Mr G

by Alan Lightman

  A birthday party is a splendid idea, said Uncle D. But about the presents, I don’t know if—

  No buts, said Aunt P. I’m going for my beauty rest now. When I wake up, I want presents. Lots of them. You’ve got a whole universe full of stuff to choose from. And I want something pink. With that, Aunt P yawned and retired.

  A difficult spouse, Uncle whispered to me in exasperation. But what can you do?

  So Uncle and I went into the universe and found a newly forming galaxy, full of pink stars, and we carried it back to the Void. In the Void, the material was nearly weightless. It shimmered and glowed. You could almost see through it. With a few folds and tucks, we made a beautiful dress for Aunt Penelope, as she’d always wanted. Uncle named the dress Kalyana. He said nothing about the mismatch of essences, as he had in mind a few material things he wanted for his birthday. Which, he informed me, was coming up quite soon.

  Oh my! Aunt P exclaimed when she woke up and saw the dress draped over an outcropping of the Void. It is lovely. You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble. Immediately, she put on the garment. Then she studied herself for a few moments. She turned this way and that, exclaimed again, and began dancing about and singing at the same time. Although there were many pink stars, there were also blue and yellow and green ones. It was a dress of many colors. Wearing it, Aunt Penelope was the most beautiful thing in the Void. Every time she twirled, a few stars came loose and began sailing off, and Uncle would shuffle over and scoop them up and stick them back on.

  For eons, Aunt P never took that dress off, even for sleeping. It lasted for 1033 atomic ticks. After that, most of the stars had exploded or burned out, and the garment lost its color and shape.

  Belhor & Co. Go to the Opera

  Uncle Deva, Aunt Penelope, and I were not the only ones making expeditions into the new universe. For some time, Belhor and his two assistants had been doing so as well, without my authorization. And while Belhor had beseeched me not to intervene in the course of mortal events, he himself had meddled from time to time.

  On his first visit to Aalam-104729, Belhor landed at an opera house, on a planet almost completely covered with water. The intelligent life had constructed vast floating cities, and the opera house was located in the largest of these. As it happened, Belhor and the two Baphomets materialized during the middle of a performance, in the dark, suddenly occupying three vacant seats in the center front row. So as to attract as little notice as possible, the three visitors had taken the form of the local inhabitants. Belhor, tall and elegant, wore a charcoal black dinner jacket with tails, a starched white shirt with platinum cufflinks, a black bow tie, and shiny black shoes. Baphomet the Larger was dressed in a tan sports jacket several sizes too small, which strained to pop its single button at the waist, a wrinkled green shirt, polka-dot tie, and sandals. Baphomet the Smaller wore pajamas and slippers but had taken the trouble to put on a necktie, lopsidedly slung around his thick neck.

  “The mezzo-soprano is off-key,” said Baphomet L. after a few moments. “And I do not like her looks.” The beast loudly leafed through the program notes until he found the singer’s biography. “No, she will not do.”

  “We do not like her looks at all,” said Baphomet S., who also riffled through the program.

  “Quiet,” said the patron sitting directly behind them. It was a woman who had spoken. She wore a taffeta evening gown with jewels in her hair, and she reeked of an unnatural scent.

  Baphomet L. turned around in his seat and grinned at the woman.

  “Surely, madam, you were not speaking to me,” the beast said loudly, and rolled one of its two eyes clockwise and the other eye counterclockwise. At which point the woman gasped, leaped from her seat, and went hurrying up the aisle.

  “Behave yourselves,” whispered Belhor. “We are in a public place. We are here to observe.”

  “But the mezzo-soprano has an awful voice,” complained Baphomet L. “We should speak to the manager and get our money back.”

  “We should demand a full refund,” said Baphomet S.

  “Quiet,” said Baphomet L.

  “Quiet both of you,” whispered Belhor.

  Almost imperceptibly, the theater rose and fell, as did all of the buildings in the floating city, and the overhead chandeliers slightly swayed.

  “I am annoyed with that mezzo-soprano up there,” said Baphomet the Larger. Suddenly, the mezzo-soprano, who was at that moment singing an impassioned aria with outstretched arms, discovered that the clasp holding her dress had come undone. The dress slithered down to her waist.

  For the next few moments, the audience became very quiet. Then someone in the second balcony shouted an off-color remark, someone else began applauding, and the singer ran off the stage.

  “Baphomet!” Belhor said sternly. “You disappoint me.”

  “But she had such an insufferable voice,” said Baphomet L.

  A young woman appeared on the stage and announced with apologies that there would be a brief intermission. The lights went on. “I hope that they have got something good to eat,” said Baphomet L.

  “I’m famished,” said Baphomet S.

  A gentleman in a grey suit walked up to Belhor and tapped him on the shoulder. “The manager would like to see you, sir,” said the gentleman. “Would you please follow me to the manager’s office.”

  “And I would like to see the manager,” said Baphomet L. “We want a refund. That mezzo-soprano was atrocious.”

  “What is the issue?” Belhor quietly asked the gentleman.

  “Please come with me,” said the man. He stared at Baphomet S., now standing in full view wearing his striped pajamas. “And bring your friends with you.”

  The three visitors followed the gentleman in the grey suit up the aisle through crowds of opera patrons, to a door at the far end of the lobby, up a stairway, and into the manager’s office at the back of the mezzanine. The room was richly appointed with platinum fixtures, woven rugs, and furniture made out of crystal and glass. Photographs of the manager posing with various dignitaries covered the walls.

  The manager was a middle-aged man with a soft and mushy face, like a piece of fruit past its prime, a limp moustache, and luminous green jewels on both hands. For a moment, his gaze fell on the two Baphomets, one after the other. Then he addressed Belhor. “May I see your ticket stubs?” Belhor produced three ticket stubs. The manager examined them, then examined them again, as if something were not quite right. “I am going to have to ask you not to speak during the performance,” said the manager. “You have been disturbing other patrons.”

  “Certainly,” said Belhor. “With all apologies. We were … stimulated by the performance.”

  “I have not seen you here before,” said the manager. “Is this your first time?”

  “I have not seen you before either,” said Belhor. “How long have you been the manager of this theater?”

  “If you were regular patrons,” said the manager with a slight smirk on his face, “you would know the answer to that question.” The manager looked again at Baphomet S. and could not hide his disdain. “May I ask your name?” he said to the beast.

  “May I ask your name, my dear fellow?” said Baphomet L. “You seem to be doing very well for yourself.”

  “Very well indeed,” said Baphomet S., gawking at the glass furniture.

  “You do not have appropriate dress,” the manager said. “Our ushers should not have let you into the theater.” The smaller Baphomet began crying fake tears. “This is one of the most prestigious venues in the city,” continued the manager. “Our patrons expect refinement. They deserve refinement. Royalty comes to our theater. Important guests come to our theater. Are you having fun with us?” At this point, Baphomet L. began hugging Baphomet S., pretending to comfort the beast. “Your friends should have more respect,” the manager said to Belhor.

  “You are insulting us,” said Baphomet the Larger. “I do not like to be insulted.”

  “No, we do not like that
one bit,” sniffled Baphomet S.

  The manager smiled. “You pretend to be something you are not,” he said. “And then you mock what you cannot have.”

  “My gosh, you are right,” Baphomet L. said, grinning, and he did a magnificent backflip. “You have found us out.”

  “I want all three of you out of my theater,” said the manager. “Now. And don’t leave through the main door. Mr. Thadr will show you out a back way.”

  “You have treated my friends discourteously,” said Belhor. “I am not pleased with how you have treated them.”

  The manager laughed. “Take them out to the street,” he said to Mr. Thadr. “And bring back an air freshener.”

  Suddenly, a woman flew into the manager’s office, breathing heavily and appearing frightened. “I am … so sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Lzehr. I don’t know … I don’t know what happened. I had the money in the cash box, and it just … disappeared. It was there, and then it wasn’t there. All the money from the night’s ticket sales. It was there … and then it … was gone. I … don’t know what happened.”

  “What a shame,” said Baphomet L. “You have our sincere condolences.”

  “Our very most sincere condolences,” said Baphomet S.

  “We will take our leave now,” said Belhor. “Please, Mr. Thadr.”

  In the confusion that followed, with ushers and cashiers rushing about, the manager barely heard the frantic message that a water pipe had just burst and the lobby was flooded.

  Mind Planet

  As eons went by, the civilizations in Aalam-104729 rose to greater and greater heights before they inevitably passed away and were replaced by new civilizations. I was continually surprised to see what new things the intelligent creatures would invent. They made machines that could fly. They built machines that could perform any mechanical task. They built devices to hear acoustic frequencies that their own sensory organs could not, see light that their own eyes could not, smell molecules that were undetectable by their own olfactory organs. They invented silicon-based electromagnetic communication devices that allowed them to see and talk to one another from great distances. They manufactured appendages and internal organs, so that they could replace defective parts in their own bodies. In some worlds, the creatures learned how to suspend their aging processes, so that they could take long trips between star systems and revive themselves upon arrival, many lifetimes later. On other planets, the creatures learned how to modify the replicating and control molecules so that they could create new life-forms that had never existed. Occasionally, the artificial organisms proceeded to infect and destroy all animate matter on the planet, but in other cases, the new life-forms could be engineered to cure diseases or provide energy or produce new types of machines, part animate and part inanimate. In some worlds, the creatures invented techniques to alter memories in their brains, so that they could have the sensation of experiences that had never, in fact, occurred.

  The most fascinating invention—which occurred on a particularly advanced planet in a certain ellipsoidal galaxy—was the ability to separate mind almost entirely from matter. After eons of suffering from the various illnesses and disintegrations that necessarily accompany all animate matter, the creatures on this planet developed a method to extract the information in the cells of their brains and encode it in high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. These beings were completely devoid of bodies. They were pure energy. The only material substance remaining of each individual was a highly polished reflecting sphere, needed to contain and confine the mental radiations within.

  To be sure, these creatures had to pay a heavy price for being thus encoded. They could no longer move about. They could no longer receive sensory impressions from the outside world, except for signals from other encoded brains. They could no longer see their thoughts carried out as actions. However, there were compensations. Once encoded, these creatures never suffered physical pain. They never had unsatisfied physical longings. They never grew hungry. They never grew thirsty. And they could live a very long time, their demise coming only by the slow degradation and information leakage of the electromagnetic radiation as it bounced back and forth trillions of times between the polished walls of the confining spheres.

  These bodiless creatures truly lived in an interior world. It was a world of pure thought. It was a world of pure mind. Mountains, oceans, buildings could be imagined, but they existed only as abstractions, as slight alterations of electric and magnetic fields. Touch and vision and smell could be imagined, but they existed only as changes in frequency or amplitude of the energy waves that bounced back and forth, back and forth. Perhaps surprisingly, emotions could be felt. Long ago, the creatures, in their embodied form, had learned how anger, fear, joy, love, jealousy, and hate were imprinted in the biochemistry and electrical impulses of material brains. Thus, when the contents of their brain cells were analyzed and encoded in the delicate vibrations of electromagnetic waves, the emotions were transferred as well. Fear was a certain diagonal modulation of frequencies and amplitudes. Love was another. Jealousy was yet another. The bodiless creatures, existing entirely as energy waves, could experience all of these sentiments, if one interprets experience as the sensation of recognizing the meaning of certain repeating patterns of energy. But then, does that experience differ so much from the sensation of anger, hate, passion, and so forth in creatures with bodies, who recognize the meaning of certain repeating patterns of chemicals and electrified particles in their material brains?

  Not only could these bodiless creatures experience emotions. They also had personalities. If a creature had been pompous and overbearing in its original, embodied form, then so it was in its bodiless, encoded form. If a creature had been meek and timid, fawning, good-natured, insecure, temperamental in its embodied form, then it would be the same when reincarnated as a concentration of pure energy. Likewise, if a creature had been a painter, a musician, a technician, a philosopher in its embodied form, it would be the same in its encoded form, since these talents and dexterities and intellectual capacities are, at their essence, properties of the mind. A painter, for example, could still create paintings, but the artistic aesthetic and design, the line and the form, would be translated to patterns of energy.

  Furthermore, the painter or the musician or the philosopher could have personal relationships—friendships, business dealings, romantic liaisons—with other bodiless creatures, through the transmission and reception of radiation from one sphere to another. Although such relationships were strictly cerebral, they could be satisfying. If two creatures developed a romantic attachment to each other, they could share joy and pleasure and even a certain kind of sexual congress, all experienced in the exquisitely subtle transformations of their electromagnetic minds.

  When one visits this planet, one beholds entire cities of these creatures. But instead of buildings, avenues, solar domes, bridges, one sees rows upon rows of little titanium spheres covering the hillsides and valleys. Love affairs, arguments, paintings, the discovery of scientific principles, even warfare are taking place within these spheres, yet are totally invisible from the outside. From the outside, one sees only rows upon rows of little spheres, motionless, soundless, serene. But I, who can see everything at once, know all that transpires within. I know that many of these bodiless creatures yearn for the bodies and physicality they once had. They are tormented. They worry that because their entire existence is now interior existence, then the exterior world might be only an illusion. Carrying this logic one step further, they worry that even their interior world might be illusion, that all is illusion. For how could they tell, within the confines of their little spheres, whether anything exists? All they know for sure is that they think. In a certain sense, isn’t this true of creatures with bodies as well?

  Good and Evil

  “Please do me the honor to see where I live,” Belhor said to me soon after Aunt Penelope’s dress began to fade. “I think it will be worth your time.”

  “I
know where you live,” I responded.

  “You know, but you do not know. Please. You will be my guest.” As always, Belhor had a way of speaking that was hypnotic, a whispering voice that emerged from everywhere at once, like a wind that blows from every direction. And yet, as I have said before, no wind ever moved through the Void.

  To get to Belhor’s abode, we traveled an enormous distance. In fact, an infinite distance. But there are many orders of infinity, and after aleph-naught, we proceeded to aleph-vav, and then on to aleph-omega, and even on beyond that, to realms I had rarely inhabited. In a way that is difficult to characterize, the Void became thicker and thicker during our journey. Not that the Void has any substance or mass, but the layers of nothingness grew more compressed and dense, more tangled together, so that one had the sensation of moving through ever-thickening somethingness—like a gauze, to use a metaphor from the new universe. Moreover, as we came closer and closer to Belhor’s domain, the music of the Void went through its own transmogrification, increasingly shaped and controlled by Belhor’s thoughts as well my own. Dark fugues. Nocturnes. Symphonies of melancholia. It was all extremely beautiful but unsettling and sad at the same time, as if the Void itself were longing for something it desperately wanted. It also seemed that as we traveled farther and farther, we were descending, but that was only a sensation, since the Void has no down or up, no gravity. I can only report the impression of walking down a great stairway, down and down and down, farther and farther to some submerged depth in the emptiness. Billions and billions of descending steps. Even the ambient light of the Void—which, like the music, originates in my mind—grew dimmer and dimmer. We traveled in silence. Eons passed.

  Eventually, we came to a magnificent floating castle. Its walls and surfaces, although made from layers of emptiness like all things in the Void, were so compacted and compressed that they seemed to have a materiality. Parapets carved with strange symbols thrust outward in peculiar directions. Towers and turrets shimmered in pale colors, first translucent, then utterly transparent, then translucent again. Through great arched windows, one could see courtyards and walkways, storerooms, great halls with ornate chandeliers, balconies and winding stairways, elliptical pools of liquid nothingness. Each of these structures emerged from the Void, vibrated and fluttered for brief moments, then dissolved into the surrounding vacuum. When the structures reappeared, they would be shaped differently or placed at different locations. At one moment, a round tower would appear next to a particular battlement. At another moment, both battlement and tower would melt away and reappear as a four-sided bell tower on the opposite wall. Each architectural feature of the castle was temporary and fleeting, of course, yet there was a density and momentary persistence I had seen nowhere else.