The Constant Heart (32 page)

“Jake,” she said. “If I think back to my other life, before here, I can remember that I should say I'm sorry. So, I'm sorry, OK?”

I swallowed.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It's nothing,” she said. “Don't worry about it.”

Then I hung up.

“So,” said Sara. “What did she say? Is she coming?”

“No,” I said.

Sara took the iodine-colored pill bottles from the little compartment between the seats where she had put them and said, “You want some of these? It might make you feel close to him for a little while.”

I put out my hand and she shook in one of each. She was right: For about three hours I felt a kind of warmth that made me think of those times my father and I went up to Furnace Creek together.

T
HE UNIVERSITY WHERE I work has two parts, the older one, which is a quadrangle around which some Federal-style buildings sit, all painted white and having stone lintels, but beyond them some other buildings have been put up. In this new part you can feel the passage of time by the speed with which the buildings in it become ugly. Another notch each year. Glass and flat roofs, aluminum doors that are already pitted, flooring that will not last.

The building where I work is a new one, and in the lobby downstairs a large fossil hangs on the wall. The stone must be five feet by eight, and in the middle is the image of a turtle, caught in what seems to be mad swimming. I have often stood there and wondered what was chasing it. Some enormous thing, just off screen, so to speak, and getting closer and closer. Jaws open. Now, though, when I saw it, I thought about Furnace Creek, the bottom of that well, and the eyes of the snake, not so much them in particular, but as evidence of what we have to face, that ominous, unseen quantity that human beings just can't seem to shake.

My office is a small one with a view of the older part of the school, and I sat there, with the computer on. Of course, I was behind. I'd missed a class. Some new photos from the Hubble sat on my desk. We were getting closer: The secrets weren't too far away from being revealed, after all. We were looking further into the past than ever, and soon, we would have it. Of course the Constant has a value, and it will show how dark matter affects the speed at which he universe is accelerating, and how quickly the things we see in the heavens will disappear.

I went down the hall and stood at the door of the computer center. It was early. All of the computers were on, but no one was using them, aside from a young man who seemed to be having some trouble. He typed and looked at the screen, and when he saw the results of the calculations he had done, he leaned forward until his nose almost touched the monitor.

On the rest of the monitors there were two hands, the ones from the billboards with the twenty-foot fingers, posed over the keys of a laptop: This was the logo that came from a computer program called Infinitus, which was being used on all the stations here. I sat down in a chair. Surely, the hands meant well, or at least were part of some order. Something one could depend upon and that had, at its heart, some moral instinct. I realized I was sweating, and that my hands were shaking. Well, what was I to do?

In my office I tried to do some work, but when I sat down, I realized that there was no lead in my pencil, and I looked through the drawers to find some, going through one drawer after another, pushing the stuff aside, the papers and paper clips and Tums that had collected there, pens that didn't work,
dry Magic Markers, none of it making any sense and all of it seeming to demand that I go on looking for the one thing I needed but couldn't find.

I couldn't sleep. Downstairs, in my house, I worked in my pajamas, going through the equations I had written, following from one to the next, writing in letters a little smaller and a little neater than usual. I thought that later I would go back to the computer center and use the machines there. Sara slept upstairs, and sometimes, before she went to work, I'd get into bed with her and put my nose next to her hair. For the dealership she still wore her premature soccer mom outfit.

The road that went toward the mall still had some old houses on it that were slowly being surrounded by the gas stations and Radio Shacks and Rite Aids, but the people in those farmhouses with clapboards and slate roofs weren't trying to ignore progress altogether, and, in fact, a lot of them had commercial ideas of their own. This is one lesson I learned about grief. You think, for a while, that the world can't go on, but it does, and does so in a way that is so smooth and indifferent as to leave you amazed. In some of the old houses you saw knitting shops and a beauty parlor, but the signs for these places were made with fluorescent paint out of a spray can, or with imitation brass letters bought from True Valu. Sometimes, when the weather was nice, you could see the owners of these places as they sat in lawn chairs and fanned themselves with pieces of newspaper as the cars went by.

A lot of cars were in the mall's parking lot, but even though it was full, it still had an air of desolation. The mall wasn't new and the paint was chipped here and there, but it still had some good shops in it. Sara liked scarves. Nice things on the skin. Silk.

I sat in the car for a while, thinking things over.

I thought of the silk that Sara liked to have against her skin. Now, when she came to my house, sometimes she'd walk into a room where I was with just a scarf across her lower stomach, the shape of the hair between her legs visible through the transparent material, but a little more mysterious through the veil. She drew the scarf slowly between her legs, dragged it upward, and ran it over my face. Perfume. Texture. Sometimes I didn't take a shower before going to see students in my office, because I couldn't stand the idea of washing off Sara's scent, and I often wondered if those students were aware of it. Sara said that if she had known, years before, that an orgasm could have stars that ran down into her heels, she would have thought differently about astronomy. Then we laughed.

Some young men, just kids, stood by the door of the mall and smoked cigarettes, all doing so with the same quick gesture, the same slow exhaling of smoke, the wisps curling out of their noses. One of them had a small angel tattooed on his forehead. Inside, the air was a little stale. Air-conditioned.

I went along, looking into the windows. One of the places sold leather pants, and Sara had always wanted a pair. Black ones, with a dull finish. She said she liked the way they would look when she walked. Maybe the pants would make a little squeak when she sat down. Would I like that sound?

Record shops, snack bars. I stopped for a cup of coffee with steamed milk. A table and a chair sat under an artificial palm tree, and a slight artificial breeze made the fronds rustle. Just like paradise. The coffee got cold, and a little foam sat in the bottom of the cardboard cup. I tried to understand the nature of fear, but I couldn't get to the heart of it. There wasn't much
to go on aside from the effect of it, which was like being in a mist that penetrates everything and makes the colors more gray or more garish, the sounds more irritating. The weight of it seems to be astronomical: Fear bends everything, time and space, back toward the center of anxiety. Nothing escapes.

I started walking again. My shoes echoed on the composite stone of the mall floor, which had been recently buffed. I turned into the lingerie store, where the mannequins stood, each one of them staring off into space with a blankness that was so complete as to seem like a warning. Bins of items, and on the wall, some scarves. Green, blue, a gray like that hour just before dark. Furnace Creek. The well. What they tried to do to Sara.

“Those are nice,” said the saleswoman. “On sale.”

“Yes,” I said. I ran my fingers over one. Maybe.

“They won't last forever at that price,” she said.

The material slipped over my fingers, and I thought of Sara and of those times when she told me something that she thought was funny, throwing back her head and showing her long neck as she laughed. Shaking her head and putting a hand up to dab at the tears from laughing.

“This one?” said the saleswoman.

“Yes,” I said.

“A good choice,” she said. “You're going to make someone happy.”

“Yes,” I said.

We stood in the anxious moment while the machine tried to decide if my credit card was any good. We waited. I looked over my shoulder, into the hallway. No one there.

“It takes a minute sometimes,” the saleswoman said.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

She put the scarf into a bag.

“There,” she said. “See? Everything's fine.”

I signed the slip and went into the hall that was filled with the distant scent of popcorn, or some sweet thing, caramel I guessed. Like that honey, but not as real. I had a desire for something sweet, just on the tip of my tongue. The weight of the scarf in the bag was so insignificant that I opened it up and looked inside. Still there.

Maybe Sara will like it, I thought. Maybe she'll say, “Oh, isn't that nice?” Maybe she will give me an unexpected kiss.

 

 

THE STUDENTS WERE arranged around a table, as though this was a board meeting. Upturned faces. In their twenties, scrubbed, enthusiastic. I came into the room and it was like walking into a wall of vitality: glossy hair, eyes alert, shirts fresh from the laundry, new running shoes. Comforting rustle of new fabrics. Gor-Tex. They opened their spiral books to new, blank pages, looked up, smiled. They thought I had some answer, some detail that would make it all clear. As I stood there I thought of Xeno's paradox, of his observation that to get across a room you have to get to halfway across, and then half of the remaining distance, and then half of that, cutting the remaining distance in half over and over again so that you can never get there.

I swallowed.

I went around the table where they sat, stopping at each one of them to talk about what was new, what difficulties they were having with their projects, glitches in computer programs,
library access, approval needed for one thing and another. We talked about a new Hubble photo of the Eagle Nebula, NGC 6611, which is elongated and smoky, misty with clouds of gas, and, of course, is the site of the Pillars of Creation, a birthplace of the stars. In fact, the elongated form of the Eagle Nebula, which seems oddly fertile, reminds me of an umbilical cord. The students all wanted time on the Hubble, and I explained about the man in Maryland, for whom 5 percent of the time has been reserved for his discretionary uses. “He must get his way,” said one of the students, a young woman who almost always had the right answer. I nodded, yes, yes. He gets what he wants. I stood and said, “I have something to say . . . ”

They looked up. All expectant. How could I have done this, spoken out like that, so ready to inflict something on them? My face drawn, tired. Not well shaved. Bags under my eyes. I thought about the artificial breeze, the smell of caramel. The honey. The jets. The perfume of Sara's hair. The students waited. The air conditioning throbbed from the bottom of the building and reminded me of the turtle caught in stone. Was that the cadence with which it swam? One of them held up a pen, ready to write. This was it. A secret.

“Have a good weekend,” I said. “Next week is going to be one from hell.”

They nodded, relieved. Just that. No raving. I stood there, smiling. They filed out. All but one. A young woman with short hair and a black skirt. She leaned close to me, confidential, almost whispering. She said, “I wanted to talk to you about Einstein's Constant. What will it mean if the value is not zero?”

The scent of the soap she used was strong. What was it she was asking? Is the Constant a matter of anxiety, of trying to
keep things the same, or is it the moment of opportunity, of finally being able to see some order and beauty? Is it something you can depend upon, or just another receding and beguiling mystery that makes understanding that much harder? The air conditioning throbbed. Well? What is it?

My mouth moved like a fish out of water. I was left with my own half-assed attempts to put things to rights. Sara's black eye. The jets. That black stain that collected on the ground from Bo's white skin. The echo of water in the bottom of the well. What can I say? How can I suggest the task of being human, which is to live in the commingling of the destructive and the sublime, the vicious and the moral, darkness and light?

“That's a good question,” I said. “I'm working on it.”

At home, Sara said, “It's a nice scarf.”

“I'm glad you like it,” I said.

“How much time do you think we have?” she said.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Un-huh,” she said. “Well, I'm a great one for signs. I'll tell you.”

“Can you give me one?” I said.

“MD and Scott came to the dealership today. I offered them a great deal on a Forester, leather, air, the works. Even an iPod. They didn't take it.”

At the university, construction crews were putting up makeshift fences and bringing in trailers to serve as headquarters for a new library, which was about to be built. Men in hard hats walked around with instruments that sat on tripods, like creatures from another world. The cranes arrived shortly after, and the derrick-like shapes of them stood against the sky, the dark lines suggesting the awkward and angular pattern of fate.

The first thing to do before putting up the new library, which was going to have its own computer center, was to knock down a building that had become useless: three stories, squat, ugly, a dark brick monstrosity that was a mistake right from the beginning. Part of it had been used as a gym, and around the basketball court, suspended above it by iron rods, an indoor track was hung. I have run around and around on its short circumference, feeling that I was getting nowhere. In fact, everyone was glad to see this place go, and when I pulled into the parking lot on the day they were going to knock it down, a small crowd had assembled to watch the wrecking ball, hung from the end of the fully extended crane, do its work. At the base of the crane was the place where the operator sat: His controls, dark and angular levers, were in a little house, bright yellow with flat windows that reflected the blue sky and the shape of the clouds.