Zig Zag (2 page)

Elisa
Robledo was not cold at all. She was passionate about her teaching,
and she captivated her students. What's more, she was an excellent
academic, and a kind, supportive colleague, always willing to help
out in a crisis. On the surface, there was nothing strange about her.

And
that was what was so strange.

People
thought she was too perfect. Too intelligent and too worthy to be
working in a mediocre physics department at a business-oriented
university like Alighieri, where no one truly cared about physics.
Her colleagues were sure that she could have had her pick of careers:
a post at the Spanish National Research Council, a tenured
professorship at a public university, or some important role at a
prestigious center abroad. Elisa was wasted at Alighieri. Then, too,
no theory (and physicists love theories) adequately explained why, at
thirty-two, almost thirty-three (her birthday was in April, just a
month away), Elisa was unattached, had no close friends, and yet
seemed perfectly happy. She appeared to have all she wanted in life.
No one knew of any boyfriends (or girlfriends), and her friendships
were limited to colleagues with whom she rarely if ever spent free
time. She wasn't conceited or even arrogant despite her obvious good
looks. And although she accentuated her attractiveness by wearing a
whole range of perfectly tailored designer clothes that often made
her look downright provocative, she never seemed to be trying too
hard to attract the attention of men (who often turned to gawk when
she passed) with the clothes she wore. Elisa spoke only about her
profession, was courteous, and always smiled. The Elisa Mystery was
unfathomable.

Occasionally,
she seemed unsettled. It was nothing concrete: maybe a look, or a
momentary dullness in her brown eyes, or just a feeling she gave
people after a quick conversation. As though she was hiding
something. Those who thought they knew her—Noriega, the
department chair, among others—thought it was probably best
that she never reveal her secret. For whatever reason, some people,
regardless of how insignificant their role in others' lives, or how
few close moments they've shared, are unforgettable. Elisa Robledo
was one of them, and people wanted it to stay that way.

Professor
Victor Lopera, one of Elisa's only real friends, was a notable
exception. Sometimes he was overwhelmed by an urgent need to unravel
her mystery. Victor had experienced the temptation on several
occasions, the most recent being last year, in April 2014, when the
department decided to throw Elisa a surprise birthday party.

Noriega's
secretary, Teresa, had come up with the idea, and everyone had jumped
at it, including some students. They spent a month enthusiastically
preparing, as if they thought it would be the ideal way to infiltrate
Elisa's magic circle and touch her ephemeral surface. They bought a
cake, balloons, a giant teddy bear, and candles shaped into the
number thirty-two; the chair even went in for a few bottles of
champagne. They shut themselves into the seminar room, decorated it
quickly, drew the curtains, and turned off the lights. When Elisa
arrived that morning, one of the custodians told her they had called
an "urgent faculty meeting." Everyone waited in the dark.
The door opened and Elisa's hesitant silhouette was framed by the
doorway, outlining her cropped cardigan, tight pants, and long hair.
Suddenly, laughter and applause erupted, the lights were turned on,
and Rafa, one of her best students, was there recording the young
professor's disconcerted expression on one of those state-of-the-art
video cameras that was no bigger than a pair of eyes.

The
party was brief and made no inroads at all into the Elisa Mystery.
Noriega said a few emotional words, people sang the same old songs,
and Teresa stood before the camera, waving a funny banner with
caricatures of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and
Elisa Robledo sharing a cake (Teresa's brother, a graphic designer,
had made it). Everyone was jovial and affectionate and tried to show
Elisa that they gladly accepted her without asking anything in
return, except that she continue to enliven them with her mystery, to
which they'd grown accustomed. As always, Elisa was perfect, her face
an ideal picture of surprise and happiness. She even seemed a little
moved: her eyes looked like they'd welled up. Judging from the video,
and seeing her perfect body outlined by her sweater and pants, she
could have passed for a student, or maybe the presenter at some
spectacular event or (as Rafa later told his friends on campus) a
porn star winning her first award. "Einstein and Marilyn Monroe,
all rolled into one," he said.

But
an attentive observer would have noted something that didn't quite
fit. When the lights had flipped back on, Elisa's face had changed.

No
one really noticed because, after all, no one spends their time
scrutinizing other people's birthday party videos. But Victor Lopera
had caught the fleeting yet significant change. When the room lit up,
Elisa's features reflected not the emotion of someone caught off
guard but something deeper, more disturbed. Of course, it had lasted
only tenths of a second. As instantly as she had flashed that pure
reaction, she had then smiled and gone back to being perfect. The
Mystery. But for that brief moment her beauty had been transformed
into something else. Aside from Victor, everyone watching the video
laughed at her "surprise." But Lopera saw something else.
What was it? He wasn't sure. Maybe just displeasure at something she
really didn't think was funny, or intense shyness, or something else.

Maybe
fear.

Victor,
intelligent and observant, was the only one who wondered what it was
that Elisa might have thought she was going to find in that dark
room. What kind of "surprise" had distant, beautiful
Professor Robledo thought awaited her in that darkened seminar room,
before the lights went on and she heard the laughter and the
clapping? He'd have given anything to find out.

What
was going to happen to Elisa in a serene classroom that morning, in
just over six minutes, would have given Victor Lopera some clues,
but, unfortunately for him, he wasn't there.

ELISA
always
tried to give examples that would appeal to the insipid minds of the
rich kids who sat in her classes. None of them would ever major in
physics, and she knew it. They just wanted to breeze through abstract
concepts superficially, pass their classes, and get out of there as
quickly as possible, degree in hand, so they could stroll into
privileged, hotshot positions in business or technology. They
couldn't care less about the whys and wherefores that had comprised
the basic enigmas of science; what they wanted were the solutions,
the effects, the concrete answers they had to come up with in order
to get their grades. Elisa tried to change all that, teaching them to
think about causes and the unknowns.

At
that moment, she was trying to get her students to visualize the
extraordinary phenomenon of our reality having more than three
dimensions, possibly many more than the easily observable
length-width-height trio. Einstein's theory of relativity had proven
that time was the fourth dimension, and the complex string theory
that was challenging contemporary physics hypothesized that there
were at least nine further spatial dimensions—something almost
inconceivable to the human mind.

Sometimes,
Elisa wondered whether people even had a clue about all the varied
and important discoveries that had been made in physics. Here we were
well into the twenty-first century—the Age of Aquarius—and
the general public still couldn't get enough of so-called
supernatural and paranormal phenomena, as if we'd already solved all
the mysteries of the natural and the normal. It didn't take flying
saucers or ghosts to see that we live in a very disturbing world. As
far as Elisa was concerned, there was far too much to take in right
here in this world, even for the wildest imagination. And she planned
to prove it, at least to the fifteen students sitting in her small
class.

She
started with a fun, easy example. First, she put a transparency up on
the overhead projector. On it, she'd drawn a human stick figure and a
square.

"This
man," she explained, pointing to him, "lives in a world
with only two dimensions: length and width. He's worked hard all his
life and earned a fortune: one euro." She heard a few snickers
and knew she'd grabbed the attention of several sets of glazed-over
eyes. "So that no one can steal this euro from him, he decides
to keep it in the safest bank in his world: a box. This box has only
one opening, on one side, which our man uses to deposit his fortune,
and which no one else can open."

Elisa
quickly extracted the euro coin she'd had with her from her jeans,
and placed it in the square on the transparency.

"Our
friend feels safe with his euro in that bank. Nobody, absolutely no
one, can penetrate any of the box's sides. Or, at least, no one from
his world. But I can steal it easily, from the third
dimension—height—which is invisible to the inhabitants of
his flat universe." As she spoke, Elisa took the coin back and
replaced the transparency with another one that had on it a different
drawing. "You can imagine how the poor man feels when he opens
his box and finds that all his savings have disappeared. How could
anyone have robbed him if the box was never opened?"

"Guess
he's pretty pissed off," whispered a boy in the front row with
brightly colored glasses and a crew cut. Laughter. Elisa didn't mind
that they were laughing, nor did she care about their apparent lack
of concentration. She knew it had been a simplistic example,
rudimentary for top-notch students, but that was exactly what she
wanted. She wanted to open the door as wide as possible on their way
in, because she knew only a few would be able to find their way out.
So she stifled their laughter, speaking now in a different, much
quieter, tone.

"Just
as that man can't even conceive of how he was robbed,
we
can't
conceive of more than three dimensions around us. Now then," she
said, stressing each word carefully, "this example proves that
dimensions can affect us, even lead to events we wouldn't hesitate to
call 'supernatural'..." Suddenly, they were all murmuring,
talking over her. She knew they would.
They
think I'm exaggerating, veering into science fiction. They're physics
students, they know I'm talking about reality, but they can't accept
it.
From
the little forest of hands that had shot up, she chose one. "Yes,
Yolanda?"