“Feel what?” she said sitting at the table in her bikini top and a gold hunting horn dangling from a necklace. (He, a French horn player, wrote these details.)
“Don’t you feel this thing inside you,” he said. “This is emotion-driven logic, this feeling of how you want something to be true? How wonderful would the universe be if we could discover this one little thing that tied everything together — phones and door locks? We could unlock our car doors from anywhere! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? When it feels that kind of wonderful, it’s never true.”
To prove it, he used his charm to borrow a server’s cell phone, and left Jessica at the table and went alone to the gravel parking lot and held the phone to Jessica’s Porsche. Behind the restaurant Jessica held the remote keyless fob to her phone (open line to Van Raye) and tried to broadcast its signal over the airwaves. Nothing happened.
“Nope,” Van Raye said on his end of the phone.
Her voice came from the hollowness of cell phone reception: “Are you holding it to the car?”
“Yes, darling.” He blandly turned the phone to the Porsche and smiled at the waitress who looked out the open window of the taco shack to see what he was doing with her phone. Lifting it back to his ear, he said, “Nothing, dear. Sorry.”
He writes that Jessica was angry: “As if it were my fault that she’d believed this thing.”
He hated the term “skeptic,” but he wrote in “There Are Neutrinos in My Hair” that the more we want to believe in something, the unlikelier it is to be true.
Back eating tacos behind the restaurant, Van Raye took Jessica’s keys off the table and said, “But watch this.” He held it up in the air, pushed the button. He showed her that it was still out of range, her car silent.
“Now,” he said, “put it under your chin like this.” He put the fob beneath his chin in the V of his jawbone and pushed the button. When the wind rested, when the waves were in lull, Van Raye and Jessica could hear a beep coming from her car in the parking lot each time he pushed the button. She wanted to try, pushed it into the tender spot beneath her jaw. Her Porsche beeped and then beeped again.
“Your body is an antennae,” he said to her.
She was underwhelmed, he wrote.
“What’s the difference,” she asked, “in believing this will work, and my idea. . besides the fact one of them was my idea and one was yours?”
“My idea isn’t very grand. It’s not something I felt I wanted to believe in, the way a part of us wants to believe in the supernatural or horoscopes. I could feel how much you wanted to believe that the universe is built like that. Always be suspicious of what you feel yourself wanting to believe. Couldn’t you feel your imagination being played with? I actually felt myself wanting to believe in the idea too.
“Professor Marcello Truzzi said it best: ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’ My idea just uses your whole body as an antenna,” he said. “Of course, some bodies are better than others.”
If you watch the archived video of him reading this essay that night in the auditorium, you’ll be able to distinguish the exact moment when he saw Ruth Christmas.
He noted this person in the audience, a woman in an oversized puffy coat, and he did think she was a homeless person who’d wandered in to eat the free food.
He was wrapping up the reading, “The universe itself is a wonder but often completely unfascinating to ordinary people, and therefore they want to believe in little green men, monsters, or God. .”
Here, in the video, he does a double take, adjusts his glasses with his knuckle.
He said she mouthed words at him, holding an unlit cigarette beside her head and he recognized Ruth Christmas. Her gorgeous dark hair was gone.
Van Raye stopped the reading midsentence and tried to hear what she was saying. Here was his most recent ex-wife.
“I’m sorry, darling?” he asked.
Annoyed, she spoke louder from the thin audience, “I have something for you.” There was percolating from the coffee boiler in back, and the shifting of the few people in the audience to see who was interrupting.
Van Raye cleared his throat. “Wonderful,” he mumbled.
He found the place in the book and wrapped up, “Why do human beings find such outrageous beliefs comforting? Can they not find satisfaction in reality? Has reality not served them well? Why isn’t the neutrino, which can pass through matter, not as exciting as a ghost?”
CHAPTER 19
To write this book, I have researched websites and personal blogs of people who attended some of the public events of his book tour, and I have noticed that quite a few of the women posing with him have their hands on his stomach.
The reception at his university that night Ruth showed up was in a room adorned with portraits of dead university presidents. He signed all twelve books presented to him in the same way:
On the night
of the noisy coffee maker.
Van Raye
Ruth, who sat at a table by herself, watched people posing with him, and she said she felt at ease for the first time since she’d returned to Earth, watching him with his arm curled around the book, trying to pay attention to the people he was signing for, but his eyes kept finding her, her fake smoking an unlit cigarette.
When the caterers were clearing away the one table of food, he went to her and stood without speaking.
She said, “Not a big crowd, huh? It’s a sad thing when people no longer find you interesting. If only they knew what you’ve found.”
“Let’s keep quiet, shall we? When did you get back?” He straightened his posture and asked the bartender for a beer, got it and guided her away. He swigged from his Heineken and smiled at a couple with their coats over their arms, wanting to talk to the author before they left, but he turned his back to them.
“This is my home,” Ruth said. She touched her head as though she could fix the stubble of hair. “What? You don’t want to see me?”
“I didn’t say that.” A server came and put a new Heineken on the table and took the empty bottle from Van Raye.
“Should you be doing that?” she asked, pointing to the beer.
“You knew all along I didn’t have a problem.”
Three years ago he’d shown up to a department meeting with ice cubes in a glass of Guinness beer. When asked by the chairman what he was drinking, Van Raye had told him it was iced coffee. The department had formed an intervention (not including Ruth who was training in Houston) and gave him the ultimatum that it was AA or face serious reprimands. AA seemed like such a commitment that Van Raye had quit drinking, and in the last several years he’d gotten into the habit of not drinking, and he’d kept on not drinking until now.
Now he tried to look at Ruth, put the Heineken bottle to his lips. He’d forgotten the perfect click a Heineken bottle makes when it touches your incisors. No other beer bottle is made so perfect, he thought. Also the hissing foam in the mouth. That sounded like a large audience applauding. He took swigs just to hear applause.
He felt electricity when he touched the sleeve of Ruth’s insulated parka as he swallowed and thought about her body beneath it. He remembered her strong legs and her daringness in bed, the way she would hop around. Now she stank a little.
“Would you like to go back to my place?” he asked.
“I was surprised to find that it was still your place.”
“It’s still my house,” he said. “Barely. Is that yours?” He pointed at the radio in the chair beside her.