Properties of Light, page 16
— He told me how you had danced out the progression of the gyroscope when you were a young girl. Not Bohr or Planck or Born, Pauli, Dirac or Heisenberg. Not even Schrodinger. They none of them felt it in just that way. Dana feels it, too, he said, that you know, and I said yes.
— Yes.
And ravished still, I move toward her.
She is sitting straight up in her bed, on the night table the sleeping drafts and the teacups stained with herbal leaves, the halfhearted gestures she makes against the murderous ravages at work in her breast.
We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. We carry it in us like a darkening fruit. It opens and spills out and that is death.
She shoves the bedclothes to the side, the down-filled comforters she piles on top of her each night to try to fend off the cruelties of the cold, and, as if she were the young Dana Mallach again, with youth and beauty preserved in her limbs, she jumps lightly to her bare feet, and slowly raises up her palms to me as, ravished still, I move toward her, she moves toward me.
And one must know her face as well as I, one must have been an advanced student of her features through all the years, to see the astonishments wrought in the mysteries of the transformation, her beauty purified, too pure and bright for sight now, for any sight but mine, her body so filled by the beauty of the equations that there is no place in it now left for her.
She sighs, then moves, a vast and hidden motion down inside of her, a displacement deep in her own body, like two ecstatic dancers only conscious of the dance, neither knowing where one soul ends and the other begins, dancing out the mind she's always known was there, the fact of spirit caught in the last equations, with all infinities subdued.
Palms up and she is dancing, and I am dancing godlike in her limbs.
XXVII
They worked through the days, only pausing with the timid approach of the deer.
It was an October of long, hot, summery days, though the earth had tilted, the trees gone to their dramatic shades. Out from the raging colors the deer would come to eat the apples Dana set out daily on the ground for them. Her father loved these creatures, loved it when they drew near. They watched the silent feeding through the large glass windows looking out onto the wooded back.
When the word came, he had felt a knowing panic. Justin Childs stepped out from his classroom, a piece of chalk still in his hand, forgetting to put it down, leaving his few students gaping, for the corridors were ringing with the word from Stockholm, and the word was "Spencer."
He stepped out and heard that it was Spencer and Zweifel, for their work on background radiation of a decade before, completed when he, Justin Childs, was still living within his haze of unimaginative safety, constructing his truth tables for propositions of a first-order logic that had seemed inviolably complete.
The word came down from Stockholm declaring that Spencer and Zweifel's stumblings in the dark had led to a greater knowledge of the cosmic spectacle that had given birth to all the world, and the word rang out through the corridors of the department, in voices that were triumphant or aggrieved, with money changing hands, for almost all had taken bets, from the lowliest struggling graduate student to the other two Nobel laureates.
There was a larger than half probability, according to Justin's desperate calculations, that Mallach would not even hear the word from Stockholm. He taught his courses and fled the campus, more swiftly now than ever since that one brief visit to an afternoon tea.
But before the door was even flung open to him by Dana, he knew it had all changed and it was a different world entire.
"Not now, Justin. Stay away."
She whispered it, a low and angry sound, its hiss unleashed, and her face was barely one he knew, her lips making a cruel shape.
"Just leave us alone. Go away and leave us alone."
She tried to close the door on him, but he held it open with his whole body, if only he had never held it open.
Mallach materialized from behind, his voice the high tremolo of his memorized poems.
"False friend, false friend!"
It was a different Mallach, like some avenging angel beating wings of implacable flame, drawing down a hatred that can blacken out the world, and the high stilted tone of his voice so hideously at odds with the great solemnity of his pose that, hideously, Justin did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
"Must you pursue me as God pursues me! Think again: let me have no more injustice!"
And still Justin could barely restrain the lunatic urge to laugh, he felt half-maddened by the desire forcing its way up his throat, threatening to split him wide open, though he could feel the annihilating breath of those great fiery wings, and Dana's face was a mask to him, her grief and frenzy painting a frightening stranger over her features.
"My entire life I've been betrayed, and you, false friend, are the last and you are the worst, but at least you are the last!"
Against the awful beating of those world-blackening wings, the voice of reason makes a pitiful whine, and so it was, in the thin voice of reason, that Justin whined.
"I never betrayed you. Any work I did that wasn't with you was nothing! It was shallow work, completely shallow!"
Mallach made the mirthless sound that was his laughter.
"Shallowness is the property the world loves best. Only be shallow and the world will love you."
The bitterness with which he spoke these words, the bitterness, so that Justin, hearing it, cried out. He had thought that he might laugh, but instead there rose up out of the deeps, those awful deeps, this dreadful cry of pity, he cried aloud from pity, to see the precise shape of the bitterness that had all along informed Mallach's madness, that had given to his sickness its deathless life.
How much Mallach must have wanted the world's love, with how much terrible passion, to have answered the world's indifference with such a shape of bitterness as this. He must have loved the world quite madly, madly. All along he must have loved, always desperately longing for the world to love him back.
His madness, then, was the madness of love, and that is always a terrible madness.
He had done enough to earn the love of the careless world, he had done more. Yet here he was, a madman, teaching his Physics for Poets to contemptuous children and fleeing the campus with a madman's terrified haste, lest he be confronted with one more sign of how the world would never love the better man, only lavishing its love upon the lesser.
Unworthy world, but still: the only one we have. It is the only world we have.
Justin saw the shape of Mallach's bitterness and wept for him, while Dana with the stranger's painted face was whispering Daddy! and tugging like a toddler on her daddy's arm, though he seemed not to notice, his eyes and wings implacable. And would Dana know, would she ever know, that it was for Daddy that Justin wept and not for himself?
And still, the old yammering habit of reason would not be denied, and so, though Justin wept, he also tried, in the age-old whine, to argue out the merits of his case.
"The prize is for work that Spencer did ten years ago. I had nothing to do with Spencer's getting the Nobel Prize. I was fourteen years old when Spencer did that work!"
"Spencer! Spencer! Spencer!"
Justin did not know this voice at all, it was the voice of the wrathful angel thundering down from on high, and, only seconds before it had emerged, he had seen from Dana's panicked eyes that Spencer's name should not have been mentioned. Three times Justin had spoken it, and now three times the angel had shouted it forth, his eyes in a terrifying glow.
"Consider the crocodile!" Mallach thundered out. "He is the child of God's works, made to be a tyrant over his fellow creatures, for he takes the cattle of the hills for his prey and in his jaws he crunches all beasts of the wild!"
Justin trembled, his terror at this raving drying up his tears, Dana tugging and whispering her pleading Daddy!
"God has left me at the mercy of malefactors! He has cast me into the power of the wicked!"
Then silence from the angel, no spoken word at all, but the sound of the eyes' awful fire. It seemed to Justin he could hear their blaze.
When Mallach finally spoke again, it was not with the fearful voice from out of the whirlwind, but with the voice of Samuel Mallach, in the bitter voice of his old rage.
"I studied betrayal for years and years and I thought I understood it on a fundamental level, I thought I had seen clear through to the bottom on the subject of betrayal, but no, no, I hadn't generalized to all the conceivable instances. I hadn't considered the case of Justin Childs."
It was the embittered old man and not the fiery angel who spoke now. Justin could perhaps have endured it better to hear the sound of God's terrible messenger pronouncing his name than to hear how Samuel Mallach said it, to hear the hatred compacted dense inside of it.
Justin did not cry out, not aloud, he did not think.
And even so he clung to what he knew, clung to: every statement is either true or false, and no statement is both! And so he pushed on, made reckless on his knowledge of irrefutable logic.
"How could the decision of the Swedish Academy of Sciences possibly affect what I've already done? How can their decision retroactively transform me into a monster?"
"Strength resides in the crocodile's neck, and dismay dances ahead of him!"
The words were those of the angel, but the voice was not. The voice came drifting as colorless as smoke.
"You forgave me before," he whined, he whined. "You didn't hold my working with anybody else, not even him, against me before. Why now is it an absolute betrayal?"
"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy..."
"How is what I've done been made any different by what was done in Stockholm? How can that have any possible effect on what was already done?"
"The arrows of the Almighty find their mark in me, and their poison spirit soaks into my spirit."
"It doesn't make sense!"
"Every terror that haunted me has caught up with me, what I dreaded has overtaken me."
These last ravings were muttered in his old, diminished voice, the wrathful angel entirely departing, the mumble barely breaking the surface into the audible, and Justin could see now how frighteningly pale the old man had become, Dana tugging at his sleeve, and he, quite suddenly docile, following behind, the door on Bagatelle Road left gaping open, as if forgotten, as if all the external world was at last forgotten, Justin left dangling on the threshold, neither inside nor out, neither dead nor alive, but forever watching, as the two of them slowly climb the spiraling stairs.
XXVIII
It was the nighttime journey she had rehearsed since she was a little girl.
She started up in bed a few brief moments before it came, so that when it came, she was fully awake.
Climbing out of her bed and going on her icy bare feet through the house, the pitiful tremble of her body no more now than on all those other sleepless nights, only now she ran instead of walked, and she knew exactly where to go, she ran straight to where he lay.
He was already dead when she found him. There was no question of that. He had put the gun to his left temple and then pulled the trigger.
A shattering noise that shattered the night wide open and left it bleeding on the other side of the glass, lying among the cores of the fruit they had set out for the deer, the death that had been ripening in Samuel Mallach through all the years.
XXIX
The news from Stockholm had thrust a window of the department wide open, and the external world came pouring in.
There were camera crews roaming the hallways, men and women with pens and pads at the ready, cornering physicists to prod from them a punchy line or two on the ultimate significance of the work of the newly immortalized Dietrich Spencer. Justin emerged from his office to collide with a bristlingly beautiful young woman in a tightly cut and bright red suit, its hemline pulse-quickeningly high across her thighs, who glanced up at the nameplate on the door to ask the surprisingly dishy young man whether he was Professor Childs or only a student.
"I'm Professor Childs," he answered her.
"You look so young to be someone so important." She smiled, showing perfect teeth, while at the same time giving the cameraman a little nod, so that a small red light on his handheld video camera blinked on.
"Could you tell me, Professor Childs, whether you agree that Dietrich Spencer's discoveries in physics cast light on the existence of God, as many are saying."
Justin stared down at the stunning young woman, who was nodding up at him with warm encouragement, and he felt correspondingly stunned. The sweet confidence of her nods disposed him reciprocally toward her, and she seemed not so brittle as a moment before, far more limpid and just as beautiful. He wanted very much to answer her in a way that would please her, if only he knew what it was that she was asking.
"God's existence?" he asked her haltingly. "Who's saying that?"
"Well, apparently not you," she answered, her warm smile going out simultaneously with the little red light on the camera, and her face resetting itself. Justin watched her moving off down the hall in the midst of her technical crew, stopping before the door of Ledoute, who popped out instantaneously and proceeded to opine magnificently on cue.
For the most part, the members of the department mildly enjoyed the distractions invading their halls. Nobody, of course, positively reveled in it like Dietrich Spencer himself, who stepped into the world's glare so masterfully that one might have supposed he had been preparing for it his entire life. The systematic charm that he had been practicing within the academic community for years was now turned up a notch or two and equipped with a high beam of flash, in acknowledgment of the less subtle audience that constituted the world at large. If pretty young roving reporters wanted him to wax eloquent on the subject of the big bang and God, then, by God, wax he would, though the cameramen were careful to keep the snapping left fingers out of view.
"In the beginning there was the big bang, a moment of infinite singularity, into which we cannot probe. Our knowledge begins at ten to the minus thirteen seconds after ground zero; only then can we lift the heavy veil and take a peek. All moments before that one are cloaked from our scientific view, and it remains to others to imagine what lies behind the cognitive curtain: whether it is there that God's hand may be invisibly moving."
The man's compressed energy was undeniably erotic, titillatingly telegenic. He managed to project himself, most especially before the camera, as both sage and rogue, and it was all splendidly effective. When he spoke, as he did for an in-depth interview on BBC i, of the 10 to the 29th degrees centigrade theorized to be the temperature of the very young universe, "far hotter than the interior of any star," he somehow insinuated that there was something primally libidinal in the cosmological situation, so that a viewing don at Oxford was motivated to plod over in her creaking men's shoes to her bookcase, there to lay her hand to a reference that Thomas Hobbes had made to the libido sciendi:
"A lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of carnal pleasure."
Quite.
Justin had not caught a direct glimpse of Spencer since the news had broken over them, sweeping the laureate away on the exuberant wave mechanics of fame. There had been champagne bottles laid out for a week at the departmental tea, but Dietrich had had time to make only one tumultuous appearance there, on the very first day that the word had descended from Stockholm. Justin had not been in the faculty common room that afternoon, having immediately gone to the house on Bagatelle Road, and since that day he had kept to himself, teaching his courses and then fleeing the campus.
The closest Justin had come, in fact, to Spencer, in the ten or so days that had passed since the external world had broken through, was to ride up in the elevator one morning with Spencer's secretary Della, who was looking decidedly prettified and smug, like a husband-proud wife, graciously receiving armloads of the bouquets of plaudits on behalf of her surrogate spouse. Her hair was somehow different—perhaps she had not been a redhead before?—and Justin seemed to remember that prior to Spencer's ascent she had worn glasses.
"Some excitement, huh." She had grinned at Justin, when he had (gallingly) failed to say anything at all to her on how the world had been decisively reconfigured.
Justin had nodded numbly, for he had become permanently benumbed, and she had shrugged her shoulders and hurried away as soon as the elevator doors opened, an enemy now forever.
So it was that Justin was quite unprepared when, in the late afternoon of the late autumn, the laureate himself had knocked at the closed door of Justin's small office.
Justin had been standing with his back to the door, staring out of his window at the grand and Gothic architecture laid out beneath him. A television van that had been parked on a little side road was slowly pulling away, and a little farther down the same road a township police car was just vanishing. Chalked up on the blackboard were the equations Justin had been working on when the news had come from Stockholm, with a little note to the cleaning crew, boxed off in the right-hand corner: DO NOT ERASE!
Today he would return to his interrupted work. He felt a subtle easing in his mind's icy stillness, the tentative life beginning once again to flow, promising the fire that was not far off.
It was so nearly his now to possess, his and Dana's and Mallach's. He would return today to the difficult mathematics, would crack it open to reveal the final form within, diaphanously lit and irresistible, so that Dana and her father would be appeased.
He had no other resources to unseat their unreasonable anger. Logic fell deaf on their ears. He would have to leap into the fire for them, to leap like the ancient madman, summoning all he had in him and even more. He was gathering his strength for the task even now, convincing himself that the solution most certainly lay hidden where he suspected it. For so long as he could be certain that the answer was there, then he knew he could count on his own brain to find it. And then they would love him, they would take him back and be at peace, the three as self-contained as before.
