Interference

by Brad Parks

  “A year?” I said, dropping the dish towel.

  Matt nodded. It was four times his current salary.

  “To do research.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “Exactly what I’m doing now. He would set me up in a lab with the same equipment. But I’d be doing it for him.”

  “You said he ‘started at’ five hundred. Did it go down when he realized how ridiculous that number was?”

  “No, it went up,” Matt said. “When I didn’t immediately accept the offer, he doubled it.”

  “Doubled it?” I said, because I was sure I must have heard him wrong.

  “A million dollars a year,” my math-savant husband confirmed, in case I was incapable of doing the calculation.

  “Oh, Matty,” is all I could think to say.

  “I still don’t think we should take it.”

  “Why? Because of New York?”

  “No, because . . . I don’t get the best vibe from Plottner. He’s basically just another Wall Street guy.”

  Matt had repeatedly expressed his dismay that the financial sector was gobbling up some of the world’s most brilliant mathematicians and that rather than using their gifts to tackle the world’s thorniest numerical dilemmas or improve the human condition, these geniuses were now engaged in the zero-sum game that was making bets on the stock market.

  “Beyond that,” Matt continued, “I don’t even know if he really understands what he’s getting into. I mean, yeah, I think I’m close to a breakthrough. But I’ve been thinking that for a while now, haven’t I? And until I actually bring it home, I’m just another struggling scientist going around dishing out pithy aphorisms about how many airplanes the Wright brothers crashed. What if a year from now Plottner gets bored or impatient and decides he’s wasting his money? Dartmouth isn’t going to take me back. And these kind of positions . . .”

  He didn’t need to complete the thought. A tenured Ivy League professorship was the most sought-after prize in American academia, not to mention the most recession-proof job of all time.

  “Well, you know enough people,” I said. “You’d land on your feet somewhere.”

  “Yeah, but where? Say I hang on for a year or two with Plottner before he pulls the plug. It will have been that much longer since I published anything. I’d be lucky to get an interview with Southern North Dakota College for the Directionally Challenged.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “It’s more than that, though,” Matt said. “If I work for Plottner Investments, I am no longer part of the community of scholars, creating knowledge for the sake of knowledge, freely sharing my ideas. He would own whatever I did. I wouldn’t get to publish a paper unless he okayed it. Let’s say I do finally have a breakthrough and he makes me sit on it?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he wants to patent it and sell it to the highest bidder,” Matt said. “He’s an investor. He’s not offering a million dollars a year—plus benefits, plus lab setup costs, plus whatever—simply because he wants to see Plottner Investments get a one-line mention in Physical Review Letters. My work would remain under lock and key until he said it wasn’t.

  “And then there’s my health.”

  I felt a small catch in my breathing. The great unspoken was being spoken.

  “What about it?”

  “Dr. Reiner said I need less stress. Not more. What if taking this job makes it come back? Moving to New York is stressful. Starting a new job is stressful. Working for a guy like Plottner is stressful.”

  “Okay. You’re right. Turn it down.”

  “I know. But a million dollars a year?”

  “Money isn’t everything,” I said.

  “But it’s to do something I love.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And no more grant proposals.”

  “That too.”

  “And . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I just feel like it would be . . . selfish of me not to take this,” he said. “There’s Morgan’s college to think about. And I could retire my parents.”

  Matt’s parents still spent seventy hours a week at the diner. Matt worried they were working themselves into the grave. They had been trying to sell the business for a few years but hadn’t been able to find a buyer.

  We stopped and stared at each other. I looked into those puppy dog eyes of his and tried to divine what was really happening deep inside.

  What I saw was a man legitimately torn.

  A million dollars was a lot of money for anyone, but especially for a kid who grew up in a diner in Clinton, North Carolina.

  “When does Plottner need an answer?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say. We left it that I’d talk to you, and then we’d talk again soon.”

  “Which way are you leaning?”

  “The risk-averse part of me leans toward no,” he said. “But then, as soon as I try to live that decision, I feel crazier than a bag of monkeys. Who turns down a million-dollar-a-year job?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Let’s sleep on it and see how we feel in the morning,” he suggested.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll sleep on it.”

  We slept.

  Or, in my case, pretended to sleep until sometime well after midnight.

  Growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, I never would have described my family as rich. But we had always been comfortable. I had the privilege of never worrying about where my next meal came from, of being able to plan for the future while taking the present more or less for granted.

  Ditto with my adult life. Even when Matt was a broke grad student and I was riding the reference desk in West Windsor, the second-most junior librarian in the system and paid accordingly, we had everything we truly needed. I could sing for free. And ramen noodles weren’t so bad.

  These days, we weren’t just comfortable. We were very comfortable. Truly, working for Dartmouth College was the quintessential golden handcuffs.

  Still, we had our worries. Hanover real estate wasn’t cheap, and our mortgage payment gobbled up a big chunk of our paychecks. We probably weren’t saving enough for Morgan’s college, the cost of which only grew more astronomical with each passing year. And retirement? Don’t even start.

  All those qualms would be eliminated if Matt was making a million dollars a year.

  A lot of things got easier with a salary like that.

  Plus, there was always hopeful talk about the cutting-edge treatments for hearing loss that might soon be coming and could significantly improve my condition.

  They were all expensive. And none were covered by insurance.

  What would it be like to hear again? To sing again?

  To not have to wonder if I’d be able to know what my sweet boy’s voice sounded like when he became a man?

  I immediately chastised myself for even thinking about that. Matt had enough pressure on his research already. There is this incredible urgency that physicists feel as they age. Albert Einstein was twenty-six when he had his annus mirabilis, his miracle year. Werner Heisenberg was twenty-five when he published his uncertainty principle. Niels Bohr wrote his famous trilogy of papers when he was twenty-eight. Erwin Schrödinger was considered an old man when he was doing his best work at thirty-nine.

  There were far fewer examples of people whose best work came in their forties and beyond, the wall Matt was now staring at. It had long been my role in his life to remind him there was more to life than winning the Nobel Prize. He often thanked me for bringing balance to his worldview and “saving” him from the unhappy life of a narrow-minded, workaholic physicist. Is that what I should do again here?

  At least now, at Dartmouth, he still had his teaching, which he enjoyed. Did we really want to put him in a place where his research would be everything?

  At some point, I finally drifted off. Matt made
his usual five o’clock exit. Or at least I assumed he did: when the bed started buzzing at six thirty, his side was already empty.

  I got Morgan off to school, then groggily made my way to Baker Library.

  Around ten, my phone started flashing.

  It was the Dartmouth College Department of Physics and Astronomy.

  Matt. Probably asking whether I wanted to start looking for apartments in Manhattan.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I said.

  “Brigid, it’s Beppe,” he said gravely. “It’s happening again.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I texted Aimee a 911, then raced to Dartmouth-Hitchcock.

  At the information desk, a gray-faced woman asked, “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I’m Brigid Bronik. I’m looking for my husband, Matthew Bronik. He was just brought here in an ambulance. I’m not sure if he’s in the ER or if he’s been moved somewhere else already.”

  “Can I see some ID?”

  I hastily produced my driver’s license. The woman glanced at it just long enough to verify my name, then started typing.

  “He’s in the ICU. It’s—”

  “I know where it is. Thank you.”

  I hurried off through the hallways. When I reached the ICU, a nurse asked me to stay in the waiting area, just like last time. Matt had the same alarmingly low blood pressure and heart rate.

  Around eleven, the cardiologist came out and told me Matt was responding well to fluids and norepinephrine and we were “out of the woods” after some nervous moments, at least as far as his respiration and oxygen levels were concerned.

  At noon, Dr. Reiner escorted me into Matt’s room, where he looked mostly the same as he did last time. The hospital gown. The tube stuck in near his collarbone. The gadgets surrounding him.

  Except this time he had a nasty gash on his forehead. Reiner said the EMTs found him that way and surmised he hit his head when he lost consciousness.

  Reiner wanted to at least try a CT scan, hoping Matt would be still and they could get pictures of his brain while the fit was still ongoing. After that, he was transferred to neurology.

  I recognized one of the nurses there, a woman named Yvonne who gave me a grim smile of recognition.

  Back again?

  I just nodded. No one wants to be a repeat customer in the neurology wing.

  Time passed slowly. Whenever Matt got riled up and began fighting against those awful straps, it got even slower. He was hurting himself, but there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  At one point, Reiner came by to say he had read the CT scan. It didn’t provide any firm answers as to what was happening.

  “Does that mean he’ll come out of it again?” I asked.

  “Maybe? I’m afraid if I told you anything else, it might be a lie.”

  I continued my vigil, talking to him when I could think of anything to say, remaining watchful for any changes in him.

  He kept alternating between closed eyes and half-lidded vacant ones. Periods of frightening agitation—moaning, sputtering, struggling against his restraints—were followed by calm.

  When he started getting upset, I’d massage his bare scalp, something he liked—or at least he did when he was conscious. It was difficult to tell whether it was having any effect.

  Now and then, I’d put an ice bag on his forehead. The wound there was so angry and swollen, I figured it might help.

  Mostly, I waited. And watched.

  The first real sign of life came around 5:30 p.m., and it came from Matt’s tongue.

  It was searching out his teeth, like he was checking to see if they were all there.

  Other signs soon followed. A flexed hand. A shifted leg.

  Then, with his eyes still closed, he said, “Do you think this place gives frequent-flier miles? We’ve got to be halfway to a ticket for Bora Bora by now.”

  He had been out for roughly eight hours. I felt like, one forehead gash aside, it had taken as much of a toll on me as it had on him.

  We ran through the same battery of tests, plus a few extra “just in case” ones.

  Once he recovered from his headache—he described it as “thunderous” this time—Matt was an agreeable, good-natured pincushion, joking and quipping his way through the whole thing.

  I made a quick trip home, where Aimee had everything under control. Morgan loved his time with his aunt, who followed the rules just enough to give him the structure he craved but playfully bent them just enough to be fun.

  Then I returned to the hospital and spent a long, uncertain night by Matt’s side.

  The next day, morning soon blurred into afternoon.

  I wasn’t aware of the exact time when Dr. Reiner appeared and gave us a rundown of everything he had learned from the tests.

  Or, rather, everything he hadn’t.

  He concluded by saying, “I have to be honest: at this point, we’re looking for zebras.”

  “Zebras?” I said, sure I had misheard him.

  “Have you ever heard the expression ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’? Well, in this case, we’ve looked for all the horses. So we’re left with zebras.”

  “Great,” Matt said. “I’ve always wanted to go on a safari.”

  “I keep going back to the similarities between this attack and the last one,” Reiner said. “It was the same time of day, which makes me wonder if it’s some kind of narcolepsy. I’m going to order a sleep study to see if it tells us anything. I’m afraid that’s going to mean another night at the hospital.”

  “Seems like I’m going to keep getting those one way or another if we don’t figure this out. Might as well plan it.”

  “The other thing that’s the same is where it happened.”

  “The lab,” Matt said.

  “Is there anything in there that might have caused this? You said you play with lasers. Could you have zapped yourself unconscious?”

  Matt shook his head. “We’re not exactly talking about Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber here. It’s very low powered, very delicate. I use it to gently nudge around things that could fit on the head of a pin with room to spare.”

  “Still—”

  “You’d have better luck knocking down the Empire State Building with a flyswatter. I could run the thing over your body all day long and you’d never feel it.”

  “Okay, what about some kind of contaminant?”

  Matt, who was sitting in bed, crossed his arms and frowned. It was not a look I normally attributed to him.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m not sure I would call it a contaminant. And I can’t imagine how it would . . .”

  “Matty, what are you talking about?”

  He took in a deep breath, then let it go.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “No, not forget it,” I said. “This is not a ‘forget it’ kind of time. You’ve got something really scary happening to you, and we have to figure out what.”

  “It’ll help me to know more, not less,” Dr. Reiner said.

  Matt looked back and forth between the two of us before finally settling on Reiner.

  “This is . . . something I can’t advertise,” Matt said. “Some of my funding comes from the Department of Defense. They haven’t explicitly told me not to tell people about what I’ve been doing, but they’ve cautioned me against loose talk. Particularly with foreigners or people I don’t know well. I’m not saying it’s you they’d be concerned about, but I wouldn’t want you discussing this with colleagues.”

  “Doctor-patient privilege applies to whatever you say right now. I’m ethically bound to keep this to myself.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I don’t mean to make this sound all cloak and dagger. But I have been working with viruses.”

  I felt something squeezing in my chest. Viruses? Since when?

  “I see,” Reiner said.

  “I suppose that could be viewed as a contaminant of sorts.”

  You suppose?
I wanted to interject. And you’re just now mentioning this?

  If we hadn’t been in a hospital, talking to a doctor, I never could have kept my poise.

  “What kind of virus?” Reiner asked.

  “The tobacco mosaic virus,” Matt said. “It’s a real scourge where I come from. But it’s a good, solid, well-studied virus. It’s very stable. It can survive at a wide range of temperatures or in a vacuum. And it’s pretty commonly available for research purposes.”

  “What, exactly, have you been doing with it?”

  “How much do you know about quantum physics?”

  “I pretty much peter out at Schrödinger’s cat.”

  “Okay, so let’s start at the top,” Matt said, slipping into professor mode. “The quantum world is a very strange place. Particles can make sudden leaps from one place to another and leave no footprints behind as to how they did it. Or they can pass through solid walls, which we refer to as quantum tunneling. It’s all very unsettling and very difficult to imagine, even for people like me who deal with it all the time. The way we reassure people is by telling them it’s okay for all this weirdness to exist, because it’s all happening on an incredibly small scale. Here in the world we can see, what we call ‘classical’ physics rules the day. Newton’s apple still falls from the tree and that sort of thing. Or at least that’s what we thought. But it turns out it’s more complicated than that.”

  “It usually is,” Reiner said.

  “In the last few years, we’ve been able to get larger and larger objects to act in these bizarre quantum ways. To ‘interfere’ them, as we say. We started with particles, which are incredibly small—ten to the negative fifteen meters. Then we moved up to atoms, which are ten to the negative ten meters. Then we were dealing with molecules like carbon-sixty, which we call a buckyball. It’s ten to the negative nine meters, which is still very, very small, but absolutely huge compared to where we started. Then we got to clumps of atoms, getting up to ten to the negative eight meters. And now?

  “A group of researchers at Delft University of Technology interfered a silicon wire that is ten to the negative six meters. That’s billions and billions of atoms, plunged into a quantum state. We’ve reached the point where no one knows exactly how large we can go. Where does quantum physics end and the classical world begin? The limits appear to be technical rather than theoretical.”