Antiphony (5 page)

Theodore nimbly dodges the table lodged within the aisle that holds the projector and his laptop. Would it be better to simply turn around and leave now, rather than risk the chance of embarrassing himself by speaking without his notes? A section man in one of his undergrad courses, perhaps one of the humanities requirements he resented having to take, once told him that ninety percent of life is showing up. And he has found this to be true, for the most part, ever since. Show up for all the proper meetings, sign up for all the right grant opportunities, fill out the paperwork, check all the boxes, cite all your sources, and the rest is left to fate.

The front of the room opens before him. There is a gap between the first rank of chairs with their esteemed occupants and the jerryrigged stage, a platform three feet off the floor that he must mount via stairs to the left. He turns towards these and the vision of the universe as nothing more than a thought, the dream of a madman, invades his head again. If this is nothing but a dream, the conception of a giant singular presence, then he can make it do whatever he wants, can he not? For isn't he, with his own tiny glimmer of consciousness, part and parcel of this creation? He can envision himself rising to the occasion, his words lifting with confidence in such a way that his audience will not only be impressed, they will be moved. Perhaps he has
indeed been looking at everything the wrong way, carving things apart, dismantling the universe into smaller and smaller pieces as if it were merely a giant machine. The way physics has worked for the past three hundred years, the idea has been that if we could only find our way to the smallest moving parts, we could decipher how the machine works. But that's analogous to trying to figure out what a laptop computer is and what it was made to do by sawing the smallest silicon chip inside it in half, naming it, and declaring that electrical energy flows through it. It's a bit like slicing a horse in two and trying to understand what it is and what it does by picking apart a cross-section of its belly.

These thoughts are distracting him. He must focus. He climbs the three steps, careful now—mustn't trip—and shakes the hand of the moderator for the session, an adjunct prof at the local college, who seems genuinely enthusiastic and excited that Theodore has finally arrived and can now be introduced.

Theodore turns his eyes to the audience, sees only a blurred mass of faces, a carpet of flesh color and earth-toned clothing. His head swims as if the room is in an ocean liner rolling to one side, the sensation of a pool of oily liquid shifting inside his head. He places his hand on the podium for balance.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for your patience.” The moderator is a stocky young fellow, Theodore knows the type. Finishing up his thesis for two or three years now, living on cheap food in campus housing, probably with a wife and a kid or two in the cramped apartment with him. Looking forward to rubbing elbows with this crowd for weeks. Lurching towards a desultory future as a prof at a community college
somewhere. “It is my great pleasure to introduce to you one of the leading lights in the advancement of String Theory today, a true visionary in our field.” Theodore does not begrudge the young man casting himself together with him through the use of the word “our.” “Theodore Reveil is the John Stockbridge Fellow at the Institute for Cosmological Physics and one of the founding members of the Assembly of Particle Theorists. He is widely noted for his leadership work with the National Science Foundation and the American Physical Society and has been hailed as one of the true gentlemen in our field.” The man's untidy beard trembles a bit as he pronounces these words. “He will be speaking to us today on the topic of his latest research in Perturbation Theory, which will be published in the March issue of
Nature
.” And with a mincing step to one side, he yields the stage by saying, “Please welcome Theodore Reveil.”

What he didn't expect, what he wasn't prepared for, was quite this elaborate an introduction, and then, from the room full of people who had been waiting for him, a steadily rising round of applause, like a small wave that builds to something faintly menacing as it rolls up on itself and reaches the rocky shore, as if he is not just about to undertake his presentation, but has already completed it. So, at least to this extent, his reputation does precede him. But instead of reassuring him that whatever he has to say next will be accepted by these people as a kind of mildly interesting and enlightening hour of entertainment, the dozens upon dozens of hands beating together, first out of phase in the ragged disjoinder of spontaneous appreciation and then somehow falling for a moment into a kind of syncopated seven-metered rhythm—instead of giving him the confidence
to simply launch into his talk (which is titled, as everyone can see projected in foot-tall letters on the screen behind him, F
INITE
R
ESOLUTION OF
F
OURTH
-D
EGREE
P
ERTURBATION
T
HEORY AND
T
HE
C
ONSEQUENT
I
MPLICATIONS FOR
M T
HEORY
R
ESEARCH
), reminds him of exactly how much is at stake in the delivery of the next several hundred words that will come out of his mouth.

He wonders now what Ilene is doing. She will be blissfully unaware of the plight he is in, having assumed that he of course found his notes upstairs in the room precisely where he must have left them. She will be settling into the chair at her cooking class, in the old house that has been converted into a combination spa, bed and breakfast, and New Age learning center that they passed on their walk through the central city yesterday afternoon, in a neighborhood that alternates between slightly rundown bungalows in need of paint with dusty front yards and the occasional Victorian two-story that has been turned into offices for struggling lawyers or architects. She will be settling herself into the chair with a pleased look on her face, the gentle smile and crinkle around the corners of her eyes that she gets when all the moving pieces of her life have come together into a moment of perfect satisfaction. There will be other middle-aged ladies and young doctors' wives there with her, maybe ten or fifteen altogether, chattering, introducing themselves, looking forward to watching the chef from the bed and breakfast concoct several new dishes they can taste and then try to emulate at home. He wonders if this is perhaps what love is, nothing more than seeing the world through the eyes of another person, sharing the experiences of your life with them, even in imagination,
inhabiting their consciousness remotely, and, in turn, wanting them to somehow also see the world as you see it too.

He wishes he were there with her. If this universe were really nothing more than the dream of some sleeping giant consciousness, he could make this afternoon turn out exactly how he wants it to. He could slip out from under the pressure he has loaded on his shoulders, the expectations that live within the heads of the people that sit before him, staring at him, waiting for him to open his mouth and speak. If they are all living within that same being's dream together with him, he is the same as them and can make them think whatever he wants them to think, he can make his words perform whatever magical somersaults of logic and reasoning he has been envisioning now for weeks to suitably impress them. He can be the dream and the dreamer too.

But that is not the world he has been taught to believe in. Since his earliest days he has been told that the world is a place where one action follows another, where cause precedes effect. Where a wheel turns, and a cog in the wheel slips past a cog in an adjacent wheel and makes that next wheel turn another notch. His entire life's work has been predicated on the assumption that he can pry open every living and non-living thing and understand their workings by digging ever deeper, down to the smallest constituent parts, breaking objects into pieces and putting them back together again to generate understanding and knowledge. He has been taught to believe that there is a simple and beautiful language that describes every kind of action and reaction he can observe, expressed by nothing more than numbers and letters and the relationships between them. Everything
worth knowing can be boiled down to this—to the kinds of equations that are lodged in his laptop computer, waiting for him to release them onto the screen.

His words and his actions are the only things that matter. He cannot dream an escape from this. His decisions at every point in life are what make his life up, what determine its outcome. And so, he asks himself for guidance now. He has never been a religious man, and he certainly has never prayed, but he asks now for the right words to come, for something deep inside to inspire him. And, to his great surprise, what does come out is this:

“What if the universe, instead of being a giant machine, as we have looked at it and studied it for the past three hundred years, is really a giant thought?”

The words are as startling to him as they appear to be to the people in the front row whose eyes he sees looking back at him. He realizes that even with this first sentence he has betrayed Ilene—who sits blameless in her cooking class in another part of the city, what seems a very great distance away from him—and their future life together, and all the work both she and he have done to get them where they are, but he understands now that it is time for him to begin.

    2    

“W
HY IS IT
that the more we discover about the world—the universe—around us, the less we really know about it? We dive deeper and deeper into the realm of subatomic particles, quarks and gluons and leptons, we give these new particles we discover every year strange names and attributes, and yet this added knowledge only seems to underscore how little we really understand. We discover more elements, more galaxies and hot burning stars racing away from us at incredible speeds. We see farther away in space and farther back in time, almost to the very first instant of creation—we can almost touch it—but the final answers always seem to escape us. The nearer we think we are to a final theory, the faster it seems to recede from view, like everything else in the expanding sphere of space. We are continually baffled by the infinities and singularities that keep popping up in our finely-tuned equations.”

These words have rushed from his mouth in a torrent of breath, a burst of thoughts that must have been fulminating beneath his day-to-day concerns for months or maybe even years, waiting for this precise opportunity to erupt. As much as he wishes they would stop, they are like an elemental force which, once released, must grow to take up all available space.

“Perhaps we are not seeing with the proper set of eyes. Can it be possible that the very tools we use to view and calculate and measure the world have limited what we are able to see? If we can only prove the existence of one thing in terms of another knowable thing, we might never be able to prove, or even see, what that final thing—the entire thing—is.” This is certainly not what he intended to do. He is painting himself into a philosophical corner. No self-respecting scientist in his right mind would launch into a presentation of his career-defining research with a series of open-ended and unanswerable speculations such as this. But the mind moves faster than the tongue. And the words keep coming, trying to catch up. He draws in a gulp of air and speaks again.