Charades (3 page)

“Well,” he says, bemused. “What a relief.”

“Oh, quite the contrary, I assure you. No. I think it was another case of microphenomena in uncertain states. I think it was parthenogenesis in the manner of amoeba. They can sub­divide themselves just by thinking about it, right?”

Her hand sweeps through a delicate arc, a sort of visual punctuation point, and he catches hold of her wrist and pulls her toward him. “Why are you getting dressed?” he reproaches.

“Because it's almost daylight,” she says, indicating the window.

3

Matter, Anti-Matter
and the Hologram Girl

“The creation of a hologram,” Koenig's colleague, the experimentalist, is saying to a cluster of awe-struck undergraduates, “begins with the splitting of a laser beam in two.” He is holding court in a corner of the Media Lab, and Koenig stops to listen. “And then,” his colleague says, “the beams spread out to caress, as it were, the entire subject — in this case an arrangement of doughnuts, styrofoam cups and one hot dog.”

Koenig watches with the mildly patronising disdain of the theoretical physicist. There is a certain doggedness to all this, a terrier-like persistence that one has to admire, but when all is said and done, the Media Lab people are little more than brilliant technicians, dealers in nuts and bolts and razzle-dazzle. Experimentalists. It is not that Koenig is an intellectual snob, he quite absolves himself on that score. It is simply that mere electronic hocus-pocus is not particularly interesting, and nor is mere data; and he is not inclined to be swept off his feet by the narrowly empirical until he has a theory that will give it grace and shape.

His colleague is displaying the developed holographic plate in white light now, and the undergraduates gasp as phantasmal coffee cups and doughnuts and a solitary three-dimensional hot dog float in the air. “Is that a dagger I see before me?” someone demands theatrically, lunging at ghostly colour. A scattershot of nervous laughter ricochets round the room.

Several young women move closer to their magician-professor and one of them touches his sleeve, possibly believing that energy will leap across the gap or that sorcery is contagious.

“You can do other things. Visual music, for instance. I'll demonstrate.” What an exhibitionist, Koenig thinks. His colleague is lapping up attention, fussing with glass plates, lasers, white light. “What I do, essentially, is tape myself playing blues on my sax, run the tape, and then transpose the music into visual equivalents with computer graphics.” He has the plate in position now. “It's a sort of collage with photographs, mathematical notations, graphed equivalents of sound, cathode ray tubes, and electronic imagery. I call this one
Blue Lady.”

Fanfare. Koenig could swear the room is humming with trumpets, all of them blown by Professor Magician himself.
How can the students be taken in? Koenig composes an instant jazz riff of his own, hums it silently, calls it
Cheap Trick.

And then, out of the murky room, out of nowhere, out of the saxophone and the puddle of lasers, steps the Blue Lady who brushes by them with an ectoplasmic spin.

It is the girl. Charade. Whom Koenig has not seen since she vanished from his bedroom several nights ago.

She twirls like a top, her skirt flaring and rising. From certain angles you can see her thighs, and then as she spins more slowly, languidly, the blue skirt sinks, drifts, floats about her calves and ankles. From everywhere you can see her eyes, which are very very blue, or maybe teal, or maybe blue-green (depending on the lift and dip of the skirt).

Koenig, feeling dizzy, has to lean against a bookcase.

“All done with mirrors,” his colleague jokes. “Plus beam splitters and cathode ray tubes and video photography.”

In the hallway later, Koenig asks casually, indifferently, “That girl. The hologram girl. She a graduate student?”

His colleague says sourly: “Not your type, Koenig. She'd break your balls.”

* *

Tuesdays and Thursdays, the mornings of the large introductory course, Koenig scans the tiers of seats but she does not come. Others come. They knock on his door, they saunter in the lot where he parks, no effort seems to be required; Radcliffe women, MIT women, Wellesley women, faculty and students, murmuring
brilliant,
murmuring
famous,
murmuring
Nobel Prize,
it seems to be an aphrodisiac, he does not remember their names. They come and go and nothing helps.

Nothing helps because he dreams of the girl Charade. Nothing helps because in any case the mournful eyes of Rachel, his former wife, are always watching. Nothing helps; but still the women come and go.

“You should be put in a museum, Koenig,” his colleague mutters one day in passing. “The compulsive consumer, a macho antique.”

Koenig is startled. “Listen to who's talking,” he says curtly.

“Not everyone chatted up by the Nobel committee gets to Sweden,” his colleague says.

Koenig works late. He is pushing back, mathematically, to that busy stretch of time between the Big Bang and a specific point occurring 10
-
35
of a second later. With present data, he measures the red-shifting of the light from distant galaxies. He works at the borders, at the junction of astrophysics, particle physics, cosmology. What he is obsessed with is cross-fertilisation, the braiding of disciplines. What absorbs him is the way the girl seemed to hold words in her hands and the way she appeared one night (did she not?) in his apartment, and the way she spoke of his wife Rachel, and the way …

More and more he works in the basement of Building 6, rather than in his office or his Cambridge apartment, in case she reappears. He is waiting for her to tap on his door.

Sometimes, on Tuesdays or Thursdays, he thinks he sees her from the edge of his eye as he writes on the blackboard. But when he turns, it is always someone else altogether, someone bearing no similarity to her at all, except for a braid tossed to one side perhaps, or a few curls across the forehead, or blue-green eyes.

In the murky basement light, beneath coiled ducts, he dallies with the text of a speech that is to be presented at the Science Museum.
Matter,
he writes,
a sense of the solidity of matter, is one of our most persistent illusions. The presence of matter represents nothing more than a disturbance in the field at a given point, the figure in the carpet as it were.

“What a sentence,” she says. And is still there when he turns.

4

The Second Night

When he blinks they are in his apartment again and she is asking, surprised, “Just Koenig? Really? That's your first name too?” And before he has time to answer: “Well, ah, Koenig — yes, it's nice, it suits you.”

She hooks her legs over the arm of his chair and watches as he pulls on his pants. “You know,” she says, “I haven't decided whether I'm flattered or insulted that you obviously
expected
me to drop by your office again. Eventually.”

“Well. I haven't decided whether I'm flattered or insulted that you obviously expected I'd be there.”

“No,” she says, ruling this out. “Not valid. You're always there.”

“All right then. You obviously expected I'd invite you back here.”

“You know,” she says earnestly, “I feel you seriously mis­understand
why
I … It's true, of course, that I didn't wander into your office or your class by accident, but I wouldn't want you to misinterpret my reasons. It's not sex.”

“Oh.” He pauses momentarily between one shirt button and the next.

“Have you ever felt that you were on the lip of a black hole?” she asks him. “And that unless you found something to hang onto in the next few minutes, you'd cross the ‘event horizon'?”

After that everything was irreversible and absolute annihilation was just a matter of time. So he had explained in Course 8.286.

And has he ever …?

Oh yes, he has been at the dangerous rims of black holes.

“They eat stars, you said. They eat quasars.” As though watching such distant galactic events, she unwinds herself from the chair and stands, looking at nothing, in another of her curious trances. From the window, a faint haze of neon blurs her shape and at the same time gives it a thin radiant outline, a line that shifts and turns misty, so that he has an odd sense of her body as translucent. Her hologram self, he thinks with a slight shock. He can in fact see the blue veins in her breasts, and goes to her and draws the lightest of circles around her nipples with his index finger.

“You're not listening to me,” she reproaches.

And then, for a considerable length of time, she can say nothing at all.

She manages, at last, to disengage herself from him without breaking the erotic fog in which they move, but establishing nevertheless a delicate space. She curls up in his armchair again and he watches her from the bed. In a curious way, all this seems to him a mode of sexual contact. It is as though they are still physically coupled.

“No,” she says. “It's not sex. It's because of Katherine.”

He waits and watches.

“But it's something different again that keeps me,” she says. “It's what you
know.
I want to … well, one of my professors at Sydney Uni described me as an academic glutton. He said I was driven by cerebral curiosity and greed, although he found me lamen­tably deficient in direction and purpose. That's what he said.

“On a reference letter, he wrote that I was ‘brilliant but erratic'. Frankly, I thought he could have been more tactful. But my considered response is that
erratic
 — in its pristine and original sense — did not have a negative connotation. No, that's comparatively recent, a shift in etymological history. I have nothing against
erratic,
myself.

“Errare,
to wander, right? And by extension to make mistakes. But that's the human condition, isn't it? Not to mention the best pedagogical method — the meandering mistake-making self. Don't you agree? That's what makes life bearable. I'd say history comes out highly in favour of erratic folk.

“Take Cook, Captain James Cook.” She props her elbows on the arm of the chair, rests her chin on her fists, and leans forward — what he thinks of as her earnest and sermonising pose. He waits for the lecture. “You're almost certainly woefully underinformed about Captain Cook. Americans are. About any heroes and explorers other than their own, as far as I can see. Does the name mean anything?”

“Ah …”

“Just as I thought. Well, if Cook had been less erratic, if he hadn't wandered round the Pacific and bumped into the east coast of Australia, this was in 1770, he wouldn't have landed at Botany Bay and planted the flag and claimed the entire east coast of the land mass for King George III. And if it wasn't for that I wouldn't be here on an Australian passport working for cash in Central Square so that I can hang around and sit in on your course. Curious, isn't it? Shit wages, I might add, but illegal, so I can't complain. In that dive off Albany Street, d'you know it?

“Funny,” she says, watching him watching her. “This reminds me of something in Cook's journal. He got himself trapped inside the reef, you know, the Great Barrier Reef, and strafed the underside of the
Endeavour
so badly that he had to decamp on the north Queensland beaches. Where of course the crew saw Aborigines.

“Quite naked.
Cook wrote in his journal. Which would have made the point, don't you think?

“
Without any manner of clothing whatever,
he added, just a little fascinated, I'd say.

“Even the women do not so much as cover their privates,
he wrote. Hmm.
They never brought any of their women along with them to the ship
, the old perv went on to complain,
but always left them on the opposite side of the river where we had frequent opportunities of viewing them through our glasses.”

She shakes her head. “What a bunch of voyeurs!

“I can't think,” she says archly, “what brought that to my mind. Should I cover my privates?”

“I'd much prefer not.” He reaches for her as she moves, with mock threat, to where her clothes are. There is a kind of languid skirmish, arms and legs brushing each other like ribbons, and then she has slithered away from him again, and he is in the armchair, she on the bed.

“Anyway” — she is plumping up the pillows behind her — “from my point of view, of course, it was just as well that Cook was both erratic and possessive, since you people were getting so worked up about flags yourselves. At the same time too. I mean, if the citizens of Boston hadn't done what they did while Cook was on his third and final voyage, hotfooting it to Hawaii to be murdered, then my mother Bea's great-great-great grandmother, a hardworking thief from Bristol, would presumably have been sent to some plantation in Virginia instead of to Botany Bay.

“And where would that have left me?

“Which says a lot for
erratic,
in my opinion.

“Quite aside from explorers, though, there's all that evidence you keep giving in your lectures: those muon tracks that curl like ferns, and the wandering quark, and all that stupendous power,
explosive
power, nuclear I mean, from the erratic behaviour of microphenomena … There's a lot to be said for it, isn't there?”

She sighs. “But academic supervisors, they like straight lines. You keep wasting time, they said to me. Whose time? I asked. Because I am ravenous about their courses, I can't sleep at night for wanting to get through the extra reading list. So where am I wasting time?

“But Professor Bickerton — I had him for history — now, there was an absorbing course, American Presidential Politics, though it is sometimes the seemingly trivial and idiosyncratic detail that rivets my attention. The Pepys' eye view, as it were. Like this, for example: Eisenhower is making a speech on foreign policy to a packed lecture hall full of students. I can't remember where, somewhere in the midwest for sure. There's a lot of applause and a few whistles and question period begins. First question: a girl in a green sweater comes to the microphone. ‘Mr President,' she asks earnestly. ‘Could you tell us why your wife wears bangs?'

“Microphenomena again, you see. Why is it, do you think, that the mind veers away from foreign policy and back to the little events? It's an unexpected link, isn't it? Hairstyles and the Marshall Plan. You think I'm just chattering on for the sake of it, but you're wrong. I'm obsessed with the question, I find it overwhelmingly relevant: why does the mind fasten on the trivial? The inane? On the smallest subatomic particle of the whole?”

Obviously she is not expecting an answer from him. Just as obviously, she expects him to take the questions very seriously.

“At nights,” she muses, “when I look up at the black holes — and sometimes they seem to be everywhere, don't you find? — there's this thought about linkages that consoles me. Consider how many hundreds of thousands of them there must be, links which we never manage to trace. Consider the network of ‘coincidences' which are simply cause and effect linked by not-yet-perceivable lines, the conjectures not yet refuted, the hypotheses not yet dreamed up … It's mind-boggling.

“Anyway, Professor Bickerton claimed that I had a grab-bag theory of knowledge and a first class grab-bag mind. First class, he said. But grab-bag.

“I didn't think that was very nice, but perhaps it's true. I would say that all I have done is gone on collecting a great deal of unsortable material. As yet unsortable. But isn't this good scientific method?

“Professor Bickerton, incidentally, used not to put his clothes on before he lit his pipe. You really must have a very interesting image of yourself, Koenig.”

She slides off the bed and sits on the carpet in front of his armchair and reaches up and begins unbuttoning his shirt, yet again, to his considerable pleasure. “Because I have a theory,” she says, “that it is during the phase when sexual excitement is winding down that we are our truest selves. My mother Bea would laugh about that right now, if she were here. She used to say to me even when I was very little, ‘Charade, you're a different kettle of fish from me. You'll never make your way in the world the same as I have, you like talking too much. You'll drive men crazy. You like talking more than eating and sleeping and I'll bet my last penny, when the time comes, you'll like it more than sex.”

Having completely unbuttoned his shirt, she climbs onto his lap and curls up with her cheek against his chest.

“I would say that's not entirely true,” she murmurs, “but I must admit I find it hard to separate the two.

“Anyway, you obviously have a deep-rooted image of yourself as a
clothed
person, Koenig. Or perhaps it's an astute awareness on your part of what I find irresistible about you. It's true that tweed jackets and chalk-smeared corduroy trousers drive me wild.
It all has to do with the absent father, you see, who — if he ever existed and ever engendered me at all — was a university man, according to the recollections of my mother and my Aunt Kay, both of whom found him unforgettable, though in different ways. Which brings me back to my hunch.”

“What hunch?”

“The one about my father. I told you last time. And I'm elaborating it now that you've got me reading up on probability theory, and indeterminacy, and such things.”

“Mmm?”

“It sounds a bit crazy,” she shrugs, “but then so does Einstein, and the more I think about it, the more it rings true. So.

“Hypothesis number one: my father, Nicholas Truman, was born in England and shipped to Australia as a boy; he may or may not have returned to England when he disappeared, he may or may not continue to spend his life as a global nomad, writing books, filing stories under a thousand and one different names. That is the particular history, the particle theory of my father's life.

“Hypothesis number two: my father was never more than a Platonic conception, an idealised object of adoration, in the minds of various people, most notably my mother Bea and my Aunt Kay. He glides forever on the crests of their imaginations. This is the wave theory of my father.

“And the same goes for Verity Ashkenazy, his high school sweetheart and university lover, who was intended to be my mother; that is to say, he intended that she would be the mother of any children he had. She also existed and didn't exist, in the same incompatible way that the wave theory and the particle theory of energy coexist and were once thought to refute each other.

“Or, to draw an analogy from
my
field of study, are wave/particle paradoxes much the same as what the thirteenth-century thinkers in the Faculty of Arts in Paris would have called an instance of Double Truth, which posits that a concept can be simultaneously true and false — true in the philosophical sense, but false in the theological sense, and vice versa? Of course this theory of the Double Truth resulted in certain excommunications from the Church in 1277, most notably that of Siger of Brabant — though, as you might not know, it was not that the theologians of Paris held the theory to be
untenable,
just downright undesirable. The theologians sniffed Averro
ë
s and other heresies, all of which smelled of the loss of power to them.

“Anyway. From either direction, science or metaphysics, it seems a thing
can
be both true and false. So what I want to do, Koenig, is track down the odd numbered days, the days when my father exists. I'd like to find him in his particular Nicholas shape, as his particle self.

“Koenig,” she says, running her lips lightly across his forehead, his closed eyelids, his mouth. “Koenig,” she whispers on a low husky note of entreaty. “I've run into dead ends. But surely, I keep thinking to myself, anyone who has a handle on the issues of quarks and black holes, on space that is void of space … anyone who can say to me that the selfsame photon is sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave
depending on the context
 … well, surely such a person has some answers.”