by Mark Alpert
It would’ve been amusing to talk about the Pluto spaceship, but now David was uncomfortable. He felt a strong need to improve his standing in his son’s eyes. “A long time ago, when I was in graduate school, I did some real science. And it was all about space.”
Jonah turned away from the street and stared at him. “You mean spaceships?” he asked hopefully. “Spaceships that can go a billion miles per second?”
“No, it was about the shape of space. What space would look like if there were only two dimensions instead of three.”
“I don’t get it. What’s a dimension?”
“A universe with two dimensions has length and width, but no depth. Like a giant sheet.” David held out his hands, palms down, as if he were smoothing an infinite sheet. “I had this teacher, Professor Kleinman? He’s one of the smartest scientists in the whole world. And we wrote a paper together about two-dimensional universes.”
“A paper?” The excitement seemed to drain from Jonah’s face.
“Yeah, that’s what scientists do, they write papers about their discoveries. So their colleagues can see what they’ve done.”
Jonah turned back to watch the traffic. He was so bored, he didn’t even bother to ask what the word colleagues meant. “I’m gonna ask Mom if I can take the Super Soaker to show-and-tell.”
A minute later they walked into the apartment building where Jonah and his mother lived. David had lived there, too, until two years ago, when he and Karen had separated. Now he had a small apartment of his own farther uptown, closer to his job at Columbia University. Every weekday he picked up Jonah from school at three o’clock and delivered him to his mother four hours later. The arrangement allowed them to avoid the considerable expense of hiring a nanny. But David’s heart always sank as he walked through the lobby of his old building and entered the sluggish elevator. He felt like an exile.
When they finally reached the fourteenth floor, David saw Karen standing in the apartment’s doorway. She hadn’t changed out of her work clothes yet; she wore black pumps and a gray business suit, the standard uniform of a corporate lawyer. With her arms folded across her chest, she scrutinized her ex-husband, glancing with evident disapproval at the stubble on David’s face and his mud-caked jeans and the T-shirt emblazoned with the name of his softball team, the Hitless Historians. Then her eyes fixed on the Super Soaker. Sensing trouble, Jonah handed the gun to David and slipped past his mother into the apartment. “Gotta pee,” he yelled as he ran to the bathroom.
Karen shook her head as she stared at the water gun. A stray lock of blond hair dangled beside her left cheek. She was still beautiful, David thought, but it was a cold beauty, cold and unyielding. She raised her hand to her face and whisked the blond lock to the side. “What the hell were you thinking?”
David had prepared himself for this. “Look, I already told Jonah the rules. No shooting at people. We went to the park and shot at the rocks and trees. It was fun.”
“You think a machine gun is an appropriate toy for a seven-year-old?”
“It’s not a machine gun, all right? And the box said, ‘Ages seven and up.’”
Karen narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. It was an expression she often made in the heat of an argument, and David had always hated it. “You know what kids do with those Super Soakers?” she said. “There was a story about it on the news last night. A bunch of kids in Staten Island put gasoline in the gun instead of water so they could turn it into a flamethrower. They nearly burned down their whole neighborhood.”
David took a deep breath. He didn’t want to fight with Karen anymore. That was why they’d split up—they were fighting all the time in front of Jonah. So it made no sense at all to continue this conversation. “Okay, okay, calm down. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“Take the gun home with you. You can let Jonah play with it when you’re watching him, but I don’t want that thing in my house.”
Before David could respond, he heard the telephone ring inside the apartment. Then he heard Jonah call out, “I’ll get it!” Karen’s eyes swept sideways and for a moment it looked like she was going to make a dash for the phone, but instead she just cocked her ear to listen. David wondered if it was her new boyfriend. She’d started dating another lawyer, a hearty gray-haired gent with two former wives and a lot of money. David wasn’t jealous in the usual sense—he’d lost his passion for Karen a long time ago. What he couldn’t stand was the thought of that glad-handing coot getting chummy with Jonah.
Jonah came to the doorway with the cordless phone in his hand. He stopped in his tracks, probably puzzled by the anxious looks on both his parents’ faces. Then he held the phone toward David. “It’s for you, Dad.”
Karen’s face fell. She looked betrayed. “That’s strange. Why would anyone call you here? Don’t they have your new number?”
Jonah shrugged. “The man on the phone said he’s with the police.”
DAVID SAT IN THE BACKSEAT of a taxi speeding north toward St. Luke’s Hospital. It was getting dark now and all the eager Thursday-night couples were lining up outside the restaurants and bars on Amsterdam Avenue. As the taxi hurtled through the traffic, careening past the slow-moving buses and delivery trucks, David stared at the neon signs above the restaurants, the lurid orange letters flashing by.
Attacked, the police detective said. Professor Kleinman had been attacked in his apartment on 127th Street. Now he was in critical condition at the emergency room of St. Luke’s. And he’d asked for David Swift. Whispered a phone number to the paramedics. You better hurry, the detective said. David asked, “Why? What’s wrong?” and the detective said, “Just hurry.”
David squirmed with guilt. He hadn’t seen Professor Kleinman in over three years. The old man had become a recluse since he’d retired from Columbia’s physics department. Lived in a tiny apartment on the edge of West Harlem, gave all his money to Israel. No wife, no kids. His whole life had been physics.
Twenty years earlier, when David was a grad student, Kleinman had been his adviser. David had liked him from the start. Neither aloof nor severe, he sprinkled Yiddish into his discourses on quantum theory. Once a week David went to Kleinman’s office to hear him elucidate the mysteries of wave functions and virtual particles. Unfortunately, all the patient explanations weren’t enough; after two years of frustration, David had to admit he was in over his head. He simply wasn’t smart enough to be a physicist. So he quit the graduate program and switched to the next best thing: a Ph.D. in the history of science.
Kleinman was disappointed but understanding. Despite David’s failings as a physics student, the old man had grown fond of him. They stayed in touch over the next ten years, and when David began research for his book—a study of Albert Einstein’s collaborations with his various assistants—Kleinman offered his personal recollections of the man he called Herr Doktor. The book, On the Shoulders of Giants, was tremendously successful and made David’s reputation. He was now a full professor in Columbia’s History of Science program. But David knew it didn’t mean much. Compared with a genius like Kleinman, he’d accomplished nothing.
The taxi screeched to a halt in front of the St. Luke’s emergency room. After paying the driver, David rushed through the automatic glass doors and immediately spied a trio of New York City police officers standing next to the intake desk. Two of them were in uniform: a middle-aged sergeant with a bulging gut and a tall, thin rookie who looked like he was barely out of high school. The third was a plainclothes detective, a handsome Latino man in a neatly pressed suit. That’s the man who called me, David thought. He remembered the detective’s name: Rodriguez.
His heart pounding, David approached the officers. “Excuse me? I’m David Swift. Are you Detective Rodriguez?”
The detective nodded soberly. The two patrolmen, though, seemed amused. The paunchy sergeant smiled at David. “Hey, you got a permit for that thing?”
He pointed at the Super Soaker. David was so distracted he’d forgotten h
e was still holding Jonah’s water gun.
Rodriguez frowned at the sergeant. He was all business. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Swift. Are you a relative of Mr. Kleinman?”
“No, no, I’m just a friend. A former student, actually.”
The detective looked puzzled. “He was your teacher?”
“Yes, at Columbia. How is he? Is he badly hurt?”
Rodriguez placed a hand on David’s shoulder. “Please, come with us. He’s conscious but not answering our questions. He insists on talking to you.”
The detective led David down a corridor while the two patrolmen walked behind. They passed a pair of nurses who looked at them gravely. This was not a good sign. “What happened?” David asked. “You said he was attacked?”
“We got a report of a burglary in progress,” Rodriguez said without emotion. “Someone across the street saw a man enter the apartment from the fire escape. When the officers arrived they found Mr. Kleinman in the bathroom, critically injured. That’s all we know at this time.”
“What do you mean, critically injured?”
The detective looked straight ahead. “Whoever did this was a very sick individual. Mr. Kleinman has third-degree burns on his face, chest, and genitals. He also has a collapsed lung and damage to his other organs. The doctors say his heart is failing now. I’m very sorry, Mr. Swift.”
David’s throat tightened. “Can’t they operate?”
Rodriguez shook his head. “He wouldn’t survive.”
“Goddamn it,” David muttered. He felt more anger than grief. He clenched his fists as he thought of Dr. Hans Walther Kleinman, that kind and brilliant old man, being pummeled by some sadistic street punk.
They came to a room marked TRAUMA CENTER. Through the doorway David saw two more nurses in green scrubs standing beside a bed that was surrounded by medical equipment—a cardiac monitor, a crash cart, a defibrillator, an IV pole. From the corridor David couldn’t see who was lying on the bed. He was about to step into the room when Detective Rodriguez grabbed his arm.
“I know this will be difficult, Mr. Swift, but we need your help. I want you to ask Mr. Kleinman if he remembers anything from the attack. The paramedics said that while he was in the ambulance, he kept repeating a couple of names.” Rodriguez looked over his shoulder at the rookie patrolman. “What were those names again?”
The boy cop flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Uh, hold on a second. They were German names, I remember that. Okay, here they are. Einhard Liggin and Feld Terry.”
Rodriguez looked intently at David. “Do you know either of those people? Were they associates of Mr. Kleinman?”
David repeated the names silently: Einhard Liggin, Feld Terry. They were unusual, even for German. And then it hit him.
“They’re not names,” he said. “It’s two words in German. Einheitliche Feldtheorie.”
“What does it mean?”
“Unified field theory.”
Rodriguez just stared at him. “And what the hell is that?”
David decided to give the same explanation he would’ve given Jonah. “It’s a theory that would explain all the forces of nature. Everything from gravity to electricity to the nuclear forces. It’s the Holy Grail of physics. Researchers have been working on the problem for decades, but no one’s come up with the theory yet.”
The paunchy sergeant chuckled. “Well, there’s our perp. The unified field theory. Should I put out an all-points?”
Rodriguez frowned at the sergeant again, then turned back to David. “Just ask Mr. Kleinman what he remembers. Anything at all would be helpful.”
David said, “All right, I’ll try,” but he was perplexed now. Why would Kleinman repeat those particular words? Unified field theory was a somewhat old-fashioned term. Most physicists now referred to it as string theory or M-theory or quantum gravity, which were the names of the more recent approaches to the problem. What’s more, Kleinman hadn’t been enthusiastic about any of these approaches. His fellow physicists were going about it all wrong, he’d said. Instead of trying to understand how the universe works, they were building gaudy towers of mathematical formulas.
Rodriguez gave him an impatient look. He took the Super Soaker out of David’s hands and nudged him toward the Trauma Center. “You better go in now. He may not have long.”
David nodded, then stepped into the room. As he approached the bed, the two nurses tactfully backed off and focused on the cardiac monitor.
What he noticed first were the bandages, the thick gauze pad taped to the right side of Kleinman’s face and the blood-soaked wrappings across his chest. The dressings covered most of Kleinman’s body and yet they still didn’t conceal all his injuries. David could see patches of dried blood under the old man’s white hair and purple hand-shaped bruises on both of his shoulders. But the worst thing was the dark blue tinge to his skin. David was familiar enough with physiology to know what it meant: Kleinman’s heart could no longer pump the oxygenated blood from his lungs to the rest of his body. The doctors had strapped an oxygen mask to his face and put him in a sitting position to drain the fluid from his lungs, but these interventions weren’t having much effect. David felt a fullness in his own chest as he stared at Professor Kleinman. The old man already looked like a corpse.
After a few seconds, though, the corpse began to move. Kleinman opened his eyes and slowly raised his left hand to his face. With curled fingers he tapped the clear plastic mask that covered his mouth and nose. David leaned over the bed. “Dr. Kleinman? It’s me, David. Can you hear me?”
Although the professor’s eyes were watery and dull, they locked on David. Kleinman tapped his oxygen mask again and then grasped the vinyl air bag that hung below, filling and emptying like a third lung. After fumbling for a moment, he got a good grip on the thing and started tugging.
David grew alarmed. “Is something wrong? Is the air not getting through?”
Kleinman pulled harder at the bag, which twisted in his hand. His lips were moving behind the plastic mask. David leaned closer. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
The old man shook his head. A drop of sweat ran down his brow. “Don’t you see it?” he whispered from behind the mask. “Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
Kleinman let go of the bag and held his hand up in the air, turning it around slowly as if he were displaying a prize. “So beautiful,” he whispered.
David heard a moist rattle in Kleinman’s chest. It was the fluid backing up into his lungs. “Do you know where you are, Professor? You’re in the hospital.”
Kleinman kept staring with wonder at his hand, or more specifically, at the empty space cupped in his palm. “Yes, yes,” he rasped.
“Someone attacked you in your apartment. The police want to know if you remember anything.”
The old man coughed, spraying pinkish spittle on the inside of his mask. But his eyes remained on the invisible prize in his hand. “He was right. Mein Gott, he was right!”
David bit his lip. He knew now beyond a doubt that Kleinman was dying, because he’d witnessed a similar struggle once before. Ten years earlier he’d stood by his father’s hospital bed and watched him die of liver cancer. David’s father, John Swift, was a bus driver and former boxer who’d abandoned his family and drunk himself to death. At the end he didn’t even recognize his son. Instead he thrashed under the bedsheets and cursed the names of the once-famous welterweights who’d beaten him senseless thirty years before.
David grasped Kleinman’s hand. It was soft and limp and very cold. “Professor, please listen. This is important.”
The old man’s eyes locked on him again. They were the only part of him that still seemed alive. “Everyone thought…that he failed. But he succeeded. He succeeded!” Kleinman spoke in short bursts, taking shallow breaths in between. “But he couldn’t…publish it. Herr Doktor saw…the danger. Much worse…than a bomb. Destroyer…of worlds.”
David stared at the old man. Herr Doktor? Destroyer o
f worlds? He clasped Kleinman’s hand a bit tighter. “Try to stay with me, okay? You need to tell me about the man who hurt you. Do you remember what he looked like?”
The professor’s face was shiny with sweat now. “That’s why…the shtarker came. That’s why…he tortured me.”
“Tortured?” David felt a sickening jolt.
“Yes, yes. He wanted me…to write it down. But I didn’t. I didn’t!”
“Write what down? What did he want?”
Kleinman smiled behind the mask. “Einheitliche Feldtheorie,” he whispered. “Herr Doktor’s…last gift.”
David was bewildered. The easiest explanation was that the professor was hallucinating. The trauma of the attack had dredged up memories from half a century ago, when Hans Kleinman was a young physicist at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, hired to assist the legendary but ailing Albert Einstein. David had written about it in his book: the endless stream of calculations on the blackboard in Einstein’s office, the long futile search for a field equation that would encompass both gravity and electromagnetism. It was not unreasonable that Kleinman, in his final delirium, would think back to those days. And yet the old man didn’t seem delirious at that moment. His chest was wheezing and he was sweating profusely, but his face was calm.
“I’m sorry, David,” he rasped. “Sorry I never…told you. Herr Doktor saw…the danger. But he couldn’t…he couldn’t…” Kleinman coughed again, and his whole body shuddered. “He couldn’t burn…his notebooks. The theory was…too beautiful.” He let out another violent cough and then he suddenly doubled over.
One of the nurses rushed to the other side of Kleinman’s bed. Grabbing the professor by his bruised shoulders, she propped him back up to a sitting position. David, who was still holding Kleinman’s hand, saw that his oxygen mask was filled with pink froth.
The nurse quickly removed the mask and cleaned out the sputum. But when she tried to put it back on, Kleinman shook his head. She grasped the back of his neck to hold him still, but he batted the mask away with his free hand. “No!” he croaked. “Stop it! Enough!”