“How about tonight?”
“Could you?” Her heart leaped into her voice.
“I’ll e-mail from the San Jose Airport, let you know when I’ll be coming in.”
So she had gotten through the rest of the day, dividing her time between office hours for her Physics 3B class, talking to Max in the lab, and dealing with the safety office. She picked Dad up at John Wayne Airport just before the rush hour. He came out of the terminal in a trim gray suit that framed his bronzed head well, gracefully swinging his flight bag, looking more rawboned than usual. He wore a tie she had given him years ago for a birthday and wondered if that was deliberate, a sweet gesture; then she thought better of asking.
“You look great!” He grinned at her, getting in the passenger seat, giving her cheek a quick peck. His diction was precise, even prissy at times. She could remember him doing imitations of educated blacks trying to do streetspeak, the “mutha” for mother, “livin’ large, girl,” “What dey gone set bail at?” jive. He was the opposite, controlled and exact, comfortable with his repute. She recalled that she had been so insecure during her college years, she hoped that some of the gold of her father’s fame would rub off on her, a sort of gilt by association. Now she needed some of his calm to rub off, too.
They got into the usual catching up, asking about relatives, who was where doing what. She had long ago learned that from her father’s pinnacle, one wing of his family was trash, people who learned only at the toe end of somebody’s boot. These he ignored, while the suitable wing got meticulous attention; he regaled her with stories. In that wing you never missed a day of school unless you were bleeding from your eye sockets, wore demure clothes with orderly hair, and not only kept your eyes on the prize—you were the prize.
On the drive down Laguna Canyon she ventured a question about Maria, his wife of two years, and he said, “I still think it’s best that you two not see each other for a year or so.”
“It’s been two,” she said. He expressed surprise and she knew that nothing had changed. She and Maria had gotten off on the wrong foot and they had never put it right. Maria had a compulsion to verbally rearrange the world to fit her tight specifications; in practice this meant that she had plenty of theories about how black women should be, too many for Alicia.
“Well, Aleix, this’ll take time,” he said in a studied tone. She had changed her name from the African Aleix to Alicia when she went away to college, fresh beginnings and all. Her parents had been into black roots and the rest of it when she was born, then had rapidly backed away. Her father’s political evolution had followed a trajectory away from what he termed in one of his op-ed pieces “the narcissism of minor differences.” He had approved her abandoning the Africa-nodding of Aleix, remarking only that his thinking in those days had been mere mulling over food and folktales.
She had been surprised when he wrote a series of columns on his emergence, his recovery from her mother’s death in an auto accident, and one entirely about her. This was on his long march abandoning, in his phrase, “obligatory blackitude,” so he had folded it into a thesis about the hollowness of hauling out costumes and traditional foods from lands you had never even visited. He had taken a stand against a black group insisting on carrying their “cultural weapons” to political rallies, on grounds that they stood for a precious cultural inheritance which should be beyond criticism. Tom Butterworth (“Uncle Tom” to his enemies, of course) then argued that a ban on spears was scarcely an attack on their culture, since none of them knew much more about real spears than which was the business end. The entire series in book form won a Pulitzer. A man of the new libertarian left (an oxymoron, but he let it stand), social critic, occasional maven to the mighty, he made judgments for a living; she needed some.
All that shadowed her mood until they were walking on the beach near her apartment. It was hard to concentrate against the sunny splendor of the place. The lazy crescent beaches, despite their lazy sun worshippers, were battlegrounds. Roving eyes compared slim thighs, bunched pecs, ribbed bellies. Bodies sought audiences. All around them stirred restless devotees of the new narcissism, the conspicuous consumption of health as a brightly packaged commodity: plastic surgery and diet for the skin’s pesky folds and wrinkles; lasers to clear blurred vision; pills galore to erase pain, amplify energy; clever genetic engineering to tailor away chronic ailments and create defect-free children. Stay slim, live right, last forever. And she kept thinking about the ruined face she had found on the lab floor…
She took some deep breaths and grasped her father’s hand. In halting phrases she told the whole messy story and he nodded and made sympathetic murmurs but nothing more. She had expected him to be riveted by the key idea, the universe in a hatbox, but he accepted this without blinking. His calm was unnerving.
They had long since left the long main beach and mounted the rise to Heisler Park. Along the scooped-out rocky arches of its coast they strolled, Dad with his head back, taking in the palm trees and vistas, she with her head down, as if suspecting the footing ahead. He watched some surfers getting slammed against the rocks below in a white froth, winced at the punishment they took, and then said calmly, “You’ll need Bernie Ross.”
“Who is?”
“Attorney, good one, knows this sort of stuff.”
“And what sort of stuff is this?”
“Media management. If you’re ten percent right about what this thing is”—hand held up, palm out, quick flash of even teeth in a dead-white smile—“not that I’m doubting your professional judgment, girl—well, then, you can’t keep it quiet.”
“Of course I can. Until we have better results, a chance to thoroughly—”
“You’ll get no chance.”
“I don’t plan to publish or even give a talk until—”
“Two weeks, tops.”
She felt a spurt of irritation at him and caught herself before she let her mouth run away. “It’s my research. Nobody, not Brookhaven or UCI or—”
“UCI will do it. You’ll have to tell them something.”
“Maybe a confidential committee. That’s all.”
“Remember that egg scandal at UCI a decade back? How long did that stay confidential?”
“Okay, but that was a scandal, as I remember.”
“This has a death in it already.”
“An accidental one,” she said, voice rickety.
“Information wants to be free—remember that old saw? Some truth to it, only it’s backward. This isn’t an information economy—we’re drowning in that—it’s an attention economy. That’s what everybody’s vying for. Me, I’ve got a li’l piece of the public’s attention, they read my column. So I know the territory. Any of my esteemed colleagues sniff what you got here, they’ll be all over you.”
“I don’t want attention.”
“No, they do. So they use you.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“I want a good lawyer to look after you. I wouldn’t put it past UCI to go after you. That’s what they did with the egg scandal doctors, even though nobody really proved a case.”
She understood now; he was rushing in with a solution, classic male pattern, before he knew what she wanted. “Okay, have this Mr. Ross call me.” Her classic easy-exit settlement.
He nodded contentedly. “Then we’ve got to talk about what the hell this all means. And how my li’l girl gets through it.”
“Let’s,” she said happily. He kissed her lightly, smiled, and they walked back toward the south. He admired the golden coast spreading into the filmy blue distance, the south coast’s offhand splendor, and she saw trouble coming toward them, in the form of Max. Waving, he walked quickly along the concrete path, oblivious to the beauty.
“Hello, sorry to interrupt,” he said rapidly as he neared them. “I missed you at UCI, wanted to look at some of that old data. The apartment manager said you’d gone for a walk.”
“You checked the notebooks in the lab?” she shot back, s
omehow disturbed at his sudden appearance.
“There aren’t many. What’s there doesn’t cover much of your work, as far as I can see.”
“I’ve got the rest in my apartment,” she said. “Oh, Dad, this is Max Jalon.”
“I’m Tom.” The two men shook hands a bit stiffly, each eyeing the other, murmuring the usual. Max complimented Tom on his suit, the first sign of fashion awareness she had ever seen from him, and Tom took it with a skeptical drawing down of his mouth. Was Max trying to get on Tom’s good side? Impressed with his minor celebrity? The thought bemused her.
Max made a few more casually companionable remarks as they all walked back toward the center of town, seagulls squawking overhead at the brimming sunset. They stopped to watch the sun’s circle warp into a refracted orange oval and Max kept talking through the whole thing, explaining in needless detail how he had searched the lab, even though the UCI safety people were there making measurements of some kind.
“What measurements? They told me they were just placing a seal on the room.”
“They didn’t let me in until their boss came by and gave me an okay. It looked like they were checking the hard disks on your diagnostics computers.”
“Taking my data!”
“Looked like. I asked them, but they wouldn’t say anything, brushed me off really, referred me to somebody across the campus. I came here instead.”
Alicia nodded, chagrined that she had left UCI without thinking of Max, who had been working in the library. Her father asked with his well-honed formality, “Mr. Jalon, may I ask your interest in all this?”
“I’m a friend of your daughter.”
“What sort of friend?”
“A colleague,” Max said, blinking with surprise.
“I see,” he said with the fine-edged disbelief she had seen the public Tom Butterworth use in debates. “Then you’ll understand her need to keep this matter as closely held as possible.”
“Sure I do. I just need to see—”
“I think she can decide when to show her results,” Tom said, aloof and smooth.
“I can, Dad, and Max is one of the few I trust,” she intervened.
What was going so quickly wrong here? She tried to figure it out as she guided them both on a shortcut along by the art museum and across Coast Highway. Traffic muttered in the early stages of the daily snarl and the fumes wrinkled her nose. She studied her father’s face and as they reached Lower Cliff Drive she guessed: he thought Max was her boyfriend. She almost laughed and then wondered what her father had seen that made him think so. Or was it the white boyfriend angle? She tried to recall, and yes—her father had never seen her going out with any of the half dozen white or Asian men she had favored in her early twenties. The two of them had been distant then, at odds; then came Maria. The last boyfriend material he had seen had been black—by pure accident, no calculation on her part—half a dozen years ago. She could not suppress a smile. Imagine!
The three of them reached her apartment and Dad looked around uncomfortably at the general clutter. He was a Neat, she was a Sprawler; genetics had failed again. Alicia went into the kitchen and opened the 1960s-style oven, fetching out six lab books, thick with taped-in printouts. “The oven?” Dad asked.
“Not as though I’m going to bake a cake or anything.”
“They’d look there pretty early, though,” Tom Butterworth said.
“Who?”
Deadpan: “UCI, once they get a writ to come after materials you’ve withheld from their investigation.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” she protested, plopping down on the living room sofa.
“Never underestimate lawyers on a roll,” Tom said.
“Ummm, can I keep these overnight?” Max said quietly, his tone tiptoeing by.
“I’d rather not let them out of my sight,” Alicia said.
“I’m interested in tracking all the spectra you measured—and the exact time of observation,” Max said, sitting down and stacking the bulky notebooks on her Danish coffee table. Three promptly toppled onto the carpet, which exhaled a cloud of dust in reply to the assault.
“Why?” she asked.
“Just a hunch. Prowling the data, y’know.”
“Look at them here,” she said.
“Looks like a lot of work,” he said. “I can’t do it in a hour or two.”
“Stay overnight, then,” she said, not wanting to dissuade him from doing anything that might help. “Tomorrow you can finish here. I’m still not going to take them back to UCI.”
When she glanced over at her father, she was surprised to see his face grim, narrow-eyed. “You should not involve others in what may be illegal.”
“Illegal?”
“Or, at the very least, cause for dismissal.”
“What? They can’t fire me—”
“Of course they can! Do you imagine faculty are dismissed only for fornication with undergraduates?”
“In the humanities not even for that,” she said, trying to let a little air into the suddenly heated tone.
“You don’t have tenure yet, honey.”
“No, but…”
Max stood. “Look, I can come back tomorrow—”
“No, you can stay here.” Alicia stood up and paced, the silence in the room growing longer, then she put her hands on her hips and marched over to the window, glanced at the mire of cars on the Coast Highway, turned, walked back to the kitchen, then whirled and said to her father, “You don’t want him to stay here overnight, is that it?”
“No no, I just—”
“That is it! And I’m thirty-one years old.”
“Not at all, not at all.” Stiff now, the public voice back. “I think you should look to the legal ramifications of all this. If UCI suspects you of withholding data which bears on an investigation, one which has criminal possibilities, even if only from negligence, then you cannot involve others—”
“You think I’m guilty of negligence?”
“I only hold out the possibility. Try to look at it the way an attorney—”
“No, you try to look at it my way!”
Max said tentatively, “Look, I really can come back tomorrow—”
“Stay there,” she said fiercely, putting a palm on his chest when Max started to take a step. “Dad, all you can think about is legal-eagle crap!”
Tom shrugged. “That’s my training.”
“How about the… the enormity of this?”
“Plenty things look important when you’re up close, honey, but—”
“It really is important.”
He tipped his chin up and assumed a look of tolerant patience. A warning bell went off in the back of her mind and she made herself take a long breath. Abruptly she remembered how, when she was a teenager, she had stormed to her bedroom and slammed the door so hard it reverberated through the house. Her father had said not a word, just took a screwdriver and removed the door of her room. She lived that way for several days until the lack of privacy and the sheer unnerving feel of living that way made her apologize. Her father just nodded, kissed her, and put the door back up.
Anger wasn’t going to work here. She expelled a long sigh and said, “We’ve created something new and, well, maybe awesome.”
Tom nodded hesitantly. “I didn’t really follow all that. The important thing is to see how UCI’s going to play this, not that it’s a new particle gizmo—”
“Gizmo? It’s fundamentally strange.”
“I understand that it’s important to you—”
“And to the world,” Max said softly. “If we’re right.”
Tom gave Max a quizzical glance, ridgelines of surprise rising on his brow. “It’s that important?”
She realized in this quick shift that though her dad had listened to her go on about the sphere—the Cosm, as she thought of it now—he had simply blanked out on the physics, including the implications. Instead, he jumped to the bureaucratic, the political. Classic Dad demeanor; whateve
r problem pops up, if you own a hammer, look for nails.
Max said, “It could be a fundamental advance. A window into another universe.”
“I thought there was only one universe.”
Max sat back down and quickly began trying to explain. He was a lot better at it than she, and she let herself relax, sitting on the other end of the sofa from her father and wondering why she had gotten so provoked. What business of his was it if Max stayed here overnight? There was nothing between them. Could it be because Max was white, after all? Incredible.
But was that what set her off? She could not see through her own fog of emotion and so pushed it out of her mind. Better, far better, the cool abstractions of physics.
“See, these wormholes could connect different parts of our universe,” Max was saying earnestly, drawing on a yellow pad, “or even hollow through to another universe entirely.”
Tom gazed skeptically at the pad and Alicia felt a spark of affection for that rugged face. She had seen the same expression of puzzled concern through her tough teenage years, when he had played both Mom and Dad, nurturing one moment and sternly setting boundaries the next. Then came the tricky parting when she went off to college, exploring fields he never understood. Had they ever had an easy time? She couldn’t recall one. Maria had been just another jarring jolt along an already bumpy road.
“It appears that in that other universe events are proceeding at an accelerated pace. It is cooling off faster than we did.”
“How fast?” She recognized one of Tom’s verbal tactics; even though barely hanging onto the drift of a conversation, he would shoot back a question about a detail. He had told her once that this created the impression of more understanding than you had, without actually making a claim.
“Millions of times faster, looks like.”
“What in the world could make that happen?” Classic Tom, probing now.
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“Ummm-hummm.” Polite frown. “How can you be so sure it isn’t dangerous anymore, then?”
“Because it’s cooling off.”
“Uh-huh. But you say it’s growing.”
COSM Page 16
