by Mark Alpert
Women physicists were uncommon enough in the 1980s, but a black female string theorist was a rare phenomenon indeed. The scientists in the auditorium regarded her as they would any other rare phenomenon, with a mixture of awe and skepticism. As soon as she began her presentation, though, they accepted her as one of their own, because she spoke their language, the abstruse tongue of mathematics. Moving to the blackboard, she scribbled a long sequence of equations, each crowded with the symbols representing the fundamental parameters of the universe: the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the mass of the electron, the strength of the nuclear force. Then, with an ease that David could only envy, she manipulated and transformed the dense thickets of symbols until they condensed into a single, elegant equation that described the shape of space around a vibrating string.
David couldn’t follow every step of her argument; by this point in his graduate career he’d realized the limits of his own mathematical abilities, and usually he felt an overwhelming frustration and jealousy when he witnessed the skills of a genius like Monique. But as she worked her magic on the blackboard and calmly answered the questions of her colleagues, David felt no bitterness whatsoever. Without a struggle, he surrendered to her powers. After she finished her presentation, he jumped out of his seat and made his way to the stage so he could introduce himself.
Monique raised her eyebrows when David mentioned his name. A look of surprise and pleasure crossed her face. “Sure, I know you!” she exclaimed. “I just read the paper you did with Hans Kleinman. Relativity in a two-dimensional spacetime, right? That was a nice piece of work.”
She clasped his hand and gave it a squeeze. David was dumbfounded—he couldn’t believe she’d actually read his paper. “Well, it’s nothing, really,” he replied. “Not compared with your work, I mean. Your presentation was absolutely amazing.” He tried to think of a more intelligent comment, but he came up blank. “I was blown away. I really was.”
“Oh Lord, stop!” She let out a laugh, a wonderful high-pitched swoop. “You’re making me feel like a movie star!” Then she moved a step closer to him and lightly rested her hand on his forearm, as if they were old friends. “So you’re at Columbia, right? How’s the department over there?”
Their conversation continued for the next several hours, moving first to the faculty lounge, where David met some of the other grad students in Princeton’s department, and then to a local restaurant called the Rusty Scupper, where the small group of budding physicists ordered margaritas and debated the relative merits of chiral and nonchiral string theories. After a few drinks David admitted to Monique that he hadn’t understood some parts of her presentation, and she was happy to fill the gaps in his comprehension, patiently explaining each mathematical procedure. After a few more drinks he asked her how she got interested in physics, and she told him it was all because of her father, a man who never got past ninth grade himself but was always devising interesting theories about the world. By midnight David and Monique were the last customers left in the restaurant, and by 1 A.M. they were groping each other on the couch in Monique’s tiny apartment.
For David, this sequence of events was fairly typical. He was in the middle of the six-month drinking binge that had clouded his second year in graduate school, and when he was drinking with a woman he usually tried to go to bed with her. And though Monique was more intelligent and beautiful than most of the women he’d slept with, she was typical in other ways—she was impulsive, lonely, and seemed to be hiding some unhappiness. So everything was progressing along the usual lines, but as Monique got up from the couch and unzipped her Kente dress, letting it fall to her ankles in a colorful heap, something went wrong. As soon as David saw her naked body, he started crying. It was so sudden and unaccountable that at first David thought it was happening to Monique, not him. He thought, Why is she crying? Did I do something wrong? But no, she wasn’t crying. The sobs were coming from his own throat, and the tears were running down his own cheeks. He quickly got to his feet and turned away from her, humiliated. Christ, he thought, what the hell is happening to me?
After a few seconds he felt Monique’s hand on his shoulder. “David?” she whispered. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head, trying desperately to hide his face. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, stepping away from her. “I better go.”
But Monique held on to him. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pulled him closer. “What’s wrong, baby? You can tell me.”
Her skin was soft and cool. He felt something give inside him, and all at once he knew why he was crying. Compared with Monique Reynolds, he was worthless. The week before, he’d failed his comprehensive exams, which meant that Columbia’s physics department would soon ask him to leave the graduate program. The drinking had certainly contributed to his failure—it’s pretty much impossible to understand quantum field theory when you’re chronically hungover—but even if he’d been stone-cold sober for the whole semester, he doubted that the result would have been any different. What was worse, his father had predicted this would happen. When he’d visited the old man two years before, in the seedy hotel room that John Swift had occupied since his release from prison, he’d laughed when David told him about his plans to become a physicist. “You’ll never be a scientist,” his father had warned. “You’ll just fuck it up.”
But David couldn’t reveal any of this to Monique. Instead he unclasped her hands from his waist. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “But I have to go.”
He kept crying as he walked away from Monique’s apartment and across the darkened Princeton campus. You idiot, he muttered, you fucking idiot. It’s the booze, all the goddamn booze. You can’t think straight anymore. He stopped near one of the college’s undergraduate dorms and leaned against the Gothic stone building for a minute to clear his head. No more drinking, he told himself. You’ve had your last drink.
But when he got back to New York the next day, the first thing he did was go to the West End Tavern on Broadway and order a shot of Jack Daniel’s. He hadn’t bottomed out yet. It wasn’t until two months later, after he’d been officially kicked out of Columbia’s physics program, that he descended to a level of degradation that was awful enough to make him quit drinking forever.
In the following years, as David straightened out his life and pursued his doctorate in history, he occasionally thought about getting in touch with Monique to explain what had happened. But he never did. In 2001, he came across an article about her in Scientific American. She was still at Princeton and still pursuing string theory, which had advanced considerably since the 1980s but remained just as indefinite, incomplete, and unwieldy as ever. Monique was now exploring the possibility that the extra dimensions predicted by string theory were not curled into infinitesimal manifolds but lay behind a cosmic barrier that prevented us from seeing them. David was less interested in the physics, though, than in the biographical details revealed in the last few paragraphs of the article. Monique, as it turned out, had grown up in Anacostia, the poorest neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Her mother had been a heroin addict and her father had been shot to death in a robbery when she was just two months old. David felt an ache in the center of his chest as he read this. She’d told him that her father had inspired her to become a physicist, but she’d never actually known the man.
David thought about Monique again after his marriage fell apart, and a few times he came close to calling her. But each time he put down the phone and Googled her instead, typing her name into the search engine and checking out the Web sites that popped up. He’d learned this way that she was now a full professor of physics, that she’d participated in a Web chat about African history, and that she’d run the New York Marathon in three hours and fifty-two minutes, a very respectable time for a forty-three-year-old woman. His best discovery, though, was a photograph of Monique in the online version of the Princeton Packet, which showed her standing in front of a modest two-story house with a large front porch. David recogn
ized the place immediately: it was 112 Mercer Street, the house where Albert Einstein had lived for the last twenty years of his life. In his will, Einstein had insisted that the house not be turned into a museum, so it remained a private residence for professors associated with Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. The caption below the photo noted that Professor Reynolds had recently moved into the home, replacing a faculty member who’d retired.
That’s where David headed as he got off the train at the Princeton station. He crossed the darkened campus again, clean and sober now but still desperate, and he doubted that Monique would be happy to see him.
LUCILLE WAS ON THE PHONE with her agents in Trenton when the secretary of defense barged into the conference room. She was so surprised she nearly dropped the receiver. She’d met the SecDef just once before, at a White House ceremony announcing a new counterterrorism initiative, and they’d exchanged only a handshake and a few pleasantries. But now the man loomed right in front of her, his square head cocked at a belligerent angle, his small eyes squinting disapproval behind his rimless glasses. Although it was three o’clock in the morning, his thin gray hair was neatly combed and his tie hung ramrod straight from an impeccable Windsor knot. A two-star air-force general trailed behind him, carrying the secretary’s briefcase.
“Uh, I’ll call you back,” Lucille said into the phone. She hung up and dutifully rose to her feet. “Mr. Secretary, I—”
“Sit down, Lucy, sit down.” He waved her back to her seat. “No need for formalities. I just wanted to see for myself how the operation was going. The air force was kind enough to fly me to New York.”
Great, Lucille thought. It would’ve been nice if someone had warned me. “Well, sir, we think we have a fix on the detainee. We have information that he’s in New Jersey now and we’re—”
“What?” The secretary leaned forward and turned his head to the side, as if he were trying to compensate for a bit of deafness in one ear. “I thought you had the guy pinned down in Manhattan. What about all the checkpoints at the bridges and tunnels?”
Lucille shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Unfortunately, there was a delay in getting David Swift’s photo to the police. Once we distributed the flyers, an officer assigned to Penn Station recognized the suspect. He said Swift boarded a New Jersey Transit train at about one-thirty.”
“How did he get on the train? Did he have false papers?”
“No, the suspect apparently joined a group of men who were rushing aboard. A bunch of drunk yahoos, basically. In the confusion, the officer failed to check for ID.”
The secretary frowned. The left corner of his mouth turned down like a fishhook. “That’s inexcusable. If this were a real army, that officer would be shot. He’d be executed at dawn by the members of his own unit.”
Lucille was unsure how to respond. She decided to ignore the bizarre comment entirely. “I just spoke with our agents in New Jersey. They boarded the train at the Trenton station but didn’t find the suspect. Now we’re looking into the possibility that Swift got off the train with the drunk guys. The officer at Penn Station said they were from Metuchen.”
“That doesn’t sound very promising. What other leads do you have?”
“We’ve positioned surveillance teams at the residences of Swift’s colleagues in Columbia’s history department. Several of them live in New Jersey, so there’s a good chance he may go to one of them for help. And we brought in Swift’s ex-wife for questioning. She’s downstairs with her son and her boyfriend, an older fellow named Amory Van Cleve. We’re going to—”
“Wait, what did you say his name was?”
“Amory Van Cleve. He’s a lawyer, the managing partner of Morton McIntyre and—”
“Jesus!” The secretary raised his hand to his forehead. “Don’t you know who that is? Van Cleve was one of the biggest contributors in the last election, for Christ’s sake! He raised twenty million dollars for the president’s campaign!”
Lucille stiffened. She didn’t like the sound of this. “Sir, I’m just following the orders of the Bureau’s director. He told me to pursue this case with all due vigor, and that’s what I’m doing.”
Grimacing, the secretary took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Believe me, Lucy, I want you to be aggressive. I want you to throw everything you have at this case. This project is one of the Pentagon’s top priorities. If the information should fall into the hands of the Iranians or the North Koreans, the consequences would be catastrophic.” He put his glasses back on and squinted at her, his eyes like a pair of snipers. “But you can’t use the standard interrogation techniques on someone like Amory Van Cleve. He’s one of the top Republican fund-raisers in the country. When the president was up here last spring, they played golf together!”
“Well, what do you suggest, sir?”
He looked over his shoulder at the air-force general. Without a word, the man opened the briefcase, pulled out a folder, and handed it to the secretary, who began leafing through its contents. “Okay, it says here that this guy Swift has a history of substance abuse.”
“He had a drinking problem when he was in his twenties,” Lucille clarified.
The SecDef shrugged. “Once a drunk, always a drunk. We can say that the guy moved on to cocaine, and he’s been dealing the stuff to the rich brats at Columbia. The Bureau was about to arrest him at his crack house in Harlem, but he and his friends managed to surprise the agents and kill half a dozen of them. How’s that for a cover story?”
Lucille tried to think of a diplomatic answer. “There’s a few problems. First of all, the Bureau wouldn’t ordinarily—”
“I don’t need to know the details. Just fix up the story and give it to Van Cleve and the ex-wife. Maybe they’ll lose enough sympathy for Swift that they’ll tell us where he might be hiding. And give the same story to the press, too. That way we can get a nationwide manhunt going.”
Lucille shook her head. Christ on a crutch. Keeping the SecDef informed was one thing, but taking orders from him was another. What made this bozo think he could run a law enforcement operation? “I don’t know if that’s the right approach,” she said. “Maybe we should contact the director of the Bureau and—”
“Don’t worry, the director will go along with it. I’m gonna talk to him as soon as I get back to Washington.” He closed the folder and handed it back to the air-force general. Then he turned on his heel and headed out of the conference room, with the general following close behind.
Lucille stood up, indignant. “Hold on a minute, Mr. Secretary! I think you should reconsider!”
He didn’t even turn around. He just raised his arm in farewell as he marched out the door. “No time for second-guessing, Lucy. You go to war with the army you have.”
DAVID HAD VISITED EINSTEIN’S HOME on Mercer Street once before, when he was writing On the Shoulders of Giants. Because it was a faculty residence, the house wasn’t open to the public, but after David made a special request explaining his purposes, the Institute for Advanced Study had granted him permission for a half-hour visit. It turned out to be invaluable to his research. He spent most of his allotted time in the study on the second floor, which was where Einstein did nearly all his work in his final years. Three of the room’s walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the fourth had a picture window overlooking the backyard. David had felt a strange giddiness as he gazed at the desk by the window. His mind stretched back half a century and he could practically see Einstein hunched over that desk, scratching away with his fountain pen for hours on end, filling page after page with spacetime metrics and Ricci tensors.
Approaching the house in darkness now, David saw that the grounds had been spruced up sometime in the past decade. Someone had put flowerpots on the front porch and pruned the unruly vine that had once spiraled around the drainpipe. Very quietly, David walked up the porch steps to the front door. He pressed the doorbell, which was surprisingly loud, and waited. To his dismay, no lights
came on. After half a minute, he rang the bell again, listening carefully for signs of life inside the house. Shit, he thought, maybe no one’s home. Maybe Monique went away for the weekend.
Growing desperate, he was about to press the bell a third time when he noticed something odd: the door frame had recently been rebuilt. The new jambs were still unpainted and a new lock had been installed in the door, its brass keyhole gleaming. The workmanship seemed hasty and slipshod, very different from the tidy appearance of the rest of the house. But before he could ponder this any further, he heard someone yell, “Hey, asshole!” just a few feet behind him.
David spun around and saw a barefoot, bare-chested young man coming up the porch steps. Dressed only in a pair of jeans, he had long blond hair and impressive pectoral muscles, but the thing that really caught David’s attention was the baseball bat in his hands. “Yeah, I’m talking to you,” the man said, unnecessarily. “What the hell are you doing? Making sure no one’s home?”
David stepped away from the door, holding his hands out to show they were empty. “I’m sorry to bother you so late. I’m David—”
“Sorry? You say you’re sorry? You’re gonna be a hell of a lot sorrier in a minute, dickface.”
As soon as the man reached the top step, he swung the bat at David. It sliced the air just inches from his head, coming so close he could hear it whistle. “Jesus!” he cried, backing away. “Stop it! I’m a friend!”
The man kept coming. “You’re not my friend. You’re a fucking Nazi.” He drew back the bat and prepared to swing again.
There was no time to think, so David’s instincts took over. He knew how to fight. His father had taught him the fundamental rule: Don’t be afraid to fight dirty. He stayed out of range until the blond guy swung the bat, then rushed forward and kicked him in the nuts. As the guy doubled over, David slammed a forearm into his chest, knocking him over. His bare back hit the porch with a resounding slap, and as he struggled to catch his breath David wrenched the bat out of his hands. Within three seconds, it was all over.