Antiphony (13 page)

He crosses it out. And then he goes to his laptop and starts the email application and creates a new message addressed to himself. He starts typing in the words he just wrote in his notebook—this is the way he sometimes saves his work, his notes. If he's working at home here late at night, he'll send himself an email message that he can open the next morning and copy to a document on his desktop computer in the office. This way, he has the assurance that he has preserved whatever work he has done on the Institute mail server where the email message is stored. The words feel strange to him as he types them into the message, as if they have been sent to him by another person, another version of himself.

There is a unity to everything, from the largest forms to the smallest. The spiral spinning of a galaxy is the same form embodied in the twist of light that comprises the most minuscule particles of matter. And the spiral is a two-dimensional slice of the three dimensional form of all matter, which is a torus encompassing the central point of emission …

It doesn't take long to get it all down in the email. A couple of minutes, and he is at the end. He is about to send the message, but he pauses and stares at the strange equation he has written—written and crossed out. It is absurd. But he types it in anyway, searching for the special symbol code for infinity in the equation app the institute has added to the email program for its scientists to use:

0 × ∞ = 1

Zero times infinity equals one. Absurd. He stares at it for a moment longer, then clicks the button that says S
END
.

    3    

T
HE MORNING ARRIVES
too soon. He goes to the kitchen and dumps a filter and coffee grounds into the coffee-maker, fills it with water. Already, the light is gaining strength—the digital clock on the coffee machine says 6:23, the ones on the microwave and stove say 6:24. No point in trying to go back to sleep now.

Dragging up the stairs, Theodore steps over the third step from the top, the one that yields a loud, groaning creak every time it is stepped on coming
up
the stairs. He skips the step and hangs on to the rail in order to avoid waking Ilene. At this hour almost any sound will be enough to wake her. And if he wakes her now she won't be able to go back to sleep.

Gently, gently, he turns the knob on the bedroom door. It too makes a kind of clunking tumble of loose hardware from within the mechanism that he knows can be averted only by grasping the knob and turning it as slowly as possible. Once the knob has been turned to release the latch, he can push the door open and tread silently across the plush carpeting of the bedroom to the security of the master bath.

On his way towards the bathroom door he pauses for a moment to glance down at the mass of blankets and bedspread that signifies Ilene's sleeping form. She would be very warm to curl up against, if only for a short while. The temptation to join her holds him there, staring at the pile of bedclothes that lifts
with her intake of breath and then, just as unhurriedly, collapses, as if a fault line has slipped and given way. He sleeps in this bed with her less and less, it seems. The trouble is, she snores. Loudly. She is doing it now. A sonorous riffling of some pad of fleshy cartilage deep within her throat that keeps time with the heaving blankets. The nights he does sleep here he can lie awake for what seems like hours listening to this chorus of vibrating flesh, an unintentional and unlovely song meant for only him to hear. After a time, the sound will assume a new pitch or a less strident rhythm, fading away to nearly nothing, and he will drift towards sleep, but then, with a slight change of position, it will pick up again, gathering force into a huge volume of undulating sound. Amazing, he thinks, how much noise the narrow cavities within our necks and chests can produce. And what variety! Now, she is on what he thinks of as a mid-range arpeggio; interesting, in fact, now that he is standing upright and able to analyze it, that the sound goes
down
the scale in tone as she draws breath in, and stays at about the same pitch on the exhale. A low G, he would have to call it.

He watches her for another moment and envies her ignorance of this resonant song she never hears herself sing. Most mornings, she is asleep long after he leaves for the office. She has nothing in particular to wake up for, no schedule of appointments, meetings, conference calls. No email to answer, other than the ones her friends send her with mildly off-color jokes or videos of odd and amusing incidents. She has no projects on deadline or research to push forward. Sometimes he wonders how she can stand it. Her days are filled with television talk shows and leisurely late-morning chats on the phone with
her lady friends and afternoons at the fitness club or the adorable shops in one of the nearby town centers, followed perhaps by a quick look at the Internet and maybe another round of late afternoon television while rustling up something for their dinner. And he envies this too: that she is totally comfortable living in this world without a job, an income, a body of work to justify her existence. It must be a kind of animal security she feels, which he has never been able to grant himself. She is here, in this life, and feels entirely justified in enjoying it. Theodore, on the other hand, has always felt a gnawing sense of inadequacy that he must repulse through the significance of his work. There has to be a purpose for his existence on this earth. If he is able to get up each day, go somewhere, and do something of use, he can feel that he has earned his place at the table, as it were. He can
be
someone.

He wants to tell her about his night, describe it to her, to see if she can discern whether it was just a dream, or something more. There must have been something more to it, something beyond this world that can merely be heard and seen and felt. But when he thinks about how he might describe what happened, he is sure he will not be able to do it justice. He will not be able to summon the words to capture and convey the gorgeous strangeness of it all. It will only sound to her like the ravings of a madman, and she does not need that now. Not after what happened in California. Not when he will have to tell her later today about the letter he has signed and will soon be submitting to Victor.

He reaches out his hand towards the heaving blanket and touches it, gently, for just a moment. His hand on her back beneath
the blanket, sheets, and bedspread. Her breathing stops, interrupted by his touch, and he thinks she may wake. But then she gasps and takes a quick gulp of breath, and the blankets fall away from his fingers.

In the shower, with the door to the bathroom safely shut behind him, the water hits his back like a sheet of sound. It is a wall of heat comprised of individual notes, pellets of water that come together to make one unified mass of pressure on his skin. The sound of the shower will not wake her; it is white noise, a steady hum, not a sudden jolt or creak. He usually keeps the shower going while he shaves and dresses for precisely this reason, to cover up the other noises he might make. As he hangs his head and lets the water loosen the small, knotted muscles at the base of his neck, he thinks about how many drops of water are hitting him at this very moment. With his eyes closed, he pictures the individual jets of water that shoot from the shower head and tries to do a count: probably twenty or so around the perimeter of the head, then perhaps fifteen in the next ring in, and ten within that, and maybe five more in the middle circle. So, he could guess fifty in all. This is the work of the scientist, the way his mind has been trained to function—break things down into constituent parts, then count them, analyze them, scrutinize. Figure out how one thing leads to another, how one part fits with the next. With the basic parameters established, he can flesh out the calculation. All he needs now is a time element—drops per second, but drops is not precise enough. Molecules per second is more like it. Start with drops per second and then convert a drop to a molecule by deciding or observing how many molecules are in an average drop. Then,
as he thinks about it further, the other element of the equation that must be determined is force—how fast the water is coming at him. That will determine how many drops and molecules are hitting him per second.

This is the beauty of science, what has always attracted him to it: any phenomenon or problem can be observed and analyzed and quantified this way. It's the same kind of thinking he had been trying to apply to the question of how many photons can fit in a cubic centimeter. The answer can be found, as long as the question is framed in the right way. There is definitely some similarity between the two problems. As he soaps under his armpit and leans back to rinse the shampoo from his hair, he thinks of the individual beads of water that form the stream hitting him as being analogous to individual photons, packets of light, within the waveform of light that is perceived by an observer as a consistent whole.

This is the way he wants to look at the world. Not through the lens of that wild, unruly, uncouth dream he had. That was not him, that was something totally
other.
Like having the television suddenly flip to another channel—a channel he would like to block.

Dried off and nearly dressed, he decides he will take a shave. With the shower still running to cover the noise he makes, he starts the tap in the sink, lathers his face and draws the razor across it, watching the blade scrape away the white foam, but not meeting his own eyes. He cannot bear to look there. There is nothing there he wants to see.

Thinking of his eyes makes him think about photons striking them, photons from a distant star perhaps, traversing the distance
from its broiling hot surface to the cool moist surface of his retina over millions of years and trillions of miles, the same way the beads of water traveled from the surface of the shower head to the skin on the back of his neck. These things are basically the same, so why has he not been able to pin down the missing element in the question of how many photons can fit in the cubic centimeter box? There must be a missing element to the equation that he has not been able to define. He wipes the last remnants of lather from his face and dresses. He straightens his collar and slips on his shoes, another day of work ahead of him. Perhaps what has befallen him is good, this misstep that he has promoted to the level of a tragedy—perhaps it will open up more time for him to think about problems such as this. Perhaps he can let go of his ambitions and just think about things for a while, and maybe something new will come to him.

With the shower off and the light filtering through the curtains and blinds, there is a good chance he may wake her on his way out of the bedroom. That would not necessarily be a bad thing. He could tell her about his dream, or whatever it was, and put off going to the office a few minutes longer. He stops and watches the back of her head as it nods with the rhythm of her sleep. If she wakes, he could talk to her one more time as a man who has a future ahead of him, who won't be relegated to the back shelf of the structure of the Institute for the rest of his career. The back of her head always speaks to him of her innocence—she is blissfully unaware of him standing here watching her, watching her the way a parent watches a beloved child sleeping. She is unaware of what he must face at the office today; she will never be totally aware of what he must go through
in the name of his profession, his job, his way of earning the money that buys them the food and clothes and gasoline for their cars. Perhaps this is what he is clinging to in this moment, watching her here. Not her, but the idea of her. Not even the idea of her, the idea of the relationship that exists between them. This is something that has been forged, built up, and twisted around them over the many years they have known each other: there is Theodore, there is Ilene, and then there is also this other, third thing that exists, which is the interaction, the relationship between them. Sometimes, in moments such as this, in which he has stopped for a second and thought of her, it raises itself up as a separate entity, and he can almost envision it as a kind of cord, a living, oblivious structure that fluctuates between them, more like a silver stream of light than a physical structure. At certain times it has grown stronger, has bound them together tighter. At other times it has loosened and seemed to unravel a bit, rays of it trailing off, turning color and dying away. Going on this trip the past weekend had brought them closer, pulled them together more in a shared adventure, the planning of it, the anticipation, holding hands together on the airplane as she read her ladies' magazine. And since the blunder at the presentation he has felt all that tightening, strengthening fall away. This separate thing that grows and fades between them has weakened, and he feels now more certain that this is what he is hanging on to as he watches the back of her head and the lump of blankets rise and fall, he is wondering what will happen to the bond between them after he endures whatever it is that will happen to him at the Institute today, whatever humiliations will come his way. Will it ever be as
strong as it had been when they first arrived at the sunlit lobby of the hotel in Santa Rosa, primed for the biggest week of his professional life to unfold?