Antiphony (4 page)

This is all inside his head, he cannot see or feel. He has been engulfed by pure sound, the sounding of these words.

Profound the moment when the word came forth

and the crackled sprawl of space and time burst into triumph.

A seed of thought,

a grain of sand that grows and grows,

propelled by nothing more than the authority of my thinking.

The voice is gone, suddenly; the ringing, shuddering noise shrinks and goes away, it folds itself up and the light which is also a part of the vibration lifts away and here he is in the hotel room again. He puts his hand on the bureau at his side, for balance. He looks around him and gathers himself. Perhaps he is going insane. He has never had anything like this happen to him before and doesn't know what it can be. What was that voice inside his head?

The closest thing he has experienced to this was the time twelve years ago when his heart went into a sudden spell of arrhythmia, first racing to an incredible speed, then slowing to a series of spastic and irregular thumps. It sent him outside of himself for a few brief moments, a feeling of being lost within a web of translucent space beyond the normal four dimensions. It had only lasted for a few seconds, this feeling of loosely floating outside his body, and he later reconciled it to a lack of blood or oxygen to his brain. Then, later, after Ilene had insisted that she take him to the Emergency Room and they spent the next few hours trying to get his heart back into a normal rhythm, they transferred him to a regular hospital room overnight for observation, to see if his heart would revert to a regular beat on its own. When it didn't, they were compelled the next morning to shave two patches of his chest hair away and put him under before shocking him with the paddles they always use at moments of desperation on TV, though this had been, they assured him, a controlled and entirely standard way of getting his errant heartbeat back on track.

What they conveniently neglected to tell him until much later, when the doddering cardiologist acknowledged that his heart was in good working order and this episode was probably the result of too many late nights working and too much caffeine, is that his heart would be stopped cold for a few seconds during the electrical shocks they administered. He had, in effect, come back from the dead.

Maybe it is happening again. He puts his hand on his chest and feels his heart beating there trapped within the fragile birdcage of his ribs, slow and steady, faithfully accomplishing its
singular mission over and over again, time after time. No, what he just went through was something far beyond a spell of light-headedness. That sound, that voice, had filled him up—it was coming from inside him and all around him at the same time. And he had been transported, as if tunneling
into
himself—down into a higher part of himself somehow.

But he cannot consider it now. He stares again at the clock by the bed and sees that he has only three minutes left. They will all be waiting there for him, the Calistoga Ballroom filled with his esteemed colleagues, wondering where he could be.

Three minutes. Still enough time to make it, if he hurries. But perhaps he should not go, in this state of mind, without his notes. If he tries to wing it, he will make a fool of himself in front of them. He has been apprehensive about this presentation for weeks, and now it has somehow come to this. He could tell them he is ill; he could call Pradeep on his cell and inform him that there has been another episode of arrhythmia. Very plausible, the anxiousness that comes with giving a major speech like this could well bring on another attack. But imagine it: Pradeep, his chief rival for the position of Research Director, going to the podium to announce that Theodore cannot make it, and all of them rising as one to leave the room, the moment of glory Theodore has worked for years to achieve, squandered—gone.

No, he must do it. They are waiting for him.

At the elevators again, Theodore notices that music is being piped in from speakers overhead, lending the hushed vault of the corridor an air of floating, sprightly extremity. Was the music here before, when he came up? If so, he hadn't noticed. Perhaps
someone in the hotel has only just now decided to activate the music over the speakers scattered throughout the hotel's public spaces. Or maybe he is only now open to hearing such a sound, after having been filled with sound a few moments before. The music accompanies him as he steps into the elevator for the ride to the ground floor, a pulsating string section dancing on top of mincing triplets of flutes and oboes calling back and forth to one another. He suspects it may be Schubert, one of the symphonies. Theodore enjoys Schubert, but his music seems somehow derivative, a lesser form of Mozart that doesn't quite seem to generate as much of a punch. He wonders whether Schubert would have garnered as much attention without the mystery of his Unfinished Symphony or his early death at the age of thirty-one from complications due to syphilis. Theodore turns this thought around on himself: Perhaps he is too old to accomplish anything great; the great ones, in music, in physics—in most fields—do their best work by the time they turn thirty, and then, if they are lucky, they die, transforming their lives into a dramatic opus commensurate with their art, and heightening the speculation about all the great work they might have done had they lived to a ripe old age. James Dean made three movies. Enough to make him a legend—or perhaps not, had he actually lived to survive them. Jackson Pollock found a tree with his speeding convertible and his mistress in the front seat to save him from growing old with his work. And in one single year, 1905, twenty-six year-old Albert Einstein discovered, in turn, the Special Theory of Relativity, in which he demonstrated that measurements of time and distance vary systematically as any object moves relative to anything else, the
quantum theory of light—the idea that light exists as tiny particles called photons—proved that atoms really do exist, added the field theory to the quantum theory of light, and, of course, extended Special Relativity into the proof that matter and energy are one and the same, in the most famous equation ever conceived:
E = mc
²
. And he did all of this while working forty hours a week as a clerk in a patent office, shunned by the cloistered world of academia. What could be more daunting than that set of world-changing insights for any new physicist starting his career, hoping to be the one to discover the single theory that will tie everything together? Theodore is fifty-one years old and is having trouble describing his own little specialized corner of Perturbation Theory. Masturbation Theory, they call it. No wonder.

The languishing string section follows Theodore off the elevator and down the long vault of the passageway that leads towards the conference center. His mind's eye transfers the sound of the vibrating catgut strings of the violins and violas into a set of the subatomic strings that are at the heart of his research. The image he keeps in his head to help him visualize his work emerges—a loop of pure energy plucked by a finger on a hand that materializes from nowhere, the loop of energy twanging in the pattern of a seven-pointed star, a type of harmonics he finds particularly pleasing to envision. Then, he sees this star of light shift to another shape, another pattern of vibration, as the energy poured through it is increased—another pluck of the finger. And this string of light is merely the three-dimensional snapshot of a higher-dimensional object—his mind's eye transposes it as a three-dimensional star-shape collapsing into the vibrating twodimensional
star-string—when, in fact it is really either a ten- or eleven-dimensional energy string passing through the screen of his own limited energy spacetime. But when he keeps his eye focused on the vibrating star of energy and adds others to it, interacting with it, he starts to conjure a swarming field of these vibrating loops and open-ended shoestrings, all buzzing with the excitations of their various levels of energy—and he achieves the fullest sense he can of visualizing the math that goes into creating String Theory. None of this is precisely accurate, but he sees a semi-transparent window of buzzing stars and loops and shoestrings forming into fields of energy that, in turn, interact to create matter, to create objects such as the thick sound-deadening pile of the carpet his shoes are treading on. All of the many things he sees around him, the walls, and comfortable leather-covered chairs, tables, and doors to the many conference rooms lining this corridor are simply half-frozen sheets of energy, slowed down enough to be within the range of his perception as solid objects. And his own research, the subject of the speech he is about to give, is merely the proof that one of the terms in the chain of mathematical equations that describe this gorgeous sea of bustling energy is finite. Because it is finite, in the world of science and math as he knows it, it does indeed exist. What could be more simple?

His vision of that chain of terms in the mathematical equations describing String Theory always appears to him as a sequence of numbers, starting with a very large 1, and continuing on through 2, 3, 4, and beyond, each numeral growing a bit smaller as they stretch out before him into the far distance of the horizon. He has solved for 4, the fourth term—a very important
accomplishment. And now, all he has to do is translate this beautiful vision he is holding in his head into words. He must simply fill in the gaps between the bullet points on his presentation slides. But… that phrase carved into the stall of the bathroom crowds into view, supplanting the lovely vibrating strings and the numbers receding into darkness.

T
HE
W
ORD
I
S A
L
IE
.

What if everything he is about to tell them is untrue?

It can't be. There are too many wise men who have spent their entire lives documenting, calculating, and expounding upon the theory of the vibrating strings. The gorgeous economy of it—the fact that all the equations describing the forces and particles known to man can be boiled down to the simple condition that strings must take up the least amount of spacetime possible. The mere geometry of strings is enough to explain the way the world works, at least on the flat, two-dimensional level of a chalkboard. But there are doubters. The elegant equations cannot be physically tested, at least with the particle colliders that exist now. There have been beautiful mathematical theories before that ended up proving nothing. And even though the math is lovely on paper, when he tries to project it onto the physical world where he lives, the ever-changing relativistic universe of Einstein, all sorts of infinities and singularities annihilate the beautiful equations. There is something missing—it is like a directional sign, true enough on its own level, but perhaps nothing more than an arrow that points to the real destination far beyond it.

The plaque beside the closed double doors says C
ALISTOGA
B
ALLROOM
. This is it. He pauses, looks down the empty corridor
and takes a deep breath, as the piped-in orchestra soars through what must be the crescendo that will tie up all the loose ends Schubert has postulated in the course of his symphony. Judging by the tarantella rhythm and the progression of the harmonics one after another, a sequence of key changes that builds and builds, this is probably his Third. He was only eighteen when he wrote it. It reminds Theodore of a November wind that blows through an Italian forest in the mountains, or a pack of wolves running through the snow.
A seed of thought, a grain of sand that grows and grows.
The voice comes back to him, tangled up with the final drowned out notes of the symphony.
Propelled by nothing more than the authority of my thinking.

A giant thought that grows and grows. What if the universe is nothing more than that? An idea, pure and simple, taken to its furthest possible extent, from zero to infinity in a single instant. The image flashes before his eyes, blanking out the door and his hand reaching for the handle. A single thought, thought by whom? By someone, the only one, and he is in it. A dream that never ends and never did begin. It cannot be. He is hallucinating, going insane. The door is still here, his fingers grasp the burnished handle and pull it down, which pries the door open with a click and a creak. And beyond the door, as he steps through the threshold, is a room full of people who have been waiting for him.

There is a center aisle, not wide, angled between row upon row of chairs crowded with the most exalted aspirants in the String Theory firmament, which he must navigate. The heads turn, nearly all of them male, many balding or gray, and follow him as he proceeds towards the front of the room where a
raised stage has been erected. He can feel the heat of their staring eyes boring into his head. But he does not look at them, he dares not meet the gaze of a single one of them. Each man and woman, every one of them, has done before what he is doing now, has faced a room full of his colleagues and spoken to them of his life's work, boiled down into a few dozen slides and an hour or so of discussion. It hardly seems fair, that this is the format by which his great knowledge, his depth of understanding of the workings of the universe, should have to be transmitted. He would prefer a series of informal talks over a period of about a week in the hallways of the Institute or at the comfortable couches and easy chairs of the coffee shop by the quad. He can picture the windows steaming up there, the soothing smell of roasting coffee lending a magical precision to the conversation. But this artificial division that has been set up in this room, this controlled aura of confrontation between the many, the audience, and himself—the one—is stifling really, a forum for despair.

He spots Pradeep in one of the back rows just past, his eyes inky black. He ignores him. If he looks towards him and catches his eye, he will not be able to go forward. For some time now he has been able to sense in Pradeep a sullen watchfulness, a wariness that is unusual in their exchanges about the daily goings on at the Institute. He knows that it is because they have been rivals now for the Directorship, that Pradeep sees him as his chief obstacle to the next, and most important step on the career ladder. Opportunities like this don't come along very often, and though Pradeep is young, much younger than Theodore, he must know that obtaining a position like that will set
him up for life. But there will be other chances for a bright young man like Pradeep. Theodore, on the other hand, is almost past it. If this doesn't happen for him, he figures he may as well resign himself to a rather unsatisfying final twenty years of research on what will likely be increasingly arcane and minor subtopics within the hierarchy of String Theory treasure hunts.