Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

  ‘Oh look, Leo, they’re chatting again,’ she would say when ants going in opposite directions met along the trail and appeared to stop and talk. Eleni’s main contribution to the science had been her vivid translations of these ant conversations.

  ‘Hello, Sister, how are you?’

  ‘I’m very well, thank you, Sister. What’s that you’ve found?’

  ‘Well you’ll never believe it but a rotten apricot just appeared from nowhere and I thought Her Majesty the Queen might like some.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, why don’t you just call her Mum? I wonder where all this fruit comes from?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sister, but there’s something new every day and it’s always yummy.’

  ‘There must be a God, Sister.’

  ‘Yes, there must be. What shall we call him?’

  ‘How about Leo?’

  ‘Good idea, Sister. Well, really must dash. I’ve left a pongy path so you can find the apricot. Good luck.’

  ‘’Bye, Sister.’

  Leo reckoned the males would hatch in two days and then Queen Eleni could take her pick. He spent those days mooching about the lab wondering why on earth he had chosen to do a PhD on ant-mating frequency. Four years spent producing a piece of research that no one cared about and that had no conceivable application. And when it was done it would be sent to the British Library where it would slowly rot. His passion for his subject had died with Eleni. It was quantum physics that excited him now, and instead of writing up his notes on the computer he sat there ploughing through Roberto’s reading list. Leo had been meeting him on a regular basis in the student canteen and had persuaded Roberto to let him sit in on one of his tutorials. Leo wanted to be well-prepared for it.

  There were ten students waiting for Roberto when he arrived, dressed as always in jeans and a light-blue shirt.

  ‘I hate these classrooms,’ he said, ‘they remind me of school. We need to challenge the way we learn. Let’s change the configuration. Can we get rid of these desks?’

  Before long all the desks were piled up around the edge of the room.

  ‘Put your books away. You won’t need to write anything down. I’m hoping that by the end of the tutorial you will know everything you need to know. Great! Now there’s nowhere to hide, no barriers between us. How can we open ourselves up to learning with all this crap in the way? Let us be demanding of ourselves: if I can’t stimulate you enough for you to remember what I’m saying then I’ve failed. Today I want to look at the double-slit experiment. Before I open the subject up to discussion let’s make sure we all understand what exactly is happening here.’

  Roberto asked the students to line up their chairs in one long row across the middle of the room. He then removed one chair from the centre to create a small gap in the row and made the chair’s incumbent stand against a wall like a naughty boy. The students giggled. Leo wondered what on earth was going on.

  ‘Don’t worry, Brian,’ Roberto smiled at the student, ‘you have a very important role to play. I want you to imagine you are an electron, and here before you is a barrier with a tiny slit where your chair used to be. You are about to be fired through the slit on to the back wall, which we shall imagine is a screen on which you can leave a mark.’ Roberto gave Brian a piece of chalk and Brian charged through the gap, and when he reached the far wall he turned and looked hesitantly at Roberto. ‘You want me to draw on the wall?’

  ‘Yes, please, leave a mark,’ Roberto insisted.

  Brian put a cross on the wall.

  ‘Good. When an electron is passed through a single slit it behaves like a particle and leaves a mark on the screen. Now, let’s try to confuse Brian. Let’s make a second slit in our barrier. Camilla, could you please take your chair away and stand aside.’

  A girl stood up from further down the line leaving two gaps a couple of metres apart in the row of chairs. Roberto brought Brian back to the start.

  ‘Now, Brian, what are you going to do this time?’

  ‘I’m going to choose which gap to go through,’ Brian said, and walked through the other gap. Some of the students were shaking their heads.

  ‘Is that what happens?’ Roberto asked.

  ‘No,’ Leo heard himself say, ‘when there are two slits the electron goes through both of them at the same time because . . .’

  ‘Stop there,’ Roberto interrupted. ‘Brian, can you do that?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Can a particle do that?’

  ‘No,’ Brian said.

  ‘What can go through two holes at once?’

  ‘A wave,’ Camilla offered.

  ‘Exactly, just like at sea, the same wave can pass through two gaps in a sandbank. So let’s see what that looks like. If you could all come and stand with Brian. Now you are a wave. Please walk through the gaps.’

  All eleven of them approached the chair barrier in a line like a wave, and one by one passed through the two gaps and fanned out again to reach the other wall.

  ‘So, my friends, when there are two slits, the electron seems to behave like a wave, and what we see on the screen on the other side is a classic wave interference pattern. Please bring your chairs into a circle . . . let’s sit down.’ When they were all gathered, Roberto grinned. ‘So what is the question on every physicist’s lips?’

  ‘Is an electron a particle or a wave?’ a lanky girl with plaits chimed in.

  ‘Exactly, and the answer is it depends how you look at it. The observer’s choice of whether to use one or two slits affects the result. What we learn is that the scientist is as important a part of this experiment as the electron, and that the scientist and the electron are in fact connected. This experiment is the cornerstone of the holistic universe theory.’

  ‘But how can something be a wave one day and a particle the next? Just because you make a dog walk through a catflap it doesn’t turn it into a cat,’ Leo protested.

  ‘It does with electrons. They are strange little things, terribly irrational, and we’re full to the brim with them.’ Roberto pondered. ‘Maybe that’s why we’re so emotional.’

  ‘Yes, but a rock is full of them too, and a rock isn’t emotional,’ Brian said.

  ‘How do you know?’ Roberto retorted.

  There was a silence whilst the students stretched their brains around the concept of emotional rocks. Roberto never took anything for granted.

  Something was troubling Leo. ‘What happens to the electron when no one is watching; is it a wave or a particle?’

  ‘No one really knows, we can only say that the electron lives in the realm of possibility.’

  So was every experiment subjective? Leo wondered what was the point of his own research. Did the behaviour of animals in captivity have any bearing on reality? What were those ants doing when no one was looking? What was Hannah doing when no one was looking? She always performed for her public, but what dark emotions bubbled up from her soul when she lay alone in her bed?

  ‘Dr Panconesi,’ Camilla asked, ‘does this mean we could change the world simply by looking at it differently?’

  Or by walking differently, Leo thought, remembering how uplifted he had felt when he copied Eleni’s gait the very first evening he met her.

  ‘It’s a sweet idea,’ Roberto responded. ‘Normally these things apply only at the quantum level, but why not use the notion to change the world? Yes, yes, I like it, Camilla. Let’s try it, let’s all do a little thought experiment. Tomorrow we will change our world simply by looking at it differently. Let us imagine that this earth is actually heaven; that there is nothing more beautiful than the rolling hills, the rushing streams and the drifting clouds; that this planet, where water drops on to our heads and food grows beneath our feet is the ultimate paradise; that those who leave their bodies merely pass on to a higher level and enter into the fabric of this heaven to provide an infinity of pleasures, textures and vistas; that the dead literally turn into soil, flowers, air and animals.’ Roberto was now pacing the
room, visibly excited by where his thoughts were leading.

  ‘What if we changed the story that has been peddled to us over thousands of years by those religions who want to control us, that this life is merely a stepping stone to something better or something worse, and that we can only achieve the better by passing through the doors of their institutions and following their rules? What if we trash this arcane story which has caused so much suffering and hostility, and accept that we have already arrived in heaven and that there is nothing more gorgeous than here and now? Oh yes, I like it, Camilla, let’s change the world together.’ Camilla blushed.

  Leo walked home Eleni-style. He bounced along the pavement and imagined himself in heaven. And for the briefest of moments the world changed for Leo.

  It had been an uneventful fortnight since the Formica rufa males had hatched; Leo was observing them despondently as they flitted around their cage. Queen Eleni was nibbling at some cereal when all of a sudden a male landed beside her. She stopped eating, turned to the male and sniffed him out. She took off and the male followed. Leo turned the video camera on in slow-motion mode. Queen Eleni had sniffed out a lot of ants, and he had already filmed a dozen rejections, so he was surprised when the two ants engaged in an aerial flirtation. The male latched on to Eleni’s back and they began to mate.

  ‘Quick, quick, everyone. Look at this,’ Leo called out, jumping up from his chair. The other researchers and lab assistants gathered round. A ripple of excitement circled the group. Queen Eleni soared upwards with her charge hanging on determinedly. They alighted for a moment on the roof of the cage in a blatant display of exhibitionism. Five smiling faces stared at them. Then off they went again, wheeling around in a magnificent dance. A few seconds later it was all over. There was a great cheer and a lot of handshaking and hugging. The research group were all delighted that a new colony was likely the following year. No one noticed that in the commotion Queen Bess had died, eighteen months short of the world record.

  The researchers left their stations and piled into the pub to celebrate. Among them was a young lab assistant called Amelia who secretly harboured a crush on Leo. Amelia was everything that Eleni wasn’t: tall, blonde, slim and of English aristocratic stock. He had not been especially polite to her, if anything the contrary was true. But she perceived in the emptiness of his exchanges an emotional volatility that she found sexy. His aloofness was darkly attractive, for it gave the illusion of an unattainable yet tantalizingly complex soul. A soul that would have to be excavated with painstaking care, like ancient treasure lost in a sea wreck. For weeks she had fantasized how this man would ravage her silently and distantly, and as she closed in on him at the bar she knew that her time was now or never. She casually ordered herself a drink.

  ‘Will you join me? You’re almost empty.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Leo replied, ‘a glass of red wine.’

  They chatted long after the others had left. Leo exhibited his new-found weakness for alcohol and drank more than he should, and Amelia matched him glass for glass. And with the flow of alcohol Amelia’s courage grew as Leo’s resistance ebbed. She was attractive for God’s sake, easy to be with. Eleni was dead. Dead. How long could she hold him in this emotional limbo? Suddenly he was desperate to break free of her, desperate for affection, desperate for Amelia. He urgently wanted to feel a woman’s skin against his own, lose himself in passion, break away from the sterility of grief. She leant forward tentatively to kiss him and was shocked when he responded like a starving man to sustenance. One kiss unleashed a whirlwind of desire and pent-up frustration. He took her in his arms and embraced her deeply. He soared upwards, light and free. The dark walls of the pub fell away and he was gliding through sweet-scented pastures. He slipped his hand around her waist, under her camisole, and explored the gentle undulation across the small of her back. Her skin was as warm and smooth as a sun-drenched boulder rounded by the caress of wind and sea for a thousand years. She could feel the hunger in his fingers and managed to hold him off until she could drag him out of the door on to the street where she managed to hail a taxi. Before long they tumbled into her flat and made reckless love.

  They lay breathless on the bed, Leo mistakenly building a love from a night’s passion, Amelia delighted that for once a fantasy had lived up to expectations. If a relationship could be mapped in the warm post-coital glow of first love-making their future would have looked rosy. As their racing pulses began to settle, Leo felt compelled to speak. He wanted to spread his heart like strawberry jam at her feet so she might accept him, battered soul and all, for who he really was. So he related the entire story of Eleni: from their first meeting, to the moment they knew they were in love, from their adventures in Latin America, to the tumult of her death and the dreadful scenes at her funeral.

  Amelia was appalled – not at the events he described – but rather by the way Leo was unravelling before her very eyes, denuding himself of mystery. When at last he finished she sighed heavily; a sigh that contained all the sadness and regret of a disillusioned woman. A sigh that told Leo immediately that their fleeting relationship was over.

  His dalliance with Amelia left him drained of hope. He berated himself for falling for her so quickly and he was angry with her for judging his honesty so harshly. But when he replayed the events of that evening he realized that he had, in effect, conjured up a corpse and slapped it down in front of her. What was she supposed to think? The stench of Eleni was all over him. He was soiled goods. Hannah was right: he was intense – unbearably so. But worse than that, he had proved himself a fool. Why couldn’t he take things for what they were? The daily sight of Amelia wandering around the laboratory pretending nothing had happened only compounded his feelings of self-pity and regret. One day he caught her shaking her head to herself and fancied she was thinking about him. That day Leo retreated into himself like a butterfly that takes one look at the miserable world into which it has emerged and decides to crawl back inside its chrysalis.

  He brought home the video of Queen Eleni’s spectacular aerial mating so that he could make his notes at home and escape Amelia’s disappointed gaze. He watched it over and over again to the music of Puccini, which, coupled with slow motion, had the effect of transforming the act into ballet. The unselfconscious purity with which these two little creatures engaged with each other resonated inside him. It was as if for that brief instant they were immortal, hovering in the void that Roberto described, touching on infinity, masters of their senses, home at last in Eden. These ants were in paradise and Leo recognized it, for he had been there himself with Eleni in rare moments when love had freed them from self-consciousness and they had transcended their own sense of mortality.

  As he was filing his video at the Institute of Zoology he wondered if he might find more images that captured that moment of freedom – which somehow encapsulated his relationship with Eleni – and happened across a tape entitled Wild Love. He took it to the viewing section and put it on. There before him were two small sea horses copulating. The video must have been part of a series on the mating habits of animals. Sea horses were followed by hyenas, salamanders, elephants and more. As he watched this great and beautiful parade of animals fornicating the universe into existence he was overcome by a feeling of humility. He began to recognize his friends in those coupling reptiles and mammals. The males who have six partners, the females who bite their partner’s head off after sex, the ones who travel thousands of miles to mate, the ones who develop elaborate courtship practices, the ones who show off like peacocks, and the ones who stay with the same partner for ever.

  It was the beginning of a new obsession. At last he had found something to fill the pages of his notebook. He jotted down descriptions of unusual mating practices and interspersed them with photographs that he bought or ripped out of books. Soon these animal stories were joined by quotations, poems and real-life love stories that he came across in magazines. Anything was worthy of entry if it triggered the intangible aroma of Eleni. T
he notebook became his best friend and confidant.

  By December Hannah was back in his life. She had received a distressed phone call from Charlie about Leo. He was disturbed by Leo’s behaviour; he was becoming increasingly reclusive. He spent all his time watching wildlife videos and reading romantic magazines. In autumn he had stood under trees trying to catch the leaves as they fell, believing that if he caught one before it touched the ground he had saved a soul. On one occasion Charlie had heard Leo speaking to himself in his bedroom and when Charlie had peeped through the crack in the door he had seen him standing on a chair talking to a fly on the ceiling and calling it Eleni. Otherwise Leo hardly said a word and never helped out around the flat. It had been eight months and Charlie was alarmed that Leo had made no effort to find a place to live. ‘I want him out, Hannah,’ Charlie concluded guiltily, ‘but I don’t know how to tell him.’

  21

  HANNAH’S RETURN WAS DRAMATIC. SHE STORMED INTO Charlie’s flat uninvited, took hold of Leo’s arm and dragged him to the door.

  ‘We’re going out, you miserable git. There’s a Christmas party on. Oh, and by the way when are you going to move out and get your own place? Charlie has had enough of your self-indulgent moping. It’s about time you stopped feeling sorry for yourself and got a life.’

  ‘He hasn’t said anything to me.’

  ‘No, but he has to me. He thought you’d have made some effort to find somewhere by now. Take a jacket, it’s raining outside.’

  Leo grabbed his green raincoat and was pushed out of the door. ‘Why are you being so horrible to me?’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Leo, you wanted me to be more honest, so I am. Don’t tell me you don’t like it. And while I’m at it, you know that girl Amelia you slept with? I met her and I thought she was a posh tart.’

  ‘She is. You sound jealous?’ he teased, but immediately regretted saying it.

  ‘Oh my God, jealous! I am beside myself. I so wanted to be in her knickers listening to you pontificate about your favourite subject.’