“Hey,” Erin said.
I guess it doesn’t take much to cajole me into sex, even if I didn’t feel like doing it at first. But there was something smug and aggressive in Erin’s eyes, like she knew something I didn’t. The opposite of her having something to prove. I wish I knew what she was thinking because it was beyond me. She looked satisfied, maybe not with the sex itself but with something else, some checkmate she had accomplished, she was on top of me, bucking and grinding down, looking directly into my eyes with a kind of gleeful ownership, and I unexpectedly and overwhelmingly came.
She said, “You’ll get used to me.”
* * *
—
Well, we know how that story ended.
And now I’m lost.
It’s not just that I can’t find Julia’s house in this San Francisco maze. I can’t even find my way back to the approved route. My phone is telling me one thing but I’m seeing another. I’m missing turns in this neighborhood of cul-de-sacs and one-way streets, designed to baffle so that people who don’t belong here stand out. So they look suspicious.
Well, the system works. I don’t belong here.
I stop at a gas station.
I try to push myself into the right headspace for this dinner with Julia. Jaunty, optimistic, in the mood of: Just going to see an old college friend! How many years has it been?
Forget those blue envelopes.
On a whim I buy cigarettes at the gas station. A lottery ticket, too. I recite Julia’s lucky numbers to the guy at the cash register. I’m surprised I still know the numbers by heart. When’s the last time I spoke them out loud? It feels like I’m nineteen. Like old times!
Old times.
The act of saying Julia’s lottery numbers stirs something up in my brain. Maybe it’s because I had looked through my undergraduate calculations last night, but old seams of thought feel ready to reopen. A half-forgotten mathematical idea bubbles up. Then another, connecting with some equations from the blue books I had paged through the night before. Old calculations, proofs, derivations.
Something is coming together.
I will show you the eschaton.
Careful.
Don’t chase the idea right away. Don’t try to pin it down too hard. Let it float there for a little bit. To do the math makes the math come true. But I can feel the shape of a new idea about the eschaton, an alternate way to derive it, the theoretical end-of-the-world particle. The idea might not even work in the end but that’s fine, don’t judge it right away, maybe it’ll lead to something else that will. Let the process happen. Because I can actually feel it, I can begin to sense the eschaton drawing closer to me until it’s almost quivering in my hand…
Then it’s gone.
Quick as a flash. But I had it for a second.
That flash—I knew that flash.
* * *
—
I had felt it around the time Kulkarni disappeared.
There aren’t many people named Craigory so it was easy to check a few years later whether his batshit children’s book ever got published. It never did, apparently, nor did I find any information about a musical instrument called a “scribbleboard.” Perhaps both book and scribbleboard were shadows lurking in a cave somewhere, waiting to become real. Or more likely, Gregory had been making it all up.
Anyway, I mentioned the Plato’s-cave-in-reverse idea to Kulkarni.
It was the kind of crackpot notion Kulkarni enjoyed batting around, although as we glided into middle age he treated our geeky discussions as an odd vice, to be indulged only discreetly and occasionally.
I didn’t know this time would be the last time Kulkarni would be acting like Kulkarni.
I was in Connecticut on business. Kulkarni was there for some family occasion. We saw each other plenty at work, but I was curious to observe him in his native element. When Kulkarni suggested we meet at the yacht club his family belonged to (a yacht club!) I jumped at the chance.
I wasn’t disappointed. In Chicago, Kulkarni’s WASPishness almost seemed like an affectation, but here he fit right in—striding across the lobby of his club, six foot three, sunglasses hooked onto the collar of his pink polo shirt, supernatural hair, a man seemingly incapable of sweating. We spent a sunny afternoon sailing around the harbor in his boat, Kulkarni handling the sails and the rudder masterfully, giving me minor nautical tasks so I didn’t feel totally useless. I felt I knew Kulkarni better after a day on the water with him, even though we didn’t discuss anything much of substance the whole time.
Afterward, over dinner at the club, the topic of Julia came up and for some reason I found myself telling Kulkarni the details of her wedding (to my discredit, playing up the colorful details of its midwestern absurdity for his upper-class East Coast delectation, as though I were some anthropologist reporting back to him, instead of, you know, one of them) and I happened to mention Craigory’s dumb variation of Plato’s cave.
Kulkarni, tipping his drink back and forth, said, “So Craigory’s book doesn’t exist. Okay—but if it did, how would it go?”
That, I didn’t expect. “What do you mean?”
“I remember thinking, when I first heard of it, that Plato’s cave is such a weird Rube Goldberg idea.” Kulkarni’s debate-club rhetorical perversity tended to emerge after his third gin and tonic. “What’s the motivation? Who benefits from chaining up people underground and making them watch shadows on the wall?”
“So your objection is economic?”
“Or it’s a wrong turn in philosophy from the start, that all the engineering details of Plato’s cave are worked out to the last detail, chains and shadows and puppets and fire and stuff, but the question of why it’s there at all isn’t touched. Why put on a puppet show for prisoners? Where do the puppeteers come from? Who’s paying them?”
“They’re enthusiastic volunteers?”
“No, no, just forget about the puppets and the puppeteers. The prisoners too. Our man Craigory is right, the shadows are the heroes here.” Kulkarni ordered another round. “So how would his book work, if it existed?”
I enjoyed this kind of nonsense with Kulkarni. “Lots of questions. What happens when a shadow learns it’s not real?”
“But the shadows are already kind of real, right? That’s Craigory’s point,” said Kulkarni. “The shadows want things. They have thoughts and intentions.”
“But they’re stuck in the cave. Half real.”
“Say the cave is destroyed.”
“But maybe if the shadows escape the cave, they can become fully real.”
“Perfect, great, send that to Craigory,” said Kulkarni. “A shadow of a lion comes out into the sunlight of actuality, and that sunlight causes it to become a real lion.”
“It’s like something from one of Renard’s books.”
“What?”
“Friend from when I was a kid. He liked this kind of thing.”
“I was going to say it was right up my great-uncle’s alley.”
“Maybe Nate could do a concept album about it on his scribbleboard.”
And so on.
It was the last time Kulkarni and I had a real conversation.
* * *
—
Not long after that, something changed in Kulkarni.
I didn’t make the connection at first. But in the weeks after we met in Connecticut, Kulkarni spent less time meeting clients for assessments and more time holed up alone in his office. This was back when everyone at Dare to Know worked together in the same building. Not the grand space we used to own in our glory days, but still, a nice rented space downtown.
Kulkarni had started working on something. His office, normally clean to the point of barren impersonality, became infested with scribbled-on papers. He got a hollow look.
He avoided talking to me.
It was as
though Kulkarni had caught some mental virus. He began to dress sloppily. At first it was just a wrinkled shirt, an errant stain, the same trousers worn twice in the same week. He didn’t shave. Kulkarni had always been impressively buff, going to the gym four times a week, a regular tennis player. That all stopped.
I asked him what was up.
He mumbled something and kept his distance.
So one day after work, I illicitly let myself into Kulkarni’s office. There was a sour smell. I looked through the mess of half-full coffee cups, crumpled-up papers, smeared whiteboards. Kulkarni was working his way through some thicket of mathematics. I could see that he had reverted to his original metaphor, his interlocking glass boxes with ever-shifting panes. Reengaging with the primal image that first gave him access to subjective mathematics.
I couldn’t imagine why anyone would do that.
Page after page was filled with scribbled geometrical diagrams, more and more complicated, and by their very nature incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t Kulkarni. But I could feel a pattern in it. I could sense how the logic hung together. I could almost sense it drawing closer to me, until it was quivering in my hand…
Then it was gone.
Quick as a flash. But I had it. I did have it, for a second.
Then I saw this scrawled on one of Kulkarni’s papers:
7/4/1054.
* * *
—
I meant to ask Kulkarni about that date. The same date on the envelope Xuuzi had handed me in my dream just a few days before that. The date of the supernova. The date I had somehow written myself. But why?
That was when Kulkarni quit Dare to Know.
I didn’t understand why. Nobody did.
It was abrupt.
It happened the day after I rummaged through Kulkarni’s papers. Kulkarni had acted strangely with me all that week. Avoiding me at work, as though he sensed something about me had changed. Something had changed, of course, but I hadn’t told anyone about my encounter with Xuuzi the week before. About the weird shit she and I had taken together. About Xuuzi coming out of the hotel bathroom with Julia’s impossible hair and dress, about the bronze monsters in a flaming desert of metal, about a ritual in the hotel’s banquet hall with everyone from Dare to Know looking like Cahokians, and then Renard appearing, and then all of us becoming Flickering Men…
I will show you the eschaton.
Xuuzi had shown me something, for sure: a nightmare. And the hotel room had been wrecked the next morning. I quietly paid for the room damage, though not on the corporate card, obviously. Dare to Know didn’t need to know. Something in me didn’t want me to know either. Didn’t want to think about it. It had just been a bad trip on her weird shit. The more that night receded into the past, the more it felt like a dream best left forgotten.
But this bad dream slotted in too snugly with other bad dreams.
7/4/1054.
I would ask Kulkarni about it.
The next morning, though, I couldn’t find him. When I did spot Kulkarni, I happened to be in the break room with some new interns—for some reason I was telling the interns about the early years of Sapere Aude, the crazy years, stories of how it felt like we used to be something more than just another corporation trying to keep its shareholders happy, mentioning only in passing the freaks, charlatans, and witches that hung around us at the beginning—I was more aiming to give the interns a flavor of what the company was like when it still felt like we stood for something, some ideals, when we were making big technical breakthroughs, when we were explorers and revolutionaries who were going to change the world. I did notice the interns share an exasperated glance—when is this old blowhard going to shut up?—and maybe I was going too far when I claimed that our start-up had almost felt like the Manhattan Project, especially when I told the interns about the night of the infamous Hopkins incident, and I compared it to when they exploded the first atomic bomb in 1945, saying we felt the way Robert Oppenheimer must’ve felt after the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexican desert, when he famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Kulkarni was standing in the hallway when I said that.
Staring at me in an odd way.
Like when you unexpectedly see someone you don’t want to see.
Kulkarni quit that day. I didn’t know at first. I came around to his office later to talk to him and learned it was already cleared out. I asked people where Kulkarni had gone. Nobody knew.
A temp said he had already left, maybe?
I went outside and spotted him.
Kulkarni was across the parking lot with a man who looked like an older relative, a kind of professor emeritus, leather-elbows-on-a-tweed-coat grandfather type—wait, was that actually Kulkarni’s mathematician great-uncle? The half-respectable, half-crackpot guy he’d told me about who was trying to derive a mystical glyph to ward off evil?
Kulkarni said something to the old man.
The old man stared at me, agitated.
He waved his hands in the air at me, like he was playing a scribbleboard.
I started walking across the parking lot to them.
Kulkarni helped his great-uncle into the car. He didn’t even look at me. Before I reached them, he drove off.
I wanted to ask Kulkarni what the hell was going on.
I called him. Nobody answered.
I went to his house. Nobody home.
I never saw Kulkarni again.
* * *
—
For what it’s worth, I later learned that the “I am Death” quote was almost certainly fabricated by Oppenheimer later. The actual night of the testing, Oppenheimer is only reported to have said, “It worked.” And another scientist added, “We’re all sons of bitches now.”
Actually, it’s just me.
I’m the son of a bitch. The destroyer of worlds.
Stop putting it off.
Go to her.
* * *
—
I haven’t been paying attention to the road. I have been driving on autopilot through Julia’s neighborhood, not even listening to the phone’s directions. But now I’m back in the real world, with the cigarettes and lottery ticket from the gas station on the passenger seat…
Wait.
I’m somehow pulling up at Julia’s house.
How had I found my way here, how had that happened on its own?
But it happened.
Here I am.
Look at her house.
The cigarettes and lottery ticket I just bought are suddenly ridiculous.
Jesus. Her place is huge.
I knew Julia and Keith had done well for themselves. Still startling to see it with my own eyes. I don’t want to be here. Be honest: Julia knows quite well things didn’t work out for me. I don’t want to see her pitying smile. Painful for her too. And Keith, who’d gone from shitty midwestern improviser to jackpot-level screenwriter, and then, even more improbably, on to film producer, I can already see Keith backslapping me with a, How’s the Grim Reaper business, man? Those trains still running on time?
Well, no, Keith, for me personally that train is now officially twenty-five hours late.
Make an excuse.
Turn around. Go home.
But the blue envelopes—
It doesn’t matter. Put the car in reverse. Back out.
My phone buzzes.
A text from Ron Wolper. I understand you’re in town. Please come by the office at 2 tomorrow.
Wait—how does Ron Wolper know I’m in town? Well, Dare to Know headquarters are in San Francisco. Julia is probably still in touch with the old gang, she probably mentioned to someone that I was coming to town and Ron Wolper heard it through the grapevine. Plus Lisa Beagleman probably has lodged her complaint by now. I’m surprised it took Wol
per this long, then.
Two o’clock meeting, though. That means Wolper isn’t taking me to lunch. Ominous. Well, whatever Wolper wants to say to me, minus the courtesy of lunch, I’ve got an ace up my sleeve.
Because I’m dead.
Because the books are wrong. Because there’s an error in the thanatons. How many other times have the thanatons spoken inaccurately? Never, as far as I know. Maybe I’m the first? Maybe the whole system of thanatons has become unstable, maybe it’s about to break down, maybe I’m the first chink in the armor?
“You gonna stay out there all night, big guy?”
I look up.
Keith is silhouetted in the door, holding two beers, a big smile on his face. A daughter behind him in pajamas shrieks and then disappears.
Too late to back out now.
* * *
—
For years it bothered me that the fairy-tale by-product of my calculation of Julia’s death date never had a proper ending.
Of course, that was because I had never properly completed her thanaton calculation.
But examining the vectors of symbols up to that point, I could make a probabilistic case that the story would go in a certain direction.
In the fable, the king and the princess get trapped inside an enchanted hill, hypnotized by their own fears and fantasies, which become semireal in the darkness—so many dreams that the king and princess are hypnotized, and eventually don’t even recognize each other, and are trapped under the hill forever.
But the story wasn’t over. Because the calculation wasn’t over. Out of the various possibilities hinted at in the symbols, out of the remaining elements that still had to be slotted into place like leftover Scrabble letters, I calculated this as a likely ending:
Once during the night, or during those thousand years, the princess discovered another man who lived in the darkness, a man who was not the king—a little wizard with black eyes and a great staff of carved iron.
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