Love Is Both Wave and Particle

by Paul Cody

  Well, maybe grad school?

  Okay. Where?

  I shrugged.

  What’s your GPA?

  Three-nine-something. Seven or eight.

  You take the GMATs?

  Seven-seventy.

  How’s the B-School sound?

  The who?

  Harvard Business School.

  Me? UMass Boston. Roslindale.

  You’d be the first.

  Could I do it?

  Shit, yes.

  You’d get in, he went on. They’d love to see a kid make that kind of jump, and you’d kick ass academically. The big thing is the social shit. All the arrogant shits with the social skills, Choate, Exeter, Yale, Williams, the clothes, the cars, the clubs, the confidence. But I’d like to see you do a Ph.D. after the M.B.A. Give you more flexibility, if you got tired of just making money.

  Should I apply anywhere else?

  He gave me one of his sly smiles. No need, he said. I think you’re a lock.

  No BU, UMass Amherst?

  Fuck ’em, kid. You’re going all the way. To the moon, Alice! And he made this punching gesture, which I didn’t realize till years later was an imitation of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners.

  So the B-School was the only place I applied, and I got in, and I got a full ride, which was unusual. Harvard had a great deal of money, and they give a great deal in scholarship money, but far less to B-School students, in part because the average incoming student is twenty-seven, and has some money saved, and will soon be making a great deal more.

  But Ira Rosen must have made some phone calls, must have talked about UMass, about Roslindale, about my father the mail carrier, and he must have convinced them I walked through fire and then across water.

  I took all the usual first-year stuff, finance, marketing and technology, operations management, and a bunch of other stuff, but I got very lucky because I did my Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development at Fidelity in Boston, which was big at the time, but not yet huge. And I studied their security systems.

  I later did a six-week FIELD at Bank of Boston, and that was where I met Vera Van Resse. Vera was in her first year at the B-School, and I was in my second.

  Vera was about five eight, and had brown-blond hair that was always coiled, or held with silver combs, and she wore silk scarves, even in the summer. She had very fair skin, and green eyes, and high cheekbones, and she seemed to know she was a knockout, but she didn’t seem to care. She was friendly with everyone, and during that first summer, she’d come to me with questions, always with computer questions. I’d answer them, and one time, near lunch, she said, Don’t you ever eat lunch? And I said I brown-bagged it.

  She didn’t know what that meant, and when I said I brought my own lunch, she laughed, and said, I think I at least owe you a lunch for answering all my questions.

  I seemed reluctant, and she said, The building won’t collapse without you holding up the walls for an hour.

  Vera and I went to a diner, and I’ve got to say, I liked her, and I think she liked my reluctance, that I wasn’t hitting on her.

  So you’re the boy wonder from UMass Boston, she said, and I said, Roslindale, ever been there?

  She said she’d heard of it, that it was near Mattapan and Jamaica Plain—but no, she’d never had the pleasure.

  Such as it is, I said. You’re from?

  Back Bay, then Williams. Plus a house on the Vineyard. Ever been there?

  I shook my head. You will, she said. But you’ve become kind of locally famous, and pretty fast, she said. A real comer. Top five percentile.

  The B-School loved percentiles and statistics, and everyone seemed to know where everyone else stood in the class.

  And Peter Lynch is reputed to have his eye on you, she said.

  Peter Lynch was just getting really, really famous at Fidelity Magellan, the way Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were famous. I had had lunch with Mr. Lynch and two vice presidents at Fidelity once, and everyone seemed to know it.

  So that’s where you’ll be next year? she asked.

  Nope.

  Where?

  MIT. Ph.D. in computer science. Hacking, worms, viruses, security. Two more years.

  So somehow, in this unlikely way, Vera Van Resse of the Back Bay and Martha’s Vineyard and Nathan Vash of Roslindale became a couple.

  The first time I met her parents, went to their house on Marlborough Street between Dartmouth and Clarendon, I realized just how different the world I was entering actually was. It was a full brownstone, with marble steps, and it was so much bigger inside than I could have imagined. There were old paintings, and there was, I believe, a real Jackson Pollock, and there was Jack Van Resse and Vivian, and they were gracious and kind, and they sat us down in the upstairs parlor—I remember Jack called it a parlor—and Vivian brought in cocktails on a tray, and Jack positively beamed at me.

  I understand you’re putting off Peter Lynch for a few years, Jack said, and I said I thought it would give me more flexibility.

  So MIT? Vivian asked. How many years will that take?

  I hope two, I said. I’ve done a lot of the preliminary work. Maybe two and a half.

  By gosh, Jack said.

  Nathan’s a grinder, Vera said, and we laughed.

  When Vera came to meet my dad, she could not have been more kind, more natural. She acted as though she’d been in Roslindale every other weekend, and that tiny yards with chain-link fences and Mary on the half shell were commonplace.

  We had come, in fact, to tell him we were getting married. We had moved into an apartment in Cambridgeport together in mid-August, just before I started MIT. We had brought a bottle of wine, and we drank it in the parlor, out of juice glasses. Vera had kissed my father on the cheek, and I realized in heels she was as tall as he was, or that he had shrunk after so many years of lugging mail.

  He was shy. Then she stood up and started looking through his bookcases and CD collections.

  Trollope, she said. Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain. Nostromo. You’re a reader, Mr. Vash.

  It passes the time, he said.

  You’re a serious reader, she said. Chekhov. Middlemarch.

  Then she reached the CDs. Bach, Schumann, Chopin, Fauré. Respighi, Puccini.

  Vera got him talking about Chekhov, of all things, how he got life onto the pages. No guns, he said, no car chases or horse chases, just basic everyday life, and there was never a false word, a false moment. At first you thought, Is that it? Then you reread and reread, and you realized, That’s what life is.

  We got married, I finished the Ph.D. in two and a half years, Vera finished the B-School and started working for First Boston, then Credit Suisse after the merger of the banks, and I worked at Fidelity.

  I did some work in the financial sectors, but by then Fidelity was a giant, managing about one trillion dollars in investments, and all of that traveled by wire. Telephone, computer, wireless wire, and there were tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of transactions a day. And where there were vast amounts of money, there were hackers. Very smart, very savvy people who could create worms and viruses, who could find keys to unlock doors, who could hack their way into our systems.

  So this became my specialty, and I was good at it. I was good at encryption, at firewalls, at usernames and passwords, at setting traps, hoops for hackers to jump through. Trips and traps. By the time I was twenty-eight, I was junior vice president, by thirty-one, senior vice president. When I was twenty-nine years old, I made over a million dollars a year, not counting my bonus. At thirty-three, I made three million dollars including bonuses.

  And that’s when everything started to change. Sometime between twenty-eight and thirty-three. We had Samantha, Vera left First Boston, we bought a three-million-dollar house in Chestnut Hill, and I was working seventy-hour weeks.

  It was slow, and it was invisible and incremental, but we were going so fast in the slowness that we didn’t notice how much things were changing. Lik
e you looked in the mirror every day and didn’t see anything different, but put two photos of the same face taken five years apart, and it was obvious. Time had moved.

  We had obscene piles of money, a house that felt like a museum, and my daughter and wife, who I loved more than the world, were drowning in something I couldn’t even name. It was so bad, I was working so much, I barely noticed they were drowning.

  Nine

  Sam

  At that first meeting, when I talked about how maybe Levon was seeing himself as the old people, not going out much, and peeking out at the world, and possibly ending up kind of alone and isolated and strange—and then there was silence, that stillness, and then the stricken look on his face—I thought, You asshole, Sam. You absolute blundering asshole. What have you done? I wanted to crawl into a closet.

  But then something changed. Levon changed, or Meg let us sit with it in silence, and then at the end when Levon said, almost with glee, The Dude abides, I can’t tell you what a wringer, a seesaw, a roller coaster of emotions I went through, all in about fifteen minutes.

  It was like he was really, really sad, and I saw how terribly alone he was, and probably always had been. He was almost embarrassed but glad at the same time to be seen, to be found out. That someone had looked closely and carefully enough, and he could finally exhale.

  I also felt a little bit ashamed of myself, because I had written my enigmatic little poem, and what was he or anybody supposed to make of that? I mean, he said nice things, he noticed what was interesting and good in it, but I gave him almost nothing to work with.

  So I thought I should start with Groton, which was just about a year ago, and how much I didn’t want to go, and what a bad, awful idea it was. I’d had over a full good year at this place called the Crafts School, which was pretty much a fancy sort of Clock School. But Vera’s dad had gone to Groton, and maybe her uncle and grandfather too, and no one thought about how terrible it would be for me to enter as a junior, when everyone else had already found their friends and groups.

  So Grandmother and Grandfather pushed, and asshole Mom really pushed, saying this would show just how far I’d come, and how the previous fifteen years had really been nothing, had been kind of a big mistake, a patch of stormy weather, and now I could go to Groton and then Smith or Princeton or Swarthmore.

  Dad wasn’t crazy about the idea, I remember. He kept saying, She’s doing great. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, but he wasn’t around much, even though he was working for the Harvard Corporation by then, and wasn’t nearly as busy.

  The Crafts School was loose and easy, kind of how the Clock School turned out to be. I had been doing okay there. I didn’t like the rigidity of regular fifty-minute classes.

  So I took a bunch of tests that summer, and did very well, even in precalculus, and was accepted. Groton was beautiful in the summer—all this old red brick, and huge oaks and chestnuts. And no students around.

  I moved in in late August for a week of orientation, mostly with younger kids, and a few other transfer students. And as soon as my parents drove away in Dad’s black Benz, I thought, This is a mistake. This is a big and bad and stupid mistake, and I have no fucking way out of here.

  There was chapel, and the pastor or minister, or whoever he was, welcomed us, and talked about the long proud history of Groton, and the tradition of Duty, Service, and Courage, and I swear to God it was as though he was getting us ready to go fight the Huns in the First World War.

  There were dorms, in red brick, of course, two-story buildings in a semicircle, and then when the regular students came back, it was a nightmare. They had special names for each other—the Loomster, Otter, Feet, Cactus—and they had spent the summer on the Vineyard or some island off the coast of Maine, or in Italy, Morocco, Greece, building huts for poor people in Bolivia. Dude, that’s major service points for Yale, some kid said.

  They wore pale green and orange shorts, blazers and ties, and by the first regular weekend of the semester, I bought a pint of vodka from a kid on the hall downstairs for twenty bucks. I just saw no way out of this awful world. I had no place in it. I was utterly trapped, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. The world was black and white. While everybody was off at a movie or dance or playing video games in game rooms built for the sons and daughters of kings, I locked the bedroom door on myself. I had a cup, a pint of orange juice, my vodka, and an X-Acto knife.

  I made a screwdriver with the vodka and juice, and drank slow enough so that I didn’t throw up or spill anything, and the place was empty. The place was quiet.

  Then after an hour or so, I was pretty drunk. When I tried to stand up, I nearly fell over. I sat on the edge of the bed, took my top off, took off my socks and jeans, so all I was wearing was a bra and panties. I remember they were both black, and I remember how pale my skin looked. I even took my watch and earrings off.

  Then I went to the bathroom, which was en suite, with my drink and my blade. I turned the water in the shower on. When it was warm, but not too hot, I sat on the floor of the shower. I drank the rest of the screwdriver.

  Then I leaned my head back against the wall of the shower, and thought, Well, here we are.

  I picked up the X-Acto knife in my right hand, pressed the blade deep into the inside of my left wrist, and drew it across. It stung like hell, and was bright, bright red. I knew I got the tendons, ’cause I could sort of feel my hand flapping.

  But the blood was not gushing, just dripping pretty steadily, and I sat there and thought, Sam, you’re so pathetic. You’re such a fucking drama queen. I knew I hadn’t hit a vein because veins spurt blood.

  Then after a while, five minutes or a half hour, I either passed out or fell asleep.

  Then there was just nothing, just blackness.

  Then there was everything. Banging on the door. Loud bangs. People yelling, Samantha, Samantha, you in there? Then keys jangling and bright lights, and someone said, Oh, God, and there were about three or four people in the tiny bathroom.

  Two were in blue uniforms, and one was in white, and I heard, Ambulance.

  Someone else said, Elevate, direct pressure, and someone asked if there were pill bottles around, and another person said just vodka as far as she could see.

  They got me on my feet and wrapped me in towels and a blanket, and put a towel in my hair. A woman in blue lifted me onto a stretcher, and there were kids staring on the stairs, and a lot more kids outside on the lawns, near the ambulance.

  I didn’t think anything, didn’t feel anything. I was a pure black hole, just dense as matter could be, and someone held my left arm up the whole time.

  They radioed the hospital that we were coming, and took my pulse and temperature and blood pressure, and I think they said the pulse was racing and the blood pressure was low. Or the pulse was low and the blood pressure was racing. I can’t remember.

  At the hospital, they got me into one of those curtained rooms, and they were very gentle. But I was falling deeper and deeper down and it was getting darker and darker. I was way down low where I could barely hear them. I was less than nothing. A fuck-up’s fuck-up.

  They had to get a plastic surgeon, to reattach the ligaments or tendons, or whatever the fuck I’d cut, and that took a while. For him to get there, and get his gear on. And when he was done there was a second doctor who did the outer skin, and by then it was pretty late. It was one or two.

  Some social worker or nurse or someone asked me if I wanted to die, and I said, Yes, and she said, A beautiful girl like you, with everything to live for.

  I thought, Lady, no offense, but you have no clue, no hint of an idea of what it feels like in the darkness.

  Then they took me to a medical floor, then a psychiatric floor, and they shot me full of something that made me wicked tired. And I remembered reading how sometimes, because of a head injury or something, they’d have to put someone in a medically induced coma, and I thought that that was what I wanted. If I couldn’t die, I wanted a coma. A long, long t
ime under.

  I barely talked for days. My dad and mom came, and flowers came, and nurses and doctors came, and after a day or four days, I was taken by ambulance to McLean, with a big white bandage around my left wrist, which made everything pretty obvious and boring and unambiguous.

  I still said just about nothing, and within a week, I think, they started ECT. That had its own whole protocol, almost like you were going to surgery. No solid food after eight the night before, and only clear liquids until eleven, I believe it was. You had to answer all these questions about anesthesia: Could you climb stairs without getting winded? Any family history of sleep apnea? Any trouble breathing? And on and on.

  I was still in a small dark place. A closed place. And I didn’t want to leave. As long as it was quiet, as long as nobody came or went, as long as the world left me alone, I was good. Just keep it dark and keep it closed. I remembered these lines from the Psalms, Thou hast laid me in the lowest place, in darkness, in the deeps.

  So they came for me early, and they put a needle in the back of my hand, and they said that I would be sedated, first with something called a benzodiazepine, to help me relax, and then with this white milky drug called propofol, which would put me to sleep. They put me on a gurney, and put a hairnet over my hair, but otherwise I kept my regular sleeping gear, my sweats, on.

  They wheeled me into a room, and some young guy with the doctor thing over his hair said he was Dr. Someone, and they shifted me to another table.

  I’m the anesthesiologist, he explained. I’ll be with you the whole time. I’m giving you something to relax, and he injected something clear into the lead in the line on the back of my hand, and it was immediate, and, man, it was fast. I was swooning.

  Then he took this syringe with milky stuff in it, and he said, We call this milk of magnesia, and he injected it, and in one, two seconds, I was gone.

  I woke up in a comfortable, deep leather recliner, and I was floating slowly and I could have been on the way to France or Japan or Patagonia—it was all good with me.