Something the shade of melted clay. Tough gray rubber and hard white cap. She grips it to her all the ride back. The bottle is a skinned lapdog, half as large as her little one, and twice as resilient. At home, she covers his wounded foot with it. The day is so hot already, they’ve made his invalid’s bed right inside the window casement, his little swollen foot practically hanging out the screens. Her Joey can’t understand why his mama wants to inflict him with freezing cold. But he suffers the torture with a smile meant to absolve her.
Her husband, the awestruck scientist, finds her in the kitchen, laying furiously into the bottom of the saucepan with copper cleaner. “Everything is good?”
She drops the scouring pad and grips the lip of the sink. She’s pregnant again, in her fifth month, past the early spells of bodily revolt. This is a different dizziness. “Everything,” she says, “is what it is.”
Two years ago, when Charlie was still alive, when it might have kept her flesh and blood from harm, she wanted this bomb. Now she only wants her husband back, the world she knows. Those hundred thousand brown bodies. How many of them children, as small or smaller than her JoJo? Hundreds of men involved: scientists, engineers, administrators. He can’t have contributed anything. Nothing the others wouldn’t have figured out on their own. He’s never told her just what part he worked on. Even now, she can’t ask.
At night, in bed, she wants to whisper, Did you know? Of course he knew. But what her David knows, she can only guess at. He’s never done anything but play with the world, that bright hypnotic bauble. Like Newton, he says: gathering pretty shells on the beach. His life’s work, chosen because it is more useless than philosophy. Avoiding trouble, evading detection, expelled anyway. Jews and politics do not mix. She remembers his interview with that national academic honor society: “Are you a practicing Jew?” How he almost lied, on principle, just to force them out of hiding. And how they rejected him anyway, claiming, “We don’t accept people who renounce their given faiths.”
She watches as he undresses, hanging his rumpled trousers on a chair, exposing his shocking whiteness, a strangeness even greater than she’d suspected before they married. Stranger, even, than the strangeness of men. This white, this man, this unpracticing Jew, this German shares her room with her. But the room they share is stranger than either of them.
He can’t have contributed much to this bomb. You can’t turn an atom into twenty thousand tons of TNT on anything so imaginary as time. He’s explained it to her, his accidental expertise, his spin-off ability to imagine what goes on inside the smallest matter’s core. Still she can’t see his connection. His colleagues have kept him around — through Columbia, Chicago, New Mexico, all those epic train rides — as nothing but their puzzle-solving, happy mascot. The one who helps others find what they’re after.
Four months before, he became the least-published member of his department ever to make permanent faculty. His colleagues bent the rules, granting him tenure largely for the one paper he published while still in Europe, the one his friends say will keep his name around for years. She has tried to read it, slipping down its pages as down a glass mountain. Then, only two more papers since his arrival, and those got written only because he was bedridden with glandular fever. The American work simply never materialized. The stream of follow-on discoveries exists only in his mind.
Still, the department has given him security for life, if only for selfish reasons. Even those who believe David’s own lifework will forever come to nothing have never profited more from any other colleague. First, there are the students. The shy ones, the ones with no English, even when it’s their native tongue. The ones who go out in public as if climbing the scaffold. The ones who wear the same white short-sleeved shirts and cotton pants, even in the dead of winter. They adore the man and crowd his lectures. They’d lay down their lives for him. Already they land sterling jobs — Stanford, Michigan, Cornell — their work fueled by tricks of insight derived from their beloved teacher.
“What’s your secret?” she asked him once. She, with students of her own.
David shrugged. “The ones without talent can’t be taught. The ones with talent need not to be taught.”
The department might have kept him on for his teaching alone. But there’s more — far more. He wanders the halls of the building with a fountain pen and a pocket score of Solomon tucked under his arm, waiting for offices to open at the sound of his step and pull him in. Or he’ll sit in the coffee room, scanning his score, humming to himself until some stumped colleague slumps down next to him and bemoans the latest obstinate equation. Then, for the price of a cup of coffee, he leads them to answers, scribbling out the groundwork on a paper napkin. Not that he ever solves the problem. His mastery of any but his own small corner of time is dusty at best. He has no great skill at formulas, although he loves that game of estimation they all call “Fermi problems”: How far does one crow fly in the course of a lifetime? How long would it take to eat all the bowls of cereal made from a hundred-acre cornfield? How many notes did Beethoven write in his life? Whenever he pesters her with such questions, she replies: “Far.” “A heap of days.” “Just enough for us to listen to.”
But for the price of a cup of coffee, he gives them something invisible. They leave clutching the magic napkin, staring at the scribbles before they fade, sure that they could have seen the way forward themselves, given a little more time. But this way is faster, cleaner, lighter. No one can say exactly what David does. Nothing rigorous. He just displaces them. Moves them around the sealed space until they find the hidden door. He scribbles on the white napkin, relying more on pictures than equations. His colleagues complain that he doesn’t really use reason. They accuse him of jumping ahead in time to that point where the researcher has already solved his problem, then coming back with some rough description of solutions yet to come.
His pictures are the flattened traces he brings back from later worlds: imps climbing up and down staircases. Snaking queues of moviegoers waiting to enter a theater by two separate doors. Zigzag arrows with heads and tails hooking up in tangled skeins: the experimental, extended notation. Those whose work he helps dislodge must then pester him, needing to know how he always finds, in single lightning flashes, the angle that aligns.
“You must learn to listen,” he says. If particles, forces, and fields obey the curve that binds the flow of numbers, then they must sound like harmonies in time. “You think with your eyes; this is your problem. No one can see four independent variables mapping out a surface in five or more dimensions. But the tuned ear can hear chords.”
His colleagues dismiss this talk as mere metaphor. They think he’s hiding something, storing up his secret method until it delivers the one blinding insight he’s after. Or perhaps he’s in it for the endless free cups of coffee.
Delia, though, believes him, and knows how it is. Her husband hears his way forward. Melodies, intervals, rhythms, durations: the music of the spheres. Others bring him their deadlocks — particles spinning backward, phantom apparitions in two places at once, gravities collapsing on themselves. Even as they describe the hopeless mysteries, her David hears the rich counterpoint coded in the composer’s score. This, she sees, lying in bed watching him undress, is how he helped them build their bomb. He did no real work except to free up the thoughts of men who made the design. All of them boys, caught up in pure performance. The permanent urge to find and catch.