Biblical (14 page)

Poulsen nodded.

“The Pons is where all of the automatic and basic functions of life are centered – breathing, swallowing, taste, hearing, eye movement, et cetera. These are the functions that are compromised in your wife’s case. I’m afraid she is suffering from ventral pontine syndrome, commonly known as locked-in syndrome. At the moment, her paralysis is truly total, including absence of eye movement. Only time will tell how permanent the paralysis is, but I have to be honest with you, based on the data we’ve obtained through imaging, the prognosis is not good.”

“The baby?”

“I’m sorry …” Larssen lowered his eyes.

Poulsen wept and the physician remained quiet, allowing him his grief.

“Can she hear me?” Poulsen asked eventually.

“There’s no reason to believe she can’t,” said Larssen. “And any stimulation you can give her is good.”

Again there was a pause, Poulsen looking back into the room. Then, with a determined tone, he asked: “Is there a hospital library?”

*

Now, one year and three months later, and as was his Saturday afternoon custom, Georg Poulsen sat and read to his wife about Roussel’s fantastical world where the deceased did not know they were dead, or that the world they inhabited was a staged tableau.

Casey was Macbeth’s younger brother by four years. They had been close with each other and with their father, who had always referred to their small family as the ‘Three Musketeers’. It had been an expression of sad solidarity; not that Macbeth, and even less Casey, had been fully aware at the time of their father’s sadness. Macbeth’s mother had been present in their lives only as an absence: Macbeth was six when she died, suddenly and unseen, like a central character in a play inexplicably dying offstage. The older Macbeth discovered that his mother had fallen victim to a Circle of Willis berry aneurysm that had ruptured and flooded the base of her brain with blood. As a child, he had imagined she had simply closed her eyes as if falling asleep; as a physician, he had been able to put together the likely scenario: the intense thunderclap headache, the catastrophic loss of motor control, perhaps a swirl of confusion, vivid hallucination, convulsions and death. A common feature of berry aneurysm was ptosis, where an eyelid would unilaterally half-close over one eye, and he had often imagined her thus – something he had been reminded of when he had seen Gabriel Rees’s half-closed eyelid in death and in his dream.

Whatever the details of his mother’s death, it had been a sudden, abrupt extinction: Cora Macbeth had been a physical presence in his life that morning and had not that afternoon. His mother had thereafter existed only conceptually, as an idea in a growing mind and, with the unquestioning adaptability
of childhood, Macbeth had become accustomed to her absence. Or at least adjusted to it; as he grew up he had concocted detailed fictions about his mother being alive and well in some other place, living some other life, perhaps under a different name, but crying herself to sleep each night as she thought of the sons she’d left behind. He’d even elaborated an alternative in which the truth was being concealed from him and his mother had fallen into a profound and unrousable slumber in which she dreamed another life for herself; perhaps he, his father and brother, their entire world, were simply the imaginings of his dreaming mother.

Whatever the deficit left by a dead mother and a saddened father, it had been compensated by the presence in his life of his brother. Casey was so similar to Macbeth, yet at the same time so very different. As they had grown up, Macbeth had been the trailblazer. Despite the emergent glitches in his psychology, Macbeth had excelled at school. His IQ had been measured at the extreme end of the bell curve, but at that point at which the advantage was possibly a disadvantage, creating the potential for mental stumbles. Then, as Casey had grown older, it became clear that his baby brother was intellectually his match, but there also emerged a grace and symmetry to Casey’s intellectual function that marked him for great things.

No glitches.

While Macbeth followed his father into medicine and psychiatry, Casey studied physics, then astrophysics, then quantum mechanics. Despite his youth, Casey was now amongst the most valued brains on the planet and a possible future Nobelist.

It was something that filled Macbeth with both envy and pride. Most of all, he loved his kid brother and any sense of competition had been subsumed by their friendship; the closest Macbeth had. Maybe the only real friendship he had.

*

They met, as agreed, at a bowling alley off Massachusetts Avenue, not far from Casey’s second-story apartment in a Back Bay brownstone, in turn a fifteen-minute bike ride over the bridge to MIT.

Casey Macbeth was clearly John Macbeth’s brother. He was smaller and slighter, and had a gentler look, but they shared the same green eyes and dark hair and the general architecture of their faces was the same. But where Macbeth was a fastidious and expensive dresser, Casey always looked as if his mind had been on weightier things when he reached into his closet. When he walked into the bowling alley, Macbeth’s kid brother was wearing jeans and a dark blue T-shirt that bore the white-lettered caption:
Wanted Dead and/or Alive: Schrödinger’s Cat
. Macbeth had once tried to explain to a bemused Casey why not everyone got quantum-physics humor.

The brothers played three games, Macbeth winning easily every time, even when he tried not to. Casey’s passion for tenpin bowling was matched only by his incompetence. Macbeth could never understand how his brother, who could have quantified in an elegant equation every force, angle and torque required to make the ball behave in the desired way, so often managed to steer it straight into the gutter.

“I am fulfilled …” Casey said with a joyous smile after his third defeat. “Let’s go back to my place and get drunk. Sound like a plan?”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Macbeth enthusiastically, although he knew neither he nor his brother had ever got completely, recklessly drunk. “After the night I had last night, I could do with a little cutting loose.”

“Why? What happened last night?” Casey frowned.

“I’ll tell you later,” said Macbeth.

*

Casey’s apartment was not what anyone, other than his brother, would have expected from his outward appearance. While his
wardrobe suggested mental chaos, Casey’s living environment revealed the crystalline order of his mind. Macbeth suspected his brother shared his need for surroundings that delivered some sense of harmony.

“You got everything you need? I mean while you’re over here … I know it’s difficult to pack everything.” Casey placed a coaster then a glass of wine on the coffee table in front of Macbeth.

“I’m fine, thanks. The only thing you could maybe help with is my laptop.”

“Sure. What’s the problem?”

“The weirdest thing – a folder on my desktop I can’t open. I can’t even remember creating it.”

“No problem. Sounds like you’ve locked it by accident. I’ll have a look at it.”

“No … it’s not locked,” said Macbeth. “If I click on it, it doesn’t ask me for a password or open a message window or anything, it’s just like it’s a phantom or something.”

“A phantom?” Casey laughed. “If you’re going to get all metaphysical about computing, then you’d better come over to my side of science. Bring it with you next time you come over.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you never miss it? Here, I mean?” asked Casey.

“I guess. The Cape more than Boston. But I do enjoy Copenhagen. I know you’d really like it too.”

“We hardly get a chance to see each other,” said Casey. “I was thinking that I might come over to see you next month.”

“In Copenhagen? That would be great, Casey.” Macbeth grinned. “Why don’t you stay for a couple of weeks, if you can get the time off. I’ll introduce you to some beautiful Danish blondes.”

“Sorry … It’ll be more like a few days. I’m going to be over in England, at Oxford, and I thought I could take a flight across to Copenhagen. I mean, it can only be a couple of hours away.”

“Like I say, you’re welcome to stay for as long as you want. I’d be delighted just to see you. What’s in Oxford?”

Casey took a long sip of his wine and grinned a conspiratorial grin. “The greatest scientific discovery of all time, that’s what. Bigger than Higgs, bigger than General Relativity, if you can believe that. You are looking at one of the chosen few … the elite, apparently. In fact, you should be treating me with much more deference.”

“Okay, let’s have it …”

“You’ve heard of Henry Blackwell?” asked Casey.

“Yeah, believe it or not, I am aware of some of what goes on outside the world of psychiatry. What about him?”

“Well, you’ll know he’s the world’s greatest living quantum physicist. He’s been working for years on a project that he’s been unusually secretive about — or at least as secretive as anyone in the scientific community can be. Actually, there’s bits and pieces of the Prometheus Project running all over the world in various research establishments. But Blackwell has kept the core project very close to his chest.”

“Prometheus?”

“Yeah, I know,” said Casey with a grimace. “But it’s big … really, really big. The Prometheus Answer is his codename for a Great Unifying Theory. He actually claims he’s done it – what Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, Hawking all failed to do. Anyone else and I’d take it with a shovelful of salt … Anyway, he’s promised it’s the greatest revelation in the history of quantum physics. The definitive, elegant solution that solves, once and for all, the way the universe works.”

“And you’ve been invited?”

“He’ll be publishing formally in a journal, but he’s summoned together a couple of hundred of the top brains in the field from around the world for a special seminar in Oxford. Including yours truly. Basically he’s using the symposium as a peer-group launch and I can’t begin to tell you what it feels like for Blackwell to have identified me as one of his peers.”

“Nothing more than you deserve, Casey. I’m really pleased for you. But why all the secrecy?”

“Things are getting nutty out there. I mean attitudes to science. You’ve heard of Blind Faith? The fundamentalist Christian group?”

“Yes. A bunch of lunatics.”

“They’re more than that … Blind Faith has gone completely underground since the FBI tagged them as a terrorist organization. We’ve been issued with a stack of guidelines at MIT and there’s going to be all kinds of security at the Oxford symposium – Blackwell’s been sent death threats and some kind of half-assed device was intercepted in his mail. I’m telling you, these people are dangerous.” Casey shook his head and a lock of black hair fell over his eyes. “We think we live in enlightened times, but there are just as many would-be inquisitors set on persecuting the Copernicuses and Galileos of today’s world.”

“I don’t know what they’re all so afraid of.”

“Extinction, that’s what. Do you know what religion is?” Casey leaned forward, animated. “It’s the absence of science. Religion thrived when we didn’t understand how the universe worked. With every new discovery, we cancel one more superstitious explanation for a natural phenomenon. Science has been killing religion since the Enlightenment and now it’s fighting for its last shred of life. That’s why Blind Faith, every Islamic fundamentalist and born-again crackpot has a particular hard-on for Blackwell and his research. I can’t blame him for playing his cards close to his chest.”

“Well,” Macbeth raised his glass in a toast, “I’m really pleased for you, Casey. And it really would be great if you could come over to Denmark for a few days afterwards. Maybe you can explain it all to your dim-witted brother.”

“You always put yourself down.” Casey frowned. “Truth is, I’ve always envied your mind.”

Macbeth mock-spluttered his wine. “You? Envy
my
mind?”

“You always go on about my focus … A friend, Juergen, who’s a physicist out at CERN, told me this German word –
Fachidiot
 – it means something like ‘expert idiot’. Juergen says that’s exactly what we are … we know a lot about what we do and shit about anything else.”

“
An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less
 …” Macbeth smiled, raising a knowing glass. “Nicholas Murray Butler.”

“There you go …” Casey pointed at Macbeth emphatically. “Your head is full of facts and dates and knowledge about stuff other than your work. Me? I’m a one-trick pony.”

“I wouldn’t complain about the brain you were handed.” Macbeth sipped his wine. “And as for my memory for general knowledge – I’d swap it in the bat of an eye for a better recollection of real life. Give me an autobiographical memory over a semantic one any day.”

“We are what we are,” said Casey resignedly.

“Ever heard of Cosmos Rossellius?”

Casey shrugged.

“He lived in the sixteenth century. In Florence – formulated all kinds of theories about the memory and its functions – theories way ahead of his time. I should reread him some day … try some of his mnemotechnics.”

“What?”

“Ways to re-create the real world in your memory. If he visited a place, a church or a castle, say, he had these techniques for rebuilding them perfectly in his memory. God knows I need something like that.”

“It’s good to hear you’re keeping up with the literature …” Casey raised an eyebrow. “Sixteenth century, you say?”

“The mind was the mind back then just as it is now. The weird thing is that we’ve only now discovered that we allocate specific neurons to specific concepts. If you think of a certain person you’ve known or a place you’ve been, it’ll trigger a set
of neurons you’ve grown specifically for that memory. People really do live in your head. Rossellius was way ahead in his thinking and talked about memory-space as a dimension of existence. He even wrote this description of Paradise and Hell that was as ornate and convoluted as Dante’s. The difference was that Rossellius’s afterworld was entirely constructed from memories. An eternal memory-space.”

“Mmm …” Casey poured another glass of wine. “Remember how Dad always talked about the two universes? The Outer and the Inner. Don’t you think it’s weird the way we’ve ended up each exploring one?”