An Elegant Theory

by Noah Milligan

  He couldn’t wait, though. He knew he couldn’t. Before he realized what he was doing, he was walking across the street toward her bedroom window, careful not to make any noise. When he reached the sill, he noticed he could see through a slit of the curtain. Sara’s bed was right underneath the window. Her back was to him, the blanket down by her ankles. She was sweating, and her clasped hands were clenched in between her knees. He wanted to reach in and towel her off and fan her with his hand and tell her that he was there for her. He would get a cool washcloth and dab at her shoulders and neck and chest. He would rub ice chips over her lips. Anything she wanted. It didn’t matter. He would do anything for her. He would stand here for hours and never leave.

  She flipped over. He dropped, but before he did he noticed her eyes were open. He panicked. She had to have seen him. She was going to call the police. He told himself to move, to stand and run, but he couldn’t. He was frozen with his back pinned against the wall. He tried not to breathe. She’d be able to see his foggy breaths. A minute passed, and then two. He listened for sirens or the idling engine of a police cruiser, but neither came. His heart rate returned to normal. Slowly, he turned and raised his head over the sill. She was still lying in bed and staring out the window, her eyes locked on him. Strangely, she didn’t move or blink or seem worried at all. Maybe she couldn’t see past her reflection in the glass. Maybe she’d known that he’d been watching this entire time. Maybe she’d been waiting for him to knock on the door and ask to come in. He mouthed “hi” and waved and hoped she’d acknowledge him and smile. He hoped. He hoped. But she didn’t. She only lay there. And then it hit him, and he couldn’t help but curse his good fortune—she couldn’t see him at all. She was sleeping with her eyes wide open.

  CAUSE AND EFFECT IS A FUNNY THING. PEOple see evidence of it all the time. They kick a can, it scuttles down the road. They turn the wheel of their car, the car veers. They cut themselves, and they bleed. Many take it for granted, chalk life up to fate and destiny, their actions predisposed by a benevolent creator. Others take the opposite extreme, giving too much credence to the phenomenon, to the point the historical record collapses into a linear function. Lost are the appreciation for happenstance and dumb luck, the complexities of motive and accident, the systemic interplay between the natural and the synthetic, the conscious and the unconscious, the animate and the inanimate worlds. We over and underestimate our importance in the universe. We grieve over our mistakes too much. We too often do not make amends. We celebrate our victories with too much aplomb. We give credit where no credit is due. Human history is an endless web of interrelated mistakes and accidents.

  I take solace in that fact. No matter what I could’ve done differently, I still would’ve made mistakes. Perhaps not as grave. Perhaps more so. The only certainty is that I would have erred. This does not excuse what I did, of course. But, on the other hand, the choices I made are only relevant for a short amount of time, to a few select people. Then they are as minuscule as the choices of a gnat, whether to continue to fly or to fall to the floor, giving up after only a few, short days.

  I’d been back to work for three or four weeks, and my dissertation was finished and under review by committee. Sara’s parents had gone back to Oklahoma. After three months, the search for Sara had gone cold. Calls from Detective Landsmen went from every day to every third to every week to not-at-all. Dad called regularly, though. He asked how I was holding up and how my mother was doing, and I told him fine, and he said “sure” like he didn’t believe me. Mostly, though, I stayed in with Mom. We watched television and ate dry cereal and hardly spoke. It was lonely and depressing and thoughts of suicide returned. For hours I would fantasize about cutting my wrist, laying in the same tub my wife had died in, about buying some rope and hanging myself from the second story banister at work, about jumping from the Longfellow Bridge. I wanted to ask my mother for advice. How had she tried it before? Why did she fail? What suggestions would she give to go painlessly? Slowly? Agonizingly?

  I didn’t ask, though. Our conversations were short and often onesided. She would ask me how my day went, and I would tell her about my classes, about lectures on Newton’s Laws and the Standard Model. The news about both my missing wife and my work had spread throughout the department, even reaching the undergraduates, and I would tell my mother about these eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls, looking up at me with pity, with longing, with soft eyes full of adolescent crushes. They wanted to take care of me, to comfort me, and it made me want to throw up. She would tell me about her day. Often she went sightseeing, back to Old North Church or to Boston Harbor. Sometimes she would apply for jobs at delis or at clothing stores, Gap or Abercrombie & Fitch. She never received a call back. We avoided any meaningful conversation, afraid, I supposed, that if we broached anything about what had happened, we would somehow make ourselves more culpable in the crime. Condone it, or justify it, or even acknowledge it had happened. It was easier to live like this, as if we didn’t even speak each other’s language. We were basically strangers, and through our actions, we’d decided to remain that way.

  We were in the living room when Dr. Brinkman knocked. The place was a mess, hadn’t been picked up in weeks. At first, both my mother and I simply stared at the door as if we both believed that if we just stayed quiet, the person would eventually go away.

  Another knock. “Coulter? Are you home?” Another knock. “Coulter?” There was desperation in his voice. I had been avoiding him lately. With my dissertation finished, I no longer spent several hours at the lab. I’d teach class, then go home. He’d called and emailed a few times, but I hadn’t returned any of them. “I need to speak with you.”

  “Maybe you should answer,” Mom whispered. She nudged my elbow. “He sounds like he’s about to panic.”

  “He’ll go away.”

  “He might call the cops. He might think you’ve done something to yourself.”

  “So what?”

  “They’ve just been gone. You want them asking questions around here again?”

  “Fine.”

  I opened the door. Dr. Brinkman did look concerned, apprehensive even, digging at his cuticles.

  “There you are. You had me worried. You haven’t returned my calls, my emails. Nothing. Not a word.”

  I apologized. “I’ve just wanted to be alone.”

  He smiled, took off his glasses, and cleaned them with his shirttail. “No. I’m sorry. I overreact sometimes. Of course you want to be alone.” He grinned but didn’t look relieved. After he put on his glasses, he glanced around the room. To his credit, he attempted to hide his disgust at the dishes caked in dried marinara, at the laundry strewn everywhere, the shirts over a chair’s back, underwear lodged under the coffee table. It was the home of a person who simply didn’t care anymore. That wasn’t the case, however. Depression, at least for me, wasn’t that I had given up. I hadn’t, which exacerbated the problem. I wanted to go into work, to reach out to contemporaries for insights into my discovery, to try and formulate an experiment that would prove my theory to be correct. But I couldn’t. I didn’t have the energy, or the motivation, the willpower, whatever. I didn’t shower. I didn’t move. I simply lay, defeated, and longing.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Brinkman said to Mom. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “My mother,” I said. She stood to take his hand in hers, but I put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her.

  “Let me make tea,” she said.

  Mom disappeared into the kitchen, and Dr. Brinkman and I stood and stared at everything but each other: the ceiling and the floor and the coffee table and the television. A cartoon aired, an old Looney Toons episode. Wile E. Coyote chased the Roadrunner through the desert while driving a racecar, but he couldn’t quite make the turn before the ledge of a butte. The car hovered there for a moment, Wile E. facing the audience with a knowing expression on his face: he would fall, he was sure of it—it was, after all, just a matter of time.

  Mom
returned with three cups of iced tea. Dr. Brinkman took his and sipped, flinched from the bitter taste.

  “I’ve heard so much about you,” my mother said. “Coulter looks up to you greatly.”

  Dr. Brinkman blushed, and we all three sat on the couch, the only place to sit, and crouched in shoulder to shoulder. Each of us faced forward, watching the cartoon.

  “I should’ve called,” Dr. Brinkman said. “I didn’t know Coulter had company.”

  “During trying times, a mother is always needed,” she said. She played with her hair, pulling it back into a ponytail. She was putting on a hyperbolic farce, it seemed, the worried and hovering mother, perhaps just to see how Dr. Brinkman would respond. It was like a game to her, to try and shock people into awkwardness. I didn’t know if she did it on purpose or if it was rather some sort of ingrained instinct, having for so long been treated like she was crazy and a bad person she now simply acted in a way she thought other people expected.

  “A truer statement has never been spoken,” Dr. Brinkman said.

  “Right?” she said. “I remember when he was little. He didn’t always have the easiest childhood, being as smart as he is.” She glowed, continuing her performance. “He used to come home with bruises all the time. Fights with the other boys. They picked on him incessantly. Just because he was different.”

  “Coulter never told me.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t. He never complained. But a mother always knows.” She tapped the end of her nose. “Even if he doesn’t say a word. A mother always knows.”

  “Intuition,” Dr. Brinkman said.

  “Just love,” Mom said.

  “Paranoia,” I said. “Delusion.”

  “Of course,” my mother continued. She took a sip of her tea and grimaced. “I wasn’t always there. You see, I left when Coulter was about eleven.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Brinkman said, uncomfortably. “I’m sure you had your reasons.”

  “I did. They weren’t good ones, but I did have reasons. That’s why he’s not very good with loss. That’s why he’s holed himself up here. That’s why he won’t get himself off the couch. That’s why he won’t return your phone calls. It’s my fault.”

  “It takes time,” Dr. Brinkman said.

  “Sure.”

  “Everyone grieves differently.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  An awkward silence followed. Dr. Brinkman placed his tea on the coffee table, atop two-year old National Geographic magazines and Goldfish crumbs.

  “Abandonment twice in his life now,” Mom continued. “First it was me. Now his wife. I’m sure he’ll never trust a woman again.”

  “Okay, Mom. That’s enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a problem with not filtering what I say. I’ve been working on it.”

  “Honesty is a virtue,” Dr. Brinkman said.

  “Maybe,” Mom said. “I just find it gets you into trouble.”

  “Well,” he said, “I should be going. Coulter, would you join me in the hallway?” He smiled, rose, and took my mother’s hand in his. “It was very nice to meet you.”

  Mom smiled without revealing her teeth, cocked her head at an odd angle, like she had an unbearable crick in her neck. “It wasn’t,” she said. “But I don’t blame you for lying.”

  Dr. Brinkman bowed his head and walked away without saying a word, the first time I had ever seen the man speechless. Out in the hallway, he took off his glasses, cleaned them with a handkerchief, and said: “Coulter, I’m worried about you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

  “Have you been to see Dr. White?”

  “Twice. I have more meetings scheduled.”

  “And are you going to go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should, Coulter. She can help you. She did me, when my wife and I were trying to have children, and we couldn’t, she helped. I was angry then, and sad. Depressed even. I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t happening for us. Even though I don’t believe in fate or karma or anything like that, I felt like a victim of divine judgment, like I had done something to be punished. She helped me find acceptance.” He reached out and grabbed my forearm. It shocked me, literally, with static electric discharge. I flinched, and he let go. “Just think about it, okay? You should keep your appointments.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “I know it will take some time.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you can take all the time you need. I’m not saying you need to stop grieving or anything.”

  “I appreciate your concern, Dr. Brinkman.”

  “Before I go—” He trailed off and smiled. He looked giddy, like a child might, told he’d finally get that bike he’d always wanted. “I have some exciting news. CERN called. They think they might be able to prove your theory.”

  “You’re joking.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “They wish to speak with you.”

  The LHC stood for the Large Hadron Collider. It’s the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. A 38,000-ton supercollider that runs twenty-seven kilometers in a circular tunnel one hundred meters below the Swiss/French border at Geneva, it is the engineering marvel of our generation, perhaps in all of human history. It accelerates thousands of protons at 99.99991% light speed from opposite ends of the tunnel so that they will collide and erupt into millions of miniscule particles.

  “They think they can show mass disappearing,” Dr. Brinkman explained. “Before the experiment, they will measure the strength of gravity, collide the particles, and then measure it once again. They hope to find a discrepancy from prior to the experiment: mass will have disappeared.”

  It was an elegant experiment, really; since gravity is directly related to mass, mass must have disappeared. Mass is a form of energy, as is seen in E=mc2, and can neither be created nor destroyed according to the Law of Conservation of Energy. Thus, it had to have gone somewhere. The question is then where. Where in the hell did it go? The answer, if string theory is correct, would be in higher dimensions, the fifth or sixth or even the eleventh, lost in the curvatures of my Calabi-Yau manifold. If the experiment worked, it would prove the theory of everything, the scientific framework that would bridge quantum mechanics and general relativity.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “When should we know?”

  “They want you to come.”

  “This is happening so quickly.”

  He sighed and laid a hand on my shoulder. “I know,” he said. “But if they are correct, you’d be the frontrunner for the Nobel, Coulter. The Nobel Prize. No one else would even be close.”

  It was hard not to feel conflicted. Excitement and anxiety came naturally, like the rush of endorphins after a long jog. Everything I’d ever dreamt about, everything I had worked for was coming to fruition. The Nobel Prize. Nothing compared to that. Yet, it seemed ironic Dr. Brinkman had broached the subject of karma and fate. Where was the justice for me? I had murdered my wife, covered it up, yet it seemed I was being rewarded. But I suppose that was his point. Good people experienced terrible things. Terrible people experienced good things. There was no such thing as karma or fate. Only cause and effect. Luck and happenstance. Indiscriminate causality.

  “When would we leave?”

  “In about a month. We’d be gone for a few days at most. See the experiment. Come back. You can take time off work again. As long as you need.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’ll go.”

  He hugged me. “I’m glad,” he said. “I’m glad.”

  I applied for a passport, paid for expedited service. For work, I requested other PhD candidates to cover my classes. I wrote my students’ final exams. I honed my dissertation, clarified, perfected. I stayed away from the press. A few larger, mainstream magazines had gotten whiff of the story, The New Yor
ker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times. They understood something big could be discovered, but they only had a crude understanding of the implications. They were more interested in reporting that some young graduate student had claimed to have proven Einstein wrong than the truth, the discovery of a grand unified theory. The universe as a whole could be understood, explained, even artificially replicated. Einstein wasn’t wrong. He just wasn’t completely right.

  I was at the grocery store perusing the produce aisle with Mom, getting her supplies for my week away in Switzerland. Since Dr. Brinkman had broken the news about CERN a couple weeks prior, we’d decided to make a concerted effort to get healthy. The idea focused upon diet and exercise. We believed if we ate better, green vegetables and fruit and broccoli, and if we exercised, going for a mile walk each day, we’d begin to feel better, both physically and mentally. Serotonin and endorphins would elucidate happiness, a sense of euphoria, and we’d be able to beat our depression, like it was some sort of obstacle to overcome, like learning a foreign language despite a speech impediment. We simply needed dedication and perseverance. So we’d implemented our plan. We walked, and we cooked healthy meals. While we ate, we talked about our plans for the future, where we’d move after I graduated. We both wanted out of Massachusetts, out of New England and its cold, biting winters. This limited the schools mostly to California. Top choices were Pasadena, Stanford, La Jolla, or Berkeley. She’d go with me, though she’d get a place of her own, a small studio apartment close by. I’d try to get her a job at the university, perhaps at the library, restocking shelves, that sort of thing. We discussed getting a dog, a Weimaraner. I’d name him Isaac, and he’d stay with me, but we’d take care of him together, feed him, take him for walks. We were excited. Planning felt good, like we were beginning to move on, to be happy.

  As we shopped, Mom told stories from her past, like one time when she and a friend, who she’d helped escape from institutionalization at a psychiatric hospital in San Bernardino, had gone to Yellowstone National Park.