The Pacific and Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  “Not just a god,” said Zipsehr, “God Himself.”

  “God Himself?”

  “Himself. He. Him. The instantaneous transmission of thought by electric waves, over a great articulation spread across the earth … thought traveling without constraint, multiplying, tumbling freely, projected across seas, humming on wires that vibrate and sing like locusts in the sun … Never has the spirit been so loosed from the body, electrified, liberated, and yet with a disciplined resonance that vibrates across the universe. The telephone is the voice of God, born in us, echoing back to His distant precincts. If God is metaphorically in nature with such intensity that nature becomes the face of God, can He not jump at will to the machine, and would not this net of golden wires be an irresistible place for a divine being, capitalizing on a billion invisible impulses scattered musically to the winds with the swiftness of light? And we have made this dovecote, where the spirit of God, like a dove, has alighted.

  “You, there, a bedraggled man, gross in feature, powerless and possession-free, trapped in the darkness of a previous age, would deny the very light. Look up, after a rainstorm, at the reticulation of wires in a ray of declining sun, and listen, and tell me that your heart is so hard as not to love the chant of God that sparkles and dries the golden drops with divine electricity, the sap of the blessed one that glistens in the moon, the gilded vibrations of the Jovian jug.”

  The audience was so taken by this poesie that Jacob Bayer’s heart began to threaten him from within his chest. Why, at this moment, was he not free of the reminders of mortality? He did not know, and though he felt ill, he plodded on.

  “What is the quality of this machine that you have made …?” he began.

  “I didn’t make it,” Zipsehr Tuchisheim declared with precision and contempt.

  “That others have made, then, and to which you accord such singular status. What is the quality that makes it divine? What goes over its wires? Let us say, hypothetically, not a message in any language but merely a pattern of electrons. Why would God favor or distinguish, much less leap to, a pattern of electrons moving feebly across the surface of a single planet of a single star, when in the infinity of the universe there are countless stars of far greater power than ours, from which emanate every kind of wave on the spectrum of radiation and in such great quantities as to make what pulses from dry cells and generators perhaps less than significant?”

  Professor Voolsamdrek of the Technische Hochschule cocked his head. This ragged, itinerant creature was speaking without authority of things in which he had no qualification or degree, which was dangerous. (Indeed it was, and the reason Jacob Bayer had been ejected from one town after another like bullet casings from the port of a gun.)

  “Significant!” Jacob Bayer repeated derisively. “The emanations that you take to be enough to provide for God a dwelling are equal only to a tiny fraction of the flood that reaches us from the sun. A billionth? No. A trillionth? No. Perhaps a trillionth part of a trillionth part, if that? And that flood that strikes us is of the sun’s full generation only what strikes [pausing to calculate the circumference of the earth’s orbit around the sun and convert it, approximately, to degrees, he appeared to be undergoing some sort of attack] thirty seconds of arc on a flat plane, concomitantly reduced by the fact that the sun is a sphere. In other words, half a sixtieth of a three-hundred-and-sixtieth, of half a sixtieth of a three-hundred-and-sixtieth, or, approximately, one part in two billion. And that just of our sun, an incomprehensibly minor part of the fleet of suns that stretch into the infinity of the universe.

  “Mind you, to be infinitely insignificant in power is only one shortcoming of your golden network. It is also a weakling of variety, a tiny sliver of the radio spectrum, not even a piccolo to a great symphony orchestra. The curtains of light and sound that flood through space in mutual clashes and interference are something rather different from your little mousetrap for God. But perhaps you did not know this.

  “Perhaps it is, then, quality that distinguishes this construction. I have been in Koidanyev only a day, but I have heard, or heard reported, quite a few telephone conversations. Many of them were about the telephone itself, and how miraculous it is. Surely a declaration of miraculousness does not, cannot, itself provide the substance of a miracle. And then I have heard inquiries about the health of interlocutors, How are you? for example; and the exchange of contractual information, You bring me the planks, and I’ll attach them to the axles; and the articulation of great questions, such as, Didn’t his eyes sweep over Mrs. Molodetsky’s bosom like a hand stroking a cat? Of course, we can infer the substance of the p’tcha-making woman’s exchange with Markovich the egg handler and Sam the butcher. Orders for calves’ feet and eggs, or perhaps for blotting paper and glue, certainly would attract the eye of God, if not His envy, and excite in Him the lust to lie in a place where such miracles occur, to take up residence even, amid the dim and monochromatic electrons, confined in hair-thin channels rather than exploding in stormlike fronts across galaxies, because such miraculous quality cannot prove to Him anything but irresistible. Right?

  “But I ask you this,” he said, as if dismissing his previously stated arguments, as of course he was not. “What makes this network more miraculous than the telegraph, which has been with us in force for half a century, which casts a wider and more comprehensive net, runs under more seas, crosses more passes, and branches into countless more locations? Would God favor speech more than abstract code, and, if so, why? Why, in fact, would He not want to live in the post office? Hundreds of thousands of nodes, branching into hundreds of millions of terminals, in a spectacular network the mission of which is to transmit great masses of silent, simple, unspoken code—that is, lines that make letters, letters that make words, words that make phrases, and so on. A code that, though transmitted in utter soundlessness and privacy, blossoms at its destination into colorful and evocative images—of battles, love affairs, great cities, oceans in storm, stars bursting, children born, wagons creaking, hearts healing. A code that opens like fireworks against a black sky, and rises in its solidity and beauty like prayer. Why is this in any way a lesser network, a lesser attraction, or a lesser temptation to the eye of God?

  “God, you see, has been around for a long time. He knows what to look for. He can see into every crevice. His music sounds at His whim throughout this universe and an infinite number of others. He does not need our constructions for His habitations, and, besides, His mass and glory would burst the skinny thing—of which you are so proud—the instant He tried to wriggle into it. Like the golden calf, the telephone is only a thing that you have made, and that has distracted you from the song of life.”

  Suddenly, as if directed from without, Jacob Bayer (who had certainly not been born a diplomat) turned to the people of Koidanyev, whom he had perhaps begun to sway, and put to them the question that had haunted him since his arrival, a question that even Rabbi Blarma had not dared answer. “Where are the children of Koidanyev?” he asked, looking around, his gaze as tense as glass about to shatter. He felt the breaking of internal things, as if he could hear the sounds of beams snapping within walls, even if the outside seemed placid. When they did not answer, he asked again. “Where are they? I have seen hardly any children. There are hardly any hadarim. What have you done with your children? I’ve been in hundreds of towns and villages in the pale. This is the only one where children are not only not the center of life, but not even to be seen.”

  “There are some,” Haskell Samoa said, “but there aren’t as many anymore. It’s quieter now, and things are different.” He stopped there. Jacob Bayer surveyed them uncomprehendingly. Everyone in Koidanyev was either looking down at the ground or hatefully staring at him. He felt beyond the moment the great comfort that awaited him in its aftermath, when the world would be quiet and he would once again be a wanderer on the roads. But as soon as his heart was calmed by the velvet of these imaginings he was startled out of them by the monstrously self-confiden
t voice of Professor Voolsamdrek. I can’t do this, Jacob Bayer thought to himself. I knock one down (I don’t even know if I knock them down) and another rises.

  When Voolsamdrek addressed him as if he were a dog, Jacob Bayer knew that nothing he could say would make Voolsamdrek think for a moment that anything he did say would in any way be inoffensive, that whatever progress he might think he was making, Voolsamdrek would only perceive inversely, and that the people of Koidanyev wanted Voolsamdrek not merely to best him but perhaps even to kill him. What was it about Voolsamdrek? What was the strange emanation? He had a darkness about him such as Jacob Bayer had never seen.

  “The telephone is not God,” Voolsamdrek said with great irritation. “The telephone is superior to God. Why is that? That is because, unlike God, the telephone exists. We know, see, and can prove it exists. Facts are better than dreams. What is, whatever it may be, is superior to what is not. I understand and have always understood why man has created God. With his laudable curiosity, man invented a delusion to provide the answers to his questions and to comfort him. But as the questions are answered, one by one, the delusion loses its power. And, finally, when all of them are answered, the delusion will cease to exist. We have already solved the riddle of human existence. We know how and when we originated. The universe can be summed up in twenty-seven precise statements. We can perfect human behavior if only we are granted or take the power to do so. We are close to determining all the answers to all the supposedly unanswerable questions, probably within eleven years—nineteen twenty-four, perhaps nineteen twenty-five, and by nineteen thirty without doubt. My colleagues, the physicists, know the origins of the universe, its exact size, and its fate. Like any mechanism, including ourselves, it is decipherable, and we can decipher it. This is nineteen thirteen! I am an optimist and a believer in the power of man. I believe in his perfectibility, and that part of the inherent nature of truth is that it can be found.” He looked at Jacob Bayer ever so briefly and ever so dismissively, and the people burst into applause.

  Jacob Bayer had no plan to counter this, nor any illusion that with the elements of faith, apprehension, and beauty, he could prevail against reason within the bounds of its closed and potent system. Nonetheless, like a student in a heder, he raised his hand. A now relaxed Haskell Samoa recognized him, unafraid of what he might say. But before Jacob Bayer could say anything, a man in the back, a somewhat disheveled devotee of the telephone, jumped up and yelled, “What does this have to do with the telephone? This was supposed to be about the telephone, the marvelous telephone!”

  “I will tell you,” Jacob Bayer said, right index finger pointing straight up. He had no idea what to say, but, having launched himself, began to slide down the mountain. “It has everything to do with the telephone.” A long pause. All he wanted was to get back on the road. “Why?” Another long pause. The corners of Voolsamdrek’s granitaceous mouth began to curl upward. “This is why.” Another silence. Haskell Samoa reached for the gavel.

  “The telephone,” said Jacob Bayer, slowing Haskell Samoa’s hand. “You have poured your souls into the telephone. You have directed to a mechanical thing made by man the very qualities—love, gratitude, devotion, faith, trust—that previously you reserved for God and nature and your fellow man.”

  “‘Souls’?” mocked Voolsamdrek. “What is the ‘soul’? Can you show me one? Can you prove its existence? How long will you speak nonsense?” he shouted.

  “The soul,” said Jacob Bayer, quietly, “is what distinguishes us from mechanisms. Our bodies are mechanisms, but we are more than that.”

  “Prove it. Show me the soul.”

  “All right,” said Jacob Bayer. “I will show you the soul.” Everyone peered at him, moving in their seats. “Bring me a telephone,” he commanded. A telephone arrived immediately and was placed, disconnected, in Jacob Bayer’s hands. It was a beautifully crafted rosewood box with fittings of polished brass. When Jacob Bayer received it, the mallet brushed against one of the bells and made a sound both delicate and refined. “This,” Jacob Bayer announced, “is a telephone. It is a mechanism. It is of great value, and, when attached to a telephone wire, can carry your voice across continents.”

  After the audience had sighed with pleasure at what he had said, he stood on his tiptoes, raised his arms to their full extent, hands still holding the telephone, and brought it from a height of three meters crashing to the piazza’s flagstone floor, having propelled it with all the force he could draw from within him, which was quite a lot. The largest pieces to remain intact were the bells, and of the rest nothing was left bigger than a pea pod. It was as if the machine had had a bomb in it. First came screams, then shock, then remonstrances, then a murmur, which Jacob Bayer silenced by standing to his full height and bellowing over the heads of all who looked at him, “Bring me a baby!”

  Absolute silence.

  “Bring me a baby!” he cried. “There are very few children of any kind in Koidanyev, I know, but there must be a baby or two.”

  “Mrs. Freiburg has a new baby,” said the same man who had asked the previous question, a simpleton.

  “No!” screamed a woman in the front. Then she repeated herself, softly, and then what she was saying became sobbing. What Jacob Bayer heard in her cry was grief for the dead. Everyone except a few had the air of seasick passengers in a storm.

  “Why not?” asked Jacob Bayer. “Why not? If we are mechanisms, then what’s the difference? So what? If a baby’s head,” he held an imaginary bundle in his arms, rocking it, “and its eyes,” he rocked some more, “and its flesh and blood … are,” he feigned taking the bundle as he had the telephone and propelling it with full and sudden power toward the stone floor, “smashed!” (more wails and involuntary cries of no, no!) “broken,” he said, “opened, separated, lacerated, drained, burst.” He spoke these words as in the Passover recitation of the plagues, and as he did the people of Koidanyev dropped to their seats, heads buried in their arms.

  Jacob Bayer took the same right index finger that had not long before pointed gently upward, and cocked it like a pistol at Voolsamdrek, closing his left eye with the resolute follow-through of aiming. “That,” he thundered, “is the soul. I have shown you two mechanisms, one without—and one with—a soul. And you have seen with a sense more powerful than sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch—all of which are part of the mechanism and fall away when the mechanism fails—that this is so. You have seen it with the one sense that cannot be taken away, that cannot fail you, and you show it.” They had begun to recover, although some breathed as if they were ill.

  “Tell me something, Professor Voolsamdrek,” Jacob Bayer commanded. “Why is music beautiful? Why is a face beautiful? Why is a river, or waving wheat, beautiful?”

  “It can be explained,” Voolsamdrek said, coolly, “with mathematics. It can be plotted, charted, and graphed.”

  “You mean that the pattern of pitch and frequency in music, for example, can be visually confirmed in a pleasingly symmetrical display?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does plotting it, which is no more than expressing it another way, explain it?”

  “Because certain proportions trigger in the body the release of specific chemicals that, when absorbed by the brain, create the sensation we know as pleasure, which, in certain coherent packets, we experience as what we term beauty. It’s much the same as love. There is no such thing as love, only the release of these chemicals according to stimuli.”

  “Why are they released?” Jacob Bayer asked.

  “When certain stimuli act upon the physiological system.”

  “Why do such stimuli cause these reactions as opposed to others? Why, for example, does the sight of one’s beloved not cause the release of the chemical that blocks the actions of digestion? Why does not the sight of a wheat field waving in the June sun release the chemical that makes you enraged and increases blood supply to the muscles for combat or flight? What cells or receptors make the interpretation a
nd discrimination that account for the difference?”

  “It probably isn’t a cell or a receptor,” Voolsamdrek said, “but a process among the cells of the brain.”

  “Yes,” said Jacob Bayer, “and ineffably, nonmechanically, nonphysically, that decision is rendered. And there, in this, you will find—invisible, unrecorded, and unrecordable—both beauty and love. And where do they come from? From the same place as the soul, a place totally outside the mechanism.”

  Now patiently, but still contemptuously, Voolsamdrek said, “No, no, no, no, no. We have knowledge. We build on it in a process of validation, replication, and review. This is our solid foundation. Everything else is a sham.”

  “No. Everything else is not a sham. Some things are beyond your method, and always will be. Tell me, for example, about the origins of the universe, and its extent.”

  “We know approximately when it began, and we know that it is limited.”

  “What lies beyond the limitation?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then science, I take it, can define ‘nothing,’ can prove its existence, and can exclude that ‘nothing,’ being the absence of something, is therefore something in itself, in that it defines a limitation? Or that ‘nothing’ is neither the area into which something can intrude, nor that which prevents something from intruding, and that this paradox is not unsettling and is, therefore, ‘nothing’?”

  “This is metaphysics and philosophy, not science,” Voolsamdrek protested.

  “I know that,” Jacob Bayer answered, “and you brought us here, did you not? And why not? It is a place where you would be welcomed to rule—if you could. Tell me, then, how did the universe begin? You do have an answer to that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, it simply sprang into being, ex nihilo, in what we call ‘a singularity.’”

  “Really?” Jacob Bayer said, pulling back, relaxing a bit. It scared Voolsamdrek. “And what came before? Oh, yes, that nothing, the existence of which, unfortunately, you cannot demonstrate. But what caused it suddenly to leap into being?”