Antiphony (18 page)

“They'll sort it all out.”

Theodore surprises himself as much as he does Wayne, when these words come out of his mouth. He's not even sure why he has said it. Perhaps just to shut Wayne up, or see what he will say next.

“Yeah, you say that, and it's guys like you who really do have something to lose and don't have the guts to stand up to them who will get burned in the end.”

The waitress is back now with Theodore's cup of coffee. She sets it before him on the counter with special care, as if she brewed it specifically for him. Perhaps she did. She can sense that the conversation has heated up, so she retreats to her corner of the bar and her dying cigarette without a word.

“Something out of nothing, that's what they all want. Hell, you could just as soon turn one of those coals into a loaf of bread as do what they say they will do.”

Wayne nods in the direction of an open brazier on the floor behind the bar, in which a pile of charcoal is smoldering beneath a wire rack. This is probably in keeping with the wilderness theme—it may even be a way of helping to heat this place. Wayne's assertions have brought Theodore down from whatever high orbit he had attained when he felt he was viewing the motions of the sun and the earth in their flight across heavens, from whatever transfiguration had caused him to spin into the realm of those whirling and wistful ramblings about infinity he sent in that e-mail message meant only for himself. His only concern now is how to tell Ilene about what he has done, how to frame his latest and most fatal blunder in a way that will ease the shock to her. But there is no way around it—he no longer
has a job, no longer has a steady paycheck to pay for things like health insurance and their mortgage and their monthly night out on the town. They will have to sell the house and move to something smaller, an apartment maybe. Perhaps Ilene will have to find some line of work herself, her afternoons talking on the phone with friends, lounging in front of the flat screen TV a thing of the past. The future he sees spread out before them is one of dwindling opportunities, diminishing pleasure, struggle and hardship. How will she react to the news? There is no way to know until the words come out of his mouth—perhaps she will leave him. Perhaps that living visceral cord that has joined them together over the years will finally fray and fall apart under the strain.

Wayne is correct about one thing; in his heart of hearts Theodore has known this all along: There is no other reality than what he can see before him with his own two eyes. There is no way to transmute those burning coals into something entirely other, except by the means prescribed by the laws of physics. If he were to stay here the rest of the afternoon—and what else does he have to do?—Theodore could watch as the coals slowly burn themselves out, converting each molecule of the impure carbon briquettes by combustion into heat, light, and reaction products released as the trace odor of smoke that permeates the room. And that faint star above him too will burn itself out in somewhat the same manner, an immense downward spiral of combustion, just as surely as the other stars in the universe will, over time, cool down and drift apart and disintegrate until there is nothing left but a vast and empty nothingness, an absence of all heat and all light and all coherent particles of matter, nothing
but the absolute zero null and void from whence Theodore and Wayne and Ilene and all the rest of this came.

    4    

T
HIS CHURCH IS
falling apart. He can see that clearly enough. To Theodore's great surprise, the blue door at one side of the giant limestone building yielded to his tug on the handle and opened right up, granting him access to the warmth of the building. Anyone could simply walk in, just as he did, and wander around the building, just as he is now, looking for things to steal if they so chose, or, as Theodore is now, merely looking for another place to get in out of the cold, dark February afternoon. This old place is a warren of cramped passageways and empty rooms used for what? The building must be at least a hundred years old, and he can see signs of its general deterioration, its slow and inevitably losing battle against entropy.

Disarray is everywhere. He pokes his head inside one of the many rooms that line this corridor and sees what might on occasion be used as a Sunday school classroom, but might also be nothing more than a storage room for miscellaneous church-related junk. There is a pile of musty hymnals strewn haphazardly on top of a radiator and windowsill; a loose assortment of metal folding chairs arranged in no particular manner in the same far corner of the room; a bulletin board with a sheet of ruled notebook paper pinned to it containing a list of children's names and a few check marks next to them as well as a few dull golden stars for attendance or assignments completed that are
curling and about to fall at any moment to the floor. On the wall at the opposite end of the room, someone—a child, a teacher—once stapled the first few letters of a Bible verse cut meticulously with scissors out of fading yellow construction paper: N
OW THESE ARE
; there is a pile of towels and bathrobes and motheaten men's dress shirts and neckties; there is an old upright piano probably used to play along with hymns the children might have sung. He steps to it and runs his right hand up the C scale. The tension in the keys has come unsprung; the strings are loose and out of tune. The pale green paint on the wall above the radiator is peeling; chips of it litter the pile of leather-bound hymnals, their pages thin and brittle and just as prone to crumbling into dust as the leaves that littered the doorway of the tavern he left several hours ago. Everything has a tendency to disorder; everything is falling apart. It takes energy, work, applied to any system, any
thing,
such as the objects in this room, to keep them in good order, to keep them from disintegrating into a loose and random collection of atoms. There must be a constant application of energy to every thing, every person, to keep it from returning back to randomness and cold.

He goes back to the corridor and follows it to another larger room that looks as if it might be a kind of library. How long had he been outside after leaving Wayne and his depressing talk of government health insurance—two or three hours perhaps? He had wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood, looking at storefront windows filled with nothing he wanted, staring at anyone who had happened to pass by with the certain understanding that they could provide no manner of assistance with the problem he has yet to solve. What he has found interesting
in the course of this day is how time and space have
opened up
, the extent to which his concept of his self has until now defined his relationship to everything he perceived. He saw a giant acacia tree guarding a tiny bungalow and stood there on the buckling sidewalk observing its roots and the leathery bark of the tree, watching it, staring at it for several minutes, as if it might yield some secret to him about its existence. In standing there, examining the tree, without his own idea of who
he
was—scientist, physicist—or where he needed to be, or what he should be doing, he began to feel a sense of relationship to the tree, both of them living creatures, both of them complex mechanisms for converting energy into form, coherent structure, both of them extravagant localized systems of order fighting against the downward gradient of entropy, the tendency for things to fall apart. He could feel the tree standing there before him, dormant, waiting, waiting for the first few gusts of warm air and glimpses of the sun to suck in and trigger itself back to life. He went up to the tree and touched one of its many hooked thorns, each of them an inch or two long, protruding from the branches of the tree at random intervals. He held the ball of his thumb against the pointy tip of the thorn and, in that brief moment, felt as if he could sense the tree poised there, even in its dormant state, feeling the slight and elusive pressure of him as an intruder.

Later, he had watched a dog amble across the street, a collie mix it had appeared, ears pinned back against its head, eyes squinting into the wind. Where was the dog going? What thoughts moved across its brain, telling it where to go, what to do? He felt just as aimless and unsure as the dog must be—no,
moreso. The dog must have had more of a sense of itself than he did at that moment, some purpose it was pursuing, perhaps headed back to its master's home, perhaps in the direction of a garbage heap where it knew some particularly choice scraps might be found. His only motivation is one of avoidance, avoiding being himself, this new self that is no self, that has nothing familiar or acceptable to hold on to.

In the library room, books are strewn along one low shelf in no discernable order. There is a series of Christian self-help titles and a set of travel magazines that feature destinations in the Holy Land called
Footsteps in Faith.
In one corner of the room, a stack of beat up children's board games, “Monopoly,” “Risk,” “Candy Land,” and another one called “The Bridges of Shangri-La.” Time has come to a standstill—he feels as if he could stand here staring at these things and listening to himself breathe for a very long time without moving or without wanting to move. He could stay here and just watch whoever might enter the room without any interaction with them whatsoever. What need is there to interact? Perhaps there is a place where they will let him do this—just exist, taking in sensations of sound and color and motion, without any need to process them into data, without any reason for doing anything with these bits of information. All his life he has been directed towards a purpose, towards a goal. Now that he has nothing to move towards, the most natural thing to do appears to be just standing still and letting whatever comes along pass over him.

In one corner of the room he has come to think of as the library, though it hardly qualifies as such, he finds a small refrigerator, no taller than his waist, the kind undergrad students keep
in their dorm rooms for leftover slices of pizza and bottles of beer. He opens the fridge and sees it is empty save for a plastic jug of apple juice and a torn package of shortbread cookies, snacks for a Sunday school class. Suddenly, his appetite rears up—he is ravenous—he has not eaten anything since the restaurant meal he shared with Ilene before the symphony the night before; ages ago it seems. He pops the plastic lid off the jug and lifts it to his mouth, letting the cool, slippery liquid slide down his throat. He can barely even taste it, but as he takes a second gulp, he realizes that the juice is not quite right—the granules of apple flavoring have separated and settled to the bottom of the jug. He checks the rim of the jug's mouth and sees that the juice is several months past the sell-by date. No matter—it still tasted good, still feels good as it nestles into his stomach. He grabs the package of cookies and pops one of them whole into his mouth. Chewing, he realizes these are very old too. The cookie is virtually tasteless, bland, soft and crumbly, but he savors it as he chews and swallows—anything tastes good after not having eaten for nearly a day. He takes another cookie from the package and bites into it. He does not need much more than this—a warm place to stay, a few bites of food to sustain him. All the rest is over-elaboration.