Antiphony

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  So perhaps, he thinks, time is only a man-made thing, a sequence of sensations that we convert into a stream of instants. The flow of one thing after another hitting our nerve endings. But we do measure it; we have created precise, technical instruments—clocks—built on the solid foundation of shifting gears or vibrating sub-atomic particles that can count out nanoseconds without fail for thousands of years. Still, he thinks, what are these clocks measuring but a sequence, a one by one pattern of the movement of objects, no matter how minuscule or how fast? Time can only be the change in the state of these objects, not something separate and unto itself.

  His eyes blink, and he sees the trees again. He feels the presence of the woman beside him in the wind.

  He does not want to be thought of as an outcast, like that dead English poet. He does not want to be thought of as insane. His mind has always wandered off as it did just now into purely conceptual things, wondering about how one thing relates to another, wondering about how the world he sees around him works and fits together. This has always been his strength as a scientist—his power of observation and the creative way he was able to translate the observations into abstract and mathematical frameworks. But somehow this talent seems to have ended up working against him. He somehow stepped over a boundary where others did not dare to go.

  He looks at the woman and sees that she’s been watching him think. Of course—this woman’s face reminds him of what he has always known. This woman’s face is what’s real. The wind, the movement of air molecules across his skin, is what’s real. Only the things he can observe are real, the solid, physical objects and their attendant motions. Everything else, the frameworks of thought and concept, the notion of anything beyond the particles, and atoms, and molecules—the idea of consciousness!—even the mathematical formulas he might use to describe the particles, none of that can exist outside of the pattern of electrochemical processes and charges flowing through the cellular structure of his brain. Those rational, clear-headed Englishmen had been quite right to throw that man, that poet, into an asylum.

  More to touch another solid object than anything else, he turns and envelopes the woman’s body in both of his arms. Feeling his arms around her, she turns more to face him, lifts her face up closer to his. Closes her eyes in anticipation of a kiss.

  He keeps his eyes open and regards her face for a brief moment—her cheekbones are broad, high, Slavic perhaps. Her eyelids, even as they are stretched shut, are crinkled at the corners by fine, crêpey dimples where the skin shows her age. He can feel one of her breasts, cupped within his hand. It is larger, more full, than Ilene’s. This, he thinks, is what’s real. This woman’s form, this body he holds in his arms. Nothing more.

  He places his lips on hers and feels them yield. The sensation of two soft pillows opening up, wet, and then her tongue extending, reaching out—his tongue meets hers, searches, seeking attachment. While he kisses her, he thinks about what attracted him to her most, the beauty of a woman’s collar bones poised beneath a clear smooth canvas of skin, more beautiful even than the breasts below, the intricate structure where the lines of the neck converge to the intersection where the chest is held taut, supporting the head and arms and shoulders—the crux. He thinks of this as his mind reaches out towards hers, his mind released from all other forms of attachment, released from everything that had made him who he was, now reaching out for something else to latch on to, out of panic, dread, and fear. There must be always some other thing, some other one to hold on to, something to reflect himself off of, to define himself by. And he thinks for a moment that this is what a woman is for—what Ilene has been and what this woman is now—a mirror, a prism, to reflect and refract himself off of. A perfect way to establish the form of his own self, to spur him on—that has always been Ilene’s function—he would always view his own accomplishments through her eyes, thinking about how she would see it, what her reaction would be.

  But what of that? It is all over now, and he has been avoiding going home to tell her because he cannot face the thought of letting her down. So here he is, betraying her, his mouth, his lips seeking the comfort of another woman, the thrill of attaching himself to this strange new person in his arms. In a way, this long kiss is more intimate, more of a betrayal than any other sex act could be, his face joined together with hers, the connection to her face more intimate than sex; for her mouth and face are closer to her brain, more uniquely hers alone, more significant of her individual nature than the genitals, which, though shocking and thrilling when encountered, are more generic, less indicative of the person with whom the connection is made.

  Through this kiss, he is trying to define himself as someone once again. Not the blank emptiness he felt when he entered the church. He is Theodore: the failure, the betrayer, the experiencer of this woman’s breasts and lips, and even that, though that is all he is and can be at the moment, is better than nothing. This kiss is what’s real, nothing else. Not his old identity as a string theory physicist, not his marriage to Ilene, not his research grants or concepts about Perturbation Theory or his misguided musings about God. Those things are just ideas his mind needed to hold on to, to enable itself to say, “This is me, this is Theodore, this is who I am.” But he knows now that the only true reality is what he can see or feel or hear or touch in this very moment—this woman’s tongue drawing him near. That’s all there is. Everything beyond her is only an illusion his mind has dreamed.

  She pulls away from him. His hand is still cupped around her breast.

  “I have to go back.” Her eyes are blurred by what just happened. “Stay and we’ll have dinner after.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I would like that.”

  She turns to go down the stairs again, expecting him to follow, but he does not go.

  “I’ll just stay here for a while and look at the view.”

  She nods and is gone, her soft fragrant hair and small back receding down the dark passage, and even as she goes, he knows he will never see her again. He will never know her name. She will go on singing her beautiful songs, and he will do … what? He does not know. He has always been an ascetic—he would have made a good priest; he cannot allow himself too many attachments. He stares out over the churchyard and looks down at the dead yellow grass below. Today he has been relieved of nearly every attachment, every thing that held him to this earth. And this woman, just now, made him see how easy it is to latch on to something new, whatever comes along. If he had gone with her, he would only be building up another kind of Theodore, another identity, perhaps no better nor worse than the one that has been ripped from him today. So therefore, (he can see his mind working, like a kind of machine set out apart from him), therefore, perhaps it would be an apt and fitting test now to see what would happen if he tossed himself from the great height of this tower, from the top of this temple, to the frozen ground below. Would that not be the true and only test of whether he is only what he can physically see and touch, or whether there is something more? That is what a scientist would do, having formulated this hypothesis to test—and isn’t this the only test that really matters?

  What would happen next?

  He has a sneaking suspicion that the one he has known as Theodore, the one who is thinking these thoughts, watching and deciding, would be no more.

  No archangel would swoop down from the parapets to save him, or lift him up to heaven.

  He would not be around to see what’s next, so therefore, there could be no answer, no solution to this experiment.

  And he cannot stand the thought, the vision that enters his head, which is the image of Ilene standing in the yard below surrounded by policemen and an ambulance there to take his lifeless body away.

  THERE IS A garden on the way home. He has walked this way many times before, on his daily trek from the office building, across the north quad, towards the faculty parking lot. It is only a brief detour to pass through this nearly forgotten corner of the campus, a small garden tended with care in memo
ry of an obscure benefactor of the university from the 1890s, the heiress of a soap-maker’s fortune.

  He turns into the garden now, marked at its entrance by two pinkish gray stones engraved with the name of the heiress. He has always coveted this out-of-the-way place, this corner of the campus not too many people know about or care to visit. He has always thought of it as his own private spot, where he could spend a few quiet moments in thought before the drive home, contemplating the beds of flowers blooming here a good part of the year. Today the beds are empty, the bulbs tucked beneath the frozen earth, dormant. Still, it has its beauty. There are two alleyways between the beds where he can walk, lined on both sides by giant sycamore trees, their wet black branches waving high above him in the wind. At the center of the garden is a desolate fountain in the shape of an octagon—the figure of the octave, of completion—out of which rises a green copper statue of Persephone, her gaze caught it seems between the underworld and the barren garden she watches over here above.

  He knows he is only postponing the inevitable, dawdling here, as he has been doing all day long, wandering aimlessly, without direction or purpose. The sun takes a little longer to set in late February, but it is nearly dark by five fifteen. There is not much daylight left—soon enough he will have to tell Ilene. She will be expecting him home. He brushes his phone on to see if he has somehow missed a call from her. There are no messages, no notifications of an incoming call—only a handful of straggling emails, from colleagues who haven’t heard the news of his demise, or those who copied him on routine notes out of habit or in response to a message with REPLY ALL. The world goes on without him, he can see. The emails still get sent, the science still gets done, and tomorrow morning the board meeting will still happen without him, and a new Research Director will be chosen to take Victor’s place. He glances at the phone’s tiny screen again and tosses it into the dirt. He won’t be needing it any more.

  At the end of the pathway, the garden bends away from campus and tucks against the side of a small hill, an unusual outcropping of earth where the terrain begins to rise a bit more steeply from the shore of the lake that defines the eastern edge of the city. Here, there is a strange relic from the original designers of this refuge—a set of concrete steps that leads down to a public restroom. The way in to this place is shrouded in shadow, with the sun dipping behind the knob of the hill; it looks like the entrance to a cave or a tomb. He takes the first steps carefully, not knowing what to expect. Seeing this place has reminded him that he needs to go to the bathroom, and he hopes the doors are open. That weak cup of coffee he had and the juice at the church are making him want to go.

  The seven or eight steps that lead down to this enclosure smell of urine—not a good sign. Sure enough, the doors to both men’s and women’s bathrooms are bolted shut. And now that he has been thinking about it, he really does need to piss, urgently. He takes a quick look around, making sure no one can see him, drops his computer bag, unzips the front of his trousers, and lets fly. He can tell by the dank smell of this cavern that he isn’t the first one who’s done this.

  After that bit of relief, his eyes have settled in to the gloom of dusk in this place. He looks around and sees dead leaves, a shriveled, desiccated condom, and, in the far corner, a bird’s nest, falling apart, abandoned by old crows now forever gone away. Odd to find a bird’s nest here in this low place—perhaps some animal dragged it down here or it was blown here by the wind. Would a bird seek shelter or find it in a place as far down in the ground as this? For all his knowledge of the physical mechanics of the universe at the grandest and most infinitesimal levels, his understanding of the natural world of plants and animals has always been lacking. He sets his bag down again next to the nest and kneels to take a closer look. It almost appears on closer inspection to be nothing more than a loose clump of grass and twigs, but he can see that it has been gathered together, formed by a being of some intelligence, into a coherent pattern, a slack, flowing weave of the bits of tree branch padded by softer brown grass in a semblance of a hollowed out circle not unlike a crown. The intent behind this crude undertaking—he pictures the black bird bustling about plucking these twigs and branches and weaving them together, purposeful, thoughtful almost—is comforting. At every level, life will find a means to survive. He turns and gazes up the steps at the wedge of sky above him, poised like a great gray stone that could wheel about and shut him in. He will rest here, lay his head down on the bag for a moment—only for a moment, he will close his eyes and rest.

  The darkness feels divine. The backs of his eyelids are a perfect expanse of blankness, a field of nothingness where his mind can empty itself and go still. With his eyes closed and his other senses shutting down, he feels it—something hard in the briefcase his head is lying on. Not his computer, he left that back at the office in his hurry to get away. A book. His eyes open again and he sits up, unzips the front pouch where he sometimes puts a book or two he has been reading. He opens the hardcover book and flips through its pages—The Mathematical Theory of Cosmic Strings: Series in High Energy Physics, Cosmology, and Gravitation. He had been reading it on the flight to California, engrossed in its descriptions of infinite straight strings and loops and the associated singularity structures—the zero point and the infinite strings that go with it. Here, on page 337, is an interesting passage, something that had caught his eye:

  “The remaining metric function, ψ, is fixed by the constraint equation (10.12) and can be expressed as an infinite series of toroidal harmonics. It turns out that ψ is well defined if ξ0 is smaller than a critical value ξcrit which depends only on the mass per unit length μ of the string. One interesting feature of the solutions, alluded to earlier, is that as ξ0→ ξcrit the ratio M/(μL) of the gravitational mass of the string to its local mass tends to zero. Thus, the effect of the impulsive toroidal wavefront is, in some sense, to mask the far gravitational field of the string.”

  This had seemed to him to be an important insight into the basic structure of the universe, hidden here in the back pages of this obscure and mostly unacknowledged book. He had underlined the passage heavily in blue pen, in his typical manner of annotating books he reads, and had drawn a number of blue arrows in the margin pointing to the passage. The insight comes back to him—the image of a vast, infinite set of toruses spiraling out and away from an infinitely long string that spans the breadth of the universe—this could serve as the underpinning of the basic cosmic structure and the key to understanding the far-reaching, yet unexplainable effects of gravity. He turns the page to read more, and then he sees. There, buried in the back of the book, stuck between the pages, two folded pieces of notebook paper covered with his scratchings in blue ink—his notes! The notes he searched for everywhere; of course, how could he have not remembered. He had been reading the book on the plane, had gotten excited about this description of the gravitational effects of infinite strings, jotted something down on the notebook paper, folded it up and tucked it away. But his growing sense of panic at the hotel, his vision of doom, had blurred his thinking—he had searched everywhere in this bag, but didn’t remember to look inside the pages of this book.

  Here it is—the equation from the book that he jotted down in one of the few remaining spaces on his two pages of notes:

  He had intended, on the plane, to refer to this equation and the idea of the toroids spiraling out from the infinite, universe-sized looping string, and the toroids masking the effect of the string’s gravity, but he had been so totally flustered that he had forgotten all about it by the time he appeared on stage to give his presentation. And he had forgotten many other things, many other equations, scribbled in a kind of haphazard grid between the lines of the two pages of notebook paper. He looks at them now and remembers all the hours he put in, all the hard-fought victories and insights he had won and weaved into this research. All of it for naught.

  Why couldn’t he find these notes when he needed them? Why hadn’t he sent them to himself in an em
ail? That’s the thought that worms its way into his head and will not go away as he lays the pages down beside him. He stares up at the grim gray wedge of sky. If there is a God out there in the heavens above, how could His will be so diametrically opposed to Theodore’s own? How could God have wanted him to fail so miserably—in such an embarrassing way—by saying something to all those people about God? A kind and loving God would have wanted him to succeed, to make Himself known in a better way than this. But perhaps God is indeed the kind of vengeful, wrathful God Victor said he had no need for, when they were talking in his office. Theodore knows now why his colleagues had been so appalled by his evocation of God during his speech: We can only be certain of what we can see and measure and detect with our instruments and our own two eyes. Everything else is subject to guesswork and speculation, and the dangerous attribution of whatever any madman may want to propose as the Will of a Higher Being than us, without proof. In that case, there can be only the testimony of one man against another. When that happens, history has shown that the result must be bloody wars and tyranny and persecution, the very things that rational scientists and all sane men have been trying to rid the world of the past four hundred years.

  Theodore closes his eyes and lays his head down again on his bag. Of course, there is no God. How could he have ever entertained such an idea? There is only the spinning, expanding remnants of an accidental explosion, shreds of energy that have slowed down enough after billions of years to congeal into clumps of cooling matter which exhibit a tendency to hang together in particular ways that sometimes allow for structures that show a slightly higher degree of order and self-perpetuation—what is commonly referred to as life. There is only the cruel cold vacuum of blackest space beyond this thin envelope of drifting clouds; there is only death and decay and destruction awaiting him and every other animal that has had the audacity to witness and consider the setting and rising sun, the infernal phases of the moon marching onward in its elusive transit across the sky. Into his head and through even his heart the pain of this knowing has spread, and with his eyes closed and his head sunken down upon the bag as a cushion against the hardened ground of the pit, he calls upon the mercy of sleep to calm him and send these terrible visions of affliction on their way.