‘But how…?’
Mario shrugs smugly, a sort of smrug. ‘I am Italian,’ is all he will say. ‘Come on, Geoff, we’re going to be late.’
Now the question becomes what to say to her. A text message is deemed preferable to a calclass="underline" other than that, though, there is little consensus.
‘Why don’t I just say, Hi Lori, this is Daniel, it was nice to talk to you the other night, if you want to meet up again sometime give me a call.’
‘That’s fine,’ Mario says, ‘if you want to send her into a coma. You need something with oomph.’
‘How about a haiku?’ Geoff says.
‘How about, instead of “if you want to meet up again”, you say, “if you want me to sex you hard”,’ Mario says.
It’s the end of the school day; they are walking down the laneway to the Doughnut House. In the dusk the world appears pale and exhausted, like a vampire’s been drinking from its veins: the thin pink filament of the just-come-on doughnut sign, the white streetlights like dowdy cotton bolls against the grey clouds, the soft hand-like leaves of the trees with the colours leeched away to match the asphalt.
‘What have you got so far?’ Geoff asks.
Skippy presses a button. ‘ “Hi,” ’ he says.
‘That’s all you have after four hours?’
‘It’s the only thing everyone agrees on.’
Geoff frowns. ‘Actually, I’m not all that crazy about “Hi”.’
‘What’s wrong with “Hi”?’
‘It just seems like the kind of thing my mum would say.’
‘It’s the kind of thing everyone says.’
‘Have you thought about “Hey”? Don’t you think “Hey” might be more kind of rockin’? Or “Yo”?’
Dennis and Mario, meanwhile, have fallen behind to debate the merits and demerits of Mario’s new phone. ‘The thing you don’t understand about this phone is that it’s state of the art, which means, this is the best phone you can get.’
‘I do understand that, you moron, I’m saying what’s the point of having a state-of-the-art phone when everyone who’s going to call you on it is living six feet away from you?’
‘I think what it is, is, you are jealous of my state-of-the-art phone, which has a camera and an MP3 player.’
‘Mario, if you can’t see why your parents suddenly gave you that gay phone you’re even dimmer than I thought. I mean, think about it, they leave you in school for the entire holiday, and then they give you some rinky-dink piece of plastic so they can talk to you without having to see you face-to-face. They couldn’t say, “We don’t love you” more clearly if they wrote it in skywriting over the rugby pitches.’
‘That shows what you know, because my parents do love me.’
‘Well, why did they leave you here over mid-term, then?’
‘They did not go into it, but they were very specific about it not being because they didn’t love me, and I know because I asked them that very question.’
‘What did they say? Did they say it would be character-building?’
Mario suddenly takes on a hunted look.
‘Face it, Mario, the only reason any of us are here is that our parents don’t want a bunch of stinky, no-longer-cute adolescents getting in their hair.’
Skippy turns round. ‘Would you say “Hi” or “Hey”? If you were talking to a girl?’
‘I would say, “Put on your crash-helmet, hot stuff, because you are about to have the ride of your life!” ’
‘I would say, “Please ignore my friend, his parents dropped him on his head when he was a baby, over and over, because they do not love him.” ’
Ed’s buzzes with blonde hair and St Brigid’s plaid; but Lori’s not there, and the table where they sat that night is occupied by two others blithely unaware of its history. At the back of the restaurant, however, they find Ruprecht, surrounded by maths books.
‘What have you got so far?’ he asks.
‘ “H,” ’ Skippy says.
‘ “H,” ’ muses Ruprecht. ‘ “H”.’
‘A haiku would be nice and sort of different,’ Geoff says, mostly to himself. ‘Lori, your eyes… your big green eyes…’
‘How about asking her a riddle?’ Ruprecht says.
‘A riddle?’
‘Yes, a riddle always grabs the attention. Something about your name, for instance. Instead of “this is Skippy,” you could say, “Who am I? Above a rope, or Down Under. Pass over my name, and you will find it.” Something like that.’
‘What?’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘Ruprecht, have you ever actually met a woman?’
‘Lorelei Wakeham,’ Geoff blurts, ‘your sad eyes of emerald are my only stars.’
Everybody stops dead and stares at Geoff. ‘It’s a haiku,’ he explains.
Ruprecht repeats the words softly to himself:
Lorelei WakehamYour sad eyes of emeraldAre my only stars.
‘Seventeen syllables,’ he pronounces.
‘Holy smoke, Geoff, that’s really beautiful.’
‘Oh, it’s just a little something I thought up,’ Geoff demurs.
‘You see, this, this is what I have meant by oomph,’ Mario tells Skippy. ‘A haiku like this is the express train to Sexville.’
‘Yeah, and Geoff can recite it at your funeral after Carl kills you,’ Dennis scowls; but the heady combination of Japanese poetry and chocolate doughnuts sweeps away any misgivings, and Skippy hurries to key in his message before anyone can change his mind.
Ever since the Hop, Ruprecht has been acting strangely. According to Mario, who also stayed in school over mid-term, he spent most of the break in his laboratory, and since term resumed he has scarcely been seen. In the morning and at lunch break he skips the Ref and heads directly for the basement, huffing down the corridor with papers spilling from his pockets and a distrait air; meanwhile in class he keeps putting up his hand to ask convoluted questions no one can follow – haranguing Lurch about Riemannian space, pestering Mr Farley about Planck energy, in religion, most startlingly, asking Brother Jonas whether God was God in all universes, or ‘just in this universe’.
Loss of appetite, sleeplessness, erratic behaviour – if you didn’t know better, you’d almost think Ruprecht, like his room-mate, was in love. You do know better, though, so you conclude it’s far more likely to be something to do with this new theory he’s been going on about.
Actually, Ruprecht has discovered, the term “M-theory” is something of a misnomer. Theory suggests a hypothesis of some sort, a line of inquiry, a set of principles, at the very least a vague idea of what it is, itself, about. M-theory offers none of these things. It is pure enigma: a nebulous, shadowy, multi-faceted entity infinitely bigger than what it was originally intended to explain. Confronted with it, the best scientists in the world are as schoolboys – less than schoolboys, cavemen, primitives who, foraging with their stone axes in the jungle, stumble upon a spaceship squatting huge and opaque amid the ferns. It swallows entire fields of mathematics like they were nothing at all. The most complicated equations devised by the most brilliant minds operating at the very limit of human capability represent only the most childish gestures at description of its outermost edges, weak flames that reveal the barest inkling of the vastness retiring back into the darkness. For all their labours, the reality of the theory – what it actually means, what it says, what it is a theory of – remains hidden behind the inscrutable M, and while each of them dreams of being the one who will crack it, bring the theory, like King Kong wrapped in chains, into the light, they are prone, late at night, to the chilly thought that rather than illuminating, their efforts are merely feeding it, gorging it with knowledge, which it devours with no sign of satiety.