Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  “Yes, but you haven’t said why none of it makes sense, why no one can actually generate our sensory world out of all that craziness,” said Morgensen. “Instantaneous action at a distance, time stretching, cats being alive and dead at the same time, all of that. I personally think you guys just made it up.”

  “Because you’re a primitive creature and not a scientist,” said Zwick. “A lovely though primitive creature.”

  “I beg your pardon: I am a scientist.”

  “No, you’re a pseudoscientist. Sociology is a pseudoscience, using statistical methodology to massage a set of lies. It’s like phrenology. It doesn’t matter how accurate you are with the fucking calipers or whatever, the underlying theory is crap, as are the data sets. Science is physics: theory, analysis, experiment. Everything else is dogshit.”

  “And see who gets another crack at my milk-white body,” said Morgensen, “probably not Mr. Dogshit here.”

  “And yet from another perspective,” said Zwick instantly, “we see that sociology is actually thequeen of the sciences, profound, illuminating, un-dogshitlike….”

  “But according to you, string-theory physics is dogshit, too,” said Lola.

  “No,” Zwick replied, “it has the shape of real science, it mathematically predicts stuff we know to be true already, but it’s really unlikely to be anything but a kind of, I don’t know,theology, which is why I bailed. It’s gotten absolutely medieval, guys spinning out theory that there’s no hope of ever confirming because there’s not that much energy in the universe, I mean to get down to the strings or the dimensions wrapped up in the Planck length. And the cosmos stuff, yeah, but it’s like looking for a cat in a blacked-out room. Dark matter? Dark energy? Please! But biology, especially neuro, is where physics was a hundred years ago. We’re generating volumes of new, real information just like Rutherford and all of them. We can look inside the brain now, actually watch it thinking, just like they discovered how to look inside the atom. Magnetic resonance imaging technology and the cyclotron are machines of the same order of importance. Plus, we have genomics now, which means we can trace the genetic switching that creates learning, that creates behavior, down to the molecular level. So psychology is out the window. I mean it was always crap, but now we know it’s crap. There’s no psych to ‘ology’ on.”

  During all this Paz had been quiet, sucking it in along with a lot of Bacardi, and having obsessive thoughts about Beth Morgensen. He hadn’t thought about her for three minutes in over eight years, but now she seemed to have moved in and taken a lease on large tracts of his midbrain. What she was like in bed, how different from the Lola, the wife, how light the relationship had been, how much fun, how little like warfare. Although he knew that it was relationships just like that in their many dozens, in their ultimate ennui, that had driven him into matrimony. But still…

  More to clear his mind of this garbage than because of any real engagement, he said, “Bullshit. There’s no way you can know that.”

  “Well, not now, but we will. The whole field is being systematized, physicalized, which is the characteristic of all real science. We’re moving toward a real understanding of the neural code, the way the brain actually works, in exactly the way that we really understand how the underlying properties of quarks establish the qualities of elementary particles, which establish the qualities of chemical elements, then molecules, then life, and so on.”

  “Never,” said Paz.

  “Why, never? What’s your argument?”

  Paz stalled by doing a superfluous check on the grilling meat. A woman’s face and body floated into his mind, long and white, frizzy brown hair, pointy nose, slanted gray wolf eyes, small hard breasts, Silvie the philosophy major and the theory of logical types.

  “The theory of logical types,” Paz said, “Alfred North Whitehead.”

  Both women were delighted to see Zwick brought up short by this. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” he demanded.

  “Because a set can’t be a member of itself,” said Paz, drunkenly confident. “Say that total knowledge we have about any given subject is a set, set A. And say all the things science or people, the culture, knows is another set, set B. Any number of set A’s will fit into set B, by definition. We know everything possible about how to make flan, about the mass of the particles, about the number of barbers in Cincinnati, right? But the set ‘understanding consciousness’ is a set of a different type. It’s not another set A. It’s larger than set B, which is actually made up of all human minds. For the human mind to understand consciousness would be a violation of the theory. That particular A just won’t ever fit into the B, ever.”

  Zwick stared for a moment, rolled his eyes, and said, “That is complete and utter horseshit.”

  “Plus,” said Paz, “the mind is not necessarily a product of the brain. You can’t disprove dualism, and if you deny it, it’s just another belief. It’s not science.”

  “‘The mind is not a product’…what is this, the Middle Ages? There is no mind. What we interpret as consciousness is an epiphenomenon of an instantaneous electrochemical state generated by a piece of meat. It’s an illusion devised by evolution to organize and coordinate sensory data with actions.”

  “Then who am I talking to, and why should I believe you any more than you believe in spirits?”

  “Hey, the proof is let me go into your skull and make a couple of tiny cuts and there won’t be a you anymore. Trust me on this, pal.”

  “I do trust you, but it don’t mean shit. I could go in there and shoot my radio while it’s tuned to Radio Mambi. The radio won’t make noise anymore; does that mean that Radio Mambi just ceased to exist? Not that that would be a bad thing.”

  “What, you think that there’s a substance called ‘mind’ that’s somehow floating in the ether and our brains just pick it up?”

  “Not necessarily, but it’s just as logical as saying that mind is determined by the meat. And it would account for demons and dreams and clairvoyance better than your way.”

  “Jesus! Thisis the Middle Ages. Where to begin? Okay, first of all, any dualism falls before Occam’s razor-that is, it adds an unnecessary level of complexity to a phenomenon that can be fully explained-”

  “Fuck Occam and fuck his razor,” said Paz, and then, “Wait a second, hold that thought!”

  A tiny clock had just rung its notional alarm in Paz’s nonexistent mind, and he got up and snatched the cover from the grill, revealing racks of glistening, steaming ribs at the precise moment at which they were perfectly done.

  “Let’s eat,” said Paz, and everyone applauded.

  During the actual dinner, Lola turned the conversation artfully away from cosmological themes, drawing Beth out about her work, which was a study of the lives of Miami street prostitutes, or girls who let boys kiss them for money, as they explained to Amelia, and herself supplied numerous amusing anecdotes about life as a neuropsych resident in the emergency room, her current duty, and also about going through med school with Zwick, his complete incompetence at any healing task, apparently a man who had never once found a vein on the first try, and often not on the twelfth either. Zwick took this good-naturedly enough, asserting that he’d only become a doctor to be able to do fiendish experiments on human beings and had no guilt about it at all.

  They drank nearly half a gallon of the Spanish white, and after they cleared away and served dessert, Paz brought out a bottle of Havana Club anejo rum, and they sipped off that for a while until the child got cranky and had to be dragged off to bed.

  “I’m scared to go to sleep, Daddy,” she said when he’d got her under the covers at last.

  “You’re so tired you’ll be asleep before you know it.”

  “Yes, but what if the dream animal comes back?”

  “It won’t. It’s bothering another little girl tonight.”

  “Who?”

  “A naughty girl, probably. Not like you.”

  “But what if another animal
comes?”

  “Well, in that case, would you like to borrow my enkangue? No dream animals are going to mess with that.”

  “Uh-huh. Abuela made that for you, didn’t she. To protect you from the monsters.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mommy says it’s just superstition.”

  “Mommy’s entitled to her opinion,” said Paz blandly and slipped the charm on its thong over his head. He tied it carefully to the bedpost. “Don’t open it, okay?”

  “What will happen?”

  “It might stop working. Now, good night.”

  “I want a story.” She got one and held out for just three pages of Charlotte’s Web.

  Back on the patio, Paz slipped an Ibrahim Ferrer CD into the machine and stood listening to the mellow voice singing an old bolero, music from the great age of son, the 1940s, his mother’s music. It was velvet dark now, insects buzzing in the trees, jasmine floating in the air, the only light coming from citronella candles in yellow glass jars on the table. He put an arm around his wife’s shoulders and led her into a close dance. From a distance, from out in the dark yard, he heard the sound of Zwick and Beth having an argument.

  “What’s all that about?” he asked into her ear.

  “She’s drunk and belligerent. He doesn’t respect her mind enough. He doesn’t think people who want to have serious careers should have kids. She was looking at Amy like she wanted to kidnap her. The biological clock is running down on old Beth, and a tenure-track associate professorship don’t seem to be filling the void, nor do brilliant heartless dudes like Bobby Zwick, the poor bitch.”

  “You’ve been there.”

  “I have. With guys like that, too.” She gave him a hard squeeze.

  “What I get for being a dummy.”

  “You’re not a dummy, dummy.”

  “But not as smart as Zwick.”

  “No, but you’re cuter. I’m not sure anyone is as smart as Zwick. Although that line about Whitehead threw him a little. You never fail to amaze me.”

  The sounds of argument faded, succeeded by some weeping, some softer talk; then, the faint creak and rattle of a rope hammock.

  “Uh-oh, do you think they’re doing it back there, in our hammock?” Paz asked.

  “I hope so. They can warm it up for us. God, when was the last time we did it in the yard?”

  “Not since Amelia learned about doorknobs.”

  “Go have children,” Lola said.

  Zwick wandered back and sat at the table and poured himself a couple of fingers of old rum. Paz and Lola joined him.

  “Where’s the girlfriend?” Lola asked. “Strangled?”

  “Passed out in the hammock. It’s all your fault, Paz, you and your daiquiris and your anejo and your ontological speculations. Did you know that physics is a patriarchal conspiracy to promote a dominant worldview? As is medicine.”

  “Well, when you solve the mystery of consciousness it won’t matter,” said Paz. “You can recode everyone’s brain.”

  Zwick laughed, a little more elaborately than the comment deserved. “Yeah, and what if that changes physics? Listen, you want me to tell you the secret of the universe?” He mimed a paranoid looking over both shoulders. “Don’t tell anyone. Okay, so let’s say we have these vast pillars of physics, relativity and quantum electrodynamics, and they’re both as elaborately confirmed as anything in the world. Maybe too elaborately confirmed, out to a part per billion or more. Now, you’re a detective, right? What if I told you that every time there’s been a physical breakthrough, we’ve found a piece of abstract math that’s just tailor-made to fit the new concept? Einstein just happened to find Riemann geometry to fit general relativity. And the quantum boysjust happened to find matrix algebra and tensors. And when they first proposed string theory, it just happened to fit Euler’s beta-function, a two-hundred-year-old piece of math that had never been used for anything before. And Calabi and Yau’s canoodling with hyper-dimensional geometries just happened to describe how the extra dimensions required by string theory are curled up. Not to mention the fact that a whole bunch of universal constants just happen to lead to a universe where conscious life evolves, and if one of them was changed even a tiny bit there’d be no stars, no planets, no life. What would you say to a case like that?”

  “I’d look for a frame-up. Or it might just be a slam dunk.”

  “Yes! But which? That’s the killer question. Now let’s say they confirm string theory physically. Let’s say it’s Hawking’s conjecture that black holes radiate outside their event horizons, and we find a black hole small enough to study and string theory predicts that radiation exactly. Then we know it’s true, hallelujah! Physics has the theory of everything at last, except…except what if we made it all up? Observation is a slender reed when you come right down to it. Thousands of astronomers observed the skies and fit their observations into the Ptolemaic system, making loops and littler loops to save the appearances until the whole thing collapsed, but string theory can’t collapse because it’s a theory of everything, everything is already accounted for, and confirmed by a zillion observations. But observation itself is a product of consciousness, and we don’t know what that is!”

  “Why you’re a doc now.”

  “Why I’m a doc. So let’s say I’m wrong, John Searle and all of them are wrong, consciousness is not a little trick of the brain, let’s say it’s its own thing, a basic constituent of the universe on a par with space-time and mass, that only occasionally comes to rest in brains but has its own life, maybe down in the Calabi-Yau spaces or out in some connecting universe. That’s your substance dualism, yes? You and Descartes. Then you could have your gods and demons, hey? Your miracles.”

  “But you don’t believe that,” said Paz. His throat was suddenly dry, and he poured himself a little of the fruit juice they had laid out for the child.

  “Nah, this is just drunk talk. But let’s say it is true we did discover the secret of consciousness, just like we discovered the secret of the physical world, and then there would be these two new pillars of knowledge, the exterior and the interior worlds reaching up to the heavens, and then some Einstein would come along and figure out how they locked together. Then what? We might hear a buzzer, likeennnnnhk! And across the sky in humongous letters, GAME OVER. Or we might learn not only how to observe the quantum world but to actually change it. Actually manipulate the intimate fabric of space-time and mass-energy!”

  “This is not going to happen soon, is it?” asked Lola. “Because I just dropped off a big load of dry cleaning.”

  Zwick snatched up a candle and held it under his chin, and in a horror-movie voice intoned, “We would be like GODS! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  And they all laughed, but each was a little uneasy in the laughter, each for a different reason.

  Six

  Jenny tossed a broken banana into the blender to keep company with the celery, the beets, the spirulina protein powder, and the psyllium husk extract and goosed the HI button. Through the glass top she watched the smoothie come into being, a pinkish gray vortex. Making the midmorning smoothie for Rupert was one of Jenny’s tasks, along with feeding the birds, the cats, the boyfriend, and recently Moie, the Indian; or the Runiya, as she had to remember to call him. But Moie didn’t eat, which worried her, although she herself did not think much of the cuisine at FPA. Rupert thought that it was wrong to consume animals raised for food, and thought that they should set a good diet-for-a-small-planet example, and also establish solidarity with the indigenous people of the rain forests. Rupert got Professor Cooksey to question Moie about his diet, and how to prepare it, but Moie didn’t know about any foodstuffs but meat (in which he included fish, which in turn included turtles, reptiles, and waterfowl) and seemed somewhat affronted to be asked about “women’s things.” Meat and women’s things were how he divided edible substances.

  She was supposed to watch him as well, which was not difficult, much easier than minding a kid, for he was in general
docile and gentle. In the mornings, when she did her chores, and during the times, as now, when she had to prep and serve food, she parked him in front of the big TV in the living room. They had cable, and she usually punched up a nature program for him. He seemed to like these, and he would also sit solemnly with her while she took in One Life to Live, her favorite show, although here she had to explain what was going on, because it was kind of hard to get into the plot if you hadn’t been watching for a long time.

  She poured the smoothie into the special smoky green glass that Rupert liked to drink it from, placed it on a serving tray, added Luna’s herbal tea and Geli’s coffee and Professor Cooksey’s regular tea, extra-strong with milk, a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a Sprite for herself, and brought it into the office. They were all talking about Moie and what to do about him now that there was this murder of the old Cuban guy, and she was sort of interested in that, so after she’d placed the tray on the table and everybody had their stuff, she sat down in a chair away from the meeting table and listened. That was cool according to Rupert because she wasn’t to think of herself as anything but a full member of the community and not just, like, a maid or anything. Which she mostly thought. She had been an actual maid at one time and so she knew the difference.

  Jenny thought that coming into a meeting in the middle of it was a little like coming into the middle of One Life to Live, it took a while to figure out what was going on, but you knew the characters, so in a little bit it made sense. Luna was all about using Moie to make a big stink about the people trying to cut down his forest. She had a friend who was a TV producer on Channel Four, and she thought she could get a feature made, and also some of the national enviro groups might pick it up. It was a great story, how this little guy had traveled all that way from South America in a canoe. Geli said, unfortunately he’s not a Cuban, and when Luna asked what that meant, Geli said, he’s illegal, he’s in the country illegally, and if he comes out in public the INS will arrest him and he’ll be stuck in Crome Avenue behind a wire with all the Haitians, and then Luna said, oh, shit, I didn’t think of that, and then added, Rupert, you should talk to your congressman, because Rupert gave a lot of money to this congressman, Jenny always forgot his name, something like Woolite, and he sometimes got him to do stuff, like make a speech about something the FPA was hot on, in the Congress. But Rupert said, maybe that’s not such a good idea at this point until we have clarified about this murder. And he asked Professor Cooksey what he thought, was Moie capable of killing someone that way?