“Bring it on, Cummings. I know what I am becoming, and nothing will keep me from it. Who knows what adventures await?”
“Who, indeed, sir.”
“Now,” said Rat, through heavy eyes, “where is the little beastie?”
“There, sir,” said Cummings, directing his gaze toward the inverse mirror that comprised the bulk of the room’s furnishings. “May you pass safely through those realms where are knit the raveled sleeves of care.”
“Good night, Cummings. For the last time, good night.”
Rat was alone with his reflection, that of a bearded, bespectacled man who stared at the telescope with a haunted expression. His eyes were veined with exhaustion from having stared so long at the heavens, in search of something, watchful for anything, finding nothing. The naked night—pouring through the telescope’s vast opening overhead—mocked his ignorance with the boundless tapestry of unknowing that surged, and sprang, and danced in infinite silence . . .
For the Mind of Jonathan Gray
The twenty-second night
Despite the cold, Dr. Gray couldn’t bring himself to close the mechanical dome, to shut out the stars. He pulled the goose-down sleeping bag a little closer under his chin, talking to himself the whole time, as always, dragging his thoughts into a perceptible dimension where he could hear their heartbeat, feel their pulse. This was his practice, to pit himself against himself in a dialogue of one—an attempt to argue himself out of ignorance. To seize the universe by the neck with the hungry fingers of his intellect and throttle it until it gave up its secrets. He voiced every thought, however trivial, however reckless or ridiculous, for these were often the germs of new lines of questioning, often leading to unexpected answers.
“There’s a complete absence of nothingness,” he said, each syllable immediately echoed by the Greek chorus of convex walls. “There’s nowhere you could shoot a celestial arrow through space without hitting something, eventually. Matter, antimatter, quarks, quasars, time and anti-time, light matter, dark matter, superforce and nanoforce . . . ever expanding.
“Ever expanding . . . to what?
“From what?”
Those were the questions that beguiled his mind, night after night. From what had it all sprung? The Big Bang theory, though acceptable and oddly comforting as a mathematical equation, simply didn’t satisfy. It was impossible to get away from the conviction at the stunted nub of his primitive nature that nothing comes from nothing.
And as to where it was all headed—the vast outward sweep of matter through immeasurable universes, times, and dimensions—his brain, like a drowning man slowly surrendering to the depths rather than expend his final heartbeat to get one meter closer to the impossible, however tantalizing, often wearied of the battle.
“I have thought as far as I can think,” he said, resignedly. “My mind has gone as far as it can go, yet . . . I’ve only begun the journey. Only just untied the boat from the dock.”
Space stared down on him with ruthless indifference, morbidly, grotesquely impervious to reason. Theories were the ships in which one ventured onto this ocean, but, in time, they all began to disintegrate in the face of new suggestions from the Unknown; siren-like whispers of unreachable islands in the firmament that were at once completely likely and utterly impossible. Interstellar rumors told by minutely wobbling specks of light that may or may not have ceased to exist countless eons before they were ever perceived by the eye of man. The ship, though hulled and demasted, would be frantically patched and repatched by those aboard, determined to keep her afloat, sail her a bit further. But, in time, they would have to abandon her. She had taken them as far as she could. “And presently another comes by,” said Dr. Gray, “to scoop us from the water. And we will prostrate ourselves before its flag, and live and die upon its decks until they, too, give way underfoot.”
For a moment he turned toward the wall, and studied his faint shadow there, a man-shaped smudge painted on the darkness by the feeble remnants of starlight. “‘Vanity of vanity. All is vanity and striving after the wind,’” he quoted.
For a while he said nothing. In some nearby crack or crevice a cricket marked irregular time. The whir of the computer fan sliced the air into infinitesimally small wedges and hung their whispers on the silence.
For some reason the plaques on his office wall came to mind. Diplomas, citations, scientific awards, numerous articles in every major scientific journal, more accolades and honors than most in his profession could ever hope to attain in a lifetime. He was at the peak of his profession. The top rung of the ladder. It was his work against which all others measured their success, against which all challengers aligned themselves.
“Vanity of vanity,” he sighed. How quickly, he thought, would he trade all that weighty paperwork for the slightest glimpse of all he didn’t know. Time, though he questioned its existence, was working against him.
It often occurred to him that the only thing all his education and experience had bought him was an awareness of his own ignorance. Every new discovery mocked a former absolute, knocked another pillar from the temple of fast-held scientific beliefs.
He should have been a poet.
That’s where he and Dustin differed. Nothing occurred to Dusty.
“Dusty,” he said softly. All his lofty thoughts crashed to earth at the thought of his son, the hopelessly autistic offspring of two certifiable geniuses, one of whom had died giving him birth.
“Where are you, my boy?” he said to the child’s image as it formed in his mind. He was exhausted, and exhaustion often made him sentimental and in that state he imagined himself suspended between two realms of absolute unknowability—the universe and his son.
Dusty would never know the restless striving of the intellect. He seemed completely at home amidst the dysfunctional clockworks of his tiny world. Unlike the universe, it was a place whose boundaries were fixed by his inability to conceive of anything else. He never had a thought for what might exist beyond his immediate senses. Dusty was at peace with himself, completely at home with his ignorance.
So it seemed to his father.
“He has thoughts, though,” murmured Dr. Gray. Disconnected thoughts. Thoughts expressed in the curious, disjointed lexicon that held meaning for Dustin alone.
He knew a lot of words, and used them enthusiastically—in whatever order appealed to him—without reference to their meaning. “My little parrot,” said Dr. Gray. He smiled the wan smile of resignation that comes at the end of a long, bitter trail of tears.
He turned on his back, twined his fingers behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling. The blip of his watch reminded him that it was two o’clock. He should be home in bed. But he seldom went home anymore, except to shave and shower and make sure the housekeeper and the nanny had everything well in hand. When his wife was alive, home had been a place charged with the peculiar electricity of scientific debate, its doors always open to colleagues from every branch of study whose observations, whose conjecture, whose passionate arguments, however empirically suspect, were pure adrenaline to the brain. Now it was a place of shadows. Echoes. And at its heart was a little boy whose inner workings were benighted by the most impenetrable shadow of all.
He hadn’t known how much he loved his wife—if love could be measured by that cavernous, aching emptiness it left behind—until she died. He had seen a film once, a grainy newsreel from the First World War, in which a soldier, crawling from the trenches, was blown apart by an enemy hand-grenade. That’s what he had felt like at the time. Only he hadn’t the benefit of dying. Instead, he lived on, a gaping hole unfit to sustain life, yet refusing to yield to death.
The circular pattern of his thoughts told him how tired he was, yet there was no reining them in. He was over-tired, and couldn’t sleep.
“All my plans,” he said. Somewhere in the attic or the garage was an old box with two baseball gloves. It would never be opened. “I can’t reach him,” his eyes drifted toward the swatch of space a
bove, “any more than I can reach the stars.”
Dusty woke the next morning happy and excited. He was always happy and excited, though he didn’t know why. Why not? He had no recollection of the previous day. No anticipation of the next. No disappointments. No unreasonable expectations. Every time he awoke, everything was new. He was new. The world was new. The house was new. His toys were new. The wall at which he stared hour after hour was completely new, every microscopic crack and crease an undiscovered country he had no recollection of having traversed the day before, and the day before, and the day before. The words that came to his tongue were surprising, and the fact he didn’t know what they meant, or why he spoke them delighted him. He was equally delighted by the body’s other involuntary spasms—farts, coughs, sneezes, burps—any of which would produce the most delightful reflex of all: laughter. He didn’t know why.
He had a vague awareness of familiarity with the housekeeper and the nanny, enough so that their voices were comfortable. Their presence added to his peace. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care. And he didn’t know that he didn’t care. Everything was new. Every day he was three years old.
Something happened that morning. Something different. He didn’t know why it was different, only that it was. One moment he was sitting on his chair in the corner, facing the wall, tracing his shadow with his forefinger, when the screen door slammed. Loud noises disturbed his peace. He didn’t look away from the wall, but he heard anxious voices.
He didn’t look away from the wall, but he wanted to.
Then he saw that there was a mirror not far away, and in that mirror, he could see into the world behind him. In that world were walls like his wall. There were doors, and floors, and a nanny and a housekeeper just like the ones who spoke to him and brought him sandwiches and sang him songs. But they were backwards. This made him laugh. And he continued laughing until he saw something unfamiliar. A little girl. She was crying. Nanny and the housekeeper were making words at her.
“That’s a nasty scrape, my love,” said Nanny. She was on her knees in front of the little girl who was sitting on the floor, and she was holding the little girl’s leg.
“Did you fall off your bicycle?” said the housekeeper, handing Nanny a cloth that Nanny used to wipe blood and grime from the hurt.
Dustin saw them all backwards, except for the little girl. He had no idea if she was frontward or backward. He didn’t know her. But he was perplexed that their words were frontward. He didn’t know what they meant, but they were frontward. The smile slowly dissolved from his mouth.
“I’ll call your mother,” said the housekeeper, and she went away.
“It’s all right, dear,” said Nanny. “Nothing broken. The hurt will go away.”
The little girl looked up at her, but didn’t stop crying. There was something about her expression that made Dustin’s heart ache. He got down from his chair and walked to the front hallway, not surprised that everything was no longer backward. Why should it be?
He stood by the umbrella stand and watched.
With great effort, the little girl stood up, still crying. Nanny took her in her arms and held her for a moment then, gently cradling the child’s face in her hands, looked comfortingly into her eyes. “You’re all right, Lizzie, my love. Everything is going to be all right.” And she wiped away the little girl’s tears with her thumbs.
The effect was magical. Suddenly the little girl stopped crying. She sniffed away a tear or two and her face, so achingly miserable one moment, was transformed by a smile. A little smile, just born, but one that grew quickly and leapt to her eyes.
“I know just what you need,” said Nanny, standing up and taking the little girl’s hand in her own. “Hillary!” she called, and Hillary answered from the kitchen. “Lizzie needs a cookie!”
And they were gone.
The little tableau had made a profound impression on the unsteady palimpsest of Dustin’s brain. Not much affixed itself to that Teflon parchment, but this did; Nanny’s hands had turned the little girl’s unhappiness into happiness, her tears to laughter, her hurt to well-being. Dustin didn’t know how, or why, nor did these questions occur to him. They were unimportant. The fact remained: an indelible memory that seeped deep into the pages of his consciousness. One he could call up whenever he wished.
It was Saturday. Dr. Gray had spent the night at home, had breakfasted with Nanny and the housekeeper, and with Dustin, with whom he would spend the day, his last remaining concession to fatherhood. They would go to the park, as they always did, and Dr. Gray would feed the ducks and make words while Dustin would giggle and pound his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to dislodge some disturbing thought.
Dr. Gray had long ago given up speaking to Dustin directly. More often than not, he would simply extemporize upon his most recent train of scientific thought, as if talking to a student or a colleague.
He had had a particularly hard night. A recent article in a popular scientific journal had propounded a notion he had entertained for some time: that all of the perceptible universe was no more than a two-dimensional holographic projection upon the surface of space-time that, owing to its curvature, gave the illusion of three-dimensions. He appreciated the tantalizing suggestion of mathematical symmetry, but knew instantly that it still begged by ultimate question: projected by what? He was so engrossed in the accompanying monologue that he was unaware of the drama unfolding around him until it landed, literally, at his feet. Looking down from a gentle knoll above the pond, he saw a little knot of humanity, interspersed with a frantic conglomeration of ducks and geese, gathered at the water’s edge. He perceived instantly that a child—whether boy or girl, he couldn’t tell—had fallen in, had been dragged ashore, and efforts were underway to revive it.
Dustin was at the edge of the crowd, watching the hapless efforts of various well-meaning adults with apparent interest that, to Dr. Gray, was as arresting as the tragedy itself. Something was going on in his son’s mind. Some pseudo-conscious connection to the event. What was it? What?
Paramedics arrived in minutes and began following procedure, pumping the child’s arms—Dr. Gray could see now that it was a boy—applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and, finally, resorting to the electronic paddles that, though they convulsed the tiny body with a spastic parody of animation, failed to bring him back to life. In time, sensing the hopelessness, much of the crowd melted away. The mother huddled over her child’s lifeless form, weeping pathetically, calling his name over and over, “Michael! Michael!” as if to command his return from some dangerous precipice. Her friends patted her on the head and shoulders, hugged her, cradled her, wiped her tears, mouthing idiocies, wandering in close circles. They didn’t know what else to do. The paramedics assembled their equipment and stowed it in the appropriate compartments in the ambulance. They shut off the revolving light. The emergency was over.
Dr. Gray watched his son, who hadn’t stirred, whose eyes, which seldom made contact with anything, had not strayed from the lifeless body. He seemed to be contemplating something. But that was impossible. Dustin was incapable of contemplation. This sure knowledge rooted his feet to the spot when Dustin finally walked toward the epicenter of the drama: the mother and child.
She was kneeling on the ground, clasping the dead child who lay like a rag doll across her arms. Her hair, matted with sweat and tears, swept the boy’s face as she rocked back and forth in the universal expression of inconsolable sorrow, too familiar to mothers through the ages.
Suddenly she felt tiny, cool hands upon her cheeks, and opened her eyes to find herself staring into those of a strange boy. Startled, she inhaled sharply, momentarily stanching her sobs. This is the result Dustin had anticipated. Soon she would smile.
Dr. Gray was on his way down the hill. He would have to explain to the woman about Dustin. He would apologize for his bizarre behavior, this painful, inexplicable intrusion, and take his son home. All of which, he knew, would mean nothing to the woman. She was t
oo paralyzed by grief to know or really care what was happening. Another soldier blown apart.
The woman and Dustin were staring at one another, her eyes brimming with a mixture of anger and confusion, his with an otherworldly calm. “You’re all right, Lizzie, my love,” said Dustin. Dr. Gray stopped in his tracks. Dustin had never uttered a complete sentence in all his seven years. “Everything’s going to be all right.” And he wiped the woman’s tears from her eyes with his thumbs.
“Lizzie?” said the woman, too perplexed to say anything else.
Dustin released her and, before she could protest, took her son’s face in his hands, bending so close their noses touched. “You’re all right, Lizzie, my love,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
And the child opened his eyes.
The mother was incapable of portraying her joy with anything but a renewed torrent of tears, the almost maniacal clutching of her son to her breast. The senses of friends and standers-by were so utterly overwhelmed they could express themselves with nothing but primitive, inarticulate displays for which there was no socially acceptable pattern. They yelled and cried and threw themselves into one another’s arms. The paramedics attempted to assure themselves the child had at last responded to their efforts. Let the superstitious think what they would. Inside, however, though it would forever remain unsaid, they knew they had done all they could and that the child had been stone dead. All of their equipment verified the fact beyond a shadow of doubt, as did the witness of their own experience. They climbed into the ambulance, slammed the doors, and drove away.
“I’m so sorry,” said Dr. Gray, resting his hands on Dustin’s shoulders. It was a silly thing to say. Sorry for what?
The woman looked up through her tears. “Is this your son?”
“Yes.”
“He saved my boy.”
It was an awkward moment; the scientist in him balked. The fallacy had to be corrected at once or he’d have pilgrims at his door, standing vigil for a glimpse of the miracle boy. “I assure you, he did no such thing. He’s—he’s mentally handicapped. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
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