American Innovations: Stories (3 page)

“Jacob’s a boor, isn’t he?” Ilan said. Or maybe he said “bore” and I heard “boor” because Ilan’s way of talking seemed so antiquated to me. I had so few operating sources of pride at that time. I was tutoring and making my lonely way through graduate school in civil engineering, where my main sense of joy came from trying to silently outdo the boys—they still played video games—in my courses. I started going to that coffee shop every day.

*   *   *

Everyone I knew seemed to find my new companions arrogant and pathetic, but whenever they called me, I ran to join them. Ilan and Jacob were both at least twenty years older than me, and they called themselves philosophers, although only Jacob seemed to have an actual academic position, and maybe a tenuous one, I couldn’t quite tell. I was happy not to care about those things. Jacob had a wife and daughter, too, though I never met them. It was always just the three of us. We would get together and Ilan would go on about Heidegger and “thrownness,” or about Will Ferrell, and Jacob would come up with some way to disagree, and I would mostly just listen and eat baklava and drink lots of coffee. Then we’d go for a long walk, and Ilan might have some argument in defense of, say, fascist architecture, and Jacob would say something about the striated and the smooth, and then a pretty girl would walk by and they would talk about her outfit for a long time. Jacob and Ilan always had something to say, which gave me the mistaken impression that I did, too.

Evenings we’d go to the movies, or eat at an overpriced restaurant, or lie around Ilan’s spacious and oddly neglected apartment. He had no bed frame, nothing hung on the walls, and in his bathroom there was just a single white towel and a TWA mini toothbrush. But he had a two-hundred-dollar pair of leather gloves. One day, when I went shopping with the two of them, I found myself buying a simple striped sweater so expensive that I couldn’t get to sleep that night.

None of this behavior—the laziness, the happiness, the subservience, even the pretentiousness—was “like me.” I was accustomed to using a day planner and eating my lunch alone, in fifteen minutes; I bought my socks at street fairs. But when I was with them, I felt like, well, a girl. Or “the girl.” I would see us from the outside and recognize that I was, in an old-fashioned and maybe even demeaning way, the sidekick, the mascot, the decoration; it was thrilling. And it didn’t hurt that Ilan was so generous with his praise. I fixed his leaking shower, and he declared me a genius. Same when I roasted a chicken with lemons. When I wore orange socks with jeans, he kissed my feet. Jacob told Ilan to behave with more dignity.

It’s not as if Jacob wasn’t lovable in his own abstruse and awkward way. I admired how much he read—probably more than Ilan, certainly more than me (he made this as clear as he could)—but Jacob struck me as pedantic, and I thought he would do well to button his shirts a couple of buttons higher. Once we were all at the movies—I had bought a soda for four dollars—and Jacob and I were waiting wordlessly for Ilan to return from the men’s room. It felt like a very long wait. Several times I had to switch the hand I was holding the soda in because the waxy cup was so cold. “He’s taking such a long time,” I said, and shrugged my shoulders, just to throw a ripple into the strange quiet between us.

“You know what they say about time,” Jacob said idly. “It’s what happens even when nothing else does.”

“OK,” I said. The only thing that came to my mind was the old joke that time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. I couldn’t bear to say it. It was as if without Ilan we couldn’t even pretend to have a conversation.

Though there were, I should admit, things about Ilan (in particular) that didn’t make me feel so good about myself. For example, once I thought he was pointing a gun at me, but it turned out to be a remarkably good fake. Occasionally when he poured me a drink, he would claim he was trying to poison me. One night I even became very sick, and wondered. Another evening—maybe the only time Jacob wasn’t with us; he said his daughter had appendicitis—Ilan and I lay on his mattress watching TV. For years watching TV had made me sick with a sense of dissoluteness, but now suddenly it seemed really great. That night Ilan took hold of one of my hands and started idly to kiss my fingers, and I felt—well, I felt I’d give up the rest of my life just for that. Then Ilan got up and turned off the television. Then he fell asleep, and the hand kissing never came up again.

Ilan frequently called me his dusty librarian. And once he called me his Inner Swabian, and this struck him as very funny, and even Jacob didn’t seem to understand why. Ilan made a lot of jokes that I didn’t understand. But he had that handsome face, and his pants fit him just so, and he liked to lecture Jacob about how smart I was after I’d, say, nervously folded up my napkin in a way he found charming. I got absolutely no work done while I was friends with those guys. And hardly any reading, either. What I mean to say is that those were the happiest days of my entire life.

*   *   *

Then we fell apart. I just stopped hearing from them. Ilan didn’t return my calls. I waited and waited. But I was remarkably poised about the whole thing. I assumed that Ilan had simply found a replacement mascot. And that Jacob—in love with Ilan, in his way—hardly registered the swapping out of one girl for another. Suddenly it seemed a mystery to me that I had ever wanted to spend time with them. Ilan was just a charming parrot. And Jacob the parrot’s parrot. And if Jacob was married and had a child, wasn’t it time for him to grow up and spend his days like a responsible adult? That, anyway, was the disorganized crowd of my thoughts. Several months passed, and I almost convinced myself that I was glad to be alone again. I took on more tutoring.

Then one day I ran randomly (OK, not so randomly; I was haunting our old spots like the most unredeemed of ghosts) into Jacob.

For the duration of two iced teas, Jacob sat with me, repeatedly noting that sadly, he really had no time at all, he really would have to be going. We chatted about this and that and about the tasteless yet uncanny ad campaign for a B movie called
Silent Hill
(the poster image was of a child normal in all respects except for the absence of a mouth), and Jacob went on and on about how much some prominent philosopher adored him, and about how deeply unmutual the feeling was, and about the burden of unsolicited love, until finally, my heart a hummingbird, I asked, “And how is Ilan?”

Jacob’s face went the proverbial white. I don’t think I’d ever actually seen that happen to anyone. “I’m not supposed to tell you,” he said.

Not saying anything seemed my best hope for remaining composed.

“I don’t want your feelings to be hurt,” Jacob went on. “I’m sure Ilan wouldn’t have wanted them hurt, either.”

After a long pause, I said, “Jacob, I’m not some disastrous heroine.” It was a bad imitation of something Ilan might have said. “Just tell me.”

“Well, let’s see. He died.”

“What?”

“He had, well, so it is, well, he had stomach cancer. Inoperable, obviously. He kept it a secret. Told only family.”

I recalled the cousin from Outer Swabia line. Also, I felt certain—somehow really certain—that I was being lied to. That Ilan was actually still alive. Just tired of me. Or something. “He isn’t dead,” I said, trying to deny the creeping sense of humiliation gathering at my liver’s portal vein.

“Well, this is very awkward,” Jacob said flatly. “I feel suddenly that my whole purpose on earth is to tell you the news of Ilan—that this is my most singular and fervent mission. Here I am, failing, and yet still I feel as though this job were, somehow, my deepest essence, who I really—”

“Why do you talk like that?” I interrupted. I had never, in all our time together, asked Jacob (or Ilan) such a thing.

“You’re in shock—”

“What does Ilan even do?” I asked, ashamed of this kind of ignorance above all. “Does he come from money? What was he working on? I never understood. He always seemed to me like some kind of stranded time traveler, from an era when you really could get away with just being good at conversation—”

“Time traveler. Funny that you say that.” Jacob shook extra sugar onto the dregs of his iced tea and then slurped at it. “Ilan may have been right about you. Though honestly I could never see it myself. Well, I need to get going.”

“Why do you have to be so obscure?” I asked. “Why can’t you just be sincere?”

“Sincere. Huh. Let’s not take such a genial view of social circumstances so as to uphold sincerity as a primary value,” he said, with affected distraction, stirring his remaining ice with his straw. “Who you really are—very bourgeois myth, that. Obviously an anxiety about social mobility.”

I could have cried, trying to control that conversation. Maybe Jacob could see that. Finally, looking at me directly, and with his tone of voice softened, he said, “I really am very sorry for you to have heard like this.” He patted my hand in what seemed like a genuine attempt at tenderness. “I imagine I’ll make this up to you, in time. But listen, sweetheart, I really do have to head off. I have to pick my wife up from the dentist and my kid from school, and there you go, that’s what life is like. I would advise you to seriously consider avoiding it—life, I mean—altogether. I’ll call you. Later this week. I promise.”

He left without paying.

He had never called me sweetheart before. And he’d never so openly expressed the opinion that I had no life. He didn’t phone me that week, or the next, or the one after that. Which was OK. Maybe, in truth, Jacob and I had always disliked each other.

*   *   *

I found no obituary for Ilan. If I’d been able to find any official trace of him at all, I think I might have been comforted. But he had vanished so completely that it seemed like a trick. As if for clues, I took to reading the
New York Post
. I learned that professional wrestlers were dying mysteriously young, that baseball players and politicians tend to have mistresses, and that a local archbishop who’d suffered a ski injury was now doing, all told, basically fine. I was fine, too, in the sense that every day I would get out of bed in the morning, walk for an hour, go to the library and work on problem sets, drink tea, eat yogurt and bananas and falafel, avoid seeing people, rent a movie, and then fall asleep watching it.

One afternoon—it was February—a letter addressed to Ilan showed up in my mailbox. It wasn’t the first time this had happened; Ilan had often, with no explanation, directed mail to my apartment, a habit I’d assumed had something to do with evading collection agencies. But this envelope had been addressed by hand.

Inside, I found a single sheet of paper with an elaborate diagram in Ilan’s handwriting: billiard balls and tunnels and equations heavy with Greek. At the bottom it said, straightforwardly enough, “Jacob will know.”

This struck me as a silly, false clue—one that I figured Jacob himself had sent. I believed it signified nothing. But. My face flushed, and my heart fluttered, and I felt as if I were a morning glory vine in bloom.

I set aside my dignity and called Jacob.

Without telling him why, assuming that he knew, I asked him to meet me for lunch. He excused himself with my-wife-this, my-daughter-that; I insisted that I wanted to thank him for how kind he’d always been to me, and I suggested an expensive and tastelessly fashionable restaurant downtown and said it would be my treat. He again said, No.

I hadn’t thought this would be the game he’d play.

“I have something of Ilan’s,” I finally admitted.

“Good for you,” he said, his voice betraying nothing but a cold.

“I mean work. Equations. And what look like billiard ball diagrams. I really don’t know what it is. But, well, I had a feeling that you might.” I didn’t know what I should conceal, but it seemed like I should conceal something. “Maybe it will be important.”

“Does it smell like Ilan?”

“I think you should see it.”

“Listen, I’ll have lunch with you, if that’s going to make you happy, but don’t be so pathetic as to start thinking you’ve found some scrap of genius. You should know that Ilan found your interest in him laughable and that his real talent was for convincing people that he was smarter than he was. Which is quite a talent, I won’t deny it. But other than that, the only smart ideas that came out of his mouth he stole from other people, usually from me, which is why most everyone, although obviously not you, preferred me—”

Having a “real” life seemed to have worn on Jacob.

At the appointed time and place, Ilan’s scrawl in hand, I waited and waited for him. I ordered several courses but ate only a little side of salty cucumbers. Jacob never showed. Maybe he hadn’t been the source of the letter. Or maybe he’d lost the spirit to follow through on his joke, whatever it was.

*   *   *

A little detective work on my part revealed that Ilan’s diagrams had something to do with an idea often played with in science fiction, a problem of causality and time travel known as the grandfather paradox. Simply stated, the paradox is this: if travel to the past is possible—and much in physics suggests that it is—then what happens if you travel back in time and set out to murder your grandfather? If you succeed, then you will never be born, and therefore you won’t murder your grandfather, so therefore you will be born, and will be able to murder him, et cetera, ad paradox. Ilan’s billiard ball diagrams were part of a tradition (the seminal work is Feynman and Wheeler’s 1949 Advanced Absorber Theory) of mathematically analyzing a simplified version of the paradox: imagine a billiard ball enters a wormhole, and then emerges five minutes in the past, on track to hit its earlier self out of the path that sent it into the wormhole in the first place. The surprise is that just as real circles can’t be squared, and real moving matter doesn’t cross the barrier of the speed of light, the mathematical solutions to the billiard ball–wormhole scenario seem to bear out the notion that real solutions don’t generate grandfather paradoxes. The rub is that some of the solutions are exceptionally strange and involve the balls behaving in extraordinarily unlikely, but not impossible, ways. The ball may quantum tunnel, or break in half, or hit up against its earlier self at just such an angle so as to enter the wormhole in just such a way that even more unlikely events occur. But the ball won’t, and can’t, hit up against its past self in any way that would conflict with its present self’s trajectory. The mathematics simply don’t allow it. Thus no paradox. Science fiction writers have arrived at analogous solutions to the grandfather paradox: murderous grandchildren are inevitably stopped by something—faulty pistols, slippery banana peels, their own consciences—before the impossible deed can be carried out.