Antiphony

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  The driver behind him presses closer, flashes his brights at him. One now becomes the next.

  Clearly, this man is in a hurry. He must get to the next moment in time faster than the other drivers around him. Or, what he is really trying to do, Theodore sees, is extend himself into a greater area of space than the other drivers. He cannot get to the next moment faster—all the moments come to them both at the same equivalent speed. This other man wants to take up more space in the limited span of his existence than Theodore will.

  Theodore complies. The cordon of cars to their left has maintained its speed, so Theodore pushes up to seventy, moves beyond them, opens a gap for the tailgater to slither through. When the opening is just wide enough for the car to change lanes, it darts to the left and plows ahead of him. Theodore does allow himself to glance over and get a look at the tailgater passing by and sees a young woman with flattened red hair glaring at the road ahead, oblivious to Theodore and any other driver on the road, intent on her mission of getting to the next place faster than the rest.

  AT THE OFFICE he avoids the secretaries and the corridor along the outside of the cubicles and makes it to his desk without encountering anybody. Slings his briefcase with the laptop in it onto the chair his visitors are supposed to use, slumps into the ergonomic chair on wheels, and punches the button that starts his desktop machine. He didn’t go to the coffee shop because he didn’t want to stand in the long line with the other caffeine fiends and didn’t want to have to make small talk with that woman who wears two hats. This is better; alone here in his office no one will bother him.

  He stares at the Degas print on the wall across from him and contemplates the dancers. One of them, the stocky, plump one whose back is reflected in the mirror, his favorite, always in the same pose, stretching her instep, pointing her toes down at the floor in a graceful drop step behind her, her other foot extended and turned at a square angle out to the right. The faint hint of a smile permanently etched on her face as she peers at the floor, lost in her work. A couple of the other dancers watch her from the side, more lithe and graceful, slimmer, they study her moves while others stretch at the bar towards the back of the room. And, what he often overlooks, seated at the bench by the piano, an old man with white hair and a full white mustache holds a violin to the crook of his neck and the bow in his other hand, about to resume playing. In the lower left corner, beneath the piano, a watering can sits, incongruously, the acute angles of the spout and handle perhaps a reference to the splayed and tortioned extension of arms and legs by these perfect human forms. He envies these young women forever captured in a moment of joy, expressing themselves through their bodies—he can almost smell the tang of female sweat and the chalk dust in the room, the late afternoon light evanescent in a dim gray winter rectangle reflected off the larger wall mirrors at the back of the room. He could stand and watch such a scene for hours, not thinking about it, not coming to any conclusions about it, just observing it and letting the sensations of the movement and sounds and smells overtake him and flow through him. He could stare at the dancers without any trace of sexual interest, merely observing the glistening forms and planes of their bodies exhibiting a kind of ever-evolving landscape that his mind could navigate, traverse. He has often looked at the stars in the night sky the same way, wondering about the distances and relationships between the pinpricks of light suspended above him, speculating about what holds them still in a seemingly-fixed firmament even as he knows they are all rushing away from each other at a speed beyond his limited comprehension. If he could stare at these things and wonder about them without having to come to any conclusions, without having to quantify them and arrange them into a paradigm, a set of mathematical rules, perhaps then he could escape the consequences of what he has done.

  Pling!

  The email program on his computer notifies him of a new message arriving at his inbox. Or, in this case, more than a dozen which have already been sent by the more industrious colleagues and underlings on staff. There is always a rush of morning emails flying about, Theodore feels, as a way of impressing upon others the amount of work someone is getting done—a kind of office tailgating, pushing the next guy to move a little faster.

  Theodore looks at the list of boldfaced messages that have arrived in his box as yet unread. Several messages from Jerry Himmelstein, an aggressive young grad student who just came on board fall semester from Cornell. Jerry must copy him on every message he sends, no matter how trivial. A note from his friend Nick Behar in the foreign language department, one of the guys he briefly carpooled with, reminding him that they have been trying to plan a poker night with some of the other profs that never seems to fit anyone’s schedule. It used to be a regular monthly event he looked forward to; now, as several months have passed without it occurring, it seems destined to slip away from them. And finally, a note marked URGENT that just arrived two minutes ago from Ji-Wan Sing, an up-and-coming Korean string theorist over by the break room. Every email from Ji-Wan is URGENT. Theodore clicks on it and opens it. Though he and Pradeep and Adams Niley are listed as recipients in the TO: line, Ji-Wan has copied nearly the entire department, including the two administrative assistants:

  CC: Steve Nulph, William Radgowski, Victor Fieldman, Amanda Nicholoff, Parag S. Punjary, A.C. Greisl, Waverly Earwood, Janice Pahud, Changyuan Nguon, Eric Christensen, Jo Anne Meranda, Rodrigo Lima, Jongsun Lin, Lloyd Neubauer, Tracy Tysdal, Douglas Hardy, Clifford Harrison, A.C. Bukta, Shin Chi Mie Atsuta, Gwo-Hwa Yuang, Jennifer Kowalczyk, Darlene Muzzarelli, Robert Onorato, Arthur D. Crookshanks, Bai Z. Kuay, Mary Kelley Cordova, Sabrina Johnson, Thomas P. Overpeck, G. Edwin Spilley, Aleksandr Veldhof, Zhongqing Zhou, Dung Pham Dong, Phyllis Raddatz, Sundaram Radhuramam

  SUBJ: Status Update

  I received and approved your status report for the Accounting Department tracking of the Solid-State and Fluid Thermodynamics research project.

  Please send to me within one week from today the updated departmental file, project budget file, and any crediting documentation file. Please include with that material an updated schedule showing all key dates. You can use the attached pdf.

  No signature. No thank you. Just a note to show the rest of the world that the information Theodore provided was not quite sufficient to fill out the paperwork that Ji-Wan is responsible for compiling every month for all the ongoing federally-funded research projects at the Institute. This is the kind of message Theodore hates, but typically responds to right away with a short, polite, and supplicatory note assuring the sender that he will send the requested information as soon as possible, seeking to deflect through his own courtesy any potential buildup of animosity within the department, and thereby also showing all the people on the CC: list that he is above being harried by such a note, even though he will often carry it around with him in the back of his head the rest of the day and even into the evening if he can’t pull together the information and send it right away. He has always had this need to please others, to supplicate, which has served him well enough throughout his years of navigating the academic world, even as he has risen through the ranks. Now, though, he re-reads the note and simply stares at it. It doesn’t matter one whit, doesn’t mean a thing to him. He doesn’t immediately click REPLY or REPLY ALL as he normally might have. He pictures Ji-Wan Sing in his cubicle nervously tapping his pen, as he often does during the weekly team meetings in the conference room by the break room, and contemplates walking over to Ji-Wan and telling him that he won’t be able to get this information to him any time soon—without any explanation or excuse—just to see the look on Ji-Wan’s face.

  Instead, he turns back to look at his dancer, at the tight black band that encircles her neck, at the reflection of the back of her neck in the mirror, her hair hanging down in a French braid; he stares at the door in the far corner of the room in the painting left open enough for a sliver of glowing golden light to shine through. His eye drifts towards the pink and yellow sheaves of sheet music on top of the p
iano that one of the dancers is leaning her elbow on, her other hand resting in the crook of her arm, her head craned towards the dancer in the mirror, watching her move. He has studied this painting for hours, yet he never tires of it. He always finds something new there to enchant him.

  Pradeep has never understood what Theodore finds so attractive in the painting—in this painting or in any other, for that matter. On any other morning Pradeep might very well be angling his tall frame against the bookshelf on the other side of the office and telling Theodore to stop wasting his time contemplating these daubs of paint arranged in a certain way. Pra-deep has freely admitted that he does not have the eye for seeing the painting the same way Theodore does, does not have the ear for hearing a piano concerto the same way—to him, as to Ilene, the painting is simply a swirl of colors, the music is merely a jumble of notes. There is no inherent beauty in one particular arrangement over another. One morning, Theodore was listening to Rachmaninov’s Third piano concerto on the sound system in his office when Pradeep came by, and Theodore tried to point out to him a passage that he found exceptionally stunning, a light run up the keyboard that lingered on a trilling fifth interval at the top of the scale, and Pradeep had replied simply, “All those notes,” tilting his head back in that way he has of framing his more insightful observations of scientific fact. Theodore had to laugh, for in Pradeep’s musical naive-té, he had echoed one of Rachmaninov’s most famously scathing critics, Aaron Copland, who once said of Rachmaninov’s work, “All those notes, and to what end?”

  Well, Theodore thinks, staring at the dancer’s shoe, if they can’t see, or hear, the beauty in it, so much the worse for them. He wouldn’t want to have to live in a world as cold and empty as they do.

  At any rate, the days of Pradeep stopping by his office for a chat are probably over now. He will soon be reporting to Pra-deep and taking orders from him instead of from Victor, sending him status reports and expense reports and monthly updates on the progress of his next research project, most likely at this point no more than a continuation of the Plasma Dynamics grant they had been working on the past couple of years. Pra-deep and he had shared a lot of happy hours together through the initial phases of scoping out that work—long afternoons at the student union with a raft of papers spread out on a table in the corner away from the bank of flat screen televisions and noisy undergrads at the video game machines, mapping out the problem of how to create the most effective gyrokinetic and gyrofluid simulations to identify ion-temperature-gradient-driven instabilities so they could get to the heart of what causes turbulence in a tokomak field device. They would trade email and text messages in the dim hours of the early morning, lobbing ideas at each other as soon as they popped into their heads, carrying on a virtual dialogue at two or three in the morning, that antipodal hour when some of their best ideas would come, the same time last night when Theodore drifted into that dream.

  Now, that kind of collaboration is over. Pradeep will be busy with bigger things. He may be in Pennsylvania tending to his brother’s children today, but tomorrow or the next day—whenever he returns—he will be beyond working on a project like that with Theodore again.

  Theodore reaches into his briefcase and pulls out the letter. He holds it in his hand for a moment and scans it, his eye settling on the precise curves of his signature at the bottom of the page. There is nothing else he can do but deliver it to Victor. He sets it on his desk and reverts to staring at the girl held frozen in her pose, the back of her blameless head forever reflected in that mirror.

  Then, in the next moment, the corner of his vision is pinched by a presence in the doorway. He swivels in his chair and motions for Victor to come in and sit.

  “Teddy,” Victor begins. “How are you doing today?” The question is an earnest one. Victor glances at the letter on the desk and doesn’t wait for an answer. “I know this is hard on you. Hell, it’s hard on me.” He is talking to hear himself talk, instead of having to hear Theodore. He wants to fill up the space between them with words, a way of controlling things, limiting the damage. “I remember like it was two days ago the time a schnook by the name of Lenny Feilhaber came to me and asked me if I knew what the name of God meant. This was a kid straight out of the program at Princeton and full of himself.”

  Victor sits back in the chair as if he is settling in to tell a long story. “He asks me this in the hallway after a department meeting, this new kid in the department, who I barely knew. And he asks me this like he’s asking for directions to the men’s room.” Victor scrunches his lips together into a rueful smile, his eyebrows dancing as he blinks.

  “So I say to the kid, ‘Don’t try to be clever with me. Don’t try to make yourself look good. It won’t get you very far.‘” Victor smiles to think of it, the impression his words must have made on the young man. Theodore has seen similar situations unfold in staff meetings and in the corridors of the building here over the years, where a stray word or glance from Victor could ruin a young scientist’s day or week. “The kid never spoke to me again. I think I spooked him. He only stayed here six months into a two-year fellowship, it must have been.” Victor looks over at Theodore and at the letter folded on the desk between them like a sliver of stray sunlight that has broken loose from the painting on the wall behind him. “But I’ll tell you what. That kid put his head down and worked the entire time he was here. He did his job. And he went on to Caltech and became a fine physicist. I met him again a few years ago at a conference in Vienna and listened to him present some very nice work on strong particle interactions.”

  Theodore knows now why Victor has been telling him this story, and recognizes Feilhaber’s name because it has now been attached to a piece of research he remembers. But he remains silent, out of fear and out of respect for the situation he has placed himself in, and lets Victor finish his story.

  “The kid settled down and did his work. And he put himself in position to be involved with a couple of other gentlemen you may have heard of who together, the three of them, won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago.”

  “I remember.”

  “Yes, they won the Prize for their work on asymptotic freedom in strong interaction.” Victor smiles at Theodore and rubs his forehead, knowing he has made his point. “So, you see, my friend, there is something to be said for going off in a corner somewhere and putting your head down and doing some work that may not appear to be very sexy or on the leading edge for a while. Something very valuable may be hiding there, and this could be an opportunity for you, to not have to worry so much about what it takes to get ahead and bother with all the crap that goes on with running the department.” He scratches a raw patch of skin on his wrist where his watch seems to be too tight.

  Victor is about to say something more, but he’s interrupted by the jingling beeps of his cell phone erupting in his pants pocket. With some effort, Victor lifts his hips up out of the chair so that he can fish the beeping phone out of his pants and answer it before the call goes away.

  “Yes. He’s sitting right here.” A brief pause, during which Victor’s eyes search Theodore’s face as if he expects to find a hidden meaning there. “I’m in his office.”

  Theodore returns Victor’s look, trying to decipher who the caller may be, and why they are asking about him. The look on Victor’s face has turned from one of questioning to one of distraction. He has turned his eyes away from Theodore and is staring into space now, the center of his brow contorted into a deep crease of concern.

  “Yes, I’ll call you back.”

  Victor clicks the phone call away, and looks over at Theodore, his cheeks flushed with what may be anger or may be panic.

  “What’s the meaning of this … this email?” He reaches the phone over to Theodore and shows him an open message on the device. Theodore takes the phone and starts reading, skimming through the tiny lines of text. None of this is registering with him. Something very bad must have happened for Victor to be reacting this way, and then he reads fu
rther and a glimmer of recognition takes shape in his mind. Some of the words he sees in the message appear to be words he has himself written a few hours ago, in the middle of the night. “There is a unity to everything, from the largest forms to the smallest. The spiral spinning of a galaxy is the same form embodied in the twist of light that comprises the most minuscule particles of matter.” And further down, as he thumbs through the message by brushing his fingertip against the phone: “Light is conscious energy, the medium of thought, and thought is all there is, a giant timeless thought.”

  He hands the phone back to Victor and looks at him with an empty pit of dread in his stomach. As he hands the phone to him, he glances at the address and the subject line at the top of the note and sees that it is indeed the note he jotted down in the middle of the night and sent to himself. But how, he wonders, how could it have gone to Victor and to whomever it was that phoned to tell him about it? He looks at Victor and is at a loss for what to say. Perhaps it is only a minor problem. He can explain to him exactly what happened, that he was just sending himself some notes, some ramblings from the middle of the night, half-baked ideas that don’t amount to anything, and leave it at that. Then give Victor the letter to sign and be done with the whole thing.

  “What were you thinking?” Victor’s face is bright red as he says this. His voice is a low, barely-controlled growl.

  “I wasn’t thinking. These are just some notes I was jotting down, some ideas that came to me in the middle of the night.” But there must be something more to this, a reason Victor is so furious about it.

  Theodore swivels his chair to see the inbox on his desktop machine. He sees the note he sent to himself near the bottom of the list, dated 2/16/--, 3:27 a.m. There is no subject on the note, and no other recipients but himself. Then he thinks to click the Sent Items folder and sees something strange—the same note, with no subject, sent by himself to dozens of other people at 9:47 a.m., just a few moments ago.