The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  Really, it’s only one step beyond sympathetic magic. Ingesting this mushroom shaped like an erect phallus will make my dick hard. This plant with red sap must be good for my circulation. If I eat low-fat foods, I will have less fat in my body. Fooling ourselves with simple ideas.

  She keeps staring out the window. Nothing out there. Flat, empty, lightless. She wants more of it.

  The bus left Fargo at 2:30 a.m. Not even a station there, just a parking area between a pair of one-story windowless buildings and an unmarked side door into which the driver disappeared for forty minutes. Coffee, cigarettes, NoDoz, cocaine? Now it’s 3:45. Crawling across the flattest and coldest state in the continental US. Outside it’s minus fifteen degrees. Due in Bismarck at 5:30 a.m. Eight others on the bus at the moment, spread up and down, all asleep except possibly the inert human in the penultimate row with headphones on, leaking 120 pulses of white noise each minute.

  She turns her light back on, reopens Newman. In rubber-sheet geometry, curves are defined in such a way as to eliminate every naive appeal to intuition and experience.

  Our theme for today: naiveté.

  She keeps reading, trying to concentrate. She has always been able to lose herself in Newman, but not so much now. If she has lost her ability to focus, that would clinch the argument. What is she waiting for?

  She glances out the window again. With the overhead light on all she sees is her unlovable face.

  Where is she going?

  (She’s going to Seattle.)

  What is she doing?

  (She’s sitting on a bus going to Seattle.)

  What’s in Seattle?

  (Seattle.)

  She plows through four more pages and comes to this: A proof that 1 is equal to 2 is familiar to most of us. Such a proof may be extended to show that any two numbers or expressions are equal. The error common to all such frauds lies in dividing by zero, an operation strictly forbidden.

  This reminds her of something. Years ago someone sent her one of those fallacious proofs. It must have been her father. Thinking of him, her eyes burn. If she finds the courage, of course her mother would be upset. But for some reason it hits her harder, thinking about her father. Who would he have to share snowball sentences with, goofy math puzzles, those weird things he writes? Who would he have at all?

  Thursday, February 18, 2016

  He’s talking with Beth Davis, a colleague in his department, in the hallway outside his office. She’s holding a sheaf of printouts in one hand and a Styrofoam cup in the other, describing to him some new data on supernova neutrinos. She pauses to take a sip of her coffee, ducking her head and pursing her lips, and suddenly a memory floats up from years ago, dim, barely recoverable, but it strengthens as he focuses on it. One night he and Beth had the most amazing sex. Images and sensations flood his mind. He can’t believe he hasn’t thought about this since then. They had sex all night. It was perfect sex. Where were they? At a conference? And when was it, and how is it possible that he’s never thought about it since then, and why did they do it only once?

  He wakes.

  Cancels his alarm, which is set to go off in thirty seconds. Lies in bed, pointing an erection at the ceiling. Did it really happen? It did! He still remembers it, how wonderful it was. Beth was— Beth is— He can’t believe he hasn’t—

  He gets out of bed, puts on his bathrobe, and goes to piss, pushing his boner down. With the pressure from his bladder reduced he starts to detumesce. More awake now, he knows that of course it never happened. He often has dreams similar to this one, involving various women of his acquaintance. The memory of sex is always evanescent at first, then overpowering and euphoric. He’s known Beth slightly for two years. They haven’t even sat down to coffee together. She’s married. But now when he sees her he will feel an inappropriate attraction. His subjective impression is that the dream engenders the attraction, but he acknowledges it’s more likely that he’s unconsciously attracted to unavailable women and therefore dreams about them.

  He goes down to the kitchen to start coffee, comes back up, shaves, clothes himself, redescends. Boils three eggs, two for breakfast, one for lunch. When the eggs are done, he puts the pot lid facedown on the counter and drains the water. He turns back from the sink to see the lid creeping stepwise across the Formica. The steam trapped under the hot lid is condensing against the cool surface, forming a vacuum and a water seal around the rim. When the vacuum gets strong enough to break the seal at its weakest point, the air flowing in under the rim pulls it, hydroplaning, in the contrary direction. The pressure equalizes and the lid stops moving until more condensation causes the phenomenon to recur. It’s a steam engine powered by condensation rather than vaporization. This is the sort of thing that makes scientifically illiterate people believe in poltergeists.

  He eats standing at the counter, forcing himself to listen to a few minutes of NPR news. Stupidity appears to be on a relentless rise. This sociopathic moron Trump just won the New Hampshire primary. Of course there’s little chance he’ll survive the primaries, but the other Republicans aren’t much better. Such a lineup of ignoramuses and poltroons, it’s scarcely to be believed.

  He washes his plate and cup, puts his papers and laptop in his shoulder bag, shrugs on his coat. 7:20 a.m. Sun just coming up. Lecture at nine.

  People forget to turn off a light, then remember distinctly that they did turn it off, so they say a ghost turned it on. Studies have shown that habitual actions generate spurious specific memories. People hear a distant sound, incorrectly register it as a nearby sound, and think a ghost is in the next room. This especially happens to older people because the human brain, as it ages, has more difficulty identifying the direction and range of sounds. People sense low-frequency vibrations, which often occur in enclosed underground spaces, and ascribe the physical unease engendered by such vibrations to a malign “presence.” People with no mathematical ability and consequently no notion of the prevalence of coincidence see providential intention in every random correlation of their lives.

  He looks at the five dials on the stove, says “off” five times. Goes out and locks the door, thinking, “I’m locking the door.”

  He doesn’t like taking the time to put on his seat belt before he gets the car moving, so he attaches it while he’s rolling down the driveway and turning onto the street. His Toyota Corolla complains more about this than his old Ford Escort did. If he delays his seat belt long enough, the Corolla will beep eight times, once per second, then fifty times, twice per second. The first eight beeps group themselves naturally into twos, and thus the following faster beeps seem to come in groups of four. But since there are fifty beeps instead of forty-eight, the final two sound like a mistake.

  It fascinates him, how convincing the illusion is that the first of every four beeps is louder than the others. But it is an illusion. If he blocks out several beeps and then “resets” his attention, the following beeps always fall into groups of four with convincing first-beat emphasis, regardless of where they actually are in the sequence. Might this stem from the fact that most Western music is in 2/4 or 4/4, so his brain is conditioned to hearing repetitive sounds in those groupings? Might that also be the reason people hear a “tick-tock” in clocks and a “ping-pong” in a Ping-Pong game? Older pendulum clocks really did sound “tick-tock,” since the escapement mechanism had two distinct stages. Maybe people hear “tick-tock” in electric clocks because the old phrase “tick-tock” conditions them to hear it. An interesting example, if true, of language influencing apprehension.

  The weather has warmed again, almost up to the freezing point, with patches of pale blue sky and pinpricks of snow in the air. On the way to campus, he passes a spot in the steep terrain of his neighborhood where the downhill side of the road began to slump a year ago. The town set up three Jersey barriers to keep cars away from the edge, then seemed to forget about the problem. Of course the barriers
are ugly: blotchy gray concrete, crumbled here and there at the edges, a nub of rusted rebar showing. Some of his neighbors complained. About a month ago, someone used pink spray paint to write in cursive along the three scorned objects: “Tell me/I’m/Pretty.” Yes, he’s a ridiculous person; he finds this touching.

  It also fascinates him that most people have no idea how many beeps their own cars make. (He was curious, so he started asking.) It’s not an utterly trivial question, because it is, after all, an engineering decision stemming from a social-science judgment. Manufacturers want to annoy people enough to get them to attach their seat belts, but can’t annoy them so much that they’ll buy a different car. Toyota is willing to harass him more than Ford. Could that be because Japanese are more comfortable than Americans in using social pressure to enforce norms?

  He once asked all his acquaintances to sing for him, on the spot, the chimes produced by the university clock tower. The full sequence, on the hour, is sol-mi-sol-do-sol-mi-do-mi. They had heard parts or all of this melody four times every hour, every day, for years. Of the ones who didn’t merely shrug and admit they hadn’t the foggiest, about two-thirds responded by singing the chimes of Big Ben. A fine example of pattern dependence. One study has shown that if you display to people on a screen, even for several seconds, an ace of hearts falsely colored black, they will perceive it as an ace of spades. Much of what we “see” is not actually data acquired through our retinas. Our brains economize processing power by looking for patterns, then relying on them as shortcuts. If you project on a screen a regular grid with dots placed randomly near the edges, then stare at the center of the grid, the dots will disappear from your peripheral vision.

  He parks near his building, checks to confirm the doors are locked, makes a circuit of the car to ensure the headlights and taillights are off. Takes the stairs two at a time up three flights.

  Departmental hallway (right there is where beautiful Beth stood, endearingly sipping her coffee), office, desk. He likes to start each morning by seeing what the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA has chosen to post as their Astronomy Picture of the Day. Today’s is a photo of yesterday’s launch of the Hitomi satellite by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. A beautiful image—the H-IIA rocket is riding a dazzling fan of fire up out of a cloud of water vapor, about 15 degrees off vertical. It’s interesting how the tilt makes the flight seem more “dynamic” than a purely vertical rise, and he wonders if the photographer manipulated the frame. But the orientation of the cloud argues against it.

  He loves the look of rockets. In his early boyhood, that’s what all the “spaceships” on the covers of sci-fi paperbacks actually were—sleek convex cylinders with fins, a wonderfully alluring design that he had no idea at the time was a copy of Hitler’s V-2. So those vehicles “reaching for the stars,” paeans to human idealism, were actually Nazi terror weapons. Which is kind of a fun fact. The enormous Saturn rockets of his adolescence were much less appealing, looking like Empire State Buildings lumbering aloft. But Atlas I through V got gorgeous again, satin-sheen white pencils with enlarged pointed heads evoking futuristic arrows, and delicate articulated boosters like flanking organ pipes. The H-IIA in today’s photo is a slim cone-topped cylinder, the exact shape of a Crayola crayon.

  Rockets make Mark think of his father, whose feelings about them, one could fairly say, were mixed. He liked to watch clips of failed launches: the rocket rising a few meters, hesitating, schlumping back, exploding. Or rising farther, fishtailing, turning upside down, now using its thrust to drill itself into the ground. He found these clips hilarious. The poor guy got more and more reclusive as he grew older. The inability of Mark’s parents to communicate with each other in the smallest helpful way in their last twenty years pained Mark a great deal. They were each locked in their own world, comforted by mutually antagonistic interpretations of every event of their lives. Ah, well.

  Time to get to class. He grabs his laptop and heads down the hall. (Right there, exactly there.)

  Should he be worried about Mette? Her mother often berates him for not “passing the test,” by which she means the Turing test. He wonders occasionally if she has a point. Whereas, as far as he can tell, she never questions her own emotional responses, which is somewhat annoying. He’s not blind to the evidence that he’s slow to notice certain things. And really, it’s not that he’s not a tad concerned. But he’s never gotten the impression that Mette relies on him for emotional support. His impression is that when her mother tries to interfere, she bristles. He and his daughter sometimes go months without communicating, and it has never bothered either of them.

  “Hi, Professor!” Students are entering the lecture hall.

  “Hello,” he says to their collective heads. Follows them in, glances at the clock. Six minutes to go. The only way to never be late is to usually be early.

  Shortly after his father died, Mark found among his papers a file containing testimonial letters from his colleagues, solicited and compiled on the occasion of his retirement by his long-term publication collaborator, a younger female colleague who seemed to have a soft spot for the old man. Mark can’t remember her name. One of the notes, from a much younger male colleague, was arranged like a poem on the computer printout, that dear old z-fold paper with the printer track-holes along the side:

  I usually think I know the answer

  Then there’s a UV question

  I haven’t a clue

  I turn to you for help

  You know exactly how to explain

  A light dawns

  You are a guide

  With a kind heart.

  Of all the testimonials, this one was the most moving, and Mark has wondered if his attempts to write those data set things stem from having read it.

  He’s never been good at remembering names, and he seems to be getting worse as he ages. He has also begun to experience mild anomic aphasia. For some reason, “table” gives him particular trouble. “Put that on the—on the—on that—” Whereas he’s always had, and still has, an excellent memory for numbers. So much so that he never bothers to enter phone numbers in a contact list. Through all these recent months during which he was packing up his childhood home and preparing it for sale, he had nostalgic thoughts, but was never close to tears. Then yesterday he called the relevant telecommunications giant to cancel the telephone number he’d grown up with. The woman on the other end of the line said, “Our records indicate that you’ve had this number for a long time. Would you like to transfer it to your new location?” Mark said no, because he already had a number. And discovered that his eyes were smarting.

  He remembers when his home exchange was called Volunteer 2. His dad’s workplace was Volunteer 1. Then came All-Number Calling, when he was six. When he was eleven, his dad’s lab reorganized and his office number changed, which bothered Mark. He still remembers both numbers, plus all four of his college telephone numbers and all three from his graduate years. He pulls out his phone, keys Mette’s number, composes a text.

  Your mother is concerned.

  He stares at that for a moment. Doesn’t seem quite right. Deletes it.

  Are you okay?

  Presumes too much, maybe. Might be offensive. Deletes it.

  Hope you’re doing well?

  Sounds like something from a business acquaintance. Deletes it.

  Time’s up. He mutes his phone and pockets it.

  “Hello everyone. Let’s get started.” He opens the file on his laptop, throws the lecture title up on the screen behind him. “This is the eighth lecture of our course, entitled ‘Planets are Everywhere, but Where is Everybody?’ You all should have read chapter 24 in the textbook and the two excerpts I posted on the portal, from Kasting’s How to Find a Habitable Planet and Ward and Brownlee’s Rare Earth.

  “To recap from the previous lecture: the first confirmed detection of an extrasolar planet did not oc
cur until 1992, yet today, thanks in large part to HARPS and the Kepler space telescope, we have identified more than two thousand. And when we get the first data release from the Gaia astrometry spacecraft later this year, that number will increase dramatically. Who among professional astronomers would have predicted, twenty years ago, the existence of hot Jupiters? Today we know that, not only do they exist, they are quite common. It turns out that planetary systems are far more varied than we had previously assumed, and this realization presents fascinating challenges to our theories of stellar-system formation. Astronomers today are lucky to be living at a time in which, in so many areas, we are discovering just how wrong we have been. To a scientist, being right might be good for the ego, but being wrong is good for the brain. Or to put it another way, being wrong is much more interesting.”

  This is his favorite lecture of the course. He changes it every year to accommodate new information, and since he doesn’t write his lectures out but works instead from notes, he has to be especially careful on this one not to rattle on feverishly, figuring out five different ways of making the same point, only to realize his time is up when he’s halfway through. He used to give this lecture at the end of the semester, since it’s about the Ultimate Question—does extraterrestrial life exist?—but by late April most of the students are dismaying sacks of apathy, partied-out or spring-fevered, sick to death of using their brains. It gets worse every year—all his colleagues have noticed this—and five years ago he moved this lecture up into the first half, right after the February break, figuring maybe they’ve caught up on their sleep, or have just watched 96 hours of their eight favorite TV shows, and are feeling refreshed.