In the alley, the chef crouched and buttoned the professor’s shirt over his own ribs. When he opened the briefcase, papers flew out, a thousand doves flailing against the walls of the alley. The chef ran after them, stopped them with his feet and arms, herded them back into the case — pages of numbers, of arrows and notes and hand-drawn star maps. Here were business cards: a professor of physics. Envelopes showed his name and address — information that might have been useful in some other lifetime, one in which the chef could ring the bell of this man’s house and explain to his wife about empty chains, empty wrists, empty classrooms. And here was a note from that wife about the sandwich she had packed him. There was no sandwich left. Here were graded papers, a fall syllabus, the typed draft of an exam. The extra question at the end, a strange one: “Using modern astronomical data, construct, to the best of your ability, a proof that the sun actually revolves around the earth.”
The chef knew nothing of physics. He understood chemistry only insofar as it related to the baking times of bread at various elevations. His knowledge of biology was limited to the deboning of chickens and the behavior of yeast. What did he know of moving bodies and gravity? He knew this: He had moved from his line of men, creating a vacuum — one that had sucked the professor in.
The chef sat on his bed in the widow K——’s basement and felt, in the cool leather of the briefcase, a second vacuum: Here was a vacated life. Here were salary receipts, travel records, train tickets, a small address book. And these belonged to a man whose name was not blackened like his own, a man who was not hunted. If he wanted to live through the next year, the chef would have to learn this life and fill it — and oddly, this felt not like a robbery but like an apology, a way to put the world back in balance. The professor would not die, because he himself would become the professor, and he would live.
Surely he could not teach at the university; surely he could not slip into the man’s bed unnoticed. But what was in this leather case, it seemed, had been left for him to use. These addresses of friends, this card of identification, this riddle about the inversion of the universe.
Five cities east, he gave his name as the professor’s, and grew out his beard so it would match the photograph on the card he now carried in his pocket. The two men no longer looked entirely dissimilar. To the first name in the address book, the chef had addressed a typed letter: “Am in trouble and have fled the city. Tell my dear wife I am unharmed, but for her safety do not tell her where I am. If you are able to help a poor old man, send money to the following postbox…. I hope to remain your friend, Professor T——.”
He’d had to write this about the wife — how could he ask these men for money if she held a funeral? And what of it, if she kept her happiness another few months, another year?
The next twenty-six letters were similar in nature, and money arrived now in brown envelopes and white ones. The bills came wrapped in notes (Was his life in danger? Did he have his health?), and with the money he paid another widow for another basement, and he bought weak cigarettes. He sat on café chairs and drew diagrams of the universe, showed stars and planets looping each other in light. He felt that if he used the other papers in the briefcase, he must also make use of the question. Or perhaps he felt that if he could answer it, he could put the universe back together. And, too, it was something to fill his empty days.
He wrote in his small notebook: “The light of my cigarette is a fire like the sun. From where I sit, all the universe is equidistant from my cigarette. Ergo, my cigarette is the center of the universe. My cigarette is on earth. Ergo, the earth is the center of the universe. If all heavenly bodies move, they must therefore move in relation to the earth, and in relation to my cigarette.”
His hand ached. These words were the most he had written since school, which had ended for him at age sixteen. He had been a smart boy, even talented in languages and mathematics, but his mother had needed him to make a living. He was not blessed, like the professor, with years of scholarship and quiet offices and leather books. He was blessed instead with chicken stocks and herbs and sherry. Thirty years had passed since his last day of school, and his hand was accustomed now to wooden spoon, mandoline, paring knife, rolling pin.
Today his hands smelled of ink, when for thirty years they had smelled of leeks. They were the hands of the professor; ergo, he was the professor.
He had written to friends A through L, and now he saved the rest and wrote instead to students. Here in the briefcase’s outermost pocket were class rosters from the past two years, and letters addressed to those young men care of the university were bound to reach them. The amounts they sent were smaller, the notes that accompanied them more inquisitive: What, exactly, had transpired? Could they come to meet him?
The postbox was in a different city than the one where he stayed. He arrived at the post office just before closing, and came only every two or three weeks. He always looked through the window first to check that the lobby was empty. If it was not, he would leave and return another day. Surely one of these days, a friend of the professor would be waiting there for him. He prepared a story, that he was the honored professor’s assistant, that he could not reveal the man’s location but would certainly pass on your kindest regards, sir.
If the earth moved, all it would take for a man to travel its circumference would be a strong balloon. Rise twenty feet above, and wait for the earth to turn under you; you would be home again in a day. But this was not true, and a man could not escape his spot on the earth but to run along the surface. Ergo, the earth was still. Ergo, the sun was the moving body of the two.
No, he did not believe it. He wanted only to know who this professor was, this man who would teach his students the laws of the universe, then ask them to prove as true what was false.
On the wall of the café: plate-sized canvas, delicate oils of an apple, half-peeled. Signed, below, by a girl he had known in school. The price was more than a month of groceries, and so he did not buy it, but for weeks he read his news under the apple and drank his coffee. Staining his fingers in cheap black ink were the signal fires of the world, the distress sirens, the dispatches from the trenches and hospitals and abattoirs of the war — but here, on the wall, a sign from another world. He had known this girl as well as any other: had spoken with her every day, but had not made love to her; had gone to her vacation home one winter holiday, but knew nothing of her life since then. And now, a clue, perfect and round and unfathomable. After all this time: apple.
Once he finished the news, he worked at the professor’s proof and saw in the coil of green-edged apple skin some model of spiraling, of expansion. The stars were at one time part of the earth, until the hand of God peeled them away, leaving us in the dark. They do not revolve around us: They escape in widening circles. The Milky Way is the edge of this peel.