A Model World and Other Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “It’s only seventy-five cents,” he said.

  He also said that he was too excited to eat anything, particularly goat, and so after he had paid his six bits we walked back to his car. As he pulled onto the freeway, Levine, when he saw that I was not going to censure him, began to expound on his dire plan, which was quite simply to retype Kemp’s book on approved thesis paper, in the approved thesis font, within all the prescribed margins; receive his degree; and move to Santa Fe or Taos several months earlier than he had thought possible, where he would set himself up as a maker of ceramic wind chimes. And no one would ever know of his deception, he felt certain of that. He was the only person in the world, besides the author, to have read the book.

  “Someone read it,” I said. “Or else how did it end up at Acres of Books?”

  “Kemp lived in Long Beach. When he died, someone sold off his things, and this ended up at Acres. And there was only one left to sell off, because he burned the rest. In despair.”

  I stared at him. He was driving as cautiously as ever, both hands on the wheel, never exceeding forty-five miles per hour. He always blamed his meticulous driving on his car, a blue Rambler American that had been his grandmother’s, but the truth was that Levine belonged to that large brotherhood of young men, often encountered in Academe, who are obsessively careful about two or three things—the arrangement of socks in their drawers, the alphabetical order of their jazz albums, the proper way to make a Bloody Mary—and slobs in every other regard. In any case he did not look particularly deranged, or desperate, as he wove his fantasies about New Mexico and the scattered estate of Dr. Kemp. He seemed completely certain of everything, in particular of success in his projected crime, and by the time we got back to the graduate-student housing complex, or Gradplex, he even seemed happy. I got him to invite me over to watch the Lakers game on his color television, for the first time in months. He had to retrieve the set from a closet, and, smiling, blow the dust from its screen in a small cloud. I think it was a nice evening for Levine. James Worthy scored thirty-five points, two with a reverse lay-up he sank while on his knees, and at half time Levine went into his bedroom, called Betty, and was successful.

  The next morning at eight o’clock, Levine sat down at the kitchen table to begin retyping Kemp’s book onto the sheets of archival bond he had purchased, along with three typewriter ribbons, two bottles of Liquid Paper, and a large bag of yogurt-covered raisins, on his way home from Betty’s. The acid-free paper had a lifeless, creepy feel, like embalmed flesh, and he felt bad about consigning Kemp’s words to it. It was foggy and cool out, and, a rapid typist, he planned to be done by the time the coastal morning burned off and it was glaring, limitless afternoon. There was a pot of coffee on the stove, he had unplugged the telephone, and the package of white raisins sat near at hand. He flexed his fingers, rolled in the first sheet of paper, and began to type.

  He soon ran into difficulty, however, when instead of just transmitting Kemp’s words mindlessly to his fingertips he made the mistake of reading them and grappling with the concepts they attempted to frame. This slowed his progress considerably, and by the time the sun emerged, around two o’clock, he was still mired in the second chapter, “Modeling on Cationic Residues Found in Austral Solstitial Winds,” in which the crux of Kemp’s thesis—that the ionized molecules of oxygen frequently found around quickly moving cumulonimbus clouds in the wake of a summer storm on the Ross Ice Shelf presented the likeliest model for nephokinesis—was forcefully argued.

  Levine had skimmed through this chapter in the store the day before, paying more attention to the meteorologist’s literary style, to see if it at all resembled his own, than to the burden of the prose, and now he found himself entranced. It was a creative, dogged, well-supported, even ingenious argument, and he felt a surge of custodial pride at the boldness of Dr. Kemp’s mind. Levine had suspected—it had come to him in a dream, in fact—that Antarctic winds held the key to controlling the dreamy movement of clouds, but he had never really gotten beyond this one intuition. And here it all was! Laid down in charts and statistical tables, with almost a dozen sources that were entirely new to Levine. There was a massive Soviet study of cationic Antarctic winds, undertaken during the International Geophysical Year, which Levine had somehow missed, and there were as well the priceless results of three trips that Dr. Kemp had himself made to the Antarctic, aboard the Hodge, in 1963 and 1968. The argument and its advocate were made all the more poignant by the fact that the region in which Kemp had made the crucial measurements was the Bay of Whales, not far from Little America, on the Ross Ice Shelf—a region that had broken off from the continent in 1987 and was now melting. The Bay of Whales was no longer to be found on the map.

  (“Isn’t that going to be a problem with your committee?” I asked him that night as we were on our way to dinner at Professor Baldwin’s. “Basing your whole theory on evidence that no longer exists?”

  (“That’s all you guys do,” he said—which stung me. I was engaged at that time in the observation of those subatomic particles, such as muons, that lead very short lives. I protested that evanescence itself was in a way the object of my studies—But I’m getting ahead of the story.)

  It was nearly sundown when Levine finished his dissertation. His eyes were strained, his back and his neck hurt, but there was a sweet taste in his mouth, for he had regained his faith in the stoic nobility of scientific endeavor, and his regard for the austere beauty of its method. His New Mexican plans, the tinkling of wind chimes in a sonorous breeze, all his months of fruitless research, were forgotten. He had never wanted to be anything but a scientist. He leapt to his feet and dashed out into the gray little Gradplex living room, furnished with only a stereo and a folding aluminum and rubber-lattice lawn chair. His roommate, a graduate student in English, had been expelled from the university earlier in the month, after brawling with a professor over the supposed ties to Benito Mussolini of a female Italian semiotician who was an old girlfriend of the professor’s, and now Levine had the place to himself. He lay down on the hard gray carpet and allowed the knuckles of his spine to crack and relax. A breeze blew in from the patio, through the screen door, and ruffled the hair on his damp forehead. Levine thought, as he had not since high school, about the way the breeze was composed of a trillion trillion agitated molecules that he could not see. He thought, with the wondering pedantry of a sixteen-year old boy, about the way every object around him, including himself, his body, was made of invisible things. He got up, grinning foolishly, and went to the telephone.

  Julia Baldwin, the wife of the head of his committee, answered the phone. “What is it?” she said.

  “Is Professor Baldwin in?” said Levine, momentarily filled with doubt.

  “Just a minute.” There was the sound of the receiver rattling as she let it drop. “It’s another one of your goddamned students,” he heard her say. Professor Baldwin mumbled something apologetic to her and then said hello.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, Professor Baldwin,” said Levine. “It’s just—Well, I’ve been looking into solstitial winds at Ross, and I think—I think I may have stumbled onto something really big. And, well, it kind of scares me, sir, it’s so big. I’d kind of like to talk to you about it, if that’s all right.”

  “We’re having company, Levine,” said Professor Baldwin. “One of my wife’s instructors is coming to dinner. What is it, this big, scary thing?”

  Levine filled him in briefly on the nature of Kemp’s argument for Antarctic models, without of course saying anything about Dr. Kemp. He said that in his opinion a practical method of cloud control was now ten years closer than it had been yesterday. At first Professor Baldwin interjected such comments as “Yes, yes,” and “I see,” but when Levine had finished he was silent for a long time. Levine could hear Mrs. Baldwin, beautiful Julia, shrieking with laughter in the background.

  “Perhaps you’d better come over,” said Professor Baldwin. “I’ll have to ask Julia. Hold on.”


  Levine jumped up and down while he waited and watched the last red pennant fade from the evening sky. One of the things he loved best about meteorology was that its domain encompassed sunsets.

  “Come in an hour,” said Professor Baldwin. “It’s fine. In fact, my wife has suggested that you invite your friend Smith. We have a whole salmon.”

  “Thank you,” said Levine. “I’ll call him.”

  It was, of course, this same Julia, or Jewel, Baldwin for whom I had hoped to find that volume of Franco-Egyptian dramatic theory, and I told Levine that I would be more than happy to accompany him.

  There were coyotes out laughing and looking for pussycat in the foothills above the Facuplex when Levine and I came up the driveway to the Baldwins’ house on Froebel Lane. This entire neighborhood, with its skinny new trees on their crutches, its fresh-rolled lawns, its streets named for famous educators, had not been here six months before, and Levine and I had often walked up, carrying our binoculars and a six-pack of beer, to a couple of flat boulders that had stood not far from the present site of the Baldwins’ Japanese station wagon. Among a few other things, we shared a soft spot for birds and small animals, although he knew far more about them than I, and we had once been enchanted by the sight of two red rattlesnakes, somewhere in the vicinity of the Baldwins’ front door. I reminded Levine of this.

  “They were doing it, too,” he remembered. “Making love like a couple of snakes.”

  He rang the doorbell and straightened his necktie. I had told him no one else would have one, but he’d insisted on wearing his. The only tie he possessed, it was at least twenty-five years old, brown, with a vaguely birdlike white figure, inside a pattern of concentric circles, against a grid. He called it his Radar Duck tie, and he generally wore it only on first dates and for court appearances. I was just going to tease him about it for the hundredth time when the door was opened by a large, portly man with very dark skin and gray hair, wearing a bathrobe over a pajama top and sweatpants. The bathrobe had a rodeo motif and was printed with leaping cowboys, lariats, and brands. This was Mehmet Monsour.

  “They are having a bitter argument,” he said, grinning delightedly and offering us his big brown hand. “Please come in.”

  We followed Monsour into the tiled living room, sat down at opposite ends of an elderly Danish modern sofa, and folded our hands in our laps. The Baldwins bawled and pleaded in another room. Monsour went to a battered recliner and eased himself backward, taking up a large can of malt liquor and the remote control for the television. Wearing a look of rapt scrutiny, as for the turns of a Berma or a Norma Desmond, he flipped back and forth from a courtroom-simulation program to a talk show on which three transsexuals were discussing the male lives they had abandoned; we’d evidently interrupted his theatrical studies. Like most acting teachers, he was famous chiefly for the whimsical and slightly cruel discipline he imposed on his pupils, and for the unconventional sources of his difficult productions. (Six months later I read in the Los Angeles Times a respectful review of Monsour’s “harum-scarum” new play, Divorce Court.) I had met him only the week before, when Jewel took me to his messy room at the Kon-Tiki Motor Lodge, but he showed not the faintest recognition now, and in fact ignored both Levine and me completely. After five minutes we looked at each other and rose simultaneously to our feet.

  “Just tell Professor Baldwin I’ll see him tomorrow,” said Levine.

  “Sure thing,” said Mehmet Monsour, waving us brightly away.

  We went to the door and were about to go out when Professor Baldwin came to retrieve us. His hands were in the pockets of his gray cardigan, and he was wearing the cool, bored demeanor someone in a store attempts to adopt when he has just broken an expensive item. He looked as though he were going to whistle a little song.

  “Where are you going?” he said mildly.

  “Oh,” said Levine. “Nowhere.”

  “We just got here,” I said. “Just this minute. How are you, Professor Baldwin?”

  “We don’t have to stay for dinner,” said Levine. “We can leave right now.” Faced with the substance and strife-haunted eyes of his chairman, and not just his disembodied voice on the phone, Levine felt his feet begin to grow a little cold.

  “Nonsense. Julia’s just getting dressed. Have you met Mehmet? Met Mehmet. I bet you haven’t met Mehmet yet.” He gave a small laugh, and I could see that he mistakenly felt the rift in his marriage to have been opened and occupied by Mehmet Monsour, and that he consequently liked to make fun of his visiting, untenured colleague. I felt sorry for Baldwin all at once and wished that I hadn’t come. He brought us back into the living room, and then we four sat and watched the television, wondering what it might be like to become a woman. No one spoke. I waited for Jewel to emerge, trying to guess which outfit she would wear. She had a pair of old Levi’s I liked, with a rip in the seat which showed bare skin when she bent forward.

  “Mr. Smith!” she cried when she appeared at last, in a purple sarong, and took my hand. “Mr. Levine! It’s so good to see you!” She attempted, as had her husband, to seem as though she had never in her life raised her voice, let alone in the past quarter of an hour, but her cordiality was brittle, sarcastic, and even a little frightening, as though she were doing Shaw.

  “Now, if you gentlemen will just give me twenty minutes,” she said, going around to Mehmet Monsour’s chair to give his gray head a fond pat. “Everything’s almost done.”

  “Let me help you, Mrs. Baldwin,” I said.

  “Good,” said Professor Baldwin. “Levine, let’s you and I sit in my office for a few minutes and talk.”

  Levine stood instantly, as though summoned to the bench, and followed Professor Baldwin down the hall and into the small room at the back of the house where Baldwin did his revolutionary work on the so-called greenhouse effect. The room looked out over the canyon, toward the mountains, and was furnished with a single cinder-block-and-plank bookcase on which were massed perhaps a hundred books. A much wider plank spanned two sawhorses to make the professor’s desk, at which he sat in a Barcelona chair that had belonged to his father-in-law, an architect. There was only a kitchen step stool in the corner for Levine. Although relatively young for a full professor and a laureate of atmospheric science, Baldwin possessed the hard-won virtues of an older man: caution, resignation, frugality. The few strands of black hair on his prematurely lunar head seemed, like his spare office, like his marriage, to be the conscious result of an effort to get by with as little as possible, as though he were preparing for the imminent decline of the biosphere. His only indulgence, aside from a small framed photograph of his wife in a parka on a Falkland island, was his computer—an expensive machine capable of animating color images in three dimensions, which he had bought with some of the money from his MacArthur Fellowship, and which was now running a long, slow simulation of worldwide ozone accretion.

  “That’s the man my wife is having an affair with,” he said, reaching into a cardboard box on the floor beside him. He took out a Baggie filled with marijuana and a small water pipe.

  “Smith?” said Levine, and a light went on in his head. I’m afraid I had never told him anything about it.

  “Mehmet,” said Baldwin, spitting out the last syllable. “Not Smith. It’s driving me out of my wits.”

  Levine didn’t know what to say to this. He and his committee chair were not friends. There were one or two graduate students who spent a lot of time in his office on campus, talking about Robert Heinlein and Buckminster Fuller, but they were not Professor Baldwin’s friends, either, really. Perhaps Professor Baldwin didn’t have any friends.

  “Never mind. Forget it.” He gave his head a shake. “Tell me about this Ross thing,” he said, and lit the pipe. As he inhaled, the professor raised his eyebrows, and lowered them as he blew out. He and Levine passed the pipe in near-silence for several minutes. The room filled with miniature cumulonimbus clouds. Levine looked at the titles of the books on the shelves without regi
stering them until his vacant gaze fell upon a slender black spine at the upper left-hand corner of the bookcase, unmarked, exactly the same height and thickness as the spine of Dr. Kemp’s book.

  “Oh my,” said Levine, exhaling a thick plume.

  “What?” said Professor Baldwin. He looked toward the bookcase as if there might be a large spider or rodent crawling across it.

  “Were you a student of Dr. Kemp?” Levine could see Baldwin, a little heavier, with hair, standing beside his brave mentor, frost on their faces, against a background of auks and green icebergs. They had been inseparable.

  “Dr. Kemp?” Baldwin frowned. “I never heard of him.”

  This did little to reassure Levine. Even if it were not Dr. Kemp’s book on this particular bookshelf, it might as well have been—the book was out there somewhere, waiting; he was going to be found out. He was not in the least surprised, and the sudden renascence in his heart of defeat, of the sense of failure, was almost a relief, as though he had loosened his necktie and unbuttoned his collar. There was no easy way out of the prison of his studies, and he had known this very well until yesterday. His plagiarism had been only an act of self-deception.

  “It is Smith,” he said, with a feeling of great detachment from the words he spoke.

  Professor Baldwin was staring intently at the face of his wristwatch and seemed not to have heard.

  “It isn’t that Monsour guy,” said Levine, abandoning both of us to our fates. “I think it’s Smith, sir.”

  Now the professor looked up at Levine and bit his lip. He was going through the evidence in his mind.

  “You could be right,” he said. “That sounds feasible.”

  He replaced the pipe and the plastic bag, carefully, then stood and steadied himself against his desk. On the screen of his computer a model world of weather slowly overheated and drowned.