Weak in comparison to dr.., p.31
Weak in Comparison to Dreams, page 31
— You could hire someone to replace me.
— That’s not a problem. We can even hire one of your interns. We’ll keep your things here in the back of the lab.
— You know, I said, leaning my chair back and pretending to think, what I would really like is a five-year hiatus contract.
— I don’t know anything about those. But if that’s what you want, we can make it happen.
— Wait, I said. I know what I want. I want to leave.
Her hands paused on her thighs.
— In that case, we can get Legal to draw up the papers. We could present them at the next department meeting, or in the fall, whenever you have prospects. You’d want to review the city’s terms. Osler’s Pensions and Benefits are good people. We had someone who used them a couple years ago.
— I mean I want to leave now. Permanently.
She looked at me with an expression intended to convey sadness and gravity.
— Well, if you do that, you’ll lose a lot, and the balance will be moved into a locked-in retirement account. No one is asking you—
— Now. I want to leave now.
— Okay. In that case, I can only say I am sorry. We wish you well.
— No, you don’t.
She stared at me with a flat expression. She seemed to be looking at a point somewhere inside my skull, where the centers of rational thinking are supposed to be.
Then she stood up and walked out, closing the door quietly but quickly.
It’ll be easy for them, I thought. They’ll find someone to teach the summer lab. I’ll recommend Vipesh. It will take them a while to advertise my position, but by September they’ll have a permanent replacement for me. By Christmas, no one will think of me anymore.
I went back to the book.
“Mercury,” Wolfram wrote, “has the most interesting path of any planet. If you go out immediately after sunset, you may see it somewhere near where the sun has gone down, or if you go out before sunrise you may see it a couple of minutes before the sky becomes too bright. Mercury will appear as a faint dot in the sky, just above the horizon. If you watch day by day, you will see that Mercury flies around the setting sun like a dazed moth.
“Whenever the weather permits me, I go out at dusk or dawn to observe Mercury. It is satisfying to see the pinprick of light exactly where I have calculated it should be. That is the joy of astronomy: knowing that objects in the heavens move according to laws. Such objects are predictable even though they are quite complex.”
I imagined Wolfram, twenty-five or so, in his robe, standing in his back garden with his notebook in hand. He has stepped out just before sunrise to try to spot Mercury. It is the first of January. His slippers crunch in the frost. According to his calculations, Mercury should be above the sun, just where he has drawn the fletching of the arrow. He has a good chance of seeing it. And sure enough, just above the Grünewald, there is the little point of white light, pinned motionless to the brightening sky. He opens his notebook and writes the time with a hard, sharp pencil.
On the other side of Berlin, on that same morning, Monika is getting up, putting on her old coat and blue scarf, stuffing a felt blanket in a bag, preparing to go out and watch the hyena perform its mathematically predictable figure eights.
At that same moment, a half-minute before sunrise on the first of January, 1937, out at the zoo, the hyena is lying in its box. It doesn’t feel like pacing yet. It gazes, without thought, out past its bars. There, in the thin winter woods, it sees a spot of light, hanging like a bright spider in a mesh of bare branches.
Wolfram’s drawings showed the sun’s figure eight with the mad spinning paths of Mercury flying around it. “These patterns have never been graphed before,” he wrote. “See how beautiful they are, the hidden geometry of the heavens.”
“For several years I have been able to spend considerable time on these calculations. Unfortunately, leisure is a luxury that the poor cannot afford. Next year, I begin full-time work at the Potsdam Observatory, and I doubt I will be able to continue these calculations in future.”
I closed the book.
I had negotiated my own firing, so there was no need to finish the day’s work, or even clean up. I had a last look at the three suns,
and then I put on my coat and left the building. I intended to get a hamburger and go home, but instead I turned in the parking lot and walked over to the physical plant. Normally I only went there to get water samples. There were many parts of the building I’d never seen. For some reason I wanted to have a look before I went away for good.
Inside, the walls were cinder block, painted enamel white and lit by banks of low-energy fluorescent lights under milk plastic covers. The place was deserted except for the guard’s station and the maintenance people in front. A worker had left a stepladder in a hallway. Some panels of the drop ceiling had been removed and were stacked against one wall. I took a look around, then climbed the ladder and stuck my head up through the opening. It was dark up there. Light filtered upward through seams in the drop ceiling. Aluminum suspension rods hung all around like stalactites. The space was draped with that tired kind of cobweb that hangs down and just ends. Darkness stretched away in front of me. I turned carefully on the ladder and looked in the other direction. Above me the suspension rods were bolted into the concrete ceiling with L-shaped brackets. The kind of thing no one ever notices. Even the people who installed them probably barely paid attention to what they were doing.
For a few minutes I stood there, wobbling on the ladder, thinking of those movies where people try to hide up above a drop ceiling and how it never works because it’s already infested with aliens, or it works at first, and then the panels break and they fall down right in front of the monster, or right onto a conference table. I climbed down and walked through to the engineering area. In a basement corridor I found a Coke machine and bought a drink I didn’t really want. I tried the doors as I went. Several opened; they were storage rooms stacked with wooden crates. One door opened to the outside, and I found myself on Lorck.
It had gotten dark. I walked on a gravel drainage strip next to the high brick wall of the physical plant. On that side the building reminded me of a high wall around a prison. Then came Waterworks Place, the one-track road that led to the parking lot. I’d walked or driven down there every workday for decades. I looked right as I passed it, watching the road go by like in a movie. At the end was the bank of trees that obscured the Everal river. A sight I’d seen hundreds of times and enjoyed just a little each time. I realized it reminded me of a row of trees in the back yard of the house where I grew up. Seeing that screen of trees, and not the river, had made me feel a little at home each day I came to work, but the thought had never quite surfaced. I wondered why I’d finally made the connection just as I was leaving for good, when I would probably never see the department, or those trees, again. But I was no longer that interested in understanding myself. I was content to let things be, as they wanted to be. Reasoning is something you do when you think you can fix yourself, or the world.
Walking down Lorck, I felt a sort of breathless relief, like sky divers must experience after they take that first step off the plane. I had finally lost sight of my path. As I walked I kept repeating to myself: now all I have to do is fall well.
Eleventh Dream
It was morning. The long night of burning had passed. Fires were scattered like salt across the charred land. A mournful parade of flames snaked up a hillside. Other fires rested, exhausted, by a road.
Fitful fires gathered like birds and foraged in the stubble, flapping and pecking at the dirt. Soon there would be nothing left for them to eat.
I stepped over flames the way you might step over a nest of ants.
In some places trees had survived. Their trunks were charred, but they kept their needles. Low fires rolled along the ground, consuming the last leaves and twigs.
Some trees had burned almost to the ground. Stumps continued to spout flames, like volcanic vents.
Twigs crackled and small leaves shattered. The forest floor was alive. The ground was hot.
The stumps were like furnaces, roaring. As if the fire had gone underground, leaving the world to cool.
Later there were fewer fires. They got weaker. They hid. The ones that remained seemed shy, embarrassed at what they’d done.
By the afternoon the fires were out. Resinous pines hissed and smoked black like chimneys. Gray smoke drifted tentatively through the wrecked forests.
With the flames gone, the land grew cold.
The remains of the forest settled. Charred branches collapsed into charcoal and powder. Burst and split bark collapsed.
Then it was quiet at last.
12
Dromomania
For two months I sat around the apartment, doing I suppose what many millions of unattached people do, watching TV that I forgot minutes after I’d watched it, browsing the internet, browsing in my refrigerator, watching people meander down the street, wondering if some were as purposeless as I was, drowsing in bed, drowsing on the couch, sleeping by the window, slumbering sitting up.
My new life started abruptly. That day I had spent the morning throwing out some remaining pots and silverware, toiletries, and bedding. The bedroom was a mess, because I had been disassembling the Venetian blinds, which turned out to be made of prefabricated rails and slats that had to be individually prized apart.
I emptied my computer bag so I could discard things I no longer needed. My Water Department ID, a wallet full of loyalty cards, department paperwork, a dozen pens, an address book of municipal contacts, my phone. Five large black garbage bags went down to the skip along with two suitcases full of clothes.
I paced the almost empty apartment. In the living room I walked past the bookcase to the sofa, then to the north-facing window. That was my habitual path through the living room, year in year out. I went back to the sofa. Why always take the same routes around the furniture? For that matter why always walk around furniture? Suddenly I turned and jumped over a corner of the coffee table.
That felt good. Why not jump completely over the coffee table?
I came around again, picked up some speed, and leapt awkwardly over the table. I had to pivot to avoid crashing into the Cather Street window, marked number 9 at the top of the floor plan of the apartment, and that adjustment sent me careening past the television and television stand, numbered 6 (6a).
I stood still, between the couch and the bookshelf, at point 23.
Then I made a sudden run and jumped over the middle of the coffee table.
Around and around and around I ran, like a monkey in a zoo, like a hyena, a fox, an otter, a monkey, a panther, like any demented animal anywhere.
I had a feeling stopping wouldn’t be a good idea, because then I’d feel stupid. Why do caged animals pace? Because, like Owole, if they stopped, they’d see their cages clearly, they’d see their lives.
Furniture wheeled around me. Tables, bookshelves, and televisions became obstacles, useless and annoying like those fake rocks and plastic plants they put in the animals’ cages. Each time I came to the coffee table I jumped over it, turned, and jumped again, because why not? Once I turned and wheeled the other way and nearly tipped over the standing lamp, labeled number 11. At the last second I scooted behind it and jumped over the entire seat of the couch, marked number 4.
I counted my steps, because that’s what Monika did. From the coffee table to the lamp, three. From there to the couch, two plus a stutter step. I put my hand on the wall at the point X to avoid hitting the standing lamp. I figured out how to duck behind it, push against the wall with my left hand, and emerge with enough spring in my step to come at the television, labeled number 6 (6a), with sufficient speed to make it less than an entirely foregone conclusion that I would be able to turn three-quarters of the way around without falling onto the coffee table, labeled 1.
I fell several times, but I got up quickly.
Then I devised a fail-safe: if I came over the couch too quickly, I let myself bash into the bookshelves, labeled 5 (5a), and then I set off for the coffee table, labeled 1, and jumped it. But if I emerged from behind the lamp, labeled 11, more slowly, I turned and headed back, over the empty space in the center of the room, by the number 19, and ducked behind the lamp. The two alternatives kept me occupied for several minutes: either come out from behind the lamp quickly, bash into the stacked bookshelves and careen over to the coffee table, or come out at a moderate speed, in which case pivot and return.
Even when I was behind the lamp, my left hand pressed against the wall, the pressure on the wall increasing as I ran the last half-step toward it, my head and shoulders turning to catch sight of the sofa, still I didn’t know which of the two trajectories I’d take. Sometimes I ricocheted off the bookshelf like a pinball bouncing off one of those spring-loaded bumpers. Other times I turned as if someone had caught my eye, and returned to the lamp as if it was an old friend.
I don’t know exactly how long I did this. That is just why animals pace, so they fail to feel time passing.
The room smeared out of focus. It felt safe that way. I was moving too fast to read the plastic wall clock. One time I thought I saw both hands pointing down, 6:30, but on the next round I was sure it said ten minutes to midnight. The third time I looked the hands seemed to be spinning madly.
I chose a different route, from the coffee table, where I had been ignoring a bowl of cashews, just as frantic zoo animals ignore the food that is supposed to distract them from whatever psychosis has possessed them, to the room’s small west-facing window, labeled number 13. I performed a classic figure eight. It was awkward to race such a tight course. I had to incline my body toward the middle of the figure eight.
The room became soft. The walls liquefied. The room’s four corners seemed far away. Each time I got to the lower end of the figure eight loop, I glimpsed the moon outside the small window, labeled 13. It was in the middle of an empty sky, like it usually is.
Then suddenly, again without thinking, I took two long steps over to the Cather Street window and began another figure eight, a slower one that included an optional lean over the coffee table to get a couple of cashews, then a step directly into the corner, labeled 18, and a half-second pause at the window. When I looked out the window I pressed my left shoulder and half my chest against the pane. The new route felt like a sham. It was what any distracted person might do, eating nuts and staring out the window. Any slower and I’d be back in my normal life, and I no longer knew what normal life was.
I stumbled again and discovered that it was possible to make a very tight loop right in the corner, labeled 18. It was dusty there, and I couldn’t turn comfortably, because I was crowded into a foot of space between the corner and the television and television stand, numbered 6 (6a). A couple of times my foot got jammed in, right at the spot labeled X. That was a pleasant feeling. I pushed hard on the walls and the bottom of the television stand. Big cats turn in tiny spaces. Maybe it gives them pleasure to force themselves into areas even smaller than their cages. Squeezing into the corner made me feel petulant, like a child that wants to show its parents it’s not happy, so it pushes itself into a box.
If I were a child having a tantrum, I would eventually tire out, and that would be good because my parents would comfort me and soon we’d be eating lunch and watching TV. If I were an animal pacing, I would try to keep going until I could fall into an instant deep sleep, in order not to see my life. If I were an automaton, I would go until my battery ran down, and then I would simply turn off. I couldn’t stop because I wasn’t any of those things.
I ran frantically from one place to another. I tried leaping into the three available corners of the room, even the tiny one behind the sofa, labeled number 20 in the upper right of the floor plan. I hit my shin against the coffee table and knocked over the standing lamp, which I then kicked against the wall.
lamp had been. I turned and ran out into the middle of the room, and back to the wall. After one particularly hard collision, I stayed leaning against the wall, breathing hard. I was exhausted and dizzy.
The wall clock was frozen at five minutes and fourteen seconds to twelve. According to my phone it was 2:44 in the morning. The standing lamp was broken. Its arm was snapped at the swivel. There was a depression in the wall, and in the middle of it, two cracks.
The furniture looked fake, and the room was too small.
I put on shoes, grabbed my credit cards and car keys, and headed down to the garage.
It’d always been in the back of my mind that having a car meant I could just go, anywhere, any time. My car, a late-model Toyota, still had that familiar plastic smell. I’d hardly driven it that year. It’d always been in the back of my mind that the car was for driving the wrong way, suddenly, for no reason.
Outside the night air was warm and humid. Cather street was nearly deserted. A lone car, several blocks away, turned off onto a side street. I drove a hundred feet to the intersection with Adams and waited at the red light.
I wanted to drive, but I didn’t want to decide where I was going. I needed someone to give me directions. There was change in the drinks well. I could flip those coins to determine where I’d go. I had the beaver nickel, a couple of reindeer quarters, and a dozen maple leaf pennies. But I didn’t want to make up the rules, I needed them to come from someplace else.
The light turned green. No one was behind me.
I typed “random directions” into my phone and found a site that randomizes any list you give it. I wrote “L R S” for left, right, and straight, repeated it seven times, and pressed “randomize.” The website returned my driving directions: R, S, R, S, S, S, L, R, L, S, R, L, R, L, R, L, L, R, S, L, S, S, S, S, R, L, S, L, L, S, R, S, S, L, S, L, R, R, S, L, R, L, L, S, L, R, L, L, S, R, R, L, S, R, L, S, S, S, R, L, S, S, R, S, L, R, L, L, S, L, R, R, S, L, S, S, R, L, S, L, S, L, L, L, R, L, S, S, L, L, R, R, S, R, L, S, R, L, L, S, R, L, S, R, R, R, L, S, , S, S, L, S, L, R, R, R, R, S, L, R, L, L, S, R, L, L, R, L, S, S, R, L, S, S, S, R, L, S, S, R, S, , L, S, S, R, L, S, L, R, S, R, S, S, L, L, S, L, R, L, S, S, R, L, L, S, L, S, L, L, R, L, S, S, L, L, R, R, S, R, L, S, R, L, L, S, L, R, L, S, R, R, L, L, R, L, S, , S, S, L, S, L, R, L, S, R, S, L, R, L, L, S, L, R, L, L, S, R, R, end.
