The bus jounced off again, through the midnight bush.
Although there were now at least ninety passengers, a third of them in the aisle, conversation had ceased; most were dozing or staring numbly into the Transvaal wastes. One man had affixed a large sponge, or rectangle of foam rubber, to the seat back in front of him, lowered his forehead to its padding, and fallen asleep. Perhaps he was also snoring lightly; the bus’s unceasing rattle made it hard to tell.
Damn Kiewit, anyway. With just half the money they’d realize from selling Huilbloom (as their great-grandparents had dubbed the family farm), they could emigrate to Australia or Texas and begin life anew, in a place free of the threat of Armageddon.
Suddenly, Myburgh noticed that Thubana had taken a book from a coat pocket and begun to read it with a penlight balanced over his ear and aimed downward. Clever. Or semiclever. Thubana probably hoped Myburgh would ask what he was reading. Africans sometimes liked to impress whites with a show of educability, a demonstration of their debatable love of learning.
Well, the clap on that. If Thubana was reading something, it was probably ANC or PAC propaganda or a book of trumped-up stories about oppression in the townships or an old copy of Drum, and he’d be damned if he’d rise to the kaffir’s bait. Let him pretend to read all the way to Marabastad.
Thubana spoiled this plan by lifting the book off his lap and holding it up so that Myburgh could see its cover—including title and whimsical three-color illustration.
SUPERSTRINGS, said the yellow caps above the illustration. And below the title, in more compact upper- and lower-case letters, A Theory of Everything? The book was in English, a smooth-skinned paperback, already visibly creased and battered. Myburgh recoiled from it as if from a contraband AK-47.
“Have you read this yet, sir?”
“What are superstrings?” Myburgh said. “Ordinary strings with impossible ambitions?” Perhaps this subtle insult would sink into the kaffir’s pretentious brain, stymieing further talk.
“No, sir. It’s physics, Mr. Myburgh. Very deep, fundamental physics. It answers deep questions about how the universe is, and why, and what we may expect of it.”
“So you’re a physicist, Mr. Thubana?”
“No, sir. I’m a—”
“Every day, you do physics at the university, writing equations with which to solve colossal mysteries.”
“Nowadays, Mr. Myburgh, I’m a roofer. At a housing site west of the city. After number 496, I must catch another bus.”
“A roofer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then where did you get this book?” Myburgh rapped it with his knuckles. “And what makes you think you can understand it?”
“I understand it,” Thubana said mildly. “Under a different set of circumstances, maybe I would be a physicist.”
“And if I weren’t an Afrikaner,” Myburgh said, “perhaps I’d be traveling on the next Soviet Mars flight.”
Thubana explained that his immediate boss, an Englishman named Godfrey, had given him the book—as well as the upscale trenchcoat— and that he had been reading and thinking hard about superstrings for over a month now.
“All right, then,” Myburgh said. “Tell me what you know.”
“Superstring theory,” Thubana said, taking Myburgh at his word, “holds that the building blocks of the universe are not atoms, but tiny strings—tiny strings that twitch and twitch.” To illustrate their twitching, Thubana repeatedly crooked a finger.
“Why? To what end?” Myburgh asked only because it was more amusing than staring out the window.
“I don’t know, exactly. But the twitching generates matter and energy at the submicroscopic Planck scale. It does this throughout the entire cosmos.”
These terms and explanations were unintelligible to Myburgh, as hard to untangle, as indigestible, as a platter of cold spaghetti. “What complete rot. You’d do better to have Mr. Godfrey give you books on bricklaying, tilework, vehicle repair. It’s criminal he’s encouraging you in this… this nonsense.”
“Because my mind is too dim?”
“Because it’s useless, young man. Because it’s castle-in-the-air elitism.”
“No, Mr. Myburgh. It isn’t. It’s elegant physics. If it’s open to attack, it’s only on the grounds that experiments haven’t yet been able to back it up. Also, the mathematics of the theory require that one suppose ten rather than four dimensions—nine of space and one of time.”
Myburgh snorted. He couldn’t believe that Thubana had fallen under the spell of such stuff.
“Listen, sir. Six of the spatial dimensions must be curled up—’compactified,” my book says—into a geometrical object called the ‘Calabi-Yau manifold.” Otherwise, you see, the mathematics of superstring theory, and its ability to make predictions about the world we live in, fall apart.”
“You’re giving yourself to utter claptrap, Mr. Thubana. Does it make you feel superior to”—nodding at the other riders on Grim Boy’s Toe— “your sleepy comrades?”
Thubana turned so that the penlight over his ear shone directly into Myburgh’s eyes. “It makes me sorry, sir. And—forgive me for saying so— angry. Quite angry.”
“At yourself, I hope,” Myburgh muttered, turning his face to the window. Outside, the landscape was graying, quivering like a cloudy aspic in a huge inverted bowl.
Thubana, to Myburgh’s surprise, dropped one hand to his knee, his grip like a lobster’s claw.
“Let go, kaffir,” Myburgh whispered. He took the penlight from behind Thubana’s ear and dropped it to the floor.
Thubana released him and picked up the penlight; then he leaned into Myburgh as if they were old chums at a sporting event. But when he turned the penlight on again, no beam shot forth. “That’s all right,” Thubana hissed. “Darkness is exactly what you want for us, isn’t it?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Okay. No need for light. I’m not an unintelligent man, and I remember my reading. All of it.”
He’s crazy, thought Myburgh. A woolhead twice over.
“A superstring expert at Princeton in America—a theorist named Edward Witten—said something profound, sir. He said, “To have the energy to face a difficult problem day after day, one needs the attitude that victory is just around the corner. But probably it isn’t.” Light isn’t necessary to remember that. I can remember it just as well in the dark.”
“Leave me alone.” Myburgh hated the weakness in his voice. It sounded as if he were whistling in Thubana’s shadow.
“ “The attitude,” “ Thubana grimly repeated, “ ‘that victory is just around the corner. But probably it isn’t.” “
* * * *
Suddenly, from the vicinity of the center aisle, a barrage of martial music poured forth. This music—drums, bells, trumpets—was so loud that it easily overpowered the continuous rattling of the Putco vehicle. Everyone noticed. Men and women, a moment past slumped and dozing, straightened and looked around: the man who’d rested his forehead on a sponge, the newspaper yogis, a woman who’d scrolled her turtleneck up over her eyes. Everyone—every dead-to-the-world-passenger—was instantly resurrected.
Then the music ceased, and a nasal English-speaking voice, made both tinny and scratchy by atmospheric conditions, said, “This is Radio Freedom, broadcasting to our comrades in Azania from a site we are not at liberty to divulge.”
“Mpandhlani!” cried someone far to the rear. “Mpandhlani, for God’s sake, close your mouth!”
“Tonight, we address the issue of education. The policies of the apartheid regime not only deny our people their inalienable rights but also access to universal education. Therefore, hundreds of thousands have left the country just to seek education abroad. The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, in order to cater for the students and refugees, established the department of education and manpower training so that—”
“Your hat, Mpandhlani! Put it on!”
“Close your mouth! Have pity! Close it!”
Myburgh was at a loss. First the music, then the pontifical radio voice, and finally the shouts of various passengers that the man called Mpandhlani do something—shouts that seemed to have no relation to these other events. Looking past Thubana, Myburgh saw that the bald passenger, crumpled in the lotus position not far from Thubana’s aisle-side knee, had his eyes closed and his mouth wide open. Nothing bizarre about that. The poor fellow was trying to sleep. In fact, he was succeeding in the effort, the only wretch aboard number 496 managing to do so.
And then Myburgh realized that the voice of the announcer on Radio Freedom was issuing from the toothless cavity of Mpandhlani’s mouth: “… conscious rejection of the indoctrinated inferiority complex that sparked the Soweto uprising of 1976 when our students said no to the imposition of the oppressor’s language. This fight developed into a rejection of an entire system—’Bantu education’—deliberately designed to keep our people in perpetual subjugation. Therefore, we must enforce a perpetual rainy Monday on every school using these ‘techniques of control’ and make ourselves—”
Thubana leaned out into the aisle, put his fist under the bald man’s chin, and gently closed his mouth. The harangue from the PAC spokesman continued, but mutedly, as if leaking out of Mpandhlani’s earholes and nostrils. Mpandhlani woke up and looked at Thubana in groggy bewilderment.
“What’s happening, Mordecai?” His words bled into the report on Radio Freedom like a spooky sort of overdubbing. “Oh no,” he said, pressing the palms of his hands to his temples. He glanced apologetically at several of the other passengers. “Forgive me, my friends. Please, everybody, forgive.”
“It’s okay,” Thubana told him. “Put on your cap.” He took the volleyball-half from Mpandhlani and crammed it down on his naked and— Myburgh finally saw—grotesquely stitched-up pate. There was silence again, a vacuum quickly filled by the incessant rattling of Grim Boy’s Toe. Riders fore and aft relapsed into self-protective comas, as if, having survived a crisis, they needed to recuperate. Myburgh felt even more isolated than before.
“Mr. Thubana, I don’t understand.”
“Perhaps your mind is too dim. —Forgive me. It’s just that Mpandhlani—his real name is Winston Skosana—has a metal plate in his head. Sometimes, he picks up radio broadcasts, usually illegal ones from Zambia or Botswana. This is dangerous, especially when he’s on a loading platform at the rusks factory. That volleyball—he found it in a KwaNdebele midden—saves him from embarrassment. A matter of physics.”
“Dunderheaded physics, surely.”
“No, Mr. Myburgh. It works.”
“It’s nonsense. It’s impossible.”
Thubana shrugged. He nodded at Mpandhlani—Winston Skosana— who’d already dozed off again.
“Why does he have a plate in his skull?”
“He was arrested by security police ten years ago and detained without charge for thirty-two months. Then, one day, while taking him from his cell to an interrogation room, his keepers shoved him down a flight of metal stairs. Suicide attempt, said the security police. But Winston didn’t die, and some determined ladies from the Black Sash had him released and operated on.”
“He was a terrorist, a guerrilla-in-training.”
“I suppose.” Thubana appeared bored by the possibility. “He could have been a poet.”
“Or a physicist?”
Thubana turned back to Myburgh as if he’d reopened an important area of discussion—but, astonishingly, he said, “Mpandhlani once told me that we have no word in our Nguni dialect for orgy.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“African languages are not made to talk about Western mores or contemporary physics. Bantu education—carried out in our tribal tongues—has made it very hard for us to understand the discoveries of men like Einstein and Planck.”
“What has that to do with not having a word for orgy?”
“If the Ndebele, the Sotho, the Zulu, and others have no word for this human activity, how may we—speaking only Afrikaans and our tribal tongues—grasp interactions among submicroscopic particles called fermions, hadrons, baryons, quarks? Impossible!”
“Forget it,” Myburgh said. “It’s all a lot of horsefeathers.”
“And now they’re saying that these tiny points aren’t points at all, but the ends of very small strings—closed strings, probably. Only by viewing them as strings may we construct a workable Theory of Everything.”
“Theory of Everything?” Thubana’s talk was all over the map, an obstacle course of jargon.
“A series of formulae bringing together the four major forces of the universe.”
“Right. Given ten dimensions, six of them ‘curled up.” Study architecture, man. Study mechanical drawing.”
Thubana thumbed through his book. “Gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force. Until this theory, Mr. Myburgh, no one was able to prove that these four forces were all separate aspects of one underlying force. That’s important. We must prove it. I want to help prove it.”
Myburgh found that the passion with which Thubana was speaking had touched him. “Not everyone can aid in such discoveries. I can’t, for instance. But I won’t lose sleep over it. I’ve other interests, other talents.”
It seemed a kind of hubris, Thubana’s megalomaniacal desire to put himself in the company of Einstein and Planck. Laughable. But Myburgh couldn’t laugh. Perhaps—given Thubana’s passion—all this superstring business wasn’t mere crackpottery.
Thubana said, “Gravity is the most powerful force. It works at a distance even on the macroscopic scale, and it has always been the problem. Various quantum theories have unified the other three forces, the ones working at subatomic levels, but gravity—damn it most emphatically!— always knocks each potential new TOE, Theory of Everything, out of symmetry. It ruins everything.”
“I’m sorry.” This was all that Myburgh could think to say, but he meant it. (God, his eyelids were growing heavy.)
Then the African changed tacks. “You whites, Mr. Myburgh, are gravity. Blacks, Asians, and our so-called Coloreds are like the other three forces: magnetism, weak force, strong force. In these cases, though, it doesn’t matter much which group I assign to which fundamental force.”
Now he’s talking trash, Myburgh thought, fighting drowsiness. Has the weird engine of his brain thrown a rod?
Thubana’s voice droned on, almost like a lullaby:
“Africans, Asians, Coloreds—it’s easy to unify those groups, just as one may construct theories, equations without anomalies, that bring together every major physical force except gravity. Gravity’s the hangup. Meanwhile, societally speaking, whites are the biggest obstacle to harmony among peoples. You are gravity, Gerrit Myburgh. You pull everything down. You monkey-wrench the equations.”
Before Myburgh could protest this slander, many of the bus’s passengers began to second Thubana’s remarks.
Incongruously, they did so by singing, a capella, in syncopated rhythms that reminded Myburgh of ancient tribal chants and modern street-corner sing-offs in Soweto, Nigel, Alexandro, and other black townships:
Whites are gravity—
They bring us down.
Down, down, down.
Down, down, down.
Whites are gravity—
They bring us down.
Down, down, down.
Down,
down,
down.
The purity of the laborers’ voices—the spine-tingling richness of their harmonies—gave Myburgh a chill. But their voices didn’t entirely mask the bankruptcy of the ideas set forth in their stupid little song; and Myburgh, back from the trance into which Thubana’s monologue had lulled him, turned around and shouted above the bus’s maddening rattle:
“Whites aren’t gravity! We don’t bring you down!”
“You act on us over great distances,” said Thubana. “You cause us to travel miles. Light-years, so to speak.”
“Are you puppets, then?�
�� Myburgh asked. “Is that how you see yourselves?”
“Down, down, down,” chanted a host of passengers.
“Shut up!” Myburgh cried. “SHUT UP!”
As gently as possible, Thubana pulled Myburgh back down to his seat. “Everyone on this bus—every soul on our planet—is a puppet of super-strings, Mr. Myburgh, for superstrings is a TOE, a Theory of Everything. It explains—it will explain—the physical universe to all its living and breathing puppets.”
“There’s no such thing as your Theory of Everything!” Myburgh replied, shaking off Thubana’s hand. “Theories, perhaps. A dozen different theories—but not just one comprehensive Theory that can explain everything!”
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 54
