Cady tried to calm herself by thinking of the soothing song they rehearsed earlier that day at Collegium. It was just like in choir—she didn’t have to understand the lecture or even participate—all she had to do was blend.
And listen to the voices around her.
She shook that last thought from her head.
Cady redirected her gaze to the front of the room. The moderator was introducing each professor, listing their numerous degrees and accolades. Prokop’s list of accomplishments went on for a solid minute.
The voice, thankfully, seemed to have fallen silent, and the lecture got under way. Cady looked around the room. Although fewer than half of the seats were filled, none of these students seemed like the casual lecture attendee who half-listens and surfs the Internet. Few had laptops at all, and most sat forward, listening intently, occasionally posing questions beyond Cady’s comprehension. Those in attendance were a rarefied group, even by Harvard’s standards, and they were all held in rapt attention by Professor Prokop.
But it remained difficult for Cady to focus on the content of the lecture. She was trapped in anxious anticipation of the possible return of the voice that called itself Robert, anticipation and something else—curiosity.
Her mind wandered, and as if sensing an opening …
I met Katherine in New Mexico.
In spite of her saner judgment, Cady listened.
We stayed at her dude ranch in Los Piños. This was the summer before Harvard, I was only nineteen. She was twenty-eight. Married. Utterly unattainable. Which I suppose added to her allure. But it was more than that.
She ran that ranch all by herself. She had hidalgo blood. The ranch hands respected her, so did the horses. Even the mustangs seemed to recognize her as one of their own. She was commanding.
Commanding—the word resonated in Cady’s mind as she watched Professor Prokop. Prokop was wholly transformed from the soft-spoken, self-effacing woman Cady had met in the Science Center café; this woman was confident and, yes, commanding. She strutted across the lecture hall floor dressed simply in black slacks and a white oxford shirt. She wrote on the blackboard with flourish, her marks slanted and large, striking the chalk with such force that the garments on her slim frame trembled.
She took an unlikely shine to me. She’d take me out riding through the Jemez mountains for days at a time, with only whiskey and peanut butter sandwiches for sustenance. Despite her beauty, there was nothing precious about her. She’d think nothing of kneeling in the mud to pick up a horse’s leg and hammer a nail into a loose shoe.
Prokop was barely letting her colleague Professor Daley talk, and when she got excited, she had the funny habit of raking her fingers through her hair until it began slipping from her ponytail in pieces.
Katherine had grown up in the Pecos. She could read the land like a Hopi tracker. She was in her element.
Just then, the young male teaching fellow assisting her made some sort of math joke, and Prokop burst forth with a boisterous laugh that Cady wouldn’t have guessed she had in her. Here she was masterful and charismatic. This was her element.
I was probably in love with her.
Listening to the voice, Cady saw Prokop in a new light.
Or I came to crave her approval, which might be the same thing.
She tried to look at her through Eric’s eyes. How did he see this professor?
I would have followed her to the ends of the earth. Luckily, she took me only as far as Los Alamos.
She didn’t hear from “Robert” again after that, but Cady remained preoccupied by his story and how it might be analogous to that of Eric and Prokop. She wondered if this was the connection she was intended to draw. Was this the voice’s purpose, to give her insight into her brother? Eric had always been proud of his academic abilities, and he had a strong work ethic, so it hadn’t seemed unusual when he was adamant about staying on campus to continue working on his Bauer project, despite his family’s begging him to come home. But now, as she watched Professor Prokop—masterful, charming, “in her element”—she could see how he might have had other motivation to stay on campus. Surely Eric, too, had “craved her approval.” Had he thought he was in love?
Absorbed in her thoughts, Cady didn’t realize the lecture had ended until the people around her started to shift and get out of their seats. She gathered her things slowly; she had come to talk to Prokop but found herself newly intimidated. Cady loitered in the middle of the seats, waiting for the stragglers to have their moment with the professors and planning her opener. She hoped Prokop would notice her, but she was speaking animatedly to her TF as he erased her calculations from the board, leaving behind a ghostly outline of the letters and symbols. It was the TF who finally spotted Cady waiting. He leaned over and said something in Prokop’s ear; Cady noticed he touched her arm when he did so.
Prokop’s head snapped in Cady’s direction with the precision of an owl.
Cady took tentative steps forward, “Hi, I’m—”
“Cadence, good to see you. I’m glad you could make it.” Prokop smiled. “Did you enjoy the lecture?”
“Yes, or what I understood of it.”
“Take my class next semester, we’ll fix that.” Prokop diverted her gaze to some papers on the desk in front of her.
Cady felt suddenly dry-mouthed. Prokop had a way of charging the atmosphere. “You mentioned you might have time to talk?”
“I did, didn’t I?” She paused to squint, then returned her gaze to the papers. “I’m sorry, my schedule has become compacted today, perhaps next week would be better. I have office hours on Thursdays at four.”
“I know, but I’d rather not wait, and I won’t take much of your time, if you have a minute now …” Cady waited for Prokop to finish writing something down, fearing she had already lost her attention. “Do you have a minute?”
Prokop finally looked up. “You are persistent like your brother.” Then she turned to the TF and said something in what sounded like Russian; he answered her in kind. She took her time putting her things into her laptop bag, saying goodbye to Professor Zhou when he passed, thanking the other TFs. Cady had the sense Prokop was daring her to leave, and she wanted to, but she fought the creeping sensation of awkwardness and stood, waiting. Finally Prokop ceased moving, smoothed her hands over her clothes, unaware of the faint chalk marks she was leaving on her black pencil skirt, and met Cady’s gaze. “Come. You can walk me to the T.”
Cady would take what she could get. What she got was scampering at Prokop’s heels through the halls of the Science Center. Prokop had to be five foot nine at least, and she took long, purposeful strides.
“Please, go ahead,” Prokop said.
“I want to know what Eric was working on before he got too sick.”
“Well,” Prokop began, “his initial research for the Bauer involved taking data from the Large Hadron Collider experiments, searching for Kaluza-Klein modes, and interpreting their properties in order to draw conclusions about the geometry of the hidden, extra dimension whence they came.” Without breaking her stride, she threw a glance at Cady. “I imagine you don’t know what that means.”
“Not really, but I can follow along.”
Prokop sighed. “It’s very complicated. It is not a conversation for a walk to the train.”
“That’s all you would give me.”
“You couldn’t wait until next week.” Prokop pushed through the revolving glass doors, slipping between the rotating panels before Cady could catch her. “Even if we had time, I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand.”
“My big brother killed himself, it can’t be any harder to understand than that.”
Prokop stopped and her pale eyes scanned Cady’s face, her expression softening. “I’m sorry, I’ve upset you, and this is exactly what I don’t want to do. I can speak to you about any abstraction in quantum ph
ysics, but I’m not as fluent with the spectra of emotion. The last thing I want to do is add to your pain.”
“No, I’m fine.” Cady quieted her tone. “Please, I just need the headlines of what you two were working on. Don’t worry about upsetting me, leave the emotion out of it.”
“All right. I can do that.”
They walked through the Yard, which was quieter on the weekends, and this Friday afternoon, it was warmer than it had been. People had laid out blankets on the grass, some chatted and ate, others read, a trio tossed a Frisbee, all enjoying an afternoon in the dappled sunlight beneath the fiery-colored trees. Cady longed to know the school and the life those students knew, the one of new friends and carefree afternoons. She felt no more a part of that scene than one would while watching a movie.
Meanwhile, Professor Prokop was doing her best to describe another foreign world to her. “Let me try to give you a quick frame of reference. There are certain questions posed by our universe that are not explained by the standard model of particle physics. The classic example is, why is gravity so weak?”
“Is it weak?”
“Of course it is. A small magnet will allow a paper clip to defy gravity. It is disproportionately weaker than the other three elementary forces, which are …” Professor Prokop shot Cady a teacherly glance.
“You’re asking me? I have no idea.”
Prokop lifted an eyebrow. “You are lucky you’re not in one of my classes. The other three are electromagnetism, strong nuclear forces, and weak nuclear forces. When we consider the disparate weakness of gravity, it raises big questions, such as, is our world what it appears? The short answer is no.” An errant soccer ball bounced across their path, which Prokop deftly stopped with her foot, even in its low-heeled pump. “We experience the world as having three dimensions, back-forward, left-right, and up-down. See?” She demonstrated each direction with the ball, even lifting it on the bridge of her foot. “We are not physiologically capable of perceiving anything more. But there is no theory that dictates there are only three dimensions. It is only logical to think that there are others.” A final swift kick sent the ball sailing back to the students on the green with surprising accuracy. A few clapped, but Prokop barely acknowledged them and resumed walking.
Cady was dazzled, struggling to follow the logic. “There are more than three dimensions?”
“Yes, without question. Einstein introduced time as the fourth dimension, and his theory of relativity proved that time and space are inextricable, woven together in a fabric he dubbed space-time. String theory postulates nine or ten dimensions. There could be more hidden dimensions, we don’t know yet.”
“When you say ‘hidden dimension,’ what does that even mean? Like a parallel universe?” Cady felt silly even saying it.
“Parallel universes—in the community, we call them supersymmetry theories, and they had their moment, but they’ve fallen out of favor,” Prokop answered matter-of-factly. “Warped geometry, to borrow my colleague’s term, is the current hypothesis.”
“Warped how?”
“Hidden dimensions could be any size and shape. One could be ‘compactified’—squeezed into a circle whose diameter in centimeters is ten to the negative thirty-third power, or one thousandth of a millionth of a trillionth of a centimeter. Or an extra dimension could be infinite and expansive. The shape could be curved, rolled up like a spool of thread, or doubled back on itself like a snake.”
“Doubled back?” Cady thought of the voices in her head, seemingly coming from the past. “What would cause distortion like that?”
“Any matter or energy can distort space-time. Are you familiar with the terms ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’?”
Cady shuddered and shook her head; they sounded sinister.
“Dark energy is energy in the universe that we cannot see but that we know is there. Only about four percent of the universe as we know it is observable light matter. The other ninety-six percent is dark matter and dark energy.”
Invisible forces. “So we can see almost none of what’s really there?”
“Correct.”
“If we aren’t capable of perceiving this matter or other dimensions, how can we tell they exist?”
“They leave behind tracks in our three-dimensional world. We can discover indirect evidence of these hidden dimensions and build from there, the way a shadow gives us information of size and shape of an object or an echo can tell us direction and distance of a sound. I tell my students to think of it like a crime scene, we can dust for fingerprints of the hidden dimensions left behind in our world. This is what your brother’s project looked into: the study of those particles that travel in the hidden dimension yet leave traces in our recognized three-dimensional world.”
“He was trying to find proof of the extra dimensions?”
“Yes, but proof means something very different for a physicist than it might for a mathematician or a detective. Many of the phenomena we are considering are difficult or impossible to measure. It is hard to find the answer, so we search for the best answer. The universe will always have its secrets.” They had passed out of the Yard and stopped at the streetlight, waiting to cross Mass Ave. Now that they were out of the shade of the elm trees, Cady could see that Professor Prokop’s expression had relaxed since they started their walk. “Eric was wonderful,” Prokop continued. “Such passion. He wasn’t afraid to tackle the big ideas. Other students want to approach only the problems they know they will be able to find the answer to. Their work is a means to an end, or rather, to an A. Your brother was different. He threw himself at the impossible questions with the true spirit of discovery. No challenge I gave him was too great. He had such promise.”
“So what went wrong?”
The light turned green and Prokop set off across the street with haste, the tightness at the corners of her mouth reappearing. “He forgot the cardinal rule that you must let the evidence and data speak to you, you must let the math pose the questions. You can’t go hunting for other dimensions. They are elusive and intangible by definition. If you pursue your own agenda, you poison the process.”
Cady scurried after her. “You think he was looking for something specific?”
“I didn’t know what he was looking for. He lost sight of our original objectives for the project and veered off track. Before long, work that could’ve been brilliant became ridiculous. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. My constructive criticism was viewed with great suspicion, what I later understood to be his paranoia. It wasn’t his fault, of course, I suppose his illness took over. It interfered with everything. That’s why I had to relieve him of his duties in my lab.”
They had reached the Harvard T station, a glass-covered outpost with stairs and an escalator to the underground. Cady leaped onto the escalator ahead of Prokop, just to slow her down. As they descended into the dark subway station, Cady asked more questions. “What if he was trying to explain phenomena he was experiencing?”
“Experiencing how? Psychologically?”
“Or, I don’t know, subatomically? What if he was tapping in to an extra dimension?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“His mental illness.” Cady stumbled as she stepped backward off the escalator. “He was having delusions, paranoia, maybe hallucinations, voices. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. But maybe he was looking for another answer.”
“It’s possible that he thought that, but he would have been wrong, that’s a delusion in itself.” Prokop tried to step around her, but Cady stayed at her shoulder.
“But it’s like you said, ‘fingerprints’ of other times, space-time folded over itself. What if the things he heard were echoes of voices, from this same place but from the past, like strings reverberating from a different era?”
Prokop shook her head, exasperated. “No, no. You’re extrap
olating and twisting my words. There is real quantum mechanics behind this that you simply don’t understand. It isn’t science fiction. I told you, we are not capable of registering any extra dimension.”
“But what if one person could?” Or two.
“It’s not possible. Please, I have to go.” Prokop slipped by her, swiped her CharlieCard to pay the fare, and pushed through the turnstile.
“Just one minute.” Cady hopped over the turnstile to keep up. A low rumbling began in the station like faraway thunder.
“The train, it comes.”
“How can you know for sure someone couldn’t sense another dimension?” Cady was shouting over the shudder of the train.
The banshee wail of the train screeching into the platform silenced any further argument as Prokop shook her head in dismay. When it quieted to a stop, she put a hand on Cady’s shoulder and said, “Your brother had a brilliant mind taken over by illness. Don’t follow him down that path, it leads nowhere. That’s why I had to let him go. I advise you to do the same.”
Prokop disappeared inside the subway car, leaving Cady behind as bodies pushed past her in both directions. When the train pulled away and the platform finally emptied, Cady was still standing there, unmoved by the professor’s warning. It couldn’t be pure delusion. How could she have conjured Bilhah’s name? Imagined New Mexico? Read books she’d never opened? She was tapping in to something, some dimension on this campus where time had warped.
And there was no time to waste.
17
If Cady had been thinking clearly, she might have regretted losing her composure with Professor Prokop, but she wasn’t thinking clearly. It felt like an electrical storm firing in her brain, with each burning question briefly illuminated before a new one took its place. Did Eric hear voices like the ones she was hearing now? Was he trying to explain the voices in his research on multiple dimensions? Or was she alone in that?
Ghosts of Harvard Page 14
