Chapter 10. The Inelegant Universe
According to string theory, which is the latest fashion in so-called theories of everything, the universe is made out of a lot of little vibrating strings. That idea alone is probably enough to drive most of us away; but the string theory cosmos also has something like 10 or 11 dimensions, even though we mere humans are only aware of the usual three – four if you count time. Something apparently happened to the rest of them way back there at the beginning. Either the furious heat of those early events shriveled them, or a kind of crystallization and shrinking took place as the universe cooled. They’re all still there, but rolled up tight as pill bugs in winter, so we can't see them. This scheme apparently helps the physicists keep various nagging infinities safely penned up, but at what looks to me like a high price.
I'm officially an astronomer. I’ve got the degree, and I’ve put in time in various research facilities, but I can't explain to you what a rolled-up dimension could possibly mean, since I don't really know myself. If you pinned me down I'd probably say it's a form of science mysticism, since it makes the scientists feel good, even though there’s no real evidence for it. I only mention it because I’ve been visiting Peaceful Pastures a lot in the wake of my latest romantic debacle, and have begun seeing an analogy in the situation of the weary denizens of that establishment. Most of them are mute or stumbling along mental trails I can't follow, and so my only clues to the lives whose final teetering scaffolds they're mounting are in the photos and knick-knacks on the shelves in their bare little rooms, the occasional talkative visitor, and the shrunken bodies themselves. They’re like evening blossoms folding inward for the night; and there’s a sense that all kinds of dimensions of their lives are now rolled up and hidden away: childhood, love affairs, marriage or singledom, parenthood, professional competence, music, sports, art, politics – many more than 10 or 11. Some of the bodies themselves are coiling inward as though for them even the final three spatial dimensions are in the process of closing up shop. The ruthless fourth, Time, keeps cantering along, of course.
Such analogies are useful to me, because in the last few years, having wearied of writing grant proposals and fighting with the Big Names for telescope time, I've deviated from the path of scientific righteousness and become a popularizer – the sort of renegade scientist who pretends to be able to explain to you the significance, if not the meaning, of rolled-up dimensions, quasars, black holes, and Schrödinger's hapless cat. I scrape out a meager living by writing mass-market books about these things; the tradeoff for the loss of regular income being that I'm on my own schedule and so have time to visit nursing homes whenever I want. I've been availing myself of this freedom more than usual lately, since my latest girlfriend chose a particularly creative exit strategy with which to end our relationship. I find that I'm soothed by the company of vague old people, by the pained deliberation of their movements and their ability to contemplate the carpet for extended periods, and even by the faint reality-invoking fragrance of urine that apparently can’t be eliminated completely from their habitat. After Donna I seem to need soothing.
My father resides at Peaceful Pastures, which was originally why I started visiting. He's one of the mute ones, however. It's hard to know whether he can't speak or has just decided not to. It puzzles me every time I see him, how this man who made his living for something like 45 years stumping up and down the aisles of the Erie Lackawanna on his titanium leg, jawing and wisecracking and psychologizing hour after hour with the commuters and horseplayers and vagabond grannies whose tickets he punched, could have gone so silent. But there he is every day when I go in, sitting in his wheelchair, staring at a point about a foot below the TV screen that's showing Teletubbies or some other jewel of our culture. I try to tell him a little bit about what’s going on in my life – at least I did before the Donna thing – or pointlessly ask him what's been happening at Peaceful Pastures. He'll shake his head or nod slowly, but that's all. It's not very interesting, for either of us I suppose, and after a while I'll go looking for Lina, who as far as I can tell is the only resident at Peaceful Pastures who's still pretty hip. Except for Othello, of course. Othello is the feline mascot of Peaceful Pastures, and Othello is very hip. She's a pure white shorthair with shocking blue eyes, and she occupies the corridors, chairs, laps, and linen closets of the place with ferocious self-esteem. She has a regular inspection route of all the rooms, and will even jump up on my father's lap, causing him to bestir himself to pet her slowly with grave concentration. Like me, though, Othello prefers Lina.
Lina's a couple of rooms down the hall from my father, although she spends a lot of her time wheeling around checking everything out, like Othello – and often with Othello on her lap in fact – making a circuit of the dining room, rec room, exercise room, and also glancing into the rooms of all the residents as she rolls by, hoping to see that they're up to something.
Lina wouldn't be here at all except for two circumstances. One is that she has no family or friends left, all of them having already checked out or moved too far away to visit. The other is that there's something wrong with her legs. Which doesn't keep her from showing them to me every time I visit, flipping her flowered skirt up to reveal knobby knees and sticklike calves carved in venous ivory, above slippers whose toes are the heads of zebras. It's one of her ways of flirting with me; and I don't find that too bizarre because she's among the few oldsters I've met in whom I can clearly see the image of what they were like as young people. Of course, I’ve examined the photo of her and one of her husbands that stands on a shelf in the alcove across from her bed; but beyond that, there's something in her eyes, a certain birdlike intensity of curiosity and expectation, that makes it easy for me to visualize her with smooth skin and strawberry blonde curls, and pale pink lips formed into a coquettish smile. I'm sure she was a pretty hot number in her day. I can even imagine the calves as they must once have been, tan and firmly curved.
Lina hasn’t dimmed by even a milliwatt, as far as I can tell. She’s ready to talk about anything: politics, movies, books, the stock market, sex, herself, the other patients. Amazingly, she seems to know all their life stories, along with those of the nurses and other caregivers, even the doctors, who only show up about once a week. Most of the art and music and so on I suppose she can get off the TV. They have cable here – it’s sort of a posh place – and CNN or HBO is almost always on in every room, even though most of the residents don't pay any attention to it. Lina can be quite charming, and she probably seduces the nurses and paras into telling her about themselves while they’re giving her a sponge bath or inserting her into one of her flowered print dresses. But how does she know about the other patients? She'll tell me, "You know, your father never really forgave your mother for wrecking his Camaro." Which is probably true, but how did she find out? I really don't think he's spoken to anyone for at least a year. Or she'll point out one of the old ladies sagging over the side of her wheelchair with her eyes half-closed and say, loudly, "Maggie's day-dreaming about that dinner date she had with Merle Haggard back in ’74. They both got a mite tipsy, I heard." And Maggie will actually open her eyes and straighten up, and smile a little coyly.
If Lina were 50 years younger I could imagine her being the next in my string of asteroid impacts; but her age and immobility have saved both of us from that fate. As it is, I can even talk to her about what’s been going on with Donna and get some useful feedback. She's had three husbands herself, although I guess none of them were as exasperating as I apparently am. She talks about them with conditional affection, like pets she was never quite able to housebreak.
There's something about me that sets women off. That's what I've decided after all these years and broken connections. I'm not very good-looking in the conventional sense, but I've been told by various of my girlfriends that I'm bearlike, which seems to appeal to some women. Some of them even said teddy-bearlike. I suppose it's my height and bulk, along with a lot of dark hair, all over. P
ossibly the lazy eye has something to do with it too – my inability to focus may make me look harmless and even benevolent. This seems to be what gets the action going. I've never had much difficulty attracting women.
But I must be an irritating man, also, because the tail ends of my relationships, which often trail close behind the front ends, have frequently been marked by some degree of violence – not from me, I hasten to add. I've been punched, whacked with folded newspapers and jabbed with rolled-up magazines, kicked, had handfuls of hair on various parts of my anatomy painfully yanked, and even been the target of airborne furniture. I make a point of never raising my voice during these confrontations, because I’ve learned it’s better not to start my own feedback loops spinning; but the result of my restraint has only been to leave me defenseless and to increase the rage of my lovers-turned-tormentors. I don’t have any real trouble understanding that kind of spontaneous anger. Donna, on the other hand, adopted an apocalyptic approach that seemed to me to express something a lot darker than the others. A month later, I’m still mulling it over – the look in her eyes, like a crocodile calculating attack angles. I’m 50 years old, and getting a little tired of the struggle. One of these events will obviously have to be my last, and this one might be a good candidate.
I think Lina, despite her reflexive flirting, would have liked me to succeed with Donna. She'd listen to my descriptions of the brief, weird course of our affair, thoughtfully stroking Othello, who liked to lie adoringly on her lap, upside down with all four legs stretched out, front and rear. Then she'd ask some totally reasonable question, like "Well, why don't you just let her use her own kind of toothpaste?" Unfortunately, there's no answer that would satisfy a rational person. But I also don't see why it was so difficult for Donna to accommodate my needs in matters like toothpaste, given that they were important to me and not to her. The truth is, she didn't care at all about such things, but she couldn't let me do it my way, either. I suppose that should have been a red flag.
Lina liked to illustrate her points in our discussions about Donna with parables from her own marriages, of which the second lasted the longest. She portrayed that one as a sort of zenith in her romantic arc. She let the first marriage get away from her due to youthful ignorance, as she freely admitted; and by the time the third rolled around she'd lost all patience with the quirks and obtuseness of the human male, so that one was probably doomed from the start. "I never should have married him. I just let my horniness get the better of my judgment," she told me, watching hopefully for signs of shock.
The second marriage, she noted pointedly, had worked the best because the two of them had given each other a lot of leash. They'd both kept jobs, had spent a good bit of time apart, pursuing their separate interests, hadn't forced their friends on each other, and had even preemptively purchased two TVs, knowing what a problem that could get to be. Lina had worked quite a bit on her cooking, and Frank had indulged her wishes as far as decorating the house was concerned. Besides which, he was damn good in the sack.
"It sounds like Paradise," I said. "So what happened?"
"I had a little fling with the guy who mowed our lawn. He was a part-time park ranger, moonlighting. I'd see him out there on those sultry days, riding around on his big machine in the sunshine, with his shirt off and his shiny back." She cackled happily at the memory, then sighed and went on, in her thin, quavering voice, "You'd think a marriage as strong as ours could survive something like that. I never worried about what he was doing with his secretaries. But he took it badly." Her laugh awakened Othello, who jumped down from her lap and stood for a while with a scowl on her face, lashing her tail, before stalking off around the corner.
The problem between Donna and me wasn't sex or jealousy, I’m sure of that. But that leaves me with the question of what could have inspired her to the vengeful measures she adopted, especially given the meticulous planning that had to have been involved. I wonder about this as I wander around the old house in Ossining, alone again except for my steadfast pal, Hubble, who’s got some beagle in him, some basset, and a lot of soul. He’s a good-natured guy, and pretty good company when there’s something going, like a walk or a frisbee session in the park, but otherwise he just sleeps a lot. While he snores and twitches his feet, I sit at the computer, gazing out the window at the empty bird feeder and the distant Hudson and tapping out yet another jocular screed about the beginnings and history of the universe. Between paragraphs – and even during them, since by now I’ve written so many similar ones – I have plenty of time to puzzle over what to me is the more interesting question of Donna’s motivation.
I see a connection between the two problems, although it might not be that obvious to anyone else. I’ve been writing about cosmic origins for several years now, and the more I write about it the more I see this Big Bang thing as basically the impact of a giant hammer on a fine and elegant watch. Since that long-ago event all the little springs and balance wheels and tiny screws and jewels and splinters of glass and quasars and galaxies and red giants and pulsars have just been whirling outward through a primordial emptiness (although according to Einstein that nothingness itself is being created as we go along. Is that some kind of clue – that not even nothingness can exist by itself?). Those bomb fragments are what science has been studying so diligently, as if the collisions and entanglements and stately twirlings of all this wreckage were the meaning of everything. If it has any meaning. And in the other direction too, toward the infinitesimal: the electrons, protons, ions and pions, mesons, gluons, quarks, and WIMPs, all whizzing around mindlessly like discount shoppers, and even the so-called virtual particles, which like distant and quirky family members are allowed to visit only if they don’t hang around too long. The scientists have managed to find some patterns in this mess – even catastrophe apparently has to have rules. But I find I’m less and less interested in the sterile antics of all that debris and more interested in the shattered watch. Not to mention the hammer – where did that come from? I know my attitude isn’t very fashionable, especially for a scientist, even a lapsed one. You’ll have to pardon me for wanting to see some kind of order, other than the logic of high explosive, behind all those fleeing motes. Similarly, I’ve been trying to see back beyond the tangled wreckage of my romance with Donna to whatever it was that uncaged all that violence.
I ask Hubble about it several times a day, rhetorically of course, but I’m lucky if he even opens both eyes in response. I haven’t been able to get much more than that from my few human friends, when I run into them at the grocery store or the post office. The question I put to them is this: Have you ever really hated someone? I don’t mean the wretch who pressed his crotch against your butt in the subway or the genial thug who knocked you off your bike in the park and rode away on it. I mean someone you knew, and spent actual time with – someone you worked with, or thought was a friend, the guy you went out for drinks with after Italian class, an estranged family member, or even someone you loved.
I've had a few interesting answers. One person confessed that, when she was 11, after some childish tiff she'd gift-wrapped a box of dog poop and left it in her best friend's mailbox. Another one described a complicated sort of sting they'd set up at his office to humiliate some guy they all disliked: a phony "surprise" birthday party that they carefully arranged for him to find out about and then on the appointed day all ditched him and met somewhere else to drink and have dinner and sneer at him.
I think we have to eliminate kids from this analysis, along with the somewhat similar genocidal historical monsters, because of their incomplete moral structures. And the phony surprise party doesn't sound exactly like hatred to me; more a matter of group irritation that morphed into a kind of mobbing behavior. And I'm not talking about routine road rage or even the kind of contempt you might feel for someone who behaves dependably in a petty manner. I’m asking about the white-hot fury that burns at your guts day after day until you have to do something: to lash out violently or, m
ore viciously, to plot – to turn someone's friends against him, to destroy his reputation, to confront him with a previously unimagined vileness of human behavior, to leave him in the ditch a smoking wreck. None of my friends would admit to any such feelings, let alone behavior, and though I've gone over my own history carefully, I don't believe I've ever experienced it myself. A couple of days ago, however, I asked Lina, and surprisingly she seemed to know all about it. One of her rolled-up dimensions. She told me the following story.
Back during her first husband she’d had a job in a small publishing house in the Midwest, an outfit called Twitchell-Smelt. It was a sort of harem situation as she described it, more common then than now: an office with a bunch of women all working in various capacities for the same boss, a guy, who was planted in a spacious, windowed office, wheeling and dealing on the phone and dispensing rough justice, while all the women buzzed around him in a hive of soundproofed cubicles.
“His name was Drake. We just called him that, his last name. I was so in love with him,” she told me. “All of us were. He had the most beautiful forearms. Just the right amount of hair, and he always had his sleeves rolled up to here.” She stopped stroking Othello long enough to indicate the exact location on her own shriveled arm. “He was a very manly man. He was married, of course, but he flirted with all of us. Or not really flirted, but he’d look at you a certain way. His office was the only one that had windows, so going in there was like coming out of a cave into the sun. We’d sit there when he called us in and cross our legs and lean forward to show him a little cleavage, which was all you could get away with in those days, and he’d look, believe me.
“Almost all of us girls got along pretty well together, but there was also this unspoken competition. I don’t know what we were thinking about. Looking back on it, I’d have to say there was never any real chance he was going to do anything except look. But I guess we all enjoyed thinking he might.” Drake may have flirted with all of them, she told me, but he’d also had a favorite. Needless to say, that had created tension in some quarters.
“Everybody was supposed to love Ruth,” Lina said. “Supposedly she was this kind-hearted, benevolent sweetie that was nice to everybody, not a mean bone in her body, etc. etc. I hated her.” She laughed her little laugh, which had probably been a musical tinkle when she was a young girl but now had a sheet-metal edge. “Partly I just don’t think anybody’s really that sweet, do you? So already you had this element of hypocrisy. But the main thing that annoyed me was she pretended not to know anything about Drake, as if she was completely unaware that he liked her, and that she hadn’t had anything to do with it. She was married, too, and had several teenage kids, or maybe they were even in college, and she was about 20 years older than me, so she liked to act like all that kind of thing was in the past for her. But she probably spent more time in his office than the rest of us combined. Well, you could say that was because she screwed up more than anybody else, too. She was completely unorganized and she was always late with everything, so she was constantly missing deadlines on her projects and forgetting to call important authors and rushing through her blues so she’d let big mistakes get by. Do you know what blues are? It doesn’t matter. But she was Ruth, the sweetheart, you know. So she’d be constantly running down to Drake’s office and going in and you’d hear her say ‘Well, I screwed up again,’ in this phony embarrassed way, and then you’d hear them joking and laughing in there. . . She never had to pay the price. And of course she was the respectable housewife, so god forbid she should ever flirt with him, but she’d always go in there with one too many blouse buttons open or something. It was all supposed to be part of darling Ruth’s charming disorganization. Of course, he liked to point those things out to her, and she’d get very flustered. And then he’d spend a lot of time leaning on the door of her cubicle, gabbing with her. This 50-year-old woman! He was at least 10 years younger. She started wearing more lipstick. . . uck! Well, you probably get the picture. The halo didn’t convince me. I always thought she was a phony.
“There were a couple of us who were annoyed at her, and we’d talk about it a little bit in the lunchroom. And then we’d have to shut up when she came in, later than everybody else of course, and I noticed that that spooked her a little bit, so I started going over to my friend Patsy’s cubicle, which was right next to Ruth’s, and having these long conversations with her. And we’d keep our voices really low so she couldn’t quite hear us. It might not even be about her at all, although it usually was, but I could practically see her ear coming through the partition when we did it. And over time that kind of built up.” Lina sat thoughtfully in her wheelchair, resting her hand lightly on Othello’s back. “I guess it was literally what you’d call a whispering campaign. But it was really just revealing that phony bitch for what she was.” I noticed an unusual amount of color in her cheeks.
“Then I started thinking maybe she was actually sleeping with him. Well, once that idea got around, you can imagine. Even her friends stopped speaking to her.”
Eventually Lina’s campaign had had the gratifying result of pretty much isolating Ruth in the office, until she only had one friend left. Unfortunately – law of unintended consequences – that friend had been Drake, since he was the only one who didn’t hear the whispers.
“That really made me crazy. He’d still be leaning on her door, jabbering about some project or other, and I couldn’t think of any way of waking him up, except to go right in his office and say ‘You know, that bitch is making a fool out of you.’ And I couldn’t do that, of course. I was so frustrated! I started breaking out in a rash all over my body. I didn’t know what to do. For a while I was actually sending her stuff in the mail.” I raised my eyebrows at that, and she laughed.
“I mean really nasty stuff. Snotty little anonymous messages calling her names. Once I sent her a used tampax.” She looked at me a little apprehensively for a second, and then continued. “At least I could see it was all having an effect on her. She wasn’t Little Miss Cheerful in the office any more. So that was good. And she was getting more and more flustered and late and disorganized, if that’s possible. But Drake didn’t really see any of it. Somehow she always managed to pull everything out just in time. But in the end that’s what got her, with a little help from Yours Truly.”
Lina had finally taken the direct approach, and had simply begun sabotaging Ruth’s work. “She was so messed up anyway. I just helped things along a little bit. I always got to the office early, before anyone else was there, so it was easy to find out what was happening with her projects. I could make things disappear, and she wouldn’t know what happened because of all the mess in there. I’d be in Patsy’s cubicle and I’d hear her shuffling the papers around like mad and going “Damn damn damn!” She chuckled at the memory.
“And so one morning I found this table of contents she’d just finished adding the page numbers to – you know, the pages where all the chapters started. That would get sent back to the typesetter so they could set the page numbers. There were two sets of proofs, and one of them was unmarked, so I just substituted the blank ones for the ones she’d fixed, hoping she wouldn’t notice and she’d send the blank set back to the typesetter. And she did! That was bad enough, but it all worked out even better than I could have hoped for, because she didn’t notice it on the blues or the F&Gs either! So it was really her fault, for not checking her proofs carefully. And the book actually got printed that way, with no page numbers in the TOC! And bound, too! Can you imagine how stupid that looked? I happened to be there when she saw the first printed copy. The look on her face! I thought she was going to throw up...” Lina stopped there. The color was back, high on her cheekbones.
We both thought about that scene for a while, and finally I asked her what had happened. Well, there hadn’t been any joking around in Drake’s office that time. That little mistake had cost the company a few thousand bucks – serious money in those days – and a good deal of embarrassment,
and after that he’d never really trusted Ruth again. He’d started cutting back on her projects and giving her the boring books that nobody else wanted. No more Allen Ginsberg or Staughton Lynd for her. She’d become more and more irrelevant and started looking more and more depressed. Eventually they’d made her go part-time and then freelance, and finally she’d disappeared from the office altogether.
“And then what?” I asked her.
“What, what?”
“Well, what happened after she left? What happened with Drake and all his women?”
She furrowed her brow. “Nothing! Things calmed down after that. I left myself, a few months later. I got my first job in New York.” Othello gazed at me expressionlessly from her lap.
“But then why did you do all that?”
“I just told you,” she said, stroking Othello peevishly. I thought about Ruth, ejected from her cubicle and spiraling into oblivion. “What happened to her?” I asked. But Lina didn’t know. Nobody knew. She’d just vanished. She hadn’t really had any ties with the office after she’d left, as you could imagine.
So that was Lina’s experience with hatred. I suspected it wasn’t the only one, but it was the one that stuck out in her mind. I went home not much the wiser, although I’d at least found someone who admitted to having pulled shenanigans in roughly the same category as Donna’s. Maybe that was progress. I found myself wondering what Ruth’s life must have been like after the girls of Twitchell-Smelt were done with her. I hoped she’d had some other way to make a living, or at least a rich husband. It didn’t sound to me like she’d done anything so terrible, and anyway I only had Lina’s version of that ancient episode. I wondered how it would feel to open your mail and find a bloody tampax neatly sealed into a manila envelope.
For my next visit to Peaceful Pastures it occurred to me for the first time to take Hubble with me. I thought he might perk up my father, who had always been fond of animals. That turned out to be a very bad idea, however, because the first thing Hubble did when he got through the door was to kill Othello. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to react. He just made a run at her with that kind of quiet, businesslike snarl they have when they’re not fooling around, they know they’ve really got something, and she first looked like she was going to face him down, which a cat can usually do, but he was moving too fast for that to work, so then she thought better of it and tried to run down the hall, but he got hold of her and snapped her once like a dish towel and that was that. I got him off of her right away – although I didn’t really have to, since he seemed to know he was through with her – but it was too late. She just lolled there on the carpet like a rag doll for a couple of minutes and then stopped breathing.
I could hardly bear to look at the residents, who of course were attracted by all the unusually rapid motion and the noise. Most of them I don’t think were really all that clear about what had happened, or at least couldn’t remember after about two minutes, but they were all leaning forward in their chairs, looking at me with grim expressions and shaking their heads. Lina was beside herself, yelling and waving her arms crazily from the wheelchair. Even my father lifted his gaze from the floor to watch.
One of the paras came and gave me a dirty look and took Othello away, and I just got Hubble, and myself, out of there as fast as I could, with Lina yelling after me. Hubble trotted ahead of me out to the car, quite pleased with himself and fulfilled by his part in all the excitement.
After that disaster I didn’t know what to do. I suppose it’s a bit morbid, but Peaceful Pastures has sort of become my framework since Donna left. It seems I can only sit around a few hours a day writing about a universe composed entirely of minuscule vibrating strings. Then I have to go out and interact with something a little more interesting, like a dandelion or a human being, even one that’s in the process of thinning out to a zero-dimensional entity.
After a couple of days I decided I had to go back and make amends. I left Hubble sleeping peacefully on his favorite throw rug and went to the local animal shelter to pick out a kitten. I didn’t think a white one would be appropriate, but I found a nice tabby with yellow eyes and a white bib and white feet, and took it over to Peaceful Pastures.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d show up again,” Lina said, as soon as she saw me. “You’ve got a lot to answer for, young man.” I put the kitten on her lap.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t know what got into Hubble. He’s usually such a sweetheart.”
“Oh, yes, Othello,” she said. “Well, that was sad. A dog is a dog, though.” It was apparently something else she was upset about. The kitten climbed around on her lap, anxiously stiff-legged, then up and over her shoulders and down her curved back as if she were just another gnarled old tree. Lina said, “You shouldn’t have gotten me cranked up about all that old stuff from the past. I’ve hardly slept at all the last couple of nights.”
“Happy memories?” I said, but she ignored my sarcasm.
“Now you’ve got me second-guessing myself after all these years. I keep thinking about her face when she saw that TOC. It was quite a train wreck.” She’d maneuvered the kitten back onto her lap, but it was trying to make a getaway, for all the world as if an ensemble of little vibrating strings could have a fuzzy will of its own. “I guess it doesn’t really matter much at this point,” Lina said. “She was 20 years older than me. She must be dead by now. If she isn’t, she probably wishes she was. Drake too.” I thought her edgy laugh lacked its usual esprit. She looked down to where the kitten was digging its fresh new claws deep into her wooden thighs. “You little bastard,” she said fondly.