“We know there are limits to logic, limits to what we can prove, limits to what can be known about the quantum world because
it’s inherently unknowable. And yet scientists go on probing, discovering new particles, coming up with new theories, refining
equations, all in pursuit of the Holy Grail of a unified theory—one theory that explains everything. One particle, one force,
instead of the four we have now; one equation that describes the single basic building block of the universe.”
I scooped up another forkful of my lunch, which was probably as excellent as ever, though frankly I was in no frame of mind
to appreciate such things. I leaned slightly toward Lou to make sure he was paying attention.
“But suppose,” I said, “just suppose it’s a hopeless quest. Suppose the universe isn’t made up of any one thing that we can
finally put our finger on and say, ‘That’s it.’ Suppose all that ever happens is that when we look at something closely enough,
it turns into something else? Mass becomes energy; a wave becomes a particle; a particle becomes a superstring; so on ad infinitum.
In other words, reality is a stack of Russian dolls—open one and there’s another one inside. All we’re really doing is chasing
our own tails. Sure, we’re building rockets to Mars and microwave ovens, but those are by-products, not the goal. It’s a scary
thought that maybe there is no goal. Maybe it really is turtles all the way down—turtles or whatever. But no final answers.
Because we’re looking in the wrong place.”
Lou thought this over for a moment, then said, “So where
should
we be looking?”
“Ah, if I knew that, Lou, I’d be able to write a really interesting book.”
“That would be nice.”
“All I know is that maybe it’s all about something else.”
“Like what?”
I thought about it for a while, then took a shot. After all, it was only a conversation between old friends.
“Maybe it’s not what we
are
that matters so much as what we
do
.”
Lou gave a grunt of surprise and mild disapproval. “Are you getting religion or something?”
“Maybe ‘or something.’ Mystics would know what I’m talking about. They find the idea that we can ever define reality and hold
it in our hand as laughable.”
“But mystics, as you pointed out, don’t build rockets to the moon or invent nonstick frying pans.”
“That’s not necessarily so, Lou. You don’t have to spend your life on a mountaintop contemplating infinity to be a mystic.
You can perfectly well be a chemist or a plumber or an engineer. The point is you know that reason and logic and the technology
you build on them aren’t going to give you all the answers.”
“Because it’s all about something else that’s got nothing to do with reason or logic?”
There was a glint of amusement in his eye. I suspected that Lou thought all speculation of this kind was a fool’s game, albeit
one that he enjoyed playing sometimes. Or maybe he was simply humoring me.
“Right,” I said. “Reason and logic are not the way to truth.”
“Maybe we should just say fuck the truth.”
“Maybe,” I said, “maybe not. Frankly, I don’t know.”
I finished eating and sat back. Lou had ordered a dessert, but all the same he lit up one of his cigars while he was waiting
for it. I watched him as a haze of blue smoke curled around him.
“Tell me, Lou,” I said, “the last couple of times we had lunch together, do you remember what we talked about?”
He looked mildly surprised. “Not specially. Why, what was it?”
“I don’t recall. That’s why I’m asking you.”
He shrugged. “The same kind of stuff as usual, I guess.”
“You mean like this? Ideas, stuff I might turn into a book?”
“Yeah, like we always do. I forget the details. Why d’you ask?”
“Oh, no reason,” I said, feeling suddenly that it was futile to pursue the question; after all, what would it prove? “It’s
not important.”
“One thing I remember,” he said after a while, gazing ru-minatively at the glowing tip of his cigar, “you told me you were
giving up on that book you’d been planning to write about coincidence.”
“I did? Did I say why?”
He shrugged. “You said it wasn’t going anywhere. Which I thought was a pity. I always liked that idea. If you change your
mind, we can still make a deal.”
I was silent for a moment, thinking over what he’d said. Then I shrugged. “It’s still not going anywhere, and I doubt if it
ever will. It turned into a dead end.”
“Turtles all the way down, huh?”
I looked at him, surprised by how quickly he’d picked up on the metaphor. He looked back at me across the table with an expression
of shrewd amusement, though I doubted whether he had any idea how shrewd he’d just been, or how bleakly amused he had a right
to be.
“Something like that,” I said. “Turtles all the way down.”
A
ccording to Sara, it had been my idea to go up to East-ways that weekend. I had made some casual remark about not having been there for a while, and she had seized on it and decided we should go. She sensed the strain between us that week and felt, I suspected, that we needed to spend some time together alone.
As the week passed, I dreaded the prospect increasingly. My feelings toward Sara were becoming unbearably painful to me. Whoever had been with her over the past months, whether it was Larry assuming my identity or myself in some kind of split-personality phase, had established a very different relationship from any that I was capable of living with. The gulf between my feelings for her and her feelings for me (or whoever had been in my place and whose relationship with her I had now inherited) was deep and unbridgeable. I felt the same love for her I always had. I was still suffering from the—for me—recent bombshell of learning that she loved someone else. At the same time I was living the endgame of that story. In what was for me a period of days, I had gone from a state of unblemished happiness with a wife I loved and who I thought loved me, to heartbreak when I discovered she was leaving me for someone else, then almost at once to this strange limbo in which she had come back to me for companionship and kindness, which I now had to accept was all she had ever really wanted from me. I did not know how to play the role in which I had been cast. I did not want to play it.
Throughout my lunch with Lou, the envelope and its incriminating contents had remained in my inside jacket pocket. Not for one second during our whole conversation had I forgotten its existence. When I got back to the apartment I hid it carefully at the back of a drawer in my desk, buried under a stack of old notebooks and articles I had collected for research. Almost afraid that I had imagined the whole episode, I had checked three times the same evening that it was still there. Afterward I had been forced to accept not only that it was a physical reality: It was also going to have consequences. Whatever they might be, there was no escaping them.
By ignoring or even destroying the evidence I condemned an innocent man to rot in jail for a crime he had not committed. By producing it, I would almost certainly condemn myself to take his place. I had few illusions about how far a defense of “it wasn’t me but a doppelganger because, you see, we all live in a computer’” would, as lawyers say, fly.
For me, of course, that defense would be no more than the truth. I had no doubt about what I had experienced. The question was to what extent could our own experiences lie to us? It was a fact that the human mind could deceive itself to an extraordinary degree. In the end, both in theory and in practice, it was impossible to draw a clear line between the real thing and a hallucination. Maybe it was best just to accept that fact and stop worrying about it. Maybe the distinction between illusion and reality was unimportant.
But what about the distinction between truth and lies? Was I lying when I said I hadn’t killed anybody? Was I lying even though I believed I was telling the truth but couldn’t prove it?
If I was George and only George and had been all along, I had nothing to reproach myself with.
On the other hand, if I had turned into Larry and committed murder, I’d gotten away with it. I’d won. So why quit now? The only possible reason would be that I’d turned back into George, and as George I couldn’t live with my terrible secret.
But suppose I turned back into Larry? Or suppose in some part of myself I still was Larry? Suppose the only reason my unconscious had prompted me to recover those pantyhose was so that I could destroy them and ensure my safety forever?
The more I thought about it, turning and turning with the permutations of it all till my head spun, the more I wondered if Lou was right and we should just say fuck the truth.
Only time would tell: time, which was a subjective concept anyway. And events, which, if mind really cannot be separated from matter, are at least partly what we make them.
At any rate, something would happen. That was my only hope.
And fear.
We arrived at the house late on Friday evening. Martha had prepared something simple, which we ate in the library with the television on—something we tended to do increasingly when we found ourselves alone together. I took a sleeping pill because I didn’t want to find myself awake and restless again in the middle of the night. It was agreeable to wake up to brilliant sunlight at 8:15 next morning. I pulled on a robe and found Sara already drinking coffee and reading the papers downstairs.
The day got off to an unproblematic enough start. In the morning Sara did some shopping: There were a couple of craft shops locally where she stocked up periodically on things that she could use as little gifts whenever the need arose. I tried to read, but concentration was impossible. I took a long walk, and as I returned found myself gazing up at the clock tower, remembering what Larry had planned for that night when Sara had driven up to join him. She would never know how close she had come to death that night. If she had not had Steve with her…
There was a message waiting for me from Sara. She’d run into a friend and wondered if I would like to join them for lunch in a restaurant nearby. I called her on her mobile and said I thought I’d stay home and get on with some work. Martha made me an omelette, which I ate while watching more television.
That night we had dinner with a couple of old bores called Tom and Cecily Winters. The only people I ever met who were invariably more boring than them were their guests. It was a godawful evening, which for some reason irritated me even more than usual. They had always, I suspected, felt that Sara had married beneath herself. Who was this so-called author whose name they never saw in the
New York Times or Readers’ Digest?
Still, I was tolerated for Sara’s sake, though that evening I sensed something new in the air. It was as though they knew that Sara and I had drifted apart and that maybe they wouldn’t have to tolerate me for much longer. It was a feeling they made plain in all kinds of subtle ways: References to people, places, and upcoming events were aimed, it seemed to me, deliberately over my head, as though by general consent I would not be around by then to participate. No effort was made to include me in discussions of subjects about which I knew nothing and cared less. I neither bred, raced, nor rode horses, therefore was irrelevant to a discussion about Henry’s new mare or the prospects of a win at wherever-the-hell. If I went to Aspen or St. Moritz in the winter it was not to see my friends but Sara’s, therefore my views on so-and-so and someone else were not canvassed. No one thought to ask if I would be going to Gertie Buggerheim’s (or whoever’s) party in Venice at Easter, only whether Sara would.
I wondered idly if having money, your own money, old money, automatically meant that you had to turn into a posturing phony, and tried to get a conversation going about Scott Fitzgerald and his observation that the rich were different. Obviously these people, I mentioned to a couple of them—nonjudgmentally, I thought—saw themselves as different from the common masses, but I wondered whether they could describe precisely what those differences were. Obviously it wasn’t intellect: They weren’t any smarter. So perhaps it was something else, something more important than intellect. I was willing to be instructed, and surprised. But I was out of luck. There was precious little instruction and absolutely no surprises to be had that night.
A couple of times I caught Sara glaring at me somewhat stonily and told myself there were going to be reproachful words between us later in the evening. At least, I told myself, reproachful words would be better than nothing, and cheerfully waved an empty decanter to indicate that another glass of Tom’s fine Burgundy would be welcome down at my end of the table if the butler would care to do his goddamn job.
Words were, I thought, on the cards when we got into the car to drive home. By then, however, I didn’t feel like them, so I pretended to fall asleep. It worked, and neither of us said anything till we got home. Then, having drunk enough so that the only thing I felt like was drinking more, I told Sara that I was going to have a nightcap in the library and watch the late news. She didn’t say anything, just went upstairs. There would be words, I knew, but in time, not now.
Then, of course, the next thing that happened was that news item about Steve being attacked in prison. I knew at once it was the event I had predicted that would break the deadlock we were in. I had no idea when such an event would happen or what form it would take—how could I?—but I knew instinctively that it would happen, and this was it.
I wondered whether Sara had switched on the TV in our bedroom. In all likelihood she had, but I thought I ought to check; she would certainly want to know about this and it would be unfair to keep it from her. I finished my drink and went up.
The bedroom was empty, but the television was on—the same channel I had been watching. So I knew she’d seen the item. But where was she? I called her name a couple of times without getting a reply. I went through to the old nursery, which she used as an all-purpose space for storing things, sometimes for writing letters or reading on the chaise longue by the window. I saw at once that the far door was open. I went through and down the corridor with a growing certainty that I knew where I would find her. My feeling was confirmed when I found the door up to the clock tower unlocked.