Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

  In the kitchen Leo was surprised to see a man standing by the table. He looked about twenty-five years old, with jet black hair and a handsome face.

  ‘Leo, this is Roberto. Roberto Panconesi, love saying that. Pan – co – nesi. Sounds like an exotic Italian dessert. He’s my new flatmate,’ Hannah said.

  Leo offered his hand. Roberto shook it warmly. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Roberto intoned, with the slightest trace of an accent.

  ‘Leo is doing a PhD on ants,’ Hannah explained, playing the hostess.

  ‘Really?’ Roberto raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes,’ Hannah continued, ‘he spends most of his time watching them fuck through a microscope like some sort of pervert. Isn’t that right, Leo?’

  ‘I watch them do all sorts of things, not just copulate,’ Leo said in his defence.

  ‘That’s just a big word for the same thing . . . As for Roberto, he is a lecturer in the philosophy of physics, which basically means he talks incomprehensible bollocks all day. So you two should get on very well.’

  ‘She’s always teasing me,’ Roberto protested.

  ‘Am I? Oh I’m so sorry, I’ll say something nice about you, then. Roberto is a genius. He’s the youngest in the department. Students are all over him, they fight to get into his lectures – even people who aren’t studying physics want to get in, and it’s not just because of his general gorgeousness – although that helps – but also because he’s got some mad theories and he is dangerously unconventional. How was that? Better?’

  ‘Marginally, but thank you for trying,’ Roberto laughed.

  ‘Well it all sounds . . . I mean you sound . . . fascinating,’ Leo said unconvincingly, and he felt the muscles in his face force a smile. He didn’t want to have to make small talk with a stranger.

  He sat down and looked about him. Nothing had changed in the kitchen; it was dominated by a large dresser filled with an assortment of plates and pots, none of which matched. The landlady and a parade of tenants had left them behind. There was the small balcony overlooking an inner courtyard, the unusual purple ceiling and the round pine table, now filled with salads and dips.

  Hannah tried her best to be cheerful, flapping about the kitchen filling Leo in on gossip and politics, the momentous and the meaningless given equal weight; but the others were more sombre, and the conversation inevitably turned to what had happened in Ecuador. Leo patiently explained what little he remembered, omitting only the reason why they were sitting at the front of the bus. He couldn’t bring himself to divulge that particular detail.

  By the time Hannah served up dessert the atmosphere had lightened. She had started whipping a chocolate mousse in the afternoon, but after a while her hand had ached and she had become bored so she had abandoned it in the fridge, hoping that it would sort itself out. But when she took it out it had condensed to a lumpy sludge. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I’ve made poo for dessert. Who’s for poo?’

  Later they retired to the living room and sank into the sofas. The conversation had died; the blood had been sucked out of their brains into their bellies. Their digestive juices wallowed in chocolate, occasionally gurgled, then abandoned their purpose. They were melting into the soft fabric of the furniture. Leo felt sick.

  ‘Call an ambulance,’ groaned Karen, ‘I swear I’m going to die.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t have to eat it. This will teach you to be so bloody polite,’ Hannah snorted.

  ‘I can’t move,’ Stacey moaned.

  ‘Actually, Stacey, you may not realize it but you are moving very fast.’ It was the first time Roberto had spoken since he had greeted Leo. Everyone stared at him, slightly baffled by his strange interjection.

  ‘Am I?’ Stacey said.

  ‘Yes, you are travelling at eighteen miles per second which is six thousand five hundred miles per hour around the sun. But the sun is also moving at a terrific speed and so is the galaxy. When you take all this into account we are actually travelling at two hundred and thirty miles per second which is . . .’ he paused, ‘eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand miles an hour.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I calculate that we’ve travelled almost a million miles since we ate that mousse.’

  The others reflected on this fact in bemused silence. Roberto’s outburst seemed to change everything, for now they felt like six bloated splodges slouched on couches in a lounge hurtling through space at terrifying speed.

  ‘I think I need a seat belt,’ Charlie said, eventually.

  But out of all of them, Roberto’s verbal foray into the cosmos had the most impact on Stacey, who had been looking for an excuse to fall in love with the mysterious Italian since she first clapped eyes on him.

  It was not long before Stacey and Roberto had made a discreet exit so that he could explain, in the privacy of his bedroom, the philosophy of physics and of course, like all the best scientists, do a little probing experimental work. With their departure the party descended into a medley of smutty comments until eventually it fizzled out altogether. Leo had survived his first evening back in London, not only survived it but even enjoyed it.

  That night Leo went back to Charlie’s flat, which was above an all-night shop on Upper Street in Islington. It was supposed to be a temporary measure until Leo found his feet, but Charlie had made it clear that Leo could stay as long as he wanted. They hastily converted the lounge into a second bedroom by unfolding the sofa bed. They lugged the armchair and television into the hallway and put them in the only places they would fit: the chair next to the front door and the TV half-blocking the entrance to the kitchen. Leo’s new room had a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a bus stop on the main road. As he was unpacking his clothes a bus pulled up noisily and Leo was surprised to see, only a few metres away, the long, taut faces of the overtired passengers on the top deck staring absently at him. He hurriedly drew the blinds.

  The bed was wretchedly uncomfortable. The mattress was old and thin, and when he lay down he found that his head was lower than his feet. But when he lay the other way he could feel the springs in his ribs. He closed his eyes but his ears remained stubbornly open to the symphony of unfamiliar sounds that filled the room. There was the indistinct music and chat from the shop radio, the drunken conversation of a couple of beggars who were camped outside the door, and the screeching brakes of the night buses.

  All night he chased sleep, but each time he caught hold of its soft wings and felt himself drifting into its feathery embrace he was awoken by a subtle change of sound. With each pursuit his desire for sleep grew stronger and more desperate. By morning he felt like a stalker whose love had been cruelly unrequited. Crashing on friends’ sofas was a throwback to a life before Eleni. It had been fun then, but now he felt as if he had fallen from a warm nest and was lying lonely in the mud.

  15

  WHAT IS THERE TO DO, OTHER THAN WHAT I DID? LEO thought to himself as he boarded the 73 outside Charlie’s flat, taking care to sit in the middle of the bus, which would take him to University College. He had no deep desire to resume his studies – or any not to. He merely sought a framework, like a coat hanger, on which he could hang his life. At least then it might look like a life which was ready to be inhabited, rather than a crumpled garment on the floor.

  He unzipped his shoulder bag and pulled out the small red album which he had bought that morning after collecting his photos of Latin America. As he was leafing through them deciding which ones to put in, an image caught his eye. It was the photo that Eleni had taken of them on the beach in Colombia on New Year’s Eve. Their heads were glued together at the ear and their beaming faces filled the photo entirely; how serenely beautiful they had been then. He melted into the picture for a moment, and emerged with the feel of Eleni at his side and a smile on his lips. He slid the picture into the first page of the album and carried on skipping through the photos, selecting only pictures of Eleni to put in after it. When he got to the final image his heart nearly stopped. There was Eleni on the bus with the ice pick in her hand,
pulling a comic face like the grim reaper. Leo studied the detail. She was sitting in the first seat to the right of the aisle. In front of her legs was a hardboard panel above which was a horizontal steel bar that connected to a vertical used by passengers to board the bus. Behind Eleni he could make out the high Andean plateau. The picture must have been taken only half an hour before she died. Something was coming back to him: it was the conversation that preceded the taking of the photo. They had been joking about a hundred and one things to do with an ice pick. He had laughed at the time, but now it seemed like a sick joke and Leo couldn’t help feeling that death really had visited them that day and briefly revealed himself in their game in readiness for the deed ahead.

  At the university Leo made his way down the familiar corridors to the zoology department where he checked his pigeonhole for mail. There was an out-of-date invitation to a convention in Boston, three department circulars and a letter from a professor at the University of Zurich whom he had written to in order to gain clarification on an aspect of ant behaviour for his doctorate. He was dithering between going to the café to read the letter and dropping in on his tutor, when he was swept up in a tide of excited students heading into a lecture theatre. He overheard the name of Roberto Panconesi and remembering Hannah’s effusive description of his lectures he decided to follow them.

  He sat on the back row near the door so that he could make a discreet exit after a few minutes. The lecture theatre, which held a couple of hundred students and raked steeply down to a small stage, was full by the time Roberto arrived. He was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a sky-blue shirt with a button-down collar. He put his briefcase on the table, switched on the microphone at the lectern and, impressively, proceeded to talk without any notes at all.

  ‘Firstly I’d like to thank you all for coming to this opening lecture in my summer-term series, I doubt there will be so many of you by the end,’ he laughed. ‘Physics is merely a description of reality, but the more deeply we look into things the more extraordinary reality appears. At the quantum level there is stuff happening that is so strange, it challenges the way we see the world. By the end of this course not only will you be rethinking the world, but also how you act as individuals within it. For me the ramifications of quantum physics stretch not only into philosophy but into religion and politics. It is a kind of poetry. It is also an addiction. It is my purpose to convert those of you who are not already converted, to its beauty.’

  It was as brash and arrogant an opening statement as Leo had ever heard. Roberto was laying down the gauntlet and simultaneously raising the stakes. He had certainly captured everyone’s interest, but Leo wondered how on earth he was going to live up to such hefty claims.

  ‘Ever since Newton played with his balls,’ there was a roar of laughter from the young audience, ‘scientists have seen themselves as objective outsiders. When Newton observed balls colliding he could calculate every force that acted upon them and predict exactly what would happen. For him there were no surprises, he claimed that the universe ran like a machine, consisting of millions of separate entities which interacted with each other in predictable ways. Newtonian mechanics made for a very safe and deterministic world in which nothing was connected.

  ‘How wrong he was. The latest scientific discoveries have proved beyond doubt that at the quantum level everything is subtly connected. Even the scientist is part of his own experiment because every choice he or she makes changes the results. We can now prove scientifically what the founders of some of the world’s greatest religions knew instinctively: that we live in a holistic universe.

  ‘But we have been in thrall to the likes of Newton and Descartes for so long that it has infected our reason and our politics. We still run the world as if we are separate from it and not part of it. Holism has not yet taken root but it will. For you to get anywhere in the philosophy of physics you have to engage with the notion of holism in a personal way. I want you to feel it in your bones and not just as a conceptual theory . . .’ Roberto suddenly broke off. He had noticed Leo sitting at the back of the theatre.

  ‘Ah, hello, Leo,’ he said casually. Leo flushed with embarrassment. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Leo Deakin.’ Two hundred heads turned and pinned Leo to his chair; there was no escaping now. ‘Leo is doing a PhD on ant behaviour. I think we may be able to learn something from his experiences.’ Leo squirmed in horror; he would rather drown in acid than talk about Eleni in this arena. And now Roberto was walking up the aisle towards him like a chat-show host. ‘Tell me, Leo, you spend a lot of time observing ants. I want to ask you a very simple question. Are you an ant?’

  Leo laughed, relieved that the question was about ants. ‘No.’

  ‘So you are a separate entity from the ants you observe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know? What is the difference between you and an ant?’

  ‘Size, for starters,’ Leo said, wondering where all this was leading.

  ‘Interesting. So how big do you feel next to an ant?’

  ‘Enormous.’

  ‘So next to an ant Leo Deakin is enormous. But now tell me: how big do you feel in relation to that oak tree we can see through the window there?’

  ‘Pretty small.’

  Roberto returned to the stage. ‘So I have a question for you, ladies and gentlemen. Is Leo Deakin enormous or pretty small?’

  ‘It depends who he’s with,’ a voice from the front called out.

  ‘Exactly. So we can conclude from this that in a universe where we see ourselves as separate from the ant, a Newtonian universe if you like, we tend to define who we are by comparing ourselves to the things around us. So for example, I know I am not an ant because I look at an ant and I say I am not one of those. I know I am male because I look at a woman and I say I am not one of those. I know I am a tall man because in relation to others I am taller than most. I know I am no good at football because I see others who play better than me. On every level I define myself in relation to the things around me. And when I look at the world I do the same. I get a sense of what things are by comparing and contrasting them with everything else. Our very separateness is at the core of our identity. Do we agree?’

  There were nods in the audience.

  ‘But what if all those things against which you measure yourself weren’t there. How tall would you feel then?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘OK, let’s do a thought experiment. I want you all to close your eyes.’ Leo allowed his eyes to shut as Roberto continued softly, ‘Imagine that you are floating in an absolute void and any memory of your life on earth has gone. Here there are no concepts of space or time. You are just a naked human being suspended in nothingness.’

  Leo pictured himself dangling in darkness.

  ‘Now take all the “I am’s” with which you define yourself and see how they fare in this void. I am English, I am tall, I am young and so on. Be ruthless, be honest in exposing the image of yourself. One by one let these notions parade before you like contestants in a beauty contest and examine them with a fresh eye.’

  Leo swam off into his void armed with a long list of adjectives that he would use to describe himself. As Roberto had asked, Leo tried to imagine that he had no memory of earth. But with nothing to compare himself to, with no tree to stand under, he found it impossible to say who he was or what he was like. To be English in a void was meaningless. How could he be sure that he was young when there was no one older to whom he could compare himself? He didn’t even know that he was a man.

  All his self-perceptions were delusions. They had nothing to do with the essence of being alive. The only thing that survived the void were his senses, for when he touched his face he could still feel it, and he heard the panic in his own breath. Leo opened his eyes to see Roberto smiling Buddha-like at his students.

  ‘When I do the void experiment I perceive man as limitless,’ the Italian said, ‘free from that which shackles him to ideas,
places, things and time. Free from triviality. Man becomes an ageless, sizeless, possessionless organism without racial, national or religious identity, a receptacle for higher emotion and thought, a master of the senses. He becomes a giant of possibility. How does it feel?’

  ‘Terrifying,’ a boy shouted out.

  ‘Of course, that’s the problem we physicists have in explaining this stuff,’ Roberto mused, like an evangelist warning his converts of the travails ahead. ‘People are very uncomfortable with the infinite and the eternal, especially when applied to themselves. We are a clannish and small-minded race. We feel more comfortable defining ourselves by our jobs, our social class, and our religions than by our boundless potential. The average person is happier saying he is a member of a badminton club than a member of the human race, let alone a part of the universe. But where does that small-mindedness lead? If you are a member of a club you will want to beat the neighbouring club. If you consider yourself a member of the human race there are no humans to beat but you can still subjugate the planet instead. But if you see yourself as a vital part of a holistic universe then any battle is ultimately against yourself.’

  Leo looked at Roberto, bewildered.

  ‘Don’t you get it, my friends? If you are part of unity what is there to fight against? Leo is only different from the ant in the same way as his arm is different from his leg. We do not question that his arm and his leg are part of the same entity. Is it so difficult to imagine then that Leo, the ant and indeed all of us are small parts of a bigger whole? We are like characters in a painting who do not know the painting exists, and that everything we see is part of the same picture and painted with the same brush. We are each a small piece of infinity and in some form or other we will live for eternity. Quantum theory proves that the world is neither fragmented nor divided.’

  As Roberto expanded on his theme of the holistic universe built on hidden connections, chaos and uncertainty, Leo began to feel comforted. There were particles that never died. There was the magic of light in which photons travel so fast that time slows to a virtual standstill and a beautiful moment might last for ever. (If only time had stopped on New Year’s Eve 1991 in Colombia, when Eleni had taken that picture of their happiness!) There was the notion that there was an infinite number of universes that ran parallel but invisible to our own, and that in each of those universes an alternative outcome to every conceivable situation was played out. So Leo floated off into parallel universes where he and Eleni had missed the bus, where accidents didn’t happen, where they were still together. They would now be in Peru, as they had planned, overlooking the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu. At least somewhere there was a world where he was happy, even if he could not access it.