Properties of Light, page 7
Relativity and quantum mechanics, each of which precipitated a major conceptual revolution, cognitively clash with each other. Both can beautifully cover the phenomena that come directly under them: in the case of quantum mechanics, the elementary particles of matter; in the case of relativity, the four-dimensional manifold of space-time. But when they are brought together, as they must eventually be brought—matter being situated, after all, in the domain of space-time—the covering fabric is rent unintelligible, and hideous absurdities invade.
Mallachian mechanics seems, at first blush, more irreconcilable with relativity theory than other formulations of quantum mechanics, as the very few physicists who had bothered to take notice of his work had emphasized. But this is only because it brings out into the light what the other formulations obscure, which is the utterly startling, but nonetheless utterly undeniable fact that nature is, in the word of the physicist, "nonlocal": events can have instantaneous influences on other, far-distant events. A crude way of seeing that nonlocality—and therefore quantum mechanics—is at odds with Einstein's relativity theory is to remember that it is fundamental to relativity that nothing can travel faster than light, whereas these instantaneous propagations of influence seem to indicate superluminal, in fact infinite, velocities. The cognitive dissonance can be expressed in far more subtle and technical terms, involving the relativistic condition of Lorentz invariance, which, when conjoined with quantum nonlocality, allows for such unacceptable anomalies as "backwards causation," which would be the future's affecting the past.
Einstein pursued, through all his last sad years, his elusive dream of a "unified field theory" that would comfortably embrace both q.m. and relativity, and it was in something like the spirit of Einstein's last dream that I broached with Mallach our possibly embarking on the search for the final reckoning.
He understood, of course, that the dissolution of the difficulty of reconciling the two monumental theories of twentieth-century physics required nothing less than the solution of the problem of time, the final explanation of how a correlate of illusive nonrelativistic time appears to be caught up in the quantum situation known as entanglement: systems becoming so enmeshed with one another that the question of their distinct wave functions can no longer be meaningfully raised; only the wave function of their union can be defined. He understood precisely what was entailed in my posing the possibility that he and I, complementarily joined, might together approach the formidable problem, leaping like Empedocles to emerge, both of us, divine.
—The solution would have to be very deep, and I know it would be very beautiful. I can't see the form it will take yet, but I know it would be very beautiful.
At these last words of mine, he pushed himself back from the table, his one thin leg crossed over the other, his right elbow poised on his knee and his chin resting in the open palm. He did not speak for five minutes or more, as Dana watched him and I watched them both.
— Well.
That was all he said, and he drew it out like an endless sigh.
— Well.
As one might sigh above a grave.
Then for several moments more we all three sat, each stupefied on thoughts, until he looked over the brilliance of crystal and candles at his own vision of a girl and smiled sadly at her. His smile was one of his saddest expressions, and there passed the slightest nod across the table from him to her and back from her to him, some transmission of information moving between them faster than the speed of light, like tachyons streaking across the dining room table, and I watched.
Only then did he seem to remember me again, and he smiled at me, not quite so sadly as at her.
— I will think about what you have said, Professor Childs. You will think and I will think. Perhaps the work you have in mind for us is possible. Perhaps it is even still possible for me. Though I am old with wandering.
There issued a short sound, something like a laugh, vanishing before I could quite ascertain if a laugh was what it had been.
— Do you know the poem? The poem by Yeats?
I shook my head.
— You must read Yeats. You must read Blake, Justin Childs. Tell him, Dana.
She laughed, the full range of her rapture all at once now rekindled, and repeated the words of her father obediently.
— You must read Yeats, you must read Blake, Justin Childs.
It was the first time she had pronounced my name. I could never have known what it would be like to hear my own name coming out from between her parting lips, Justin Childs, when I am Justin Childs.
—No, no, the poem. Recite the poem for him.
She looked at me, turning her strange rapt attention full on me, and she shrugged her velveted shoulders and colored in self-consciousness. I had thought myself gone as far as I could go, but at the sight of the wine flush spreading down over the skin that the velvet of her dress had left bare, I went still further.
Softly and solemnly, like a good schoolgirl, she began to recite, because he had requested it of her, the words of the poem:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
He said nothing more after that, and did not sigh his graveside sigh, but pushed himself from the table, this time unfolding his long and wasted body and slowly rising. Without a word he kissed her good night on her forehead, and then held her at arm's length for several moments more, staring at the spot he had just kissed. He kissed her again on each of her eyes, and turned to me, offering a limp and silent handshake, his hands now gone old. I thanked him for the night, he smiled, shook my hand again, just as limply, and left the room.
She told me to wait, she would be back in several minutes, and she followed him out. I heard them climbing the long swirling stairway together, their quiet voices covered at last in the measured heavy silence.
I was in a problematic state, a state of body as well as of mind, a steady pounding in the blood and subtle body.
These are sensations I cannot recall with perfect clarity and calm, and, with just so little clarity and calm, I sat and waited for the reappearance of the girl.
She came to the door and motioned silently for me to follow her.
I could not bear to end the night, though I had no thought that I might prolong it through any effort of my own. I was just as passive as I was pounding, and I dreaded, in my problematic state, to leave the house on Bagatelle Road, just as I dreaded to stay, for I knew to stay would be terrible, but not so terrible as to leave. The world outside her sphere was suddenly given to me in all its drabness and all its coldness, the world as it really is, after all, the world as it really is, so that I wondered how I would from now on bear it, live and yet not feel it, and wondered how it was that I had lived until now, what had I thought of and what had I felt?
She did not lead me to the door, but past the door and up the swirling stairs.
I followed mutely after, as I'd followed her father that first autumn afternoon, and I followed her down the haunted corridor that led us to this room, it is Dana's room, where we sat facing each other on this bed, it is Dana's bed.
She took off her shoes and they dropped soundlessly onto the thick white carpet, and I told her, so unlike me but for the pounding motions in my blood, of the fingers of my light, how they had pierced my telescope's clear lens to probe the dim, dark bodies splayed gently onto the night.
She listened with a look half-serious and not, sitting back on her feet so that she was kneeling, her knees just barely touching mine, and she reached out both hands and took my glasses off, placing them carefully on this little table. I did not gasp aloud, I do not think, not quite aloud, but I kissed her lips, and took her hands and kissed them, too, and tried to kiss her lips again, but she turned them away, and I was mortally afraid, for a split second of eternity, that I had done something wrong to turn her from me.
She had a look both serious and not, I could not quite get hold of it, as she took hold of the fingers of my hand, and she traced them with her own long index finger, the up and the down of the wavelets of my hand, so that it was the fingers of my hand that went to fire, and she took them in her mouth, one after the other, between those softly parting lips, mmm, she whispered, her mouth against my ear, fingers of light, with a look both serious and not, my fingers reaching for the knowledge of her, moving over her cheeks, her neck, her mouth, and she pretended that they burned her tongue, taking them into her softly opening mouth, fingers of light, her words against my ear, and with the fingers of my hand she led me to the otherness of her, it was a different Dana, to see such a Dana emerging from behind the other, to see the thing her body really was, how unafraid she was, stepping into the fire to emerge divine, Dana divine and taking me in, her body arched upward like a flame above my own, fierce at one moment, tender at the next, her tenderness was the most terrible aspect of it all, I did not know if I would emerge from it at all.
—Close your eyes Dana for pity's sake close your eyes for pity's sake I am dying against the glass beating helpless on the glass while you stare at me unmoved.
Gazing at me from out of the ice blue stillness of her unforgiving eyes, not a motion of pity to disturb the hard, smooth surface of her stare, a different Dana, a frightening unknown.
— For pity's sake Dana pity me please pity me.
My two fists blackening while they beat against the glass and the icy flames roared up and through me, paradox abounding, even in death, for I was turning to ice through the agency of fire, caught fast inside the flaming car, which she had driven and she had crashed, her cold voice relentlessly cataloguing the reasons for her hatred.
— It was you who destroyed him. Not my mother. Not me. Only you, Justin Childs.
And I am Justin Childs, crushed and caught in metal, beating blackened against the glass, while on the other side stands my Dana, perfectly still and staring, hesitating the long fiery seconds that would have saved me.
— For pity's sake for pity's sake why can't you pity me as I'd pity you?
The knowledge come at last, the answer written plainly in her terrible eyes.
Through hollow lands and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone.
VI
The universe might ultimately be—there is some evidence—coherent.
But it is also, and just as rigorously, cold. There are equations at the heart of it, but they are written out in a frozen fire, and the heart at the heart of the heart includes no sense at all of anything remotely resembling pity.
Such was the world according to Dana Mallach, who held that reality was both deeply rational and just as deeply unmoved, and she claimed to have had the gist of this truth from as far back as she could remember.
"Even when I was the smallest child, Justin. Of course I hadn't possessed the language for expressing what it was I so absolutely knew. Instead I had all those sleep problems."
Every night, she had wandered the house, arising two or three times before dawn to leave the frilly white bedroom at the end of the long black corridor, her dilated pupils frantically sifting the dark for intruders, flesh or phantom. She would pad softly on her bare feet the long way to her parents' bedroom, never awakening them, at least never intentionally. She would open the door, inch by inch so that it would not creak, wanting only to see that they were there, that they were safe, that they had not fallen victim to the hideous possibilities that ought not, for pity's sake, to have been possible at all, though she knew that they were, it was the gist of the truth. She wanted only to observe without disturbing, validating that they were untouched, for the time being unharmed.
Dana still described her childhood terrors to Justin with palpable anguish, and he would listen with both tenderness and respect, for Justin had never experienced anything like these early vastations. The world, to the child of him that he had been, had seemed as straightforwardly self-evident as his meticulously constructed truth tables for first-order logic. Every proposition is either true or false, and no proposition is both! It had never occurred to him, as a boy, to imagine the worst.
"That just proves I was a much more imaginative child than you were, my poor Justin."
She smiled up at him, so seraphically that he knew for certain she meant him a slight.
"I was plenty imaginative as a kid," he answered her, while seizing a fistful of her light-spun hair and holding it hard away from her face. He could see the skin being pulled up near her temples. She did not flinch, though her eyes shone too bright, and he let the fistful drop.
"Mmm, of course you were. We were both amazing children, there's no question. Only your brilliance expressed itself in fabulously untrue theories and mine took the form of sleep problems. You were brilliantly in error and I was brilliantly insomniac."
It was Justin now who barely slept, while Dana slept lightly beside him. Justin had learned how to still himself relentlessly, so that even in his sleep he never stirred even the most minor of muscles beside her. He often stayed up half the night watching her closed eyes, watching as they shivered over dreams.
—Do you dream of me, Dana?
And if she said yes, could he then have been happy? Could she be believed? She had an inner life, that was the sorry truth. She had a mind, and it was the source of his absolute uncertainty. It was a torment to need so desperately to know the contents of her mind, the hidden variables behind her words and silences and laughter, the varieties of intent behind her murmured mmm's.
Justin had never known anyone as mind-proud as Dana. Mind-proud as other women are house- or husband-proud. It was just like her to dress up even her early-childhood phobias so that they took on the brilliance of infant metaphysics, to drape elaborate ratiocinations over her spooks. It was so very like Dana to deform her early neurosis into puerile prescience that sometimes Justin found himself, in the very act of disbelieving Dana's version of herself, loving her all the better for her fabulations, for her need for these, childlike and vain.
But there were other times when he became impatient with the hidden strain of irrationality that ran through her thoughts like a poison through her system, the soured metaphysics she had imbibed from her earliest hours, from her mother, who had been a drunk. It was when her vagaries seemed to bear the taint of Dotty that Justin couldn't abide them. Everything that he had managed to learn about her dead and much-loved mother offended him, the sort of woman, silly-drunk on vanity, who drew the bitter ire from the sweetness of his mother. His mother had wasted no pity on women like Dotty.
Dotty had carried her drunken death within her like a softening fruit, even though she'd been no simple drunk, possessing spiritual leanings that had set the light craft of her mind to list. Would they had gone down with her, those obscure longings for the light, would they had died a full and fitful death in Dotty.
The faculty of disbelief in Dotty had gotten jammed, and everything was getting through. She had been an epistemological calamity. The distinction between truth and falsity had been misplaced, she had forgotten the difference altogether, until death itself made the indifference complete.
A portrait of the mother manqué and her very young daughter, done in oils, reigned above the mantel of the library fireplace, Dotty staring off into a distant place from where she might have imagined her slanted illumination to derive. His own mother would have stared at him and not at the mystic faraway.
He could not but know what a mother is meant to be. Bent at an awkward angle over the red Formica of the kitchen counter in the early evening shadowing of winter, spreading the Fluff and peanut butter onto spongy bread, the worn leather of the French volume at her pudgy elbow, her eyes lustering at each protracted tremor in the echoing chambers of Marcel's lacerated, overworked heart.
Dotty was made to be mocked. He wished for Dana to mock at her in unison with him. Their voices joined in sweetest mockery would have made a music he might love. Husband and daughter, in their bereavement (groundless), made the woman over into a false guise. Mallach was grotesquely mawkish on the subject of his dead wife.
"My wife was a most extraordinary manner of woman," he had told Justin the day that he had danced out the motions of light for him. They had walked through a frozen field, circling round and round a famous pond, its surface going from silver to lead to iodine as the winter's early dusk drew in.
It was only Justin and Mallach, Dana having stayed at home, and there was an Olympian loftiness to their stride that day, a day of glorious physics.
They had caught a glimpse of the form of forms, and the subsiding bliss left Mallach in an exalted mood of revelation, so that he had spoken to Justin of her, of his dead wife.
"She made me suffer horribly, you know. She drove me to the brink and even over, and I was grateful to her for it. I owe my best ideas in science to my life with Carlotta."
Justin had stared at Mallach, groping for words through his sense of uneasy disbelief.
"You owe your scientific ideas to her? But she wasn't a physicist. She didn't know any science."
"No, Justin, you misunderstand. It was in my life with her, in its intensity. That was what made it possible for me to think as I did in those days. I'll never be able to think with the same intensity again."
Mallach saw the woman as a seeker of their sort, when she was not. He could not see her as clearly as Justin saw. How did Justin know they falsified their Dotty if he had never met her living? How could he be so certain? He was. Insubstantial as she was, she still left marks behind that Justin, at least, could read.
He had no doubt. Her books alone revealed the fool she'd been, the drunken, soft-brained fool. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Tantra and the Sacred Fire, Madame Blavatsky Still Speaks, Meditation for the Muddled Masses, for the Huddled That Have Gone to Muddled Masses.
