He grows thoughtful. Time, he says. It’s the greatest mystery of all. We really haven’t understood time … at all.
I say something about writing—that I’ve begun to see it as a way of abolishing time. When I was little, we hardly ever saw each other, but ever since I’ve been writing, we’ve been together almost every day, on paper, in memory, in my imagination. And in a few days, I tell him, when I return to Copenhagen and resume writing, I will relive these same ten days with you here in the house over and over again for some time. It’s all here in my head. Every moment, it’s all gathered there. Time is abolished. Just as we stand here chatting now while you’re simultaneously sitting in the backroom of Poppa’s shop.
My dad’s latest thoughts circle around time being a clue to us that something is out there, a kind of god, not one of a particular religious variant, not a long-bearded man or a moral code, of course not, but as something indeterminate, something we will never understand.
Time, he says, does not exist in physics. I mean, just the fact of moments, he says. Of now. What is now? What is now? It doesn’t mean anything in physics. It means nothing in physics. Sure, one can always say: Time T, and stipulate it as a parameter for an equation or theorem, but time is nothing in itself! In physics there’s a world map where time is just another dimension. And you could look at that, he says about the map. I mean, if you are God, you could look at that four-dimensional thing—and it’s all there. It’s everything. From beginning to end. Everything!
We’re all there together, everything is there, Charlemagne, the prairie natives, the trip to the airport in a few days, along with this moment. The baby, the old man, the qualitative difference we experience by sitting here now under the glowing Milky Way only enters the equation because of us. There’s nothing in physics that can explain why. It’s this map, he says. It’s a map! Now he’s grown eager, rapping on the table with his flat hand every time he says the word map. It’s a map. You look at it. There it is. Period. God is looking at that. Okay. It’s already happened. It could be that everything has already happened viewed from outside.
And that’s what he means by time being a clue. The experience of the present moment tells us there’s something beyond the map. For something must activate time. How else would we get this experience of the now? If not, everything would just be there all at once. That’s what he’s begun thinking recently. That the now somehow needs to be activated. Otherwise there would not be this qualitative experience, this experience of the moment. Otherwise there would be no life!
He has no clue what it is beyond the map that’s doing this, that’s activating it, that’s making us alive. Otherwise there’s no life. Unless that’s there. It’s just a map. He’s talking to himself. So there’s gotta be something else. He repeats, in physics that’s all there is, it’s just a map. People’s understanding of the physical universe is simply that map. It’s not enough! he says. It can’t be!
You can find similar ideas sprinkled here and there, he mentions a science fiction book and asks me to imagine a shelf with cubbyholes, into which someone shines a flashlight. Sometimes the cone of light lands on us, and that’s what’s activating this moment. The rest lies in darkness, we don’t experience it, but it’s all there. The image is very crude, someone with a flashlight, it is very primitive, of course, but what I’m saying is I think there’s something beyond this …
It sounds a bit like everything is predetermined. If we’re locked to the map, our fates are sealed. But my dad is intent on saving free will. I believe in free will, he says. I think free will is still compatible with this. But it’s already happened! So it makes it strange, right?
Yes, I say, very strange, but I think I understand …
In a way, it’s … you couldn’t really say predestined, he says, because I still make decisions. Every single moment I make a decision to … There’s nothing to block free will in that. Free will is very much still in play. Even though it’s already happened, he reiterates, talking to me and to himself. It’s already happened, but I make the decision. Because of what I have now, in my brain, everything. His brain contains all of the recommendations and motives, all of the decisions he has ever made and which determine whether he is a good or bad person. Which is to say: He makes his own decisions. I couldn’t do otherwise, he says.
In a way, I respond, we need to believe in free will. We have no choice!
It’s contradictory, my dad says and chuckles, right? To say that you believe in free will, because you can’t do otherwise …
We laugh, relieved, because we’re both strong believers of free will. Otherwise it’s meaningless, he says. You’ve got to have free will. Everything is predestined, it’s all on a map, simultaneously, including free will. It’s as if we are intoxicated and in a single instant fall into the same pot, a transcendent ur-soup in which we swim, completely weightless.
We digest all this, I don’t know if he’s as dizzy as I am, but for a moment it feels as though I actually can experience every moment simultaneously.
It’s all on a map. Just as I can’t be in two places on the map at once, I say, Copenhagen and St. Louis, or Texas and Copenhagen, I can only be in one moment at a time. But that doesn’t mean all moments don’t exist, just as it doesn’t mean that Copenhagen and St. Louis don’t exist so long as we’re here. Other places exist, and other moments, but for me there exists only this place, this moment.
Yes, we are limited that way, my dad says. Now behind the scenes, I don’t know quite how it happens.
The man with the flashlight?
Yeah. Something is there. The clue is time—and the moment. You can’t have the same now across the entire universe. You can’t. The now we have here is not the same as the one that exists thousands of light years from here. There is no universal now. There can’t be. I mean, relativity forbids that. That’s a scary thing. And so, there is something that has to activate that. Everywhere.
These ideas exist everywhere in the world. But he’s now trying to express his own version.
I look forward to reading it.
There’s not much to see, he says, because he doesn’t yet know what to say. And he doesn’t really trust physics to help him find the answer. Unless a new branch of physics emerges, or whatever. But he’s skeptical even of that. I mean, it’s like we are a hologram, right? And we are just a projection on some screen. There is no way to get access to that. In physics, I mean, with experiments. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Maybe, he says a short time later, maybe there is a way to get there. We’ve simply not reached that stage yet. There’s so much within physics that we don’t yet know. I mean, this dark matter, dark energy. Especially the dark energy is very mysterious …
Maybe you can start writing some of these things down? I say.
Yeah, he says, but until then they just float around, his thoughts, and not very well articulated. Nor does he know which form they would take. It would be nice, he says, if we could maybe do something together.
But it is only right, he adds, that I should think about time in my last dozen or so years …
the discovery that bob may have made concerns the possibility of synchronizing clocks across great distances. He drinks a cold beer with my dad on the porch. He hands my dad his papers and says: See what you think of it. My dad removes his glasses and aims his eyes at the papers. The rooster crows, and I wander aimlessly around the lawn. The wind does not seem to get tired. The wind chimes jingle their melody. When my dad has finished reading, the two men begin speaking in the language I do not understand. Even Roy is bored. He sprawls out on the grass, wanting his belly rubbed. It’s incredible how different the dogs on this farm are. The weird, skinny one that’s always by itself stands nearby on quivering, stalklike legs, staring. Its hair is so short that it’s almost naked. I keep forgetting it’s here. Its place on the farm must be the result of pity; I have a difficult time believing that anyone can love that poor wretch. But my dad, with h
is kind heart, is nice to it. He pats it on the head whenever it comes over to him and says he’s such a good dog. It shakes for some time, then shits on the lawn, a foul-smelling, yellow sausage that lies flat in the grass. My dad and Bob are absorbed in the clock-synchronization conversation, a discovery that ought to have been made a long time ago, but somehow has managed to remain undiscovered all these years. I’ve never seen a proof of that, anywhere, Bob says. There could be a larger class of functions, my dad suggests, adding: That would be nice. The hairless dog approaches the table. Stands beside my dad and rolls his dome-shaped eyes without sniffing him or touching him, as if it knows just how difficult it is for anyone to like it. My dad sees nothing. His attention is laser-focused on Bob and the clock problem. When he’s absorbed in something, the world can do a jig for all he cares, he sees none of it. Somewhere behind the barn, the rooster crows and crows.
I go into the house, find the varnish, and head back out to paint the scrapes on the tin can. The artist in the family.
i didn’t actually think i’d brought anything with me other than my curiosity and good will, but now that I’m meeting Bubba’s widow, I realize that I’d brought something else too: a conception of a real Texan, a cardboard cutout I’ve carried around, without so far finding any use for it. But here, finally, is someone who resembles. Bubba’s widow is small and compact and uses a cane, her hair is fluffy as a dust ball, and curly. She speaks mostly to my dad. But it’s not that. It’s something else. Something about her rouses my prejudices.
They seem to be reciprocated.
I betcha don’t eat meat, she says, as I’m reading the huge menu in search of something edible. My goodness, my arms look like chicken thighs. They’ve turned the ac up high, it can’t be more than 57 degrees in here at most. I glance around, the heaviest diners seem to be doing just fine, but the few skinny ones are shivering.
My dad defends me, sure she eats meat, he says, several slices of brisket at Smitty’s the other day. As if he wants to convince her that I’m a trueborn Texan.
But we’re on to each other, Bubba’s widow and I. I’m a silly vegetable-hippie from darkest Europe, and she’s a trigger-happy Bush fan. I order fish. She talks politics. I watch Fox News all the time, she says. To my dad: Do you watch Fox News?
My dad has this way of balancing in a conversation. Taking part without being the one who carries the ball. Does he watch Fox News? Maybe, maybe not. Bubba’s widow is the one who carries the ball. As usual, he and I sit observing. She’s into politics, she says. To my dad: Do you care about politics?
My dad: Sure.
She begins to discuss my part of the world, but the image she paints is unrecognizable to me. She might as well be talking about Mozambique. He’s from one of those countries, too, she says to my dad about an Italian or Dutch politician whose name she has forgotten.
One of those countries? Tell me, does she think we live in caves?
She wants to tell my dad a story. I was in Alaska … , she says.
So was I! I interrupt, excitedly. Finally, maybe we can bond over the rugged mountains, the spruce, the monochrome beauty. Before I’ve warmed up to describe the light across the bay in Sitka when the sun sets, she says she was on a kind of pilgrimage. I must admit, I am one of those people that just loves Sarah Palin.
We could see her house across the ice, she tells my dad.
I stand up to find the bathroom. Move around some, get warm. At the front of the restaurant is a shop that they have, by hook or by crook, tried to make resemble an old country store. A woman dabs a sad broom between the pyramid-shaped stacks of hand soap and chocolate. Plastic surgery has left her face in bits and pieces, blond hair, big lips, features slightly distorted in a monstrous way. She looks the way Dolly Parton looked up-close that time I got to take a picture with her following a concert where I knew the promoter. When we got the photos, her face had been photoshopped so that she resembled Dolly Parton.
But Dolly Parton’s lookalike looks like Dolly Parton before the photos were edited, and she’s wearing a blue shop coat that, like the broom and the soap and the chocolate, seem to be mostly for the sake of appearance. She helps me find the bathroom. She’s incredibly friendly but seems a tad slow. I gather she’s mainly been hired to sweep, stock shelves, make things homey, and say howdy to visitors.
When I return from the bathroom, I catch a low oh from Bubba’s widow just as I’m sliding down into my seat.
What?
Peggy just asked about the political system in Denmark, my dad says.
How many parties is it that you have? Her tone of voice sounds as if she’s asking about someone’s metastases.
I don’t remember, I say. About nine.
Oh, she says again.
The check has to be paid in the front shop. Bubba’s widow flits about with it, wanting to show me everything in the store before she pays. Show me beads, I think sourly. Here is the soap, here are the chocolate dollar bills, Dolly Parton edges near us with her broom. Finally, we get in line. Dolly Parton reaches us and smiles at me with her strange, punctured face. Where y’all from? she asks and means me. She’d ruminated on my accent. I’m from Denmark, I tell her. She searches her memory. It’s one of those countries, I say. Dolly Parton lights up in a bright smile. Oh, how nice.
Bubba’s widow pays the check, and Dolly Parton resumes sweeping.
On the way out there’s one last chance. Next to the door there’s a rack filled with cds, mostly country and western. Bubba’s widow starts to explain what country and western music is, but first she wants to explain what a cd is. And that is Ken-ny Ro-gers, she says, pointing at one with Kenny Rogers, and that is Wil-lie Nel-son, she takes her time pointing out each and every one of the cherished cds, and I can’t help it, it’s too tempting simply to point at one of Dolly Parton’s and cry out: Look! They even have one with the lady from the shop!
Afterward I feel guilty. She wasn’t a bad person, Bubba’s widow. She just wanted to impress the primitive stranger from one of those countries, and Ken-ny Ro-gers was the final straw she’d clutched.
the next time we see Bubba’s widow, she’s leaning her compact figure on her cane underneath the porch roof at Ruby Ranch. We’ve been driving back and forth on the road searching for the gate to the ranch for some time. I don’t know what I imagined; I haven’t visited the place since I was in my mother’s belly, when Cecil tried to make her drink whiskey. My mother has told me it’s a ten-minute ride to the house. Back then, I presume, the gate wasn’t as overgrown as it is now. Rusty and inaccessible and with a grim-looking intercom the widow uses to let us in.
Now, were you Gussie’s favorite? she asks as we get out of the car. I know you were many kids, but there was only one favorite.
Gussie’s favorite child can’t possibly have been the one who was never around. And yet I say yes. Yes, it must have been me. I stare at the ground, immediately embarrassed, and hear my dad confirm my little lie.
We follow her into what is apparently a new wing of the house. Boxes and things lay scattered. She’s preparing to move to a nursing home, she says. It’s my legs, and the rest of me isn’t getting any younger, of course. The daughter, the eldest of her children, has moved into the main wing. She’s the one who will be showing us around Ruby Ranch. The widow slumps into a brown leather chair behind a desk filled with cds and various items packed in bubble wrap. I can only see her round head popping up behind the piles. On the wall behind her hangs a framed drawing of a cowboy in a long yellow coat riding a horse.
The door of the main house opens, and a woman in her fifties with short hair dyed coal-black enters in a tight lime-green T-shirt and introduces herself as the widow’s daughter. In the short pause that follows after we’ve shaken hands, which is normally filled with small talk, she asks: How do you feel about metaphysics?
My dad and I search each other’s eyes. He leaves it to me. Metaphysics, he says, that’s your department, and explains to the daughter: She’s the philosopher
in the family.
She stands with her back against the wall waiting for my response. Her blue eyes flicker. Metaphysics, metaphysics, I say. I think it’s here to stay.
Oh, good. She’s relieved. She looks at me, one hand shaky. Because there’s a skull that wants to go home with you.
A skull. Aha. A skull wants to go home with me. I think of Hamlet, I think of the death’s head. I hear my dad swallow his spit.
The daughter explains: I’m bipolar. Like many women in the family. Apparently, this diagnosis is meant to explain that she can hear them talking to her.
Who?
The ones from the other side. Beings. Voices that know better. They push her in the right direction. Now she’s also trying to push us in the right direction. Do you wanna see the house?
Bubba’s widow remains seated underneath the cowboy in the yellow coat, and we follow the daughter deeper into Ruby Ranch.
It’s like stepping into a dead person’s estate. The furnishings are random, the rooms are half empty, without order. Only the dining room is intact. It’s like looking into another time: the display cabinet is filled with crystal glassware, the chairs are nicely arranged around an oval table made of dark wood, a witness to all the dinners eaten and all the whiskey consumed or not consumed. And the parlor with its rustic stone fireplace, doubtless stone from their own quarry, where my dad remembers how Cecil used to remove his boots at the end of the day, pour himself a whiskey, and gather his thoughts while he gazed across his vast expanses.
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