Antiphony

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  Fearing the worst, Theodore looks around for a bathroom, there must be one nearby. There, just down the hall. He strides quickly towards the paired doors and charges into the bright, tiled room, grateful to find that all the stalls are empty. He slides the bolt into place and drops his trousers to the floor, twisting his boxers around the dark socks on his ankles as he falls back upon the toilet seat with not a moment to spare, the contents of his bowels spilling into the echoing bowl full of water with a thundering sound loud enough that he wonders whether anyone outside the bathroom can hear it.

  Lately, he has found himself to be ravenous, eating a huge meal for dinner, like the steak he had last night, and following it up with another big meal for breakfast—two eggs over easy, sausage links, bacon, toast, juice and coffee—and he wonders where it all goes. He hasn’t gained an ounce. He has always had a tight-knit, wiry sort of body, but he’s been eating twice as much as usual. Then, after these huge meals, he will find himself at an inopportune moment such as this, strapped in to an airplane or in the middle of a meeting in a conference room, with a sudden and undeniable need to go.

  Now that he is situated on the hard narrow seat, he takes a look at his surroundings. This is the kind of tight, confining space he never feels he will make it out of alive; the sharp smell of urine and trace of blue sanitized water from the toilet cause his nostrils to pinch. He has to shift his knees at an awkward angle so that his legs will fit between the jutting stainless steel paper dispenser and the opposite wall of the stall.

  Theodore often finds himself in situations such as this, in the wrong place at the wrong time, slightly out of phase with the world around him. He should be at the ballroom where his esteemed colleagues are gathering to hear him speak. But instead he is here, contemplating his hairy kneecaps and wondering where in the world his notes might be.

  Ilene said she saw them in the room—they must be there. Everything is okay, he will finish here and calmly go upstairs and find them. He envisions them lying on the bedside table next to the clock radio, or perhaps on the desk next to the room service menu and the cunning futuristic lamp. He sees the sheets of paper engulfed in a kind of glow that makes them stand out against the objects around them. They are there, they must be. They contain, in a mere pair of handwritten pages, the accumulated wisdom of the past seven years of his life’s work, the most comprehensive and elegant summary of Perturbation Theory imaginable.

  A surprisingly rich scent of coffee emanates from the bolus of digested food he has released into the ceramic basin beneath him. Against his doctor’s orders, he has once again taken up drinking coffee for breakfast, and he has begun to notice that his excrement somehow retains the smell of it, overpowering all the other ingredients that go into producing this concentrated distillate of his self. This is finished. He wipes himself, stands and pulls up his pants. These furtive movements initiate a startling sudden whoosh behind him. He turns to watch the waste recede into the plumbing on a cascade of fresh blue water and as he does, a series of words that has been etched into the stall catches his eye.

  THE WORD IS A LIE

  Or, maybe it is THE WORLD IS A LIE, it is hard to tell—there may be an “l” there, squeezed between the “r” and the “d.” The graffiti has been casually sketched onto the metal wall with a pen or a knife—or both. There is clearly blue ink in the outlines of the letters, but there is an indistinct mark between the “r” and “d” that makes the message ambiguous.

  THE WORD IS A LIE. What does that mean? He looks in the mirror as he washes his hands and considers the face that stares back at him. Dark hair and blue eyes that pale into gray when the weather turns grim. Narrow cheekbones that frame his nose and mouth, and a goatee speckled with blond that Ilene has never really liked, his attempt to look professorial. He would never lie—has never lied. It is outside the realm of possibility for him. His entire life has been dedicated to finding truth, to peeling back layers upon layers of obfuscation and going directly to the most basic reality of human existence. Perhaps he has been set upon this course, this life of fitful lurching in the direction of truth, by an incident that occurred when he was only six years old. He was in first grade, and they had seen fit in his primary school to organize the desks of the students in clusters of four, so that instead of having ranks of students facing straight ahead towards the teacher dispensing her wisdom at the front of the class, the students paid attention mostly to each other. An educator somewhere must have thought this arrangement would lead to a more democratic form of scholarship, students learning from each other, through teamwork and collaboration, but, as Theodore has discovered through his decades in academia since, nearly all knowledge must either be handed down from a more experienced source or painstakingly discovered on one’s own. Nearly every committee he has ever been entangled with only served to produce confusion, delay, or outright lies.

  Because his desk happened to be the one in the cluster facing the rear of the class, away from the chalkboard and the teacher’s desk, he spent nearly the entire first year of school twisted around in his chair, trying to see what the teacher might have to tell him. This arrangement also afforded him the opportunity to stare unabashed at the studious girl with the curly light brown hair whose desk was directly across from him in the cluster. He cannot remember her name. She never spoke a word to him, nor he to her. But she seemed to have something indefinable that he wanted. Then, shortly before Christmas break—they still called it that then—she came to school one day with a milk truck calendar. Now he knew precisely what she had that he wanted. The calendar was fashioned out of creamy beige cardboard, with the name of a local dairy on it, propped upright by a tongue of coarse brown cardboard, and the small rectangular pages of the calendar itself attached to the truck where the milk would have been stored. One day, he found himself in the classroom alone, back from lunch or recess early, and he seized the opportunity to take the calendar into his hands, lift the top of his desk, and stow the calendar in it. It was his now. Then, when the girl came back and discovered that the calendar had gone missing and the kindly teacher asked the classroom full of students if anyone had seen it, he had been forced to confront the fact that he must either confess to taking it or sit there, his face burning with the effort of not saying anything, knowing that the milk truck was parked snugly in his desk, hidden beneath his reading books, erasers, and pencils.

  It must have been the next day, or maybe the very same afternoon, when his mother challenged him, inevitably, with his crime. The teacher, as was her right, had searched through the desks of all the students, and had found the calendar in his. When his mother asked him whether he had taken the calendar, he stuck to his baldfaced lie. He will never forget the way his mother dug her fingers into the placid flesh of his upper arm and yanked him, her face as red in anger as his was in shame, pulling him forcibly with her to the car for a trip to the principal’s office after school. He has never even come close to telling another lie since that day, nor will he ever.

  Entering the corridor where the three elevators are lined in a row, he sees the door to one of them is open, waiting for him, inviting him to ride to his room and gather up his notes. But even as he is letting the door to the bathroom swing shut behind him, the familiar face of Pradeep Malawar appears as if from nowhere, a shadow that has materialized into another obstacle on his path. Pradeep seems just as startled to see Theodore emerging from the washroom as Theodore is to see him. Pradeep’s dark face expands into a grimace, hardly seeking to conceal his surprise at finding Theodore here.

  “Isn’t your presentation at one?” The two of them bump into each other this way so often in the cramped corridors among the cubicles at the Institute, that no other greeting is necessary. Pradeep’s office adjoins Theodore’s own, and Pradeep will often pop over unannounced and lean his long, lanky frame at a rakish angle against Theodore’s bookshelves to bounce a new idea for tackling a research problem off of him or discuss a particularly sticky matter of interdepartmen
tal politics. Sometimes, when Pradeep’s feeling playful or wants to get a rise out of him, he calls him Teddy, and it does indeed annoy Theodore to no end.

  “It is. I’m on my way now.”

  “You better get going. I was just by the ballroom and people are already waiting.”

  How much time do I have? Theodore wonders if he might already be late. A watch would come in handy now—maybe Ilene’s was running slow. But he doesn’t want to let Pradeep see him sweat. Never let them see how little confidence you have, or how little you know. That has always seemed to be the trick to getting ahead in the academic world, where every sign of weakness, in an argument or a grant proposal or a presentation such as the one he is about to give, will be pounced on and attacked, a point of leverage for someone else to advance their own career.

  “I’ll see you in there. Are you coming?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.” Pradeep places his arm around Theodore’s shoulders. “Just talk slowly, and take a deep breath now and then. You’ll be fine once you get rolling.”

  “Thanks,” he says, and turns to catch the elevator, as the doors are about to close. Pradeep is ten years younger, and some within the department might say that the arc of his career has already eclipsed Theodore’s, but there is a certain unrepentant brashness about Pradeep that may disqualify him in the minds of the Board members for the position of Research Director, a job both of them desperately want. The ride is quick, thank God. There are only four floors in this hotel, and their room is four fifteen, an auspicious number—tax day, and also his birthday. The real beginning of spring in the Midwest.

  Theodore takes the key card from his sportscoat and slips it into the slot. The light above it blinks red once, then changes to green. Inside the room, it looks as if Ilene’s giant suitcase has exploded. The contents she spent so much time carefully folding and packing into its broad bulk have been ejected into the room, extracted and strewn about, her gym shoes on the bed, her blouse from yesterday evening that she wore on the plane, the slip she had on last night at dinner, bras and underpants and a curling iron and a cosmetics bag flung open with eyeliner and mascara and cold cream on the bedside table along with some loose change and a bottle of unsweetened ice tea she bought and the oversized novel she has been reading for about a month flipped open face down to the page she last read this morning before breakfast. Three pairs of jeans laid out at the foot of the bed, remnants no doubt of the decision-making process for what to wear this afternoon to the class and massage.

  When he asked her why she had to pack so many things, she told him that she needed to have options, several outfits to choose from that might work, depending on her situation and mood. Magazines about movie stars and their tragic lives on the other bedside table, near the wall, a box of chocolate truffles from the airport newsstand, breath mints, a dinner roll she wrapped in a napkin from the restaurant last night and brought back to the room in her purse, in case she wanted a midnight snack. Three sweaters and two different jackets in case it gets cold. Nylon stockings and four pairs of dress shoes—all of these things she so carefully packed have been unfolded from a state of order into chaos. He sees this mess as if it were that very first explosion that brought forth the universe, the remnants of that initial state of perfect order and unity now unfurled into the infinite variety of states and substances he sees before him. Standing there, scanning the disarray, he pictures his goal of finding a single, unifying theory of everything as nothing more than trying to put all the clothes back in the suitcase, enfolding all the physical remnants of that initial explosion back into a single, unitary point. In two days, when their trip is over, all the clothes and shoes and jackets and toiletry items will go back into the bag, folded up once more into their initial state of order. Everything around him is enfolding and unfolding, from order to chaos and back. His life as a human being is an arc of unfolding from a single cell into a fully grown and developed physical form and then back again into nothing but the constituent parts. Perhaps, he supposes, the original order of the clothes as Ilene packed them in the suitcase still exists somewhere, in a higher dimension, like one of Plato’s perfect forms, and the clutter and confusion he sees before him is simply a manifested reality in our dimension, which must always contain the original higher order within it.

  He goes to the bedside table where the clock radio stares at him and tries to avoid reading the time—nine minutes until he must be at the podium. He lifts the gossip magazines to see if his notes are there, hiding underneath, where he envisioned them.

  No, not there.

  Neither are they on the desk next to the room service menu. He picks up dresses and blouses and throws them aside. The notes are not on the bed. He rummages through the remaining contents of the suitcase to see if she might have tossed them in there. He sifts through his small carry-on bag and also his briefcase, the deep central pocket for his laptop and the several zippered pouches where his papers and books are stowed. There are files from the latest staff meeting last week, and correspondence for the faculty evaluation committee he has been elected to chair, but not the two heavily creased pieces of paper he needs most.

  The bathroom is just as much of a mess. Both of their toothbrushes are on the sink, along with his shaving kit, four-bladed razor, shaving cream, and a tube of toothpaste squeezed halfway flat. A crusted pale green globule of toothpaste clings to the rim of the sink. Nothing. No sign.

  He looks in the closet and in every empty drawer of the bureau where the flat-screen television resides. Maybe he’s making too much of this. The outline of his presentation is on the slides on his laptop, already set up in the ballroom an hour ago. Surely he can remember the most important details of what he wants to tell them—this is his life’s work. He has something important to say, and he should be able to say it to a room full of two hundred people just as easily as he could discuss it with Pradeep in the coffee shop near the quad. He can remind them that String Theory does not rest on as sound a foundation as most of them would like to believe. They won’t want to hear it, but String Theory is only a very good approximation at best, a self-referential mathematic house of cards at worst. Many of his colleagues carry on with their work trying to find the Theory of Everything without realizing that String Theory can only model the universe up to a certain approximation. And the method of achieving this approximation is called Perturbation Theory. It’s the underpinning of all the other work his colleagues are doing, yet they conveniently tend to forget it or overlook it. They take it as a given. Pradeep and some of the other young physicists he congregates with sometimes call it Masturbation Theory, when it does occasionally come up in the course of their avid conversations about work—because they think it is a pointless way to waste research time that leads nowhere and can be done all by yourself, over and over again, to infinity.

  With String Theory, Theodore knows he can find the answer to nearly every physical question by adding up the sum of an infinite number of terms—this is Perturbation Theory at work. Each of the succeeding terms is smaller than the one before, so he can get a pretty good approximation by calculating the first few terms. However, as Theodore likes to remind his colleagues, there is no proof that String Theory—or the answer it provides to any question—is really complete, or finite, without proving that every single one of the infinite number of terms is finite.

  He has always envisioned Perturbation Theory as a long chain of hypothetical numbers, looming large in the foreground and stretching off into the far distance, growing ever smaller as they recede from view. The first three of these large terms have been proven—they are indeed finite. And now, with his years of hard work, he has laid claim to the fourth one, still large and quite important—a vital underpinning to String Theory. But without his notes, will he remember how to tell them that he has proven that this fourth term in Perturbation Theory is finite? Even in his own mind, the intricate series of interlocking equations in his proof seems to shift and squirm, the additional assumptions he has
developed to stack on top of the theory and take it to another level seem to evaporate into a kind of hazy mist. Perhaps the missing notes have brought to light his own uneasiness with his accomplishment—perhaps his proof is not really true. He has had Pradeep go over his math time after time, and Pradeep has assured him that it all ties in. The key equations will be there on the screen, projected from his laptop. All he has to do is fill in the background and walk them through how he conducted his research and achieved his proof. But it is all very intricate, and it rests on those slippery new assumptions that may or may not be true. That is what he needs the notes to explain—those notes provide the very core of the research, the hours upon hours of grinding, hard-won logic that separates this work from a speculative grad school thesis.

  A pair of Ilene’s high-heeled black dress shoes are on the floor—one standing upright and the other tipped over onto its side. Also, he sees now a rubber band on the crisp wrinkled sheets of the bed. No, not a rubber band—it is one of her hair ties, which she used to put her hair up in a ponytail when she went for a run on the treadmill a couple of hours ago, not long after they finished having sex. He cannot understand why she is so driven to exercise. She is a fanatic about it—perhaps it gives her something to relieve the boredom of her days at home alone—but the more she does it, it seems, the broader she gets. Her legs and waist and haunches have grown thick, and he blames the exercise and fad dieting for it. Still, he has remained no less aroused by her presence in bed next to him night after night, in the silky underpants and pajama top she usually wears to sleep. He cannot understand nor have sympathy for those men like him over fifty who require a pill to produce an erection. The slightest glimpse of thigh or curvature of cleavage from most any woman will prod him into a semi-hard state, and he nearly always wakes up with a thick stiffness under the sheets, ready for action. Thankfully, Ilene has matched his ever-growing interest in sex—he wishes she had been as adventurous when they were younger and could do more about it. This morning, for instance, she surprised him by rolling the very same hair tie she would later use to put her hair up at the gym onto him, though he was already in good working order—a parlor trick to harden him even more that she must have gleaned from one of her many women’s magazines that promise to reveal lists of “Fifteen Things He Thinks About in Bed” and “Seven Steps to Your Best Orgasm Ever.”