The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  He drops the board, kneels, pulling his son to him.

  “Let me see it,” he says, trying to pry the wounded hand loose. Christopher is reluctant to let go. He knows that only the pressure of his fingers is keeping the hand together.

  “I told you,” says Doris. “Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to me?”

  “This is all your fault,” shouts David, glaring at her.

  “My fault?” she says. “How is it my fault?”

  “You have to believe, don’t you understand? You have to believe for it to work.”

  His mother looks at him pityingly.

  “Listen to yourself, what you’re saying. He’s a little boy. It’s a piece of wood. The whole thing was crazy right from the start.”

  He glares at her with pure hatred. She is the problem, the kryptonite. He has seen the magic with his own eyes, has seen dreams come true—all the miracles, his children born and raised, his career blossoming, his beautiful wives. But now his mother has come and spoiled everything, just like she always does, with her doubt and her undermining, godless critique. Christopher isn’t crying, though it’s clear he’s in pain. He is being brave for his father. Tracey comes over and kneels next to them.

  “Let Mommy see, sweetie,” she says, gently prying his wounded hand loose. She examines it. The knuckles are red. She reaches out and touches them gently, one by one.

  “Does that hurt?” she wants to know.

  He shakes his head, though it’s clear it does. Tracey looks at David.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” she says, “but why don’t you run him over to the emergency room just to be sure?”

  David nods. In a sick way he is glad. It will give him a chance to escape.

  “You can drop your mother at the hotel on the way,” she continues. He nods. Her point is clear: That’s enough for one day, enough awkward silences, enough negativity.

  “Come on, Mom,” he says. “I’ll take you to the hotel.”

  Doris gets shakily to her feet. They help her to the car. She will be asleep before they arrive, her head thrown back, snoring quietly. It has been a long day, a long trip, a long life. In the backseat, Christopher will sing quietly to himself, clutching his throbbing hand, his voice like a distant seagull, while up front David watches the road like a good father, a good driver, checking his mirrors every time he changes lanes.

  Stephen Hawking has a theory. He calls it the Thermodynamic Arrow of Time. According to Hawking, time moves in an irrevocably straight line. It doesn’t look around. It never slows down. It just keeps going in one irreversible direction. But which direction? To quote Elmer Fudd, which way does it go? Which way does it go?

  Backward, says Hawking. Time moves backward.

  Think about this. Imagine that instead of moving from past to future, time is moving from future to past. For this to be the direction of time, we must imagine that the universe was at its most disordered in the beginning. Picture it, the chaos before the big bang, the scattershot universe drawing a deep, frazzled breath before giving birth to itself. Given this theory, disorder should naturally decrease with time. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Open the box, shake out the pieces. There is only one arrangement in which they make a complete picture. (A complete picture being the end.) On the other hand, there are a very large number of arrangements in which the pieces don’t make a picture at all. (Disorder being the beginning.) Thus the order of the universe increases with every piece added, and therefore time moves from chaos to order.

  However, says Hawking, all scientific evidence points instead to the conclusion that disorder actually increases with time, so then why should our perception of time be what it is? He suggests that it’s because people are like computers. Our brains function in a way that requires us to see and remember things in an order in which entropy decreases. We can’t handle watching broken cups gathering themselves together and jumping back up onto the table.

  If you believe that the universe was at its most disordered at the beginning, then you must see that it gets more orderly as time goes forward. However, if based on the laws of physics (of which ignorance is no excuse, but similarly no crime) disorder increases with energy production, then actually the universe is becoming less orderly as time goes and, therefore, we must theoretically be moving backward toward the beginning. Why, then, do we see time as moving contrarily?

  Because we have an absolute aversion to remembering our futures.

  Scott Henry sits in a strip club on Sunset Boulevard. The place is filled not with seedy trucker types, but young Hollywood hipsters, men and women. Strip clubs are the new nightclubs, the kitsch capital of ironic escape. Scott sits at a table in the back, by himself. He has had a few more drinks than when we last saw him. Everything around him is watery, fluid. The egg of sorrow has cracked, you see, and everything is coated with a broken yellow glaze.

  It is nine P.M. He has checked into the Standard Hotel, stowed his bags in his blocky, concrete room, thrown open the curtains and stepped out onto the balcony. Below him lay the neon blue Astroturf of the pool area, and beyond that the dense southern sprawl of Los Angeles. A silver beanbag chair slumped near the railing at his feet. He stood for a second breathing in the warm air of freedom. Scott loves Los Angeles, the blatant lie of it. We can be young and rich and beautiful forever. L.A. is all about the suspension of disbelief. From impossible movie pitches to houses stilted up on fault-ridden hills, the whole city is based on an idea that anything you dream up can come true.

  But his room was small and concrete and sitting in it he found himself with far too much time to think. So he called a cab and came here, to a strip club, where for a hundred dollars a half-naked woman will tell you any lie you want to hear.

  It doesn’t have to be true.

  It just has to sound true.

  Recently Scott has been reading about the German mathematician Kurt Gödel, who suggested that a mathematical proposition could be true even if there was no possible way of proving it. What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Gödel called it his First Incompleteness Theorem. It made other mathematicians uneasy, this idea that there are no absolutes. What is math, after all, if not a kind of rigidly structured religion, a promise of order and rationality in an otherwise crazy universe? In 1940, Gödel left Germany and emigrated to America. He found himself at Princeton University, teaching alongside Albert Einstein. Einstein, of course, had coined the Theory of Relativity, which stated simply that there is no such thing as absolute time. He suggested that whether an observer deems two events to be happening “at the same time” depends on his state of motion. In other words, there is no universal now. The flow of time depends on motion and gravity. The division of events into past and future is relative.

  Gödel used to walk home with Einstein every day after school (picture two old grandfathers strolling down tree-lined streets dressed in fraying tweed). He said, Your theory of relativity is interesting, but personally I don’t believe that time exists at all. Einstein was intrigued. Tell me more, he said. So Gödel showed him an epic equation, pages and pages of letters and numbers. He painted a picture of a universe that was not expanding, but rotating. An observer of this universe would see all the galaxies slowly spinning around him. This spinning, the equation showed, mixed up space and time, made them interchangeable. By completing a sufficiently long round-trip in a rocket ship, a resident of Gödel’s universe could travel back to any point in his own past. The equation it took to prove this would look like a wall of gibberish to you and me, but Gödel saw it as a code, a code that proved once and for all that time itself does not exist. A past that can be revisited has not really passed. Time, like God, is either everywhere or nowhere. If it disappears in one possible universe, it is undermined in every possible universe including our own.

  This is the beauty of theoretical physics. Past a certain point science becomes a question of faith. It is a question of creating equations that “prove” your theory, while at the same time unde
rstanding that such proof can only ever be theoretical.

  Now, in what you call the present, Scott sits in Hollywood, California, and the strippers who wander the floor with their boxy little purses are buxom, oversized. They are impossible blondes and bottle redheads—part-time porn stars. Before Kate it never would have occurred to him to come to a strip club, but tonight it was all he could think about. He is like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. He gives the strippers money and they laugh at his jokes, tell him he’s sexy, tell him he’s hysterical. A fucking riot.

  He sits in the dark funk of the club, enjoying his anonymity, enjoying the fact that none of these people are related to him. His definition of the word family goes as follows:

  Family [pham-i-lee] n. 1) a cage or similar restraining device often used in the practice of torture: e.g., Senator John McCain spent seven years in a Vietnamese family, eating bugs, while all feelings of self-worth were beaten out of him by his parents (see parents). 2) a highly debilitating congenital disease, slow acting, but almost always paralyzing. Symptoms include but are not limited to: mood swings; irritability; an inability to form close bonds; neediness; increased emotional stupidity; unexpected spikes of intense anger; shortness of breath; feelings of worthlessness; feelings of moral superiority; fear of intimacy; fear of abandonment; increased promiscuity and/or frigidity; an unnameable, unstoppable yearning; an unnameable, unstoppable dread; unexpected periods of intense desire followed by unpredictable decreases in caring; a simultaneous desire for and hatred of small children, puppies, and seals; illogical feelings of self-pity and resentment; and a deep-seated desire to be held.

  Right now he is talking to Candy, a busty brunette. She sits on his lap, dressed in pink hot pants and a tiny black bra.

  “So what do you do?” she asks him. Are you in the movie business? Can you help me?

  “I listen to other people’s phone calls,” he tells her.

  “Like a voyeur?”

  “You know how you call your bank and they say this call may be monitored for quality assurance. That’s me.”

  She squirms a little in his lap. She smells like waffles. It is the universal stripper scent, the artificial odor of sweet breakfast items and tropical fruits.

  “I’m an actress,” she says. “Of course. Who isn’t?”

  “You’re beautiful,” he tells her.

  “You’re sweet. I like you. But who isn’t beautiful in this town?”

  He has his hand on her hip, and the warmth of it, the strength of the bone, the soft, yielding flesh, makes him want to cry. She’s right, of course. Beauty is the currency of this place. It’s like living in a golden city. You feel rich, and yet how much can gold really be worth when your sidewalk is made of the stuff, your toilet?

  “Do you want a dance?” Candy asks him in a sultry, baby-doll voice.

  “Yes, please,” he says.

  She stands, takes off her top. Her breasts are impossibly round. She starts to move to the music, brushing against him, her hands on the arms of his chair. Her hair falls in his face. He is a warm sunny field on a hot summer day. He is a Long Island beach in August, waves lapping gently at the shore. She moves her face beside his. He feels the electric charge of her skin. She kisses his cheek. It feels so real, like love. The hum of her breath on his face is intimate, the way her hands move against his chest. She presses her tits against his face and for a moment he is lost in the deep well of her chest, breathing her in, her warmth, the real human smell of her, his mouth an inch from her heart. (It occurs to him that the space between a stripper’s breasts is probably the most germ-ridden inch on the face of the Earth.) Then she turns and sits on his lap, grinding herself against him, undulating her hips. He gets hard from the friction, the sight of the smooth plane of her back, the tattoo above her ass—a crucifix—the way her thighs are pressing down against his legs. He has lost his faith in people. Nobody is who they say. Nobody tells the truth. He hears it on the phone every day, the way people act on hold—honest, human—and the artifice that comes over them when the operator comes on the line. Fake, plastic. Nobody says anything real. Nobody wants to be vulnerable. He is so tired of being disappointed, so tired of wishing for things that don’t happen. What’s the point of living if you’re afraid to hope? He is exhausted by his own emotions, his own needs. Nothing lasts. Women leave. Fathers die. And how do you plan a life when you can’t count on anything? It’s like living in a city where every day the landscape changes. Each morning you wake to find yourself in a strange house on a strange street in a strange town. Every night the streets shift while you sleep, avenues turning to alleys, rivers turning to mountains. How can they expect you to keep a job when the office keeps moving? When your home isn’t where you left it? Not to mention that every day the people you see are different. They act like they know you, sure, but it is just an act. Familiar faces, but inside who knows?

  This is it, he thinks. The bottom. The lowest point. He has no idea how far he still has to fall. He thinks, We spend so much time looking for love, but none of it matters. The truth is, we’re all alone. He is embarrassed by these thoughts, the clichéd pathos they represent, and yet they’re not thoughts. They’re nodules in his chest, brittle calcium deposits forming on the inside of his rib cage. They are tumors, changing the architecture of his body. The stripper turns and places her left breast against his lips. The nipple is hard, fat. It is a sexual gesture but also strangely maternal. She touches his hair. The beat of the music is in his chest, the tribal rhythm of drum and bass. He wants to throw his arms around this woman, to take her to his hotel and lose himself in the lie of her. He’s sure if he offered her enough money she would go. He thinks of it, going to the ATM, emptying his account for her. Right now it feels so important to make a connection, to feel the truth of another body pressed against his. Is that so wrong? He has always thought men who go to strip clubs to be deviants, pathetic, and yet there is something honest about getting what you want, something safe about reducing the interactions of men and women to a question of money. Here he doesn’t have to wonder if Candy likes him or not. Here it is understood: Money buys you time. It buys you a conversation, a touch. It buys you a blowjob in a private booth. As long as you have money at a strip club, there is love for you, redemption.

  The songs shifts. Candy stands, refastens her top. He hands her two twenties.

  “Thanks, lover,” she says.

  His cell phone vibrates in his pocket. He takes it out, looks at the caller ID. It’s his brother. He checks the time, eleven-thirty.

  “Hello?” he says, plunging his left index finger into his ear, straining to hear.

  “It’s me,” his brother says. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “What?”

  “A problem. We’ve got a problem.”

  Scott looks up at Candy, but she’s already looking around the room, searching for her next customer.

  “What’s going on?” he says.

  “The hotel just called me,” says David. “They’re throwing her out.”

  “What do you mean? She’s sixty-three. Who throws a sixty-three-year-old woman out of a hotel?”

  “They caught her smoking with her oxygen machine. She could have blown up the hotel. The fucking Hotel Bel-Air.”

  Scott closes his eyes. Smoking with her oxygen machine. There are cleaner ways to kill yourself, he thinks, but this one has a certain inventive charm. He starts laughing, and for a minute can’t stop. Fucking perfect, he thinks. Death by explosion. Of course, you take a lot of other people with you, too, but then that’s always been his mother’s approach. If I’m cold, everybody’s cold. If I’m dying in a fire, everybody’s dying in a fire.

  “She’s in the lobby with her stuff,” says David. “Apparently some security goon is looming over her, making sure she behaves.”

  “So go get her,” Scott says. “What do you want from me?”

  “I can’t,” says David. “Tracey’s sick. Something she ate at lunch, she thinks. She
’s throwing up. Can you hear?”

  Scott opens his eyes. A stripper with an impossibly flat stomach stops in front of him, slips her hand into her G-string, and gives him a look that would melt a glacier. Behind her there is a black woman onstage with an ass like a pair of hams. Through the cell phone, Scott’s precision hearing can identify exactly what Tracey ate for lunch today from the way she’s heaving; a Niçoise salad and two glasses of Chardonnay.

  “I’m busy,” he says.

  “Doing what?” his brother wants to know.

  Scott pauses. The black woman jumps up, grabs the pole, and slides down with her legs jutting out at a forty-five-degree angle.

  “It would take too long to explain,” he says.

  His brother makes an exasperated sound. This is how it always is with them, the tug of war. You go. No, you go. They might as well play Rock-Paper-Scissors for who gets to take care of their mother.

  “She’s sitting in the lobby,” David says. “It’s past her bedtime.”

  “Let her rot.”

  “Yeah,” says David, “clearly that’s not an option.”

  Scott stands, grabs his jacket. He is furious, volcanic.

  “What’s the address?”

  “Just grab a cab. They’ll know the Hotel Bel-Air. I called and they can take her at the Standard. That’s where you’re staying, right? I don’t think we can trust her on her own.”

  Scott takes a deep breath through his nose, lets it out.

  “So I get her.”

  “The stairs. We’d take her, but…”

  “Yeah, whatever. You owe me so big.”

  “Don’t be like that. I do a lot.”

  Scott can hear the anger in his brother’s voice. Don’t push me. I know I’m pussying out, but don’t call me on it. Scott wants to reach through the phone line and strangle him, wants to take a cab to his brother’s house and climb into bed with the kids. If you’re going to act like my daddy, he thinks, I should at least be able to act like your child. He exits the strip club, leaving behind the myth of beauty, the myth of availability, the myth of freedom through sex. He stands on Sunset Boulevard and looks for a cab. Muscle cars troll slowly down the four-lane blacktop. One of the bouncers approaches him.