Love Is Both Wave and Particle

by Paul Cody

  But you never went away, even in the days, he continued. Just about every day there was a moment, a few seconds, sometimes minutes or hours, when I thought about you, and who you were, and where you might be, and if you knew I existed, and if you didn’t want anything to do with me.

  If that was Susan’s choice, or your choice, or the choice of both of you.

  That took me aback. To hear he was tormented by the idea that I didn’t want him to know about me.

  Every once in a great while he’d ask Susan about me. And she’d get steely. Cold, with the threat of meanness, though she’d never been mean. She’s just extremely confident, very sure. She’s a scientist. She knows facts, she presents evidence. This is proven, and can’t be unproven, or even questioned.

  But now he knows. He got into college, into Cornell, early decision. And he asked, How can we pay for this, aside from her faculty discount? It would still cost tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  She said, Don’t worry. Your dad has been saving for college for you since before you were even born. He wrote, And I thought, I actually said, What the fuck? (Excuse my language.)

  She told him the basic facts. My name, the fact that I’m a physicist at Case Western, and that he was conceived from a single act of intercourse just before we left Chicago.

  He said he looked up everything he could about me on the Internet. He tried to read articles I’d published. He saw pictures of me, and he said we even looked alike.

  Then he didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t sure if I was like Susan, if I, Trevor, wanted nothing to do with him, as she wanted him, Levon, to have nothing to do with me, Trevor.

  But he felt he wanted to at least thank me for saving all that college money. That had to mean something. To put money away every few weeks for eighteen years. That had to mean that I cared, didn’t it? Or felt responsible, at least.

  It was all very confusing.

  He was relieved I wasn’t in a prison. And he felt very proud that I was such a distinguished professor. In physics. He said he was always considered smart in school. That he read books constantly, and was considered kind of weird. That he had very few friends. Or no real friends in some way. That Susan had always been superprotective of him. Kind of crazy-protective.

  And here I almost felt like crying. I felt my heart go out to him. It had gone out to him from Dear Professor Towns, aka Father, aka Dad. But now it was a storm, a typhoon of emotion. I wanted to call him. I wanted to book a flight to Ithaca, New York, or tell him to book a flight to Cleveland.

  How could I explain Susan to him? Who I only partly knew. Who I had thought about so much over these two decades. How could I tell him that I thought of him, maybe as much as he thought of me? That I was as foolish and wrong as Susan? That I should have insisted on seeing him? That I should have been brave, assertive?

  But that there were so many things, so many years. That grown-ups, even though we appear to know and understand things, are as baffled and at sea as children much of the time. That we are lost. That we don’t know what we are doing, despite the best intentions. That we, too, were children once, and remain so as adults. At least in many respects. That love, like light, is both wave and particle. All my adult life I have been searching for ever more dimensions of light. I believe it may be more than wave and particle. It may bend, and it may involve heat and time and vast spaces. Immense perspectives may play a part in our perception of it.

  So I hit respond.

  Dear Levon, aka Son, I began.

  Where to begin? I was terribly moved and honored by your good and eloquent and searing email. I am glad to contribute to your Cornell education. It’s the least I can do, and it’s a fine school. Congratulations!

  But where to begin?

  I did not know Susan well. We were friends at best. But I had no real friends at Chicago. Like you, I was very isolated. I believe Susan thought I was somewhere in the middle of the Asperger’s spectrum, which is a form of autism.

  I came from a desperately poor family in East Anglia, in England. That’s in the far eastern part of the country. My family were tenant farmers, which is roughly the British equivalent of sharecroppers, even into the early 1980s, hard as that may be to believe. We lived in what was little more than a shack, and we lived more or less at the farmer’s whim, on his land, in his shack, working, all of us, my mother and father, my older sisters and brother, very, very hard.

  I was the youngest of four, and the youngest by some stretch. The next oldest above me, my sister Mary, was seven years older than me. I was, they said, an afterthought.

  This was a very remote farm, nearly ten or twenty kilometers from the nearest town, and we had no electricity and no indoor plumbing until I was seven, when we moved to Harwich, in Essex, so that everyone except me could take jobs in factories. We lived in public housing, which had electricity, running water, and Mother and Father, and James and Elizabeth, the two oldest, all found factory work. Within a few years, my family took a mortgage out on a semidetached house. Whatever we were, my family were very hardworking people.

  I have always carried those early years in my head. The idea that we were little more than peasants, that we shivered in winters, took baths in a tin tub once a week, in water heated on a single coal-fired stove, and that coal was very dear. The stove heated the house, was used to cook on, and our clothes were threadbare, patched, and handed down.

  In summers we bathed in a nearby creek.

  But I was a gifted child in school. Silent, awkward, acutely aware of my peasant status, I was nonetheless always the head of every class, particularly when we arrived in Harwich. I won ribbons and medals in every subject, and my teachers asked Mother and Father to come in for a conference. I don’t know what was said, but the result was that I sat for examinations for public schools (the term for private schools in the UK), and for scholarships. I won scholarships to several, and went to a middling preparatory school (or high school) in Norwich, where again, I excelled, and was encouraged to sit exams. I did so well that I could have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but my headmaster said they were too class-bound, and that I would be fine at the University of Manchester.

  Again, the pattern repeated itself. I excelled, took firsts in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and as graduation approached, the dean of students recommended I go to America for postgraduate study. It was more democratic, less posh. He further recommended that I not go to any of the famous East Coast universities such as Princeton or Yale, but to the University of Chicago. He had a friend there, and he said Chicago was intellectually elite—Fermi and Teller had been there—and had vast sums of money, but that Chicago was America’s most democratic city. He quoted the poet Carl Sandburg. “Hog Butcher for the World.” “City of the Big Shoulders.”

  So I won a prestigious fellowship to Chicago that paid for everything for five years—tuition, fees, room and board, even my airplane ticket.

  In Chicago, I met your Susan, and fell under the sway of a famous mathematician and physicist named Frank Liu. Chicago, the city, was everything the dean said it would be, but it was a case of severe culture shock. Five or ten times the size of Manchester, bustling, friendly, and back-slapping, and the university was intensely rigorous. Local wags said it was the university where fun went to die.

  Your mother, who was beautiful and conspicuous and glamorous—imagine a tall blond beauty studying the MAO-A gene, the so-called Psychopath or Warrior Gene—and I was strangely, awkwardly known because I was Frank Liu’s protégé, studying light, looking for further dimensions of something so omnipresent, so basic, and at the same time so mysterious.

  I was friendless, poor, intensely aware of how poor I was, of what odd clothes and glasses I wore, of how I utterly lacked social skills, and above all, I was intensely shy, and suffering, as I said, from the shock of the new.

  Susan, for some reason, sought me out. Maybe she found me interesting. A specimen. Possibly attractive. Certainly different. And yes, brilliant. />
  Perhaps I do have some slight touch of Asperger’s. Many good scientists do. But she knew nothing about my background, my poverty, the tin bath, the lack of electricity.

  We drank coffee once in a while, and in our last year, with another couple, we had dinner a few times.

  Not long before we were to leave Chicago, when we had all been granted our degrees and had found very good jobs at eminent universities, after a dinner and a few more drinks than usual, she seduced me.

  I never saw her again.

  In the summer, she sent me an email from Ithaca, told me she was pregnant and intended to keep the child, but that she was absolutely going to do this on her own. I said I respected her decision, would start a college fund for the child, and over the years we have had very little contact.

  A few times I asked about you via email. Asked for a photograph, wanted to know for sure what your name was, but she refused all information. She said only that the child was fine, but that it was best that we not know anything about each other.

  Why?

  I don’t know. I thought often about it, and at times I thought of pressing the issue, and at times I have been ashamed that I did not. Perhaps I assumed you did not want any contact, just as Susan did not.

  I don’t know why Susan seduced me. Because of genuine affection. Because it was exciting and we were a little tipsy, and she wanted to break through my aloneness. Because she wanted genuine contact, she wanted to give me something. Because it was an experiment, to see what two very bright people might produce.

  But why this obsession to keep us apart? To have us know nothing about each other? Susan is a scientist, as I am. She is an expert in the brain. But I wonder sometimes if she realizes that the heart, as a metaphor, is part of the brain. That our feelings, our memories, our spirit, our soul, if you will, reside in the brain. And we must attend to the matters of the metaphorical heart with information and knowledge. The brain and the heart cannot be so clearly separated.

  I have gone on too long. Let me close by saying that I very much hope we can talk more. Via email, telephone. Perhaps when you are ready, in person. We have, as they say, a great deal to catch up on. But please do know that you have always, every day, been in my thoughts.

  Your loving father,

  aka Professor Towns, aka Trevor, aka Dad

  Twenty-seven

  Anna

  Sam told me the whole story, about going to his house Christmas night, slightly drunk, through empty streets. It had to be slightly drunk, and it had to be empty streets, the feeling that nobody was watching, because otherwise there was no way she would have done such a thing.

  Even so, she felt like she was half-crazy, she couldn’t believe she was doing it even while she was doing it. She half expected Susan to jump out from behind a corner, or sirens and swirling red lights to appear. But nothing happened at all.

  And all the time, of course, she had no idea how he’d react. If he’d go nuts, or cold, or kick her out. But he was so sweet, so grateful. And though there was no sex, she slept there. The entire night. In his bed. His futon. With him. With Levon Grady. The untouchable.

  But since then, she had had no idea what the fuck was going on, why he was really distant and seemed kind of tormented. Two steps forward, sweet as honey. Then three and a half steps sideways, four backward, one and a quarter forward. She talked to Meg one-on-one about Levon, she talked to Ron, the school psychologist, good old Ron, and they both said, Patience. Said he’d been dealing with some stuff she didn’t know about.

  So they kept meeting twice a week, and I began to spend nights at Sam’s place, or she stayed over at my place, and she started to tell me about the year in the mental hospitals.

  How she’d cut herself at Groton, had shock treatment at McLean and the weird, electric, buzzy feeling you had in your brain for days. Fuzz and buzz, and clouds, with bolts of lightning. How her dad had worked at Fidelity and Harvard, and how her mom was kind of nuts. She hated all of it. This giant hole in all their lives.

  And Austen Riggs, and how much she actually liked it there. How she no longer had shock treatment, and within a month of getting there in late December, they let her have most privileges. They moved her from the second to the third floor where she could have her own room, and she had tutors, who were usually seniors from Smith or Mount Holyoke, and she read all these amazing books.

  The Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, were maybe her favorite place in the world, after Ithaca. And her doctor was an Indian woman, Sylvia Singh, who had been raised in England, and had a wonderful British accent, and was so kind, and had huge brown eyes, and laughed. She was afraid, sometimes, she was falling in love with Dr. Singh.

  Aren’t you supposed to? I said.

  In a way, I guess.

  Then she turned on her side, because we had both been lying on Sam’s bed, and said, And you, Anna? What about you?

  It was late and dark. It was February vacation, and it had been unbelievably cold. It had been below zero at least a dozen nights in the new year, sometimes as low as twenty-two below, and nineteen below, and highs during the day of minus one, or zero, or two above. The windchills were off the charts.

  Sam had a queen-size bed, and we were under about four layers of wool blankets and down comforters, and I started playing with her hair.

  Why are you always so sane and even and cool? Sam asked.

  No, I’m not, I said.

  You know Avery says you’re the coolest person in the school, but nobody notices because unlike Sierra, or himself, or Levon, you fly below the radar in your cooldom.

  Right, I said.

  He said you dress better, with more style, and don’t even try. You have the most beautiful skin, you’re insanely bright, but never show off, you take calculus, play multiple musical instruments—

  Please, I said.

  And, moreover, he said you have more genuine kindness, are more trustworthy and compassionate, by far, than anyone in the school. And Avery should know.

  But who wants to be a bridesmaid?

  You’ll be a bride. You have no idea how cool you are. And you’re my first and only friend. That sure as hell matters to me.

  It does to me too, Sam. A great deal.

  We were quiet, and we could feel the cold and dark outside. It must have been two a.m. and five below.

  But I want a boy, she said.

  I want a boy too, I said.

  And you’ll probably get him.

  Last year, I said, there were moments, a number of times, when I’d be sitting in one of the quiet rooms, and nobody was around. Say it was late, and I’d be reading, or doing something on my computer, and Noah would come in and sit down, and he wouldn’t say anything for a while.

  I’d look up, smile, but I wouldn’t say anything either. And it was so weird. He’d just sit, and watch me, kind of half smiling, or semiserious, and sometimes it would last for a half hour. And there were moments when I wanted to stand up and go over, and just start kissing him, and stroking him, very slowly and gently. I felt that at that moment he would have let me. I felt as though he knew how I felt, he would have lain back in his chair and let me kiss and stroke him. And I fantasized about it, about unbuttoning his shirt and unzipping his pants, and making him moan and beg.

  I kept thinking, This boy has never been touched. I wanted to shock and awe him with what pleasure I could give him.

  I shouldn’t even be telling you these things, but it happened, these times when he came in, and sat down, and watched me, and I just kept on doing what I was doing. And I was never sure what he was doing. If he thought anything along the lines I was thinking. Because I had such a bad crush on him, and I was just a girl with raging hormones, and it had been like that for months, and I’d been so good.

  Am I making sense? I asked.

  Sam nodded, and then whispered, Very much so.

  And in a way, I still regret that I didn’t do anything. That I was a nice girl.

  You’re not a nic
e girl, she whispered. She reached, and touched my breasts. You’ve made me very, very hot, she whispered.

  Have I? I said softly.

  We touched, and kissed lightly, and it grew more and more intense, then I thought, My God, don’t stop, don’t stop, and she was soaking, and the wind and cold were far away, and later, much later, she said, Now that was some surprise.

  And kissing her neck, holding her, I said, Indeed. Had we been talking about a boy?

  Twenty-eight

  Avery

  It was pushing toward spring, or what passes for spring in Ithaca, and I don’t know what it was, but something was going on with Levon. Maybe it had to do with this secret project. Lots of us had been asked to write these kind of top-secret reports for Meg, as part of the thing where Meg and Sam and Levon were working on this yearlong project that absolutely nobody could read—and that drove me crazy, the not knowing—but Levon was changing.

  Not completely. Not that he was no longer Levon, or that he didn’t look more or less the same, but I swear, he was definitely different, and in kind of large and small ways.

  Now remember, I’d known him pretty much forever, since he was a little kid, and while there were tons of weird kids in school, in a way every kid was kind of weird in one way or another—take me, for example, or Sierra or even Anna, who seemed pretty normal, but was really pretty quirky in her way—we were all a bunch of weirdos.

  We had twitches and tics, we were goofy and awkward, we tried so, so hard to fit in and find our way through the hell that is childhood, and especially teenager-hood, that we just fucked it up. Wore the wrong clothes, or too much makeup, or not enough makeup, or we were acne-plagued and full of angst, and it came out in all of us. We said stupid things, or were really mean to other kids, in ways that you just would not be as a grown-up.