This place has a real bed, and a real kitchen sink. Jon comes for dinner and teases me about the towels I’ve bought (on sale), the ovenproof dishes I’ve acquired, my shower curtain. “Better Homes and Gardens, eh?” he says. He teases me about the bed, but he likes sleeping in it. He comes to my place, now, more often than I go to his.
My parents sell their house and move up north. My father has left the university and has gone back to research; he’s now head of the Forest Insect Laboratory at Sault Ste. Marie. He says Toronto is getting overpopulated, and also polluted. He says the lower Great Lakes are the world’s largest sewer and that if we knew what was going into the drinking water we would all become alcoholics. As for the air, it’s so full of chemicals we should be wearing gas masks. Up north you can still breathe. My mother was not too happy to leave her garden, but made the best of it: “At least it’s a chance to throw out a lot of that junk in the cellar,” she said. They’ve started another garden in the Soo, although the growing season is shorter. In the summers though they’re mostly on the road, driving from infestation to infestation. There is no shortage of insect life.
I don’t miss my parents. Not yet. Or rather I don’t want to be living with them. I am happy to be left to my own devices, my own messes. I can eat haphazardly now, snack on junk food and takeouts without worrying about balanced meals, go to bed when I like, let my dirty laundry rot, neglect the dishes. I get a promotion. After a time I move to the art department of a publishing company, where I design book covers. At night, when Jon is not there, I paint. Sometimes I forget to go to bed, and find that it has become dawn and I have to change into my work clothes and go to work. I am groggy on those days, and have trouble hearing what is said to me; but nobody seems to notice. I get postcards and the occasional short letter from my mother, sent from places like Duluth and Kapuskasing. She says the roads are getting too crowded. “Too many trailers,” she says. I reply with news about my job, my apartment, and the weather. I don’t mention Jon, because there is no news. News would be something definite and respectable, such as an engagement. My brother Stephen is here and there. He has become more taciturn: he too now communicates by postcard. One comes from Germany, with a man in short leather pants on it and the message: Great particle accelerator; one from Nevada, with a cactus and the note, Interesting life forms. He goes to Bolivia on what I suppose to be a holiday, and sends a cigar-smoking woman in a high-crowned hat: Excellent butterflies. Hope you are well. At one point he gets married, which is announced by a postcard from San Francisco, with the Golden Gate Bridge and a sunset on it, and, Got married. Annette sends regards. This is all I hear about it until several years later, when he sends a postcard of the Statue of Liberty from New York, which says: Got divorced. I assume he has been puzzled by both events, as if they’re not something he’s done himself, on purpose, but things that have happened to him accidentally, like stubbing your toe. I think of him as walking into marriage as into a park, in a foreign country, at night, unaware of the possibilities for damage.
He turns up in Toronto to give a lecture, at a conference, notifying me in advance with a postcard of a statue of Paul Revere, from Boston: Arrive Sun. 12th. My paper is on Mon. See you. I attend the lecture, not because I have high hopes for it on my own account—the title of it is “The First Picoseconds and the Quest for a Unified Field Theory: Some Minor Speculations”—but because he is my brother. I sit nibbling my fingers as the university auditorium fills with the audience, which is composed largely of men. Most of them look like people I wouldn’t have gone out with in high school. Then my brother comes in, with the man who will introduce him. I haven’t seen my brother for years; he’s thinner, and his hair is beginning to recede. He needs glasses to read his text; I can see them poking out of his breast pocket. Someone has upgraded his wardrobe for him and he’s wearing a suit and tie. These alterations don’t make him appear more normal, however, but more anomalous, like a creature from an alien planet disguised in human clothing. He has a look of amazing brilliance, as if at any minute his head will light up and become transparent, disclosing a huge brightly colored brain inside. At the same time he looks rumpled and bewildered, as if he’s just wakened from a pleasant dream to find himself surrounded by Munchkins.
The man introducing my brother says he needs no introduction, then goes on to list the papers he has written, the awards he has won, the contributions he has made. There is clapping, and my brother goes to the podium. He stands in front of a white projection screen, clears his throat, shifts from one foot to the other, puts on his glasses. Now he looks like someone who will turn up, later, on a stamp. He is ill at ease and I am nervous for him. I think he will mumble. But once he begins he is fine.
“When we gaze at the night sky,” he says, “we are looking at fragments of the past. Not only in the sense that the stars as we see them are echoes of events that occurred light-years distant in time and space: everything up there and indeed everything down here is a fossil, a leftover from the first picoseconds of creation, when the universe crystallized out from the primal homogeneous plasma. In the first picosecond, conditions were scarcely imaginable. If we could travel in a time machine back toward this explosive moment, we would find ourselves in a universe replete with energies we do not understand and strangely behaving forces distorted beyond recognition. The farther back we probe, the more extreme these conditions become. Current experimental facilities can take us only a short way along this path. Beyond that point, theory is our only guide.” After this he continues, in a language that sounds like English but is not, because I can’t understand one word of it.
Luckily there is something to look at. The room darkens and the screen lights up, and there is the universe, or parts of it: the black void punctuated by galaxies and stars, white-hot, blue-hot, red. An arrow moves among them on the screen, searching and finding. Then there are diagrams and strings of numbers, and references to things that everyone here seems to recognize except me. There are, apparently, a great many more dimensions than four.
Murmurs of interest ripple through the room; there are whisperings, the rustling of paper. At the end, when the lights have come on again, my brother returns to language. “But what of the moment beyond the first moment?” he says. “Or does it even make sense to use the word before, since time cannot exist without space and space-time without events and events without matter-energy? But there is something that must have existed before. That something is the theoretical framework, the parameters within which the laws of energy must operate. Judging from the scanty but mounting evidence now available to us, if the universe was created with a fiat lux, that fiat must have been expressed, not in Latin, but in the one truly universal language: mathematics.” This sounds a lot like metaphysics to me, but the men in the audience don’t seem to take it amiss. There is applause.
I go to the reception afterward, which offers the usual university fare: bad sherry, thick tea, cookies out of a package. The numbers men murmur in groups, shake one another’s hands. Among them I feel overly visible, and out of place.
I locate my brother. “That was great,” I say to him.
“Glad you got something out of it,” he says with irony.