Roger's Version (2 page)

One’s time is hard to put a value on: much of it, clearly and inevitably, is spent to no immediate profit, and one of the Christian consolations, as I construe them, is that the Lord’s unsleeping witness and strict accountancy redeems all moments from pointlessness, just as His Son’s sacrifice redeemed Time in the larger sense. But
my
time, surely, was ill-spent in sitting and listening to the praises of the scheduled air service to Cleveland, that most dismal and forsaken of rust-belt metropolises, to which nothing but funerals has induced me, for thirty years, to return. Why was this young man seeming to suggest that I should fly back there, back to that muggy, suffocating
heartland? Why was he here at all? How had we become entangled, in this sudden stilted intimacy?

“How is she,” I asked him, “as a mother? Verna, not Edna.” Of Edna’s mothering I had seen, at wide intervals, something: like most of what she did, from playing tennis to driving that Studebaker convertible my deplorable father had bought for her when she turned eighteen, it was impulsive and slovenly, characterized by an absent-minded and serenely selfish carelessness she expected the world to forgive and overlook for the sake of her “warmth,” her fleshly charm. From infancy on, Edna had had a peculiar carnal pungence, a scented sponginess to her flesh; when, she a bumptious thirteen and I a recessive fourteen and condemned to spend all of August with my father and my vapid stepmother (whose name, Veronica, seemed as faded and prissy as she, the vampishness that had pre-natally wrecked my life collapsed into the dreariest sort of domestic respectability) in Chagrin Falls—when, I say, Edna began to menstruate, I had the powerful impression that the days of her “period” flooded the house with her sticky, triumphantly wounded animal aroma, even to the corners of my room with its boyish stink of athletic socks and airplane glue. Edna had had naturally curly hair and an obstinate, pudgy face that sprouted a dimple when she chose to smile.

“Well,” the boy allowed, “I don’t know how good anybody would be, only nineteen and figuring the world is passing you by, with just this baby and the welfare check for company. She says what she really minds is not having graduated from high school, but when I tell her there are these courses you can take, and equivalency tests and so on, she tunes me right out.”

“If she were good at tuning in, she perhaps wouldn’t have got so involved with this young black man and had his baby.”

“You’ll pardon my saying this, sir, but you sound a lot like her mother when you say that.”

A rebuke in this, and an aggression in his repeated stirring of me. I resented it.
Ressentiment:
according to Nietzsche, the kernel of Christian morality. I have a dark side, I know, a sullen temper, an uprising of bile that clouds my vision and turns my tongue heavy and ugly; it is the outward manifestation of my tendency to be depressed. In the professor’s role, I have found it easier to control (perhaps because less often stimulated) than in the clergyman’s. I generated some more smoke as pesticide against my visitor and, ignoring his coupling of me with that brainless Edna, asked him from behind my armor of amiable tweed, “Is there anything, you think, I could do for Verna?”

“Do what I do, sir. Remember her in your prayers.”

My inner cloud darkened. The present generation of Jesus addicts, though not, like their Sixties predecessors, wildly intoxicated on such heady blends as LSD and the NLF, have a boneless, spaced-out benignity and an invincible historical innocence that tend to madden me. I smiled. “That is certainly the least I can do,” I told him. “Do give her my love when you see her next.”

“Also, if I may say, you could visit her yourself. Here she has been in your neck of the woods for over a year, and—”

“And she has not once sought to reach me. Surely there is a message there. Now, was there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Yes.” He leaned melodramatically forward. His corneas had a fishy shine, vertically speared by the reflected shape of the tall pointed window at my back. “God.”

“Oh, really?”

“Sir, have you been following any of the recent developments in physics and astronomy?”

“Only in the vaguest way. The moon shots, and the rather marvellous photographs of Jupiter and Saturn.”

“Begging your pardon, but that stuff is utterly trivial. Even our whole galaxy, relatively, is a trivial case, though symptomatic, you could say. Professor Lambert …”

A long pause while his pale eyes lovingly glittered at me. “Yes?” I seemed compelled to answer, like Lazarus awakened.

“The most miraculous thing is happening,” my visitor proclaimed with a painful sincerity, probably overrehearsed. “The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they’ve really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. They hate it, but they can’t do anything about it. Facts are facts. And I don’t think people in the religion business, so to speak, are really aware of this—aware, that is, that their case, far-out as it’s always seemed, at last is being proven.”

“That sounds charming, Mr.—”

“Kohler. Like the plumbing.”

“Kohler. What kind of God is showing through, exactly?”

The boy seemed shocked. His tufty, rather nibbled-looking eyebrows lifted. “
You
know,” he told me. “There’s only one kind of God. God the Creator, Maker of Heaven and Earth. He made it, we now can see, in that first instant with such incredible precision that a Swiss watch is just a bunch of little rocks by comparison.”

While tapping out my pipe on my square-edged glass ashtray with its chipped corners, I took the opportunity to glance behind me out the window; its neo-Gothic panel of ornamentally leaded transparency contained, from bottom to top, the lank grass and reddening oaks of the quad, and then a construction site throwing up dust behind a chain-link fence (our neighbor the University Chemical Research Annex expanding),
and then an autumnal sky loaded with radiant, baroque clouds. Clouds are strange: at times they seem gigantic sculptures, bulging with three-dimensional form like those musclebound marble Berninis gesturing halfway up Saint Peter’s walls, and at other times, the exact copies of these same clouds, mere smudges of vapor, virtually nonexistent. They are with us, and yet not with us.

My visitor waited for my gaze to return to him before he asked me, “How much do you know about the Big Bang theory?”

“Very little,” I told him, with I suppose some agnostic smugness, “except that it is evidently correct.”

He affected pleasure at my answer, using that hoary teacher’s trick, positive reinforcement for the sluggish student. “Right! And believe me, sir, the scientists have had a hard time with it: they’ve been betting on eternal, unchanging matter ever since Lucretius. But they’ve had to swallow the pill, and now they’re finding out it’s even bitterer than they thought.”

How had I become captive, I kept asking myself, to the milky effrontery, the assaultive verbalizing earnestness, of this youth? Verna, I remembered, and behind her, a cloud of odorous memory, Edna, my semi-sister, my shadow in blood.

“There are three main problems with the Big Bang theory,” my visitor informed me, sketching with his oversize hands as if with blackboard chalk. “The horizon problem, the smoothness problem, and the flatness problem. Uniformity: the background microwave radiation of three K discovered in 1964 has been observed to be uniform within one part in ten thousand, but we’re dealing here with sections of the sky separated by more than ninety times the horizon distance, the distance that light could have travelled at the time the radiation
was emitted. So how could these regions have communicated with one another to achieve the uniformity? It seems impossible. Smoothness: to have galaxies now, you had to have had inhomogeneities in the primal fireball, but just short of absolute smoothness—absolutely smooth, you’d have no clumping; a little bit too much, you’d have much too much. There are figures for all this, but I don’t want to bore you. The fact is, for galaxies lasting billions of years to exist at all is statistically very strange. Flatness: the total energy, that is, everything in the universe, and the expansion rate of the Big Bang had to be initially in precise balance, virtually, for the ratio to be what they observe it to be today, between point one and two point oh. This may seem like a spread, between a tenth and two, but in fact it means that, for the ratio to be this close today, energy density at the time of the Big Bang had to equal the expansion rate to one part in ten to the fifty-fifth power: that’s ten followed by fifty-five zeros. Now, if that’s not a miracle, what is? A little,
really
little, bit less outward push, and the universe would have collapsed back onto itself in a couple million years—that’s nothing, in cosmic terms. I mean, the human species has been around that long. A little bit
more
, and the stars and galaxies never could have formed; matter would be blowing away too fast, out the window, so to speak. The odds of its working out the way it did are just about as long as you taking some kind of a supergun and hitting an inch-high target on the other side of the universe, twenty billion light-years away.” The young man held his fingers up to indicate the dimension of an inch. The gap seemed a gunsight between our pairs of eyes.

I hazily asked, “Isn’t this the same thing as an open versus a closed universe? Didn’t I read a while back that they settled it was open?”

“They tend to say that; but nobody knows how much dark matter there is in the galaxies, or if the neutrino has mass. The point is, it’s debatable, it’s that close. For it to be that close now, it had to be terrifically close then, at the outset. Why? Why so? These amounts are arbitrary, they could have been
anything
. And there’s dozens of amounts like them that have to be
just
what they are in order to give life time to evolve. Take the strong force, which binds the atomic nuclei together. Make it five percent weaker, and the deuteron couldn’t form and there would be no deuterium, which means the main nuclear reaction chain used by the sun couldn’t function; if it were two percent
stronger
, two protons could stick together and the existence of the di-protons would make hydrogen so explosive the present universe would consist entirely of helium. In either case, we wouldn’t be here, would we? There wouldn’t even be a here to be here in.”

“But if this God of yours—”

“Or take the weak force. You know what the weak force is, don’t you, sir?” In his expository excitement he had been forgetting the “sir.”

“It causes decay in atoms?” I guessed.

“That’s close enough. It’s about ten-to-the-tenth times weaker than the strong, which is mighty weak; but if it were any weaker, neutrinos couldn’t exert enough pressure on the outer shell of a dying star to bring about a supernova, and without supernova explosions there would be no heavy elements scattered in space, and planets like the Earth wouldn’t exist, and structures like you and me with the carbon and calcium and iron our bodies have to have wouldn’t exist either. Or take the mass of the neutron: if it were only point nine nine eight of its actual value, that’s point oh oh two less, less than
that
much”—his fingers now measured a gap so small that only
a hairline of his eyes’ uncanny blue showed through—“free protons would decay into neutrons via positron emission and there would be no atoms at all!”

His bony bright hands moved with such rapidity through this last revelation that it seemed, in the leaden but radiant filtered afternoon light of my office, he had indeed pulled the divine rabbit from the cosmic hat. I took in breath to make some obvious objections.

He leaned forward, closer, so that I saw photons bounce from the bubbles of saliva in the corners of his mouth. He insisted, “The sun. Yellow stars like the sun, to give off so much steady heat for ten billion years or so, are balanced like on a knife edge between the inward pull of gravity and the outward push of thermonuclear reaction. If the gravitational coupling constant were any bigger, they’d balloon and all be blue giants; any smaller, they’d shrivel and be red dwarves. A blue giant doesn’t last long enough for life to evolve, and the red dwarf radiates too weakly to ever get it started. Everywhere you look,” he instructed me, “there are these terrifically finely adjusted constants that have to be just what they are, or there wouldn’t be a world we could recognize, and there’s no intrinsic reason for those constants to be what they are except to say
God made them that way
. God made Heaven and Earth. It’s what science has come to. Believe me.”

“It’s not my business to doubt you, Mr. Kohler,” I said, seeing that he had momentarily finished. As he settled back into his chair, it seemed to me that even at this pitch of eloquence, which had reddened his unhealthy cheeks (his face was simultaneously bony and doughy, a face fed on junk food) and which made his acne flare, his eyes somehow floated above his passionate facts. There was a happiness to their pallor but also a coolness, a withdrawal. It would take more of an attack
than I could mount to shake him. I set down my pipe and picked up from my desktop a pencil—hexagonal, green, stamped with the name of the private school,
PILGRIM DAY
, that my twelve-year-old son attends; I had evidently stolen this from him—and focused upon its point, saying, “I do worry a bit about this concept of probability. In a sense, every set of circumstances is highly improbable. It is highly improbable, for instance, that a particular spermatozoon out of the millions my father ejaculated that particular day” (my father, who deserted my mother and me and skedaddled from job to job in the middle echelons of the Midwestern insurance business, whose idea of pleasant conversation was to relate an off-color joke he had heard that morning in the barbershop, who wore cologne and cuff links and an ex-athlete’s fragile false heartiness to the day of his death, of a cerebral embolism; where had he come from, spurting into these immense matters?) “would make its way to my mother’s egg and achieve my particular combination of genes; but
some
such combination, given their youth, attitude toward birth control, et cetera, was likely, and mine
as
probable as any other. No?”