I stood beside the answering machine, filled with dread. Then I pressed the Messages button.
There were three hangups, right in a row, then Michele Mueller, then Terry McMahon, then Terry McMahon again, then the mediator from Family Court wanting to make an appointment with me; then L.R.’s hoarse voice filled the air.
“Esme. I’m so sorry I didn’t catch you at home. I’m back in Los Angeles and I’m afraid that I owe you an explanation for my disappearance.” (You owe me a tad more than that, I thought grimly.) “The reason I went away was because, I’m afraid, I was feeling some things rather unworthy of me.” She cleared her throat.
“Esme, you cannot possibly understand what it’s like to work for so long on a project and then have someone younger and less experienced come along and redefine it, provide the missing link, just like that. I can only report to you that it is daunting and there is a bitterness that is real and threatens to consume one. That is why I left. When I flew to New York, I had actually considered submitting the TOE to an appropriate journal, under my name only, and leaving it at that. I admit this to you now and I apologize to you for having had this impulse. It was only that, an impulse. I could never have done that. You will be relieved to know that though I submitted the findings to Theory Abstracts without your knowledge (and I apologize for this unorthodox step too!), I did not submit them without your name, which will be listed after mine, as co-author of the Theory of Chirality and the Weak Force. The envelope containing our theory with calculations will be opened in the offices of Theory Abstracts at eleven A.M. EST, Tuesday the twentieth. I congratulate you, Esme, and I thank you. We deserve to be very proud of ourselves now.”
I sank down in my chair. I looked up at a framed picture on the wall: the many-armed god Shiva. Beneath was a brass plaque reading, “The Cosmic Dance of the Universe.” L.R. added that I should give her a call when I returned and she would provide me with a copy of her journal submission.
I got up and stopped the tape before the next message and played it again. Then again. Finally, breathing carefully, I let the tape go.
The mediator again. Faber. Then Gloria Walther. Her analysis of Ollie, when Ollie had been in her class at Sixth Street, was that she was highly gifted and had difficulties not uncharacteristic of the gifted. Probably she and I could find a school. Could I call her back?
Then, his voice low, almost a whisper, but urgent: Jay.
“Esme. Please c-call me as soon as possible.”
Then Jay again, same message. Followed by a third, a frantic note: “Esme, where are y-you? Something is w-w-wrong with Ollie. I don’t know what to do for her. She’s r-refusing to eat or sleep or even m-move.” He coughed, then there was a fumbled echoing hangup of the receiver.
I was up and out of the chair but I stopped in the doorway as the next message materialized:
“Esme. This is Terry McMahon. Where are you? I’m calling to inform you that Ollie was taken, an hour or so ago, to Cedars Sinai Medical Center. She hasn’t eaten anything for three days now and she is in a kind of fugue-state from which Jay has found it impossible to rouse her. Please call me as soon as you get in.”
Then one last one as I stood there frozen: “Esme. Esme. Where are y-you? C-can’t you hear me, can’t you a-answer? Esme?”
I borrowed Q’s rented Firebird and drove fast but carefully, gingerly shifting the unfamiliar gears, trying to concentrate on the traffic, billboards—anything but her.
Letter to Ollie: Schrödinger’s Cat
She stood at the top of the basement steps, calling me, the light behind her, like an angel’s nimbus. But I knew when I climbed to the top step, she’d be gone. There would be my place set neatly at the table: plate, cup of cold milk, spoon, fork. And warm from the oven: a chop, green vegetable, potatoes. She would not eat with me, the nights he worked late. She would not sit beside me cutting her meat (When did she eat? Later? Standing up at the counter?) or sipping her coffee. But she set my place; she knew exactly what I needed. And waited somewhere in the wings. I ate alone in a kind of regal if ratty splendor: talking to my knife and cup, reading comics, the periodic table, feeding bits of meat to the dog, spilling liberally on myself. Listening always for her step, waiting for her to appear, pull off her apron, sit down beside me. Sometimes, far in the back of the house, I heard her clear her throat, sigh, as if she was listening too.
I could have told her so much.
I was ridiculed at school, but casually—the other kids barely got interested enough in me to reject me; I was a natural outsider, invisible. Was I invisible to everyone, even my mother?
Talking to myself, daydreaming, forgetting things, not having the answer the teacher wanted. Obsessed with counting on my dirty bitten nails, walking in circles, lost in contemplation. I saw images superimposed on images: polyhedrons, cathedrals, talking trees, ciphers burning in the margins of my grammar workbook. Lost in the webs and lairs of insects, tracking the sonar of bats, filling jars with cold-lit bugs, rigging up a dry-cell battery, a tank for algae, a star chart, a model of the interior of the sun. Natural objects became familiar but were also graciously strange, they’d make a polite dimensional bow, then flicker in the mirror. Transformed!
Red traffic light. I braked, I waited.
I’d figured it out, sitting at my lonely meals, nine, ten years old. There was nothing that I could be kept from thinking about. Nothing that my mind could not track or invent—physics, architecture, comic books. My parents seemed not like parents, more like older siblings, unsure of themselves, emotionally withdrawn or tyrannical—or simply absent. They had, I thought, no power over me. And I could make my own judgments; I didn’t have to see what any adult told me to see.
Green light; the traffic surged forward. I shifted, with a little resistance, into first.
Then I could observe, when I built the DNA model, that no living molecule is self-reproducing—only a whole cell can clone or vary itself—and even then, the proteins of a cell are made by other proteins and without that protein-forming machinery nothing can be made.
Somebody changes lanes, too fast, without a signal, in front of me. I don’t honk at the guy, I speed up behind him. Shift, third.
Nothing can be made without interconnection, the shuttle and the daring leap of the catalyzers: Stimulated by proteins, brain neurons make new connections, create synapses with other neurons during the learning process, by reaching. The neurons reach out: synaptic plasticity. They have these fingerlike projections, the neurites, and they feel around, test like antennae, stretch, touch, then adhere. The wires connect, but first: the lift out of the familiar. Not the single, self-reproducing, macho spiral we imagine creating us and our thought—no, the crosser, the leaper, the sympathizer, the blesser, the emblematic gesture of praise and affection.
Quick left turn, close call.
And the lowly but mighty electron: blessing us by confounding our dimension-drowned minds, driving even Einstein to distraction. Yes, it’s a waveform; yes, it has dual wave-particle nature! But this shouldn’t imply it’s a wave sometimes and a particle sometimes, but that it has the properties of either, depending on circumstances.
Left turn, two blocks, right turn.
(Aspasia, Annie Jump Cannon, Sophie Charlotte, Queen of Prussia ... where is your mother, little girl?)
Because electron waves are waves of probability, like, say, the probability of more homeless people here in the inner city: people living in boxes. You can put an electron in a box, slide in a partition—and assume, according to common sense, that the particle will be in one side of the box or the other. Wrong. Quantum rules say that the electron wave is present in both sides of the box, because it’s true that when we peek into the box, we are equally likely to find it on one side of the wall or the other. And this measurement technique applies to macro particles, the human-sized world too.
Traffic backup. Honking. We wait.
She patted my face. “Ollie and Mamma,” she said.
Five minutes to Cedars ... And let us consider Schrödinger’s cat: quantum paradox of the twentieth century. I read this thought-experiment when I was ten or so, sitting at the kitchen table, and I was amazed (I still am) at the inherent ghoulishness of its givens. A cat is placed in a box with a glass flask of cyanide, and a little brass hammer is balanced above the glass. Also in the box is a radioactive source, which eventually releases an alpha particle detected by a Geiger counter, thus triggering the fall of the hammer, which breaks the cyanide flask and kills the cat. But wait! We have waveforms here, the same observer-probability measurement paradox as the electron’s. Quantamese, taking in all the eventualities, says we have two overlapping waveforms: on one a dead cat comes surfing toward us; on the other, a live cat. The cat can’t be considered either alive or dead, but both. Quantum theory says the cat is alive-dead. The cat is a “ghost-hybrid.” The natural universe will not tell us which state she’s in until we observe, we peek in, and we see her, meowing, pacing, or ... The question has to be: What is going on inside the box when nobody is looking? Both, Mother, life and its absence. Alone at the table: She is two. She is invisible, she is dead, she is homeless, she is silent, not like us and alike:—she is both mother and daughter.
Turn into the Cedars parking area—cars everywhere. Don’t you see the neon-red Emergency? The same phenomenon occurs every single time an alpha particle is released by a nucleus; watch the radioactive paint on the hands of the luminous clock embedded in the dash-well, what time is it, alpha decay? watch that car backing out— Who first looked at her and tried to determine how she would fit in the box, who first said, “No, the world doesn’t look like that,” who first said, “Medicate,” said “Impediment”?
Kick open the door, slam, lock, run. Ollie, the partitioned box, Ollie, the ghost-hybrid, Ollie, the lobby mirrors, Ollie, the elevator floor, Ollie, the lift out of the familiar, the blessing of the reached, opening door, Ollie.
She was in a bed with aluminum sides, like a crib. The sides were half raised, and I lowered the side facing me. She was curled up in the fetal position, her hands folded into each other. Looking closer, I saw the deep black and blue bruises on the left hand: They’d had trouble starting the I.V. line that ran from her palm (her fingers splayed and taped to a balsa-wood rest) to the swinging bottle hung on a hooked pole near the bed. The stenciled polyurethane I.D. band around her right wrist read “OLIVIA TALLICH. 8-19-87.” I set the dragon carefully on the pillow beside her.
No sound, except in the halls. No one was in the room but Ollie, I thought at first. Then I saw the other child, so small he couldn’t be distinguished from the pillows and sheets around him. Sound asleep. He’d had an operation; his skull was painted with iodine, shaved and bandaged. Sides up. A big bear sat next to him. He, too, had an I.V.
I pulled the sliding curtains shut tight around us. I moved closer to her, almost lying down next to her, and I whispered in her ear.
“Ollie. Ollie. It’s Mamma. Ollie.”
There was no response. Her breathing stayed regular. Then I thought her left eye jumped a little in her socket. Above that eye was the famous bruise—swelling almost faded, a delicate streak of yellow and slate color above the brow.
“Ollie, sweetheart. Can you hear Mamma?”
“Esme.”
He opened the curtains slightly behind me; they rustled on the track, but I did not turn to look at him.
“Esme, she’s b-been like this since ... you know, that night. I didn’t know what to ... I’ve been trying to reach you, where have you been?” His voice broke.
I didn’t answer. I felt each breath, in and out, little reassuring wind against my hand.
“She wouldn’t eat. Or drink. She wouldn’t even l-lie down to sleep. She kept turning and crying and then she just ... s-stopped. It’s like she disappeared. The doctors ...”
“I don’t think I can hear this right now, Jay. Maybe we’ll talk later. But I can’t talk to you now. I have to ask that you leave us alone, now, just leave us alone here, for a little while.”
The curtains slid back and we were enclosed again in that oblong space, a red-gold tent, a safe place. I heard, from the other side of the cosmos, the echoing names of doctors being paged, the squeaky wheels of gurneys passing, people talking. Once I nodded off, just for a second, and then I started, feeling the barely perceptible touch of her finger, moving over my left hand, then back.
“Ollie,” I said. I kissed her soft fine hair, then her forehead.
She breathed in and out; I breathed with her. Once, nodding off, I glanced at my watch. It was nearly midnight. But that was all right. I was prepared to wait for a very long time.
Acknowledgments
MUCH OF THE technical and general scientific information in this novel derives from the following books and articles: Malcolm W. Browne, “Mirror Image Chemistry Yielding New Products,” The New York Times, August 13,1991; Gerald Segal et al., “Chirality Forces,” Journal of American Chemistry Society 109 (1987); Richard Lewontin, “Doubts About the Human Genome Project,” The New York Review of Books, May 28, 1992; Christine de LaCoste-Utamsing and Ralph L. Holloway, “Sexual Dimorphism in the Human Corpus Callosum,” Science, June 25, 1982; Martin Gardner, The New Ambidextrous Universe; Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Women in Science: A Biographical Dictionary with Annotated Bibliography; Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland; Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius; Desanka Trbuhovic-Gjuric, Mileva Einstein: Une Vie; Richard P. Feynman, QED; Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time; Eve Curie, Madame Curie; Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics; Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit; James D. Watson, The Double Helix; John Stachel, ed., The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 1: The Early Years: 1879-1902; P. B. Hackett et al., An Introduction to Recombinant DNA Techniques; Harriet Zuckerman et al., eds., The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community; Judith Stone, Light Elements: Essays on Science from Gravity to Levity; P. C. W. Davies and J. Brown, eds., Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?; John D. Barrow, The World Within the World; Thomas G. West, In the Mind’s Eye; Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA; Jürgen Renn and Robert Schulmann, eds., Shawn Smith, trans., Albert Einstein, Mileva Maric The Love Letters; John Gribbon, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality; Jerry Bishop and Michael Waldholz, Genome; Paul Davies and John Gribbon, The Matter Myth; Philip Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times; Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein; and Science News (many issues).
The list of individuals to whom I am indebted for technical information, explanations, general assistance, and moral support is long. It includes the following: Professor Marilyn Ogilve, University of Oklahoma, Professor Emeritus James Warf, USC, Professor Gerald Segal, USC, Professor Howard Taylor, USC, Professor James Ellern, USC, Dr. Leona Ling, Biogen Inc., Professor Richard Lewontin, Harvard University, Professor Robert Hellwarth, USC, Professor Heather Weber, USC, Professor Lawrence Singer, USC, Dr. Karen Segal, USC, Professor Ellen Quandahl, USC, Dr. James Husman, Andrew Fishmann, M.D., Tom Hellwarth, Lee Shallat, Lerri Atwater, Van Ling, Gloria Walther, Susan Dubs, Holland Taylor, Catherine Bos, Martha Millard, Marty Shapiro, Dawn Seferian, Adrienne Rich, ... and special thanks to Marilyn Parkin, Debbie Silverman, Professor Nadine Halberstadt, and Zachary Santos (for the red language!), to the late Richard Rothenstein for the two stand-up jokes from his act, to Bruce Lagnese and Lynne McMahon for patient, nonstop reading and kind encouragement, to David Dukes for love and support, for making my writing possible, and to Erik Jackson for immense help, especially his uncanny ability to read pages of terrible handwriting and produce flawless typed manuscripts at record speed.
About the Author
Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of eight books of poems, four novels, and two essay collections, and is an editor of two anthologies, including Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, which she coedited with Bob Holman. Many of her books have been New York Times Notable selections. Muske-Dukes is a professor of English and creative writing at the Univers
ity of Southern California, where she founded the PhD program in creative writing and literature, and she recently fulfilled her appointment as poet laureate of California, appointed by the governor’s office. Her poetry collection Sparrow was a National Book Award finalist and she is a six-time Pushcart Prize winner. She writes for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times op-ed page, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. Her poems have been published and anthologized widely, including in several editions of Best American Poetry. Muske-Dukes has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Library of Congress award, Barnes & Noble’s Writer for Writers Award, and many other honors. She lives in Southern California and New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
An Introduction to Recombinant DNA, Second Edition, by P. Hackett, J. Fuchs, and J. Messing (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, 1988).
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