“I was sleeping, deep sleep. I’m sick.”
“Telling you man, got to get that ear checked out.”
“It’s not my ear, my ear actually feels pretty good come to think of it.”
“So?”
“Just sick.”
“Well whatever it is, this cold won’t help.”
“No.”
“Well Louie and I are going to get some food. Want to come? There’ll be heat.”
No thanks I said and he left.
I remembered the baby so tried the phone, it didn’t work.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to meet my new nephew. I knew my entire family was in noisy, celebratory congregation, most likely in my mother’s house, even on a Wednesday morning, and I wanted to be there for that. Alana and I were the only ones who lived in New York and I knew from her message that she was already there. If I wanted any information I would have to go home.
I looked out the window. I didn’t see any chaos but the immanent stillness was possibly worse. Suddenly I was really hungry and regretted saying no to Alyona’s invitation. My initial reaction was almost always to say no to that kind of thing then, almost as often, to nearly immediately regret it. The apartment was so cold it made me feel hollow. I decided to go down and try to catch them before they left. Then I would get in my car, go home, and see everyone.
Angus answered the door and I saw that I’d already missed the others and Angus didn’t know where they’d gone only that they’d gone to get food and he had not gone with them because he was sure that at any moment everything was going to be all right and power would return and everything that was off in his apartment would go on again and he wanted to be there at the precise moment that happened just as he’d been there and fully cognizant at the precise moment everything went dead; he wondered, he said, if it wasn’t warmer in my apartment given that science tells us that heat rises.
“Who tells us that?”
“Science.”
“Oh. Well I don’t think my apartment is any warmer. I think the heat has to exist first before it can rise.”
“There’s always heat.”
“Not if its absolute zero.”
“True, but it isn’t, so there’s heat.”
“All right then, where is it?”
“It’s around, I’m sure, it’s just not having any effect.”
I went inside when he asked. I watched him as he returned to the middle of his sofa then I looked at the black screen as it reflected my face back at me. He wore a hat, I had never found mine, and one of those ridiculous coats that’s all bubbly and doubles your girth. His face was drained of all color, his visible hair shone with grease. He chewed at the skin on his fingertips.
“You okay Angus?”
“In what sense?”
“Do you feel all right, in that sense, because you don’t look great.”
“I’ve been better, no question about that. But be that as it may, I’m still perfectly sanguine about the fact that we are going to get through this little problem in a matter of a few more minutes. This too shall pass Casi.”
“This blackout?”
“Yes. I have faith, you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I am twenty-three years old and in those twenty-three years science has never let me down. And it’s not going to let me down now. Two years before I was born was the last time we had one of these, at least on this scale, and you cannot seriously expect me to believe that for the duration of my entire life Father Science has not adequately investigated and prospectively remedied the deficiencies that occasionally cause us to become cloaked in unnatural darkness.”
“Forgive me but isn’t the strongest proof there’s been no prospective remedy what you currently see when you look out the window?”
“But I have faith, faith in science.”
“Okay.”
“Faith.”
“You still going to school? I mean figuratively, of course, from your computer and everything.”
“School?”
“Yeah Columbia, Psychology, that school?”
“Oh.”
“So?”
“Columbia yes, Psychology no.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’ve seen the light and now realize that terms like social science are devoid of meaning. Psychology is no more a science than astrology and here I was studying it like some hairy caveman magically transported centuries forward in time and oblivious to the news; the news being that in Science man has found his long-sought panacea to all that ails us. Really, how did you keep from laughing when I would tell you I was a psych major?”
“So what’s your new major?”
“Physics, what else?”
“I see. So at this rate you should be getting your bachelors around the time you hit, what, thirty-five?”
“See now you’re talking about time and I have a lot to say about that but I’m not really prepared at this moment to take a hard position on it, not at this time.”
“Why not finish Psychology, which you’ve spent years on, then pursue Physics? That way you have something.”
“Finish Psychology? What do you think I’ve done? Finish it is exactly what I did to it. I finished Psychology the way no one before had ever finished a discipline.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I created a malady and as if that weren’t enough I created a human being Casi! That’s what I’m talking about.”
“What? Who?”
“Kramden that’s who.”
“Ah man you still on that?”
“Of course I’m on it.”
“What are you doing to yourself Angus?”
“You don’t understand.”
“I’m serious man you weren’t always like this, you’re losing it. I thought I was in bad shape until I came in here. It’s that fucking carousel, you need to stop with that thing. This blackout might be the best thing ever happened to you. Come with, let’s go outside. We’ll look for those guys, get something to eat.”
“I’m going to forget you said that about the carousel because we’re friends, you and me I mean. Although the carousel and I are friends as well.”
“Fine, I’m sorry then, but let’s go find those guys. Let’s go outside, it’ll be good. Besides it’s just as cold in here maybe colder if that’s possible.”
“Everything’s going to come back on any minute.”
“I think you should go outside. I think you should develop a stronger relationship with reality and going outside would assist you in that.”
“Funny you should mention reality because that’s exactly what I’m trying to get to the bottom of. The problem with Psychology was it was too nebulous, there was no certitude, it was like trying to predict what the weather was going to be in two months with all those damn butterflies constantly getting in the way. Like with Kramden—”
“Please Angus no more Kramden.”
“Okay I won’t mention him again but that doesn’t change what I’m after though. I want answers; answers to the deepest questions and when I get them I want them to be indisputable and to constitute true knowledge not probabilities or conjecture. This is what Physics, a true science, is going to give me and now that I’ve aligned myself with the true king I can take my place at the right hand of the throne armed with a perfect understanding of the ultimate reality, what it precisely is and what it means. That’s the reality I’m going to be developing a relationship with.”
“Okay.”
“Proof! Indisputable proof without qualifications or gradations of any kind. Proof of the kind that simply doesn’t exist in Psychology. Physics can be verified, Psychology can’t, therefore one is a science while the other was an extreme waste of my time.”
“I understand.”
“So what’s with the face?”
“No face.”
“Yes face. What is it? What are you thinking?”
“No just that, well I hate to
say it but you know there’s no real proof in science either right?”
“What? Have you lost the little remaining sanity you possessed? Have you not heard of a little guy named Einstein? Well he proved that Newton was full of it when that apple fell on his head and shit. E = MC2 and all that other crap was proof, simple as that.”
“Well what he did was propose a theory and all subsequent experiments and observations have conformed to the results one would expect to get if that theory was true.”
“Sounds suspiciously like proof to me.”
“Except the same was true of Newton’s work for many years and under your criteria he was allegedly proven wrong.”
“No you’re looking at it the wrong way.”
“More importantly we can never really verify any of science’s claims in the sense of proving them to be indubitably true. They just aren’t susceptible to that kind of an operation. Hume showed this, ask Alyona he can explain it. As for what makes something a science it’s not the fact that its statements can be verified, it’s that, unlike in Psychology, they can be falsified, that is, found to be untrue. Read your Popper on that.”
“My popper? The only Physics my dad cares about is the shortest possible path his beer can travel to his lips.”
“Not your popper, Karl Popper.”
“As for this Hume character, what does he know? When did he write? The fucking thirteen-hundreds? What did he write on? Fucking papyrus? Fuck him, he’s just bitter that science has completely co-opted his cheesy field. Let him keep speaking ill of science and I’ll shove my new terabyte iPod up his ass, see how he likes that.”
“All right, I’m going to get some food, you coming?”
No thanks, he said, and I left.
Outside there was a slight but palpable energy in the air. It was one of those moments when strangers talk to each other and speak principally of when they discovered the situation and its resemblance to entertainment. People, many of them wearing foreheads stained with dirt, were reduced to long-obsolete forms of communication. Those with battery operated radios would use them to intercept radio waves carrying a stray datum here or there and then relay it to others using their mouths. They did this with such force that even non-participants like me could, through mere presence, become informed. In this manner, I learned that because of the darkened traffic lights no cars would be allowed on the roads until power had been restored. I would not be going home. People were stuck on elevators, people in subway cars, in buildings with electronic doors. Police were everywhere. The diner wasn’t open but a person, probably the owner, was standing outside the door with a baseball bat looking everyone in the eye. A woman handed me a leaflet. It said that if the blackout affected my thermal status there was a place I could stay and it identified that place and it listed the symptoms of hypothermia and I wondered how they, the organization, managed to get the leaflet printed. I wandered about. Nothing was open. I had no idea where Alyona and Louie could have gone. A couple of blocks away I found an open store lit only by the sun. A lot of people gathered near the open door of this place as if cheered by the proprietor’s defiance. They spoke and planned and in general behaved like a community. I said nothing. I bought some things to eat then left.
My apartment didn’t feel as cold when I got back.
Then the sun left and it started getting colder.
I put gloves on.
It got dark.
I went under blankets.
I pulled the sofa away from the windows to the center of the room, the last place in the apartment it would fit. I sat on the middle of the sofa fully dressed with every blanket I owned on top of me. I curled up into a ball. My knees were to my chest and my arms around them, my chin was between my knees. I rocked back and forth under the blankets. The only noise was my breathing. I ducked my head under the blanket and breathed my own exhaust for a while. I started feeling sick so I popped my head out. I didn’t know what time it was but it was completely dark in there. I tried to burrow inside my own body to find the body heat I was told would be there but found nothing. I got a little scared.
I started to have strange doubts. I allowed myself to think that maybe I really was the only existing person in the world. After all, I could never truly know that anyone else existed, at least not the way I knew, at that very moment, that I existed and was shaking uncontrollably. Maybe I was just a brain in a vat with some alien clown going overboard while stimulating the area for unfathomably cold.
So that’s where I was; the quiet I had longed for for such a long time had finally come and I found that more than anything it caused me to doubt the very material world that had left me hugging only myself. I wondered where the survival pamphlet was. I wondered really . . . if maybe . . . well . . .
chapter 24
um . . . if it was actually possible to die just like that, in an apartment in historic Brooklyn Heights, with every blanket I owned draped all over me and no one there to witness or document it.
I hadn’t heard a noise in hours but I decided I would check downstairs on the slight chance they hadn’t gone to Alyona’s cousin’s after all. And I didn’t so much knock as I just allowed my body to fall against the door. I heard some movement inside and relaxed so much as a result that I almost slumped to the ground. The door opened. I moved closer to make out the face and saw Angus, looking considerably worse but managing a weak smile.
“What time is it?” I said.
“No idea but God it’s cold. It’s inside me, is it inside you yet?”
“Yeah, I can’t stop shaking. Where are the others?”
“Some cousin or something, with heat.”
“How’d they get there?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s a place with heat. A pamphlet. Let’s go there.”
“A pamphlet with heat?”
“A pamphlet identifying heat.”
“Where exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s cold.”
“So cold.”
“Come in. Let’s burn something. In the sink or tub. Books. Let’s start with this Hume sonuvabitch.” I went in. “Alyona comes back before leaving. I ask him to tell me about Hume before he goes and he hands me this book. I read it and you may be fucking right and here’s the weird part: I’m sure, sure as I can fucking be, that if I had not read this Hume individual the power would have come back by now. God I miss power so much.”
“I miss warmth . . . but can’t burn books.”
I sat in a big chair and pressed into one of its corners. I needed to stop moving and losing the benefit of whatever heat I had managed to build up in a particular spot. The candle that provided what little light the room had was flickering towards its end. I heard Angus’s breathing on the sofa across from me but saw his features less and less. We didn’t burn anything.
“Look outside,” Angus said. “Yesterday wherever you looked was a star so bright you couldn’t believe it was real. Tonight we get nothing.” The candle went out and I lost his face along with everything else in the room. There was nothing to look at; all we had left was our voices and the words they caused. In that dark it was as if we could see those words; they were our only reality. “Which is fitting as I see it, this sudden lack of galactic light, because make no mistake but that we have been abandoned by the very universe that contains us.”
“And that you seek to understand to completion.”
“Yes.”
. . .
. . .
“See the thing about that Jetsons lyric is there’s no conceivable way that eep op ork ah ah can translate into I love you. First there’s the fact that the alien language uses four different words whereas the alleged English translation famously uses only three. Then there is the matter of the repeated ah at the end of the alien phrase which would seem to mandate that, at a minimum, an accurate translation would be something like I love you you making the correct lyric something along the lines of eep op ork ah ah and that
means I love you you. Casi?”
“ . . .”
We sat in the dark and said nothing and it kept getting colder and it kept feeling darker and we didn’t know what time it was and there was no noise in the streets. I had stopped shaking, instead the room shook while I sat there, frozen still.
“Look we’re obviously going to die tonight.”
“Yes,” I said.
“So I guess the only thing left to determine is who the greatest man ever lived was. Because ultimately greatness is the only thing that matters, the only thing that endures”
“We’re not all going to die. Just you and me . . . freeze to death . . . us.”
“So what? Far as we’re concerned the world ends tonight. Mankind ends tonight because tonight we’re mankind. Tonight ends.”
It was hard to both think and speak well, you had to choose.
“Plato, how’s that for a start Casi?”
“Yes, okay.”
“I mean that stuff ’s bought untold entertainment to untold kids.”
“Huh?”
“Play-Doh, the dude who invented Play-Doh.”
“No, no.”
“What then? What inventor?”
“No, no inventor, no.”
“Scientist?”
“Maybe.”
“What else is there?”
“ . . .”
“Fine I’ll throw some names out to roll the ball getting . . . um . . . yeah roll the ball getting . . . I mean the get balling. I’ll see your Plato and raise you an Aristotle how’s that? Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Christopher Marlowe—”
“You mean Shakespeare.”
“—never heard of him. Newton, Einstein, the guy with the cat, the uncertainty dude. The guy . . . Richard . . . um.”
“Dawson.”
“Yes, Richard Dawson. No wait, he hosted Survey Says that’s true but I don’t even think he ever produced it so no, not greatest man ever, but maybe Chuck Barris who both hosted and produced The Gong Show along with other seminal programs. So Chuck Barris is in there . . . and Chuck Berry too since they sound so much alike that it seems unfair to leave one out. That pretty much covers it don’t you think? Good, now let’s review our list and make sure we didn’t miss anyone. We have Homer . . . um . . . Simpson, Virgil. Aeneid. Who else did we say? Milton . . . Bradley. Bach, all the three B’s in fact, Bach, Leonard Bernstein and the other B. Hume, Kant, all the guys in that book, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, anybody who went to Berkeley. In fact anybody who went to any institution named after a dead philosopher including naturally Georgetown and Stanford, which are of course named after Phyllis George and Stanford Marsalis respectively. Gutenberg who conducted the Gutenberg trial. Nureyev Rudolph. Rudolph Valentino. Engelbert Humperdink for that matter. The guy who invented the Gouldberg variations, T.S. Eliot Gould. Oppenheimer and Manhattan, you know, of the Oppenheimer project. Eric’s son Leif, meaning Leif Garrett, who discovered Earth but watched Columbo get all the credit and even though he played for the Vikings was too much of a pussy to do anything about it. Hannibal. American Vespucci. Verdi. Vendredi. Veni, Vidi, Vici, all three of them. The Marx brothers, Karl and Groucho. The guys they worked with, Engels and Harpo. Socrates and the guy who poisoned him then put him in a hemlock. Darwin and the first guy who coined the term Darwinian. Don Quixote and his sidekick . . . Tonto . . . Villa I think. The guy who discovered the nap. The guy who founded the Freudian slip. Pasteur, the inventor of milk. The guy who unearthed the tango, the guy who discovered cash. The guy who wrote Tango and Cash. Locke along with Stock . . . even Barrel. Angelo meaning Michael Angelo. Who else Casi?”
A Naked Singularity: A Novel Page 66
