“Do we have to decide the fate of civilization?” she said, kidding.
“I don’t know if we have time for that. God, I missed you,” he said, hugging her. “I need a scintillation counter to keep track of you. You’re flitting and flashing around like a firefly.”
“Isn’t that their courtship method?”
“You tell me.”
She shifted her purse from one shoulder to the other, and examined the concrete surface at her feet. “I’m sorry if I caused you to worry,” she said. “I was in over my head—so to speak.”
They moved away from the sculpture into the shade of some trees.
“Hey, look at me,” he said, turning her face toward his. “Tell me, are you going to the University of Chicago? I heard you might quit your job and come up here to go to school.”
“Is that what they told you at work?” She laughed. “It’s a tough school to get into.”
“But you’re smart enough,” he said, caressing her face.
Suddenly she burst into tears. Uncertain what to do, he wrapped his arms around her and was murmuring, “Hey, what’s the matter?”
“I’ve had a hard time,” she said, putting her head on his shoulder. His T-shirt soaked up her tears. “This has been a hard trip.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, nobody died or anything. I’m just stressed—family stuff, you know.”
“Well, I’m here, I’ll take care of you. We’ll make it better.” He felt rather pleased to discover some vulnerability in her. She needed him to lean on. She needed for him to pet her. She sobbed briefly, uttering sentence fragments about the fate of civilization. She had seriously considered his message on the telephone, he thought. He didn’t care about the fate of civilization right now.
“How’s your mom?” she asked, breaking away from his hold.
“Dandy. Infinitely better. No worry. I’m here to take care of you,” he said. “We’ll work it out. I don’t think it ought to take the grand unified theory to get us back together.”
“But we might have to pull a few strings.” She smiled and blew her nose with a tissue she pulled from her pocket.
He stroked her hair. It had grown longer since he saw her last. “I don’t ever want to be away from you again long enough to see that your hair has grown,” he said.
“I’m going to let it grow out,” she said.
“Good. I’d like that. I think I’ll grow a ponytail again,” he said. “You never saw me with a ponytail.”
“That would be swell. We’ll just let our hair grow until there’s some sense in the world,” she said, turning away from Reed.
She was walking across the converging/radiating lines past the sculpture to the sidewalk, and he hastened to catch her.
“Hey, how come you stayed away so long? How’s your sister?”
“She’s O.K. I was worried, but I think she’s back on her feet. Feet? In over my head? Why am I speaking in body parts? Anyway, it’s a long story. I had to go up to see my parents at their cabin in Michigan. Diana’s going to stay with them for the time being. Come on, let me show you around campus.” She clasped his hand, leading him.
As he walked along with Julia past huge gray Gothic masses, he felt overshadowed by his own ignorance. He wondered what it would be like to study astronomy here. He remembered his own college days as a long, drunken party, but he had the impression that the students here were suiting up to run the world.
Looking up at the ancient, worn architecture, Julia pointed out goofy, grotesque gargoyles with their tongues protruding and full-feathered angels in bonnets reading books.
“Aren’t they hilarious?” she said. “They’re keeping an eye on us.”
“Spies,” said Reed.
They laughed together.
She led him to a spookily postmodern brick building with a security entrance. Julia knew how to get inside with a code on a keypad—from an acquaintance, a boyfriend? He wouldn’t ask. The noiseless, sterile white corridors seemed like a futuristic version of a hospital—perhaps an online hospital, Reed thought, where doctors removed gallstones in Oklahoma by remote control from Chicago. Julia paused at a bulletin board, where graduate programs and conferences were posted. A professor of microbiology was lecturing on retrovirus proteolytic processing. And another professor had published a paper on turnip vein-clearing tobamovirus. Along the corridors, Reed saw several white mobile units like miniature labs for weapons of mass destruction. Or perhaps they were only storage carts. Then Reed recognized a yellow radiation-warning sign and an emergency shower for washdowns. The shower was in the hallway, as matter-of-fact as a water fountain. Through a glass pane, he saw a desktop centrifuge in a lab.
“I bet you could dry your underwear really fast in one of those,” Reed said. He made her laugh.
As they ate sandwiches and drank coffee at a campus café, Julia chatted offhandedly about the kinds of courses required for a degree in molecular biology. Around them, students were studying and drinking coffee. A young Asian woman was methodically skimming through piles of papers. The students seemed sloppy, nondescript, like laborers. Reed thought he really should shift course—take up astronomy, carry a backpack, drink latte at coffee bars, get to know some intellectuals.
“I’ll be right back,” Julia said. “I have to go to the restroom.”
“I’ll be here,” he said. She hadn’t touched the other half of her sandwich.
Even though he felt he was in a foreign land, he did possess a great deal of experience—even wisdom, he suddenly thought with confidence—that these younger students around him did not have. His technical expertise counted for something. He listened to a couple of students discussing perturbation theory and bounds for eigenvalues. He couldn’t decide if they were discussing math, physics, or movies. They kept using the word matrix.
“How’s your job going?” Julia asked him when she returned. “Anything happening?”
“Finding out that your job has screwed you is hard to take,” he said. “It’s like coming to the end of your life and realizing you’ve lived in vain.”
“We do live in vain,” she said. “I mean, when you consider the larger picture.”
“I still think I’ve done a good job, and an important job.”
He was surprised when she said, “I know, Reed. You’ve done a great job. I never said you didn’t.”
“If you lived here, would I ever see you?” he asked.
“I told you it’s hard to get into the program.”
“Suppose you did get in.”
She sipped her decaf latte nervously. He thought perhaps he should never have come.
“Do you want another cup of coffee?” he asked.
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t you want your sandwich?”
She shook her head no.
“You’re really serious about going to school, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “You know I want to do something. Even if I just found some kind of gene match in a BLAST search that would apply in some small way—that would be great! I want to at least help in some way.”
“Test tubes and mice?” he said. “I thought you didn’t want to kill anything.”
“No, you can do a lot on computers. Do you remember telling me that quantum mechanics was more like metaphysics than physics? Maybe there is a physics of the imagination. Maybe there’s a physics of the soul.” Her face was brightening now.
“And maybe Alice went through the looking glass,” he said. “Anything is possible. But I’m sure you could figure it out, Miss Superstring. You’re dangling me on a cosmic string.” He grinned widely. “You’ve got me so wound up in strings I thought I was going to disappear into a wormhole and come out the other side of time.”
“What? You don’t get it yet?” She laughed, teasing.
“I’ve got my shorts twisted in a wad over how many quarks in a quart and how many strings in a p-brane. My mind is worn out. I still can’t grasp it. It just seems unbelievab
le.”
“I didn’t say you had to believe it.” She smiled.
He slapped his forehead. “Now you tell me.”
She laughed. “You’re getting me off track. I’m studying microbes and molecules, not quarks and strings. All that was just for fun.”
He nodded and reached for her hand across the table.
“I’m with you,” he said. “If you want to study germs, that’s what you should do.”
“Let’s go sit outside,” she said, drinking the last of her latte.
They deposited their trash into designated black holes. He followed her outside, and they found a bench.
“Come here.” She reached in her purse for her lip gloss and applied it to her lips. “Now I can kiss you better.”
“Is it germicidal?”
“No. But it tastes good.”
“Yes, it does,” he said after sucking her lips. “But you taste better.”
Reed wanted to express all his profoundest regrets and apologies, but he knew that would be inadequate. He just wanted to hold her. He felt a long wail arise in his chest. Letting the wail come out, even halfway, almost silently, was a way of translating his painful desire into the long, sustained pleasure of an ending musical note.
“O.K. Level with me,” Reed said after a moment. “What’s been going on? I know there’s something wrong.”
They were sitting close together, his hand on her leg, and the western sun was glittering through some shade trees, dappling Julia’s complexion. Her mouth started to curl—a grin or a frown? It was a slight frown, he thought.
She said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, Reed.”
“You’re engaged to some other guy.”
“No! Don’t leap to conclusions.”
“You’ve got cancer!”
“Good grief, Reed. Stop leaping.” She laid her warm hand in his lap, sweetly close to his privates.
“What is it, Julia? If you just—”
“I’m pregnant.” She clapped her hand over her mouth as if she had uttered a dirty word.
“Heaven and earth!”
“It’s true.”
Was he grinning? He wasn’t sure. “I’ll be damned,” he said. His heart seemed to be doing some kind of Texas two-step.
“You’re the lucky one,” she said. “The only one.”
He wasn’t sure if she was going to cry or laugh. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
He could feel the blood drain from his head. He was afraid. He felt a hit of aphasia, a moment of self-consciousness that lacked context. On the verge of fading out, he could see himself, stunned, in this moment, unable to grasp who he was or where he was. He could see himself questioning himself. Then he returned.
“How are you going to cure disease if you can’t even keep from getting pregnant? That’s like not using rubber gloves when you’re in the monkey-pox ward.”
“I don’t have monkey pox. I’m pregnant.”
She was irritated, he saw. “I didn’t mean to be sarcastic,” he said. “I’m just stunned. I’m flabbergasted. Whopper-jawed.”
“I really surprised you, didn’t I?”
“Heaven and earth.”
“You said that.”
“What should I say—heavens to Betsy?”
She shifted her legs on the bench and stroked his arm. “I got all your messages, but I was afraid to call back. I had to think it through.”
He gave a low whistle. “How did this happen?”
“The presence of initial conditions—of a high order. Unpredictability,” she said. “One sperm with a hairy tail wins the race. He can wiggle the fastest and he gets to the egg first and bores a hole into it.”
“Aiming,” said Reed, nodding. “What did I tell you?”
“It’s violent!” she protested. “What did I tell you?”
“When did this happen?”
“That morning rush-hour—remember?”
The tender little scene came rushing back. Reed was speechless. His feeling came in waves of mingled breathlessness, glee, horror, giggles, anticipation. Exhilaration and dread. He ran the back of his hand over his eyes. He was frightened, and he was flooded with love. His whole life rushed around him—reconsidered, reconfigured. He was a man reassessing his whole life—let alone the fate of civilization—in light of new information. Atomic Man and Captain Plutonium were just Halloween costumes compared to this.
She was alarmed. “It’s O.K.,” she said, caressing his face soothingly. “You don’t have to feel responsible. I’ll handle it.”
“I imagine you getting an abortion on your lunch hour the day you found out.”
“Do you really think I’d do that without asking you? It hurts me that you’d think that.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a horse’s ass.”
She worried with some strands of hair. “But I haven’t ruled out anything.”
“This will get in your way.”
Reed wanted to ask if she was worried about birth defects, or if some kind of test could tell. Now wasn’t the time to tell her about his exposures.
“Have I ruined your life now?” he asked.
“Don’t talk that way.”
“What about school? All your plans?”
“Shh! Finally it was the fact that you said ‘I love you’ on the phone. I don’t think you ever found that easy to say.”
“But you always knew I loved you.”
“You never really said it.”
“Well, neither did you! I never knew what you felt about me. You were always disappearing.”
Impulsively, he issued promises. “I’ll take care of the baby so you can go to school. We’ll move to Chicago. I’ll take my retirement early.” She didn’t answer. “Or whatever you want to do,” he said. “We’ll join the circus.”
She laughed; together they laughed, like children, at the fix they had gotten themselves into. This was the fourth time in his life a woman had said the words I’m pregnant to him. The first was Carol, in high school. She went to Chicago with her parents and got the abortion. And then Glenda briskly announced first Dalton and then Dana, their children, shortly after each conception, as if they were seeds that had come up in her garden, little to do with him.
Some prematurely yellow leaves were drifting down from some tall ash trees. A bell in a stone tower began to chime. Reed felt a preview of mortality, as if he hadn’t paid attention all his life, until now, to the tolling bell of his heart.
“Why didn’t you call me and tell me?”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“You should have bothered me.”
“I had to think about it.”
He pondered that, and then he faced her squarely. “The thing is, you should have bothered me. And I don’t mean because of my pride, so that I could take charge. It’s so you can have somebody with you. A person can’t do everything alone.”
“I didn’t want to intrude.”
“You wouldn’t have. And maybe all I could do was just be there.”
She nodded.
“I want you with me,” he said. “If you live by yourself, you come home and you’re alone. I talk to Clarence, but he doesn’t give a shit about string theory, and he’s got bad breath. Maybe you can talk to somebody on the phone, or somebody comes over, but whoever it is has his own life and can stick around yours only so long. So you end up online or at some titty bar or god-awful hangout, meeting somebody that makes your skin crawl.”
She pushed her hair from her eyes. “That sounds terrible.”
“I’m not begging, Julia. I’m just saying that if the human race is doomed to die from nuclear mischief, then that’s pretty sad, and the best we can aim for is a giggle and a smooch. How about it?”
She gave a long sigh. “You’re like what you said about those transuranics in the pipes. You’re in my system and I can’t get you out.”
He grinned. “That’s me, Transuranic Man.” He felt hot.
“Do I look strange?” he asked her. “I feel like I’m giving off a weird blue glow.”
She scrutinized him. “The sun is shining on your T-shirt.”
“Wait till you see me in the dark,” he said. “I’m a virtual walking criticality. I’m a criticality in your life.”
“No, you’re not. You’re critical to my life.”
Something about the scene was like the unreality of a movie ending, he thought—the warm, phony wrap-up. He tried to stop himself from seeing through it, from having the cynical suspicion that the walk into the sunset was an unending descent into flames. For a mere speck in space-time, that warm moment that glowed was essential. If you could have one or two in your life, that might be enough, but you had to have at least one before you went cold.
He stood, feeling that they needed to move along.
“Wait,” she said, her fingers twiddling a loose eyelash. “I have something in my eye.” She plucked the eyelash and then examined it closely, as though she was trying to see all the way past the resident microbes and mites on down into the dark, dancing strings that played the cosmic hum, the imaginary music he always heard in the pipes of the Cascade when he was working.
Acknowledgments
Works I consulted include Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West by Len Ackland; The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene; Atoms in the Family by Laura Fermi; A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking; Cell and Molecular Biology by Gerald Karp; Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe by Mark Voit; and The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome.
I am grateful to various individuals for their gracious help in my explorations: Philip Crowley, Marty Curtis, Mark Donham, Kristi Hansen, Kristen Iversen. Thanks to Judy Krug, my enthusiastic tour guide in Chicago; to Suketu Bhavsar for his thrilling and poetic astronomy lectures; to Dale Bauer for the use of her Twinkie theory; and to Joe Gorline for his inspiration, generosity, and wit.
And I owe my personal thanks to Dottie, Roger, Sharon, and Sam.
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