by Norman Lock
Rutherford closed his eyes, knowing that the murky drama in which he had become a principal actor was an interior one. Having suppressed my own thoughts the better to read his, I was able to follow him in his experiential … sifting—for so his thought process seemed to me:
There is someone in the room with me. I know it by the disturbance in my mind, whose cause is adventitious. I feel—there is no other word for how I am reacting to this stimulation of my nervous faculties—I feel a sensation as if a particle of grit had lodged in my eye, or a splinter—a splinter in the mind, say, is troubling me as leaves might be said to be troubled by a slight breeze turning them—their dark undersides—toward the light. A tropism. I am turned toward an alien mind—feel its presence in the room as an irritation of what nervous tissue connects the brain with its mind. My brain with my mind. I thought at first I heard a voice inside my head, a voice not my own. If I keep silent a while longer, perhaps I will hear it again.
The foregoing interior monologue is for your convenience only, reader; my experience of Rutherford’s conscious thinking (never mind its unconscious accompaniment—the ground bass to thought’s development) was not straightforward. It uncoiled like tobacco smoke in a room or water furling and unfurling in a stream. I—that is, my particles—bathed in his mind’s workings. I could no more transcribe them than I can a stream’s unintelligible chatter.
While he kept silent, I told him of my disintegration. Of an estrangement from others that had climaxed in a divided self. (Is this the answer? That I am no more than the inevitable outcome of humankind in the Digital Age?) I told him (and by “told,” I mean that I conveyed my thoughts by irradiating the particles of his understanding with my own) how—by a fetish of time—I had traveled from the Brooklyn of 2012 to the Manchester of 1910. I told him what I knew of matter—its subatomic structure, its electromagnetic and strong forces, the uncertainty principle that undermined observation of its electrons. I told him that the atom, in thirty-five years, would be split, incinerating two Japanese cities. I told him that in my own time, atomic fission would fuel submarines and electric power plants and that by accident or negligence deadly rays would escape from both: the radiation of certain substances whose half-life he himself had discovered two years earlier. I told him what I knew of the modern world and its sciences.
“I don’t understand,” he said when I had finished. It was the following afternoon, and with one exception he was not pleased: He was thrilled to have his planetary model of the atom confirmed. But my talk of quarks, antiparticles, neutrinos, and dark matter dumbfounded him. I had recited many, many facts and theories, but my recitation lacked something fundamental for his understanding. Perhaps no other outcome was possible for someone like me, whose source of information was Wikipedia. Or perhaps he was not ready to believe in the world of the early-twenty-first century. If that is the case, who can blame him?
“Can you make me whole again?” I asked, as if he were a surgeon, psychoanalyst, or priest instead of a scientist. But I knew that such wholeness as I longed for was beyond his power.
4. My Particles Become Encrypted with an Alien Time Signature
Drawn irresistibly by the lodestone of the past, I returned to London and visited the British Museum’s department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, where among books on travel I found A Thousand Miles up the Nile, written in 1876 by Amelia B. Edwards. Here, too, I thought, is another of time’s relics; and as I had done during congress with an antique train schedule, I loosened the strong force, setting my particles free to pass through the book’s cover into its foxed pages with their pleasant odor of age and dust. And by a book’s talismanic power to conjure the reality of its subject (a virtual reality, to speak in the new style), my atoms were realigned within the space-time continuum. Each particle and antiparticle was informed, or encrypted, with the qualities of that alternative reality. Wearied by the effort, I rested a long while inside those old pages, which since Queen Victoria’s reign had been slowly burning in time’s furnace. And when I felt myself equal to the exertion of governing my fragments once again, I left the book the way we had entered it and found that I was no longer in a reading room of the British Museum, but in Abu Simbel—standing (or so I would have done in my previous existence) outside Queen Nefertari’s temple with Miss Edwards and her party of Victorian travelers.
5. At the Gateway to Vanished Time
It was as though I had been born again—into the year 1873, in Sudan—by the agency of radiation produced by decaying atoms of paper and ink and also of the dust laid down by time on top of the pages of Miss Edwards’s book where it had stood for nearly forty years on a shelf in the British Museum. That book had sown its particles among my own, salting them; and because they were heavier (as Victorian furniture is heavier than that of my own time and yours), I aged. Now like an old man, I sat inside a tent pitched in the desert, while the lady undressed behind a Chinese screen—souvenir of other exotic travels—reading by an oil lamp the journal she would later shape into A Thousand Miles up the Nile. (I needn’t remind you that such verbs as sat, stand, and read are anthropomorphic conveniences.) Desire—sexual desire—had drained from me as water through sand because of my age and the heaviness of matter (a want of energy) I felt throughout my attenuated being. Hearing her underthings rustle on the other side of the paper screen, I was not in the least tempted to exploit my invisibility by behaving in an ungentlemanly manner. Had I been as other discreet or incurious men, I would have coughed to warn her of my presence; but I could not cough, any more than I could speak. As to coming into intimate contact with her mind, my disappointment in Manchester had chastened me. Instead, I contented myself with an old man’s tepid pleasure of resting under canvas while I bathed my particles in the soft light shed by the oil lamp.
Tomorrow, I will accompany Miss Edwards to the Temple of Ramesses, in whose shadow we have camped. Partially buried in sand, its many-chambered tombs are anchored in time: twelve-hundred years before the Common Era. Entangling my particles with the temple’s stone, I can travel downward into ancient history more readily than by riding a photon of light to earth’s past as it must appear, like a hologram, on some planet at the edge of the Milky Way. Had I eyes, I would have closed them—tired as I was at that moment and eager to dream of Pharaoh and his queen.
6. “I Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas”
I shaded my eyes against the overwhelming brightness of the noon sun—of Ra, who had come up the sky in his “Boat of a Million Years” (to speak in the idiom of the time into which I would soon pass). A gentleman in Miss Edwards’s entourage had set up a tripod camera. As he prepared a glass plate to make a photograph of the tombs, I entered the camera body on impulse, wondering if my particles could inflame the photosensitive silver iodide into light. What would they say when they saw my ghostly image fogging the stone effigies? That the plate had been improperly coated or had been spoiled by direct sunlight, no doubt. I laughed, and to my ears the sound was unpleasant. I grew ashamed of my childishness and resolved to refrain from behavior suitable to a variety show like the one I had seen in the West End at the Holborn Empire Theatre after returning from Manchester. Marie Lloyd—the infamous, comic, big-bosomed chanteuse—had sung “I Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas.” Soon, I would look into the furled heart of time’s cabbage. Careful! Gravity is necessary for one who is to walk among the dead who will act as if they were alive yet in the long-vanished Nineteenth Dynasty of Ramesses II. I must show respect for the countless number of my kind who have been erased.
I left the camera, passing through the black drape like a mortuary curtain behind which a corpse lies waiting for the fire or the inglorious pit. The photographer withdrew to his portable darkroom to develop the glass plate. Miss Edwards, having finished a sketch of the royal colossi, adjusted her pith helmet and sipped from a canteen. She went to find shade and I, to merge my particles with those of the carved figure of Nefertari. Time radiated from that antiquity; I felt it penetrate li
ke an X-ray mutating the genetic structure that remained, however vestigial, to my dispersed atoms. Instantly, I was transformed from a man of your time to one of the eleventh century B.C.E. I nearly swooned, as Miss Edwards would have said. My eyes stung, and for a moment I was blind, as sometimes happens when one walks out of darkness into strong sunlight.
When the black mist had dispelled and I could see clearly again, the English were gone. Sudan was once more Nubia. I slipped inside the rock mountain from which Nefertari’s temple had been carved by unhappy slaves. (Has there ever been a happy one?) I had crossed millennia to wake (my past—or future, depending on your point of view—seemed no more than a dream) in the private chamber of dw3t-ntr, a priestess of Ma’at, who with her feather weighs the souls of the dead. Dw3t-ntr, whose name I dare not pronounce aloud, was bathing in a sunken tub of rose quartz and alabaster. I felt like one of the red-eyed elders who spied on Susanna in her bath. In some part of me, I remembered desire and throbbed. But I told you I was old and the elements were heavy in me! Besides, what could a swarm of particles do to that taut and dusky flesh? I might have sneezed because of the aromatics in the bathwater—I, whose form is more like a sneeze’s than a man’s! Forgive me my bitterness, but there are times when I feel nothing but the mordancy of thwarted impulses that surge, like rage or rapture, only to spend themselves against a seawall. (Words being my only pleasure—indulge me while I indulge in them.) She rose from the bath (the moment was enfolded in the word rose) and a male slave (perhaps at that moment a happy one) dried her with a towel. Poor Miss Edwards was to this nubile woman as her pencil sketch of Nefertari’s stone facsimile was to the pharaonic consort herself.
7. Ventriloquism in the New Kingdom
In observance of sacred rite, dw3t-ntr would fall into a trance; from her ecstatic ravings, Ma’at’s wishes would be made known. Always, I witnessed those seizures with alarm; they were harrowing, like a course of insulin shock therapy. She would lay aside the sistrum with which she had made overtures to the goddess and writhe, her lovely body swept by storms of emotion. Her sweet mouth would froth, and from lips I longed to kiss came barbaric syllables, intelligible to Pharaoh’s viziers and scribes, though not to me, despite my knowledge of Egyptian. (There is, as I have said elsewhere, no language barrier at the subatomic level.)
One afternoon when the tide of her possession was at the full, the thought came to me that I might speak to Ramesses’ agents by ventriloquism. I recollected my purpose in having traversed space and time: to become substantial once again. (I may have realized, besides, that only as flesh and blood could I enjoy the incomparable dw3t-ntr. Never mind that she was, by my calendar and yours, no more substantial than dust!) I hoped some occult science or magic lost to the modern age might reconstitute me. It was folly, that hope! I weakened my strong force and sent my particles, like emissaries to Paradise, into dw3t-ntr and heard my thoughts tumble from her mouth, thus:
“I have come from the future to find someone or something to restore my shattered self. Do you understand the concept of self? Or are your personalities subsumed in the absolute of Pharaoh’s will or the gods’? Can you be said to have personalities? Perhaps in the absence of free will, you have not yet been able to construct a self. Do you understand free will? I think that in me free will had reached the point where I no longer felt obliged to observe the ordinary conventions of living. Not that I was lawless! I was not, and neither was I in the least selfish—not outwardly. Free will operated at my deepest level: at the subatomic if you like, where I maintained my self in luxurious indifference. I was, outwardly, a considerate husband and charitable friend. I did all that I could and more to protect endangered species and the fragile ecosystem. I harmed no one, was tolerant to all, envied none, and only rarely coveted some man’s wife. Regardless, I metamorphosed one morning into what you see before you. Or rather, what you do not see. Is the concept of the atom familiar to you? It’s a Greek word, meaning ‘indivisible.’ I used to take comfort in the idea of indivisibility: that there was, for matter and for the personality, a rock bottom. A pretty delusion, as it turned out!”
I went on in this vein for minutes, hours. I lost track of time. In any case, time is meaningless to me. I regret my stupidity even now—more than three thousand years after the fact. Pharaoh’s seers, priests, and viziers had never heard anything like that … spiel. They believed dw3t-ntr had gone mad. They believed her to be in thrall to Apep, the dark god who threatens to destroy Ra during his nightly voyage underground. They dragged poor dw3t-ntr, not yet recovered from her trance, into an anteroom and ordered the slaves to brick it up.
8. In Sight of the Reed-Covered Islands of Paradise
She bore it. She bore it with serenity. I would not have done so well. Was it that dw3t-ntr had many gods, while I had only the one? Or was it that she belonged already to the invisible world and did not need to resign herself to it? For her, there was no partition separating the world of living men and women from the realm of the dead. During her trances, she had passed between the two worlds as easily as I, in my severely divided nature, passed through masonry, iron, and the most impermeable and obdurate of all materials: human flesh. She took her time in dying. For three days, she remained shut up in the dark—groaning only at the end in hunger and thirst, but not once in fear of death. I wished that I could have carried air to her, bonding my atoms with oxygen’s, and water to drink. I wished I could have brought her, like the bee, a yellow meal of pollen. The darkness inside her bricked-up tomb was absolute. I could have managed light: By an act of will, I could have caused a brief incandescence as if by throwing flash powder into an open flame. But I didn’t. The sight of bricks might have unnerved her. Better, I thought, to see before her in the dark the familiar deities.
What happened in the instant of her death took me by surprise: Her electromagnetic field was not extinguished like a light one turns off before sleep. It continued and held, within the net of its mysterious force, particles of her departing flesh. Like birds rising from a winter field in search of sustenance, they had fled her stilled but still-beautiful body. I mingled mine with them. For a long while, we lay in each other’s arms (to speak in the old style), relishing the luxuriant heat of our decaying elements. I thought, then, that all things must surely reach an end; even the most potent of isotopes, selenium-82, has a finite half-life, though it exceed millennium. And I took comfort in the thought that I would not spend an eternity untouched by another, like the married pair whose fossils were discovered at Vesuvius—their backs to each other in sleep that had already lasted nearly two thousand years. Dw3t-ntr and I did not touch, any more than I had touched Marie Risset’s particle cloud in the Galápagos Islands—or, for that matter, my wife, whom I had last seen on her knees behind our house, deadheading the phlox. Not once had I sounded the depths of her being with my own! The failure had been mine. But existence—for me as for everything else in the universe—would come to an end, and I would cease to mourn.
I won’t pretend I did not enjoy what passed between dw3t-ntr and myself—our particles. I am not by nature even now puritanical. But the—oh, call it spark!—the spark was missing. That last sentence is descriptive of an imperfect electrical discharge. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not talking exclusively of sex. Sex was only a secondary aspect of a complicated state of mind. In the form in which we two appeared to each other, direct contact was impossible. Our two currents could arc, but they could never merge. I did not know dw3t-ntr. (I didn’t know other people—an ignorance that may have destroyed me.) But what I wanted to possess was not knowledge of her experiences, opinions, and beliefs or yet of her body, but only this: the certainty that I was not alone in time. I succeeded, as I told you, only imperfectly.
I remained with dw3t-ntr, obedient to the force of her, as she entered—obedient to a stronger force than either of us could engender—the passages of the Underworld below the red pyramid. We followed brazen flies that, in their thousands of thousands, flew down the dis
mal corridors (whose entrances for them were dung and corruption), buzzing with the secrets of the afterlife. Seeing Ma’at, severe and merciless, with her feather, I turned back while dw3t-ntr went to be judged. Beyond Ma’at lay the sun boat, the twenty-one gates of Aaru, and the reed-covered islands of Paradise. What had I learned? That death is a persistence of the life that went before it. And so it is that the man I used to be survives in this new form. Just so does the ocean’s basalt bed survive in the railroad tracks’ ballast. The stones contain a memory of that ocean, just as I recall my self before my breakdown.
I returned to the bricked-up anteroom (antiroom, its homonym, also applied to a space inhospitable to even a dream of life), where dw3t-ntr had resigned her body to baser elements, searching for traces of her—particles? Soul? Élan vital? (For one who has been immersed in time and Wikipedia, there is no difference.) Little of dw3t-ntr remained, apart from her atomic signature, unmistakable as perfume. I lingered in it so that I might remember her by it. I seemed to hear—as from a long way off—a distress signal in dots and dashes, sent by Gordon’s men at Khartoum, just before their slaughter. The past (or the future, if the concept pleases you) had caught up with me even here.
