Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (29 page)

“Why don’t you quit your job and come down to my place?” he said, pausing to add a few more drops of oil to his hands.

“We’d starve on what you make.”

“We could take turns eating,” he said, kneeling forward to resume his massage. “I could eat on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You could eat on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. We both could eat on Sunday.”

“Hey! Are you saying I’m fat? You’re not saying I’m fat, are you?” Heidi had raised her head and twisted around to look at him, frowning.

“No, no, no! That’s not what I meant.”

She relaxed and turned away, resting her cheek on her folded arms. “Anyhow, you’ll be making plenty next year after you graduate. We can wait,” she told him.

“I’ll be a postdoc next year. Postdocs are slaves.”

“Now my feet,” she said. “You always forget to do my feet.”

John took her to her favorite restaurant, a fancy place with soft music and dim lights, the table illuminated by five low candles floating in a shallow bowl of water. Over the lemon sorbet Heidi asked him, “What’s a postdoc?”

“After I get my doctorate I’m a postdoc. I’ll get a postdoc research job someplace. Those can go on for two or three years, or longer. Postdocs do really advanced research, but they get paid as if they were still grad students. I have to do postdoc work first to get a really good position later. That’s all.”

“Oh,” Heidi said at last, her eyes soft with sympathy. She slid a hand across the table and gently laced her fingers through his. “I’m so sorry.”

6

The next Friday Heidi phoned John, reached him on his cell phone as he was speeding from Menlo Park to her place. “Don’t come. I’ve got to visit galleries all weekend,” she told him. So John turned around, drove languidly back home to work on his dissertation. Actually, he didn’t feel like working on his dissertation, so he thought he’d knock on Amy’s door and borrow the book about Schrödinger, but when he turned into their little parking area he saw a handsome red sports car in his place beside Amy’s car. He parked on the margin of brown grass, looked at the leather-and-mahogany cockpit of the Alfa Romeo, heard rock music from Amy’s apartment and trudged upstairs to his desk, hoping it would rain into the sports car. Around midnight he heated three slices of frozen pizza in the microwave and ate dinner at the sink, returned to his desk and two hours later fell asleep over his equations. Saturday morning he pulled up his kitchen window shade and saw the red Alfa Romeo was still there, but when he went out it was mercifully gone. He crawled into his rusted car and drove to his cell at SLAC and worked for fifteen hours. Sunday morning he took a long hot shower, stared out his kitchen window a while at his car and Amy’s, side by side, drove out and bought a fat newspaper, drove aimlessly this way and that, then headed back home and knocked on Amy’s door and asked would she like to come out for breakfast or brunch.

Her face lighted up. “Come in. I’ll make us something,” she said. “I was hoping you’d stop by.”

Her place was a maze of greenery, a jungle—potted flowers crowded the window sills, mossy baskets hung from the ceiling and overflowed with blossoms, trays of pale green sprouts lay underfoot, and luminous mosaic tiled tables stood here and there and there amid the leaves, and mosaic figures looked out from the walls, and here’s a work bench packed with jars and miniature saws and grinding wheels and pocketed trays with heaps of tesserae that glowed like gemstones. “This is amazing! This is beautiful!” John said. “And this! And this!” he said, ducking and weaving among the plants and mosaics. “This is wonderful!”

“Thanks,” Amy said. “Do you like waffles? Or pancakes? Or eggs? Or cornflakes? Or what?”

“The tables you took to the flea market—,” he began.

“Were really amateurish,” Amy said. “I made them when I was still a student at Contemporary Arts—a school you never heard of—and I was keeping them for sentimental reasons. But I’ve run out of space.”

“Pancakes would be nice,” said John.

They ate in the kitchen. John set the table, sliced a cantaloupe and read newspaper bulletins to Amy while she whipped the batter and poured it onto the griddle. Over the pancakes he asked her why she hadn’t told him she was an artist.

“Full-time waitress, part-time artist,” she explained. “I’ve had a few shows in some Bay Area galleries and a couple down in Santa Cruz. I love what I’m doing, I just wish I could do it all the time.”

They talked through brunch, talked while Amy washed the dishes and John wiped them, talked and talked and suddenly decided to drive off in Amy’s car, drive anywhere, and while they drove John told her about his dissertation, about the equations he had concocted from a gedanken experiment. “What’s a gedanken experiment?” she asked him. “It’s where you just think an experiment, but you don’t actually do it, you just think it through,” he told her. “But now I’m beginning to wonder if the equations have anything at all to do with reality, real physical reality.”

And after they had parked the car and were walking among the redwood trees, Amy told him, “I began as a painter and I still like painting, other people’s paintings, but for me—you’ll think I’m crazy—for me paint is too soft and squishy, too abstract. What I like about mosaic tesserae, the little pieces, whether they’re glass or ceramic or beach pebbles or whatever, what I like is that I can hold the color in my hand. It’s a piece of color. It has shape and size and weight. I love that. I love the idea of a solid piece of color. I know it sounds crazy.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me,” John said.

What sounded crazy to John came later, after they had driven all over the place and it was getting late—Amy had to waitress at the Capri and John had to get to his dissertation—and they had arrived back at their stucco apartment house. “You remember the Schrödinger wave equations we talked about?” said Amy. “Remember how we decided that by looking into those equations you could find out who the woman was that Schrödinger made love to and that she—”

John interrupted, saying, “Not me. I mean, I couldn’t figure that out, couldn’t find out—”

“She had a child nine months after that, and Schrödinger was the father,” Amy continued.

“That’s in the book? In the biography?” He was quite surprised.

“No. But that’s what I think. I’m sure of it.”

“Ah,” John said, drawing it out slowly and, he hoped, thoughtfully. He thanked Amy for brunch and told her he had had a good time, a really good time, and Amy said she had had a really good time too.

“You said you were hoping I’d drop by. Was it anything in particular?” he asked.

“No. I was just hoping you’d drop by, that’s all.”

Then Amy went off to work at the Capri and John went off to work on his equations.

7

John spent more and more of every day working on his equations, neglecting the rest of his life—sometimes even forgetting to eat, which had never happened before. On Friday he didn’t remember to drive up to Heidi Egret’s until it was already the moment when he should have been walking into her studio. He telephoned her, knowing from experience how irritated she would be at his tardiness, and as her phone rang and rang he phrased and rephrased how he would tell her he was going to be a little late. Her voice on the answering machine said to leave a message. John announced that he was not driving up there, was going to spend the weekend on his equations, good-bye. As a matter of fact, he did spend the rest of Friday and all the next day on his thesis, but late on Saturday he phoned Amy and asked did she want to have breakfast or brunch on Sunday. “Of course I do. Knock on my door tomorrow morning and I’ll make pancakes,” she said.

The next morning John took a long hot shower, sang while he toweled himself dry, stepped into the crisp white cotton trousers which he almost never wore, pulled on a sky blue shirt and trotted downstairs, carrying CDs of Bach, Miles Davis, Olivia Newton-John, and Greek folk songs, and a big fresh pineapple, all of which he had bought right after phoning her. He knocked on Amy’s door.

“Oh, wow, you look—,” John began. Amy was in a blue-and-white striped dress; her hair was swept back and little blue trinkets dangled from her ears. She looked beautiful but also unfamiliar. “I like the way you look,” he said.

“You’ve begun a beard!” she said, rubbing her palms against the stubble on his cheeks. “And I like it,” she added.

“What beard?”

John had forgotten to shave for the past five days. As he told Amy while slicing up the pineapple, he had been working steadily and had been forgetting everything else. “I haven’t spoken to anyone for a week,” he said. He made up for it by talking all through brunch, talking while he washed the dishes and Amy wiped, was talking when they got into his car and drove all over and he didn’t fall silent until they stepped barefoot onto the beach at Half Moon Bay to watch the surfers. “I used to know somebody who surfed,” Amy said, looking away at the blurred horizon, squinting. “He’s a real estate agent now, beachfront property, and he’s rich. I met him at a gallery show last year. He drives a red Alfa Romeo. Maybe you saw it in our parking space.”

John said no, he hadn’t seen it.

“He got so drunk I didn’t dare let him drive back to Berkeley. He fell asleep on the floor,” she said, turning to John. “I don’t see how you missed his car, a red Alfa Romeo. It was parked out back all night.”

“Maybe I was away,” John said, looking off down the shoreline. “I used to go away on weekends.”

They walked along the beach and swapped stories about everything under the sun. When the sky turned gray they got into his car and headed back home, arriving in Menlo Park as it began to rain. Amy said she had been rereading parts of
Schrödinger: Life and Thought
, especially the part where Schrödinger works out his equations on quantum mechanics. “The woman he was making love to is in those equations,” Amy said. “Because this other physicist, Werner Heisenberg, had already figured out how to solve those problems in quantum mechanics. Heisenberg had a way of arranging the numbers into boxes, an array, a big matrix, so that when you work the matrix you get the right answers. Then Schrödinger, our Erwin Schrödinger, created his wave equations and solved the same problems. Schrödinger used a more tactile approach. He was that kind of man, tactile. He called Heisenberg’s math repellent and ugly. Everybody calls Schrödinger’s equations beautiful.”

“Well—,” John began.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“The part about Heisenberg and Schrödinger and the equations is true, but about the woman—”

They had turned the corner into the flooded parking area in back of the apartment house and come to a stop. The rain was beating on the car, streaming down the windshield.

“Yes, she had Schrödinger’s baby, a girl. And that girl grew up and had a daughter. And that daughter—”

“Wow! How did you arrive at that?”

She laughed. “I’ve been doing what you might call a gedanken experiment. I’ve just been thinking things through.”

John had turned to Amy and now he put his hand tentatively, gently to her cheek, his fingers moving into her hair. “I’ve been thinking too,” he told her hesitantly. “About other things. Us.”

“Good. Schrödinger loved the things of this world, women especially,” Amy said. She was slightly flushed and her speech was beginning to race a bit. “He liked to see things and touch them, smell them, taste them. He was that kind of man. But there are a lot of other people like Heisenberg who don’t care about the physical side of things. They think the world is really, finally, when you get right down to it, an abstraction.” She turned her face to meet John’s kiss, and afterward said, “Heisenberg thought the world could be reduced to a box full of numbers. In those days everybody was taking sides about this.”

“I hope we’re on the same side,” he said, his hand moving beneath her arm.

“God, yes,” she said, sliding her arm around his neck. “There was this other physicist, Max Born, who argued with Schrödinger, said the wave functions were only—Oh, God,” she said, speeding up. “Probabilities of what might be there, said you could never picture what was actually going on,” she finished in a rush.

“I’m going crazy, Amy.”

“Me too.”

The windows were getting foggy and it was cramped and uncomfortable in the car, so they dashed through the rain to the house.

8

Amy was right about Schrödinger’s equations and Heisenberg’s matrix. Schrödinger himself wrote a paper (1926,
Annalen der Physik
79, 734–56) about the relationship between his wave equations and Heisenberg’s matrix, showing that they produced the same results. But he believed theories should be visualizable (
Anschaulichkeit
) and he loathed Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics. In 1926, a few days after Schrödinger had published his fourth and final paper on wave mechanics, Max Born published a paper asserting the statistical nature of Schrödinger’s waves—the waves, he said, were unimaginable clouds of probabilities. Of course, Schrödinger rejected that idea. For Erwin Schrödinger, everything he knew and loved was graspable in this world, our world of space and time, our living world, as he demonstrated during his years in Ireland.

As for John’s thesis, it consisted of three papers on gravity, of which the first two were complete. In the third paper he had arrived at a bothersome equation or, as his dissertation director pointed out, many bothersome equations, and he was having a hard time figuring out what the equations implied. Unlike the European physicists of 1926, John had not read much in the way of philosophy and had not speculated on the relationship of mathematics to the physical world that it might, or might not, represent. Now all sorts of questions distracted and fascinated him, and though they were old questions to Schrödinger and Born, they were new to John Artopoulos. Indeed, these questions appeared to be at the opaque heart of his dissertation and they seemed unanswerable. To put it another way, in the previous six months he used up three reams of paper and hadn’t completed a single page. Of course, the past two weeks had been different because now his brain, his body, everything was on fire.