Antiphony (17 page)

Maybe he should stop at one of these places. He hesitates—maybe the café; he hasn't had any coffee yet today and his head is pounding from the lack of caffeine. But the open trail ahead of him seems more appealing. He doesn't want to have to speak to anyone just yet. As he walks on into the residential neighborhood again, he feels an odd sense of elation. When was the last time he took a walk in the middle of a week day, by himself, with nothing else to occupy his mind? It is as if he has been walking through a flat desert plain and suddenly stepped to the precipice of the Grand Canyon, a huge hole spread out before him with nowhere to go but out and
down
. As one foot steps ahead of the other, he wonders what he will do next. But there is no next. There is only the quiet scuffling of his footsteps and the faint brush of the wind against the bare damp branches of the trees. He has been released from the tube of daily commitments that has shaped his thoughts for years, the cyclical churning of the same half dozen items on his mental to do list for his various projects, tumbling through his brain like laundry in a dryer. For the first time in a very long time, no one on earth knows where he is or what he is doing.

Ahead, on his right, is a small widening of the path where a couple of red metal benches have been placed—a rest stop. And, also, he sees as he approaches, there is a mile marker set in blue and green tile in the center of the semi-circle defined by the benches. This is mile 5.0. And beyond the two benches, just off the trail, is a curious thing—a bronze sundial planted in the middle of a low stone column. He approaches it and sees the faint shadow cast by the sharp edge of the bronze blade. According to the dial, it is just past 11:30, which seems about right.
He doesn't want to look at his phone to verify it, the phone with its email messages and text messages and downloadable pop tunes, which has also obviated the need for wearing a watch. The flat top of the column has etched lines fanning away from the tip of the blade, pointing to the hours carved in roman numerals into the stone. And at the bottom of the face of this “clock” is a motto also etched in stone: T
HE
H
EAVENS
D
ECLARE THE
G
LORY OF
G
OD
.

He looks up, off to his right, through the willowy branches of the trees. The sun is a faint yellow ball, low to the horizon even at mid day, so weak through the scattering haze that he can stare at it for a couple of seconds without having to look away. What was that calculation he had been thinking about, earlier this morning? How many photons are striking him, or the blade of this sundial, each second? The question seems absurd now, beyond his ability to comprehend. How could he have ever thought he could answer a question such as this?

Instead of thinking about it, he gazes up at the sun again and closes his eyes, allowing the tranquil light to varnish a nebulous orange patch on the underside of his eyelids. As he stands there, his face held up to the sky, a thought slips across his awareness: he opens his eyes and thinks: I am staring directly at the center of the solar system. This doesn't seem like much of a revelation, but the more he thinks about it, the more fantastic it seems. Rather than a person, a man, standing rooted to the ground, he begins to feel himself as a patch of awareness, looking out across the millions of miles towards the huge ball of nuclear fire, towards the star, that is at the center of a system of planets. And in doing so, he starts to get a feel for the relative position
of the earth and his place on it—his head pointing away from the planet and towards the center of the solar system, the planet even as he does so spinning him at thousands of miles an hour to the left and away from the center. This feeling of looking at the center of the solar system makes him think of all the movements he is undergoing even as he is standing here perfectly still—the earth rotating him away from the sun, the earth revolving him around the sun, the sun and all its planets and belts of icy rock coursing through the Local Interstellar Cloud and the Local Bubble, remnants of a relatively recent supernova, only a few hundred million years old. Through the Orion arm of the galaxy and around the center of the galaxy, which would be above him, beyond him, if he were to look up here again later tonight. He can feel the earth and the sun spinning through space, spiraling around each other in a giant helix as they hurtle along in their relative paths, all these movements spinning, spinning him up and out of himself until there is nothing left but himself, his eyes closed again for a moment, his mind empty and numb, nothing left but this tiny patch of awareness at the center of all these spiraling motions.

When he opens his eyes again there is a moment, a brief instant, in which he can see in every direction at once. He sees the trees and the path in front of him and also the path behind him, the shops at the intersection in the distance, the houses and their ramshackle gardens and back yards to either side. He can see his shoes and the cuffs of his pants and the composition of the pavement beneath them and above him the milky pale overcast of the sky. It is as if he has opened up, as if somebody lifted
a tarp away from his eyeballs, uncovering his brain, and he can finally see beyond it, clearly, everything there is to see.

His eyelids shudder and blink, then blink again, and the vision is gone.

T
HE DOORWAY TO
the bar is inset from the sidewalk and sheltered from the cold. Theodore stands there for a moment and stares at what the wind has rustled into this compressed space surrounded by brick walls: dead leaves, crisp and rotten, their colors leached away by months of being blown and tossed across the city streets, a candy wrapper and a used rubber glove, its shrunken see-through simulation of a human hand looking more like the withered white carcass of a jellyfish that has washed up on the shore.

Perhaps he is just hungry—perhaps that is what made him grow lightheaded a few moments ago. Hungry and cold. He can warm up in here and have a sandwich, something to drink. He has not eaten anything since dinner at the restaurant yesterday evening, before the symphony.

A bell attached to the top of the door announces his entrance; his eyes take a moment to adjust to the light. There are only a couple of people seated at the bar and a handful of empty tables lined up against the wall of windows along the side of the building that faces the street. He would rather sit at one of the tables by himself, but the man seated at the counter looks at
him as if he might be offended if he did not join him. Theodore slings his briefcase onto one of the high wooden chairs, shrugs off his coat, and hoists himself into another chair, not directly next to the man, but close enough to not appear unfriendly. At the far end of the bar, near the door to the kitchen, a young woman sits smoking a cigarette and gazing at the television perched high above for all to see. The bar has adopted a north woods theme for its decoration, camping and hunting gear adorning the knotty pine wall behind the counter, fishing rods, the head of what appears to have been a real twelve-point buck mounted at the far end of the room, though the wilderness atmosphere is marred by several neon signs advertising national brands of beer and a large poster of the schedule from the past season of the local professional football team, including sweating bottles of beer adorned with the helmets of the team instead of bottle caps, lined up in a formation that simulates a winning touchdown pass.

It takes a while for the young woman to abandon her cigarette and attend to Theodore, as if his appearance here is an unwanted distraction from more important business she is tracking on the television. When she does come over, she approaches him not from behind the bar, but between him and the other patron, standing to his left and perching her elbows on the empty chair between them, as if her body is an unbearable weight she must prop up.

“Hey,” she says, uncertainly. Perhaps she is not a waitress? For a moment, Theodore is left to wonder. He nods, to acknowledge her presence. Then she adds, as an afterthought: “Can I get you something?”

“Yeah, she'll get you something. She'll get you whatever you want.” The burly man to the left of them laughs at his small joke, chuckling mostly to himself, but loud enough to let them know he was angling for a laugh. Then he returns to the task of shoveling a forkful of food to his mouth, bobbing his head as he chews, to confirm the validity of his statement. “Whatever you want,” he repeats through a mouthful of chewing.

“Put a lid on it, Wayne.” The waitress says this in a weary way that conveys how many times she has heard such things from him before. Throughout all this, Theodore has had a chance to browse the menu, but doesn't see anything that looks particularly appetizing.

“Do you have coffee?”

“We can do that. There's probably some left.” Left from when? “You want anything to eat?”

He does want something, but nothing from here.

“I'm fine for now, thank you.”

When Theodore finds himself in uncomfortable situations, he tends to become even more formal than usual, a safeguard, a way of putting distance between himself and those around him.

The waitress slinks back towards the kitchen and disappears in search of his coffee. In her absence, his sudden companion has seized the opportunity to start lecturing, the man's face lit by the blue incandescence of the screen looming above them, his voice urged into an aggressive tone by the tiny jabbering voices falling on them from the ceiling.

“See, they'll take any chance they can to promise something for nothing.” The man inhales and tilts his head at the screen to indicate who he is talking about. “You think health care is expensive
now, just wait until it's free. That's what they want you to believe, that's what they're selling—something for nothing. As if you could pull a bunch of doctors and drugs and hospital rooms out of a hat. These bastards will do anything to take money out of your pocket and mine, and give it to people who haven't worked a day in their lives.”

The mention of these others, whoever they may be, has served to infuriate the man. Theodore watches him as his face assumes a deeper shade of pink, his eyes squinting as he veers his attention from the debating pundits on the screen towards Theodore. The man's hands drop the knife and fork onto the plate and leap in Theodore's direction. “See, you and me, we work for a living. We pay for our health care, out of our own pockets. And these bastards want to take your money and pay for some deadbeat's birth control pills and abortions and prescription pain killers and I say let's ship them all back to Mexico where they came from. Let ‘em figure out how to have a health care plan of their own down there.”

Wayne is his name, Theodore remembers that now—the waitress called him Wayne. Wayne's face has become more plastic, his jowls loosened and expanded by the words coming out. Near the temples, directly above, Theodore can see a branching network of broken capillaries outlined in purple and blue against the soft pink skin of his face, fanning out from a single spot where a tiny vein approaches the surface of the skin. Theodore nods in agreement, uncertain about exactly what the man's point is, but not wanting to contradict him in his agitated state.

“So,” Wayne says, “you look like you rake in a good paycheck, highly qualified. Whaddeya work at a bank or something? You're exactly the kind of guy, you and me, who these bozos in Congress are trying to rip off.”

Theodore doesn't want to tell him what he used to do, or what just happened to him only an hour or two ago. It still does not seem real enough to relate to another person. Perhaps there will be a phone call from Victor telling him to come back to the office, it was all a mistake. He imagines them all there sitting in their cubes and at their desks, pecking away at their computers, talking in the conference room and the break room over bowls of microwave chili and vending machine snacks. This is about the time of day when the pressures of the first two waves of morning email wind down, and some serious thinking time, that long stretch between about one-thirty and four, can begin; he always thought of the afternoon as a kind of nap time, a siesta for the brain, where lazy staff meetings would drag on and an occasional free spell would engender some real creative talk about ways to attack the entangled equations scribbled across a white board. But the good paycheck Wayne has associated with him is gone. There may never again be another paycheck as good as what was automatically deposited in his bank account last week. That's what is most disconcerting about this train of thought—the idea of having to wonder about where the money will come from. He hasn't had to worry about money since his post-doc fellowship days. The money has always just showed up in his accounts, like magic. Even so, the money was never his primary concern. He did the work, sent the emails, filled out the reports—but deep down, he was always working towards the
idea that he might someday stumble upon the one big thing, the final answer, the Theory of Everything.

He would sometimes picture it in his head, on his way to work, or leaning back and looking out his window at the quad—not what the Theory of Everything would look like itself necessarily, but what it would feel like to have discovered it. He would assume the feeling of being The One, the next Einstein, the next Newton. The One who got it all right. He can picture it even now, as he lifts his head towards the blue light of the television and closes his eyes, a kind of deep stillness and peace settling over him—the peace of total satisfaction and knowing. Yes, there would be two different and highly pleasurable sensations: the joy of having achieved what so many others have strived for over the years, the attainment of what had eluded so many gifted minds, and then also, beyond the accolades of colleagues and the acknowledgment of genius by the wide world beyond, there would be the even greater satisfaction of really knowing, perhaps as no one else could know, exactly how it all works—every last piece of it, from the largest scale structures of space and time down to the most insignificant clockwork of the tiniest elementary particles. With the discovery of that one final principle, that one unifying theme—yes, that is how he pictures it, more a
theme
than an equation, but certainly it would be something that could be reduced or expressed as an equation—with that one theme, he could look at anything, any one aspect of the universe and say to himself or any other—even a man as bedeviled by the workaday world as Wayne here on his left—he could say to them, yes, of course, this is how it works. We understand it all now, thanks to me.