealing with is something else entirely. Something that makes … not a hole … a sort of gate that matter and energy can go through intact.”

He grew silent, his gaze distant, and a fatigue invaded the silence. They both had much to think about, and it had been a long day. Just before the silence became awkward, she stood and finished her wine, kissed him on the cheek, patted his shoulder and went to bed. Snuggled beneath the comforter on the soft bed, as she fell asleep she thought of the gentle man and his strange thoughts. And in the quiet darkness, she thought of ghosts; maybe the things that appeared were from other dimensions. Space-time ghosts. Who knew? She didn’t.