An Elegant Theory

by Noah Milligan

“And may I ask what it was?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your hypothesis. What was it?”

  “That I couldn’t stand to be around a genius. That you would make me feel inferior and bad about myself.”

  “I’m not a genius.”

  “Close enough.”

  Oh my God, one of the kids behind us said. This dude’s getting dumped right here. Ha, they cajoled. Ha ha ha. What a loser, they said. Right here in public. How goddamn humiliating is that?

  “Why don’t you kids shut up?” Sara said after turning and facing them.

  I remained staring out at the ballfield. Mahoney stared back up at me from the coaching box, his expression having turned to one of pity—he knew what it was like to be the center of harsh ridicule. But then he turned his attention back to the game, perhaps relieved his time being mocked had come and gone, clapped his hands, and bellowed an encouraging cheer for the player at bat to pick a good one, the one in your sweet spot, only the one you want to swing at.

  “What are you going to do about it?” one of the kids asked. “I ain’t your old man.” Something hit the back of my head. It was wet and cold, and I could feel remnants of it slide down my neck.

  That was when she sprung from her seat. She jumped over the back of her chair, and all I could hear was a solid thump, followed by a single, solitary whimper. Turning around, I noticed one of the kids slouched over, holding the side of his face with his left hand. The other kids simply blinked up at Sara, who towered over them, hand cocked back to deliver another blow. Each appeared too afraid to move.

  She turned back to me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me up to my feet. It was the first time she’d ever initiated contact between us. “One of these days,” she said. “You’ll have to learn how to take care of yourself.”

  Out in the parking lot, we kissed for the first time. It surprised me. She grabbed me by the collar, pulled me close, and pressed her mouth so hard against mine it hurt. When she was done, she told me not to worry, turned out her hypothesis had been false after all.

  “For you to get better,” Dr. White said, “you must accept that you will never see her again.”

  After the experiment, I decided to forego the celebration and instead walked the town. It was, despite the cold, a nice city. The trees that lined the lake looked like frozen palms. There was a group of men unloading a truck, their breaths puffing out like exhaust fumes. An ice sculpting festival was going on, and I stopped to watch for a while. People sculpted angels and swans and motorcycles. They were quite remarkable. The artists chiseled them with chainsaws, and the precision needed to exact that kind of detail deserved awe. Tourists snapped photographs, and children galloped in the snow. Despite being below freezing, it wasn’t that cold. There was no wind. With a warm coat on and some gloves, it could be called nice outside, a picturesque day. Families laughed and built snowmen and had a snow fight. Couples stuffed mittened hands into their spouse’s back pockets. I felt comfortable there, at peace.

  I contemplated what it would be like to live here, to never return as my mother had begged me to do. I could find a job, something low-key, an instructor at a local high school, teaching science to children. I’d make friends with the faculty, and occasionally I’d go out to have drinks with a colleague. I’d have a few friends, two or three tops, who I spent most of my time with. We’d catch US blockbusters months after their release when the tickets had been discounted. We’d gripe about our students, how they year after year started to show even less interest in science, instead preoccupied with celebrity gossip, video games, and social networking. I would, after a while, evolve into a cheap cliché because I wouldn’t be comfortable being anything else. Maybe, after a year or two, they’d set me up with a woman, a friend of theirs, an ex-pat like me. We’d take it slow at first. I wouldn’t tell her much about myself, and she wouldn’t tell me much about herself. She’d be embarrassed about something, her ears being of different sizes or maybe she’d have a cleft lip. Our conversations would be banal. We’d talk about the weather, how it’s so much different than back home, her humid south Florida versus my wind-filled Oklahoma. Television shows we like. Music. We’d be attracted to each other, but we wouldn’t act on it. I’d fantasize about brushing my fingertips along her neck, she tilting her head down as I did so, but we wouldn’t touch, not even an accidental graze of our hands. Soon, though, we’d become impatient, and I’d kiss her for the first time outside a deli, someplace we could get cheap salami sandwiches. We’d fall in love and move in together and start a new life. We wouldn’t ever marry, but we’d have kids. Three of them, named after our families.

  I’d feel guilt at first. My mother would have taken the blame for my wife’s murder, and she’d go to jail where she would likely die. I’d think of her often, daydreaming about how things could’ve worked out differently. I’d conjure fantasies of all four of us living together, my mother, Sara, the baby, and I, like we were some silly, archetypal sitcom. We’d suffer from trivial problems, ironic misunderstandings centered upon whether or not my relationship with a colleague was appropriate, or Isaac’s disappointment at losing the spelling bee. My new family would become worried about me. I’d start to lose longer and longer blocks of time, these fantasies once again hindering my ability to live a fulfilling, functional life. They’d ask me to see a doctor, a psychiatrist, anybody, so that I could get some help, and I’d agree even though I knew it wouldn’t. Only time would, bumbling slowly along until the daydreams ebbed away, like a throbbing ache after being sucker-punched.

  I knew that to be impossible, though, living here. There was no way my mother could’ve acted alone. Physically, she was unable to transport the body. Her confession would sound false, and because of the experiment, the authorities would find me. Interpol would investigate where I’d escaped, they’d hunt me down, and they’d arrest me. I’d be extradited to the United States. I’d face life in prison. I’d die behind bars. Normalcy would be a daily routine of food, work, food, work, lights out, isolation, servitude. Although quantum mechanics doesn’t bend toward certainties, reality often does. I hesitated to call it fate, but the notion of predetermination was there. Life, it seemed, boiled down to the elimination of alternatives until only a few remained. Each choice we make eliminates the ability to make countless others. After a while, we lose control completely.

  Seeing no other option, I returned to my hotel room and sat there, alone, taking an occasional shot of whiskey from the mini bar. Dr. Brinkman returned late that evening, after midnight. He smelled of wine and was a little drunk, swaying back and forth like he danced to a tune only he could hear.

  “We did it,” he said. “We did it. We did it. We did it!” He grabbed me like he wanted to dance. He placed one arm around my waist and clasped my left hand with his and then twirled me. “The experiment worked beautifully. Elegantly. Mass was there, and then BANG, it wasn’t. Ha HA! You were right, Coulter. You were right. I am so proud of you.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Wonderful.”

  WHEN I ARRIVED BACK IN BOSTON, I EXPECTed things to be different. I wasn’t sure how exactly—if the city would have somehow transformed, the way a movie can if shot through a lens of a different hue and clarity, or maybe my disposition would be different in some way, my mood happier, my conscience clear of guilt. But this wasn’t the case. The city remained as cold as always, more so even, my entire body aching as soon as I left the warmth of baggage claim and stepped out into the frigid wind. My thoughts clogged with melancholy and regret, tormented by how my wife and unborn son rotted, how my mother sat in a county jail cell, how I’d never feel the weight of the Nobel medal in my hands, my name now destined to be a mere footnote in the annals of string theory, pushed aside due to my more than undignified past. This last thought shamed me more than anything, the wallowing in sanctimonious self-pity, pestering me like addiction does, that unrelenting pull on a smoker’s lung tissue, pleading to absorb just one more lungful of smoke, begging
to fulfill the incessant craving, failing, no matter how hard I tried, to make it stop.

  Outside the terminal, Dr. Brinkman’s wife waited for him with their car, she waving from the driver’s seat at me, her face plastered with a genuine, face-aching grin. She was happy for us, for me, altruistically glad that all had gone as it should have.

  “Your mother coming to pick you up?” Dr. Brinkman asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “A friend? Anyone?”

  “I think I’m going to just grab a cab.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “We’ll take you home.” He pointed to the car, idling in the fire lane.

  “That’s very nice of you, but I’m out of your way.”

  “No problem at all.”

  “I couldn’t, really.”

  “We’d be glad to.”

  “I said no.”

  Dr. Brinkman flinched at my response, surprised at its abruptness. I hadn’t meant for it to come out as such, and told him so, and he waved away my apology with a flick of his wrist.

  “I understand,” he said. “I do. Sometimes you just want to be alone.”

  “Thanks for understanding.”

  He reached out and hugged me. It was warm in there, surrounded by his big arms.

  “I am so proud of you,” he said. “I am. You hang in there, okay? I know it doesn’t feel that way right now, but, in the end, everything will be okay.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He let go and picked up his luggage.

  “I’ll see you in the lab on Monday?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”

  Dr. Brinkman got in the car, and his wife leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. She seemed so glad to see him. Although we were only gone for three days, it seemed as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. She held his face in her hands, staring into his eyes, her gaze seething with pride and love, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Sara had ever looked at me like that. Perhaps in the beginning she did, when we had first been dating, still living in Oklahoma, when we’d been happier. She probably had, but I couldn’t remember.

  A bus stop wasn’t far from the airport, around the terminal’s egress end, so I pulled my coat tighter and walked. As always around airports, it was busy. Cars veered in and out of lanes, weaving through traffic. Every few minutes, a plane would take off, its engine rumbling. People shouted greetings and whined farewells. The scene reminded me of the double-slit light experiment in a way, a miasma of travelers as individual photons, racing through every conceivable path only to land in their most probable of destinations, imprinting against the Bostonian backdrop their own unique interference pattern. I found comfort in this thought, convinced I would land eventually where I was supposed to be.

  A young woman and her child, perhaps two or three, waited at the bus stop. The little girl shivered from the cold despite being wrapped in a fluffy pink coat and wool toque. She had ahold of her mother’s leg, no doubt obeying her mother’s rule to always be within arm’s reach when out in public, drilled into her ever since she had begun to understand English. When I approached, the little girl scooted closer to her mother, perhaps my presence initiating some innate desire to seek protection, security, warmth even. I understood the impulse, empathized with it. The search for sanctuary is, and always will be, an intrinsic human pursuit. Noticing her child digging into her leg, the mother turned to me and smiled. I, instinctively, returned it.

  “I still can’t get used to it,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The cold.”

  “Ah.”

  “We’re from Florida.” Her finger alternatively pointed between herself and her young daughter. “I’d never even seen snow until moving here.”

  “And now there’s no hiding from it.”

  “I always heard it was beautiful,” she said. “I don’t see it. Everything gray and dead. It’s never pristine like in movies, pure white. It’s always tainted with dirt and grunge.”

  “I tend to agree with you.”

  “Marjorie,” she said. “That’s my name.” She extended a hand to shake, and I took it. “Margie, actually. That’s what I go by. And this little one is Samantha.” The little girl hid her face behind her mother’s leg, peering up at me with saucer eyes. “She’s shy.”

  I told them my name.

  “You from around here?”

  “Not originally, no. Oklahoma.”

  “Tornado alley,” she said. “Exciting.”

  “My dad chased them, actually.”

  “What?”

  “Tornadoes.”

  “No!”

  I nodded. “Took me out once, too.”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Really?”

  “You’ve never seen one?”

  “Never,” she said. “Jesus, no. Weren’t you just scared to death?”

  “I was terrified. I was young, and we were out in the middle of nowhere. Wheat fields lined the road so that I couldn’t see the horizon in the distance. The clouds had turned green, the color of seaweed, and had become so thick and textured it looked almost lunar. You always hear that there’s a quiet before the storm, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes there’s a constant rumble, intensifying and weakening randomly. It makes you dizzy.”

  “The Doppler effect,” Marjorie said.

  “Yes. That’s correct. How did you know that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

  “It started to rain and hail. Ice pounded the car. The wind blew us all over the road. I thought I was going to die. I really did. I remember thinking that my dad was crazy, that he had lost his mind driving us into something like that. He looked a little crazy, too. He had both hands on the wheel, and he leaned forward in his seat, his knees perched out so that he almost looked like he was riding a horse rather than driving a car. He kept bobbing his head like he could get a better angle to view the storm, and I was pleading silently for him just to keep his eyes on the road, but I was too scared to say a word, but that’s when he pointed out the window and said a single, solitary word: ‘there.’”

  “Jesus,” Marjorie said.

  “At first, I couldn’t see where he was pointing, but then we passed the wheat fields to open pasture. It looked like an entire cloud on the ground. The base, I learned later, was over two miles wide. The winds were clocked at over three hundred miles per hour. It was the largest tornado ever recorded. My dad slammed on the brakes, and we fishtailed to a stop in the middle of the highway. In front of us, this monster rampaged towards a farmhouse. ‘Get the camera,’ he told me. ‘Get it, get it, get it!’ I grabbed it from the floorboard and passed it up to his assistant, Dianne, and she snapped photographs of it as it took out barns and fences and people’s homes. Every few seconds, an explosion burst out of the funnel when it hit light poles. This lasted for at least twenty minutes, and we just sat in stunned silence and watched as it sucked up everything in its path.

  “Eventually, the tornado disappeared off into the distance. It hadn’t dissipated, instead having grown stronger, and headed straight for the city. When we couldn’t see it any longer, it was like a spell was lifted. Both my father and Dianne erupted in joy. ‘Can you believe it?’ they said. ‘That was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen!’ ‘A once-in-a-lifetime storm!’ They both jumped out of the car and into each other’s arms, and it was there I first saw my father kiss Dianne. They had completely forgotten I was even there. That tornado killed sixty-seven people that day. My birthday.”

  The bus arrived, air brakes screeching, and the driver pushed open the door. Samantha lunged for the steps, but Marjorie grabbed her by the hood of her coat, telling her to hold on for just a second. Marjorie turned to me. “You coming?” she asked. “I’d love to hear more.”

  “I’m afraid my bus is the next one.”

  She smiled.

  “Funny, though,” I continued. “I always remembered that
story differently.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “For some reason I always leave out the death.”

  She smiled a knowing smile. “Perhaps you can tell me that version another time.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “It was nice to meet you,” she said.

  “You too.”

  Marjorie released her daughter, and she climbed up the steps on all fours like a little dog, her mother following after her and dropping change into the bucket for their fare. Before the driver could shut the door behind her, though, she clamored back down to the curb. In her hand was a business card. “My personal cell is written on the back,” she said. “Call me sometime. If you want.”

  I thanked her and told her I would before placing her card, folded, into a pocket of my suitcase, next to the pills prescribed to me by Dr. White. After the bus doors closed, I grabbed the prescription bottle and threw it into the trashcan.

  Fifteen minutes later, my bus arrived to take me back to a home I didn’t recognize. First, it was the smell—a chemical lemon scent greeted me. The entire apartment had been scrubbed and cleaned so that every surface shined. The glass coffee table perfectly reflected the now spotless ceiling fan; its blades no longer caked in dust. The carpets had been vacuumed, and the throw pillows fluffed. The sink no longer carried two or three stray dishes, bits of ketchup dried against its surface. My books had been neatly arranged on the bookshelf, alphabetized by author. Windows had been washed. Laundry had been folded and tucked into drawers, t-shirts and jeans hung on hangers instead of being strewn across the floor. The place had not looked this good since Sara and I had moved in years before.

  A scrapbook I didn’t recognize had been placed in the center of the newly oiled dining room table. It had a green cover and no label. Opening it up, I found newspaper and magazine clippings of my discovery, heralding me as a physicist to be watched, a doctoral student with a promising shot at the Nobel. There were pictures of the family, Sara, Dad, Mom, and I, on the first day of our reunion, eating at this Irish place outside Harvard Square. We didn’t look happy in the photo, my father reaching out his phone to snap it while we all sat at the table. Because of the angle, our faces appeared distorted, like they were being sucked into a singularity centered behind us. Each of us smiled, but they weren’t genuine. They were the plastered smiles of a coerced picture, the product of humanity’s instinct to memorialize forever what we wished reality to be, not reality itself. I’ve seen pictures like that all my life, young parents and toddlers sitting Indian style, holding books and picnicking in a park, a couple holding hands and walking down a wooden bridge, extended family in woolen sweaters cuddling around a single leather chair. These family portraits are meant to look natural, but they’re not, the viewer knowing fully well a photographer stands behind the camera directing his subjects into position, instructing them to smile, to look happy. They are artifice, full of pretense. We want to show the world that this is how we truly are, but, in the end, we deceive no one.