The resistance fighters also have a strange theory: they believe that an ancient civilization from an unknown Earth, maybe even the First Earth, somehow created the stone portals, but then disappeared. In the morning, the city is attacked by bomber planes. The man with gray eyes seeks cover in the bank vault. He covers his ears to the thundering noise of the bombers, gazes into the darkness of the bank vault, a darkness like a black canvas, and thinks of all the lives he never lived with the Dominicana. He thinks of all the other Earths where they had still met, fallen in love, and were never separated. Earths luminescent with pandemonium, beauty. In the morning, he discovers that most of the resistance fighters were instantly incinerated during the attack. The jazz musician is also dead. While searching for survivors, the man with gray eyes sees the haunting image of his shadow burned permanently onto the face of a concrete wall. He leaves the smoldering city in search of a stone portal. He follows an empty road west for some time, crosses a river, then treks through a valley, until he reaches a town on the edge of a sea-green forest.
In the town’s plaza, a crowd stands around a large pile of burning books. A woman in her fifties or sixties holds a very large black leather-bound book with gold and red decorations on the cover. The book is extraordinary. In the light of the fire, he can make out the title, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, a book, the man with gray eyes remembers with some melancholy, that the Dominicana loved with all her heart. The woman smiles at him, says that the book is degenerate, and throws it into the fire. The man with gray eyes understands then that the crowd is burning literature from parallel universes. In the center of the plaza, beyond the flames, he sees two men and a young girl in chains near a razed stone portal.
After stealing provisions and a horse, the man with gray eyes leaves the town. Then he crosses the sea-green forest—filled, he horrifically discovers, with the fresh mass graves of people from other Earths—grassy plains, and a snowy mountain range in a kind of dizzying ascent. The stars in the sky are aflame, spectral. Some days later, he reaches an abandoned fishing village by the sea. In the distance, he spots a large ship anchored near a rock cliff. He takes a small fishing boat out to the ship, which, he notices with some surprise, resembles one of those Spanish galleons from his Earth which set out for the New World during the 17th century in search of cities of bloodstained gold and eternal life. Once aboard the ship, he discovers that it’s abandoned, like the village. Who brought this ship here? Where did they come from? Where did they go? It doesn’t matter, he later thinks while exploring the holds of the ship, everything that could possibly have happened has already happened on this Earth or another. There is no such thing as history anymore. In one of the holds, he finds a working stone portal.
In the final Part, some years later while searching for the Dominicana in the streets of the cityship of Lagos, the man with gray eyes comes upon an old South American beggar shouting in a crowded street. The beggar shouts in Spanish and only the man with gray eyes can understand him. The beggar says: I discovered the true Lost City, only I know of its existence and its eternal mysteries. Then the man with gray eyes asks for proof. The beggar looks at him, takes out an old journal, and flips to a few pages near the end. The man with gray eyes recognizes the journal immediately as the 17th century one his grandfather found in Madrid as a young man. Except he’s never seen the pages the beggar shows him. On those pages, there is a drawing of a great labyrinth and maps of stone portals leading to an Earth with a city simply called Z. Abuelito, the man with gray eyes says, it’s me, Vivaldo, your grandson. Impossible, replies the beggar, my grandson died in the Amazon twenty years ago. With tears in his eyes, Vivaldo rips the pages from the journal and violently pushes the beggar to the street. Without looking back, he runs.
Some months later, the man with gray eyes finds himself on an Earth almost completely covered by jungles. Fatigued and delirious, he stumbles past Cyclopean ruins—massive bridges and overgrown roads, endless beehive tombs, and towering stone and metal structures inscribed with indecipherable lettering—speaking of daunting feats of engineering and a culture long since vanished. He vaguely recalls the thundering noise of bombers, darkness, a trip through a stone portal. Is this the First Earth the resistance fighters talked about? He has no way to know. In fact, he doesn’t even care by then.
While exploring the ruins, the man with gray eyes finds a small village. In the village, a young girl with long legs and shining black hair tells him in Spanish that she has seen the woman he’s looking for. At first, he doesn’t believe the girl, but then realizes he doesn’t have a choice. For three days, they trek through the jungle. The noises of the restless, vast jungle are absolute. In the distance, rising above the canopy, enormous black shadows seem to superimpose themselves on the violet and black sky. It’s more ruins, the girl explains, the capital of whoever was here before us. Eventually, they reach the edges of the city and a clearing in the jungle, at the center of which is a stone portal in the shape of a perfect hemisphere.
He sees the Dominicana. She’s standing over the corpse of a prehistoric creature with a sword-like beak and black wings. Nearby, a boy is busy building a fire. Despite everything, the man with gray eyes thinks, she’s alive, she’s still alive, and I’m finally here. At first, the Dominicana doesn’t see him. Her face is turned down toward the creature. As she peels away its reptilian skin with a long knife, she sings a song to herself and to the boy. How was the Earth created? she sings. Is this truly the only one? Where does one universe end and another begin? Then, suddenly, the Dominicana turns and sees the man with gray eyes. She smiles, slowly at first, and then all at once. Her eyes are dark green, almost black, and they seem to absorb all the light in the sky.
* * *
For the first time in my life, I have to do something rather than nothing, said Saul to himself. I have to find Maxwell Moreau.
* * *
Saul could find no contact information for Maxwell Moreau except for the now outdated mailing address at the Universidad de Chile and only itinerant information in terms of his personal biography. From two sparse interviews reposted in physics blogs, one from 1979, the other from 1992, Saul learned that Maxwell Moreau had been born and raised in New Orleans and that, after the war, during which he served in the infamous Red Ball Express supply unit in France, he returned home and worked odd jobs throughout the South and West Coast. At some point, in 1948, while working on a farm, he attended a lecture on particle physics at the University of California, Berkeley, given by the famous Japanese theoretical physicist Hideki Yukawa and, afterward, they struck up a friendship. In 1949, with a recommendation from Hideki Yukawa, who had just then won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Maxwell Moreau was accepted to UC Berkeley where he received a BS in Physics in 1952 and then a PhD in Physics in 1957.
Saul was able to find a good deal of information online about Maxwell Moreau’s career after receiving his PhD, a career which spanned nearly fifty years, three continents (he left the United States, happily, it was noted in one article, in 1981), over 150 papers, and one controversial book on cosmology, The Hidden Multitude, published in 1978. According to a New Scientist article from a May 1989 issue titled “Long Live the Death of Physics,” Maxwell Moreau’s book introduced an inflationary model of the universe suggesting that the early universe exploded faster than the speed of light from a size smaller than a proton and then entered an inflationary phase that would last forever. Maxwell Moreau’s theory of eternal inflation, alongside the work of younger theoretical physicists like Alan Guth, the article continued, led to the “jaw-dropping” implication that our universe may be only one “island universe” in an eternally inflating and self-replicating multiverse. Other equally “jaw-dropping” scientific and philosophical implications found in Maxwell Moreau’s work were summarized in the same article as follows:
Important aspects of inflationary models of the universe and the multiverse could be borne out empirically. New
insights in quantum mechanics and inflation, new studies of the CMB (Cosmic Background Radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang) and even more advanced computing capabilities, particle accelerators, and telescope technologies may one day create the possibility of testing for alternate realities or parallel universes. In other words, observing or even interacting with other universes will no longer be pure science fiction.
Substantial evidence for the multiverse would precipitate the end of physics since most universes would have wildly varying properties from our own.
Substantial evidence for the multiverse or the quantum universe would also precipitate the end of history since all possible histories would happen infinitely or have already happened infinitely. Thus, there are universes with Earths somewhat different from ours and universes with Earths extraordinarily different from ours. In these cases, history unfolds with all possible variations. There are also universes with Earths identical to our own, perfect replicas with all the same cities, wars, mountain ranges, and seas. In these cases, history repeats itself endlessly.
After the publication of The Hidden Multitude and its corresponding papers, the New Scientist article continued, there was some praise from theoretical physicists working “in the fringes” who called the work “revolutionary” and “an elegant way forward,” but, for the most part, Maxwell Moreau’s theories faced harsh criticism and scornful reception by others who were either trying to settle old scores or who—it was impossible not to note—truly believed that the first prominent mixed-race theoretical physicist of his generation was a madman, a crackpot. A review of The Hidden Multitude, written after a small fifteen-year-anniversary reissue of the book, also appeared in the May 1993 issue of Scientific American. The review, written by one of Maxwell Moreau’s former students, an editor at the journal Nature, was an impassioned defense of his work and stated in no uncertain terms that Maxwell Moreau was the heir to Hugh Everett III, who was also ridiculed by the physics establishment and, later, even Niels Bohr, for his idea that quantum effects cause the universe to constantly split into every possible alternative timeline. “Like Everett’s work,” the review continued, “Maxwell Moreau’s theories may yet be vindicated.
“The Hidden Multitude has been passed down through word of mouth for a generation and has even developed into a cult-like object for young students of theoretical physics who regard reading it as a rebellious rite of passage and who often seek him out (against the advice of their professors) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he has been teaching, on and off again, since 1981 or at one of his infrequent, but noteworthy, lectures in places like Tokyo, Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris, and Istanbul.”
Saul spent the rest of the day and well into the night scouring abstracts and articles by Maxwell Moreau, and even read through an abbreviated chapter from The Hidden Multitude, but, in the end, he really couldn’t understand any of it.
* * *
In the far reaches of the infinite cosmos there are endless identical and near-identical copies of you, said Saul to Romário. Also, every decision you make in this world creates new universes. But Romário just tapped a pen against the front desk and stared at Saul like he had a strange brain fever. Saul shrugged and admitted that although he understood that Maxwell’s theories were urgent and groundbreaking in the realm of physics, he understood little of them. He was just feeling his way in the dark. He couldn’t comprehend bubble universes or the many-worlds interpretation or endless doppelgängers, let alone Maxwell Moreau’s encouragement to his readers that some of these theories could be tested one day, but if he were forced to say something approximate, he would say that the theoretical physicist’s theories were a type of revolution against reality or a type of endless multiplication of it, but that too was an uninformed and ridiculous thing to say. The physics behind parallel universes would probably always lie just beyond him.
At which point, Romário turned his attention to a well-dressed, thinly bearded man who was standing in the center of the lobby and yelling wide-eyed into a cell phone about an “insurrection” at work and, if he wasn’t careful, the eventual “triumph of the unwashed hordes,” and said, check out the asshole in this universe.
* * *
The following night Saul woke with a start and thought he was back in Tel Aviv, even though he was certain he hadn’t dreamed of the city. He got up and took a cold shower, then went to his bedroom closet, where he took out the small wooden school box that had once contained postcards and Bensia pencils but now contained five photographs wrapped in scraps of black Egyptian linen. There was something incredibly beautiful and incredibly horrific about parallel universes, thought Saul as he sat on the edge of his bed. Incredibly beautiful, he thought, because the only real difference between one universe and another was merely a question of language, a question of what if? so much so that, over these past few weeks, he sometimes found himself asking with enigmatic curiosity and anticipation: What if I had never opened my grandfather’s package? What if his brain cancer had been treatable or what if he had never had it to begin with? What if Javier had never left Chicago or I had joined him in one of those distant, foreign cities? What if my parents had never boarded bus 901, traveling from Tel Aviv to Haifa, on March 11th, 1978? Of course, he had asked himself that latter question a great number of times and he had already lived a great number of lives with them in his mind, but now, if he were to take Maxwell Moreau’s theories about parallel universes at face value, he could believe for an instant that his parents were inevitably and endlessly alive on other Earths. And yet, horrifically, the opposite was also apparent to Saul. His parents had also died a great number of deaths on other Earths. They had fallen in love in Chicago, boarded bus 901 together in Tel Aviv, and then died shortly thereafter, again and again, each death on each Earth replicating itself with only slight variations, carrying the echoes and silhouettes of still yet other deaths. His parents were ghosts of repetition, ghosts of the multiverse, trapped in a ghastly and suffocating image continually running on a loop: led away by the barrel of a Kalashnikov rifle from bus 901 traveling to Haifa onto bus 311 traveling to Tel Aviv, howled at by members of Fatah through the stench of smoke, flesh, filth, shot in the neck (his father) and the back and stomach (his mother), then burned while dying or already dead and sprawled on a liquefying plastic bus seat.
His grandfather had never lied regarding his parents’ deaths, but he had always tried to protect him. He had watered down the facts or even, from time to time, concealed them from Saul, saying things like, “You’ll understand later” or “Not now” or “Your parents’ deaths, Saul, were something that nobody can ever truly understand.” The latter was probably true for his grandfather, because he had lost his only child, his daughter. On one occasion, as a teenager, when Saul had angrily pressed him on the matter, all his grandfather would tell him was that their deaths afterward had been turned into a spectacle by the nationalists and occupiers who always benefited from war, so there was no point in them turning it into a spectacle again.
Implicit in his grandfather’s statement and the fact that he had years earlier changed Saul’s surname from Mizrahi (his dead father’s) to Drower (his own Americanized surname) was that his grandfather, the historian, had wanted to forget the events of their deaths.
So, Saul had very few memories of his parents before their deaths and he had no memory of the day they were killed, only what memories he could knit together from various old news reports or imagine in the middle of endless nights. And, as he sat on the edge of his bed, clutching the small wooden school box along its dull green and black edges and staring ahead into the pulsating ditch-gray and rose–colored dawn outside his bedroom window, he imagined it once again—the Kalashnikov rifle, smoke, flesh, filth, a burning bus on a coastal road—their deaths only multiplied by Maxwell Moreau’s incomprehensible theories.
* * *
In mid-June, Javier and his family moved into a two-story, single-famil
y brownstone near Palmer Square Park. Afterward, Saul and Javier’s friendship continued in the same fashion, unshakable if occasionally tense, but also now shaped by the forces of an oscillating wormhole straining to connect their youth and adulthood.
Some days later, on a warm Friday with low white clouds, as they watched Maya play freeze-tag in a playground with two other little girls, all speaking a type of invented Spanglish (mancha estatua, corre over there, death de frío), Saul told Javier all about the manuscript and about Adana Moreau and Maxwell Moreau and how trying to find the theoretical physicist was an effort not lacking in all kinds of difficulties. In addition to spending countless hours online, he had emailed other theoretical physicists, but the only responses he did receive were not helpful. No references to other family members besides Adana Moreau could be found. He contacted the publisher of The Hidden Multitude, but the only mailing address they had for Maxwell was at the Universidad de Chile. They did have a university email address for him, but a “mailbox full” error bounced back when he tried to send a message. He even talked to the, thankfully, bilingual executive assistant to the dean who had originally sent the package back, but she only reiterated that nobody at the university, not even the chair of the Physics Department, knew where he was. He retired, she said, and left the city.
So, said Saul to Javier, the only thing that makes sense to me is that I still need to find Maxwell Moreau. The manuscript was meant for him, not me, I only found it by accident. Javier nodded, thinking, his eyes on his daughter, Maya, a skinny girl with long black hair who had just been frozen. Well, pana, I still want to read it, said Javier, by which Saul understood with some amusement that he wouldn’t read it and that at some point he would have to tell Javier, chapter by chapter, the plots of both Lost City and A Model Earth. So, the question is, said Saul, where did Maxwell Moreau go? But the question hung in the silent humid air without a response because Javier was already walking toward Maya, who had been unfrozen by a new player, a small boy nearly a head shorter than her, and had then slipped and fallen and scraped her right palm and was just then shedding tears while the pair of little girls stood on a rubber hill, watching her like bored sentries.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Page 7
