Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  More than blameless. When I look at the videos taken on that flight, I feel an emotion that’s hard to explain. At first everyone is freaking out or acting ridiculous or freezing up, it’s just a chaotic mess of humanity losing their minds. But when the huge guy comes out of the back and takes control and kills the loudmouth by bashing him with the computer, the atmosphere changes.

  Everyone believed they were going to die. But when the huge guy started bludgeoning the asshole, the passengers seemed to unite. As though this killing was a prearranged ritual. As if everyone spontaneously, unanimously assented to a human sacrifice.

  The emotion that I felt, which was hard to explain, was a dreadful rightness.

  As if, when the huge man killed the asshole, he was reintegrating himself, and everyone else there, into some kind of primal harmony of the world—because one way or another, the asshole was going to die, at that exact time. That is, even if the man hadn’t bludgeoned him with a laptop, thanaton theory assured us that the asshole would’ve had a heart attack, or the turbulence would’ve made the asshole fall in some way that would make him break his neck, or maybe indeed the whole plane would’ve crashed if the guy hadn’t killed him.

  But by voluntarily acting as the universe’s executioner on precisely the moment we knew the universe demanded it, the guy (and passively, everyone else on the plane) was freely choosing the very thing that was fated to happen.

  And that made me feel that dreadful rightness.

  It made me think of Renard’s Cahokians, of their gruesome pits full of executed men, women, and children. Maybe the Cahokians had their own thanaton theory. Maybe human sacrifices occurred so that everyone there could feel that same unnerving correctness of intentionally killing a person at the exact moment the universe demanded it. Perhaps those Cahokians, who after all were mathematically advanced enough to design their city on a precise astrological plan, also had enough of a grasp of thanaton theory that, when the calculations decreed the times for a certain group of people to die, those people were rounded up and executed precisely when the math predicted. By making their deaths ceremonial and intentional, the Cahokians could be flooded with the same feeling of dreadful rightness that I had experienced watching that video, of actively working together with the universe, of reintegrating themselves into that primal truth.

  It wasn’t the kind of feeling I discussed with people.

  But I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt it.

  * * *

  —

  I’m having a hard time. In the smelly bathroom of the plane, I feel only slight relief when I shut the door, insulated a little from the chattering spikes of computations as everyone strokes and pokes their devices.

  I’m overwhelmed. I feel like garbage. My chest is clutching up tight like a heart attack, or is it just heartburn? When can I get out of here? I flush the toilet. I want to flush myself straight out of this plane. Images from those huge-guy-killing-the-asshole-with-a-laptop videos crowding in my head…I don’t want to think about it. Just stop. Look in the mirror. Ugh. Everyone always looks terrible in an airplane bathroom mirror, I know, but still: is this what Julia is going to see? I look like death. She’ll say to herself, thank God he and I broke up. She’d be right.

  I am death.

  My mind is muddled by no sleep and too many mechanical calculations floating around this plane, knifing into my brain, mixing me all up. I rest my head against the mirror. Why am I really going to her? Can I even make it through this flight?

  The plane jolts. The bathroom lights flicker. In the mirror for a moment it’s not my face, it’s another face that looks exactly like my face but it’s not me.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re not who I married,” Erin shouted.

  She was right and wrong. Because I never was.

  Whenever things were going south with Erin, I’d turn to Kulkarni. As a friend I gave Kulkarni nothing, I just took. But one of the many likeable things about Kulkarni was that he didn’t really need me. He had his own freewheeling bachelor life that was completely separate from mine. I never had many friends—even in my twenties, there was no posse of dudes I’d go on the prowl with, or whatever.

  When Erin and I got married, I didn’t have anyone to be my best man, so I humiliatingly asked Kulkarni to do it. Work friends at best. We both knew how ridiculous it was.

  Kulkarni said fine.

  Still, whenever I had some emotional crisis, Kulkarni seemed to sense it, and in his own thoughtful way that let me save face. Kulkarni never asked me about my problems. I didn’t want him to. I just wanted to talk to him about physics and shit. I think that’s what he wanted too, why he tolerated me. We’d go out to some swank niche that Kulkarni somehow knew about, and Kulkarni let me bask in his demimonde for a night.

  I didn’t want my problems to be understood. I wanted them to be anesthetized.

  Still, I always told Kulkarni at least something about what was going on, although my family situation felt absurd as I was saying it, my homely anecdote ludicrous in the context of whatever sleek lounge Kulkarni brought me to. I had come across my son reading a science fiction book from my old collection, which was great, I wanted him to read it since neither of my sons read many books, much less any of the science fiction books I had saved for them. But he was reading the third book from a series of five, and so I advised him it would be better to start with book one. For some reason that irked him, and he put the book aside. I wanted him to at least finish the book, I told him he had to finish it, but he said nah, he wasn’t interested in it anymore. I said the whole series was worth reading, he’d just get more out of it if he started with book one—and I was startled when he actually shouted back at me, Why don’t you get off my back for once, which led to a fight between me and Erin.

  “Everything has to go precisely so with you,” she said.

  “He’d like the book better if he read the two before it,” I said.

  “Well congratulations, because now he doesn’t want to read any of them,” said Erin. “Don’t you see that he was only reading that book because he thought you’d approve of it?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s how little you know.”

  “I’m just saying he’d actually enjoy and understand it more if he read the first two books.”

  “Maybe everything doesn’t have to go just the way you planned it.”

  “You can’t deny there’s a right and a wrong way to read a series—”

  “I utterly fucking deny it.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you gave a shit about your own sons you’d see how they’re at least trying to reach out to you by reading your whatever.”

  “Okay.”

  “You think they like spending all their time learning your little rules for everything, and trying to force themselves to live by them?”

  “Okay.”

  “People can do things their own way.”

  “Jesus, fine, whatever!”

  The worst part wasn’t the argument itself. The worst part was hours later, when Erin and the boys were asleep and I was stalking around the house in the dark, in the middle of the night, on my second bottle of wine, knowing I was wrong. But, damn it: I was technically right! No, Erin was right, and she was also right that I wasn’t who I used to be. My nineteen-year-old self would scorn me. Idiotic: why should I be beholden to my younger self’s judgment?

  But I knew that nineteen-year-old me would be right to despise me.

  I sought refuge with Kulkarni. The next night he took me to a suffocating old-money lair that overlooked Lake Michigan, I couldn’t find it again if you paid me. It was the middle of winter and Kulkarni met me in his cream cable-knit sweater, his tartan scarf, his herringbone tweed coat, immaculate and precisely arrayed. Why was he so better?

  He tried to put us on the same level.


  “You and me, we’re losers,” said Kulkarni halfway through the night. “We’re never going to get, you know, the ultimate glory.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you ever want to be a unit?” said Kulkarni. “Force in newtons, energy in joules, current in amperes. In high school I thought that if I really succeeded, I’d have a unit named after me.”

  “You wanted to be a unit.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “The answer is 1.42 kilokulkarnis.”

  “The Kulkarni effect. Kulkarni’s theorem.”

  “Or a law. Kepler’s laws, Newton’s laws, Moore’s law.”

  “The best thing is to be an element. Bohrium. Einsteinium. Fermium.”

  “Fermi got the hat trick: fermium, the fermi unit, Fermi’s paradox.”

  And so on.

  The conversation became progressively dorkier and more technical. I liked Kulkarni because I could crack him, I could goad him out of being a suave ladies’ man and ensnare him in discussions so detestably nerdy that his sex appeal to everyone at the bar would plummet by two thousand percent. I could sense his mojo evaporate as I spoke to him, as I derailed him from his smooth urbanity and he got excited; any woman’s gaze that had flirtatiously locked with his earlier now avoided him. All the handsomeness in the world couldn’t hide Kulkarni’s shared dweebazoid energy with me; I gloried as every vagina in the bar turned to ice.

  But what about those scientists who are more like prophets, people who get transfigured into units and laws and elements?

  Visionaries who don’t stop at learning the little rules for everything and forcing themselves into what already exists, but who push further—who become shamans who create new rules?

  Yes.

  That was it.

  Create. Not discover.

  What if it actually worked like this, Kulkarni and I drunkenly speculated (and never did Kulkarni seem as Renard-ish to me as he did then): what if the reason that fundamental discoveries about the universe are so often accompanied by an aura of witchcraft, alchemy, supernatural noise—the gates of the chthonic cracking open—was because the act of theorizing the law somehow created the law?

  Just like how a particle doesn’t have a specific position or momentum until you measure it—just like how a death doesn’t have a precise time and date until we calculate it—maybe even physical laws of the universe don’t have a precise definition until they are defined?

  That is, Newton didn’t discover gravity—rather, through some extraordinary interaction between his mind and reality, Newton created gravity, and the universe rearranged itself to accommodate his concept, his newly minted law echoing backward and forward through space and time, restructuring reality. When Einstein revised Newton, space-time again literally changed, trembling with unearthly reverberations. Planck didn’t merely discover quantum theory, but rather, Planck stood at the fulcrum between the known and the unknown, grappled with reality and won—and in that moment Planck inscribed new physical laws into the universe, laws that explained the world while opening the way for new phenomena that simply hadn’t been possible before—phenomena that proceeded not according to laws that Planck discovered, but laws that he generated.

  Such a metaphysically destabilizing act requires more than just human ingenuity. It demands mystic force. And not just anyone can rewrite the laws of the universe. Only through grueling mental submission to the physics, plus a jolt of supernatural energy, can one grasp the levers of reality for a moment and shift them. An opportunity that might occur only once in the lifetime of a genius.

  So it was, perhaps, for us.

  In this reading, Stettinger didn’t discover thanatons, but through a tremendous mental exertion, Stettinger summoned thanatons into existence. An act primed by and followed by supernatural momentum. Stettinger didn’t merely learn something about the world; he birthed something new into it.

  It might have happened more times than we would guess. The laws of physics might have been literally rewritten not only by Newtons and Einsteins, Bohrs and Feynmans, but countless anonymous others.

  Nonsense, all of it, of course. Walking tipsily home from the train that night, though, I realized how the whole discussion only underscored how Erin was right. You can spend all your life studying the universe around you, but for what? So you can learn how to best deform yourself to fit into the machine more efficiently? How about instead of mutilating yourself to fit the world better, why not grasp those levers and change it?

  The discussion made me think of Renard.

  I felt the weird kid at my side as I walked home, an invisible Flickering Man accompanying me.

  * * *

  —

  Julia was always faintly irritated whenever I mentioned Renard. I didn’t understand why. He’d been an oddly compelling kid, and anyway there were reminders all over campus of him. It was natural for him to pop into my mind. Late one snowy night our junior year, Julia and I were holed up at her and her friends’ house eating Chinese food in bed and watching TV, and I happened to mention Renard’s prediction of what happened after you died (the Looney Tunes tunnel of red circles, the eternal stuttering voice and music, the nightmare word spelled in cryptic glyphs) and Julia said, “Oh my God, you won’t shut up about that kid you were gay with for a summer.”

  “Julia.”

  “Admit it. You totally rubbed wieners or whatever but agreed it wasn’t gay because you didn’t kiss.”

  “Julia.”

  “All right, all right. But it’s no big deal. Everyone secretly does that kind of stuff with their friends when they’re young. I wouldn’t trust someone who claimed they didn’t.”

  Not for the first time I felt the gap open up between what Julia claimed “everyone does” and my prudish childhood; but she made her declarations so breezily that I began to doubt the authority of my own lived experience and reconsidered my past in light of Julia’s version of the world. The world of sex, drinking, and parties was so unavailable to me before college that reports of it had the tinge of the fantastical; but Julia lived in that world like a native, which almost made me suspect I had been living there, too, but was just too obtuse to notice it. (Then again, maybe Julia was the na’ve one: “rubbed wieners”?)

  “Anyway, I don’t think that’s what happens when you die,” said Julia.

  “What do you think happens?”

  Julia was silent for a little while, smoking her cigarette, looking at the ceiling. I could hear her housemates clunking around in the kitchen. They had just come back from the bar and there were some guys with them. We didn’t feel the need to make an appearance. We were barricaded in her room like survivalists. Julia had a TV and it was on, but with the volume off, and an informercial struggled to make itself understood.

  “There’s a trick you sometimes see on vinyl records,” she said at last. “When the last song finishes, instead of the needle automatically lifting off the record, there’s something that traps the needle and makes it spin around forever, playing the same two seconds again and again. You have to physically pick up the needle yourself to stop it.”

  “A locked groove.”

  “Yeah, that. Okay, you know that jukebox in my basement, there’s a 45 in it with a locked groove—”

  “Which one?”

  “ ‘Muskrat Love’ by Captain & Tennille.”

  “I don’t know that one.”

  “You’d recognize it.”

  “Why don’t you ever play it?”

  “It’s terr-i-ble,” said Julia. “But also, if you play it on my jukebox it’s a chore, because you can’t, like, reach in to get the needle out of the locked groove. You have to literally unplug the whole jukebox to stop it, or it’ll go on forever until the needle wears down.”

  “Huh.”

  “But I remember thinking once it would be nice if maybe death was
like that, like when you die your brain goes into a locked groove, reliving some real moment of your life, just one moment. You don’t pick the moment, or maybe you unconsciously do, but you relive it again and again until the needle wears down, and you wear down, and then you and your moment just kind of, I don’t know, dissolve.”

  I thought about that for a while.

  “What does the locked groove on ‘Muskrat Love’ sound like?”

  “Muskrats fucking,” said Julia. “I mean, it’s in the name.”

  * * *

  —

  For a long time I didn’t know how Renard had died.

  There was no straightforward way for me to find out back when it happened. No internet. And like I said, when I tried to contact Renard’s parents, they never responded.

  But later, in my senior year of college, while browsing the early web—this was before the computer-nausea started—I found myself looking up Renard Jankowski’s obituary.

  It came up immediately. Renard’s hometown was a forward-looking community of wealthy techies and had naturally scanned their old newspaper microfiches early on and put them online. I saw a grainy picture of Renard, a face I never thought I’d see again.

  The obituary said Renard had died in a bike accident. He zoomed through a red light and was mowed down by a car.

  I read the obituary again. I was surprised at how little emotion I felt. The obituary seemed unconnected to the kid I knew. Here I was, in my new life, years later, sitting in the gleaming new computer lab of the very college where Renard and I had met and become friends. Whatever happened to the FARGs, whatever happened to the old Apple IIe computers that had been in the library? The FARGs had gone on to other colleges, the computers had been mothballed. Life continued. Only Renard was stuck back in time. More irrelevant every year. Reading the obituary made me feel the last vestiges of Renard evaporate.