Wonder
a novel
Dan Boyle
Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2007, 2011 Dan Boyle.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in slightly different form as Housecleaning in 2007 by Southern Tier Editions/The Haworth Press.
The paperback edition published as Wonder in 2011 by Lethe Press, Inc.
118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018
www.lethepressbooks.com • lethepress@aol.com
isbn: 1-59021-237-1
isbn-13: 978-1-59021-237-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Alex Jeffers.
Cover photos: blackboard: virtualphoto; canoe: Eric Naud.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file at the Library of Congress.
Table of Contents
chapter 1
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
—Carl Jung
Anna’s Kreutzberg district flat was high and expansive, though bare, showing few signs of having been lived in. So different from our own accommodations, Mom having brought her favorite Monet, her crystal eggs, and her two huge travel dressers, now opened side by side to make a suitable closet for any manor. All that for a month’s stay here in Berlin and six months previous in Geneva while Father was ambassador there. And now, our peace mission ended, our packing to return to the States would take much more time than it would for Anna Yevushenko and her family to return north for her Papa’s new appointment. They had been good proletarians, the Yevushenkos, despite their high stature in Soviet society.
Anna rushes to greet me, her arms bare in her starched black-and-white dress as they wrap around me. My hands lie on the crispness of the cloth draped over her back. I smell the freshness of linen and am happy to feel such friendship, however brief it has been.
She removes her arms and places her hands in mine, her gray-blue eyes looking deep into my own.
“Papa says we leave Sunday, first back to Moscow, to the cold, and then on to Riga. Mama is so pleased to return to her homeland, though I will miss Berlin, and Geneva, and the Alps.” She laughs, her eyes raised as though looking at those great mountains again. “Oh, I will have such stories to tell my friends back home. And you will be in all of them!”
I laugh too, recalling the last time we took the trip into the Alps, the meadow we had discovered, and how we instantly raced to the other side, leaving our mothers protesting far behind. I felt as though I was floating then as we moved across the wildflowers.
“I won’t have to tell stories,” I say. “I will just show my friends my gold medal, and they will start asking questions.”
She slaps me on the shoulder.
“Much good you did for it. You were the slowest in your relay.”
“My split tied yours!”
“But I ran anchor!”
“Wait until the Games in ’40!”
Our voices rise so high as we laugh. We hug again. Suddenly she pulls away. Aah, she sees the package I placed back at the door.
“A gift?” Her eyes stare at me. She seems surprised.
My laughter fades. What had I just said, that we would compete again in the next Olympiad? But I am unsure there will ever be another, what with the world turning on its side.
“Yes. Well…I wasn’t sure…. Just in case I don’t see you again.”
Her lips wrinkle up, as though she’s unsure whether to laugh or cry.
“Dear Maude.” She shakes her head. “How can we not see each other again? We are of the same spirit. Do you not feel it?”
“Yes. Wild!”
She laughs.
“But I’ll take the gift all the same.” When she laughs, her accent becomes strong, like her mother’s, whose English I can barely understand. But Anna is so wise. While I struggle with Russian, her English flows from her as if it was her own languages of Russian and Latvian.
“Open it! Open it!”
She looks back and forth between the gift and me. She laughs again and runs to pick it up. She passes by me with the package cradled in the palms of her hands.
“Come. On the sofa. Sit by me.”
I sit on the middle cushion next to her, so anxious, looking down at the package. She fingers the ribbon.
“No! Not slow. Rip it open!”
“But the ribbon. It is lovely. I want to bring it back and show my friends.”
“Anna, I forget. To me it’s just a ribbon. I guess I’m just so spoiled rotten.”
“That’s how I’ll describe you to all my friends—spoiled…rotten?”
“Like a rotten egg. American slang.”
She nods. “Yes. Spoiled rotten…” such a strong guttural, the way she pronounces the “r” in “rotten,” “but generous as well.”
“Your friends would hate me. I’d be a snob compared to everyone in Moscow. And in Latvia, your Riga, they would call me even something worse, I’m sure.”
“But you are so popular in Washington society, no?”
“Open the gift!”
She laughs and unlaces the silk ribbon. She then pleases me as she rips through the brown paper.
No longer bound together, the three books separate on her lap. I gaze at her eyes. They show her appreciation for the gift.
“Tom Saw…yer?”
“Sawyer. Like Sew and Yer. Well, kind of like that. More like soy. You know soy?”
“And Huckleberry Finn. I know how to say this name. Your Mark Twain.”
“Mark Twain is as American as you can get.”
“And this book. The Mysterious Stranger. I have not heard of this one.”
“It was Twain’s last novel; the one I love most. He never completed it. In fact, the publisher tagged on an ending based on some of Twain’s notes he found. But the ending doesn’t fit very well, though it’s a wonderful ending all the same. It deals with solipsism. Do you know the concept of solipsism? You probably do but just don’t know the word for it.”
She shakes her head. I’m glad I can explain.
“It’s the view that only I exist. That everything and everyone else in this world is just my own creation, my own imagination.”
“And this is what you believe?”
“I’ve considered it might be true, but I actually never believed it. I sometimes like to think this way, though, because it makes me the most important person in the world.”
“Like your ‘spoiled rotten’?”
Laughing, I pick up the book and turn to the onionskin sheet, which is the first page upon opening the book. The onionskin contains an illustration of the angel—the mysterious stranger.
“It’s hard for me to believe that I’m the only one that exists when I meet people like you who are so independent and come from such a different viewpoint than what I’m used to.” Laughing. “Perhaps you and I should create a new philosophy…one of dualipsism.”
“And what would that be?”
“That only you and I exist.”
Her eyes look down, saddened. I understand. We both gaze at the mysterious stranger soaring above an Austrian town, his mouth locked in an angelic smile—a Shiva smile—as he emits pleasure and pain while not knowing the difference between the two.
“You and I.” Anna sighs. She turns her face and looks toward the window. Outside, in the street below, are two men walking in their military uniforms. Now that the Olympic Games are over, they have dusted off their uniforms and returned to wearing them. I wonder who they are waiting to fight.
“Earlier this week, a man in a uniform approached Mama and me, just outside the Soviet embassy,” Anna said. “He stared at us angrily, and then he spoke in bad English, guessing we knew that language better than his German. He spoke mostly to Mama, but she couldn’t understand his words, though she knew the meaning in his rage. He said, ‘How could you, a Latvian, lie with a Bolshevik dog as your husband? You bring shame to your people.’”
“Anna!”
I can say nothing more. How can I wipe away this man’s ignorance?
“You see them wearing their uniforms, Maude? The German government has just voted to require every man to serve in the military for two years. It has become a military state once again. Papa tells me we must leave soon, that Hitler is planning on denouncing Bolshevism and seizing Russian territory. He says his mission here has ended in failure.”
I still cannot speak. I think of the days we were on the training track in Geneva, and then in the Olympiastadion during our competitions, how far the troubles of the world were from us. And now these troubles have caught up to us, will separate us.
“Papa told me yesterday why we are returning to Moscow, and then on to Riga, for his ambassadorship to Latvia,” Anna continues. “He says the League of Nations has no future, and so he is resigning his post in Geneva. The League has no power over the aggressive actions of Italy, or of Germany and its troop building in the Rhineland. The world is dividing, Maude, between Fascists, Bolsheviks, and Capitalists. No one trusts anyone. It will become you and I. Us and them. And you, Maude, what of your country? Will you and I be on opposite sides?”
I place my hand in Anna’s, wishing to reassure her. I force her to raise her head. I want her eyes to see what I see. “But Anna. This is only temporary, I promise you. How can it not be? When there’s people like you and me in the world, then things will change eventually for the good.”
Her eyes gaze at me through tears that have not yet fallen.
“Dear Maude. I have said just the same to Papa. He only mutters and says nothing more. I believe he sees me as too optimistic.”
“But we must see the good side, Anna. Our fathers have been here to build bridges between nations, not to destroy them. Can we turn our backs on their vision? And what they’ve done has not been a failure. It has created great ideas that will grow. Look at what their vision has done. It has allowed me to meet you. And because of you, I have a completely different picture of the world, one in which Soviets and Americans and everyone else live together in peace rather than in fear of one another. And so all we need to do is have the rest of the world see what we see. It’s that simple.”
Anna gazes at the books, her finger sliding down the gold-embossed seam of The Mysterious Stranger. I feel happy now as I see a smile return to her.
“I have a gift for you as well,” she says.
She stands and hurries to a rustic red dresser. On the dresser are five books, all askew and stacked upon one another. She picks up the top book, lays it to one side, and then raises the second. It is a fat book bound in rich, chocolate-brown leather. As she holds the book, her thumbs caress the leather, her gaze deeply contemplative on this object.
“It is Tolstoy,” she says. “And yet, Papa found this in a bookstore in New York City during his visit last year. It is the first edition ever printed in English, around the turn of the century.”
She laughs.
“My parents named me after this character, and I have read the novel several times. Papa said it would be good for me to learn how to read English by reading a book that I am so familiar with.”
She finally releases her gaze from the book and looks at me. I see that a tear has escaped her eye. I approach and look down at the title.
Anna Karenina.
“Anna. No. I could never take a gift that you cherish this much.”
Anna shakes her head and places the book into my hands. “No, Maude. I will cherish much more that I have given this to you.”
I lift, the book up, feeling the soft leather, sniffing its musty richness…
∞
“Maude…”
“Maude…”
“Dear Maude! Oh! Please Maude! Can you hear me? Maude!”
Maude’s eyes stared upward, toward the face of her neighbor, Ellen Stratfield, but her gaze—glossy, wild, the pupils wide, black, dilated—saw nothing of this time. While color had left most of her body—her hair gray, her skin white and transparent—the green of her eyes remained deep and intense all these eighty-four years. Her aged body—thin but still firm—had fallen next to her antique mahogany bookcase with the etched-glass doors. Having accompanied her on her fall were a duster—the feathered ends covered with soot—and an ancient book that struck the ground on its seam, thereby cracking its old leather cover. The book was flipped open to yellow-white sheets, releasing a scent of mildewed paper.
Ellen closed the book cabinet’s door and bent down to observe her friend. Maude’s wild eyes were directed toward the ceiling of her second-story den. A cold chill suddenly rushed through Ellen’s shoulders, due to Maude’s catatonic state and to a draft rising up the stairwell from the front door she had not closed. A constant pluck of raindrops, now striking with more frequency, rang through the doorway and thumped upon the pitched roof. Ellen’s eyes scanned the small den, and she discovered a chenille throw on a nearby leather loveseat. She arose and approached the throw. The throw’s red silk cord had been stretched and teased over its many decades, creating a large hole close to the middle. Ellen grabbed it and returned to wrap it around her friend.
“Maude…Maude…. Can you hear me? Oh, Maude…where have you gone?”
Maude did not reply, her eyes not acknowledging Ellen’s presence.
But then, after minutes had passed, Maude raised one arm from the floor. It was then that Ellen saw—tightly enclosed between Maude’s left thumb and forefinger—a scrap of leather, torn from the book to Maude’s side. Maude brought her hand to her nostrils and sniffed in the leather’s musty smell.
“Oh, Anna,” Maude’s voice cracked, “it is through this gift that we will unite the world.”
Tom Flaherty sat at his computer, his head half-buried in the palm of his hand, his elbow locked against his desk. He stared into the computer but saw nothing on its screen. He was attempting to formulate a mathematical equation, but at this time he could not focus on such detail, not while his mind was wandering on the magnificence of the possibility that a unified theory of the universe—the theory Einstein spent thirty years searching for in vain—might possibly have been discovered, that microscopic vibrating strings were the answer to everything in the universe, that many dimensions—eleven at last count—exist beyond space and time, that it is these strings that allow quantum mechanics and relativistic theory—having always jarred with one another during the twentieth century—to work together. And now he and hundreds of other scientists throughout the world were busy attempting to find a mathematical principle that proves such a concept actually is the law of the universe. For though superstring theory might be called a “theory,” it cannot be a law until a mathematical equation proves it to be so.
The concept of a unified principle of the universe was so far-reaching. How does it apply to the meaning of life, to his own existence, and to the existence of others he knows and has known? What does it say of those he has lost, for had he lost them when time is relative and so no one is ever lost if he exists in another spacetime? Tom desired to believe such a concept, even now, ten years of his own space-time later, when Ken, the one man he had loved, had passed away. Or had he passed away only from the dimensions we know, while presently, as well as in the past and future, his energy, his matter, his vibrating strings, continue on somewhere out there in one or more of these eleven dimensions, in another spacetime? And to find him, to find the meaning of all, Tom had to allow his stare—which currently caused the letters and numbers on his computer screen to run together in a haze—to refocus, back to these words, back to these numbers, back to mathematical equations. Back to reality. Back to detail.
He was saved from these details by a light tapping on his door.
“Yes.”
Mary, a new secretary in the physics department at Caltech, opened the door.
“Professor Flaherty. I have a phone call for you on line five. She says she’s your sister.”
Sister? He had not heard from Kate in five years. So many times he had picked up the phone, ready to call her, ready to ask for forgiveness, but he had never gone through with the call. For he did not want forgiveness. Asking for it would have been a lie. There was no reason to be forgiven.
Only…he wanted her love.
He looked down at the rapid flashing light on one button of his telephone. He felt his heart beating as intensely as the flashing of that light.
He picked up the receiver, his finger hesitant to push the button.
It is not time to think but to do, he thought.
He pushed the button.
“Kate?”
There was a moment of silence which, although only seconds in length, appeared to him an eternity.
“I’m calling about Maude.”
Even now Kate would not acknowledge him by name as he felt the bitterness in her succinct tone—bitterness toward both him and Maude, as Kate still refused to use an endearing term such as “Mom.”
“Mom? What? What’s wrong?”
Again, an eternity of silence.
“She’s dying.”
chapter 2
Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.
—Austin O’Malley
Tom entered the hospital room. His mother’s face was turned from him as she looked out her seventh-floor window among the white-blue clouds above Tacoma’s Commencement Bay, her thin, leathered arms resting upon the sheets of her bed. She had not noticed his arrival, and this concerned Tom, having heard from Ellen of his mother’s “condition.”
“Mom?”
She turned her head immediately, which calmed his anxiety.
“Tom. I hope you’re here to get me out of this place.”
As Maude spoke, she pulled the sheets down and swung her legs to the side of the bed, revealing the plastic brace on her left foot. “If they hadn’t put this on my leg, I’d escape by myself.”
Tom smiled as he viewed the cast. He knew that she had sprained her ankle, and luckily nothing had broken, but he now saw the brace as a ball and chain, as the hospital’s way of keeping his mother from escaping.
“I don’t think there’s anything that can stop you, Mom.”
She heaved a sigh as she looked deeply into her son’s eyes, cocking her head as a gesture of concern. He wondered then if she was doing the same as he was now doing, sizing up the other person’s constant aging, for it had been two months since he had seen his mother, and he believed he had found perhaps one more wrinkle on her forehead, perhaps a few more pounds removed from her emaciated frame, perhaps a few less hairs on her scalp. And he wondered if she saw the same in him. The Flahertys were fortunate to retain youthful looks well into their lifetimes, but now having reached the age of fifty-four, Tom’s recent boyish looks had transformed much farther along than just the puffy round circles under his blue eyes, farther than the ever-lowering flap of his eyelids, farther than just the few grays scattered among the thick brown hair. Seeing the aging in his mother caused him to consider his own hurtling away from youth—like the ever-expanding universe hurtling away from the original point of the Big Bang—and hurtling toward mortality.
But as he saw her penetrating jade-green eyes contacting him, it was then that he could see her constant youth. For those eyes always remained invariable, bright, alive. They were what connected her most intensely with him and with all she loved.
“You’re as flustered by this as I am,” she stated matter-of-factly. “But I also see you haven’t come here to set me free.”
“Mom, Ellen told me she spoke to you for fifteen minutes, but you didn’t hear a word she said.”
She flipped her hand up, dismissing his comment.
“So I was deep in thought,” she rattled back. “I’m sure whatever Ellen had to say was not as important as my own thoughts at the time. Is that such a crime? Am I to be locked away for that? You know, Tom, many times I have found you oblivious to your own surroundings as you’re thinking your deep thoughts. Should you go to jail for that?”
His smile returned as he nodded to her logic. He walked toward her and bent down to kiss her on the forehead before sitting down in the chair next to her bed.
“Ellen said this isn’t the first time. She says whenever you clean house, you forget where you are. Only, this last time you really worried her.”
“Well, perhaps Ellen needs to get a life rather than worry over an old woman and her feather duster.”
Maude shied away from her son’s gaze, as though she was embarrassed by her own argumentative tone. She looked out the window once again, releasing a sigh as she watched the white clouds drift slowly through the blue sky.
“Perhaps I need to get a life as well,” she continued, “living my memories like an old woman. Ahh, perhaps I should take a trip.”
“That would be nice. I’m sure Ellen would love to go….”
“Not with Ellen!” she exclaimed. “Don’t get me wrong, Tom. Ellen is a dear friend, but she pays too much attention to details—to travel books and room reservations and everything else that ruins a vacation. No, I’d have a much better time on my own.”
“Mom, you can’t go by yourself.”
“Why?” Her eyes widened, her shoulders protruding forward as she clawed the edge of the mattress. “Because I’m old? Because no one will be there to take care of me?”
“Mom, you fell. How do I know that’s not going to happen again when you’re five thousand miles from home?”
“Well, perhaps I need to come live with you in Los Angeles in case you might happen to fall as well!”
Tom sighed, but he also smiled as he placed his hands together and looked away, reflecting on her comment.
“Yes. You’re right,” he said. “I can’t win this argument.”
“You never could,” Maude replied back before a breath could escape from either of them. “You might be able to unravel the secrets of the universe, dear, but you’ll never win an argument with me.”
Her last remark caused Maude to turn inward again, her green eyes staring at her son but looking past him. Tom caught her look, and again he feared a relapse. He brought his face closer to hers.
“Mom? Mom?”
He caught a smile rising. She was playing with him. He had grown too concerned. It was not right to do so. He knew that. Maude had always been a free spirit, and she still was. What will happen with her will happen. He could not change who she was. No one ever could.
“I was just thinking,” she said slowly, “about you and me, how similar we are, Tom. In fact, I knew it the day you were born. There was something then. Something in your eyes, as if you were saying, ‘I’m out! I’m free! What a world! What’s next?’ And yet, you and I were born in a different age, for while I always wanted to see the whole world, you want to witness the entire universe.”
Again her eyes unfocused, no longer looking at him, her stare scanning the ceiling.
“Perhaps I shall see that universe soon.”
“Hmm? Mom? What’s that supposed to mean?”
She looked over to him and smiled. “Nothing, Tom. Just an old woman’s rantings. You know, Kate thinks I’m quite senile. I believe my doctor told her so, hmm? I liked it much better in the days before when we just called someone like me eccentric.”
Tom stood up and walked to the window. He looked down upon the aging waterfront and the smoke-scarred smelters of this city. He often wondered now how his mother, such a free spirit, could have settled down in this area, having chosen to turn the family’s vacation home on Spanaway Lake into her primary residence, now so far removed from the major happenings of the world. Yes, she did need to travel, to keep her sanity.
“Well…” he pondered his next words, “perhaps I could fly with you to Paris, and you could spend some time with Anna.”
Maude looked down at her cast, displaying a pensive smile as she thought of her friend. She then returned her gaze to her son, a calming smile still present as she spoke.
“Tom…. Anna has died.”
He stared at her, attempting to understand her emotions in that smile.
“Mom! Oh, I’m sorry. When did this happen?”
She flipped her hand up again.
“I don’t really know the details. I believe it happened yesterday, right before I saw Ellen. I….” She struggled for a moment, attempting to understand. “She was thinking of me at the time.”
Tom stared at his mother, but he could not speak, trying to comprehend what she was saying. Instantly, thoughts of Ken returned to him, how after his death, he believed that there had been times when he felt a sudden closeness to this man, as though Ken had reached out to him after death, but how each time Tom had dismissed such a notion, believing it was his own desire in believing this to be true rather than actually being so. There was no logic that proved the existence of spirits.
What was proven, however, was the condition of dementia, as his mother’s neurologist had explained to Kate.
“Mom…how did you find out about Anna? Who told you?”
Maude shook her head.
“This damned brace. They’ve put it on too tight. I haven’t figured how to remove it. And you’re no help either, Tom. How much longer do I have to stay in this room?”
“One more night.” Believing now his question would not be answered, he submitted to the subjects to which she wished to speak.
“You’re staying at the house,” she spoke again as a statement rather than as a question.
“Well, yes.”
She nodded.
“Get the house key from the nurses. I’m afraid Anna’s daughter has been trying to reach me, and I’m sure she won’t leave a message on the machine. It’s not their way. Tom, when the phone rings, be sure to pick it up.”
Tom nodded, not knowing yet what to say.
“And when you do, please let Paulette know that Anna told me.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. Told you what?”
Her pensive smile returned as she shook her head.
“Tom, for a brilliant scientist, you certainly don’t listen very well. Just say…I know about Anna, and that…she’s at peace.”
chapter 3
We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.
—Max Born
He had been waiting in the doctor’s office for nearly ten minutes, staring at two drawings of the human brain—one a frontal view and one a side view, the side view irritating him the most as each eyeball stood out alone, hanging from the cerebellum by a slender ganglion. At first the graphics interested him, perhaps for a minute or two, but they became more grotesque with each passing minute as he continued to ask himself two questions: “How can we separate our brains from ourselves, as these drawings tend to do?” and “Why do we always have to wait so long for the doctor?”
Well, at least the leather chair was comfortable. And it should be, as he was paying for one of the finest neurologists in the country—the many framed degrees and accolades hanging on the wall behind the doctor’s chair proving this to be true.
Karl Swensen opened his office door, which had been slightly ajar, and walked inside, his head down at first, not so much due to shyness but so that he could raise his face in a gesture of greeting, his hand already extended, ready to shake Tom’s hand before he had even caught eye contact.
“Dr. Flaherty. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Tom looked at the neurologist’s opaque gray eyes and recognized that Dr. Swensen was viewing him as a colleague—two men with doctorates, two men attempting to unravel the mysteries of life, and two men in the midst of their sixth decade on this world.
Tom stood to shake his hand. He nodded a return greeting.
“Dr. Swensen. Please…call me Tom. I’m not one for formalities.”
“Thank you, Tom,” Dr. Swensen continued, now stepping around his desk and sitting in his chair. He extended his hand again. “Myself, I believe formalities do have a place in a patient-physician setting, but call me Karl, as I’m humbled to be recognized on a first-name basis, since I have read several of your papers. Not that I admit that I understand them completely. A very…fascinating field of study, I must say.”
“Not much different from your own,” Tom replied, pointing to the brain poster on the wall. “You study brains. I study the universe. One could say they’re the same. Remember Jung and his circles—the mind and the universe can be interposed.”
Dr. Swensen folded his hands and looked down at his desk, an inward thought, his smile appearing as a fine line.
“To be frank, Dr. Flaher…mmm, Tom, I’m not one to think in such analogies. I’m a man of empirical reasoning. I admire your farsightedness, but I’m one who sees things as they are. I find this useful as a neurologist, to view ourselves as flesh and bone and nerves.”
Tom nodded.
“A transition I see. So then, how is my mom?”
“It’s difficult to tell without observing her over time.” Dr. Swensen arose and walked to a computer monitor. He hit a couple of buttons on the keyboard, and suddenly on the screen appeared magnetic resonance images of a brain.
“Are you familiar at all with this?” Dr. Swensen asked.
Tom arose and viewed the screen closely. “I know to look at the dark spots.”
“Which is the loss of neural activity.” He pointed to those spots, then turned the roller on the mouse to show the various images and angles of this brain. “Here and here. Your mother has a very unusual case of dementia. In most cases, the ganglia die in bunches. But hers are more like a fine line of brain tissue along the outer edges of the temporal lobes. To be honest with you, I have never seen or read of such a case as hers.”
“And this is why you need to observe her over time?”
“Well, yes. To see how this progresses.”
Dr. Swensen took a long last look at the images and then switched off the lights. He returned to his seat. Now standing by himself, Tom felt obliged to sit as well.
“Your mother is an unwilling patient.”
“She doesn’t believe her condition is an illness.”
“Ah. And what then does she think of it?”
“I believe she sees it as…some special wisdom that comes with age.”
Dr. Swensen folded his hands and hunched his shoulders forward, looking closely at Tom. “And what do you think of it?”
Tom attempted to unravel the neurologist’s question, looking deeply into his gray eyes, which appeared assuring but at the same time unswaying, as though he knew exactly what had to be done.
“Does it matter what I think?” he answered curtly with his own question.
“Are you planning to stay with her for a while?”
“I’m not sure yet. I believe my decision is to be based in part on my conversation with you now.”
“You have no classes to teach?”
“I no longer teach in a classroom setting.”
“Then if I were you, I’d stay with her for the next few months. Advise her to allow us to continually monitor her. I’m proposing a monthly diagnosis with an MRI and a CT/PET—a combined CT with PET—positron emission tomography. You are familiar with these?”
“Yes, although I’m unfamiliar with PET’s effectiveness on viewing neurological disorders.”
Tom returned his gaze to the posters of the brain, now seeing these organs as hideous, as though now, agreeing to the doctor’s orders, he was relegating his mother’s existence to a series of neurons and synaptic impulses.
“You also disagree with my prognosis?” Dr. Swensen asked.
“Perhaps. I’m unsure as of yet.”
“Uncertainty. Ah, then perhaps you will find it stimulating to observe your mother for a while. To find a meaning. To become certain.”
Tom smiled as he arose to shake the doctor’s hand. “Thank you, Karl. An interesting idea. And thank you, both for the care you have provided to my mother and…for the kind words you have given to my work. But to tell you the truth, I can honestly say to you there are very few things that I have ever really been certain of in my life.”
chapter 4
The past is never dead; it is not even past.
—William Faulkner
Tom had turned off his car engine, but his hand still remained on the key, and the key still remained in the ignition switch. He stared out the windshield onto the high laurel hedge that separated the parking space from Maude’s front lawn on the edge of the woods. A cobblestone path would lead him to that lawn and to the front door of his boyhood summer home. To his right, a second path—a set of steps of logs and dirt—would lead him down to the lakeside. He was unsure as of yet which path to take. Sense would have him walk into the house, put down his keys, and check his mother’s messages. But sensibility would have him walk toward the lake, allow him to recall his memories as a child, when he would roast weenies and marshmallows over the campfire and slip out solo in his family’s wooden canoe to discover new frontiers along the embankments of Spanaway Lake.
He gazed at his hand, still on the key, still in the ignition switch. This was indecision. Whether to believe his mother or whether to believe Dr. Swensen. His uncertainty was undoing him again.
He pulled out the key and opened the door. As he walked behind the rented vehicle, he smiled as he eyed the trunk.
The luggage could wait.
He stepped onto the lake path, looking at the muddy steps so as not to slip. As a child he had run down these steps, whether in rain or in sun, having fallen more than once. Childhood anticipation. Now his steps down this trail served more for recollection than for anticipation. There seemed so little now for him to anticipate. There was just one thing left—to seek some understanding through the theory of strings. It all seemed so simple: all elements, all electrons, neutrinos, and quarks consisting solely of strings whose vibrational patterns determine their mass and energy. A beautiful, simple, unified theory that, once all equations are determined and the final answer solved, will allow humankind to take a deep breath, sit back, and say, “Okay, now we understand. There is nothing left to solve. And so we have become finite at last.”
His drive to find meaning had become subdued with his fear of actually finding it; as Buddha would say, to reach a stage of nirvana where you become nothing. He feared nothingness, finiteness. And so he dwelled on his uncertainty.
He had completed the forty-two steps without realizing he was now standing near the lake. His mother’s home was at the northernmost side, where the water narrowed to a hundred-foot gap from shore to shore. As a child, Tom would gauge how tall he had grown by seeing how far he could walk out into the lake without his mouth going under the surface. By the age of fifteen he could walk across the narrow end without having to swim, his feet touching the muddy-rock bottom all the way.
He looked at the rotting wooden bulkhead, recalling those days where he would catch polliwogs as they would swim along this embankment. He wished now to take off his clothes and step off the bulkhead, walking deeper and deeper into the water, until he stood in the middle of the lake, thereby allowing him to look to his left and see the narrows where the lake fed into the lagoon, and also to his right where the water widened into a true lake just beyond Enchanted Isle. But then, his wish would be unresolved as the lake was too cold this late in autumn.
Instead, he peered across the lake, at wooded Spanaway Park, at the blackberry bushes that lined the eastern shore and the firs that towered behind them. There he saw something new: a wooden bench for two that had been placed on a narrow, sandy bar between the bushes. So often he had spied on the musings of those playing and walking in the park. Now that bench allowed others to sit and spy upon those at his mother’s home.
No one sits on that bench in this spacetime, and yet, during another spacetime, perhaps coordinates of just thirty minutes ago, someone sat there while my own coordinates were fifteen miles away, not one hundred yards, he thought. And forty-eight hours ago, Mom existed in two spacetimes, that of now in Spanaway and that of her past. Is that so ridiculous, to presently exist in two separate spacetimes? How many dimensions are possible?
He raised his eyes above the Douglas firs, into the sky, seeing the gray clouds consuming the heavens, disturbing him because he could not penetrate them. He wished to see ten light-years away. For then he could see Ken’s existence.
Ashamed, he looked down at the clouds reflected in the still waters. He understood his mother living her memories. Maude Flaherty had lived a full, great, memorable life. And now at eighty-four and relegated to this quiet community so far from the happenings of the world, what was there for her to anticipate, for her to dream? Tom could understand why she would often return to her past. But he could not forgive himself for doing so—he, one of the world’s most acknowledged physicists and string theorists. He was expected to continue to discover, to announce breakthroughs in the meaning of existence. And yet, instead, he thought too much of what once was.
He no longer wished to look upon this spacetime, upon this quiet, still lake, upon the firs and their branches rustling in the wind. This was a dead world.
His new wish came suddenly with a ringing in his coat pocket. He had all but forgotten his connection to the outside world.
He pulled out his cell phone. “Hello.”
“Tom! Sorry to bother you at this time. How’s your mother?”
He felt refreshed to hear the voice of his friend and colleague, Dr. James T. Atwood, fellow Rhodes scholar and physics professor at Caltech.
“She’s fine, Jim. Thanks. In fact, she’s probably of more sound mind and body than most people I know. But just my opinion. Certainly not her doctor’s.”
“Well, everything is relative.”
Tom nodded with a smile, realizing how Jim used that phrase much too often.
“At least, the last time I checked it was,” Jim continued, “which is one reason I’m calling. I just wanted to let you know that Branson and his team are publishing their findings in Science.”
“On light speed?”
“Yeah. It’s decelerating all right.”
Again Tom nodded. And so it is then. The speed of light is now slower than it has been in the past, which then means, if we follow Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, mass and energy must also be changing, or at least one or the other. Either mass is increasing or energy is decreasing. And if we follow the concept of string theory, then the vibrations of every molecular, two-dimensional string is changing. And so, there are many more equations, millions of them in fact, to conceive.
“Well then….” Tom responded. “I think we’ve got some work to do.”
“Yeah. Right. So when do you think you’re coming back?”
“Soon, Jim. Very soon. Perhaps in a few days.”
“Great! I’m getting Branson’s models. I’ll download them on Gluon,” Jim said, referring to Caltech’s supercomputer named after the strong-force particle. “Ah, Tom! So many variables. Maybe we should just quit our jobs and become accountants. I’d think we’d be pretty good at that.”
Tom laughed, his mind suddenly feeling less heavy knowing he had something to discover.
“You may be right, Jim. For once I’m looking forward to returning home and working on the details.”
“All righty then. Cubiclization begins in three days?”
“Give or take a day,” Tom replied, understanding the lingo of his comrade: to be caught up in your work, to never leave your small cubicle, even though all the professors had comfortable—if not tidy—offices.
As he pushed the end button on his cell phone and snapped the cover closed, he saw a bald eagle dive from the sky, its talons cocked as it skimmed the lake’s surface and returned upward with a perch wrapped in its claws. Tom breathed deeply, his nostrils stinging from the cool air, pausing only a moment, determining such a sight was a fitting end to his look back upon the lake.
He turned around to face those steps again. Rising above him was his mother’s three-story wooden home, now a dirty white except for the dark green ivy that crisscrossed up to the large bay window on the second level. He looked at his boyhood summer home just for a moment, then again concentrated on those muddy steps as he ascended.
If the speed of light—always considered a constant until now—truly was decelerating, what would that mean regarding the existence of time? Time then also must be slowing. Since we live in our own spacetime, we are unable to see that it is slowing, but if an omniscient traveler seeing him from another spacetime had watched him looking over the lake, he would have seen that Tom had pondered much longer than Tom himself would have realized.
Of course, Branson’s studies only show a very minute deceleration of light, but will the deceleration continue until some day, millennia from now, light will be moving at only half the speed it is now? And then perhaps in even more millennia, a quarter of the speed, until over endless time, light barely moves at all, and so then, there is barely the existence of time, or of space. One deep black hole. The combining of all matter and energy into one non-dimensional point. Entropy. The finite. Nothingness. Or is it…everythingness? Everything becoming one.
He stepped faster, now anticipating the work to be done. But first take out his luggage. Prepare the house for his mother’s return tomorrow. Check her messages.
He opened the trunk and pulled out only his small suitcase and his carry-on bag, leaving the larger suitcase in the car. He walked along the cobblestone steps to the front door. Maude did not need to provide him with a key. He always had it on his key ring, even in Pasadena.
The front door opened into her kitchen. He would have to pass her kitchen and dining room in this long and narrow main floor, where nearly all the rooms had views of the lake.
He stopped momentarily to smile at the intricate setting for six on her dining table, which was covered by a white tablecloth with laced edges. She always displayed her finest china and silverware, each piece gleaming as though having just been polished. And the lace curtains—pulled back with rings to present the lake view—now seemed so brilliant white, as though they had just been dry-cleaned. Despite her aloneness, Maude kept an impeccable home, as if she was always expecting guests.
He passed through the dining room and walked into the living room. Now the home spread out on each side, creating a cavernous but cozy space. It was a room filled with wonderful things big and small. The first item to catch one’s eye was the immense grandfather clock, made of an earthy oak with an ivory face and a brass pendulum polished so smooth that it reflected all light in the room. On the room’s shelves and in its glass cabinets lay innumerable trinkets from Maude’s travels—each a tale in itself. Tom had either experienced or had been told by his mother most of these tales, although there still were a few stories left to be told.
As far as the furniture, Maude had kept up with the changes of style, all except for an old, overstuffed forest-green chair that still lay in the coziest corner just to the left of the huge bay window. This had been the favorite chair of her husband, Patrick Llewellyn Flaherty, who had passed away eighteen years ago. Like her many trinkets, this too had become a keepsake.
Tom had caught himself staring at that chair. Again, he internally chastised himself. He placed down his bags and looked past the living room and into the small hallway that led to the bathroom, back bedrooms, and stairway. There, below the brass wall-mounted barometer that had so intrigued him as a child was a small table holding only a telephone, an answering machine, and a small notepad and pen. He looked down at the machine and noticed a light flashing and a small screen displaying the numeral “1.”
Following his mother’s request, he pressed a button to play the message.
“Hello…Tom? It’s Ellen down the street. I’ve called Maude in the hospital, and she said you would be staying at her house tonight. Anyway, please call me when you get in. 537-2202. Have you checked her refrigerator? If there’s nothing to eat, I’m baking a roast. Would you like to come over for dinner? Or I can bring you something—”
As Tom listened, musing at Ellen’s motherliness, the telephone rang.
“—it would be nice to hear from you. What did the doctor say? I’m just so—”
“How do I turn this thing off?” Tom asked himself.
He lifted up the receiver but did not provide a greeting, still trying to determine how to work the answering machine.
“Hello, is this the home of Maude Flaherty?” he heard a woman’s voice over the receiver.
“Yes. Just one moment. I’m sorry. I’m trying to figure out how to turn off this answering machine,” Tom said, somewhat annoyed at his inability to rid himself of Ellen’s voice.
“—I just am glad Maude’s coming home tomorrow. Anyway, I’ve probably been talking much too long—”
Her voice ended as he located the right button. Now he could pay full attention to the woman on the phone.
“I’m sorry. Maude is not here today. This is her son, Tom. May I leave a message?”
“Professor Flaherty?”
It was a voice he had heard before. A slight French accent.
“Yes?”
“This is Paulette DeVries, Anna Yevushenko’s daughter. I’ve been trying to reach Maude as…I have some sad news.”
Tom did not respond.
“Professor Flaherty…are you there? Hello…. Hello.”
His face reflected in the two rounded glass panes of the barometer, his eyes staring into that instrument but seeing no hands or numbers.
Light slowing. Time eliminating. Energy decreasing. All becoming nothingness. All becoming one. Anna and Maude connecting by unknown physics, unknown dimensions. Oneness.
It is all too brilliant. Too wonderful.
It is…joy!
chapter 5
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stare rapt in awe, is as good as dead.
—Albert Einstein
Maude stared at the meatloaf and mashed potatoes served in a deep round, pink plastic dish, which in turn was set on a faux-wood veneer tray table that rolled over her bed. She marveled at the artificiality of it all, even the mashed potatoes, which she reasoned had once been white flakes, margarine, and some dairy-like liquid before being whipped into this end product. What interested her even more was the coincidence of this meal. It appeared that every time she was a guest at St. Joseph’s Hospital she was served meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
The potatoes had more lumps in them then, and they were served in a metal tray with three compartments, just like a TV dinner. It had been an easy birth, two weeks early, and yet her child still had weighed eight pounds, three ounces. Again a Caesarean birth had been planned, but when the moment had come, it became unnecessary. The baby slid out simply, nearly painlessly.
∞
Does birth become easier, less painful with each new baby? But then, when I looked into his eyes…ah, if I could just see his eyes again…gray, but I know they will be brilliant blue. I can see the boy, the man he will become. So full of wonder. Such excitement I saw from him, that he was out of me now and into this world. This big, wide wonderful world! He is such kin to me!
And look at me, playing with these potatoes, twirling them around on my fork. Now look at this lump. Honestly! I know it’s a hospital, but even they should know how to get the lumps out of mashed potatoes.
A tapping on my door. I look up from my meal, my mind envisioning Tommy’s eyes again. Instead it is a nun in full habit.
“Hello, dear,” the nun says, walking into my room. “Do you wish to receive the Holy Eucharist?” She looks down at my plate. “Oh….I’m sorry. You certainly are eating that dinner a bit early. It’s only seven in the morning.”
“I’ve just delivered…” she can see me glowing, “a beautiful child. And I’ve just moved to this room famished. They said they could heat up last night’s dinner.”
“My dear! How long ago did you deliver? How in the world do you have the energy to eat so soon?”
I shake my head, wondering the same. I feel too elated to be tired. I don’t understand; I had not felt this way until the delivery. How so? What is it in my child that has connected with me?
“Sister, it was like I had just finished writing a poem or painting a picture. It was not something hard like a birth. I can’t tell you why. I can’t understand it myself.”
The nun walks toward my bed. She offers her aged, liver-spotted hand and places it in mine. I look at her face, a warm oval surrounded with black and white extended down to the floor. Her eyes are gray, like my son’s, but surrounded by crescent wrinkles both above and below, her eyes tucked back into those wrinkles like concentric circles, but even so, those eyes piercing and true.
“These are times to cherish, my dear,” she says. “Your words have allowed me to start my day with joy and peace, revering the Lord’s works. There’s nothing closer to God than the love between a mother and her child. Is this your first?”
I shake my head. I look away from her, down at the blanket tucked and folded tight against my legs. Ashamed. I am so ashamed.
“Dear, did you…lose the first?”
“No, Sister. She is two years old now. It’s just…” I look up into her concerned eyes, piercing through those concentric layers, “I have never loved my daughter.”
I think back to Katie’s birth. Again mashed potatoes. Lumpier than even now. And I was so angry to think I had to bear such pain, and to be cut just to bring in a life I had never wanted in the first place. And then to have her tie me to my home, to one place on this world. She had been a mistake. My husband’s Catholicism overwhelming his judgment, allowing no means of birth control except—ah—the rhythm method, and even that is spurned by the Church. As soon as I had known of my pregnancy I told Patrick there was no way this baby would keep me down. We would get a full-time nanny. Let her deal with this child!
And then, when I delivered Katie, she came out crying and never stopped. Those pounding, nagging bursts! Not like Tommy here. The nurse said she has never heard a quieter newborn. Why is this? Is there something that they know as they enter this world about how I feel? Have I created who they are based on my emotions?
But I had not expected to feel what I do for my son. He is different. He is an essence of his own, while Katie is the anger I have felt, and so, I am ashamed.
“My dear, you can’t mean that,” the nun speaks.
She holds my hand tighter. I look down at her thin, gray hand, having forgotten it had been wrapped in mine.
“You cannot compare your son and your daughter, how they are, how you feel for them,” she continues. “Instead, you must treat each as an individual, as another marvel of God’s tapestry, of His varied handiwork.”
I nod to her words, wondering whether to attempt a tear. My reaction is so disingenuous. This nun doesn’t understand how I feel. She refuses to believe there’s such malevolence in someone who loves her newborn so much. I wish to see how her expression would change when I state flatly that I never breast-fed my daughter, that a wet nurse was hired, that I have seen Katie no more than six months these past two years as I have gone to Europe twice, the Soviet Union once, and spent an extended two months in Africa, not so much to see the world once again but to escape a new family that has been forced upon me.
“Thank you, Sister. I feel much better now,” I say instead. “Will you be passing the nursery? Will you see how soon I can have my son by me? Thomas Flaherty is his name.”
“Ah, and a good Irish name at that,” the nun replies. “I will see to it.” She releases my hand and stands up. “So I must be on my rounds. ’Tis the time of day that I provide the Holy Eucharist to our guests. I mustn’t drag here too long. If you’re through with your meal, I can come back with the Host in an hour if you wish.”
“Oh yes, Sister. I would appreciate that.”
She gives me a wink, closing the final concentric circle. I nod back as she leaves.
And so in an hour a small round wafer will redeem me.
I look at the unfinished meal. I had been so hungry before, and now my shame has overwhelmed me. I roll the dinner tray table away from my bed and lie back on the two pillows propped against the headboard. I think of how Patrick looked as he appeared in the room right after the delivery. Tommy was in my arms. When Patrick first approached, his eyes were down at our son, a faint smile to his lips. I’m so glad he has finally removed that mustache. But then he looked up to see me, and oh, he must have seen my emotions because his whole features changed, his eyes brightening, his cheeks rising in merriment. He felt such joy, I could see, as though my feelings for this child have brought me back to this family we have created, as though Tommy has completed the picture. And could that be true? Patrick knew from the day he met me that I would never compromise my independence. But with Katie I had, and I hated both him and her for that. Divorce was never an option to him, but I have thought of it plenty of times. But then, even I am affected by the reactions of this society. Could there be anything more evil than a woman who abandons her husband and child?
Only Anna could understand. Those three weeks after Katie’s birth, when I visited her in Amsterdam alone, without Patrick, Anna had reminded me of the day I presented her with Mark Twain’s books. She then told me she had read The Mysterious Stranger many times through.
“I cannot believe in such an idea that I am the only one who exists, and that all individuals I have been in contact with I have created, or rather, are figments of my imagination,” Anna said to me. “But there is some truth in what this novel has to offer.”
“And what is that?”
“That we do create the world we live in…or more so, we create the lives we live.”
To speak of such things over a reefer in the basement of an Amsterdam coffee shop. I had experimented much just after Katie’s birth. Anna’s words rang so true then. There is free will in this world, and so it is we then that create our own barriers—not some omnipotent fate.
A shadow appears in the doorway, and then…there he is! Tommy, held in the arms of a young nurse.
“I can’t believe this baby!” the nurse exclaims. “He doesn’t cry! We were concerned at first, but…I think it’s just his nature.”
“Oh, thank you! Thank you!” I exclaim as I reach out my arms. I’m barely aware that Patrick is following the nurse into the room, as all I can see is this beautiful young baby coming to me, his gray eyes getting bigger and bigger, and then they turn blue. A brilliant blue. My beautiful Tommy.
∞
“Mom? Are you awake? Mom?”
His eyes have become blue and he has become such a brilliant man, and I knew he would. Only…so sad now…if I could bring him back to what he was, to that sense of wonder….
“Mom!”
Maude sat up in her bed, stretching her shoulders, a bit annoyed at her son’s yells.