Despite his weariness, he was unable to fall asleep. When he closed his eyes, all he could see was Miss Herwig crouched at her desk, wrinkling her nose and wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. He got up in ill humour and picked up the papers he had thrown to the floor the day before. He tried to put them in order, but even this proved overwhelming. He was incapable of untangling which argument led to which conclusion; all that was clear was the equation on the final page—which seemed to capture perfectly the movement of an electron inside an atom—but there was no evident connection between it and what he had written before. Nothing like this had ever happened to him. How could he have created something that not even he himself could understand? It was madness! He laid the sheets of paper between the worn covers of the notebook and locked it inside a drawer. Unwilling to give up, he worked on an article he had begun six months earlier, in which he analysed a strange acoustic phenomenon he had experienced during the war: after a great explosion, the sound waves weakened as they moved away from their point of origin, but at a certain distance, around fifty kilometres away, they seemed to return even more powerfully than before, as though, in advancing through space, they had moved backwards in time. Schrödinger, who at times could hear even the heartbeats of those around him, was fascinated by the inexplicable rebirth of sound from the verge of extinction, but, despite his best efforts, he could work no more than twenty minutes before his thoughts returned to Miss Herwig. He went back to bed and stuffed himself with sleeping pills. That night, he had two nightmares: in the first, a giant wave broke through the panes of his window and flooded his room to the ceiling; in the second, Schrödinger was floating naked on a choppy sea, just a few metres from the shore. He was exhausted and could hardly keep his nose above the water, but he did not dare swim in, for a beautiful woman was waiting for him on the sands, her skin black as coal, dancing on the corpse of her husband.
His dreams did not prevent his waking up in a good mood, and full of energy; he knew that Miss Herwig would be waiting for him at eleven. When he saw her, he realized she was in no condition to endure a lesson. Pallid, with sunken eyes, she told him she had spent the better part of the night watching a female aphid spawn dozens of tiny offspring. What was marvellous but at the same time horrible about the process, the girl said, was that these offspring would in turn produce offspring of their own after just a few hours of life; these new creatures were themselves gestating while still inside their mother. Three generations were nestled one inside the other, in a sort of dreadful Russian doll, a super-organism that embodied nature’s tendency to overabundance, which elsewhere compelled certain birds to produce more chicks than they could feed, so that the dominant fledgling would murder its siblings, pushing them from the nest. In some species, such as the shark, it was even worse, Miss Herwig explained, as the eggs hatched inside the mother’s womb, with teeth sufficiently developed to devour the young that came after them; this fratricidal predation gave them the necessary nourishment to survive during the first weeks of life when they were vulnerable enough to be preyed on by the same fish they themselves would feed on as adults. Following her father’s instructions, Miss Herwig had divided the members of the three generations of aphids, placing them in jars and exposing them to a pesticide that stained the glass such a striking shade of blue it seemed as though she were looking at the primordial colour of the sky. The insects had died instantly, but she had dreamt that night of their legs covered in blue dust, and had hardly got any rest at all. She would be unable to pay attention to her lessons, she said, but perhaps Herr Schrödinger would be willing to accompany her on a walk around the lake, to see if the cold air restored her strength?
Outside, winter dominated the landscape. The edges of the lake were frozen, and Schrödinger stopped to pick up little slivers of ice that dissolved slowly in the warmth of his hands. When they had reached the lake’s furthest edge, Miss Herwig asked what he was working on. Schrödinger spoke to her of Heisenberg’s ideas and de Broglie’s thesis, and described the apparent epiphany he had had his first night in the clinic and the strange equation it had produced. At first sight, it resembled closely the kind of physics used to calculate wave mechanics in the sea or the dispersion of sound through the atmosphere; but to apply it to the inner functioning of the atom, to the movement of electrons, Schrödinger had needed to include an imaginary number in his formula: the square root of minus one. In practical terms, this meant that a part of the wave his equation described escaped the three dimensions of space. Its crests and troughs travelled through multiple dimensions in a highly abstract realm that could only be described by pure mathematics. Beautiful as they were, Schrödinger’s waves were not a part of this world. It was obvious to him that his new equation described electrons as if they were waves. The problem was to understand what the hell was waving! As he spoke, Miss Herwig sat on a wooden bench at the edge of the lake. The physicist sat down next to her, and she opened a book she held in her hands, reading the following passage: “One ghost succeeds the other like waves on the illusory sea of birth and death. In the course of a life, there is nothing but the rise and fall of material and mental forms, while the unfathomable reality remains. In every creature sleeps an infinite intelligence, hidden and unknown, but destined to awaken, to tear the volatile web of the sensory mind, break the chrysalis of flesh, and conquer time and space.” Schrödinger recognized those same ideas that had obsessed him for years, and she told him that the winter before, a writer had spent some time in the clinic after having lived for four decades in Japan, where he had converted to Buddhism; it was he who had given her those first lessons in Asian philosophy. Schrödinger and Miss Herwig passed the rest of the afternoon talking of Hinduism, Vedanta and the Great Vehicle of the Mayahana with the enthusiasm of two people discovering, without any prior indication, that they shared a secret. When they saw a flash of light illuminate the mountains in the distance, Miss Herwig said they should return right away to the sanatorium, because a storm was closing in. Schrödinger looked for an excuse to remain with her. It was not the first time he had become obsessed with a woman that young, but there was something different about Miss Herwig, something that disarmed him, that put his self-confidence in jeopardy. When they reached the foot of the stairs, he wondered whether to offer her his arm to lean on, and, in his hesitation, he slipped and sprained his ankle. They had to take him to his room on a stretcher, and he needed her help to remove his shoe from his swollen foot before climbing into bed.
Over the following days, Miss Herwig played the part of nurse and student. She brought him his food and his morning paper and obliged him to take the remedies her father had prescribed him, offering him her shoulder so he could hop to the bathroom. Schrödinger longed for those brief moments of contact and would drink up to three litres of water a day as an excuse to have her close, indifferent to the pain that unnecessary back-and-forth caused him. They continued their lessons in the evenings. The first day she sat in a chair, resting her feet on the bed, but Schrödinger had to strain his neck to see her notebook, and so she wound up sitting beside him, so close he could feel the heat emanating from her body. He could hardly resist the urge to touch her, but he tried to remain completely immobile to prevent her taking fright, even if it seemed this familiarity did not bother her in the least. Schrödinger would masturbate as soon as she had left the room, when he could still close his eyes and see her sitting by his side. Afterwards a tremendous guilt would beset him. Because he could not reach the bathroom without her help, he would clean himself with a cloth he kept hidden beneath the bed, like an adolescent still living at his parents’ house. Every time he did it, he promised himself he would speak to Doctor Herwig the next day and cancel their lessons. Then he would call his wife to pick him up and would never set foot in the clinic again, even if it meant coughing himself to death in the streets like a beggar. Anything was better than bearing this infantile infatuation, which deepened the longer they spent together. When she gave him a sump
tuous illustrated copy of the Bhagavad Gita, he dared to confess to her a recurring dream that had tortured him since he began to study the Vedas.
In his nightmare, the goddess Kali would sit on his chest like an enormous beetle, crushing him so that he could not move. With her necklace of human heads, and brandishing swords, axes and knives in her many arms, she would bathe him in drops of blood that fell from the tip of her tongue and jets of milk from her swollen breasts, rubbing his groin until he was no longer capable of bearing the arousal, at which point she would decapitate him and swallow his genitals. Miss Herwig listened to him impassively and told him his dream was not a nightmare, but a blessing: of all the forms taken on by the female aspect of the divine, Kali was the most compassionate, because she granted moksha—liberation—to her children, and her love for them extended beyond all human comprehension. Her black skin, she said, was the symbol of the void that transcends all form, the cosmic uterus in which all phenomena gestated, while her necklace of skulls comprised the egos she had freed from the principal object of their identification, which was nothing less than the body itself. The castration Schrödinger suffered at the Dark Mother’s hands was the greatest gift he could receive, a mutilation necessary so that his new consciousness could be born.
Confined to his bed for hours with no means of distraction, Schrödinger made great advances with his equation. Its power and scope became increasingly evident the more he approached a final version of it, though its significance in physical terms seemed to him ever more strange and indecipherable. According to his calculations, the electron was diffuse around the nucleus, like a cloud, and it oscillated like a wave trapped between the walls of a pool. But was that wave a real phenomenon or merely a trick that allowed one to calculate the particle’s location from one moment to the next? Harder yet to understand was the fact that his equation showed not a single wave for each electron, but an extraordinary variety of them, superimposed. Did all describe the same object, or did each represent a possible world? Schrödinger considered the second possibility: those multiple waves would be the first glimpse of something completely new, each a brief flash of a universe that was born when the electron leapt from one state to the other, branching out to populate the infinite, like the jewels of Indra’s net. But such a thing was inconceivable. Rack his brain as he might, he could not understand how he had strayed so far from his original intent. He had hoped to simplify the atomic world, had looked for a common attribute to all things, and had given birth to a greater mystery. His malaise kept him from working further, and he could think of nothing but the pain in his ankle and the body of Miss Herwig, who had missed her lessons over the past few days to help her father organize the Christmas celebrations.
On Christmas Eve, all the patients at the clinic—irrespective of the severity of their illness—attended a party that had become increasingly elaborate as the years went by. The celebration incorporated traditions from all over Europe and even beyond the Levant, pagan rites that had been lost with time and that celebrated not the coming of Christ, but the winter solstice, the return of the light after December 21, the longest and darkest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. The patients’ inflexible routine was broken, and, just as during the Roman Saturnalia, they walked half-nude through the halls, blowing whistles, beating drums and shaking bells before choosing their disguises and coming together for a great banquet. Schrödinger hated the celebration, and the first thing he did when Miss Herwig came to his room to resume her lessons was complain that the hellish racket of that carnival of imbeciles would keep him from sleeping all night. To the physicist’s astonishment, she took off her earrings, placed them in her mouth, and pulled the pearls away from the clasp with her teeth; after drying them on the cuffs of her dress, she bent over and put them in his ears. She explained that she did this when she had a migraine, and insisted that he keep them as a token of gratitude for the time he had devoted to her. Schrödinger asked her if she would take part in the festivities that year, imagining her naked and masked, though he knew that she never did so. She confessed that she hated Christmas; it was the period of highest mortality in the clinic, and neither drunken revelry nor frenetic dancing cleared her mind of so much death. Schrödinger was about to reply, but she fell backwards over the bed as if a bullet had struck her in the centre of her chest. “Do you know the first thing I’ll do when I get out of here?” she asked him with a smile crossing her face. “I’ll get drunk, and I’ll sleep with the ugliest man I can find.” “Why the ugliest?” Schrödinger asked, removing the pearls from his ears. “Because I want my first time to be for me and me alone,” she said, turning her neck to look him in the eyes. Schrödinger asked her if she had ever been with a man. “No man, no woman, no animal, no bird, no beast, no god, no demon; no material or incorporeal being, not this, not that, not the other,” Miss Herwig recited, rising slowly in the bed, like a corpse returning briefly to the world of the living. Schrödinger could hold back no more: he told her she was the most fascinating creature he had ever met, and that she had mesmerized him from the moment she had touched him in the canteen. The little time they had spent together had been the greatest happiness he had known over the past ten years, and the mere thought of her filled him with zeal. The idea of returning to Zurich terrified him, as he was certain she would pass her entrance exams and leave for boarding school and he would never be able to see her again. Miss Herwig barely moved while he spoke, and stared intently at the window; on the other side of the glass, an endless row of tiny lights rose up the path snaking up from the valley to the summit of the Weisshorn, thousands of torches shining brighter as the procession advanced and the sun vanished beneath the horizon. “When I was a girl, I had an uncontrollable fear of the dark,” she finally told him. “I would spend the whole night awake, reading by the light of candles my grandfather had given me, and I couldn’t sleep till the sun had begun to rise. I was so fragile in those days, my father didn’t dare punish me; his solution was to tell me that light was a finite resource. If too much of it were used, it would vanish, and darkness would reign over all things. That fear of an endless night convinced me to snuff out my candles, but I adopted the even stranger custom of going to bed before night fell. In summer that wasn’t difficult, the sun would go down late and I could take advantage of the entire day, but in wintertime, I had to go to bed not long after lunch, and I spent more time asleep than awake. The worst night of the year was this one, the winter solstice. The few children in the clinic would go on playing till midnight, dancing and running through the hallways, while I had to wait until the morning after to gather up the sweets that had been lost in the darkness and weave wreaths from the stomped tinsel of the decorations. I was nine when I decided to confront my fear. In this same room, in front of this same window, I stood while the sun sank behind the horizon, so quickly that it seemed dragged by a force stronger than mere gravity, as if, weary of its own brilliance, it wished to extinguish itself once and for all. I was about to climb under the sheets to cry when I saw the torches on the path. I thought they were my imagination, because in those days I often confused my dreams with reality, but as the lights came closer I could see the silhouettes of those carrying them. When they set alight a gigantic wooden effigy, I saw the men and women dancing around it; opening the window, I heard their songs, carried over with absolute clarity by the mountain air. I dressed as quickly as I could and asked my father to take me up to the burning pyre. He was astonished to see me awake at night, and put everything aside to accompany me. We walked together, holding hands, my palm sweating against his despite the cold, and we returned there year after year, irrespective of the weather or the state of my health, as if it were a covenant we had to rekindle again and again. This is the first night when we won’t go. There’s no longer any need; that same fire is now alight inside me and is consuming all that I have ever been. I no longer feel things as I did before. No ties bind me to others, I treasure no memories, no desires drive me onwards. M
y father, the sanatorium, this country, the mountain, the wind, the words that come from my mouth, all seem to me things as distant as the dreams of a woman long dead. This body you see eats, grows, walks, talks and smiles, but there is nothing left inside it but ashes. I have lost my fear of the night, Herr Schrödinger, and you should do the same.” Miss Herwig stood and walked to her room. She stopped an instant at the threshold, leant the weight of her body against the frame, and it seemed as though she were about to lose her strength. Schrödinger asked her not to leave, and tried to stand to reach her, but before he could take a step she had closed the door behind her.
Schrödinger spent the rest of the night with her pearls in his ears, incapable of banishing the image of the young woman bringing them to her mouth, her tensed lips biting the clasp, the glimmer of her spittle as she removed them. Humiliated by his confession and in despair at his inability to sleep, he took them out and masturbated, holding them in the palm of his hand. When he ejaculated, he heard Miss Herwig suffer an attack of coughing that seemed as if it would never end, and he hobbled to the basin, disgusted with himself. He soaked the pearls over and over, letting the water restore their gleam before putting them back in his ears, not to muffle the revelry, but to deaden the interminable hacking of his neighbour, which he heard all night, not knowing whether its pitiable staccato was emerging from the throat of the woman he loved or his imagination, for when he awoke the next morning, he still heard it, regular and maddening as a dripping tap, and it seemed to have invaded his own body, and he could not move without coughing himself breathless.
When We Cease to Understand the World Page 11
