Antiphony (16 page)

“Of course,” Victor says, glancing over at Theodore, his eyes barely able to stay fixed on Theodore's face. “Right away.”

Theodore looks straight ahead, not wanting to meet Victor's eyes, waiting for the other shoe to drop, hoping for this moment to disappear.

“Teddy, that was the Chairman of the Board of Directors, in town for the board meeting tomorrow. This email, this message from you, means I have to let you go. I have to fire you. They say this is grounds for terminating your employment, and I have to agree. This message …” He stares at the words on his phone again and blinks his eyes, as if he can't believe what he is seeing. “The future of this Institute, our funding and our reputation are at stake.” The words are like splinters of metal cutting through Theodore's face. “What the hell were you thinking?”

Theodore doesn't know what to say. He hadn't intended the message to go to anyone but himself. And he's not sure how it could have been sent to anyone else. At the moment the message was apparently broadcast to the entire String Theory community, he had been staring wistfully at the back of that dancer's neck in the print on the wall of his office—hell, he hadn't even thought about the note since he sent it last night.

Something isn't right here; something doesn't add up. That's all Theodore can think, as he tries to frame a response to Victor's question. But then, nothing has seemed to go the way he thought it would since the moment he discovered he lost his
notes in the lobby of that hotel. He never envisioned that his life could spin this wildly out of control within a few days, over a few misplaced and misconstrued words. He still wants to work here, at the Institute, in whatever capacity they will have him. That's what Victor's story was driving at a few moments ago—he was prepared to simply let him go off in a corner by himself, collect his comfortable salary and daydream about whatever it is he wants to think about. And now this—whatever this is. He still cannot believe that Victor has said he is going to fire him, that he could turn against him so quickly, over such a trivial matter.

“I don't know what to say.” Theodore looks at Victor, tries to make eye contact with him, to rebuild with his eyes the relationship that his words have destroyed, to restore the connection between them. But Victor will not meet him; he's looking instead at the letter on the desk. “I'll sign the letter,” Theodore says, watching Victor's eyes. “I already did sign it. I'll do anything you say—I know I was wrong.”

Victor won't look at him; he has already moved on. What-ever friendship had been there between them doesn't matter anymore.

“I'm sorry. Some things are bigger than any one person.” Yes, Theodore knows, he has seen something much bigger than this Institute only a few hours ago, in the monstrous vision that is quietly fading into the recesses of his memory. Victor stands and is ready to leave—he wants this to be over with now, as soon as it can possibly be.

Theodore watches him stand to go and wants to latch on to him, to hold him with some other plea for a reasonable solution
to this—he still cannot believe that a simple email message, a harmless message he sent to himself, could mean the end of his career as a scientist. What could really be so terrible in that note that would warrant an outcome such as this? Yes, he did mention consciousness again—
thought, a giant thought.
Yes, he said that again, and perhaps on top of what happened at the conference the other day this is the capper, the final straw. But he didn't say anything about God, didn't use the word, that he can recall. What has he done that is so very wrong?

Theodore wants to scan the note one more time, to see if he can make a case for himself. “Wait.” There has to be something he can say in his own defense.

He pulls the note up on his own phone and skims through it—it isn't really very long. A few paragraphs, a couple hundred words …
the spiral is a two-dimensional slice of the three dimensional form of all matter … The shape of a tree, and an apple, and a cyclone emulate this outward flowing … every particle, quark and lepton and gluon that conspires to generate these forms is created by light … To us the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate because we cannot measure eternity or infinity.

What is wrong with these statements? They seem now, as he reads them, in the pallid light of a February morning, to be merely weak attempts to grasp at some glimmers of meaning that may have seeped through a restless night of sleep. But then he nudges the screen of his phone a bit faster and scrolls all the way to the end. There, at the bottom of the page, the last thing he jotted down, an afterthought really, an equation that would make any scientist reel:

0 × ∞ = 1

Zero times infinity equals one.

Absurd.

Of course, now he sees it. On top of all the other things that have happened since Friday, these five symbols arranged this particular way are enough to spell out his doom. No scientist in his right mind would write such an equation and send it out to his most esteemed colleagues. Not even a scientist who told them in a big hotel ballroom that they ought to consider God as part of the equation. It simply doesn't make any sense—‘doesn't add up,' as Victor is fond of saying.

He looks over at his friend of twenty years and knows that he is through.

How did this get copied to everyone? That's his final thought—how did it happen? But it does not matter. It is done, it is out there. He looks at the letter he signed, still lying there crisp and clean on the desk as if it were still of some use, then he puts on his coat, picks up his briefcase without even unplugging his laptop and putting it in, and walks past Victor without saying another word.

T
HERE ARE MOMENTS
when nothing around him seems real, when he feels as if he is moving through a dream. This is one of them. With his briefcase slung over his shoulder, he trudges
down the outer corridor with the window offices of the research fellows on his right, the cube maze on his left. He is just moving, floating. Going forward, one step after another. He doesn't see anyone in the offices he marches past, and he doesn't care whether they see him. He is gone, he is no longer a part of this, and they will carry on without him. He is no longer a part of any of this, the research, the staff meetings, the committee meetings, the all-expense-paid conferences in far-off countries, the workaday feeling of just grinding through, pushing through until something good and useful comes of a day. Those things are gone.

The office is nearly silent. The whispering outflow of dehydrated air pumping through the ventilation system is the only sound, punctuated by someone up ahead pecking away at the keyboard of their computer. The tapping of the keys grows louder as he approaches—one of the associates chatting on a forum or plowing through some email. Yes, it's Ji-Wan, he sees the back of his head now, coarse, lank black hair thinning to a bald spot at the top his skull, collared light blue dress shirt with short sleeves, oddly enough. This registers—one of Ji-Wan's quirks: he wears short-sleeved shirts in all seasons, even through the bitter cold of the Midwestern winters. Ji-Wan, generating more of his tone-deaf and slightly strident email messages for the department to read. Well … good for him. He will be here sitting in his cubicle, typing away the rest of today, and tomorrow, and the next day. And what will Theodore be doing—smarter than all the rest—what will Theodore be doing the rest of today, and tomorrow, and the day after that?

As he shoves the door open that leads him out of the huddled warmth of the building and into the quad, the air that strikes him feels like a wall, so great is the contrast between the artificial warmth of the interior and the great mass of cold he is stepping into, as if he is stepping out of an airplane into the middle of the sky.

The quad is bustling at this hour, students running late for the last round of morning classes, backpacks slung across their shoulders, boys and girls alike—young people with their entire futures ahead of them, single-minded in their pursuit of the next pleasure, the next adventure.

At first he starts to head across the wide expanse of the north quad towards the faculty lot where he always parks his car. This is the automatic path he would take when leaving the building, heading home. But there is nothing to go home to; he cannot imagine facing Ilene with this news at this hour, arriving home before lunch, startling her in the middle of her daily routine. Perhaps he could call and warn her first, but the thought of breaking this news to her on the phone doesn't seem right. It will have to be in person, and it will have to wait. He has no blueprint for how to handle a situation such as this. He only knows that he cannot go home yet.

He follows a girl walking alone towards one of the liberal arts buildings, political science, economics, languages, where some of his friends from the faltering poker group teach. She is compact, petite, her bottom maybe half the size of Ilene's, her blond hair shaped into a thick wedge at the back, not concealed by a cap. Like the others on campus, she is weighed down by a grungy gray and green backpack, overloaded with textbooks.
She reminds him of a girl he dated briefly in his own undergrad years, a tiny political science major, full of life—his intellectual equal, who could outmaneuver him in any debate that concerned the slippery concepts surrounding the systems human beings have designed to control one another. He has always preferred the solid world of physical facts, phenomena that can be calculated and observed. Everything she had told him about the courses in her major seemed to involve an artificial world that man dreamed up—and then he found once he got into grad school that these kinds of
de facto
political systems existed everywhere and had to be navigated carefully. He had always been good at being careful, being correct.

The girl veers from the tarmac path and charges up the steps that lead to the lecture hall, a grand faux-gothic cathedral of learning, a mixture of limestone and touches of brick with withered strands of ivy clinging to the walls. Sometimes he thinks it is these buildings and their look of a medieval sanctuary of wisdom that counts for more than the faculty inside as a means of recruiting new students and maintaining the reputation of the university. When he looks at the overhead panorama of the campus proudly displayed on the brochures and web sites to lure the students and their parents in, he can't help but think of how much money flows through this place in the form of grants and endowments: the millions parents pay in tuition is hardly even necessary to keep the place going. The quad speaks not only of learning, but also of wealth—the wealth that only knowledge and a degree can bring. The students who go here now realize that they are here not only to learn, but to earn. They are not as idealistic as he had once been. Perhaps they
have simply grown up faster, but they seem to behave like young initiates to a select form of country club.

As the girl disappears within the building, he finds he cannot resent her though. He only feels a deep sense of detachment, as if he is looking at her through a second pair of eyes set deeper within his head. Withdrawn from the ones he has been accustomed to using.

There is a hiking trail, an urban bike path that leads away from the campus just beyond the liberal arts building—Lyman Hall. Every building on campus here is not just a building, it is a Hall. Even his own former office in the modernistic science building was actually housed in Foster Hall, which he always thought sounded more like a men's clothing retailer. To avoid sounding pompous, he had preferred using the basic street address for the building on his business cards and email signature: Room 157, 6054 South Woodlawn Avenue.

The trail leads west, away from the lake and away from campus. In the days ten years ago when they first converted this former rail line into a bike path, students rarely ventured more than a few hundred yards from campus for fear of being raped or mugged. There was talk of closing the trail—the few pioneers who were not afraid to use it were putting themselves in danger, and the residents of the neighborhood whose houses backed onto it feared it would provide an easy access point for burglars and drug pushers. Now Theodore doesn't think twice about wandering away from campus along the path. The neighborhood has been revitalized by the influx of students, and there is a plan to extend the trail even further west, into the
heart of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city, as a catalyst for re-development.

This is good, he thinks, walking this way, away from campus, away from everything he is leaving behind. After a few hundred yards, the last remnants of the campus are behind him, the path is lined on either side by the back gardens of slightly rundown woodframe houses—former family homes now sub-leased as rentals for grad students and upperclassmen. Homes for the lower tier of associate profs, clerks, and admins to lease. Twenty years ago this was a ghetto. Now the yards have been cleaned up and there are gates in the fences and garden walls to allow for access to the trail.

The path is nearly deserted at this hour, classes in session, midday Tuesday. Only a stray biker or jogger disrupts the tunnel of his vision looking down the trail. After a few blocks, the houses are replaced by a loose constellation of businesses, lining a minor thoroughfare. The backside of a liquor store littered with stacks of broken cardboard boxes, a vending machine that does not display the friendly red and white swirl of a Coke can, but instead is dressed all in black with a pair of scowling green snake eyes and a menacing slogan: P
IERCING
E
NERGY THAT
S
TRIKES
B
ACK
.

He has to stop and look both ways before crossing the street—motorists are not expected to yield to pedestrians here, the car is king. On the other side of the avenue, he sees the grungy backside of another retail block, with signs that cater to passersby on the trail: E
LGIN
W
ATERCARE
, B
ISCUITS
C
AFÉ
and C
LASSIC
C
LEANERS
– T
AN
& L
AUNDRY
.