Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  There was a moment’s silence during which Popi’s husband took the opportunity to make a trip to the kitchen; so far he had added little to the conversation besides his hearty smile, for he was not confident of his English, which the others were speaking in deference to Peter, who did not speak a word of Greek. Meanwhile Peter savored a morsel of marinated octopus and wondered just when Minakis had promised to produce him.

  “Two years ago,” Peter said, after pausing to swallow, “I would have had to decline your invitation. I was as much a logical positivist as Werner Heisenberg, who was suspicious of the word ‘reality.’”

  “Was he really?” Gorgopoulou asked, amused.

  “Because, said Heisenberg, while such words lend themselves to sentences that produce pictures in our imagination—he used the example, ‘Besides our world there exists another world, with which any connection is impossible’—such sentences have no consequences and therefore no content at all.”

  “But surely reality is what we can see and hear and feel,” said the ephor. “Our experience. Our sense impressions.”

  “Most of us can agree on that,” Peter said, “but if that were all we had to go on, we wouldn’t know much about the world. We continually make assumptions, we fall into habits, we build little rational constructs on top of our sense impressions. I’ve seen the sun come up most days of my life, unless it is cloudy, so early on I concluded that the sun really does come up every day whether I see it or not. And I can think of good reasons why it should do so. And that becomes part of reality.”

  “A modest assumption,” said the ephor.

  “Not so modest. The realm of sense impressions plus the rational constructions we base upon them extends a long way, all the way from distant quasars down to the smallest virus. But try to look at anything much smaller…” Peter shrugged and speared another fragment of octopus tentacle with his fork.

  “Please don’t keep us in suspense,” Anne-Marie said dryly, twisting her wineglass between her fingers.

  “When we try to look inside atoms,” Peter said, “not only can we not see what’s going on, we cannot even construct a coherent picture of what’s going on.”

  “If you will forgive me, Peter,” Minakis said, turning to the others. “He means that we can construct several pictures—that light and matter are waves, for example, or that light and matter are particles—but that all these pictures are inadequate. What’s left to us is the bare mathematics of quantum theory.”

  “As you’ve said before, Manolis”—Popi Gorgopoulou broke in enthusiastically—“and according to quantum theory, the microworld doesn’t really exist?”

  “More precisely,” Minakis suggested, “according to the prevailing interpretation of quantum mechanics, the question of whether the microworld has an independent existence is meaningless.”

  “Yes, but do you believe that?” she asked. “You, Peter. Do you really believe there are two worlds, one that doesn’t exist and one that does?”

  Peter found Minakis looking at him across the table with an expression of wolfish amusement. “I used to,” he said. “No more. Quantum theory works, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.”

  “Then you believe in one world,” said the ephor. “One really real world.”

  For a moment, no one said anything. Finally Peter nodded. “I’d like to.”

  Anne-Marie said, “Note the conviction.”

  Minakis said to Gorgopoulou, “Whatever the really real world is like, my friend, it is not what you might imagine.”

  “And you, Manolis?” she asked. “Can you imagine it?”

  “I can imagine the real world.” Minakis’s smile was enigmatic. “Alas, in the time available to us tonight, I could not begin to describe it to you.”

  After dinner they took up their glasses of sweet mavrodaphni and moved away from the table. The ephor and her husband took Anne-Marie to see the Cycladic sculptures whose fragments were displayed in the hall of the adjacent museum; speaking Greek, kyrios Gorgopoulos was not at all reticent.

  Meanwhile Peter followed Minakis onto the stone terrace that overlooked the ruin field of Apollo’s sanctuary. The fat sun was wobbling toward the horizon across the narrow strait between Delos and its neighbor island Renia, backlighting the marble rubble with orange light.

  “Professor Minakis, people speak highly of you, but I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your work.” Talking physics, Peter tended to bluntness. “Tell me more about this real world you imagine but can’t describe.”

  Minakis turned away from the view of the sunset. “Are you familiar with John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Some years ago Cramer followed up Feynman’s and Wheeler’s proposal that the self-energy of the electron can be eliminated if one assumes the existence of advanced-wave solutions to Schrödinger’s equation for electromagnetic waves.”

  “Which proved to be a red herring.”

  “I’d prefer to call it a useful mistake, given the subsequent course of cosmology and quantum electrodynamics.”

  Peter shrugged.

  Minakis leaned closer, his back to the spectacle of the setting sun. “Also possibly useful, I think, for removing the absurdities of quantum mechanics generally. Cramer takes Feynman and Wheeler several steps further, you see; he develops the notion of an exchange, or transaction, between what he calls ‘offer’ waves—analogous to the wave function describing any quantum event—and ‘confirmation’ waves, which are emitted backward in time by the absorber of the consequences of the event.”

  Peter cocked his head quizzically. “That makes it sound as if every quantum event is a negotiation between the past and the future—between a cause and its effect.” In full sunlight Peter’s skepticism was plain.

  “Although Cramer’s scheme is only an interpretation,” Minakis replied, his shadowed expression unreadable, “in my view it is much more sensible than the Copenhagen interpretation and at least as logical as the many-worlds interpretation. But Cramer assumes it can’t be tested…that it makes no predictions which differ from those of standard quantum mechanics.”

  “You disagree?”

  “Theory is indispensable, of course, but I was always one of those chaps who are happiest getting their hands dirty in the laboratory,” Minakis said. “Read Cramer. I’ll give you his papers. Then we can talk.”

  Popi Gorgopoulou came onto the terrace, leading Anne-Marie by the hand. “Time to go, you two, while there’s light to see by.”

  Peter saw his wife radiant in the orange light, her pale eyes afire, her soft clothes wrapping her form in the evening breeze like a statue of Victory. He felt a rush of desire, having nothing whatever to do with the abstract matters he had been discussing a moment before.

  But her pale gaze was fixed on the man behind him. On Minakis.

  By the time the ephor’s launch drew alongside the stone quay in Mykonos harbor, the stars were out overhead and the bars and discos were warming up, their big speakers throbbing. The quayside was filling with boisterous tourists; a few feet away a party of tanned young Scandinavians piled out of a taxi, laughing, and Minakis commandeered the cab.

  Peter and Anne-Marie rode with him to the sprawling villa on the hill above the town that housed the Delos II conference. Minakis rode in front and paid the fare efficiently before Peter could muster even a feeble protest; the three of them parted at the gate with promises to find one another tomorrow.

  Peter led Anne-Marie through the olive-planted courtyards along paths dimly lit with low fixtures. It would have been a perfectly quiet night except for the attenuated revelry that floated up from the town below. He showed her into the guesthouse they’d been assigned by the conference organizers and flipped the switch that turned on the bedside lights.

  It was not much bigger than a motel room, just a bedroom plus a WC with shower, but pleasantly furnished in varnished pine and rough cotton, with oil sketches of Byzantine churche
s and blue seas hanging on the whitewashed walls. The villa staff had already moved Anne-Marie’s single bag into the closet.

  “A nice place,” she said, “to be alone with you.”

  “It looks a lot better tonight than it did last night.”

  She came lightly into his arms, loosening her knees and pressing the length of her body against his. They had never been alone through the long afternoon and evening; every look he’d had of her had fed his desire, even when she was mocking him. As she kissed him hungrily, making little sounds of want, she pulled his shirt free of his trousers and insinuated her hands, impatiently undoing the buttons from his throat to his belly. His long-fingered hands supported her bottom as she leaned back, opening his shirt, smiling at what she could see of his spare, muscular body in the warm lamplight, then pulling her own cotton T-shirt over her head—shaking out her dark fragrant hair—pressing her cool bare breasts against his smooth chest and kissing him again, probing his mouth with her tongue, working at his belt buckle while he caught the elastic bands of her skirt and panties in his thumbs and pushed them down over her flaring hips.

  They stumbled over their clothes onto the bed, snorting with muffled laughter, their mouths still pressed together. She drew her knees up under his arms and clasped his sides with her thighs while her hands found his hard buttocks, and he found her center.

  Time was confused; they lost the sense of what was supposed to come before what, and for a burning interval their laughter and need and exultation were scrambled. Then she groaned and arched, and he pulsed. Within a few falling seconds time reasserted itself—

  —and they heard the ticking of Peter’s travel clock on the table under the lamp.

  “I missed you,” he said, his nose and forehead against hers, peering into her eyes that, this close, were one pale eye.

  “I could tell,” she said. “Could you tell I missed you?”

  He chuckled. “I got that feeling, yes.” He gently disengaged and sat up beside her. “Tonight’s a bonus. I thought I would never have you alone again.”

  Her fingernails meandered across his belly, but she said nothing.

  “Tell me about Geneva. What was so urgent about what your brother had to tell you?”

  “Not as exciting as he made it sound. Turns out he had an assignment for me—he’d pitched a story to the editor of a Swiss business magazine.”

  “Let me guess. Professor Minakis.”

  She pushed her face into his side, laughing, blowing hot bubbles against his skin.

  He laughed too, but not so freely. “This was supposed to be a vacation. Kids and all. You’re working, Jennifer’s with your mom—not much left of that scheme.”

  Anne-Marie looked up. “You’re working too. I should be done by the time you are.”

  “By tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I’ll interview him, make a few pictures…the two of you together, if you’ll let me. He seems quite taken with you.”

  “You seem quite taken with him,” Peter said quietly.

  She turned away, rising naked from the bed. She sought something to cover herself in her garment bag hanging from the closet rail, while she tried hard to calm her temper.

  The first time they’d met they were in a temper, challenging each other. She was married to Charlie but had left him alone with Carlos, just long enough for a photographic assignment to cover the dedication of the giant TERAC accelerator in Hawaii. She’d been drawn by the sound of Bach on the piano, a complex and unmelodic piece Peter was playing in the midst of a big party of physicists and their spouses and hangers-on—a piece her father had performed to critical raves. Peter wasn’t as good as her father, of course, but for an amateur he was very good. She’d fallen in love with him that night, and he with her, but both were wary of their feelings, and after a few turbulent days they had separated. Months passed between the first heat of their romance and the reemergence of what they could trust as love, months during which Anne-Marie left Charlie forever, and Jennifer was born; their emotions were still on shaky ground and could crumble beneath them without warning.

  “I’m sorry, it was a stupid thing for me to say,” Peter said from the bed, watching as she pulled a black silk kimono over her nakedness. “But sometimes I wonder if I know who you are.”

  She shook her head and turned away so that he could not see her tears. “I’m sorry to hear that. Don’t expect me to spell it out for you.” She sounded angry, even to herself. She hated sounding that way. The anger she felt wasn’t against Peter; it was her defense against despair.

  4

  Early the next morning Minakis left the villa and walked down the rocky slope overlooking the harbor, toward Mykonos town below. Doves had softly announced the coming day, but already the light was hard, reflecting heat from the shimmering surface of the water. At this hour, with the shops closed and most tourists still in their beds—only an occasional German drinking his breakfast beer—the overcrowded town could have passed for the pleasant village it had been half a century ago.

  He walked through the narrow streets to a little square by the sea, where a coffeehouse was open early for the convenience of fishermen, and sat at a table under a pungent eucalyptus. A sleepy waiter brought him boiled coffee and a slice of galaktobureko.

  Minakis pulled a string of amber worry beads from his jacket pocket and began absently clicking them through the fingers of his left hand. The view from his table was a pretty cliché: the three whitewashed windmills on the promontory were for snapshots, not for grinding grain, and the houses along the seawall with their wooden, Turkish-style second-floor balconies overhanging the waves housed boutiques, not families. But small boats with saints’ names painted on their bows—Ayios Nikolaos, Ayia Varvara—still hauled out on the strip of yellow sand, and fishermen still went out lantern-fishing on calm nights. Last night, coming across the strait from Delos when the sky was tinged with the smoky afterglow of sunset and the water was as smooth as oil, the fishing lanterns were a floating galaxy, which their launch cleaved like a slow rocket.

  At dawn the fishermen carried their catches to market, then spread their purple nets to dry on the quays and squatted beside them, sewing up the tears. On the beach a few feet in front of Minakis a gang of dark-skinned fishermen who could have been medieval pirates were bent over their nets, wielding spikelike needles and purple polyester thread.

  As he sat clicking his worry beads, Minakis contemplated the progress of his own fishing expedition. Yesterday, on Delos, his hopes had been confirmed: Peter hadn’t once spoken of observations or measurements, only of reality; he was on the verge of abandoning quantum conservatism for a much older conservatism. It remained to convince Peter that his search was noble but that he was hopelessly lost, that only Minakis could lead him out of the dark wood of quantum field theory.

  Peter was not the only challenge, however. Until the moment of his first sight of Anne-Marie, while she was still a distant figure descending the sacred hill of Delos, he’d begun to think that his scheme to lure her and her husband to Crete was working after all.

  Richard had assured him that Anne-Marie’s brother had practically salivated at the photographs of the Minoan artifacts “rumored” to be in Minakis’s possession—that Alain had leaped at the hint that his sister was just the person to do his dirty work for him. Minakis had not fretted about the cool cynicism of entangling Anne-Marie in his affairs just to bind her husband more closely. But until yesterday, when the first distant sight of her had raised the hairs on his neck…

  His banter with her had been a precarious performance. Something about her—he could not imagine what—made him feel as if he were in the presence of the uncanny.

  He sipped his bitter coffee, and when he looked up, he saw Anne-Marie walking toward him across the little square from the direction of the sea, her dark hair stirring about her face, her battered camera hanging by its strap from her shoulder. For a moment he went cold, as if she had caught him in some sacrilegious act. “An
ne-Marie,” he called. He stood up and slipped his worry beads into his pocket. “Good morning.”

  She stopped and shaded her eyes against the direct sunlight. “Is this place open? Can I get something to eat?”

  “Of course.” He waved at the waiter, who was already hurrying toward them, less sleepy now. “Tell me what you’d like.”

  Anne-Marie turned to the waiter impatiently. “Ena galaktobureko, parakalo, kai ena kafes Ellenikon, metrio, kai ena potiri nero, poli krio.”

  “Malista, kyria.” The waiter bobbed his head and hurried away, and Anne-Marie sat down, smoothing her blue denim skirt over her brown legs.

  “Pardon my presumption,” Minakis said. “I forgot that you don’t need an interpreter.”

  She smiled crookedly. “I make allowances for Greek males.”

  He studied her with circumspect pleasure. Her sandaled feet were powdered with beach sand, and her white cotton blouse was unbuttoned to the curve of her tanned breasts. A beautiful and decisive woman, he thought, who does not doubt the reality of the world she sees through those pale, fierce eyes. How deeply does she see into it?

  She returned his impertinent gaze and said nothing.

  “If I may ask,” he said. “The breakfast at the villa is very good, very eclectic.”

  “Is that meant as a recommendation?”

  “I mean you could have gotten anything you wanted there.”

  “You’re here, not there. Assume my reasons are like yours.”

  Clearly he didn’t think they were, and presently she admitted as much.

  “No, not like yours. I followed you.” She brought her camera up to the level of her chest and levered it to the next frame.