Philip closed his eyes for a long moment, and then quietly returned his attention to the dishes soaking in the kitchen sink.
He felt Alicia’s hand on his back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was inappropriate. I shouldn’t have said that, right then.”
He turned toward her again, and she silently took his hand between both of hers. He choked back a sob. She had a faint smell of vanilla.
Philip is working his way through Wandering Rocks, watching Dublin’s citizens cross each other’s paths from a God’s-eye view. At a table nearby a woman dandles a cheerfully babbling toddler, who hasn’t yet learned that the strings of noises coming from human mouths aren’t music made for its own sake.
From the balcony he can hear the murmur of physicists in conversation, though he can’t exactly make out what they’re saying. He doesn’t need to know the lyrics to hum the tune, though. The words are about science, but the music is about the people who do the science.
The volume at the table drops for a moment: one person has been yielded the floor. Alicia. She accents her speech with sharp, precise hand movements, like an orchestra’s conductor; the rest of the table is silent and attentive. When she stops they are all quiet for a second; then the entire table bursts into a laugh that is long, and from the gut, and laced with a touch of poison.
That is the kind of laughter that finishes careers, though science moves slowly, and whoever they are speaking of will not discover for two or three years that his fate has been decided. Over time his citations will dwindle; new papers that feature his name prominently will have trouble finding homes. His versions of the truth will go unheard, no matter how loudly he proclaims them. Then, as if it is his own idea, he will think to himself that, at last, it is time to get out of science: perhaps he is not too old to change careers, to try something else, before it is too late.
He finishes the chapter of Ulysses just as Alicia appears in the balcony. “Hey, sweetie,” she says, rubbing his back and pecking his cheek.
“Hey,” Philip says. “Lively talk this morning, sounds like.”
“Oh, you know: just deciding who’s going to get the next Nobel. Don’t worry about it.” She bent over and hugged him. “Today’s your big day!”
“Papers in Honor of Philip Steiner. Who would have ever thought.”
After Rebecca’s death, Philip saw no other choice but to throw himself wholeheartedly into the Great Work. There was no other option! He could not let the effort he’d put into it go for naught. The child he’d been left with was entrusted to a succession of nannies, babysitters, and au pairs. He spent all the time in the lab that he could, and the giant machine never failed to reward his unceasing attention with inscrutability, or with the tantalizing promise of a solution, or with the promise of a solved problem that would in turn produce a yet larger conundrum that would be an even greater pleasure to solve. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he ever actually figured the whole thing out: it’d be like a longtime lover announcing unexpectedly that her dependable ardor had finally flagged. It’d be the end of him.
The thing that happened with Alicia: it was more complicated than it looked. It really didn’t have anything to do with loneliness, or bereavement. She was brilliant: that was the plain fact of the matter. And when the two of them were alone in the lab at night, speaking the private language that had sprung up between them after years spent in the company of the great machine…there was nothing like it. Even though grief draped his heart in a cloak of black velvet, he could still feel that joy, the simple happiness that came from expressing an original idea and being understood.
Those in the lab who noticed something was going on between Philip and Alicia appeared to turn a blind eye, even when the two of them gave up their pretenses and stopped being quite so circumspect. Alicia eventually applied for job positions elsewhere as her post-doc appointment approached its end. Her publications and her assiduous social networking paid dividends: in the field she’d made a name for herself as someone who would soon make a greater name for herself, whose success was a foregone conclusion, merely lying in wait for the right time. She got three job offers: Berkeley; Harvard; the Delft University of Technology.
Philip selfishly hoped she’d take the Harvard spot, only a few hours away. But one evening Alicia and Philip went out for dinner, and she mentioned that Dutch had some surprising linguistic similarities to English, and the language would be easy to pick up.
Though she left the country, she didn’t leave his life: they kept in touch, daily, via e-mail and phone and webcam. They talked mostly about work, and though Alicia was pursuing her own projects in Delft, she still had ideas to offer Philip that could provide new directions for research. Philip could not help but notice that once Alicia left, his research efforts began to slow and stall: he would have liked to chalk it up to the possibility that Alicia’s presence had boosted lab morale, but he suspected, in his heart of hearts, that she was just smarter than he was. He’d come up with the idea of the CVD, but she’d been able to take it and run with it, farther than he ever would have without her.
He got the feeling that she was losing interest in it. While her work on her own projects showed significant promise, Philip could tell from the tone of her voice during their daily talks that she was beginning to see his work as undead science, still soldiering on in ignorance of its own demise. Nonetheless, it was Alicia who halfheartedly gave Philip the idea that, instead of sending a robot into the causality violation device, he should go back to basics: install an electron gun in the roof of the machine and perform a double-slit experiment. He didn’t think there’d be much of a result, but any promise of something interesting happening was better than none at all, and if there was any kind of anomaly in the resulting diffraction pattern, such an anomaly might show the way forward.
He installed the electron gun himself: it was the kind of easy task he’d normally farm out to a grad student to let him get his hands dirty, but to his shame, he hadn’t been able to attract any grad students to his lab this year, and he’d been carrying out most of his work alone. Even the DAPAS money had begun to dry up as the pie-in-the-sky defense folks found other pipe dreams more promising.
Philip completed the installation early one Saturday morning and, after taking a quick break to brew a cup of tea, began the initial run. He set the gun to fire for an hour, planning to spend the interval writing a grant proposal. He began work, cutting and pasting paragraphs from other failed proposals, attempting to ignore the sinking feeling that though all these proposals were going to different addresses in the United States, they were all being read by the same person, when from the causality violation device came a strange, muffled sound that shouldn’t have happened, an inexplicable thump.
Had he improperly mounted the electron gun? Had it come loose from its housing? Surely not: a glance at his screen showed that it was still firing. Nonetheless, that sound needed investigation, even if it ruined the run. He shut the gun down, approached the causality violation device, and opened its door. And out tumbled the body of his first wife, Rebecca Wright, looking as if she’d passed away in her sleep just seconds before.
In the intervening year between the day when the chair of Stratton’s physics department announced a symposium in his honor and today, Philip had allowed himself fantasies of what the event would actually be like, and slowly reined in those fantasies as he watched plans for it come together. Instead of a full day, the program is half a day, from noon to five. Instead of the proceedings being published in a hardcover book to be sold to libraries at no small expense, they will occupy the back half of a special issue of a journal that is well regarded, but not top-tier. Instead of Stratton University’s largest auditorium being booked for the event, the symposium is being held in the physics department’s second-largest classroom, which seats about fifty. Instead of a golden throne, Philip sits in a wooden chair in the front row, where he must, for five hours, perform the act of close attention.
&nb
sp; Sean is slouched in the seat next to him, and clearly feels the need to perform nothing except his constant teenage discontentment. Though this boy shares Philip’s home and half his genes, he is a stranger to him. He has made a pro forma attempt at dressing for the occasion: a suit jacket paired with faded jeans and dirty sneakers, and a tie knotted loosely around his neck, striped green and silver. Beneath this is a white T-shirt that features David Bowie’s downcast face, a pink and blue lightning bolt painted across it. Though Philip does not quite get David Bowie, he has tried to use Sean’s newfound love of classic rock as a means of creating a father-son bond. But when he bought Sean a recording of Rush’s Signals (thinking that he’d dig “Subdivisions” in particular: be cool or be cast out!), he said it had “too many synthesizers” and dismissed the band’s entire corpus as “Randroid horseshit.” This was the first time Sean had used a swear word in Philip’s hearing, and unprepared for this sudden testing of boundaries, Philip had chosen to let the moment pass in silence. That had probably been a mistake, he thought: the occasion called for parenting, called for discipline.
Alicia is sitting on Philip’s other side, and occasionally she reaches out and places her hand on his. He can read her face, and can tell that she agrees with the opinion that he himself is too politic to speak aloud: that the papers being delivered today are not that good. They are not very interesting. They are parsimoniously doled out fingernail parings of thought, bloated into full length by badly written prose and extensive recapitulations of material with which an audience of this kind would already be familiar. They are evidence that the desire to bide one’s time in order to do good science has been sublimated to the constant drive to publish; as the saying goes, the committees that hand out funds and grant tenure cannot read, but they can count. The colleagues and former students presenting today—a couple of whom he still remembers; some of whom he shared a credit with on a paper as one of forty authors—are here primarily to get yet another line on their CV.
Though there are good intentions here that should not be discounted. Philip’s career is not one that will be long remembered—his most famous paper, the capstone of his labors, is famous for the wrong reasons. But he has given good service to Science for many years, and if there is a hint of there but for the grace of God go I in the eyes of younger physicists at this afternoon’s symposium, they are doing what they see as their duty to a colleague who has reached his career’s end without turning his back on the field: they are providing the final cadence that signals a happy ending, despite the tragedy or the impermanence of all that came before.
There is a newly hired assistant professor at the back of the hall who is not on the same page as everyone else, who does not realize that the function of this symposium is largely ceremonial. His snorts and harrumphs land like spitballs on the back of Philip’s head. He seems considerably annoyed by the talk given by the high-energy physicist who came up from Louisiana, on the current efforts toward gravitational wave research: there are plans under way to launch three spacecraft equipped with lasers, which will work together to function as an interferometer that will be several orders of magnitude larger than the interferometers currently running on earth. Surely everyone in the room is imagining what wonders they could accomplish with the funding necessary to undertake such a project. But the money goes where it goes.
The young, arrogant assistant prof saves his biggest raspberries for the last talk of the afternoon, given by a former post-doc of Philip’s who left the field to teach high school physics. It’s Carson Tyler! Philip always liked Carson, and recalls that Alicia was fond of him, too. Carson’s talk isn’t about the cutting edge of physics so much as it’s about how what he learned in Philip’s lab about the day-to-day details of scientific research helps him to get kids interested in physics and related fields. “Kids are natural-born experimenters,” he says. “You don’t have to encourage their desire to do science: you just have to not discourage it.” He displays a chart at this point that causes some uncomfortable stirring in seats: it shows that while the raw number of women and ethnic minorities applying to physics graduate programs has been rising over time, the attrition rate once they get inside the gate is still alarmingly high.
Rather than gloss the chart and suggest conclusions that one might draw from the data, he takes it down after a few moments without comment, and quietly segues into homilies about the fulfillment he gets from seeing his students’ faces when they experience a “sense of wonder.” This calms people down. Everyone in the hall has heard this stuff before, but it is still comforting: it reminds them of when they themselves were young, of the parts of their minds that have still remained youthful.
When he concludes his talk to polite applause, the assistant professor says, a little too loudly, “That wasn’t science.” Alicia has had enough. She turns and shouts, “It was. Shut it.”
When Rebecca’s body fell out of the causality violation device, aged several years since he last saw her alive, dressed in the sort of tank top and leggings that implied that she’d been about to go for a run, Philip went insane, for a little while. There was some screaming. When he came to his senses briefly, he found that he had somehow gashed the back of his left hand, though the cut wasn’t bleeding heavily. Then he remembered what Mr. Cheever had told him, long ago: If something weird happens, and I mean only if it’s really weird, call this number. I might not pick up, but the message will get to me fast.
He had the number written on a slip of paper folded up in his wallet: he’d copied and recopied it from the original napkin that Mr. Cheever had given him years ago, the napkin that he had since lost somewhere in his home office. (Multiple backups in multiple places: it pays off.) He dialed the number and a woman’s voice answered, curt and English. “Speak.”
The command startled him. “Rebecca,” he stammered. “She’s here. She’s: I think she’s dead? She’s here—”
“Is your name Philip Steiner?”
“Y-yes.”
“Don’t move.” He was pressed up against the wall, looking at the body that lay inert in front of the door to the causality violation chamber, one of its legs folded awkwardly beneath its back. He looked up at the ceiling-mounted camera that hid behind its hemispherical dome, and presumed that the camera was looking back at him.
“Please stop wailing,” the voice on the phone said. “You’re panicking. Don’t move. Stay on the line.”
Philip clamped his mouth shut.
“Leave this room and enter your office,” the voice said. “Then close the door.”
Philip walked past the body (she doesn’t look like she did the last time he saw her; her hair is longer; she looks thinner; there are no signs of an accident or an autopsy; it is her; it is her; it is her), through the double doors of the lab’s entrance, and into his office, the first door on his left. He shut the door behind him, locking it for good measure, as if the body in the lab, once disgorged into this world, might get up, might begin to articulate questions best left unspoken.
“Sit down in the chair behind your desk,” the voice said, “and remove your shoes.”
“Why should I—”
“Do not ask questions! You’re panicking; you will be calmer without your shoes on. Remove them!”
Philip, chastened like a schoolboy, kicked his shoes off. “Okay: done.”
“Now. My name is Sidney. I’m here to help. But you must do exactly as I say. First: I will be disconnecting from you without warning, and calling you again sometime later. When I call, answer immediately; answer by saying Hello, Sidney.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t move. Don’t turn on your computer! Stay calm. Relax.”
“Okay,” Philip said, but there was no further response.
Ten minutes later the phone rang again. “Rebecca,” he said. “Rebecca—”
“Say Hello, Sidney.”
“Hello, Sidney.”
“Hello, Philip. You will notice some noise outside, of conveyances an
d personnel. Stay in your office. Do not be curious.”
As Sidney said this, Philip heard what sounded like two large vehicles pulling up outside the building, perhaps the size of garbage trucks. There was a commotion of men barking commands.
“Mr. Cheever says hello,” said Sidney. “He will be in Stratton in three hours.”
“Oh, good,” said Philip, but Sidney was already gone.
Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang again. “Hello, Sidney,” Philip said.
“In a moment a man in uniform will knock on your door. He is bringing you a slice of chocolate cake and some hot tea. Eat the cake. Drink the tea. Relax.”
She hung up just as Philip heard a rap on the office door’s frosted window.
He opened it to reveal a soldier in full camouflage gear looming over him, corn-fed and twenty-four, his red hair cropped to a buzz cut, his uniform free of any insignia that would indicate name or rank. An assault rifle was strapped to his back, the end of its barrel peeking over his shoulder. In one hand he held a steaming Styrofoam cup; in the other, a slice of dark chocolate cake in a clear plastic container, along with a plastic fork.
“Cake, sir,” the soldier said, proffering the food.
Philip took the cake and the tea, but the soldier remained standing there. “I just wanted to say,” he said, “that it’s a real honor to meet you, face-to-face.”
Behind the soldier Philip could see four people in white hazmat suits, pushing a gurney into the lab.
“Thank you,” he said. Don’t you tip people when they bring you food? It seemed to Philip like a good idea. He pulled out his wallet and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, fastidiously folding it in half so that the crease cut across the face of Theodore Roosevelt, with its shining spectacles and its Cheshire Cat grin. He held the money toward the soldier, who politely waved it away with a nervous laugh: “Nice, but this one’s on us.”
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