The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison Macleod

  He’d grabbed the big table in the middle of the window, though, sitting there with her, he felt strangely conspicuous, as if he were the view for passers-by and not the other way around. She seemed bemused, her eyes wide, searching, over the white rim of her cup. He asked her how she was. She shrugged in that French way of hers. He crunched away on the biscotti, his mouth always full when he went to speak. She sat very straight in her chair, elegant, braced from the start. And though he’d wanted to apologize, though he’d asked her there expressly to apologize, even after he’d left it too late, he never managed the words. He smiled, at the table mostly. He played with his cuffs. He found himself flirting happily with the waitress. He never found a way to begin.

  When she first arrived in the department in 1990, there was the usual flutter of interest in a new face. She was half French-Canadian, half Egyptian. His boss had lured her, just as she’d started to publish, from McGill with a low-rung salary and a temporary visa. She spoke with a French accent. Was Muslim, someone said, but who really knew anyone’s private world in that place? He remembered noticing her heavily pregnant the following year. Was embarrassed when she saw him staring at her.

  He knew something of her research on E3 × E3 strings, one of the five rival string theories. But mostly, he knew her only to see her. Dark hair. Dark eyes. A generous mouth.

  When was that student-staff picnic? ’92? ’93? She had Aarif with her, balanced on her hip most of the day. Just another single working mom, he heard her joke modestly. No, she said, no family in Chicago. Everyone was back in Montreal. Yes, she admitted, sometimes it did make her feel unmoored in the world.

  He brushed her shoulder, accidentally. Somewhere between the chicken jambalaya and the potato salad. A sudden voltage. Maybe he said, Excuse me. Or smiled an apology.

  Jen was failing. His girl. Still with her big tail of honey hair, in spite of the chemo. Still reading every old novel she could because she’d die, she said, if she died without reading The Rainbow or The Buccaneers or Bleak House.

  He never could bear the joke.

  In bed at nights, sweating against her stack of pillows, she popped morphine pills and turned pages, awake often for the first time in the whole of the day. ‘Giles, where’s the pencil?’ she’d whisper as he slept, her hand rooting under the covers. She scribbled notes in the margins. ‘I hope she’s not going to India with him. Don’t ever go to India with a man who secretly hopes you might fail your exams.’ ‘Yes, DHL gets wordy, of course he does, but you’ve come too far now to stop.’ He was to keep her books so that one day her daughters might turn the pages and find her talking to them. So her voice would always be there for them.

  He wasn’t about to tell her that he’d been suspended from teaching. He never mentioned the disciplinary hearing.

  It was Nathalie, a woman he’d never even spoken to, who knocked on his office door one day, saying he could tell her to mind her own business. She got him a top-notch legal adviser from the union. She organized student testimonials. She offered to speak at the tribunal on his behalf. One day, in the staff cafeteria, she grabbed his palm, squinted at it and, laughing, assured him things would work out. ‘Your career line shoots right up your hand, straight as an arrow. This is just a setback.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘About your career?’

  ‘About reading palms.’

  ‘My aunt from Cairo taught me every summer. I used to work street corners in Old Montreal.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I was good. How do you think I paid my tuition?’

  There were things about Nathalie Haddad he’d never know.

  By ’93 there was infighting in the strings camp. Fewer positions. Less of the brash confidence of the early days. Because the theory was starting to look less like a theory and more like a five-headed monster. And what does she do while everyone’s arguing whose head is first for the chop? She takes up the cause of the department’s heretic. Someone who kept coming up with eleven dimensions when everyone else was counting ten.

  Yet he let her do it. His own life was imploding. Jen weighed just seventy-two pounds.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted at her one day when she wouldn’t take another sip of her Ensure. ‘Trying to kill yourself, for Christ’s sake?’

  The world was bursting its banks. Space-time itself was bending and twisting. Its coordinates were blurring. Where was his wife’s funny, dirty laugh? Where was her lap for Maggie’s sleeping head in the car? Where was the rise of her nipple for his mouth? Where would the light of her eyes go?

  He left the department at the end of that academic year. He and Nat spoke once or twice afterwards. He can’t remember if he ever asked after her. If he ever asked how things were for her, really.

  *

  Five years later, they alight from the same commuter train at Geneva. They’re a few feet from one another in the cab line. They’re both on their way to Wilson Hall. She’s hardly changed – still hasn’t lost her accent. She’s one of a number of physicists being briefed at Fermilab on the new plans for the Tevatron accelerator. Run II, they’re calling it. He’s got work in the lab. The shuttle’s late. They agree to share a cab. They each appear casual. He wonders, fleetingly, if he should sit up front with the driver. Instead, he gets the door for her, walks round to the other side, and slides on to the back seat.

  There’s a moment or two of silence.

  Then filler. Predictably, she’s struggling to get her contract renewed again. Says she’d rather be in Montreal, but it’s not as easy as you think it’s going to be to make the move back. He nods. Mentions a name, an idea or two. She asks after him. He says, yup, he’s well. Not that the old conundrum isn’t still keeping him awake at nights. Nothing new there.

  The cab driver takes in the rear-view, fleetingly interested. He imagines Dr Giles Carver is talking relationships. It’s what they don’t say, he’ll tell his wife later, that tells you the most. The driver’s smug. His own mid-life crisis is comfortably past: a mother of two who bartended downtown at Sly Al’s, showing more than her roots.

  Would he be interested if he knew that Carver was in fact referring to one of the physical world’s most stubborn mysteries? How to make gravity fit. How to make sense of it in the world of the very small as well as the very big – because there’s no escaping the fact that the very big is always, first and finally, made of the very small. If we can describe the speed and location of a cannonball at any one moment, we should be able to do likewise with one of its electrons.

  Only we can’t. The electron eludes us every time.

  Giles Carver is still trying to figure out how to translate supergravity’s non-linear language, Einstein’s difficult legacy, into orthodox quantum-speak. How to complete the puzzle of quantum-think. How to find himself a place, holding fast to gravity’s elusive coat-tails, in the fold of meaning.

  She nods. Smiles. Turns to look out the window as they pull at last into Fermilab’s west entrance, the cab scooting below the high, bright arches of the Broken Symmetry sculpture. The silence turns to calm. Her arm is warm against his. They both know this is where they begin.

  Two years together, on and off. Then last summer – was that the last time? – he’s out of control. He can’t help himself. He’s telling her to fuck off, to just fuck off out of his life.

  The day was stifling. He’d assumed the girls were too old to be interested in a Sunday walk with their old dad – but they said, sure, why not? It was too hot not to go for ice cream. They hadn’t been to Petersen’s in ages. Great, Nat said. He hustled everyone out the door, remembering his keys only at the last minute, as usual. Maybe afterwards, he said, they could stretch out in the shade of Austin Gardens.

  Most of the way, the sidewalk wasn’t wide enough for four abreast, but Nat understood. Anyway, in front of the girls, out of respect for them and Jen’s memory, he wouldn’t show her partiality. He walked with the girls. She walked behind, pretending to window-shop alon
g the way. And the girls pretended not to notice she was no longer with them.

  (‘I want to marry Christina.’ He’d said that once. One night, apparently, as they slipped drunkenly, happily, off to sleep in his bed, after sex. He was dewy-eyed as he mumbled it, she said, like a sixteen-year-old boy in love. She’d laughed. She didn’t make it into anything, and he’d liked her for that.)

  In the ice-cream parlour, it was her treat, she said. She took the order. Black Walnut for him. Blue Moon for Christina. Cookies ’n’ Cream for Maggie. Tradition, he said, and the girls beamed.

  At the booth, when she arrived with the four double-scoop cones in a tray, he was next to Christina, squeezing her knee; teasing her out of an approaching mood. She sat down next to Maggie, who sat twisting the rings on her fingers. The air conditioner rattled above their heads, but there was a breeze at least.

  They were halfway through their ice creams when he asked her what time she had to catch her train.

  ‘Giles, I only just got here.’

  ‘I think we’re all a little tired today, aren’t we, girls?’ He looked at her. ‘The weather,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘You invited me over. I booked Aarif ’s babysitter until this evening. So we could spend some time.’

  ‘I know. But I didn’t count on the day being so muggy.’

  ‘I feel fine. The air conditioning’s revived me. What about you, Maggie?’

  ‘There’s a three o’clock train on Sundays, Nat.’

  ‘Can I talk to you?’

  ‘You’re talking to me. Isn’t Nat talking to me, girls?’

  Christina and Maggie stared at the table.

  ‘We used to go to Austin Gardens with Jen,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s sort of our special place.’ Both girls looked up briefly and smiled, quiescent, the old family romance flickering to life. ‘I’ll walk you to the door.’

  By the time they got to the door, she was pale with the strain and, seeing her like that, put upon, he started shouting. He knew what he was doing even as he did it, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  Christina and Maggie could only have heard it all. The whole restaurant heard it all. But when he returned to the table, smiling, embarrassed – ‘Whoops!’ he joked – both were concentrating on their cones.

  ‘Good ice creams?’ he tried, sliding into the booth.

  ‘Delectable,’ said Maggie, still keen in those days to flex her burgeoning vocab.

  ‘Are we going to the gardens soon?’ asked Christina. But it wasn’t a question in search of an answer.

  Under the table, she stretched out her legs and rested her feet on the seat next to Maggie. Maggie pulled out a library book and spread it flat on the Formica table. Neither told him off, like they did when he barked at the parking-lot guy the week before. Neither said, how could he speak to anyone like that, let alone Nat? Instead, the three of them sank deeper into the cracked red leather of the booth, sighing, letting formalities go, as if they, together, had summoned the torpor of the day.

  He lies in his bed now, trying to catch a few hours of sleep, the blinds shut against the daze of light. But his mind is racing.

  Could it have been Nat on the phone? Did the disastrous coffee date in June heap insult on injury?

  It’s absurd. He knows it is.

  Yet he can’t chase the question from his head.

  And there are others.

  In the final days at the university, colleagues he’d worked with for years wouldn’t look him in the eye. But that was the least of it. His funding had already been curtailed. No self-respecting postgrad wanted to work with him. And, yes, he kept himself aloof where he might have more usefully played dead. He alienated people. Made a few enemies probably. It’s what happens.

  After the hearing, and the highly conditional offer of continued employment, he quit. It made little difference. Effectively, he’d already been cast into the hinterland.

  So there were those who were less than thrilled when he landed on his feet in a matter of months. At Fermilab. With a grant. A hefty grant.

  But God, that was eight years ago now. Enough time surely for anyone to grab hold of new grudges. If someone wanted to harass him, why now?

  He thinks back to his early exchanges with Ed Witten. To the M-theory stuff.

  Wasn’t there a landmark conference at Cambridge only last month? The very first to catch the public eye. Wasn’t he himself footnoted in at least a dozen of the M-theory papers? Hadn’t he just started to shine unforgivably in Witten’s reflected glory?

  Giles Carver needs answers. He will have answers.

  And he’ll grasp at them as long as his daughter lies silent as a riddle in a hospital bed.

  4

  It was December ’94. Edward Witten contacted him out of the blue. He was going to be in town for a few days. A family visit to Chicago over the holidays. Is that what he’d said? They’d agreed to meet late one frosty morning in the lobby of the Sears Tower next to Calder’s spiralling Universe.

  Witten must have been in his mid-forties then, about the same age Carver was now. Carver was then thirty-six. Recently widowed. Still sick and restless with grief at night, alone in their bed. Suddenly a single parent of two small girls. Newly outcast from the university, and still a stranger in Fermilab’s community. When Witten’s call came through, it was as if someone had thrown him a lifeline. Someone was talking to him, someone was interested, and that someone was Edward Witten.

  Carver arrived first. He and Witten had never formally met, but he didn’t doubt that he’d know him right away. You saw his eyebrows coming first – intent writ large on his face. Carver remembered them from a U of M conference in ’81.

  Witten had been one of the plenary speakers. There’d been a blizzard at the time; winds of eighty miles per hour whipping the rooftop of the lecture hall. Drifts were amassing at the windows. The overhead lights sizzled. Then died. For a minute or two the room was cast into complete darkness. Witten’s microphone failed. Naturally soft spoken, he made a joke that only the front rows heard. Who wants a roomful of high-energy physicists when you’d pay double-time for just one electrician with a pager? Somewhere a back-up generator kicked in. The lecture continued.

  Everyone arrived for the meal that night, dazed by snow. Yet within minutes, the whole room was talking about Witten’s simpler proof of the positive mass conjecture. Even to Carver, then a postgraduate, a humble initiate, Witten had seemed like a man with some kind of tongue of fire. He seemed able to speak everyone’s language, and, in the climate of the day, that constituted a minor miracle.

  As a boy, Giles Carver had juggled: apples, oranges, golf balls, ping-pong balls. He did magic too. Sleights of hand mostly with coconut shells and balls of red foam. To his surprise, he discovered in the eighth grade that algebra was like the balls and coconut shells; that its equations asked only to be arranged and rearranged until the unknown appeared – always there, both obscured and revealed by the terms of the known. As he grew older, he was drawn to the algebra of an invisible world; to the search for deep principles.

  He chose Stanford for a BSc in physics in the end, because everyone knew that only actors got less work than mathematicians. Then it was the École Normale Supérieure for master’s work in ’78 and ’79 under Joel Scherk.

  Scherk’s version of supergravity was the first in which Giles glimpsed the possibility of a multidimensional universe. Of extra dimensions that might lie hidden in the three we know so well – undreamed-of spaces that lie curled up or crunched down in what we see only as length, breadth and depth.

  Of course string theory also depended on a multidimensional space. Ten in its case. But the maths of supergravity predicted an eleventh dimension: a dimension that was infinitely long but only a tiny distance across – a trillionth of a millimetre maximum. Closer to you now than the clothes on your body. Yet because of it, one could harness, on paper anyway, the force that had eluded the quantum world so far – gravity.

  Carver couldn’t res
ist.

  He met Jen in Paris. Discovered her sitting on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, ignoring her Hemingway novel, her face turned like a sunflower to the noonday sky. In time, she joined him in Stanford, in a crummy apartment that overlooked a gas station and truck stop. He was starting his postgrad. She was teaching night classes – literature, literacy, composition.

  He found Jack Conroy’s office at the end of a remote, unswept corridor in a building far beyond the science block. He introduced himself by saying he’d worked with Scherk in Paris. He was young, gung-ho. He said, Throw it all at me: the crazy dualities, the broken symmetries, the tease of the graviton.

  ‘Okay,’ said Conroy, leaning back in an oversized La-Z-Boy recliner. ‘This is supergravity. I’ve got no fellowships or bursaries or stipends. The best I can do is get you some undergrad teaching. Kids who want to hear that Einstein was a mystic and that Bell’s theorem means we’re all actually telepathic. This is Californ-i-a, remember. And would you mind losing the lab coat? The things give me the creeps. My therapist says it’s got something to do with an unresolved fear of priests.’

  Carver got up, shook his hand, made to go.

  ‘And one other thing . . .’ The springs of the La-Z-Boy creaked. ‘This is the only time you’ll hear me say this. A good theory’s more than just a good theory. It’s more than a hunch. It’s more than an educated guess. A good theory is one that’s caught reality by the jugular. If you’re any good, you’ll know it first and prove it second. So roll up your sleeves, Giles Carver.’

  Giles Carver was good, which is why he was also trouble. To himself as much as anyone else.

  Edward Witten would have known his reputation. Yet perhaps, too, he had recognized something oddly familiar in Carver’s research. Didn’t they share, after all, a quiet passion for pure mathematics, for its symbolic language, for its uncanny magic? Certainly Witten had noticed something, for he was travelling out of his own very comfortable camp to meet a colleague who’d almost been thrown to the wolves.

  In the Sears Tower lobby, Carver spotted him coming in from Wacker Drive, stamping the slush off his boots. He introduced himself. They shook hands. They strolled over to the Calder sculpture and looked thirty feet up to its animate spheres, to its bright moving parts, like a couple of kids gazing at the kinetics of Creation. Then they hopped the elevator to the Skydeck, climbing 1,300 feet in just under a minute, their ears popping.