Still the Same Man

by Jon Bilbao

  “I don’t see the relevance of this to your argument,” said Joanes. “The dramatic or truly problematic element of this story isn’t that a mystic or religious doctrine was extrapolated from a scientific discovery, but the fact that this doctrine was espoused by another, larger one for exclusively utilitarian motives. The Nazis appropriated Hörbiger’s cosmogony not because they really believed in it, but because it suited their interests. The truly despicable thing is to carry an ideology, in this case National Socialism, to such twisted extremes.”

  “I’m not sure that the Nazis didn’t believe in The World Ice Doctrine,” the professor responded, “although it’s possible that you know more on this matter than I do. In any case, what really matters here is that his cosmogony was accepted thanks in great part to its scientific foundations, which lent it credibility. Worse still, they converted it into something applicable to the real world. Hitler believed that by simply adhering to The World Ice Doctrine, ice would obey him, as if by uncovering the secrets of ice’s origin and behavior, the Führer could become its master. When he launched his winter campaign against Russia during the Second World War, Hitler spoke of how the cold was going to obey him like one of his generals. Of course, you’re well aware of what really happened. Temperatures dropped to as low as forty below, liquid syngas disassociated, and vehicles stopped working, soldiers would bend down to defecate, and their asses would turn into ice donuts. Until one of Hitler’s generals dared to ask him to reconsider the Russian assault. Do you know what his response was?”

  Joanes did know, and hastened to answer.

  “‘Leave winter to me. You, attack.’”

  “That’s right. That was more or less Hitler’s answer. And he meant it literally; he believed he could control the cold.”

  Joanes was still at a loss as to the relevance of the story. The reference to Nazism, what’s more, seemed to him an extreme measure. To his mind, anyone who resorted to those kinds of references, even to berate them, was employing the kind of radical, devastating argument that was all too reminiscent of the National Socialists themselves. There was something premeditated, too, about the professor’s argument, a hunch that only fueled Joanes’s general suspicion. His whole cosmogony spiel seemed pre-rehearsed, as indicated by the—albeit shoddy—alliteration of a phrase like “the earth sizzled and spat and cracked open,” and his way of introducing the Nazis as “Wagner-loving opera-goers.”

  Joanes imagined the professor in his study or his office or wherever it was he worked, researching and putting his speech together, reading it aloud, adjusting the story to the lesson he wanted to communicate through it. It was clear the professor had not been irritated by the interruption to his conference. Quite the contrary. He’d delighted in the opportunity to share the story with an audience, and he was so self-satisfied that now he was treating Joanes to another round.

  “And there’s an even more serious problem,” the professor was saying. “And this is precisely what I tried to make that gentleman at the conference understand when he began speculating over whether a new religion could arise out of Artificial Intelligence. If something like that happened, as was the case with Hörbiger, we’d find ourselves with a case of regression. A scientific advance, a rational advance, a logical advance would make us move backward of our own free will to a state of pre-logical thinking.”

  He paused to let his words sink in and added, “And what’s more, this regression would discredit the achievements of the logical advancement that occasioned it. We mustn’t forget that Hörbiger was right, up to a point. It is true that there are celestial bodies out there composed of ice, like comets and the rings of Saturn, and it’s also true that there’s ice on the Moon. We must prevent such kinds of discrediting,” said the professor, pointing an admonishing finger at Joanes, as if he were still his student. “We must never give in to what Jung called ‘the libido of the unreasonable.’”

  Joanes shifted position, and his joints cricked. The professor’s wife remained unmoving on the bed, looking out into the nothingness like a zombie.

  “And yet . . .” Joanes began, as if speaking to himself, but he fell silent again without adding anything.

  “And yet what?” the professor prompted him.

  “And yet it’s natural, after all, for man to give in to ‘the libido of the unreasonable.’”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “It’s a natural consequence of our thirst for knowledge. If science takes its time offering us answers, then we have to fill in the gaps with—”

  “With what? With fallacies? With mythology?”

  “Not always,” responded Joanes. “The physical or mathematical models that scientists use perform the same function. Researchers use them to try to explain what we don’t know. And that leads us to findings as incorrect as those occasioned by religious meddling and myth.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong. Scientific models are hypotheses based on verified facts. They’re not born with the aim of surviving, as religions are, nor of reaching above or beyond themselves, as also happens with religions, rather their aim is to provide a working basis until the number of experimentally verified facts increases.”

  “I was only offering a point of comparison,” explained Joanes. “I wasn’t saying that the scientific model exists on the same level as Hörbiger’s cosmogony.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it, bearing in mind you’re one of my alumni.”

  Joanes wiped the sweat from his brow.

  “Scientists have the necessary discipline and knowledge to keep their conjectures under control,” he ventured, “but what happens when unanticipated or tricky or only partly explicable facts, which are the cause of such conjectures, move into a wider forum? In such a case, it’s little wonder the hypothesis gets out of control, as happened when Hörbiger’s ideas came to the Nazis’ attention.”

  “That was an extremely specific case,” said the professor.

  He spoke softly, waiting to see where his old student’s argument was leading.

  Joanes perked up again. He could tell the professor was not enjoying having someone stand up to him.

  “Of course it’s a specific case,” he went on, “to which we must add that Hörbiger’s ideas couldn’t be qualified even as a hypothesis. The World Ice Doctrine didn’t have a sufficiently solid scientific basis to endure without Hitler’s backing. But what would have happened if the doctrine’s origins had been altogether different, unquestionably sound and at the same time attractive to a great number of people, demanding our consideration.”

  “You mean, for example, something like Artificial Intelligence?”

  “I don’t know enough about AI, although I understand why the gentleman at the conference asked what he did.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Imagine a tesseract, a hypercube, a four dimensional cube. Do you know what that is?”

  “Of course,” the professor replied, glacial.

  “Let’s imagine, then, that a century ago, a tesseract appeared before three shepherd children herding their flock on the outskirts of Fatima. What would have happened?”

  “Nothing,” responded the professor, growing more and more irritated. “We live in three-dimensional space. The shepherd children would have seen nothing more than a normal, run-of-the-mill cube, not its projection in the fourth dimension.”

  “What I mean is let’s imagine what would have happened if that four dimensional cube had appeared as such. I’m talking in abstracto.”

  “I understand perfectly well what you’re trying to say. A separate question is whether it’s a pertinent example. I happen to believe it is not.”

  Joanes didn’t let himself be put off.

  “A tesseract is inconceivable in our world,” he said. “It’s a theoretical construct, but no less real for that. Mathematicians use it every day, extend it to five dimensions, to the
nth dimension, lend it practical applications. So tesseracts are real and at the same time . . . fantastical. Let’s call them that. Now let’s suppose that one manifested itself as it really is. What would the young shepherds have done? What would they have believed they were seeing? What conclusions would such a vision have led them to when considered in conjunction with the traditional tales or the Sunday sermons they were used to? In what way would their vision have morphed the moment they put it into words and shared it with their neighbors? Might there not exist, today, in Fatima, a shrine—one perhaps with a different image at the altar, but a shrine nonetheless—to which devotees of the fourth dimension would make their pilgrimage?”

  “Enough!” exclaimed the professor.

  “What I’m trying to explain to you is that—”

  The professor jumped out of his chair.

  “There’s nothing you can explain to me!”

  His face was red, and he clenched his fists as if about to punch his old student.

  “OK,” said Joanes, getting to his feet. “Don’t get mad. I thought we were just talking, like colleagues.”

  “Colleagues?” asked the professor. “Colleagues? You and I?”

  “OK, OK. I’ve got it.”

  “Be quiet! Not another word! Don’t make things worse than they already are.”

  And muttering away, the professor exclaimed, “Idiot!”

  Joanes swallowed hard.

  “I won’t hold that one against you,” he said. “You’re having a difficult time and—”

  “Don’t you dare patronize me! Who do you think you are?”

  Joanes was looking for the words to answer when the professor’s wife piped up.

  “You should see yourselves,” she said, rubbing her temples. “You’re behaving like morons. And worse still, you’re a pair of bores. Why don’t you talk about something else? You and your math,” she said to her husband. “You can never keep your cool when you talk about math.”

  “We’re not talking about math exactly,” he retorted.

  “Change the subject,” she requested.

  Just then, the door to the room opened, and a soft light filtered in. The owner’s daughter looked at them with her customary poker face. She was holding a bottle with a candle sticking out of it. The room was almost pitch black. The storm had brought the evening on early.

  “Don’t you know how to knock?” asked the professor.

  “I did. You didn’t hear me,” said the girl.

  “Sure you did,” said the professor. “Is that for us?”

  The girl nodded and held out the candle. The professor got up to take it and left it on the table next to the bed.

  “Thank you,” he said, not a hint of appreciation in his voice.

  The girl backed out and closed the door without a sound.

  Nobody moved or said a word for a moment, until the professor’s wife repeated, “Change the subject.”

  “Don’t you speak to me like that!” responded the professor. “If I hadn’t listened to you when you wanted to stay on in Mexico, we’d be on our way to see our son already. It’s your fault we’re here!”

  The woman’s face was illuminated by the candle next to the bed. On hearing these words, she put her hands over her face, but she neither uttered a word nor made a sound. Joanes guessed she was crying, but when she moved her hands away, her eyes were dry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Joanes. “I’m very sorry. I wish you didn’t have to see us in pieces like this, overcome with pain. I wish you didn’t have to share this room with us. We’re making things hard for you. You, who’ve been so kind to us. I’m sorry.”

  And then the tears did come, and her sobbing prevented her from saying any more. Joanes was at the foot of the bed, ready to help in any way he could. He was waiting for the professor to console his wife, but instead the old man stood there, snorting through his nose.

  “Don’t get all sentimental,” he told his wife. “If this man is so kind and generous, why hasn’t he let us use his phone to call our son?”

  Her sobs stopped in a flash. Joanes looked at the professor, petrified.

  “He has a telephone?” asked the woman.

  “He sure does,” answered her husband.

  The professor’s wife looked at Joanes, her eyes wide open and her jaw trembling.

  “I’ve already told you that my phone ran out of battery,” replied Joanes.

  “It’s not true,” said the professor. “And don’t insult me like that, lying to my face. Don’t you dare. Your telephone is still working.”

  “He has a telephone?” repeated the woman.

  “I just told you he does, are you deaf?” responded her husband, not looking at her, and his eyes locked on Joanes. “And now I’d like to know why he won’t let us use it, what critical motive is preventing him from lending it to us.”

  “I’ll say it again—my phone is out of battery.”

  “You know as well as I do that’s not true.”

  The professor’s wife heaved herself across the sheets toward Joanes.

  “Please . . . I have to know how my son is.”

  Joanes backed off, as if afraid of her touch.

  “Please, I’m begging you. I have to know if he’s OK!”

  The professor held his stony expression.

  Joanes threw up his hands, trying to appease the situation.

  “I need the phone,” he said, categorically.

  “You need it,” said the professor.

  “That’s right.”

  “For what, may I ask?”

  “I’m expecting a call.”

  “From your family?”

  “An important call.”

  “Even though the system’s overloaded.”

  “That’s right,” repeated Joanes, now less certain.

  “Which is to say that your phone is still in working order. Perhaps because it’s a satellite phone?”

  Joanes didn’t answer.

  “What does that mean?” asked the woman, unnerved by the silence that followed. “What was that about the phone?”

  “What it means,” explained the professor, “is that with this kind of phone, it makes no difference if the network’s overloaded. What it means is that the phone is perfectly usable.”

  The professor’s wife immediately redoubled her pleading.

  “There’s hardly any battery left at all,” said Joanes, remaining firm. “Just enough for one call. And I need it.”

  The woman seemed not to have heard him. She begged, her face bathed in tears.

  “Why is this call so important?” the professor demanded to know.

  His calm tone was somehow far more unsettling than his wife’s supplications.

  “Why haven’t you made the call already?”

  “It’s not a call I have to make. It’s one I’m waiting for,” Joanes explained. “A professional matter.”

  “Would you care to elaborate?” asked the professor. “I believe the situation calls for an explanation.”

  “All you need to know is that it’s an important call for my business. If it weren’t the case, I’d have already lent you the phone, I assure you.”

  “But . . . my child!” implored the professor’s wife.

  “I’m sorry,” said Joanes. “Maybe your husband will be able to get ahold of another phone. There are several people in the hotel that—”

  “This professional call,” interrupted the professor, “it’s more important than a person’s life?”

  “Forgive me, but, from what I’ve heard, your son’s life does not depend on you calling him. He’ll live or he’ll die, phone call or no.”

  On hearing this, the professor’s wife buried her face in the pillow, and her entire body collapsed into great, sobbing heaves.

 
The professor was unmoved. Staring at Joanes, he said, “You cannot imagine what I can achieve with a simple phone call.”

  Joanes took a deep breath, looked at his hands, and dried his palms on his pants. He contemplated the tiled floor for a second and said, “In that case, I’m very pleased for you. All you have to do is get ahold of a phone, and all your problems will be solved. But it won’t be mine.”

  He got back down on the floor, leaning his back against the wall, and sat glaring into a corner of the room.

  The professor looked at him in disgust and turned his attention to his wife. He rubbed her back and whispered soothing words—quite unconvincingly—in her ear. After a while she drew her face away from the pillow and muttered something. The professor put his face right up against hers in order to make out what she was saying. Then he said, “Of course,” and his wife buried her head back in the pillow.

  The professor got to his feet and addressed Joanes.

  “My wife would like to be alone for a moment, if you would be so kind. Given that you cannot lend us the telephone, perhaps the least you could do is grant us this small request. We’d like to have a moment alone.”

  Joanes grabbed his backpack and reluctantly got to his feet.

  Some candles stuck in jars were the only form of lighting in the living room. The hotel owner had a prime position among the many people in the room—a massage chair right in front of the television. Neither, however, was working. He spent a while fiddling with the dial on the portable radio, hoping to find a station without interference, but he gave up and switched it off.

  “Saves the battery,” he said.

  The living room was packed. As well as the people sitting on chairs and sofas, there were dozens of others on the floor. Joanes was among them. They’d provided seat cushions to make them more comfortable, but the room was boiling, and the cushions seemed to make it even hotter. There were two babies in a little playpen. At least one of them needed a change of diaper. A huge, sourfaced woman, who was in charge of the hotel storeroom, appeared carrying bottles of water whose seals were broken and took away the empty ones. Several of the Mexican guests were nibbling on strips of jerky. Another had a guitar in his arms; he didn’t play a single note, just held it against himself tightly. Various conversations were going on at once, and Joanes only joined in when someone addressed him directly.