“Pay close attention to details,” said the Regent.
I humoured the bird. After all, I was her guest, and she had laid out the spread to end all spreads and treated me with gracious hospitality. I peeped around the room once more.
“Abe’s drawers!” I said, at length.
“Tell me!” said the Regent.
“Everything has changed!” I said, agog.
Oan gasped again.
“What do you mean?” asked the Regent.
“It’s — well, dash it — it’s difficult to describe. Everything’s broadly the same as it was before this quake, but slightly different ’round the edges. Take the tapestries. Some of the imagery has changed. The little chap with the eagle’s head is facing left instead of right. And the pattern on the serving dishes exhibits a bluer hue. The cutlery has changed, too. We’re all still wearing the same clothes that we’d been wearing all along, but Oan’s necklace has gotten longer. My tie is stiffer. Norm’s beard is—”
“And the weather?” pressed the Regent.
“The air seems thicker,” I said, remembering. “Harder to breathe. Heavier. Laden with rummy sultriness.”
“Very good,” said the Regent. “I see things as you do, Mr. Feynman. Before now, I’ve been the only one who could see such things or perceive the quakes themselves.”
I looked around at my fellow guests. Oan and Norm sat there goggling at me in an awed sort of way, like children of tender years who’ve just witnessed their first conjuror pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
“But what in Abe’s name is causing them?” I asked.
“The world is reshaping itself,” said the Regent, leaning in. “Detroit is being transformed. The quakes started a few days before we brought you here. The first ones left very few changes in their wake, but each successive quake seems to be stronger.”
“It’s Climate Change!” said Norm Stradamus. “The reshaping of the world! Everything’s just as I foretold.”
“The High Priest speaks the truth,” said the Regent. “Reality is bending. The very fabric of Detroit is being rewoven.”
“Odd,” I said.
“Odd?” said the Regent, cocking an eyebrow at me as though she expected Greater Things from one who had mysteriously perceived the recent thingummy.
“It’s just an odd sort of coincidence,” I said. “All of this Climate Change stuff. You’ve been noticing these changes in china patterns, atmospheric pressure, tapestries, and whatnot — little marginal changes which don’t matter a single damn — all at the same time that I’ve been taking note of some of the Author’s larger-scale editorial revisions: deleting here an IPT, there a protagonist’s biographical sketch, and swapping personal secretaries for famous mathematicians. And you now describe these changes as the ‘reweaving’ of the fabric of Detroit. Yet another rummy coincidence.”
“What do you mean?” asked the Regent.
“Nothing of consequence,” I said, waving a carefree forkful of soufflé. “It’s just that Isaac Newton used the same bit of metaphor when describing his latest research. He didn’t spell out the details, mercifully sparing his audience a lecture on experimental methods, but he broadly described the thrust of his current work as reweaving the fabric of Detroit.”
My three dinner companions now permed a synchronized slack-jawed goggle — all four of them if you count Memphis, for he too seemed to stare at me with a look of wild surmise.
“What is it?” I asked. “A bit of asparagus in my teeth?”
“What did you just say about Isaac Newton?” said Norm.
The Regent shushed him with a gesture, as if she wasn’t interested in rehearing what I’d just said. She seemed to be keen on footnotes rather than repetition.
“What’s Newton doing?” she demanded.
“Nothing important,” I said, surprised at this crowd’s keen interest in an academic’s work. “Merely science. Your concern is forgivable, though, and has been shared at the highest levels. Abe himself had doubts and qualms about Newton’s experiments, fearing that this science fancier might be up to something that could cause Detroit to spin off its axis or otherwise come to a bad end. I investigated the matter and quickly put those fears to bed. Rest assured that all is quiet on the Isaac front. He’s is merely fiddling about with atomic whatnots.”
This failed to placate my audience.
“Atomic whatnots?” said Oan.
“That’s right,” I said. “The quantum level. That’s what he said. He wants to change Detroit at the quantum level. His grandiose plan, such as it is, is to alter all of the world’s quantum thingummies all at once, and he needs my help to do it. There was something in there about Napoleons which I couldn’t quite follow, and something else about time travel, but none of that seemed to be of the essence. The nub of the thing is — the thing I mean to impress upon you — is that Isaac Newton’s scientific fiddling is confined to this sub-molecular quantum realm, and that anything he does will be on such a teensy weensy, imperceptible scale that it couldn’t matter to anyone larger than a virus who smoked in boyhood and stunted his growth.”
I’d intended this spot of exposition to act as a balm for their collectively troubled spirits, but it didn’t seem to have worked. Indeed, rather than soothing their troubled s.’s my recent statement seemed to have thrown fuel on a fire, for the Regent and Norm Stradamus appeared to respond with no small measure of alarm and agitation. Norm Stradamus suddenly leaned toward the Regent and cupped a hand over her ear, whispering something at her in a flagrant violation of dinner-party etiquette. And the Regent, eyes now bulging, shoved her chair back from the table and stood up.
“You’ll have to excuse us, Mr. Feynman.”
“But dash it, wait,” I said, hoping to pour oil on the troubled waters, “you’ve got the thing all wrong. These reality-quake thingummies, this Climate Change you fear, this is probably nothing more than the Author scrapping a few unhappy words. Making changes here and there. Some of His changes are barely worthy of mention — tweaking description of the furnishings of this room, by way of example — and others are more macroscopic, if macroscopic means what I think it does. Like the IPT business I mentioned, or my own past biography. Or the transformation of Isaac from a bureaucratic toady to a ruddy Lucasian Chair. It’s happening all the time, that sort of thing. I’ll admit these changes can occasionally be irksome, but there’s nothing to be done about them. Just keep calm and await the Author’s next set of amendments. But rest assured that Isaac’s messing about is a wholly separate issue, and one which needn’t wrinkle the trousers. It’s less worthy of grabbing headlines than a newly released batch of Isaac’s I-Ware thingummies. Newton’s work is the idle scientific puttering of an egghead and something that, like any peer-reviewed slab of research, is probably best ignored.”
Once again I’d missed the mark, for rather than calming down, Norm appeared to writhe like an electric blender and the Regent seemed to arm herself with a sort of chilled resolve, her face setting into the steely glare of a soldier setting out for the front lines.
“You said Isaac is changing Detroit at the quantum level,” she said. “You claim that he’s hoping to increase his power to make these changes. Seeking to change all things at once.”
“That’s right,” I said, “but seeing that you’re failing to take this in the proper spirit, I think I should add a word or two in season. What I think you fail to realize, befogged Regent, is that the defining trait of the quantum level is that it’s very small. Exceedingly so. Take your favourite amoeba or bacterium and adjust the scale downward. Isaac Newton is fooling about, as I think I mentioned, with atoms, quarks, bosons, Higgs-thingummies, and similar teeny tiny bits and bobs. Small potatoes, I mean to say. So small that you’ll never notice. Nothing to worry about at all. What harm could come from poking quarks or splitting atoms?”
This didn’t seem to have helped.
The Regent looked from me to Norm, then back from Norm to me, and then finally back at Norm. Norm, who’d ceased his bit of writhing, shrugged his shoulders and wiped a hand across his brow.
“We have much to discuss, Mr. Feynman. I’ll meet with you in the morning. In the meantime, please return to Vera’s room. I will ask, once again, that you do your best to unlock the secrets of her prophecy. This is imperative. Now, more than ever.”
And before I could respond, she had thrown down her napkin, picked up the centrepiece from the dining table, said the words “Memphis, heel,” and withdrawn. Norm, Oan, and Memphis followed closely on her tail, leaving the undersigned alone and bewildered.
Chapter 23
It wasn’t long before William came to clear away the debris and chivvy me to my next appointment, viz, another meet-up in Vera’s quarters. The path we travelled en route to Vera’s nest took us, as I’d hoped, straight through the door that had hitherto been guarded by my pal Zeus. I was disappointed to see there’d been a changing of the guard, for now some alternative variety of extra-large-sized chap had taken Zeus’s customary post, if you can call it a customary post when you’ve only seen a chap there once. I was therefore in a slightly dejected mood when I hitched up chez Vera, as anyone would have been who’d failed to reunite with a long-lost pal and now faced the prospect of a night discussing poetry.
Safely ensconced in Vera’s room I exchanged cordialities with both Vera and Nappy and asked if either of them had noticed the “reality quake” thingummy which had disrupted my formal dinner. They hadn’t. This matter filed away as resolved, we got down to the apparently urgent business of discussing Vera’s poem, aka her prophecy, which ran, if you’ll recall, along the following lines:
Two chairs define a man and men;
Two chairs that free and bind;
Two chairs that open worlds and free
The body and the mind;
One chair sought and held by both,
The other coveted by none;
The first chair reunites two souls
Intended to have been just one.
“All right,” I said, having gone through the text with those assembled. “So what’s it mean?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Vera.
“Search me,” said Nappy.
“Helpful,” I said, with a touch of exasperation in my v. I mean to say, if you can’t turn to the poetess herself when seeking to ferret out the meaning of a short scrap of verse, where can you turn? I remembered a bit of advice I’d once taken from Matron Bikerack — something or other about breaking horrible tasks up into manageable chunks — and went at the thing line by line.
“Two chairs define a man and men,” I said. “Let’s start with that.”
“It seems to me zat zere are two chairs,” said Nappy, “and zat bos of zem define a pair of men.”
“That’s right,” I said, “that much is specified. But the question, I think, is this: how can a chair define a man?”
“The Lucasian chair!” said Vera, echoing a notion I’d shared with Norm earlier and reminding me of the gag about great minds thinking alike.
“The chairs mightn’t be physical,” Vera added. “If anyone is defined by his work, it’s Isaac Newton, and Isaac Newton’s job is Lucasian Chair.”
“Quelle sort de chair?” said Nappy.
“Lucasian,” I said. “L as in laparoscopic, U as in ulcerative colitis, C as in—”
“It’s the name of the chair that Isaac Newton holds,” said Vera, cutting in.
“’E ’olds une chair?” said Nappy, befogged.
“Do keep up,” I said, perhaps a touch more impatiently than was warranted. This Nappy, after all, had just been through the wringer alongside countless fellow Napoleons, and couldn’t be expected to be perfectly up-to-date with current events.
“Isaac is the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Detroit University. He’s what you call a ‘chair holder’ — one who occupies an office of particular importance. Think of the chair of a board, or the chairperson of a committee. Not an actual chair. I was telling Norm, earlier, that Isaac might be one of the chairs in Vera’s poem.”
“But there again,” said Vera, “the prophecy could mean actual chairs. Or maybe one of the chairs is Isaac Newton, and the other’s just a piece of furniture. My visions don’t usually come as poems, but when they do they’re never easy to understand. You can’t expect the words to be used consistently.”
“We can’t even be sure zat Isaac is one of ze chairs,” said Nappy.
“True,” I said, “but it does seem right. This Lucasian chump seems exactly the type who’d pop up in an oracle’s visions. The last time we rubbed elbows he went on at length about the wrongness of the universe and his own plans to fix it. And even Abe, however wrongly, deemed this chap to be dangerous. If any chair is qualified to waft around in the ether and pop out in prophetic poems, it is this Lucasian Chair.”
“It feels right to me, too,” said Vera. “But you’re right: we can’t be sure.”
“So what’s ze ozzer chair?” said Nappy.
“Who knows?” said Vera. “It might be another chair at the university, it might be a lawn chair. It could just be an everyday, garden-variety seat.”
The word “seat” lit an unexpected fire in the Feynman bean, and by what I’ve often thought was an odd coincidence, it struck Nappy in precisely the same way, for at the same time, and with roughly the same volume, we both shouted the words “a seat of power!” as if directed by a conductor.
“Perhaps the ultimate seat of power,” said I.
“Abe!” said Nappy.
“Rem acu tetigisti!” I said. “That has to be it. One chair is the Lucasian Chair, the other is the mayoral seat of power. I think we’ve solved it. Let’s move on.”
Nappy clapped her hands and bounced delightedly in her seat, indicating to those assembled that she, too, was finding poetic interpretation to be a good deal more diverting than expected. Vera, by sharp contradistinction, failed altogether to string along with our merry mission-accomplished spirit. Instead, she sat there in a grey-cloudish sort of way, corrugating her brow at us and saying “hmmm.”
“I don’t know,” she added, with a rummy sort of skepticism dripping from every word.
“Oh, dash it. Stop raining on parades. Chair One is Isaac Newton, and Chair Two is Abe. Or perhaps the other way ’round. Abe did arrive here first.”
“You’re making an awful lot of assumptions,” said Vera.
“No more than two or three,” I said.
“But they’re big ones. Does the rest of the poem make sense if we assume the two chairs are Isaac and Abe? Does the Lucasian chair both ‘free and bind’? Does the mayoral seat?”
“Zey do!” said Nappy. “Ze mayor is, in many ways, free to do ’ow he chooses. But ’e is bound to serve Detroit.”
“That’s right!” I said, applauding this bit of reasoning. “And the Lucasian Chair, if I understand correctly, frees Isaac to pursue whatever research he likes, yet binds him to the university!”
“Okaaaaay,” said Vera, still with a skeptical tone I found discouraging, “but it sounds like a stretch to me. How do these chairs ‘open worlds,’ or ‘free the body and the mind’? How is either seat ‘occupied by both,’ while the other is occupied by one?”
“Isaac’s never occupied the mayoral seat,” I conceded, but I wasn’t yet prepared to admit defeat. “Was Abe ever a maths professor?”
“I don’t think so,” said Nappy. “Being ze mayor keeps ’im busy.”
“Hmmm,” I said.
“Hmmm,” said Nappy.
“The trickiest bit,” said Vera, “is the part about two souls that were meant to be just one. What’s that all about?”
“It’s your poem, you tell me!” I said.
“But that’s just it,” said Vera. “I haven’t a c
lue. But I think that — I dunno — I think that I’d know it if I heard the right explanation. I . . . well I think I’m sure about Isaac being one of the two chairs. It feels right. But Abe? He doesn’t fit. I’m sorry, but I just don’t think my poem refers to him.”
I slumped the shoulders. Say what you will about the weirdness of television and the even greater loopiness of soothsaying via poem, but this Vera had never once, since our association began, led me astray — unless you count an unexpected betrothal and a couple of whitish lies during her escape from the hospice as being led astray. But the point I’m driving at is that she was, and always has been, a good egg, and one upon whose intuition and future-gazing powers it has been safe to rely. She’d even laid down her life on one occasion — at least so far as a life can be laid down in Detroit — to ensure that self and others got to safety. And now she assured us that, despite our best efforts, our attempts at sorting out her poem’s meaning had missed the mark. We’d tried our best, straining every nerve in Olympic-level poetic analysis, and failed. So as I said, I slumped the shoulders. My entire bearing must have resembled that of a basset hound with a secret sorrow, for both Nappy and Vera rallied ’round with multiple doses of consolation, patting here a shoulder and there a head.
“It’s all right,” said Vera. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”
“Just look ’ow far you’ve come!” said Nappy. “You’ve found Zeus, you’ve learned Isaac’s plan, you’ve sorted out part of zis ‘two chairs’ poem — you should be ’appy, Monsieur Rhinnick!”
“But how can I be ’appy?” I riposted. “Zeus is here, yes, but his memories have gone phut. And Isaac’s plan has been revealed, if you’ll pardon the expression, as purely academic: a phrase which, I should point out, means both scholarly in nature and unimportant. The quest on which Abe sent me — a quest initially advertised as being of globe-wobbling import — has turned out to be based on a complete misunderstanding and amounted to little more than a walk in the park. As for Vera’s poem — well, dash it, why are we even fretting about this slice of verse? The Regent says it’s important. Norm Stradamus says it’s important. But the two of them, if you don’t mind my making a personal observation, seem likely candidates for residence in Detroit Mercy Hospice under the watchful eye of Everard M. Peericks, wetting their pants about Isaac’s trivial plans and throwing fits over the Author’s editorial revisions. What I mean to say,” I added, preparatory to summing up, “is that nothing seems to matter.”
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