Impossible Things (15 page)

He is a long way away, behind a coiled line of barbed wire, but I can see him quite clearly in spite of the snow. He has the motorcycle fixed, and as I watch, he flings his leg over it and presses his foot down. “Go!” I shout. “Get out!” The motorcycle jumps forward. “Go!”

The motorcycle comes toward me, picking up speed. It rears up, and I think it is going to jump the barbed wire, but it falls instead, the motorcycle first and then the recruit, spiraling slowly down into the iron spikes. The ground heaves, and I fall, too.

I have fallen into Schwarzchild’s dugout. Half of it has caved in, the timber balks sticking out at angles from the heap of dirt and snow, but the blanket is still over the
door, and Schwarzschild is propped in a chair. The doctor is bending over him. Schwarzschild has his shirt off. His chest looks like Hans’s did.

The front roars and more of the roof crumbles. “It’s all right! It’s a disease!” I shout over it. “I have brought you a letter to prove it,” and hand him the letter which I have been clutching in my unfeeling hand.

The doctor grabs the letter from me. Snow whirls down through the ruined roof, but Schwarzschild does not put on his shirt. He watches uninterestedly as the doctor reads the letter.

“ ‘The symptoms you describe are almost certainly those of Neumann’s disease, or pemphigus vulgaris. I have treated two patients with the disease, both Jews. It is a disease of the mucous membranes and is not contagious. Its cause is unknown. It always ends in death.’ ” Dr. Funkenheld crumples up the paper. “You came all this way in the middle of a bombardment to tell me there is no hope?” he shouts in a voice I do not even recognize, it is so unlike his steady doctor’s voice. “You should have tried to get away. You should have—” and then he is gone under a crashing of dirt and splintered timbers.

I struggle toward Schwarzschild through the maelstrom of red dust and snow. “Put your shirt on!” I shout at him. “We must get out of here!” I crawl to the door to see if we can get out through the communication trench.

Muller bursts through the blanket. He is carrying, impossibly, the wireless. The headphones trail behind him in the snow. “I came to see what had happened to you. I thought you were dead. The communication trenches are shot to pieces.”

It is as I had feared. His curiosity has got the best of him, and now he is trapped, too, though he seems not to know it. He hoists the wireless onto the table without looking at it. His eyes are on Schwarzschild, who leans against the remaining wall of the dugout, his shirt in his hands.

“Your shirt!” I shout, and come around to help Schwarzschild put it on over the craters and shell holes of his blasted skin. The air screams and the mouth of the dugout blows in. I grab at Schwarzschild’s arm, and the skin of it comes off in my hands. He falls against the table, and the wireless goes over. I can hear the splintering tinkle of the liquid barretter breaking, and then the whole dugout is caving in and we are under the table. I cannot see anything.

“Muller!” I shout. “Where are you?”

“I’m hit,” he says.

I try to find him in the darkness, but I am crushed against Schwarzschild. I cannot move. “Where are you hit?”

“In the arm,” he says, and I hear him try to move it. The movement dislodges more dirt, and it falls around us, shutting out all sound of the front. I can hear the creak of wood as the table legs give way.

“Schwarzschild?” I say. He doesn’t answer, but I know he is not dead. His body is as hot as the Primus stove flame. My hand is underneath his body, and I try to shift it, but I cannot. The dirt falls like snow, piling up around us. The darkness is red for a while, and then I cannot see even that.

“I have a theory,” Muller says in a voice so close and so devoid of curiosity it might be mine. “It is the end of the world.”

“Was that when Schwarzschild was sent home on sick leave?” Travers said. “Or validated, or whatever you Germans call it? Well, yeah, it had to be, because he died in March. What happened to Muller?”

I had hoped he would go away as soon as I had told him what had happened to Schwarzschild, but he made no move to get up. “Muller was invalided out with a broken arm. He became a scientist.”

“The way you did.” He opened his notebook again. “Did you see Schwarzschild after that?”

The question makes no sense.

“After you got out? Before he died?”

It seems to take a long time for his words to get to me. The message bends and curves, shifting into the red, and I can hardly make it out. “No,” I say, though that is a lie.

Travers scribbles. “I really do appreciate this, Dr. Rottschieben. I’ve always been curious about Schwarzschild, and now that you’ve told me all this stuff, I’m even more interested,” Travers says, or seems to say. Messages coming in are warped by the gravitational blizzard into something that no longer resembles speech. “If you’d be willing to help me, I’d like to write my thesis on him.”

Go. Get out. “It was a lie,” I say. “I never knew Schwarzschild. I saw him once, from a distance—your fixed observer.”

Travers looks up expectantly from his notes as if he is still waiting for me to answer him.

“Schwarzschild was never even in Russia,” I lie. “He spent the whole winter in hospital in Göttingen. I lied to you. It was nothing but a thought problem.”

He waits, pencil ready.

“You can’t stay here!” I shout. “You have to get away. There is no safe distance from which a fixed observer can watch without being drawn in, and once you are inside the Schwarzschild radius, you can’t get out. Don’t you understand? We are still there!”

We are still there, trapped in the trenches of the Russian front, while the dying star burns itself out, spiraling down into that center where time ceases to exist, where everything ceases to exist except the naked singularity that is somehow Schwarzschild.

Muller tries to dig the wireless out with his crushed arm so he can send a message that nobody can hear—
“Help us! Help us!”—and I struggle to free the hands that in spite of Schwarzschild’s warmth are now so cold I cannot feel them, and in the very center Schwarzschild burns himself out, the black hole at his center imploding him cell by cell, carrying him down into darkness, and us with him.

“It is a trap!” I shout at Travers from the center, and the message struggles to escape and then falls back.

“I wonder how he figured it out,” Travers says, and now I can hear him clearly. “I mean, can you imagine trying to figure out something like the theory of black holes in the middle of a war and while you were suffering from a fatal disease? And just think, when he came up with the theory, he didn’t have any idea that black holes even existed.”

T
he Monday before spring break I told my English lit class we were going to do Shakespeare. The weather in Colorado is usually wretched this time of year. We get all the snow the ski resorts needed in December, use up our scheduled snow days, and end up going an extra week in June. The forecast on the
Today
show hadn’t predicted any snow till Saturday, but with luck it would arrive sooner.

My announcement generated a lot of excitement. Paula dived for her corder and rewound it to make sure she’d gotten my every word, Edwin Sumner looked smug, and Delilah snatched up her books and stomped out, slamming the door so hard it woke Rick up. I passed out the release/refusal slips and told them they had to have them back in by Wednesday. I gave one to Sharon to give Delilah.

“Shakespeare is considered one of our greatest writers, possibly
the
greatest,” I said for the benefit of Paula’s corder. “On Wednesday I will be talking about Shakespeare’s life, and on Thursday and Friday we will be reading his work.”

Wendy raised her hand. “Are we going to read all the plays?”

I sometimes wonder where Wendy has been the last few years—certainly not in this school, possibly not in this universe. “What we’re studying hasn’t been decided yet,” I said. “The principal and I are meeting tomorrow.”

“It had better be one of the tragedies,” Edwin said darkly.

By lunch the news was all over the school. “Good luck,” Greg Jefferson, the biology teacher, said in the teachers’ lounge. “I just got done doing evolution.”

“Is it really that time of year again?” Karen Miller said. She teaches American lit across the hall. “I’m not even up to the Civil War yet.”

“It’s that time of year again,” I said. “Can you take my class during your free period tomorrow? I’ve got to meet with Harrows.”

“I can take them all morning. Just have your kids come into my room tomorrow. We’re doing ‘Thanatopsis.’ Another thirty kids won’t matter.”

“ ‘Thanatopsis’?” I said, impressed. “The whole thing?”

“All but lines ten and sixty-eight. It’s a terrible poem, you know. I don’t think anybody understands it well enough to protest. And I’m not telling anybody what the title means.”

“Cheer up,” Greg said. “Maybe we’ll have a blizzard.”

Tuesday was clear, with a forecast of temps in the sixties. Delilah was outside the school when I got there, wearing a red “Seniors Against Devil Worship in the Schools” T-shirt and shorts. She was carrying a picket sign that said, “Shakespeare is Satan’s Spokesman.” “Shakespeare” and “Satan” were both misspelled.

“We’re not starting Shakespeare till tomorrow,” I
told her. “There’s no reason for you not to be in class. Ms. Miller is teaching Thanatopsis.’ ”

“Not lines ten and sixty-eight, she’s not. Besides, Bryant was a Theist, which is the same thing as a Satanist.” She handed me her refusal slip and a fat manila envelope. “Our protests are in there.” She lowered her voice. “What does the word ‘thanatopsis’ really mean?”

“It’s an Indian word. It means, ‘One who uses her religion to ditch class and get a tan.’ ”

I went inside, got Shakespeare out of the vault in the library, and went into the office. Ms. Harrows already had the Shakespeare file and her box of Kleenex out. “Do you have to do this?” she said, blowing her nose.

“As long as Edwin Sumner’s in my class, I do. His mother’s head of the President’s Task Force on Lack of Familiarity with the Classics.” I added Delilah’s list of protests to the stack and sat down at the computer.

“Well, it may be easier than we think,” she said. “There have been a lot of suits since last year, which takes care of
Macbeth, The Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale
, and
Richard III
.”

“Delilah’s been a busy girl,” I said. I fed in the unexpurgated disk and the excise and reformat programs. “I don’t remember there being any witchcraft in
Richard III
.”

She sneezed and grabbed for another Kleenex. “There’s not. That was a slander suit. Filed by his great-great-grand-something. He claims there’s no conclusive proof that Richard III killed the little princes. It doesn’t matter anyway. The Royal Society for the Restoration of Divine Right of Kings has an injunction against all the history plays. What’s the weather supposed to be like?”

“Terrible,” I said. “Warm and sunny.” I called up the catalog and deleted
Henry IV, Parts I
and
II
, and the rest of her list.
“The Taming of the Shrew
?”

“Angry Women’s Alliance. Also
Merry Wives of Windsor, Romeo and Juliet
, and
Love’s Labour’s Lost
.”

“Othello?
Never mind. I know that one.
The Merchant of Venice?
The Anti-Defamation League?”

“No. American Bar Association. And Morticians International. They object to the use of the word ‘casket’ in Act III.” She blew her nose.

It took us first and second period to deal with the plays and most of the third to finish the sonnets. “I’ve got a class fourth period and then lunch duty,” I said. “We’ll have to finish up the rest of them this afternoon.”

“Is there anything left for this afternoon?” Ms. Harrows asked.

“As You Like It
and
Hamlet
,” I said. “Good heavens, how did they miss
Hamlet
?”

“Are you sure about
As You Like It
?” Ms. Harrows said, leafing through her stack. “I thought somebody’d filed a restraining order against it.”