Antiphony

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  These thoughts are distracting him. He must focus. He climbs the three steps, careful now—mustn’t trip—and shakes the hand of the moderator for the session, an adjunct prof at the local college, who seems genuinely enthusiastic and excited that Theodore has finally arrived and can now be introduced.

  Theodore turns his eyes to the audience, sees only a blurred mass of faces, a carpet of flesh color and earth-toned clothing. His head swims as if the room is in an ocean liner rolling to one side, the sensation of a pool of oily liquid shifting inside his head. He places his hand on the podium for balance.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for your patience.” The moderator is a stocky young fellow, Theodore knows the type. Finishing up his thesis for two or three years now, living on cheap food in campus housing, probably with a wife and a kid or two in the cramped apartment with him. Looking forward to rubbing elbows with this crowd for weeks. Lurching towards a desultory future as a prof at a community college somewhere. “It is my great pleasure to introduce to you one of the leading lights in the advancement of String Theory today, a true visionary in our field.” Theodore does not begrudge the young man casting himself together with him through the use of the word “our.” “Theodore Reveil is the John Stockbridge Fellow at the Institute for Cosmological Physics and one of the founding members of the Assembly of Particle Theorists. He is widely noted for his leadership work with the National Science Foundation and the American Physical Society and has been hailed as one of the true gentlemen in our field.” The man’s untidy beard trembles a bit as he pronounces these words. “He will be speaking to us today on the topic of his latest research in Perturbation Theory, which will be published in the March issue of Nature.” And with a mincing step to one side, he yields the stage by saying, “Please welcome Theodore Reveil.”

  What he didn’t expect, what he wasn’t prepared for, was quite this elaborate an introduction, and then, from the room full of people who had been waiting for him, a steadily rising round of applause, like a small wave that builds to something faintly menacing as it rolls up on itself and reaches the rocky shore, as if he is not just about to undertake his presentation, but has already completed it. So, at least to this extent, his reputation does precede him. But instead of reassuring him that whatever he has to say next will be accepted by these people as a kind of mildly interesting and enlightening hour of entertainment, the dozens upon dozens of hands beating together, first out of phase in the ragged disjoinder of spontaneous appreciation and then somehow falling for a moment into a kind of syncopated seven-metered rhythm—instead of giving him the confidence to simply launch into his talk (which is titled, as everyone can see projected in foot-tall letters on the screen behind him, FINITE RESOLUTION OF FOURTH-DEGREE PERTURBATION THEORY AND THE CONSEQUENT IMPLICATIONS FOR M THEORY RESEARCH), reminds him of exactly how much is at stake in the delivery of the next several hundred words that will come out of his mouth.

  He wonders now what Ilene is doing. She will be blissfully unaware of the plight he is in, having assumed that he of course found his notes upstairs in the room precisely where he must have left them. She will be settling into the chair at her cooking class, in the old house that has been converted into a combination spa, bed and breakfast, and New Age learning center that they passed on their walk through the central city yesterday afternoon, in a neighborhood that alternates between slightly rundown bungalows in need of paint with dusty front yards and the occasional Victorian two-story that has been turned into offices for struggling lawyers or architects. She will be settling herself into the chair with a pleased look on her face, the gentle smile and crinkle around the corners of her eyes that she gets when all the moving pieces of her life have come together into a moment of perfect satisfaction. There will be other middle-aged ladies and young doctors’ wives there with her, maybe ten or fifteen altogether, chattering, introducing themselves, looking forward to watching the chef from the bed and breakfast concoct several new dishes they can taste and then try to emulate at home. He wonders if this is perhaps what love is, nothing more than seeing the world through the eyes of another person, sharing the experiences of your life with them, even in imagination, inhabiting their consciousness remotely, and, in turn, wanting them to somehow also see the world as you see it too.

  He wishes he were there with her. If this universe were really nothing more than the dream of some sleeping giant consciousness, he could make this afternoon turn out exactly how he wants it to. He could slip out from under the pressure he has loaded on his shoulders, the expectations that live within the heads of the people that sit before him, staring at him, waiting for him to open his mouth and speak. If they are all living within that same being’s dream together with him, he is the same as them and can make them think whatever he wants them to think, he can make his words perform whatever magical somersaults of logic and reasoning he has been envisioning now for weeks to suitably impress them. He can be the dream and the dreamer too.

  But that is not the world he has been taught to believe in. Since his earliest days he has been told that the world is a place where one action follows another, where cause precedes effect. Where a wheel turns, and a cog in the wheel slips past a cog in an adjacent wheel and makes that next wheel turn another notch. His entire life’s work has been predicated on the assumption that he can pry open every living and non-living thing and understand their workings by digging ever deeper, down to the smallest constituent parts, breaking objects into pieces and putting them back together again to generate understanding and knowledge. He has been taught to believe that there is a simple and beautiful language that describes every kind of action and reaction he can observe, expressed by nothing more than numbers and letters and the relationships between them. Everything worth knowing can be boiled down to this—to the kinds of equations that are lodged in his laptop computer, waiting for him to release them onto the screen.

  His words and his actions are the only things that matter. He cannot dream an escape from this. His decisions at every point in life are what make his life up, what determine its outcome. And so, he asks himself for guidance now. He has never been a religious man, and he certainly has never prayed, but he asks now for the right words to come, for something deep inside to inspire him. And, to his great surprise, what does come out is this:

  “What if the universe, instead of being a giant machine, as we have looked at it and studied it for the past three hundred years, is really a giant thought?”

  The words are as startling to him as they appear to be to the people in the front row whose eyes he sees looking back at him. He realizes that even with this first sentence he has betrayed Ilene—who sits blameless in her cooking class in another part of the city, what seems a very great distance away from him—and their future life together, and all the work both she and he have done to get them where they are, but he understands now that it is time for him to begin.

  2

  “WHY IS IT that the more we discover about the world—the universe—around us, the less we really know about it? We dive deeper and deeper into the realm of subatomic particles, quarks and gluons and leptons, we give these new particles we discover every year strange names and attributes, and yet this added knowledge only seems to underscore how little we really understand. We discover more elements, more galaxies and hot burning stars racing away from us at incredible speeds. We see farther away in space and farther back in time, almost to the very first instant of creation—we can almost touch it—but the final answers always seem to escape us. The nearer we think we are to a final theory, the faster it seems to recede from view, like everything else in the expanding sphere of space. We are continually baffled by the infinities and singularities that keep popping up in our finely-tuned equations.”

  These words have rushed from his mouth in a torrent of breath, a burst of thoughts that must have been fulminating beneath his day-to-day concerns for months or maybe even years, waiting for this precise opportunity to erupt.
As much as he wishes they would stop, they are like an elemental force which, once released, must grow to take up all available space.

  “Perhaps we are not seeing with the proper set of eyes. Can it be possible that the very tools we use to view and calculate and measure the world have limited what we are able to see? If we can only prove the existence of one thing in terms of another knowable thing, we might never be able to prove, or even see, what that final thing—the entire thing—is.” This is certainly not what he intended to do. He is painting himself into a philosophical corner. No self-respecting scientist in his right mind would launch into a presentation of his career-defining research with a series of open-ended and unanswerable speculations such as this. But the mind moves faster than the tongue. And the words keep coming, trying to catch up. He draws in a gulp of air and speaks again.

  “Perhaps this is why we can only ever achieve an approximation of the truth.” Now he has found it, the way back, a loose strand in his ramblings that can lead him back towards what he really meant to tell them here today. He dares to look at the people staring up at him. One man in a tasteful gray mock turtle neck sweater meets his gaze with the squinting, screwed up eyes of a bystander who is witnessing a car wreck. “I have spent most of the past decade constructing a set of equations that will yield a result that should satisfy most, if not all, of you here in this room that the fourth term of Perturbation Theory is finite. I believe this is a great accomplishment—it certainly feels that way to me, after a lot of hard work, and false starts, and doubts about whether what I intended to accomplish was even provable. And yet, this is only the fourth term in what is, by definition, an infinite number of terms. A string—if you will pardon the expression—of ever-smaller, more insignificant, numbers that get us ever closer to the certainty of a final theory that works in every corner of the universe. But it will never be finished. Not in my lifetime, nor in yours, nor any other. We can never solve for an infinite number of terms.”

  Now, though he has succeeded in linking the point of his presentation with his initial febrile preamble, he has also quite nicely succeeded in pointing out the utter futility of his work—and, by implication, the work of all the other fine men and women in the audience, who came here this afternoon in good faith expecting little more than an informative and probably slightly tedious summary of his rather finicky sector of their professional world.

  He draws another breath and tries to settle his mind.

  If only he had his notes. His hands reach for the podium in front of him. He grasps the smooth wooden edges of it and holds on for a moment. An image flashes into his head, a memory of himself lying on the bed in their old house, the three-bedroom red brick colonial they raised their children in, in the residual waning moments of a hectic, tiring day. His eyes close in memory, and he hears the sound of his teenage son’s voice singing in the shower. The words of the song are long forgotten, a lilting pop tune from the late nineties. But the sound, the unrestrained sound of joy coming from the young man’s voice, nearly brings a tear to his eye now and he must hold it back and focus. Focus.

  His notes—if he had them here, what would they tell him? He can envision them folded over twice, once lengthwise and once crosswise, into quadrants. Two sheets of college-ruled paper filled with his cramped and nearly illegible handwriting. Key equations, the initial building-blocks of his research. And then a brilliant insight, the flash of inspiration that launched him on his way towards discovery: Each term in the theory is a kind of tightening of perspective inward, drawing his viewpoint down to a deeper layer of reality that at the same time expresses a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the universe. And so he built the rest of his research on that insight—it became simple really, years of extrapolation, research grants formalizing the request for funding that would allow him to work out and prove in minute detail a fact that, in his head, he already knew.

  He can picture these things, but now he must find the right words to say them.

  In the nook beneath the tilted top of the podium there is a digital clock that flashes both the time of day and the duration of his talk. The two numbers read:

  1:11

  0:00

  It does indeed feel as if time has stopped, but it cannot be zero o’clock. It must be one eleven, eleven minutes after one. He must not have pressed the button that starts the duration counter.

  These two numbers conspire to mock him. They are both representative of perfect states, a binary on/off expression, 1:11 representing the state where time, and hence the universe, exists, and 0:00 representing the state before, or after, time exists, when there was or will be nothing. All or nothing at all.

  The number 1:11 blinks and flashes a new number at him: 1:12.

  His son’s deep voice comes back to him, haunting, amplified by the years that have passed since that moment and by the pleasing, echoing acoustics of the shower tiles then. Of all the instruments man has fashioned over the centuries, none can match the range of pitch and expression of the human voice. Even a relatively poor singer can create an almost infinite variety of sounds by changing the shape of his throat, his mouth, his tongue, and modulating the flow of air across the vocal cords. And even everyday speaking, as Theodore is attempting to do now, projecting his voice towards the microphone so it can be amplified and carried throughout the wide expanse of this room, is a type of singing, a difference in degree, not in kind. As the next words come out, “During the course of my research,” Theodore realizes that he has changed pitch three times. During the are on a kind of default middle tone, call it A, and then he goes up a tone to B on the word course, not for emphasis, but as a matter of creating interest for the listener. Back down to A for of and my. Then up again to B on the first syllable of research, and dipping down two whole notes to G for the final syllable, search.

  Re- search. Searching over—and over—again.

  All this modulation in one simple opening phrase of a statement.

  “During the course of my research,” Theodore continues singing, “I have come to think of Perturbation Theory, and, in fact, String Theory in general, as a kind of directional sign that is true, that is entirely valid, in and of itself, but is not our final destination, the final Theory of Everything we really want to achieve. It is an arrow pointing towards a deeper reality, the ultimate truth.”

  “Where do all the infinities and singularities in our equations come from?” He looks around the room and sees that he has at the very least grabbed their attention, if not their admiration. “Could it be that we are missing something that we are not even capable of seeing, at least with our current way of looking at the world?”

  “Could these zeros and lazy eights be telling us something very important that we are simply choosing to ignore?”

  He has veered off track once more, away from the comforting set of certainties described by his computer slides. Maybe it would be a good idea to click the remote and display one of those slides on the screen. But another image has entered his head, an image of madness: a disembodied face, an ivory mask floating above a black pool of water, its eyes empty, mouth unsmiling. The mask hovers for a moment over the water and then, what seems to fill Theodore’s head, a rustling sound of a wind, a current flowing across the black water as the empty face moves over it. The room before him collapses, the dozens of people and the walls and ceiling and floor collapse; the very substance of time and space have collapsed and there is nothing left before him but a void. A void he must fill. That voice, which called to him inside his head, whose was it? Was it his own?

  A grain of sand that grows and grows.

  In the next instant, the room is back and all the people with it. Time begins again. And they are watching him as if he never left them.

  It is hard to imagine, but quantum theory states that in every second the universe and everything in it essentially disappears and then reappears in a slightly different, changed state—thousands of times. Perhaps he has merely experienced some
sensation of this quantum fluctuation, flashing off and then on again.

  Nevertheless, they are looking at him, expecting him to speak.

  “If the universe really is nothing more than a giant thought, a thought projection emanating from some form of consciousness, and we are living within this projection, it would be impossible to discover the source of this projection by examining the projection itself in finer levels of detail. We cannot find the source of the thought by carving the thought apart, by dissecting it and relating it to itself. We can only find clues, glimpses of the true, underlying reality.” The mask hovers over the still black water. “The infinities and singularities in our equations may be telling us that what we are missing is unknowable in terms of physical science. These unsolvable terms in our equations may be roadsigns pointing to consciousness—to God—as the missing piece in the puzzle.”

  The room has grown very quiet. Only the hush of the ventilation system and the resonating presence of a single syllable his voice has pronounced. It hangs there in the air like the vibration of a giant gong that has been struck, the waves of sound still radiating outward in all directions from their source. He cannot believe it—it seems as if it hasn’t really happened—but he knows now that he has crossed a line which he can never step back over again. He has brought God into the equation.

  The eyes of the man in the turtle-neck sweater glare at him in disbelief. Others in the front row of chairs are gazing at him as if he has removed his clothes and begun performing a pornographic dance. At the far back of the room, three men arise from their chairs and glance in his direction for a lingering second, then stride towards the double doors, open them, and vacate the room, indignant, letting the doors slam shut behind them with a loud clattering groan. But at least this noise has wiped away the besmirching remnants of that syllable he pronounced, its single vowel sound still loitering in the shape of Theodore’s open mouth like a curse he has uttered—G-aw-d. It is, in fact, when he considers it, an ugly Germanic word, commenced by the guttural G, the mouth opening wide for the aw as if in shock or fright, and then clamped shut at the end by the harsh, terminal d.