Antiphony

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  He watches her for another moment and envies her ignorance of this resonant song she never hears herself sing. Most mornings, she is asleep long after he leaves for the office. She has nothing in particular to wake up for, no schedule of appointments, meetings, conference calls. No email to answer, other than the ones her friends send her with mildly off-color jokes or videos of odd and amusing incidents. She has no projects on deadline or research to push forward. Sometimes he wonders how she can stand it. Her days are filled with television talk shows and leisurely late-morning chats on the phone with her lady friends and afternoons at the fitness club or the adorable shops in one of the nearby town centers, followed perhaps by a quick look at the Internet and maybe another round of late afternoon television while rustling up something for their dinner. And he envies this too: that she is totally comfortable living in this world without a job, an income, a body of work to justify her existence. It must be a kind of animal security she feels, which he has never been able to grant himself. She is here, in this life, and feels entirely justified in enjoying it. Theodore, on the other hand, has always felt a gnawing sense of inadequacy that he must repulse through the significance of his work. There has to be a purpose for his existence on this earth. If he is able to get up each day, go somewhere, and do something of use, he can feel that he has earned his place at the table, as it were. He can be someone.

  He wants to tell her about his night, describe it to her, to see if she can discern whether it was just a dream, or something more. There must have been something more to it, something beyond this world that can merely be heard and seen and felt. But when he thinks about how he might describe what happened, he is sure he will not be able to do it justice. He will not be able to summon the words to capture and convey the gorgeous strangeness of it all. It will only sound to her like the ravings of a madman, and she does not need that now. Not after what happened in California. Not when he will have to tell her later today about the letter he has signed and will soon be submitting to Victor.

  He reaches out his hand towards the heaving blanket and touches it, gently, for just a moment. His hand on her back beneath the blanket, sheets, and bedspread. Her breathing stops, interrupted by his touch, and he thinks she may wake. But then she gasps and takes a quick gulp of breath, and the blankets fall away from his fingers.

  In the shower, with the door to the bathroom safely shut behind him, the water hits his back like a sheet of sound. It is a wall of heat comprised of individual notes, pellets of water that come together to make one unified mass of pressure on his skin. The sound of the shower will not wake her; it is white noise, a steady hum, not a sudden jolt or creak. He usually keeps the shower going while he shaves and dresses for precisely this reason, to cover up the other noises he might make. As he hangs his head and lets the water loosen the small, knotted muscles at the base of his neck, he thinks about how many drops of water are hitting him at this very moment. With his eyes closed, he pictures the individual jets of water that shoot from the shower head and tries to do a count: probably twenty or so around the perimeter of the head, then perhaps fifteen in the next ring in, and ten within that, and maybe five more in the middle circle. So, he could guess fifty in all. This is the work of the scientist, the way his mind has been trained to function—break things down into constituent parts, then count them, analyze them, scrutinize. Figure out how one thing leads to another, how one part fits with the next. With the basic parameters established, he can flesh out the calculation. All he needs now is a time element—drops per second, but drops is not precise enough. Molecules per second is more like it. Start with drops per second and then convert a drop to a molecule by deciding or observing how many molecules are in an average drop. Then, as he thinks about it further, the other element of the equation that must be determined is force—how fast the water is coming at him. That will determine how many drops and molecules are hitting him per second.

  This is the beauty of science, what has always attracted him to it: any phenomenon or problem can be observed and analyzed and quantified this way. It’s the same kind of thinking he had been trying to apply to the question of how many photons can fit in a cubic centimeter. The answer can be found, as long as the question is framed in the right way. There is definitely some similarity between the two problems. As he soaps under his armpit and leans back to rinse the shampoo from his hair, he thinks of the individual beads of water that form the stream hitting him as being analogous to individual photons, packets of light, within the waveform of light that is perceived by an observer as a consistent whole.

  This is the way he wants to look at the world. Not through the lens of that wild, unruly, uncouth dream he had. That was not him, that was something totally other. Like having the television suddenly flip to another channel—a channel he would like to block.

  Dried off and nearly dressed, he decides he will take a shave. With the shower still running to cover the noise he makes, he starts the tap in the sink, lathers his face and draws the razor across it, watching the blade scrape away the white foam, but not meeting his own eyes. He cannot bear to look there. There is nothing there he wants to see.

  Thinking of his eyes makes him think about photons striking them, photons from a distant star perhaps, traversing the distance from its broiling hot surface to the cool moist surface of his retina over millions of years and trillions of miles, the same way the beads of water traveled from the surface of the shower head to the skin on the back of his neck. These things are basically the same, so why has he not been able to pin down the missing element in the question of how many photons can fit in the cubic centimeter box? There must be a missing element to the equation that he has not been able to define. He wipes the last remnants of lather from his face and dresses. He straightens his collar and slips on his shoes, another day of work ahead of him. Perhaps what has befallen him is good, this misstep that he has promoted to the level of a tragedy—perhaps it will open up more time for him to think about problems such as this. Perhaps he can let go of his ambitions and just think about things for a while, and maybe something new will come to him.

  With the shower off and the light filtering through the curtains and blinds, there is a good chance he may wake her on his way out of the bedroom. That would not necessarily be a bad thing. He could tell her about his dream, or whatever it was, and put off going to the office a few minutes longer. He stops and watches the back of her head as it nods with the rhythm of her sleep. If she wakes, he could talk to her one more time as a man who has a future ahead of him, who won’t be relegated to the back shelf of the structure of the Institute for the rest of his career. The back of her head always speaks to him of her innocence—she is blissfully unaware of him standing here watching her, watching her the way a parent watches a beloved child sleeping. She is unaware of what he must face at the office today; she will never be totally aware of what he must go through in the name of his profession, his job, his way of earning the money that buys them the food and clothes and gasoline for their cars. Perhaps this is what he is clinging to in this moment, watching her here. Not her, but the idea of her. Not even the idea of her, the idea of the relationship that exists between them. This is something that has been forged, built up, and twisted around them over the many years they have known each other: there is Theodore, there is Ilene, and then there is also this other, third thing that exists, which is the interaction, the relationship between them. Sometimes, in moments such as this, in which he has stopped for a second and thought of her, it raises itself up as a separate entity, and he can almost envision it as a kind of cord, a living, oblivious structure that fluctuates between them, more like a silver stream of light than a physical structure. At certain times it has grown stronger, has bound them together tighter. At other times it has loosened and seemed to unravel a bit, rays of it trailing off, turning color and dying away. Going on this trip the past weekend had brought them closer, pulled them together more in a shared adventure, the planning of it, the
anticipation, holding hands together on the airplane as she read her ladies’ magazine. And since the blunder at the presentation he has felt all that tightening, strengthening fall away. This separate thing that grows and fades between them has weakened, and he feels now more certain that this is what he is hanging on to as he watches the back of her head and the lump of blankets rise and fall, he is wondering what will happen to the bond between them after he endures whatever it is that will happen to him at the Institute today, whatever humiliations will come his way. Will it ever be as strong as it had been when they first arrived at the sunlit lobby of the hotel in Santa Rosa, primed for the biggest week of his professional life to unfold?

  He turns from her and walks away. He grasps the doorknob and turns it—slowly—and then he is out, the door shut tight behind him. He takes the first few steps carefully, and then, as he turns the corner at the landing, hears the bed in the room behind him creak. He stops to listen. He knows this sound very well: she is up and shuffling to the bathroom. He can hear every step clearly. She is on the toilet now, he can hear the slight tinkling stream hitting the front of the bowl. He could go back to her, tell her about his vivid dream; maybe time for a kiss or something more. But he looks down at his shoes and feels it is too late. He has already primed himself for what he must do today, and this would only delay it—complicate it. Now that it is really possible to speak to her, he doesn’t want to have to describe the crazy dream, he doesn’t want to avoid telling her about the letter, or tell her about it and have to explain. He takes the next step and feels the world around him loosen its grip and let go of him a little more.

  THE NEXT DECISION Theodore must make is easier. Driving to the commuter rail station in the next village over from his own, he sees the parking lot is unusually full for a Tuesday morning—maybe he is running late? No, the digital clock on the dash stares back at him: 7:14. A good number, seven and twice seven. But the lot is full, and he imagines the frustration of circling among the ranks of gleaming machines, hustling to nose his way into a spot just ahead of another harried businessman and decides to flick his left turn signal on and take the freeway instead.

  Once he has merged into the flow of traffic building towards the city, he knows he has made the right choice. He can be alone with this thoughts here, without the mirror of another person’s face to tell him whether he is doing something wrong.

  For the most part, he stays in the right lane and goes along with the slower pace of the cars that must yield and blend with others merging from the entrance ramps every mile or so. He has tried every different method of traveling from his home to the office—commuter rail, freeway, surface streets, even car-pooling with a couple of university professors from the foreign language department briefly—and has found that each route gets him to campus in roughly the same amount of time. It will take him anywhere from forty-eight to fifty-five minutes door to door. The extra effort required to shave a few minutes by hustling to catch an earlier train or weaving in and out among the more dangerous drivers in the leftmost lanes is not worth the aggravation. He allows his mind to wander, landing on whatever happens to catch his eye. A woman in the next lane over is peering into the rearview mirror and applying mascara to her lashes with her right hand as she steers with her left. A minivan coated with a thick layer of salt and winter grime has a heart traced in the dirt of the back windows with what appears to have been a girl’s finger. Inside the heart is etched the somewhat startling message I LOVE MEN. The miles flow by. One freeway merges with another, and the road becomes even wider, six lanes on each side, with the commuter rail line bisecting the road down the middle, punctuated by stations at every major interchange. The traffic is light; he maintains a steady pace. The freeway emerges from the industrial wasteland of chemical tanks and warehouses that buffers his beloved suburbs from the hardscrabble wood-frame houses of the inner city. Row upon row of these drab two-story homes line the highway, perched above it on either side and giving it the feel of a tunnel. A semitrailer changes lanes in front of him and he draws alongside it for a moment. He can feel the shuddering flanks of its trailer laden with goods, he can sense the vibrations from the pipes and mechanisms that populate the underside of the vehicle as it surges past him. There is a whimsical design on the mudflaps that bounce against the paired rear tires at the back of the truck: an image of an angry-looking semi driven by a crazed, cartoon-like man with a red handlebar mustache and a beat-up cowboy hat holding a pistol in one hand, steering wheel in the other, and the words KICKIN’ ASPHALT in grubby chrome underneath.

  Now the freeway makes a giant looping bend and comes back above ground level to give him his first view of the city skyline. It never fails to impress him, spread across his field of vision like a stack of multi-layered dominoes, some of them catching the first sparks of the sun as it peeks above the horizon. Another long looping turn affords him a glimpse of the gleaming lake to the east. Just a few seconds of this, and then he is back heading north, the buildings lined up again along their grid, providing the more conventional view of the city favored by the skycams for the lead-in shots to the local evening news.

  He has allowed himself not to think, to let his thoughts merely flow along with the traffic. There are only a couple more miles to his exit. He glances up at his rearview mirror for some reason and catches a quick look at his own blue eye, blue surrounded by whiteness and pierced with a black hole in the middle. He sees now what has drawn his eye to the mirror: coming up behind him, a car just behind his, pressing forward, tailgating him, aggressively filling the mirror with two headlights and two bright fog lights below them and a grill that seems designed to intimidate him. In the past, having this person press him from behind like this would have nudged his blood pressure up and elicited a response from him—either speeding up to comply with the driver’s insistence that Theodore go faster to accommodate him, or, more likely, slowing down to frustrate and further infuriate the tailgater. Once, when he was quite young, he tapped his brakes and nearly caused a tailgater to slam into him, provoking the enraged driver to zoom around and swerve in front of him, which forced Theodore onto the shoulder of the freeway and very nearly off the road.

  Now, Theodore sees this as an opportunity to practice what he has tried to learn about staying calm. He maintains a steady speed, which just happens to be a speed that keeps the driver penned in behind him and a set of cars in the next lane that are also going about the same speed. Why does everyone want to make the world go faster? What will this man accomplish by getting around him and arriving at his office five minutes earlier than he might have? An image of time as a fluid tape measure gently undulating in a stream of warm water that flows above their heads presents itself to Theodore, the hours and minutes marked by tick marks along one side, each one passing by like the mile markers on the side of the freeway. Then, just as suddenly, the tape measure fades away, and another image draws itself to him—time expanding out from himself and the tailgating driver like a huge box above their heads, a fourth dimension they are moving through.

  But this is not right.

  He has envisioned time as merely the third dimension, height. He and his new friend the tailgater are traveling in a line along the first dimension, length, and it is possible that the tail-gater could slam into his bumper and send him spinning out along the second dimension at an angle from the first. And the giant clear box that appeared to him is the extension of these two dimensions upwards to create the three dimensions of space. Then, he sees it: His line of sight extends to the far horizon where the road narrows down to a blurred shadow, and for a brief moment his consciousness withdraws to a point somewhere above himself, somewhere that seems to be both further within his head but also at the same moment outside and beyond it. From this new vantage point he can see the freeway in its entirety—not only the entire length of it spanning the miles from the farms beyond the city to the central core with its sky-piercing glass towers—but also the entire existence of it all at once from w
hen the first buildings and homes and streets were torn up to make the right of way, through the bulldozers pushing earth around to dredge out the roadbed and the pouring of the first layers of gravel and cement, and then all the cars and trucks and the trains and the people milling at the stations all of them buzzing back and forth across the length of it like another layer of liquid life flowing in an ebbing and fading stream unfolding and enfolding with the cycle of every day illuminated by sunlight and then shrouded by darkness with the road lying there in its serenity beneath them, the houses torn down and replaced innumerable times, the road razed and resurfaced time and again, and then at the far end of this buzzing flow, a gradual diminishment of the flowing lights and then a complete stop where the road crumbles to dust, all of this seen as a whole: the road lying there stretched out before him like a kind of vein stripped from someone’s leg with the blood of the traffic flowing over it—and the beginning and end of it and all the in between existing there at once. And it is not only that he is imagining this image of the road spread out before him, he is actually experiencing it, for just one instant, all existing there with him at one contemporaneous point. He feels it—here—now—all of it, all the millions of cars and trucks and trains and people who have passed and ever will pass over this point are here with him at this very same Now.