First Light

by Charles Baxter

  He feels light-headed, a bit unhinged. The sensation is similar to the texture of faintness he felt in the showroom earlier this morning.

  All his life, he has wanted to be a good man, a soldier in the army of tenderness; yet here he is in this brutally plush motel. The authorities on how to be a good man disapprove of what he is doing. These authorities are all self-proclaimed; like the black-and-white movie gangsters, they, too, are on television. To get through the long hours of the day, Hugh needs help; love, from any source, makes the time pass. He believes in love, in giving away as much of it as he has, as he can find. But there must be something wrong with his forms of affection. Looking at his lover’s frizzy hair, he thinks of how people keep walking away from what he offers them. They don’t need it. But Noah: his nephew, Noah, doesn’t do that. Hugh reminds himself to buy Noah a present for his arrival, maybe a soccer ball. This woman, in bed with him now, has very little time for him. She complains about his calls, but sometimes she’ll see him. It’s something. It fills the afternoon. He bends down, and, against everything the world believes he should be doing, kisses her on the arm, just below the wrist. Her skin, damp minutes ago from love but now dry, gives off a slightly acidic taste to his tongue of salt and brine, and it makes Hugh think of the sea.

  II

  4

  She would like to begin by saying to her class: imagine the universe, its colossal size. Imagine the energies in the interaction of particles as they combine and recombine. Imagine the features of naked singularities and wave fluctuation and the shape of de Sitter spacetime. She’d like to stand there in front of them and give them, these hard-headed kids, a good dose of awe. Not using chalk for once, she would just speak about the possibility of a universe, perhaps this one, trapped in a false vacuum of the Higgs field. What would happen? she’d ask, and no one would answer. Well, there might be a process of tunneling through the energy barrier until the universe came to the state of the true vacuum. Imagine that.

  She’d like to say something about the metaphors of space. She won’t, but she’d like to. In many religions, the sun is viewed as an analogue to God, and in some Near Eastern cults, the fire cults that interested Nietzsche, the sun is a deity, the origin of all energy, heat, light, and life. A masculine force, this sun, countered by the feminine lucent moon, mutable, pale pink at the horizon, grayish white overhead, and silver in daytime. The moon is a friend to women. Its attraction, its capacity to pull objects toward itself, is traditionally a metaphor for womanly force. Lovers know and understand the moon as a sign for love: a cliché, certainly, but one that does not wear out. “The moon,” they whisper, infinitely.

  If the sun is God, what, then, is a black hole? What is this—call it an object even though it has no objecthood—what is this object that can draw matter within its event horizon and obliterate it? Is it primitive, and naïve, to say that physics has at last discovered the physics of nothing-ness? Yes, it is naïve to say so, but if Stephen Hawking is correct, and black holes do eventually evaporate and explode, what would a mind that has made a god of the sun make of this? Steven Weinberg, who has won the Nobel Prize, says that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. What would such a mind do with the idea that the universe is closed and finite and will collapse again, come to a point, and then re-expand? What if the universe is in an infinite process of expansion and contraction, like the bellows of an accordion being played through the creation of time, its obliteration, and its recreation? Oh, children, she’d like to say, staring out starkly at their faces, for whose enjoyment is this cosmic tune being played?

  She doesn’t say such things. She is a professional and knows what she is supposed to be doing. Besides, this class is filled, not with children, but with careerists, young go-getters with minds like calculators, calculators that are unmoved by metaphors but can easily quantify salaries and perks and benefits.

  She stands in a university classroom in Buffalo, writing out

  where H(t) and p(t) are the values of the Hubble “constant”—they know, because she has explained, that it’s not a constant at all—and the cosmic mass density at time t. She’s getting white chalk dust all over the sleeves of her blouse. There she is, her blondish hair cut short, her eyes ringed with insomniac circles, explaining the function of these formulas to her students, an international ragbag of brilliant, scruffy, brooding-faced men and three women, all of whom have probably never had physics taught to them by a woman before. The course is Physics 501, Astrophysics, which includes atomic spectroscopy, quantum mechanics, stellar evolution, the general theory of relativity, and an introduction to recent theories of cosmology. Dorsey’s wedding ring and her slightly bored explanations of the materials give her an offhand and disconcerting authority in front of this class. Only the bravest ask questions, trying to employ the same bored intonations that she uses.

  After class, she wants to get home—it’s a day with no committee meetings—but she’s met at her office door by Bobby Chin, who is working out for himself a problem in cosmological parameters for a restricted class of closed Big-Bang universes. She agrees to talk to him and look at his calculations for five minutes. Bobby’s face falls. He doesn’t really care about cosmological parameters, Dorsey thinks; what he wants is more than five minutes, with her. His face struggles to suppress its yearning. He’s a slender, good-looking boy, with raven hair and eyes she might fall into, if she were a different sort of person and let herself do such things. She examines his calculations, which are excellent though flawed, and closes her eyes for a moment against the force of what she knows to be his feelings. Eros and mathematics: in one possible universe, though not this one, the two can meet.

  At last Dorsey is driving down Main Street in Buffalo to get Noah at his school, the Pendrick School for the Deaf, where students are not forced day in and day out to verbalize or to lip-read. Its emphasis is on dual-language signing, and as much lip-reading and speaking as the child can take. A miracle of a school. It’s late March, and Noah comes rushing out of the stony, functional brown building with his jacket unzipped and his arms making happy arcs in the ugly damp air. He waves good-bye to a small cluster of his friends, gets into the car, and kisses his mother on the cheek.

  Soon they are back home in their large old rented house that faces the Delaware Park Zoo. Noah stays downstairs, in the back playroom, building with his Lego Masterbuilder set, while Dorsey goes upstairs to her study to slit open the mail. Simon is out. Simon is very often out, no explanations given and none asked, though he does leave phone numbers on pieces of paper stuck with magnets to the refrigerator. These numbers tell Dorsey where he may be reached: theaters, studios, apartments, places where he plays. The point of these letters is, he will be back.

  The mail is mostly bills, but here is a letter addressed to Dorsey Welch, not Dorsey O’Rourke, with a California return address. The envelope is tissue-thin, European stationery paper, the handwriting both formal and ornate in its tiny methodical hand with no traces of the Palmer Method. It’s not ballpoint ink, either; the ink is sea-blue, straight from the gold fountain pen Dorsey knows is kept in an engraved silver case at the front of her correspondent’s desk.

  The tone of the letter is both fierce and autumnal. It begins with the writer’s assertion that he will say nothing about their last phone call. A cruel misunderstanding, he says, and repeats that he will not speak of it. Without any transition he announces that he is learning Danish, the better to read Kierkegaard, whose thoughts on faith and psychic cataclysm he is eager to examine in the original. In the same paragraph (he is a man without transitions), he says that he will soon apply himself (again) to the learning of Sanskrit so that he may once more read the Upanishads as they are meant to be read. He would like to read the Panchatantra, Sanskrit fairy tales, but he does not believe that he will be able to achieve this goal for another three or four years.

  The Oppenheimer project, he says, is coming along, always coming along. About his
work on Yang-Mills gauge theories he says nothing.

  He asks Dorsey how she is. The wording of the question is kindly but also gruff: “I am deeply interested, as you know, in your condition. What is it?” He says, as he has said before, that a woman of her promise and potential should not be in an urban caricature like Buffalo. He asks about Noah. Please, he says, send me a picture. He does not ask about Simon, nor does he mention Simon’s name.

  I have some displeasing equations here that I’ve been working on, he says. I may be getting too old to stalk and discover the elusive banality of truth.

  Is this the twilight of the Age of Science? he suddenly asks. The generation of data has become a tiresome joke. Even educated persons are becoming weary of the information glut that science has produced, and of its Kali-like thirst for destructive energies. This is a clear cultural sign. It is a mistake, of course, to think of physics as a destructive art, and yet that is how people tend to think of it. Not all these people under contract to the Defense Department are engineers. Some call themselves physicists, after all. Even worse, they think of themselves as Americans, with that dangerous innocence. All right: if it isn’t new data, what is it?

  Dorsey, reading, says aloud, “How should I know?”

  What we will get from now on, he says, is the organization of data, not new data, but old data leashed and whipped by the computer boys. Power is moving from science, the discovery of new information, to data processing, old information used in new ways. This means that the human spirit is reaching the end of its tolerance for discoveries. Human beings want to forget, he says. Humankind has gone forward; now it will go back. They have learned all they want to know about the universe. In any case, advances in cosmology may soon bring about the end of physics as we know it. The end, the end, he writes.

  New paragraph, a short one. I think, he writes, of the arch of your foot. I think of the metatarsal bone structure and the pale sheath of skin. With you, the darkness stays at its own distance. This paragraph concludes with a reference to the late poetry of William Butler Yeats.

  There is one page left to the letter, and the handwriting is getting tinier, the letters looking more algebraic.

  The writer complains of aches, of arthritic stiffness in the knees, and pain in the lower back. Physics, he says, is no field for old men obsessed with their own anatomic breakdown. He says he has gotten rid of his dogs; he is incapable of walking them.

  In the last paragraph he says that he knows he has rambled but that the point is this: what about Dorsey’s professional advances? Where are they? Should she, he asks, make her life unnecessarily miserable by staying in this field that is bringing about its own end? Should she not give herself up to the pleasures and vicissitudes of common life? Life is infinite, he says, and there’s no disgrace in setting aside science for an untormented life, particularly in a diminished epoch like ours. Take care of Noah, he says. Don’t forget the child and don’t let him feed on the imbecilities of the age. Ah, he writes, catching himself, I am beginning to sound like a patriarch, which I have no right to do. What I am, he says in the final sentence, is your loving (he underlines the word) … Carlo Pavorese.

  Dorsey lets the letter drop on her desk and she closes her eyes, counting to twenty. She raises her hand to her forehead and is relieved that no perspiration, hot or cold, has been squeezed out of the glands onto her skin. Outside her study window a nuthatch flickers from branch to branch of the oak tree. Watching it, Dorsey tests her mouth and finds it dry. She picks up the letter again, puts the thin sheets of paper into the envelope, and holds it in both hands. A car honks as it passes on Parkside, startling her. With her fingertips she worries the fine paper of the envelope back and forth, so that the paper rustles rhythmically, sounding like a small machine. This noise grows louder as Dorsey tugs harder at the paper, ripping it slightly at the top. She stands up.

  She goes downstairs, the letter still in her left hand, letting the cool bannister pass under the fingers of her right. Breathing quietly, she walks back to the rear study where Noah is playing with his Lego set, sent to him by his Uncle Hugh. Already he has built what seems to be the lower half of a motorized oil derrick.

  Noah, she says, I’m going out for a quick walk. I’ll be right back. You want to come?

  No, Mom. I’ll stay here.

  Do you want a snack?

  I got one already.

  Daddy should be home anytime.

  I know.

  He has already started to turn away from her. It’s a safe neighborhood, and he doesn’t mind being alone for a few minutes. Dorsey puts on her coat and stands in the hallway, the letter still in her left hand. What to do with it? She swears heavily to herself, then drops the envelope into the ceramic bowl on top of the steam radiator. The bowl is the place for messages, for mail, for change and money for babysitters. She opens the front door, breathes in a gulp of Lake Erie air, and locks the door behind her.

  She begins her walk by heading north on Parkside toward the zoo. She looks down at her hands, sees that they are clenched into fists, and relaxes them, putting them into her coat pockets. To her left is the fenced area for lawn bowling, the grass still brown and muddy from the spring thaws.

  She crosses Parkside and enters the Delaware Park Zoo. From every corner wafts the smell of popcorn and animal dung and peanuts. It’s a small zoo, the old-fashioned kind with animals-except for the lions—tightly caged; they either sleep or gaze glumly at the onlookers. Since it’s a Wednesday afternoon in March, there aren’t many people here, though Dorsey does see one couple, teenagers, soul kissing in front of the gorilla cage, as if to provoke the animal to some kind of violence. But the sidewalk is gray, the sky is gray, and most of the people are dressed in Great Lakes Industrial grays and browns, and the gorilla doesn’t budge.

  Where are the lions? Dorsey wants to stand in front of a lion, though she’s not sure what she’ll do once she finds one. She knows the zoo well enough to make her way to the seal pool, but she has to check the directions posted on the side of a peanut stand to find out where the big cats are located. A bag lady in a long, oversized parka glances at Dorsey and then goes on surveying the ground for peanuts still in their shells. She finds one near a sidewalk puddle underneath an overflowing drinking fountain; she breaks the nut open, eats it, and looks directly at Dorsey: I’m eating. What are you doing?

  The lion cage is one of the larger displays, half indoors and half out, built with an incline to suggest an African slope, on whose lumps are positioned some rocks and some upright branching sticks to suggest trees. A deep uncrossable man-made gorge separates the lions from the spectators, of whom there are three: Dorsey, and two police officers who are strolling in the general direction of the giraffe. With her hands down on the barrier, Dorsey gazes across the gulf toward the one lion she can see, a female. The animal is awake but apparently immobilized, gazing at something just to Dorsey’s right. Dorsey turns, sees nothing there, and turns back toward the lion. The animal is resting, down on its stomach like the Sphinx, its front paws out in front of it, its head held up, the eyes alert. The yellow-gold fur, for all the animal’s captivity, is textured with ridged muscle underneath. Now the animal turns its head to the right, as if it heard something from that direction. No. Nothing there. It turns its head back, again looking at some object, visible or invisible, just beyond Dorsey. It has not glanced at Dorsey; it does not seem to see her. All its head movements are slow.

  “Arrgh,” Dorsey says softly.

  The lion has perhaps not heard. Dorsey repeats the sound, more loudly, not yet a shout. It’s not conversational level, this cry, and is not meant for other people. It is meant for the lion. But the lion still has not heard, or if it has, it shows no sign. Dorsey spins around to see how many people will hear her. There is the sound of traffic, of an elephant halfheartedly trumpeting. No one is nearby except for the bag lady, muttering to herself.

  Dorsey opens her mouth involuntarily. This time she shouts without knowing. She
discovers herself making noises, loud quavering vowels, which echo off the back of the pseudo-African scene, and this time the lion notices. Unhurried, it turns its head so that its gaze is fixed on Dorsey. With the lion looking at her, Dorsey is jammed into her own quiet. The animal’s gaze, now that Dorsey can see it directly, is not empty and blank; it is watchful and intelligent, but pitiless: the face of a well-traveled old woman. The lion does not seem surprised that Dorsey would shout, but it is not that interested, either. After a few seconds, it turns its massive head and powerful thoughtless eyes so that it is once again gazing at whatever is just above the horizon to Dorsey’s right. Dorsey turns to look. She follows the lion’s eyes to a poplar tree planted in the middle of the zoo’s walkway. A squirrel perches in the bare branches. It chitters, climbing down one branch and then up another, all its motions rushed and jerky, squirrel-manic. Dorsey looks one last time at the lion, who in turn still watches the squirrel with a calm predatory gaze. And now the lion yawns, exposing its huge instrumental teeth and pink cavernous mouth. Dorsey turns away and heads home.

  After Dorsey lets herself in through the side door, she sees across the width of the house Simon sitting on the floor near Noah. They are working together on the oil derrick. Simon is stringing the threads over the hanging pulley. Pulleys? Threads? Perhaps the oil derrick has turned into a crane. She walks into the room and watches them working quietly together, Simon pointing and signing, Noah signing in response. Simon’s great talent for physical expression helps him in these situations. He and Noah can work together on a project faster and more efficiently than Dorsey and Noah can. Dorsey is always trying to explain things in detail, while Simon finds the quick, expressive, inclusive gesture.