Antiphony

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  When he opens his eyes again there is a moment, a brief instant, in which he can see in every direction at once. He sees the trees and the path in front of him and also the path behind him, the shops at the intersection in the distance, the houses and their ramshackle gardens and back yards to either side. He can see his shoes and the cuffs of his pants and the composition of the pavement beneath them and above him the milky pale overcast of the sky. It is as if he has opened up, as if somebody lifted a tarp away from his eyeballs, uncovering his brain, and he can finally see beyond it, clearly, everything there is to see.

  His eyelids shudder and blink, then blink again, and the vision is gone.

  THE DOORWAY TO the bar is inset from the sidewalk and sheltered from the cold. Theodore stands there for a moment and stares at what the wind has rustled into this compressed space surrounded by brick walls: dead leaves, crisp and rotten, their colors leached away by months of being blown and tossed across the city streets, a candy wrapper and a used rubber glove, its shrunken see-through simulation of a human hand looking more like the withered white carcass of a jellyfish that has washed up on the shore.

  Perhaps he is just hungry—perhaps that is what made him grow lightheaded a few moments ago. Hungry and cold. He can warm up in here and have a sandwich, something to drink. He has not eaten anything since dinner at the restaurant yesterday evening, before the symphony.

  A bell attached to the top of the door announces his entrance; his eyes take a moment to adjust to the light. There are only a couple of people seated at the bar and a handful of empty tables lined up against the wall of windows along the side of the building that faces the street. He would rather sit at one of the tables by himself, but the man seated at the counter looks at him as if he might be offended if he did not join him. Theodore slings his briefcase onto one of the high wooden chairs, shrugs off his coat, and hoists himself into another chair, not directly next to the man, but close enough to not appear unfriendly. At the far end of the bar, near the door to the kitchen, a young woman sits smoking a cigarette and gazing at the television perched high above for all to see. The bar has adopted a north woods theme for its decoration, camping and hunting gear adorning the knotty pine wall behind the counter, fishing rods, the head of what appears to have been a real twelve-point buck mounted at the far end of the room, though the wilderness atmosphere is marred by several neon signs advertising national brands of beer and a large poster of the schedule from the past season of the local professional football team, including sweating bottles of beer adorned with the helmets of the team instead of bottle caps, lined up in a formation that simulates a winning touchdown pass.

  It takes a while for the young woman to abandon her cigarette and attend to Theodore, as if his appearance here is an unwanted distraction from more important business she is tracking on the television. When she does come over, she approaches him not from behind the bar, but between him and the other patron, standing to his left and perching her elbows on the empty chair between them, as if her body is an unbearable weight she must prop up.

  “Hey,” she says, uncertainly. Perhaps she is not a waitress? For a moment, Theodore is left to wonder. He nods, to acknowledge her presence. Then she adds, as an afterthought: “Can I get you something?”

  “Yeah, she’ll get you something. She’ll get you whatever you want.” The burly man to the left of them laughs at his small joke, chuckling mostly to himself, but loud enough to let them know he was angling for a laugh. Then he returns to the task of shoveling a forkful of food to his mouth, bobbing his head as he chews, to confirm the validity of his statement. “Whatever you want,” he repeats through a mouthful of chewing.

  “Put a lid on it, Wayne.” The waitress says this in a weary way that conveys how many times she has heard such things from him before. Throughout all this, Theodore has had a chance to browse the menu, but doesn’t see anything that looks particularly appetizing.

  “Do you have coffee?”

  “We can do that. There’s probably some left.” Left from when? “You want anything to eat?”

  He does want something, but nothing from here.

  “I’m fine for now, thank you.”

  When Theodore finds himself in uncomfortable situations, he tends to become even more formal than usual, a safeguard, a way of putting distance between himself and those around him.

  The waitress slinks back towards the kitchen and disappears in search of his coffee. In her absence, his sudden companion has seized the opportunity to start lecturing, the man’s face lit by the blue incandescence of the screen looming above them, his voice urged into an aggressive tone by the tiny jabbering voices falling on them from the ceiling.

  “See, they’ll take any chance they can to promise something for nothing.” The man inhales and tilts his head at the screen to indicate who he is talking about. “You think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free. That’s what they want you to believe, that’s what they’re selling—something for nothing. As if you could pull a bunch of doctors and drugs and hospital rooms out of a hat. These bastards will do anything to take money out of your pocket and mine, and give it to people who haven’t worked a day in their lives.”

  The mention of these others, whoever they may be, has served to infuriate the man. Theodore watches him as his face assumes a deeper shade of pink, his eyes squinting as he veers his attention from the debating pundits on the screen towards Theodore. The man’s hands drop the knife and fork onto the plate and leap in Theodore’s direction. “See, you and me, we work for a living. We pay for our health care, out of our own pockets. And these bastards want to take your money and pay for some deadbeat’s birth control pills and abortions and prescription pain killers and I say let’s ship them all back to Mexico where they came from. Let ‘em figure out how to have a health care plan of their own down there.”

  Wayne is his name, Theodore remembers that now—the waitress called him Wayne. Wayne’s face has become more plastic, his jowls loosened and expanded by the words coming out. Near the temples, directly above, Theodore can see a branching network of broken capillaries outlined in purple and blue against the soft pink skin of his face, fanning out from a single spot where a tiny vein approaches the surface of the skin. Theodore nods in agreement, uncertain about exactly what the man’s point is, but not wanting to contradict him in his agitated state.

  “So,” Wayne says, “you look like you rake in a good paycheck, highly qualified. Whaddeya work at a bank or something? You’re exactly the kind of guy, you and me, who these bozos in Congress are trying to rip off.”

  Theodore doesn’t want to tell him what he used to do, or what just happened to him only an hour or two ago. It still does not seem real enough to relate to another person. Perhaps there will be a phone call from Victor telling him to come back to the office, it was all a mistake. He imagines them all there sitting in their cubes and at their desks, pecking away at their computers, talking in the conference room and the break room over bowls of microwave chili and vending machine snacks. This is about the time of day when the pressures of the first two waves of morning email wind down, and some serious thinking time, that long stretch between about one-thirty and four, can begin; he always thought of the afternoon as a kind of nap time, a siesta for the brain, where lazy staff meetings would drag on and an occasional free spell would engender some real creative talk about ways to attack the entangled equations scribbled across a white board. But the good paycheck Wayne has associated with him is gone. There may never again be another paycheck as good as what was automatically deposited in his bank account last week. That’s what is most disconcerting about this train of thought—the idea of having to wonder about where the money will come from. He hasn’t had to worry about money since his post-doc fellowship days. The money has always just showed up in his accounts, like magic. Even so, the money was never his primary concern. He did the work, sent the emails, filled out the reports—but deep down, he was always working tow
ards the idea that he might someday stumble upon the one big thing, the final answer, the Theory of Everything.

  He would sometimes picture it in his head, on his way to work, or leaning back and looking out his window at the quad—not what the Theory of Everything would look like itself necessarily, but what it would feel like to have discovered it. He would assume the feeling of being The One, the next Einstein, the next Newton. The One who got it all right. He can picture it even now, as he lifts his head towards the blue light of the television and closes his eyes, a kind of deep stillness and peace settling over him—the peace of total satisfaction and knowing. Yes, there would be two different and highly pleasurable sensations: the joy of having achieved what so many others have strived for over the years, the attainment of what had eluded so many gifted minds, and then also, beyond the accolades of colleagues and the acknowledgment of genius by the wide world beyond, there would be the even greater satisfaction of really knowing, perhaps as no one else could know, exactly how it all works—every last piece of it, from the largest scale structures of space and time down to the most insignificant clockwork of the tiniest elementary particles. With the discovery of that one final principle, that one unifying theme—yes, that is how he pictures it, more a theme than an equation, but certainly it would be something that could be reduced or expressed as an equation—with that one theme, he could look at anything, any one aspect of the universe and say to himself or any other—even a man as bedeviled by the workaday world as Wayne here on his left—he could say to them, yes, of course, this is how it works. We understand it all now, thanks to me.

  “They’ll sort it all out.”

  Theodore surprises himself as much as he does Wayne, when these words come out of his mouth. He’s not even sure why he has said it. Perhaps just to shut Wayne up, or see what he will say next.

  “Yeah, you say that, and it’s guys like you who really do have something to lose and don’t have the guts to stand up to them who will get burned in the end.”

  The waitress is back now with Theodore’s cup of coffee. She sets it before him on the counter with special care, as if she brewed it specifically for him. Perhaps she did. She can sense that the conversation has heated up, so she retreats to her corner of the bar and her dying cigarette without a word.

  “Something out of nothing, that’s what they all want. Hell, you could just as soon turn one of those coals into a loaf of bread as do what they say they will do.”

  Wayne nods in the direction of an open brazier on the floor behind the bar, in which a pile of charcoal is smoldering beneath a wire rack. This is probably in keeping with the wilderness theme—it may even be a way of helping to heat this place. Wayne’s assertions have brought Theodore down from whatever high orbit he had attained when he felt he was viewing the motions of the sun and the earth in their flight across heavens, from whatever transfiguration had caused him to spin into the realm of those whirling and wistful ramblings about infinity he sent in that e-mail message meant only for himself. His only concern now is how to tell Ilene about what he has done, how to frame his latest and most fatal blunder in a way that will ease the shock to her. But there is no way around it—he no longer has a job, no longer has a steady paycheck to pay for things like health insurance and their mortgage and their monthly night out on the town. They will have to sell the house and move to something smaller, an apartment maybe. Perhaps Ilene will have to find some line of work herself, her afternoons talking on the phone with friends, lounging in front of the flat screen TV a thing of the past. The future he sees spread out before them is one of dwindling opportunities, diminishing pleasure, struggle and hardship. How will she react to the news? There is no way to know until the words come out of his mouth—perhaps she will leave him. Perhaps that living visceral cord that has joined them together over the years will finally fray and fall apart under the strain.

  Wayne is correct about one thing; in his heart of hearts Theodore has known this all along: There is no other reality than what he can see before him with his own two eyes. There is no way to transmute those burning coals into something entirely other, except by the means prescribed by the laws of physics. If he were to stay here the rest of the afternoon—and what else does he have to do?—Theodore could watch as the coals slowly burn themselves out, converting each molecule of the impure carbon briquettes by combustion into heat, light, and reaction products released as the trace odor of smoke that permeates the room. And that faint star above him too will burn itself out in somewhat the same manner, an immense downward spiral of combustion, just as surely as the other stars in the universe will, over time, cool down and drift apart and disintegrate until there is nothing left but a vast and empty nothingness, an absence of all heat and all light and all coherent particles of matter, nothing but the absolute zero null and void from whence Theodore and Wayne and Ilene and all the rest of this came.

  4

  THIS CHURCH IS falling apart. He can see that clearly enough. To Theodore’s great surprise, the blue door at one side of the giant limestone building yielded to his tug on the handle and opened right up, granting him access to the warmth of the building. Anyone could simply walk in, just as he did, and wander around the building, just as he is now, looking for things to steal if they so chose, or, as Theodore is now, merely looking for another place to get in out of the cold, dark February afternoon. This old place is a warren of cramped passageways and empty rooms used for what? The building must be at least a hundred years old, and he can see signs of its general deterioration, its slow and inevitably losing battle against entropy.

  Disarray is everywhere. He pokes his head inside one of the many rooms that line this corridor and sees what might on occasion be used as a Sunday school classroom, but might also be nothing more than a storage room for miscellaneous church-related junk. There is a pile of musty hymnals strewn haphazardly on top of a radiator and windowsill; a loose assortment of metal folding chairs arranged in no particular manner in the same far corner of the room; a bulletin board with a sheet of ruled notebook paper pinned to it containing a list of children’s names and a few check marks next to them as well as a few dull golden stars for attendance or assignments completed that are curling and about to fall at any moment to the floor. On the wall at the opposite end of the room, someone—a child, a teacher—once stapled the first few letters of a Bible verse cut meticulously with scissors out of fading yellow construction paper: NOW THESE ARE; there is a pile of towels and bathrobes and motheaten men’s dress shirts and neckties; there is an old upright piano probably used to play along with hymns the children might have sung. He steps to it and runs his right hand up the C scale. The tension in the keys has come unsprung; the strings are loose and out of tune. The pale green paint on the wall above the radiator is peeling; chips of it litter the pile of leather-bound hymnals, their pages thin and brittle and just as prone to crumbling into dust as the leaves that littered the doorway of the tavern he left several hours ago. Everything has a tendency to disorder; everything is falling apart. It takes energy, work, applied to any system, any thing, such as the objects in this room, to keep them in good order, to keep them from disintegrating into a loose and random collection of atoms. There must be a constant application of energy to every thing, every person, to keep it from returning back to randomness and cold.

  He goes back to the corridor and follows it to another larger room that looks as if it might be a kind of library. How long had he been outside after leaving Wayne and his depressing talk of government health insurance—two or three hours perhaps? He had wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood, looking at storefront windows filled with nothing he wanted, staring at anyone who had happened to pass by with the certain understanding that they could provide no manner of assistance with the problem he has yet to solve. What he has found interesting in the course of this day is how time and space have opened up, the extent to which his concept of his self has until now defined his relationship to everything he perceived
. He saw a giant acacia tree guarding a tiny bungalow and stood there on the buckling sidewalk observing its roots and the leathery bark of the tree, watching it, staring at it for several minutes, as if it might yield some secret to him about its existence. In standing there, examining the tree, without his own idea of who he was—scientist, physicist—or where he needed to be, or what he should be doing, he began to feel a sense of relationship to the tree, both of them living creatures, both of them complex mechanisms for converting energy into form, coherent structure, both of them extravagant localized systems of order fighting against the downward gradient of entropy, the tendency for things to fall apart. He could feel the tree standing there before him, dormant, waiting, waiting for the first few gusts of warm air and glimpses of the sun to suck in and trigger itself back to life. He went up to the tree and touched one of its many hooked thorns, each of them an inch or two long, protruding from the branches of the tree at random intervals. He held the ball of his thumb against the pointy tip of the thorn and, in that brief moment, felt as if he could sense the tree poised there, even in its dormant state, feeling the slight and elusive pressure of him as an intruder.