First Light

by Charles Baxter

  “You’re back,” Simon says, not glancing up. Noah looks briefly at his mother, to smile.

  “So are you.”

  “Ten minutes ago.” He attaches a square red piece to a triangular blue piece underneath a small crank near the crane’s pivot point. “I saw Carlo’s letter. That is, I read Carlo’s letter. I snooped. It was a very disagreeable experience. I wish that man would trade up to a better class of clichés. Where did you go?”

  “I walked over to the zoo,” Dorsey says. “I spent a minute or two shouting at the lion.”

  Simon turns, a great smile on his face. “Shouting at the lion! Well, God bless you and keep you, sweetheart. What a great idea. Next week I’ll do that. I wouldn’t mind if the lion shouted back. By the way, I’ve started dinner.”

  “You have? What is it?”

  “It’s sort of a spaghetti sauce, with subtle ambitions. It’s bubbling away there on the burner. I’ll start the pasta in a minute.”

  “All right. Fine.”

  “Your friend Carlo,” Simon says, still assembling parts for the crane, “is becoming avuncular in a new and, I think, deeply unattractive manner. Is there anything more tiresome than a man who is faking the wisdom thing? What wisdom? I hate wisdom anyway. Wisdom is always a drag. Of course, he’s a genius, we all know he’s a genius, we’ve been told that often enough: Carlo is a genius. Lucky for him, but not for you.”

  Dorsey sits on the floor. “I wish I knew why he was doing it. Why can’t he just leave me alone?”

  “He’s old and crabby and arthritic and it gives him pleasure to make you miserable. And of course he still loves you, in his crabby and miserable way. And you … you still listen, when he talks.”

  Noah stops, looks at Dorsey, and asks, What are you two talking about?

  Someone. A teacher I once had.

  “I got an offer last week,” Simon announces. “I forgot to tell you. That director in Minneapolis has offered me a part in a Joe Orton play that this group near the university is putting on. They’ll actually pay me Equity and they also want some help in the direction. This is for four weeks. We could load the car and spend July and August up there, and he says there are other jobs … who knows, even the Guthrie …”

  “We could visit Hugh on the way,” Dorsey says.

  “Yes,” Simon says, and the moment passes. “But back to Carlo. You aren’t going to let his affection get you down, are you? Fuck Mr. Wizard. He’s just a notorious old man with brains enough for three normal people, and you don’t have to pay attention to his attentions.”

  “I don’t,” Dorsey says. Simon smiles at her denial. “All right. I pay attention. He’s still on my scorecard, and I admit it.”

  “Listen,” Simon tells her. “These generalissimos of intellect have shriveled hearts, I’m here to tell you. Love confuses them. He’s envious. He’ll eat his words with a fork and spoon. You’ll see.” Simon puts his hand gently on Dorsey’s back. “How do you feel, kiddo?”

  “Like a piece of chewed string.”

  “I have the cure,” Simon tells her. “But you have to wait.”

  “How was your afternoon?” she asks him.

  Simon sighs, eyes raised in mock-exasperation. “Rehearsals, naturally. I keep telling them, quietly of course, my best sotto voce, that if you’re going to do Tennessee Williams the point is to do the bad taste with delicate exuberance, just the right frequency of leering, of creeping things coming out of closets. I mean, I’ve played Cat on a Hot Tin Roof before, but never with a director who thinks it’s drawing-room comedy and who instructs us in enunciation and elocution. This stuff ain’t genteel. So I’ve been overplaying a bit. You know, to compensate. A touch of show biz.”

  “Good.”

  “For the rehearsal breaks, they serve herb tea.” Simon attaches a crane claw to the end of Noah’s pulley string. “Herb tea, my God. Talk about narcissistic gentility. I’ve been asking everyone what herb it is but no one will tell me. It’s probably deadly nightshade. I’m worried about my hair falling out in tangled clumps. This tea smells like mosquito repellent. Soon I’ll only be able to play butlers.”

  Dorsey smiles, in spite of herself. Simon leans back, triumphant.

  Am I your fool? he signs.

  Dorsey grabs Simon behind the neck and pulls his head over to her. Then she lets him go. You’re just shanty Irish, she tells him.

  Am I your chattering magpie? Simon asks.

  Yes.

  Do you love me?

  You’re such a sentimentalist.

  Do you?

  I won’t tell.

  Come on. Cleanse your soul. Don’t hold it all in.

  No. I don’t love you.

  You lie.

  All right. It’s true. I lied.

  I knew it, he signs.

  Noah, ignoring them, switches on the crane, and as the three of them watch, the toy machine lowers its hopper, picks up a ballpoint pen from the floor, swivels over, and drops it into Dorsey’s lap.

  At the dinner table the conversation is all in sign. Between forkfuls of Simon’s fettucini, Noah tells his parents about this girl who sits in front of him in class, and how when she blows her nose, she wipes her nose, and the gunk, on her sleeve. Noah pantomimes this action, which pleases Simon so much that he shows his teeth. She doesn’t think I see her do it, Noah tells them, but I do. He makes another face. What’s her name? Dorsey asks. Patty. Patty what? Patty Yzemberg, he spells out. Both Simon and Dorsey watch his fingers, thinking that he’s misspelled it, but unsure.

  She’s so … and he makes a vulgar, tasteless gesture in American Sign Language.

  Noah! Dorsey signs. You should be ashamed of yourself. But Simon, of course, is laughing and applauding.

  There is an evening rehearsal, and when Simon comes back from it after midnight, smelling of sweat and herb tea, Dorsey is curled in bed. Simon walks into Noah’s room to check on him and then returns to the bedroom, where he undresses in the dark, humming “Stop in the Name of Love,” as he takes off his maroon nylon bikini briefs and his white socks and running shoes. He snuggles in next to Dorsey and sees that her eyes are wide open, fixed on the ceiling. He puts his hand on her cheek and says, “Playing night watchman again?” and she nods. He reaches under her nightgown and places his hand on her hip. She shakes her head no, she does not want to make the slow theatrical love that Simon favors, not tonight. All the same, she puts one arm around him, and they lie there quietly, with only the sound of cars going by every few seconds. She kisses him, a kiss without desire but full of affection, a kiss he returns.

  She pulls back and returns her head to the pillow. “Simon,” she whispers, “I can’t sleep.”

  “Of course you can’t,” he whispers. “That’s your métier.”

  “No, I mean I can’t sleep tonight.”

  “You’ve been thinking about Mr. Wizard.”

  “Yes. Simon, damn it, can’t you be serious?”

  “No. I’m much too weird.”

  “I know it.” She waits. There is a faint, odd sound in the distance, which may be an elephant trumpeting in the zoo. “Yes, I have been thinking about him. You know what it means when you can’t stop thinking about somebody.”

  “Think about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “We’ll do a category game. Down the alphabet, as usual.”

  “What’s the category?”

  Simon is quiet, thinking. “Railroads,” he says at last.

  “I don’t know any railroads.”

  “Of course you do. Everyone knows railroads. Search your mind. It’ll put you to sleep. A.”

  “Amtrak.”

  “Amtrak is not a railroad. It is a wholly-owned government-operated passenger service. Give me a company that owns track.”

  “Atlantic Coast Line.”

  “That’s better. See? You do know a few things. B.”

  “Boston and Maine,” Dorsey says.

  “C,”

  “Chesapeake and O
hio.”

  “Pretty good. D.”

  “I don’t know any D railroads.”

  “Think. Think of a city.”

  “Denver and Something,” she says, after a minute.

  “Denver and Western,” Simon tells her. “E.”

  “Erie Lackawanna. That’s easy.”

  “F.”

  “Frisco Line,” she says sleepily.

  “G.” He waits for two minutes. “G,” he whispers. She is breathing lightly, her eyes closed at last.

  5

  In her upstairs desk drawer she keeps four photographs and a collection of postcards whose messages she reads when she is stuck in her own work and needs a distraction. The postcards are all from Simon and were mailed one or two blocks away from where she is sitting now. They are expressions of his fantasies of being somewhere else. The Empire State Building: “Dear Dorsey, I thought of you as the wind roughed up my hair here on the observation deck, 102 floors above sea level. Love, Simon.” The Eiffel Tower: “Darling Dorsey, I am sipping an unpretentious burgundy as I write to you here where I am sitting on the Left Bank. Love, Simon.” The Grand Canyon: “Dear Dorsey, Sitting on my burro, I think of you. Kisses.”

  Throughout the winter, when she isn’t teaching at the university or taking Noah to school or watching Simon come and go, Dorsey sits up here, tapping the computer’s keyboard or scribbling out equations on her yellow pad. On the wall is a picture of Maria Mitchell, an astronomer who worked on sun spots in the nineteenth century and who was the first woman admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Next to this photograph are three lines of Whitman’s poetry, written out in calligraphic ink and framed by Simon.

  Darest thou now O soul

  Walk out with me toward the unknown region

  Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

  She doesn’t really like the lines, but a gift is a gift.

  Copies of Nature, The Astrophysical Journal, Scientific American, Astrophysical Letters, and other journals are scattered on her desk and the floor and the empty chair on the other side of the desk. She scans the table of contents of a current issue: steady hydromagnetic flows in open magnetic fields … relativistic beaming and quasar emission lines … gravitational collapse and the cosmic antineutrino background.…

  She has been collaborating on a theory of missing mass with her colleague, Leo Henderson, a brilliant man and something of a sociopath in his private life. She likes to collaborate with him at a distance, over the phone or through the mails, even though he lives only two miles away. A pudgy man who reads science fiction and watches “Star Trek,” and whose face has an odd warped geometry to it, Leo has only one true avocation: making up stories about the private lives of his professional colleagues. He is a fictionalist, a hobbyist of lies. Dorsey thinks she can get a year’s worth of useful collaboration with Leo before he insists on betrayal and begins to make up stories about her. She looks down at her pad of paper and starts to work.

  The equations she has been writing are complicated, inefficient, and discordant. Aesthetically, they are unattractive and therefore incorrect. And yet she sees in these equations something latent and beautiful that desires to be expressed more simply than she has found a means to express it. The truth wants to emerge in all its beautiful simplicity, without these complications cluttering everything up. As she works, covering page after page with speculations in mathematical form (with occasional notes in the margin, such as “No!” or “Can’t be right”), she feels as if she has an itch that she can’t quite scratch. At such times she leans back and stares at the picture of Maria Mitchell. Problems in physics always have, for her, a specific mood, a psychological feel. This one feels like a wall she can’t climb over or burrow under or go through.

  She looks over at the old black-and-white television set in the room’s northeast corner. Whenever she is working upstairs, she keeps it switched on but tuned to the vacant channel, with the sound muted. The screen shows a line of static, the random visuals of the atmosphere and of the cosmic radiation background.

  She breathes in and closes her eyes. She runs the expansion of space backwards, crunching it, so that space heats up and approaches the point at which it once began—or began again. She runs through the theories like a pack of flash cards: broken symmetry, the Higgs field, inflation, gauge particles, supersymmetric grand unified theories, magnetic monopoles, folded dimensions, string theories. She’d like to make a movie of it, though there are few visual representations for any of it; even so, some of the theories have a singular kind of beauty, those that she can understand. She tries to keep up, but she doesn’t understand all the developments in her field; she keeps this fact to herself. She looks down again at her own work, and as she stares at the symbols and numbers and brackets and signs, the lines themselves, shadow figures for the forces loose in the universe, begin to waver and dance like puppets suddenly pulled upright on strings. She shakes her head and rubs her eyes, and the lines settle down once more. But whenever she is tired, the same process occurs: the equations she has written out, stared at for too long, begin to move and to shudder.

  She even has a name for it: differential nausea.

  Why is the universe isotropic? If the universe ends its expansion and collapses back into a final spacetime singularity, what happens to the laws of physics? In a singularity, these laws are obliterated. The idea of naked singularity, of all matter and spacetime compressed to a point, nauseates her. At least with dust and ashes you have dust and ashes, blown somewhere to reactivate the soil. With singularities there is not anything, anywhere, left to note that a universe once existed.

  She shouldn’t think about these things. She should work on more practical problems. Leo Henderson calls it “Your unfortunate tendency to speculate.” He should talk. She will never be invited to conferences where Minkowski space and cosmological constants are discussed; she will never be able to get up and say what she thinks about these theories: that they are vertiginous, wondrous, terrible.

  What’s being discovered in cosmology is in equal parts exhilarating and disturbing: at last the physicists, too, are staring into theoretical abysses of their own making, cosmic vacuum cleaners obliterating time and history.

  She’s asked some of her colleagues whether they’ve ever stared at equations for so long that they started to move, right there on the paper; and of course they’ve said, “No, never.” That’s what Leo says. Though he’s a sociopath, he’s practical, often sensible, and goal-oriented. A good cook. Professor Planetarium. The man can repair anything mechanical and makes the best osso buco she’s ever tasted. Like many physicists he projects a sense of well-being, of generosity and happiness. After the likes of Carlo Pavorese, Dorsey would like to have men around her with the souls of garage mechanics.

  It is now early December. Heavy snow is piled on the branches outside her window. But in Dorsey’s mind—she is leaning back, her eyes are closed—the universe has returned to the first tenth of a nanosecond. The weak interaction force and the electromagnetic force are still in a state of symmetry. She opens her eyes, looks at the calculations she has made on her own set of problems, and goes to work. But in the midst of this problem, she is also a mind of subatomic particles loose among what there is of space, curved, and expanding or contracting, it doesn’t matter. At such times Dorsey does not feel like herself: she is an electromagnetic conglomerate of atoms that have combined to figure out where they have been and what has happened in the universe to bring them to this point. I am, Dorsey thinks, formed from the ashes of long dead stars, and I want to know what I was.

  She looks up. The television is on, as usual, to Channel 10, a blank station, a field of static, cosmic background. Outside the snow is falling in heavy fat flakes, a thickening texture like a snow dome paperweight that someone has shaken hard or dropped. The snow gives her the unpleasant sensation of being here and not being here simultaneously. She has been working for over two hours. To calm hers
elf, she opens the drawer and pulls out her four favorite photographs.

  One, two, three, four: she sets them on the desk. They are tender from much handling, from being packed in purses and wallets and suitcases.

  One: this is a picture of William and Katharine Welch, her parents, now both dead. It’s in black and white, a snapshot, but taken in over-the-shoulder sunlight so that the definitions are jagged and sharp, and in it her mother and father stand outside the house in Five Oaks in worn-out late summer, her mother leaning toward her father. She smiles, generating light rather than reflecting it, and he smiles too, less brilliantly. She wears a light cotton dress, and her dark hair is parted in the middle. Her right hand touches her husband’s elbow in affection or support. William Welch holds a glass of something—Dorsey has always thought it was a gin and tonic—and on his face is a worldly, calm smile. Though the mouth smiles, the eyes hold something back, some final commitment to happiness. Her father’s face in this picture reminds Dorsey of faces in nineteenth-century paintings. Her father’s eyes have a quality of intelligent melancholy that seems to have vanished from American faces.

  Two: a snapshot of Dorsey’s mother, sitting on a cane chair at the front of the porch. She is glancing up from her book to the camera lens. The season is summer. Her dress is dark, not quite appropriate for the season. On her face is not so much a smile as the visible evidence of happiness: the thought of a smile, not meant for others, just there. Her expression blesses life. It forgives everything. Dorsey would give her life’s savings to know the title of the book in her mother’s lap, but no one she has asked has ever known what it was.

  Three: her brother, Hugh. Dorsey has many pictures of Hugh and Laurie and their two girls, but this is the photograph of her brother she likes to return to. In it, Hugh is eighteen and has just graduated from high school. Captain of the hockey team that year, he was at his moment of greatest physical grace. In this picture Hugh stands in the driveway next to his car, which he has been sponging with Ivory flakes dissolved in warm water. He looks like a minor deity who rules over drive-ins, beaches, and lovers’ lanes. The car is a red Chevrolet Nova and is called “Hugh’s Bad News,” with the vowel in “bad” stretched to last a second. He is wearing cut-offs and a sleeveless jock-in-his-glory T-shirt. Though the photograph ends at Hugh’s knees, Dorsey knows that her brother was barefoot, because she took the picture and remembers how he tried to stomp on her tennis shoes. Hugh’s hair, blond from lifeguarding, flies every which way across his head. He’s grinning at the lens with his happy-animal smile. Dorsey remembers exactly what she thought the day she took this picture: she thought her brother that summer was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.