8. Unruly trail
‘…whoever calls to his mind… the great image of our mother nature… whoever sees himself in it, and not only himself but a whole kingdom, like a dot made by a very fine pencil; he alone estimates things according to their true proportions.’
Let’s talk about electrons. Wait, don’t skip this bit! Not because Dan’s dizzy little flock might take offence, but because there is magic here. Electrons, as most of us vaguely know and little care, govern chemistry and bind atoms into molecules, and so explain why everything around us — including this page, the air in your lungs and the front tyre of Dan’s motorbike — looks, feels and works the way it does. Most of us could also guess that electrons are what electricity is made of: when you switch on your kettle, electrons in the copper cable start to sway backward and forward, like weeds on the seabed. The electric current shuttles through at the speed of light, but the electrons themselves just sway gently: the current is not them flowing, but them passing on the nudge, like the clicking balls in a Newton’s cradle. Similes drawn from scales we can comprehend.
But what are electrons, really? Are they, really and truly, little shiny balls whirling around in orbits, and occasionally drifting off as though caught in a breeze? Like any other balls, but smaller? Or are they mere eddies of the breeze itself, or ripples in a flowing stream? Or are they, in the end, just equations on a page, mathematical constructs designed to embody a fundamental constant — a suspiciously arbitrary number, the elementary charge, that we are told possesses a profound and magical significance — that it is better not to try visualising at all?
Dan Mock is happy to think of his electrons as all of these things simultaneously. When he first encountered the wave-particle duality, reading ahead of the GCSE syllabus at school, the concept elbowed its way into his tidy brain and started a riot. Not waves, not particles, but both! At the same time. Wow! Everything I — we, everyone — had assumed about the world is fucked! When, soon afterwards, he read about relativity and its consequences, his mouth hung open. Even more fucked. It had been years earlier, at a parents’ evening when he was just eleven, that his science teacher had confidently predicted, ‘Natural Sciences at Cambridge’ (overconfidently, as it turned out — Dan spilled a glass of water down his trousers while waiting to be called for his interview at Peterhouse, and fluffed it). But it was then, at sixteen, learning of these mind-bending wonders, that the passion, the thrill, took root.
Since then his vision of the universe — yes, Dan carries in his mind a vision of the universe — has matured and expanded, but the thrill has remained. His vision encompasses not only observable reality, which is peculiar enough, but also the hinterland of conjecture, of interpretation, at the fringes of science. You can, for example, make the wave-particle duality go away, if it troubles you — but at the cost of accepting countless parallel universes. His job at the synchrotron combines the fantastical — electrons going so fast that time itself runs slow — and the tangible — oversized fridge magnets. Magnets are the tools of his trade. It’s magnets that accelerate the electrons to their barely conceivable, take-it-on-trust speed, magnets that steer and focus them, and magnets that hurl them around those vomit-inducing corners. Dan’s father — another gadget-lover, but one fitted with a pacemaker — isn’t allowed on the guided tour.
Dan didn’t end up at this particular synchrotron by accident. Ever since he specialised it has been his ambition to defy the critics of his arcane field — particle physics — by helping to solve real problems. In recent months he has been working with a team of pharmacologists, interrogating a protein in the DNA of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, seeking a vulnerable spot on which to focus future attacks.
Come on, he urges, as the electrons shine their blinding X-ray torch on the miscreant. Strike a blow for all the consumptive scientists who died before they could make their discoveries, and whose names we have therefore forgotten — and for the million human hosts TB works through every year in its own mindless, pointless battle for survival. It has a ferocious armoury of adaptations, but we, the human species, are the more ingenious.
Are we the more deserving? Dan briefly ponders interspecies ethics as he skips through diffraction images of blurry dots — TB’s Enigma code. Yes: the vicious little monsters have to die.
James F. Saunders thinks about his impending rendezvous with Brenda, and speculates furiously. He hasn’t had sex for seven years. After Becks commanded him, in front of all their friends, to walk out of her life (he pushed back his chair, stood up, strolled out of the restaurant forgetting his jacket and never saw Becks or the jacket again), he had a couple of drunken one-nighters. Then there was a two-month thing with Kate, the librarian with big glasses, who was a decade older and didn’t really want a loser like James. He shudders to think of it.
Cowed by the failure and embarrassment of these ill-matched unions, he became for a while a sullen slave to internet porn. He was living in a shabby house-share in York, supposedly writing his debut novel behind a locked door, but actually clicking through an endless, lonely anatomical slideshow, trying to escape or conjure memories of Becks, perhaps, or just wallowing without intention. The Cormorant, at first so imperious, so electrifying, his paean to mortality, died itself there among the computer viruses and bog roll.
This is one reason he is happy to have no internet connection in his room in Merryman’s Bay. Over the past five years the sexual impulse, which transforms an intelligent man into a slavering beast but which is, ironically, essential to his identity, has slowly faded. He has written about it, read about it, abstracted it, and finally starved and sublimated it almost out of existence. Almost: arousal revisits occasionally at odd or inconvenient times, like a bad back. He usually tries to ignore it.
Now he’s going to meet Brenda. It’s not a date. But he can’t stop thinking about those biceps under the lace — that physicality — and a knowingness, a sexual presence that moved behind the screen of her shyness. He pushes aside his chair to make a space on the floor and attempts a few press-ups. To his surprise, he can do ten. Later, in the bathroom, he examines his stooped reflection, forces his shoulders back, tries to look like a sound specimen. Should he clean-shave, or just tidy up? Should he trim the unruly trail of hair below his navel? Should he splurge eight pounds fifty on a haircut in Whitby?
Love is an emanation. Love is a mirror. Bring the notebook.
When Natalie Mock describes her accident, representing the shower cradle with two up-curled fingers of her right hand and her falling body with her left, her colleagues’ faces wrinkle with fascinated horror. The bruises and the breathing discomfort are fading and various scabs are itching and flaking over vivid new skin.
She has, of course, skimmed through the letters. The girl they’re addressed to isn’t her — no longer exists. Could it have been otherwise? Is it possible to ride so carefully through life, push so smoothly and confidently over obstacles and traumas, that your identity is preserved more or less intact at thirty, forty, eighty? Would you want to? Or does time itself enforce reinvention, repurposing, rebranding? Are she and Dan the same people who agreed to marry each other? Back then, she was going to be an architect (a nettling postscript: Dan was going to be a particle physicist, and is one).
Such silence here without you. You are my voice, my music, my rowan parting the wind. Rain falls, my heart beats without a sound until you return. Come back to me soon.