“Old times were great, weren’t they? You got an apron on and a bunch of squalling kids hanging on your legs, your husband just died from some damn disease hasn’t even been discovered yet, you bite into a boiled turkey drumstick and it pulls out two of your front teeth.”
“Then your mother says, I warned you: this is what happens to a woman when she turns twenty-three.”
“Seriously, to hell with time travel.”
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here. Have a good morning, you guys.”
“What’re you spinning today?” Spivey said to Alicia as she walked away.
“Mostly stuff from ’87, ’88. Some Ultramagnetic MCs; some tracks from He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper; some Public Enemy to keep it honest.”
“Elvis! Was a hero to most—”
“But he never meant shit to me!” Alicia said over her shoulder as the door to the lab closed behind her.
“I told you,” Spivey said to Terence. “My girl.”
Carson came into the lab about an hour later, just as Terence and Spivey were getting ready to get off shift. Terence had that loopy feeling you get when your body clock goes out of whack—if he was lucky and the traffic was good, he could be in bed by nine thirty, and he’d wake up in the early afternoon in time for a ravenous brunch.
Spivey was sitting at the desk when Carson approached. “I don’t know if you need this back,” Carson said. He proffered a white plastic rectangle attached to a lanyard, which Spivey plucked from his hand: it was Kate’s temporary ID. Over the last day the image of her face had faded from it, Cheshire-cat-like: nothing remained of it but the ghost of a single, pale blue eye and a washed-out smudge of red that had once been a lip.
“Thanks,” Spivey said, and then, with a stand-up comic’s timing, waiting a beat for Carson to turn away: “Carlton.”
Carson took a couple of steps away from the desk, then stopped, his shoulders sunken. Then he turned and said, with a voice that sounded louder than it would have if he’d shouted, “Look. You need to stop calling me that. I get your little joke. Now this is the story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down. I get it. But it isn’t funny, it never has been, I’m not in the mood to pretend it is, and I’m sick of hearing the same tired little insult whenever I set foot in this place. I get it. Now leave it alone.”
Before Spivey could reply, Carson stalked away, letting the door to the lab slam shut behind him.
Terence looked at the back of Spivey’s balding head over the top of his book. Then, as if he could feel his gaze on him, Spivey turned to face Terence, and in that quick moment Terence caught an expression on Spivey’s face of despair and confusion.
Then Spivey brought forth a tortured guffaw. “Hoo ha!” he said, with unconvincing bonhomie. “Did you see that? I tell you I had my doubts about him, I had my doubts about the man, but I figured if I poked at him enough he’d show me he has a little fire in him after all.”
11
ATMOSPHERIC NOISE
Philip proposed to Rebecca about a year after they started dating, and a couple of months after she’d moved in with him. His request for her hand in marriage came in a way that made it seem like it was a surprise even to himself, and when Rebecca later tried to puzzle out the chain of events that led to it, she decided that its principal cause was her gift of the wristwatch.
Since Rebecca and Philip had started seeing each other, she’d gotten a pretty decent idea of what he was doing as a physicist. As a graduate student and post-doc, his primary interest had been gravitation, but when you started to deal with the really big concepts in physics, like gravity and space and time and light, you soon found that they were all inextricably linked together, and the more you pondered one, the greater the chance that you’d find yourself mixed up with another. Hence Philip’s somewhat vague description of his work to nonscientist strangers as “an investigation into the nature of spacetime.”
Rebecca knew a little more about his research than could be gleaned from that imprecise summary, though, enough to know that he tended to keep it imprecise unless he was pressed because he didn’t want to sound like a crackpot. At the moment the lab he supervised at Stratton University was engaged in the development of a device called the Planck-Wheeler clock, which would make all sorts of incredibly accurate measurements across space as well as through time. But the clock was only part of a larger project that Philip had just begun to seek funding for, writing grant proposals to send to various government agencies and private organizations. He called it a “causality violation device,” but part of his problem was that the people who held the strings of the purses he wanted to open usually weren’t scientists. So the grants had to be written in plain English instead of a specialist’s jargon; unlike the precise scientific language he favored, in which each word had a single, agreed-upon definition, he had to use words of a common culture, words that necessarily came freighted with other, older meanings. And anyone who considered Philip’s idea for more than a couple of minutes, written out in that plain manner, was likely to decide that what he was actually doing was looking for money to build a time machine, which was deep into crackpot territory.
It was easy for Rebecca to see that rejection after rejection was bringing Philip’s spirits low. And so she decided that a gift would be good for him, a pick-me-up meant to show she still believed in him. Lately she’d landed a temp job doing secretarial work at an architectural firm. The gig wasn’t great, but it was as steady a paycheck as she’d had recently, and she figured she had enough disposable income for the moment to afford some largesse. God knows he’d taken her out to dinner enough times when she was broke.
The perfect present nearly jumped out at her when she walked past it, sitting beneath the glass of the jewelry counter in Macy’s. Amid the selection of men’s wristwatches, which ranged from the austere to the egregiously complicated, with dials marking off every unit of time from days to tenths of seconds, sat a timepiece whose face was completely transparent—you could see the assemblage of gold and silver gears beneath it, driving its hands forward tick by tick. It was mesmerizing.
The slim, bird-boned saleswoman behind the counter saw where Rebecca’s eyes were pinned. “A lovely, lovely watch,” she said. “Completely mechanical: powered by stored kinetic energy. Accurate to plus or minus, say, one minute per week. But higher accuracy, in a fully mechanical watch? Brand-new cars are cheaper! This one is a bargain at two hundred.”
Rebecca didn’t care about the accuracy—she thought the watch was super cool. With a digital watch, you couldn’t really see how it worked, and so the ability to measure the passage of time seemed like a mundane task that took place at the heart of a microprocessor. But there was something about seeing a mechanical device work that spoke to everyone, not just electronics experts. It made the mere act of marking time look like some kind of magic. Two hundred dollars was a good deal steeper than what she’d planned to spend when she stepped through the store’s doors, but she was so sure that Philip would love it that it was worth the cost. She heard her credit card squeal in anguish when the saleswoman ran it through the reader.
Later that week, Rebecca and Philip had dinner at an Indian restaurant on Route 27, one of those ethnic holes in the wall that turned out to be much more promising inside than its dingy facade would suggest. The two of them were the only white people there, which was a good sign to her—it foretold food that would be spiced without fear of offense. Philip had ordered the lamb biryani cooked “medium”: even so, he kept spooning yogurt onto his food and removing his napkin from his lap to wipe his damp forehead.
Rebecca saw that Philip was clearly not in a good mood—another grant rejection must have come in today, or the day before. Her sallies at idle conversation died in the air; questions about his work were met with grunts.
She waited until the server brought two bowls of irresistibly sweet gulab jamun to fish the jewelry box out of her purse. When she placed it on the table and pushed it acros
s to Philip, he picked it up with cautiously extended fingers, as if he feared it would electrocute him. Once he sensed its weight and confirmed that it was too heavy to hold a mere band of gold, he relaxed. He popped the box open, peering at its contents; then he closed it and shook it vigorously to set the watch’s gears twirling. He reopened the box and stared inside for a moment.
The smile that Rebecca expected to see on Philip’s face, the one she depended on to soften his default expression and remind her of the gentle personality that lay beneath his gruff exterior, did not materialize. “It’s a wristwatch,” he said.
“Yeah!” Rebecca said. “Because, you know: time.”
He looked at her blankly.
“I thought you’d appreciate it,” Rebecca said. “I just—I was thinking about you, and I saw this. And.”
He looked down at the watch again.
“It doesn’t have to be a special occasion to get a gift for someone you care about. If you care about someone, a lot of the time you just get them little gifts whenever.” Maybe that was a touch resentful, a little passive-aggressive. So be it.
“I already have plenty of ways to tell time,” Philip said. “I usually carry a phone. And I can’t help but be near a computer during most of my day. It’s hard for me not to have an idea of what time it is. And Rebecca, this looks unnecessarily expensive: especially given its probable lack of accuracy relative to a quartz watch, which would have cost you next to nothing—”
“Damn it, Philip, I didn’t get you the watch so you could tell time!”
She watched Philip stare into the middle distance, presumably riffling through possible responses. “It’s a very nice present,” he said finally, his voice distant and muted. He extracted the watch from its box and clasped it to his left wrist; then, as if he’d been quietly waiting for the little tiff between the two diners to end, the server appeared with the check.
Rebecca pretty much forgot about the incident until a month later, when she got the flowers. They showed up at the architectural firm where she was working, her job primarily consisting of fielding complaints from angry callers who’d gotten hold of the phone number for the front desk. The architect’s designs were the sort that could not have been conceived in the days when blueprints had to exist on paper instead of in a computer’s memory: houses with walls at seventy-three-degree angles from each other; roofs with swooping, asymmetric domes. While their interiors looked spectacular, with wide-open, light-filled spaces, their outsides looked like the kind of shapeless things a six-year-old would make by mashing together a bunch of Lego bricks. Most mornings the first phone call of the day was from an elderly woman already in mid-rant when Rebecca picked up the receiver: this thing that’s being thrown up in this historic neighborhood, it’s appalling, it’s outrageous, it has no respect for our community, for God’s sake it’s taller than our church. In her heart of hearts Rebecca sympathized with the callers, but she couldn’t very well say that—the most she could do was say she’d be sure to pass their grievances on, and then forget to do that.
So the flowers were nice when they showed up around eleven a.m., a simple arrangement of a dozen roses with an accompanying note:
Hello, Rebecca:
I was just thinking of yuo!
—Philip.
The message was sweet in its plain sincerity, and even if it had something of a taint of duty—she imagined Philip sticking a Post-it note to his monitor at work that read “show appreciation for girlfriend at random times”—it was better than nothing at all. In his somewhat distracted way, he cared. The typo in the note was a little negligent, but it was the thought that counted.
The strange thing was that when Rebecca called Philip that evening to say thanks, there was a moment when she could have sworn he didn’t actually know what she was talking about. “Oh, yes!” he said. “That was—that was just a thing. It seemed like a good idea.”
“Well, it certainly was, sweetheart.” Positive reinforcement.
“Yes!”
She shifted to another subject, and didn’t think about Philip’s seeming forgetfulness again until two months later, when another assemblage of flowers showed up at the office around nine thirty, dropped off by a delivery woman who shrugged quizzically as Rebecca signed for them on a proffered clipboard. The bouquet was perhaps more appropriate for a funeral than a display of affection, a spray of pale lilies and carnations mounted on a slender tripod. Rebecca removed the little card from the ivory envelope attached to it and read:
Hello, Rebecca:
Just wanted to say hi!
—Philip.
It wasn’t as completely surprising as the first time she’d received flowers from Philip, and people coming into the office today would probably stop to offer condolences, but she still appreciated the effort. She’d have to make him a nice dinner or something, she thought.
An hour later, a different delivery person from a different flower service arrived, holding a crystal vase containing two dozen daisies. “Rebecca Wright?” he asked as he stood at the office’s entrance, and when Rebecca approached to receive the flowers from him, he saw the funeral arrangement already standing next to her desk and looked at her briefly in confusion. But he declined to ask questions.
Another envelope, this one periwinkle, was attached to the end of a slender plastic stick lodged in the vase along with the daisies, and Rebecca read the note inside:
Hello, Rebecca:
I was just thinking of yuo!
—Philip.
Something was definitely weird about this. Philip had never been the type to get sentimental. And yet despite the irregularity of the situation, the two bouquets didn’t quite seem like mistakes: they came from two different flower shops, the arrangements themselves were different, and even the notes were different. There was something off about the whole thing. She had it in mind to call Philip to see if he was okay, but then the phone rang with an irate Kingston resident who wanted to give her an earful for twenty minutes (“This is ghastly. This is ghastly. I’m calling my lawyer. I’m calling my lawyer.”) and then it was time for her to go out to a local pizza place for lunch with the rest of the office.
The third bouquet showed up about a half hour after she got back, brought by the same woman from the same service that had delivered the funeral flowers that morning. The dozen roses had been placed in a white ceramic vase. When the delivery person placed them on Rebecca’s desk next to the daisies, she leaned over and said sotto voce to Rebecca: “It’s not my business, but I just want you to know that I’m really sorry about whatever it is. Unless your boyfriend or husband or whatever is apologizing for screwing up, in which case, you give ’em hell.”
“Thank you?”
“We had one customer get eight dozen roses in a day once. I think that’s the record.”
The note that accompanied the roses read:
Hello, Rebecca:
I was just thinking of yuo!
—Philip.
What in the hell? She dialed him up at the office, let it ring until it went to his voicemail, hung up, and immediately dialed again. He picked up on the sixth ring. “I’m really busy, Rebecca,” he said, without a greeting.
“Philip! Honey! What’s going on?”
“We’ve got some interest in funding the development of the causality violation device. An eccentric millionaire kid. Teleconference in an hour. I have to go—”
“Philip! Don’t hang up. You sent me three bouquets of flowers today. What is this?”
“I…what?” he said, after a moment of stunned silence.
“I’m looking at them. I’ve got them right here. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Just a second, Rebecca. Just a second.” She heard the furious clacking of a keyboard. “I didn’t need this right now. Just a second.” More typing. A pause, and then a quick flurry of keystrokes. Then: “Oh God. I’m a moron.”
“Philip?”
“I’ll explain this evening. I really have to
go now. But I have an idea: we’ll have a candlelight dinner this evening. That’ll be very romantic. I’ll order pizza—half pepperoni, half cheese, per usual. Would you go by some kind of department store and pick up some candles on the way home? Thanks.” And before she could tell him that she’d already had pizza for lunch, he disconnected.
Philip was in a better mood over dinner. It looked as if he’d secured some grant money, from a young investor named Edmund Taligent, whose father’s company, Taligent Industries, specialized in the construction of robotic prosthetics for amputees. It wouldn’t be nearly enough to finance the construction of the causality violation device entirely, but it would be enough to pay for some initial computer modeling, develop a plan and a timetable for building the device, and establish “Point Zero,” the point in spacetime that Philip called “the fixed end of the wormhole.” Once Point Zero was established, Edmund Taligent would see how things were going, and decide whether to fund the rest of the project.
“To be honest, the man is kind of a kook,” Philip said after he folded a slice of pepperoni pizza in two, shoved the end of it into his mouth, and took a large bite. “He’s like a twelve-year-old kid bouncing around in an adult’s body. But he appears to have a nearly infinite amount of money and a willingness to spend it. He doesn’t even want to draw up a contract—he says it’ll ruin things.
“But I feel optimistic about him. And this is the most optimistic I’ve felt about the whole project in a while. You don’t know what it’s like, to have a new truth in your head that you feel so sure about, that you want to bring out into the world so that others can know what you know. But then just when you make that first attempt at describing it to someone, they look at you and they say: Oh, you’re crazy. Or worse: You’re too ambitious. Your reach is exceeding your grasp. Like there is such a thing. Only a person who had already reconciled himself to a life of mediocrity would even say such a thing.
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