The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (96 page)

“Impossible,” I said. “He’s spent the whole conference looking at Deanna Durbin’s footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and trying to talk me into going to the movies.”

“And are you going?”

“I can’t. Dr. Gedanken’s giving the keynote address
in half an hour.”

“He is?” Darlene said, sounding surprised. “Just a minute.” There
was a silence, and then she came back on and said, “I think you should go to the movies. David’s one of the last two charming men in the universe.”

“But he doesn’t take quantum theory seriously. Dr. Gedanken is hiring a research team to design a paradigm, and David keeps talking about the beacon on top of the Capitol Records building.”

“You know, he may be onto something there. I mean, seriousness
was all right for Newtonian physics, but maybe quantum theory needs a different approach. Sid says—”

“Sid?”

“This guy who’s taking me to the movies tonight. It’s a long story. Tiffany gave me the wrong room number, and I walked in on this guy in his underwear. He’s a quantum physicist. He was supposed to be staying at the Rialto, but Tiffany couldn’t find his reservation.”

Forest Lawn closed at five o’clock. I looked it up in the Hollywood brochure after Darlene hung up. There was no telling where he
might have gone: the Brown Derby or the La Brea Tar Pits or some great place near Hollywood and Vine that had the alfalfa sprouts John Hurt ate right before his chest exploded in
Alien.

At least I knew where Dr. Gedanken was. I changed my clothes and got into the elevator, thinking about wave/particle duality and fractals and high-entropy states and delayed-choice experiments. The problem was,
where could you find a paradigm that would make it possible to visualize quantum theory when you had to include Josephson junctions and passion and all those empty spaces? It wasn’t possible. You had to have more to work with than a few footprints and the impression of Betty Grable’s leg.

The elevator door opened, and Abey Fields pounced on me. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said. “You
haven’t seen Dr. Gedanken, have you?”

“Isn’t he in the ballroom?”

“No,” he said. “He’s already fifteen minutes late, and
nobody’s seen him. You have to sign this,” he said, shoving a clipboard at me.

“What is it?”

“It’s a petition.” He grabbed it back from me. “‘We the undersigned demand that annual meetings of the International Congress of Quantum Physicists henceforth be held in appropriate
locations.’ Like Racine,” he added, shoving the clipboard at me again. “
Unlike
Hollywood.”

Hollywood.

“Are you aware it took the average ICQP delegate two hours and thirty-six minutes to check in? They even sent some of the delegates to a hotel in Glendale.”

“And Beverly Hills,” I said absently. Hollywood. Bra museums and the Marx Brothers and gangs that would kill you if you wore red or blue
and Tiffany-slash-Stephanie and the World’s Largest Oil Painting Incorporating a Religious Theme.

“Beverly Hills,” Abey muttered, pulling an automatic pencil out of his pocket protector and writing a note to himself. “I’m presenting the petition during Dr. Gedanken’s speech. Well, go on, sign it,” he said, handing me the pencil. “Unless you want the annual meeting to be here at the Rialto next
year.”

I handed the clipboard back to him. “I think from now on the annual meeting might be here every year,” I said, and took off running for Grauman’s Chinese.

“I want a ticket to
Benji IX
,” I told the girl at the box office. Her name tag said, “Welcome to Hollywood. My name is Kimberly.”

“Which theater?” she said.

“Grauman’s Chinese,” I said, thinking, This is no time for a high-entropy state.

“Which theater?”

I looked up at the
marquee.
Benji IX
was showing in all three theaters, the huge main theater
and the two smaller ones on either side. “They’re doing audience-reaction surveys,” Kimberly said. “Each theater has a different ending.”

“Which one’s in the main theater?”

“I don’t know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons.”

“Do you have any dice?” I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This was quantum theory, not Newtonian. It didn’t matter
which theater I chose or which seat I sat down in. This was a delayed-choice experiment, and David was already in flight.

“The one with the happy ending,” I said.

“Center theater,” she said.

I walked past the stone lions and into the lobby. Rhonda Fleming and some Chinese wax figures were sitting inside a glass case next to the door to the restrooms. There was a huge painted screen behind the
concessions stand. I bought a box of Raisinets, a tub of popcorn, and a box of jujubes and went inside the theater.

It was bigger than I had imagined. Rows and rows of empty red chairs curved between the huge pillars and up to the red curtains where the screen must be. The walls were covered with intricate drawings. I stood there, holding my jujubes and Raisinets and popcorn, staring at the chandelier
overhead. It was an elaborate gold sunburst surrounded by silver dragons. I had never imagined it was anything like this.

The lights went down, and the red curtains opened, revealing an inner curtain like a veil across the screen. I went down the dark aisle and sat in one of the seats. “Hi,” I said, and handed the Raisinets to David.

“Where have you been?” he said. “The movie’s about to start.”

“I know,” I said. I leaned across him and handed Darlene her popcorn and Dr. Gedanken his jujubes. “I was working on the paradigm for quantum theory.”

“And?” Dr. Gedanken said, opening jujubes.

“And you’re both wrong,” I said. “It isn’t Grauman’s Chinese. It isn’t movies either, Dr. Gedanken.”

“Sid,” Dr. Gedanken said. “If we’re all going to be on the same research team, I think we should use
first names.”

“If it isn’t Grauman’s Chinese or the movies, what is it?” Darlene asked, eating popcorn.

“It’s Hollywood.”

“Hollywood,” Dr. Gedanken said thoughtfully.

“Hollywood,” I said. “Stars in the sidewalk and buildings that look like stacks of records and hats, and radicchio and audience surveys and bra museums. And the movies. And Grauman’s Chinese.”

“And the Rialto,” David said.

“Especially the Rialto.”

“And the ICQP,” Dr. Gedanken said.

I thought about
Dr. Lvov’s black and gray slides and the disappearing chaos seminar and Dr. Whedbee writing “meaning” or possibly “information” on the overhead projector. “And the ICQP,” I said.

“Did Dr. Takumi really hit Dr. Iverson over the head with a gavel?” Darlene asked.

“Shh,” David said. “I think the movie’s starting.” He took
hold of my hand. Darlene settled back with her popcorn, and Dr. Gedanken put his feet up on the chair in front of him. The inner curtain opened, and the screen lit up.

A little after three, it began to snow. It had looked
like it was going to all the way through Pennsylvania, and had even spit a few flakes just before Youngstown, Ohio, but now it was snowing in earnest, thick flakes that were already covering the stiff dead grass on the median and getting
thicker as he drove west.

And this is what you get for setting out in the middle of January, he thought, without checking the Weather Channel first. He hadn’t checked anything. He had taken off his robe, packed a bag, gotten into his car, and taken off. Like a man fleeing a crime.

The congregation will think I’ve absconded with the money in the collection plate, he thought. Or worse. Hadn’t
there been a minister in the paper last month who’d run off to the Bahamas with the building fund and a blonde? They’ll say, “I
thought
he acted strange in church this morning.”

But they wouldn’t know yet that he was gone. The Sunday night Mariners’ Meeting had been cancelled, the elders’ meeting wasn’t till next week, and the interchurch ecumenical meeting wasn’t till Thursday.

He was supposed
to play chess with B.T. on Wednesday, but he could call him and move it. He would have to call when B.T. was at work and leave him a message on his voice mail. He couldn’t risk talking to him—they had been friends too many years. B.T. would instantly know something was up. And he would be the last person to understand.

I’ll call his voice mail and move our chess game
to Thursday night after the
ecumenical meeting, Mel thought. That will give me till Thursday.

He was kidding himself. The church secretary, Mrs. Bilderbeck, would miss him Monday morning when he didn’t show up in the church office.

I’ll call her and tell her I’ve got the flu, he thought. No, she would insist on bringing him over chicken soup and zinc lozenges. I’ll tell her I’ve been called out of town for a few days on
personal business.

She will immediately think the worst, he thought. She’ll think I have cancer, or that I’m looking at another church. And anything they conclude, he thought, even embezzlement, would be easier for them to accept than the truth.

The snow was starting to stick on the highway, and the windshield was beginning to fog up. Mel turned on the defroster. A truck passed him, throwing
up snow. It was full of gold-and-white Ferris wheel baskets. He had been seeing trucks like it all afternoon, carrying black Octopus cars and concession stands and lengths of roller-coaster track. He wondered what a carnival was doing in Ohio in the middle of January. And in this weather.

Maybe they were lost. Or maybe they suddenly had a vision telling them to head west, he thought grimly. Maybe
they suddenly had a nervous breakdown in the middle of church. In the middle of their sermon.

He had scared the choir half to death. They had been sitting there, midway through the sermon, and thinking they had plenty of time before they had to find the recessional hymn, when he’d stopped cold, his hand still raised, in the middle of a sentence.

There had been silence for a full minute before
the organist thought to play the intro, and then a frantic scramble for their bulletins and their hymnals, a frantic flipping of pages. They had straggled unevenly to their feet all the way through the first verse, singing and looking at him like he was crazy.

And were they right? Had he really had a vision or was it some kind of midlife crisis? Or psychotic episode?

He was a Presbyterian, not
a Pentecostal. He did not have visions. The only time he had experienced anything remotely like this was when he was nineteen, and that hadn’t been a vision. It had been a call to the ministry, and it had only sent him to seminary, not haring off to who knows where.

And this wasn’t a vision either. He hadn’t seen a burning bush or an angel. He hadn’t seen anything. He had simply had an overwhelming
conviction that what he was saying was true.

He wished he still had
it, that he wasn’t beginning to doubt it now that he was three hundred miles from home and in the middle of a snowstorm, that he wasn’t beginning to think it had been some kind of self-induced hysteria, born out of his own wishful thinking and the fact that it was January.

He hated January. The church always looked cheerless
and abandoned, with all the Christmas decorations taken down, the sanctuary dim and chilly in the gray winter light, Epiphany over and nothing to look forward to but Lent and taxes. And Good Friday. Attendance and the collection down, half the congregation out with the flu and the other half away on a winter cruise, those who were there looking abandoned, too, and like they wished they had somewhere
to go.

That was why he had decided against his sermon on Christian duty and pulled an old one out of the files, a sermon on Jesus’ promise that He would return. To get that abandoned look off their faces.

“This is the hardest time,” he had said, “when Christmas is over, and the bills have all come due, and it seems like winter is never going to end and summer is never going to come. But Christ
tells us that we ‘know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning,’ and when he comes, we must be ready for him. He may come tomorrow or next year or a thousand years from now. He may already be here, right now. At this moment…”

And as he said it, he had had an overwhelming feeling that it was true, that He had already come, and
he must go find Him.

But now he wondered if it was just the desire to be somewhere else, too, somewhere besides the cold, poinsettia-less sanctuary.

If so, you came the wrong way, he thought. It was freezing, and the windshield was starting to fog up. Mel kicked the defrost all the way up to high and swiped at the windshield with his gloved hand.

The snow was coming down much harder, and the
wind was picking up. Mel switched on the radio to hear a weather report.

“…and in the last days, the Book of Revelation tells us,” a voice said, “‘there will be hail and fire mingled with blood.’”

He hoped that wasn’t the weather report. He hit the scan button on the radio and listened as it cycled through the stations. “…for the latest on the scandal involving the President and…” the voice
of Randy Travis, singing “Forever and Ever, Amen”…”hog futures at”…”and the disciples said, ‘Lord, show us a sign. …’”

A sign, that was what
he needed, Mel thought, peering at the road. A sign that he was not crazy.