Antiphony (22 page)

Another day the sun rolls round, the earth spins spirals round the moon. The pallor of the first dim rays exposed, the shining glory grows to be indemnified. They pried him off the cross and when he raised himself again they wondered who this new man was, when he dared to bear his golden fleece before them, golden halo round his head, they stood before him, shocked to see his countenance again. For they said, he is beside himself, he who wakes and dares to show his face again with each new breaking dawn.

T
HE PHONE IS
still there in the dirt where he threw it the night before. Even being outside on the frozen ground the whole night hasn't hurt it—these gadgets are virtually indestructible now. A few months before, he had left this very same phone in the pocket of his favorite pair of jeans, and Ilene had tossed it in the wash. Too late, he thought, one complete rinse cycle must be enough to knock the life out of it. But Ilene said “Quick, put it in the freezer. I heard that will dry it out.”

Sure enough, the phone had pulled through then, and a full night of bitter cold could do nothing more to hurt it now.

Thirteen more email messages have found their way into his inbox since yesterday evening, the last time he checked, even though he no longer works at the Institute. And six new voice messages. Two from Victor and four from Ilene. He can imagine what they must be—Ilene wondering where he is around six o'clock, late for dinner; Ilene growing concerned by seven when she hadn't heard a thing. Ilene perhaps calling Victor and Victor calling him. Ilene again and Victor again, then Ilene growing frantic, having heard the news about his job, and Victor worried too. Worried enough to offer him his job back? He doubts it, but he doesn't want to hear the messages, doesn't want to hear the fear in Ilene's voice. So he hits the green button to dial and taps the quick dial icons that call home.

On the second ring she answers, hoping it might be him.

“Hello?” Her voice is ragged from lack of sleep. “Theodore—where are you?”

“I'm okay. I'm sorry, I should have called. I found my notes and laid down to rest …” How can he explain it. “And I guess I just … shut down.”

“I told Victor to call the police—they were all over campus and the neighborhoods around there looking for you. They said if you didn't turn up by morning they would start dredging the lake.”

“I'm sorry, I just …” His voice falters—there really isn't any explanation. He has news to tell her. “Listen, Ilene, I figured out what happened. I know who did it.”

“Did what?”

“I know who sent that message, the email that went out to everybody with my notes in it—the notes I wrote the other night. That's what got me fired—that email. Didn't Victor tell you?”

“I guess so. He told me he had to let you go—the Chairman of the Board told him he had to fire you. He didn't say why except it was because of the thing that happened out in California.”

“Well, it's not just that—it's a long story. The other night, after the symphony, I had a dream, more like a vision really, and it gave me some ideas that I wrote down. I usually email my notes to myself,
so I don't lose them!
Can you believe it? I didn't want to lose these notes, and then that bastard Pradeep has been getting in to my email, and he sent them out to everyone. See, he must have gotten my password when we've been working on the Plasma Dynamics project together—what a dumbass I've been, using the same password for my server account
and
my email, the kids' names crunched together. But that sonofa-bitch saw these notes had some ideas about consciousness in them and he sent them out to everyone and their brother, everyone on the Board and at the Institute and everyone who was
at the conference. And when the Chairman saw that, he freaked.”

“Wow.”

“That bastard Pradeep. He knew exactly what he was doing.” Theodore is walking at pace now, leaving the garden. Walking with a purpose. “Listen Ilene, I'm going to the Board Meeting and I'm going to tell them.”

“Tell them what?”

“Tell them that Pradeep did this.”

“What good will that do?”

“I don't know, but I have to do it. I have to say my piece. At least I can try to clear my name, tell them these were my personal journal notes, not something I intended everyone to see. This is how a creative scientist has to work. It may not be conventional, but you need to think outside the box sometimes to come up with new ideas. And then that bastard will have some explaining to do himself, right there in front of Victor and the Board.”

Nothing comes back to him, no response. Then, “I guess so. What have you got to lose?”

“You're damn right. Best case, I convince them to give me my job back. Worst case, it throws a giant wrench into rubber stamping Pradeep for Victor's job.”

“Are you sure about this? Maybe just wait and talk to Victor. Tell him in private and let him tell the Board.”

This is why he didn't want to call her right away yesterday. She doesn't understand the way things work around the Institute, and he didn't want to have to explain everything to her without having time to think.

“No, I've got to do this—what time is it? I have to go.”

“Ten after eight.”

“Okay, good, plenty of time.” He does the calculation, probably ten or fifteen minutes to get across campus and up to the ninth floor conference room. He can make it if he hurries.

“I have to go, I have to hustle over there.”

“Why don't you just come home?”

“I have to do this. I was supposed to be at this meeting, and I'm going to be there. I'll call you later.”

Already with this first brief phone call, he feels as if he has been sucked back into the grid of his old life again—people making demands of him, people telling him what he should do. Time feels compressed again; once again he is running late. As he hurries across the pavements that lace the northwest corner of the sprawling campus, he wonders whether it might be better to go back to that path he was on yesterday afternoon and keep on walking. Walk away from everything that has bound his old life together, the phone calls, the emails, the expectations. He considers those several hours of absolute freedom he experienced yesterday, how the world had opened up into a vast blank gray abyss. This has often been a fantasy of his, to run away somewhere on his own, a lonely cabin in the woods far from any other person, surviving on very little food, reading books and writing down his musings by whatever light the sun provides, no phone, no computer, no television—maybe a select few CDs for music; he cannot do without his music. But it would probably grow old quickly, a week or two at most. Maybe all he really needs is a very long vacation.

Still, there was something lovely about the way his senses had released themselves from their usual pattern of knowing, unconstrained by the relentless headlong tumble of his thoughts. Already here in the midst of the first wave of half-awake undergrads straggling towards their morning classes, he can feel the pinch of his old familiar world closing in on him, his status as a member of the faculty readily accruing to him by virtue of his age and the rumpled clothes he wears.

On the frozen tarmac path ahead, angling across the maze of quads bound by limestone walls, he has a sudden memory of his daughter, gone away to live a life of her own, laughing at one of the overworked jokes he used to tell, her head tossed back, advising him that his jokes were all meant for third graders, but laughing just the same.

Forgive me please, he would say to her now. Forgive me for not holding on to every moment like that even as it was happening. For soon enough those moments evaporate and fade away. The clock ticks and the earth revolves into whatever it is that comes next. And the moment is gone.

Heading north towards his old office, he could just as easily be slogging to work again today the same way he had the day before. The buildings of the campus are just as beautiful as they have been every other day, the sky half filled with clouds, a bank of them pressing low towards the lake and shredded there, ripped into drifting loose curls of gray fluff by the wind. If he had it to do over again, he would have devoted less time to work, would have never come in on a Saturday morning, foregoing a day at the park with the kids for a few more hours staring at the whiteboard and the computer screen and the scribbled
equations there that are gone now, all gone. In the midst of the students and their hangovers on the way to class, he can feel himself dwindling to a single solitary point, alone. The kids are gone, his son and his daughter, their laughter only an echo in his ear. His work is gone, the years of research, and with it any sense of worth he could bring home to Ilene. He is only now a point of dim awareness, taking in a shifting set of images brushing past him as his legs carry him one foot and then the other in the direction of the giant building that looms against the sky, hanging over him just ahead as if it were a mountain, one last mountain left to climb.

Inside, he takes the elevator to nine. The elevators are wedged into one of the many weird angles the new modern section of the building has after having been grafted on to the older ivy-covered limestone hall. But there is a spacious waiting area and a reception desk as he steps out, with wonderful floor to ceiling windows providing a panoramic view of the campus. There it is, all spread out before him. All of it his once. He had been part of this, a respected pillar that helped prop all of this up. The students move across the quad gracefully, in slow motion it seems from this height, threading their way towards their own destinies, making their own way in a world that no longer exists for him.

Wait. A voice somewhere in a corner of his brain calls out. This can all still be his. He can go to the meeting and tell them—tell them what Pradeep has done—and they will redeem him. Of course they will! He is too valuable to be cut loose. He is an important part of the work here. That's been part of the problem these past few days—he hasn't stated his own case
strongly enough, hasn't stood up for what's rightly his. They can't just take it away from him. He has devoted his life to this place. He has given it everything he has to give. He looks down on the mellow lumps of limestone and the quads still brown in winter and the black trees etched against them and the students weaving their way through them and knows he can have it all back, he can do this. Just a word, the right word, spoken at the right moment, can make it all his again.

It is a short walk down a wide hallway, a gallery really, of empty conference rooms with walls of glass. The one he wants is the largest one, at the end of the corridor. Each of these rooms is like a fish bowl surrounded and defined by glass, their inhabitants visible for all to see. He stops outside and sees the room full of people, many of whom he knows, and the sight of him freezes them for an instant, the ones who don't have their backs to him. There is Pradeep, his eyes wide, watching him with the same look Thomas must have had, seeing him stand before them again, back from the dead. There are several of the Board Members, half a dozen of them on one side of the room who can see him through the glass, with the Chairman at one end of the table, wondering why he is here. And there is Victor at the other end, staring at him, his eyes pinched down to a glare, gesturing with one hand touching the other, about to make a point, and wondering whether Theodore will simply continue to stand there as a spectator, a witness to what is happening, or whether he will have the audacity to actually come into the room among them.

Theodore does go in. He watches them for a moment longer, frozen there in a tableau, a group of men gathered round a
table in a painting; he approaches the glass door and opens it and enters. Then there is a moment, the moment of his ultimate power, when all eyes are on him standing before them in one corner of the fish bowl as it were, even the eyes of those who had their backs to him, who have turned to see what the others are staring at—who has entered the room?

And Theodore can see now what he couldn't have understood yesterday or the day before: They have brought someone in from outside! Theodore is not the only reason Pradeep has a look of shock and anguish on his face. There, on the righthand side of the room, among the women and men who had their backs to him, is the outsider, a Russian physicist named Rainer Milshovsky—half Russian, half German now that he thinks about it—the director of the program at the University of Moscow, who could be here for no other reason than to take Victor's job. That's the one thing Pradeep and Theodore could not consider in their closeness to the situation and to each other, that the Board might actually dare to go to someone outside the Institute—they had been so busy trying to jockey for position between themselves, and Victor had never given them any reason to believe otherwise, and now here he is, Rainer, sitting between Amanda and the Chairman looking already like he owns the place.