Einstein was said to have shown that time was relativistic, and he sensed that in some fundamental way, Stella was not bound by the rules of the temporal. Could she have arranged to appear within the depths of his Normandy childhood, perhaps as a dream or hallucination, so far back that his thought processes were still too infantile to shape meaning? Had she inexorably enticed him toward a passion for guiding sixteen-piece armies on boards of sixty-four squares?
He shook his head in denial and hopped out of bed. Such ideas were madness.
Strolling through Central Park a short time later on his way to a rendezvous, he felt as if he’d recovered from the strange events. Still, in the back of his mind lurked a suspicion that the encounter with Stella had somehow detoured him into a fundamentally altered reality, onto a path distinct from where the rest of the world tread.
A portly man in a dark navy overcoat waved at Marcel from a park bench, thankfully distracting him from a further rehash. He was to provide the man’s son with French lessons in exchange for a tidy sum of coins. It would be enough money so that if he ever again found himself confronted with the choice of walking Manhattan streets in the wee hours of the morning or hailing a taxi, he would have the economic wherewithal to elect the latter course.
* * * * *
Never had she found herself imprisoned within a pair of lifestreams simultaneously. She was intrigued by the possibilities her predicament afforded – unprecedented physical and emotional interaction with two members of an Anomalous Tripartite species. Yet she was concerned that she might never be able to return to her observational context.
Although trapped, she maintained a certain freedom of spatiotemporal movement. Her essence could navigate across the face of the planet, the same capability with which Duchamp and Einstein were endowed. In terms of human timekeeping, the artist’s existence went from 1887 to 1968, and the scientist’s from 1879 to 1955, which meant she could move freely across the breadth of those years. Any such leaps within that span would leave temporal wakes, possibly causing phantom traces of her thoughts and intentions to appear in the dreams and imaginations of sensitive humans.
Although she doubted that any human remained completely immune to the inherent warlike tendencies of their species, Duchamp and Einstein’s interest in chess would seem to indicate that their physical and emotional selves, the sources of much of their propensity to warfare, had been subsumed beneath an intellectual stratum. They might engage in a rational form of combat via the game, thereby avoiding the havoc of the genuine article.
That led her to configure a plan. It was one that not only would fulfill her requirements in regard to the expulsion and enable her to escape the limitations of this locus, but also allow for a deeper exploration of physicality and emotionality.
LONG ISLAND, 1939
Albert’s second season in Cutchogue, Long Island, should have been as enjoyable as his first. But recent events had accelerated the worrisome situation in Germany. That madman Hitler’s lust to conquer and destroy seemed to possess no upper limit. Last November’s anti-Jewish pogrom had been awful enough. This year, his renouncing of non-aggression pacts with Poland and Britain suggested worse.
It was a warm evening, this first Tuesday in August, although not unbearably so.
Albert had opened all the screened windows in the tidy cottage he rented on Old Cove Road, which was only a few hundred feet from Little Peconic Bay. Those waters constituted the most beautiful sailing ground he’d ever experienced.
Wednesday’s forecast indicated a continuation of today’s weather: blue skies and steady winds, perfect conditions for venturing out onto the bay from Nassau Point in Tineff, his little sailboat.
He was alone at the cottage, the way he liked it. His secretary Helen Dukas, also his housekeeper since the death of his second wife, Elsa, in 1936, had remained behind in Princeton. But solitude and sailing plans were likely to be disrupted by tomorrow’s visitors.
Albert had been tempted to reject the visit, order that it be postponed until he returned to New Jersey at the end of the season. But fellow physicist Niels Bohr had urged him not to dawdle and to meet with the two men as soon as possible. The situation in Europe not only grew more perilous by the day as indicated by the radio and newspaper reports, there were darker rumblings on the horizon, Nazi threats as yet unrevealed to the public at large. Niels felt they could not risk delaying.
Needing a distraction from the troubles and tensions that tomorrow’s visitors likely would bring, Albert settled into his comfortable leather chair beside an open window and delved into a book. He’d borrowed it from a neighbor, an aspiring sculptor. The book was a far cry from his usual fare, which tended to be steeped in the rigors of science and higher mathematics.
It was a brief history of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, a touring show that began its successful run at a Manhattan armory before proceeding to venues in Chicago and Boston. The show had served to introduce experimental European styles such as Cubism and Futurism to American audiences. A number of artists had achieved fame through the exhibition with their unusual works, most prominently Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp.
The book included a number of photographic plates of the artists’ projects. Albert had never been enamored with the modern art scene. Matisse’s portraits, Blue Nude and Madras Rouge, left him cold. Yet he couldn’t help but admit that Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 possessed a quality that defied simple analysis and subsequent dismissal. The painting’s sense of abstract motion – delineated by cones and cylinders in shades of gold, ochre and brown – seemed to render it simultaneously irrational and logical. The Frenchman’s effort had captured, in artistic form, the paradoxes that might or might not be inherent to the pesky and oft indigestible impacts of quantum theory.
He stared at the painting, trying to make sense out of it, trying to see something beyond the mere image. Suddenly, a newborn baby materialized swathed in an inner light that brought to mind the multi-hued luminosity of a brilliant sunrise. She floated a few feet away, just beyond his reach. Was he dreaming? If so, the dream bore a potency he had never experienced. Sitting up, he tentatively extended a hand to touch the tiny figure. But at the moment contact should have occurred, the apparition disappeared.
Albert was puzzled yet too tired to contemplate. His youth was behind him, having turned sixty in March, and his waking energy level had decreased even as his mass had increased. He supposed there was a formula linking a person’s tiredness with their age and rotundity. If so, he was not the man to seek it. Still, on the surface it would seem that such a theoretical formula was an inverse of E=mc², whereby even a modest increase in mass could lead to a tremendous increase in energy.
Thinking of his famous equation ignited fresh concerns about tomorrow’s visitors and the purpose of their meeting. How a thing so elegant as a formula relating mass, energy and the speed of light could become, some thirty years later, the basis for such troubles was a thing he’d never contemplated. Yet perhaps that belief wasn’t entirely true. Perhaps his subconscious mind indeed had noted the possibility decades ago but had refused to allow it full entry into awareness, except maybe in his darkest dreams.
He closed the book and headed for the bedroom. Leo Szilárd, who had produced a nuclear chain reaction at a Columbia University lab, would arrive in less than twelve hours, accompanied by the occasionally volatile Edward Teller. Albert knew exactly what they wanted of him. He was to dictate a letter, already primarily composed by Szilárd and other fellow physicists, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Szilárd felt that the letter would carry more impact if it came from Einstein, arguably the world’s most famous scientist.
The letter would warn that it was becoming probable, based on the recent experimental work by Szilárd and others, for a chain reaction to be set up in a large mass of uranium. Such an event could unleash a vast amount of power and create large quantities of new radium-like elements. It could allow for the construction
of bombs so powerful that should one be carried by a ship into a port, detonation could destroy the entire port as well as the surrounding territory.
The letter would note that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines it has taken over, and that American research on uranium was now being replicated by German physicists at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin. To counter the inevitable conclusion that the Nazis were attempting to develop such a weapon, the United States should start its own nuclear program.
A part of him knew that the letter to Roosevelt was the right thing to do. They could not take the chance of Germany building such a bomb first. Still, another part of him nurtured doubts. He could envision a future where such atomic weapons might result in unprecedented levels of global destruction, perhaps even to the point where the human species itself would court extinction. That was good enough reason for not putting his signature to such a document.
One way or another, the dilemma would resolve itself tomorrow. He’d expended enough thought on it this evening. He got into bed, pulled a light cover up to his neck and turned out the lights.
But just as sleep seemed ready to close its net, something utterly strange happened. He couldn’t be sure of the reality of what was happening, but it seemed as if a naked woman lay nestled in bed beside him.
Was she real? Or was he was experiencing an intense dream, one in which perceptions were being lensed to such a degree that the very fabric of consciousness was warped.
The woman leaned over him, pressed her bosom against his chest. Her body gave off a swaddling energy. Her skin emitted a pleasantly tart aroma, reminding him of freshly peeled apples fated for crust and oven. The whisper of her breath tickled the brittle hairs of his neck. Her fingers delved under his nightshirt, probing and caressing.
He felt himself growing excited. The reaction served to ground the experience in the realm of the authentic. It was not a dream, not a fantasy. She felt real therefore had to be real. And yet at the same time, he knew that this could not be the case.
Whatever she was, her kinetic presence triggered a memory from more than three decades ago, when he’d worked in that patent office in Bern, Switzerland. He’d been tasked with examining the plans for The Zurich Electrical Supply Company’s invention for promoting feminine relaxation and improved health, their Premium Vibrator. Back then, he’d believed that however pleasurable such a creation, it could not compare to the organic prototype upon which it was based.
But the years had dulled such certainty, and he now acknowledged that no proof existed to support the claim, and that such a belief might represent little more than relativistic prejudice, the thrusting expression of Albert’s maleness.
She kissed the lobe of his ear, gently ran her mouth down across his cheek. Her tongue probed his lips. Their faces blended with a passion born of both familiarity and new discovery. They made love with tender urgency, a climbing couplet, swirling into and around one another, seeking and retreating. Yet as with a swirl of two noble gases that could never truly join atomic structures to form a compound, a distance remained between them, a gap that he sensed the woman refused to, or was unable to, cross.
She left him as quickly as she’d arrived, slipping out of bed and dissolving into a blur of shadows beyond the nightstand. Not until that moment did he suspect that she must have been the same woman he’d encountered on the bench outside the Bern patent office in 1905.
On occasion throughout the intervening years, Albert had thought about the phantom woman who’d called herself Stella. He’d never been able to escape the notion that her appearance and interaction with him had shortly thereafter led to the final development and publication of some of his most important theories. Special relativity, the photoelectric effect and, most germane to the letter to Roosevelt he was expected to sign, his paper on inertia and energy content. That introduction of E=mc² into the lexicon of physics and popular imagination had jump-started international efforts to unleash the energy of the atom. Could all of it in some unfathomable way have been inspired by Stella?
No physical evidence remained to prove she’d actually been there and engaged in the sex act with him. Nevertheless, a feeling of serenity and post-coital languor came over Albert. Lying there in bed he felt more at peace than he had in a long time, more attuned to the moment, less concerned about distant possibilities, about the far future.
Indeed, the development of nuclear bombs might someday threaten all of humanity. There was no getting around that possibility. Yet the insatiable Nazi war machine existed on a closer temporal horizon and represented a more immediate and fundamental threat.
He drifted into a sleep devoid of dreams, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow he would sign the letter.
* * * * *
Sexual liaisons with Einstein and Duchamp were aspects of her plan but introducing distortions into the future of the human species was not. It was an unavoidable side effect. Certain patterns had been set in motion that unlikely would have happened without her intervention. Even trapped here amid these self- aware organic entities grown of the DNA she remained, to a large extent, a creature apart, a creature of pure intellect. And yet…
Something strange was happening to her, something that defied the very nature of her normal observational identity, albeit an identity removed from its natural habitat. Rationally, she understood. Caught up in this locus enabled the conditions for bidirectional impact to occur.
Such a result had happened before of course, countless times. The pattern was a well-established aspect of her existence and should not have surprised her.
But it always did. It always felt new.
Just as she was capable of influencing Duchamp and Einstein, they were capable of influencing her, albeit on levels beneath those of intellectual consciousness. She was being swayed by the corporeal. Psychic turmoil was being planted by the erratic energies inherent to Anomalous Tripartites. Turbulent forces of physicality and emotionality were undercutting the purity of objective analysis, creating imbalances that were simultaneously exciting and disturbing.
Was this the sort of chaotic agitation that humans experienced throughout their existence? If so, how did the species survive? Did they possess some organizing principle opaque to her own perspective that allowed them to maintain a steady course and function in the midst of near-constant turbulence? Did they unconsciously recognize that mass-casualty warfare was a suitable means for maintaining long-term stability?
The questions lacked clear answers, perhaps because she was becoming too much like them. She was losing her ability to perceive the situation from a strictly rational point of view. Her manipulation of Duchamp and Einstein, whether physical, emotional or some combination of the two, was causing her to entertain upsetting ideas, including a sense of guilt that she was negatively impacting the entire future of their species.
Was it really necessary for her to escape the limitations of Duchamp’s lifestream? Did not his span of years offer an opportunity for numerous interactions with artists possessed of similar brilliance? Were not John Cage, James Joyce, Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday and Frida Kahlo equally worthy of physical and emotional entanglements? Would it really be so bad to be marooned here indefinitely, utilizing gifted humans to perpetually refuel?
No, a permanent fusion was incomprehensible. She was a visitor to a realm of Anomalous Tripartites, not an immigrant. Disengagement was vital despite her contrary desires to deepen involvement. Besides, the amalgamation had been realized. Having ensnared both Duchamp and Einstein made the expulsion inevitable. And her subsequent departure was part of the pattern.
Albert Einstein awoke in a daze and could not recall where he had previously been. Nor was he familiar with his current surroundings. It was possible he was still in some sort of dream state.
Yet even dreams have rules, he thought. Freud had claimed that dreams liberate us from the constraints of matter. Yet Albert sensed he was fettered, as if some force more powerful tha
n electromagnetism bound him to this place.
He seemed to be standing in a windowless study in front of a high bookcase crammed with texts. Across the room was a green couch and large oak desk with an antique navigation sextant resting upon it. In the far corner, a cushioned armchair of rich dark leather suggested luxurious comfort.
He returned his attention to the bookcase. Many of the texts were in Spanish, a language he couldn’t read. At random he pulled a book from the shelf. Judging by its cover, a yellow frog in a tropical forest, it seemed to be about amphibians.
And then something more startling caught his attention. His own hand. The flesh was taut, free of the age lines and liver spots indicative of his advanced years.
Running his fingers across his face and through his hair provided further evidence of a pleasing alteration. The skin was smooth, the hair short and barely touching his ears. He plucked a strand from his scalp. Even in the dim illumination he could see that it was black, not white.
He was young again.
Movement. Across the study. A man shifted his position in the armchair, which Einstein was certain had been unoccupied only moments before. The man looked vaguely familiar.
Marcel Duchamp awakened, surprised at his locale and unable to remember where he had been prior to this comfortable chair. The figure standing by the bookcase at the other end of the room grabbed his attention. The man looked very much like that famed physicist, Albert Einstein, albeit a younger version than pictured in recent newspaper photos.
Marcel arose and as he did, became aware of something extraordinary. The varied and distasteful infirmities of aging had departed, replaced by the energetic bounties of youth.
He stared at the scientist. “What has happened? Where am I?”
“I was rather hoping you would tell me.”
“Is this another of Salvador’s jokes?” Duchamp wondered. In some undefinable way, the environment reeked of Dali’s impishness.
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