The wailing dragged Paz out of the dream, brought him onto his feet stumbling as the dream paralysis passed from his limbs. He struggled into a robe. His wife, now awakened herself, cried, “What is it?”
“Amy’s having a nightmare.”
“Oh, Christ, not again! What time is it?”
“Four-thirty. Go back to sleep,” said Paz, walking quickly from the room. Entering his daughter’s bedroom, he saw by the glow of the Tweety Bird night-light that Amelia was sitting up in bed weeping and clutching her old pink blanket to her face. She stretched out her arms to him, and he sat on the side of the bed and held her to his body, cooing and stroking her hair. This was the fourth one in the last couple of weeks.
“What was it, baby, did you have a bad dream? Tell Daddy, what was it? Did you see a monster?”
Gasping, the child said, “It was a aminal.”
“An animal, huh? What kind of animal?”
“I don’t know. It was yellow and it had big teeth and it was going to eat me all up.”
At this, Paz felt a shock of fear shoot through him. It was at this moment that he understood that he had come to the end of the seven years of peace. What he always referred to as “weird shit” had now officially returned. He wanted to join Amelia in tears but instead took a deep steadying breath and asked hopefully, “You mean like a dog?”
“No, it was a little like a dinosaur and a little like a kitty cat.”
“Boy, that sounds scary,” Paz said, terrified himself. “But it’s all gone now. It can’t get you, okay? Dreams are just in your head, you know? Animals in dreams can’t really bite and scratch you. We talked about this before, you remember.”
“Yes, but, Daddy, I waked up…I waked up and the aminal was still here. I was all waked up and it was still here.”
She had slipped a little back into her baby talk, not a good sign. He said, “I don’t know, baby, sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly when you’re all waked up, especially if you’re having a bad nightmare. Anyway, it was just a dream. It wasn’t real.”
“Abuela says dreamsare real.”
Paz took a deep breath and uttered an inward malediction. “I don’t think that’s what Abuela meant, baby. I think she meant that sometimes dreams tell us things about ourselves that might be hard to find out otherwise.”
“Uh-uh! She saysbrujos can send you bad dreams and they can choke you forreal.”
“But the dream you had wasn’t like that,” said Paz with authority. “It was just a dream. Now, it’s the middle of the night and I want you to try to get back to sleep.”
“I want to read first.”
“Oh, honey, it’s the middle of the night…,” he whined, but the child had already leaped light as a fairy to her bookcase and brought back a large-format volume calledAnimals Everywhere, and Paz had to leaf from Aardvark through the beasts of field and forest, ocean and stream, one for each letter, reading each caption, and not missing out on a word, for the child had the whole thing nearly by heart.
“That’s the animal that was in my bad dream,” she declared, pointing her small finger at the page.
“Uh-huh,” said Paz nonchalantly. The smart move here was not to get excited and move on quickly to the harmless Kangaroo. She was out by the Opossum. He shelved the book, tucked her in with a kiss, and left, but not back to bed.
In the kitchen, he found his wife wrapped in a pink chenille robe, in the act of placing a large, blackened, hourglass espresso maker on the burner.
“How is she?”
Paz said, “Fine, just a dream. You’re going to stay up.” He gestured to the coffeepot and took a seat at the counter.
“Yeah, I have some case notes I have to write up that I fell asleep over last night.”
“It’s still last night now.”
“Yeah, right. And before I forget, speaking about tonight, I mean twelve hours from now, don’t forget the food for Bob Zwick and whoever.”
“That’s tonight?”
“I knew you’d forget.”
“I’m a bad husband. Can’t I talk you back into bed? We could fool around.”
She looked at him, eyebrows up, a half smile on her lips. She was still a handsome woman, he thought, pushing forty and seven years into a pretty good marriage. She’d stopped obsessing about her weight and was a little lusher than she had been, but she carried it well on her substantial frame. A Marilyn type, blond, generously breasted and hipped, although the face did not go with the 1950s pinup body, being sharp-featured and intelligent, sometimes neurotically so. She had been Lorna Wise, Ph.D., when wed, and was now Lola C. Wise Paz, M.D., Ph.D.; like her name, a handful.
“You tempt me, but I really have to get those notes done, or I’ll be fucked all day.”
“Choosing the figurative over the literal, so to speak.”
She laughed. “Guilty.”
“That being the case, since you’re being so professional, can I have a consult?”
The coffeepot hissed, and she attended to it, pouring herself a large cup of tarry black, offering by gesture the pot to him. He shook his head. “No, I’m going to try to get a couple more hours.”
She sat across from him, took a couple of sips. He’d addicted her to this kind of coffee early in their relationship, and it had helped carry her through what she always referred to as medical-motherhood school. “So consult. The doctor is in.”
“Okay, just before Amy started yelling I was having a dream, vivid, clear, like I don’t usually have anymore. I’m sitting in our living room, but instead of our couch I’m leaning against a kind of fur wall, like a leopard skin fur wall, and I’m waiting for something, I forget what, just a sense of anticipation. And then I realize that the fur is moving in and out, and that it’s a living animal. I’m actually leaning against an animal, yellow with those little circular black dots on it, like a leopard. This is all incredibly clear. It’s a leopard the size of a horse, huge, maybe bigger than a horse. And I’m not scared or anything, it just seems natural, and then we have this weird conversation. It says something like, ‘You know the world is dying,’ and I say, ‘Oh, right, war, pollution, global warming,’ all that shit, and it says, I don’t know, ‘You could stop it if you wanted to,’ and I get all pumped up, I’m like, ‘I’ll do anything, whatever you say,’ and it says, ‘You have to let me eat your daughter.’”
“Good God, Jimmy!”
“Yeah, but in the dream it made perfect sense, and what I was thinking about then, was how would I explain it to you, why it made sense, you know? That crazy dream logic? And the leopard gets up and stretches, and it’s like something on a flag, you know…from mythology? And I want to fall down and worship it, even though it’s going to eat Amy. So I hear her crying, and I want to say to her, hey, it’s okay, it won’t hurt, it’s part of what has to happen to save the world, but then it penetrates that she reallyis crying and I wake up.”
“That’s quite a dream. Try half a milligram of Xanax before retiring.”
“But what does itmean, Doc?”
“It means there’s static in there during REM sleep while your brain transfers material from short-term into long-term memory and your cortex interprets the static into factitious incident. It’s like hearing music in the hum of a fan or seeing pictures in clouds. The brain is a pattern-making organ. The patterns don’t have to have any meaning.”
“I know, that’s what you always say, but get this: okay, I go to see what’s up with Amy. She tells me she had a nightmare about an animal trying to eat her, the bad kind where you think you woke up but you’re still in the dream. So I calm her down a little and she goes for her animal book and makes me read it to her and she picks out the animal. From her dream.”
“You’re going to say it was a leopard, right?”
“A jaguar. What do you think of that?”
“A coincidence.”
“That’s your professional medical opinion? A coincidence?”
Lola did a little eye rolling here. “Yes, of course! What else could it be, mind travel?”
“Or something. I always forget you have this weirdness-deficit thing.”
“It’s called reason, Jimmy. The rational faculty of mankind. What are you doing?”
“Interfering with you. Running my hands inside your pathetic stained chenille bathrobe. Checking to see if it’s still there. Oh, yes. What do you think of that, Doctor?”
Lola closed her eyes and sagged against him. She said, “This is so mean of you when I have to work.”
“A quickie. Get up on the counter.”
“What about Amy?”
“I gave her powerful drugs,” he said, “barbiturates, brown heroin,” and lifted her onto the Formica.
She said, “This is what I get for marrying a Cuban.”
“What, Jews don’t fuck on the kitchen counter?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll ask around,” she said as his mouth closed down on hers. For a while she forgot about her pile of work, and he forgot about dreams.
Lola Wise Paz was at this period a resident in neuropsychiatry at South Miami Hospital, a short bicycle ride from her home. She’d owned a doctorate in clinical psychology when she and Jimmy Paz hooked up, and she’d borne the child, and then, in something of a panic about time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near, she had decided to go to medical school at age thirty-four. Paz had backed her play in this, and the two of them had worked like cart horses to make a living, clear time for study, and do the endless tasks of parenthood, helped in this last by the mighty Margarita Paz, the Abuela of Doom. Now, as on most mornings, after Lola had pedaled off, Paz got the kid dressed and fed, delivered her to the first grade at Providence Day School, went to the restaurant, prepped lunch, and cooked much of it. Meanwhile, the Abuela picked up Amelia and brought her to the restaurant Guantanamera. Grandmotherly affections, it appeared, proved even stronger than the desire to exert total control over her restaurant during every single minute it was open. When the lunch rush had declined to a trickle of orders, Paz found his offspring trying on a cook’s apron that the grandmother had apparently altered to fit her. Paz looked the tiny prep cook over with a professional eye. To his mother he said, “She looks good. Why don’t we let her handle the lunch tomorrow? We wouldn’t have to pay her because she’s just a little kid.”
“I do too get paid!” Amelia protested. “Abuela gave me a dollar.”
“Okay, but lay off the booze and cigarettes unless you want to be three feet tall your whole life. And ticklish.”
After the shrieks had subsided, Paz set her up with a pan of radishes to be carved into roses. When she was settled, he went to talk to his mother. Margarita Paz was a black peasant from Guantánamo and still bore as she closed in on sixty the marks of that origin: strong arms, wide hips, a bosom like a shelf, and a hard, calculating stare. She dressed in bright colors and lipsticks and nail polishes that set off her shiny chocolate skin; a turban was often on her head, as now. Paz had always been a little afraid of her; he knew no one who was not, except his daughter.
“The produce was garbage today,” she said when he came into her little box of an office. “Talk to Moreno, and tell him we’re definitely going to switch to Torres Brothers if it happens again. Tell him his father never treated us like Americans.”
“I’ll take care of it, Mamí,” said Paz, although the produce was prime as always. Complaining and snapping orders was her way of showing affection. “Look, I wanted to ask you…Amelia’s been having nightmares, and she wakes up screaming at night, and when I tell her not to worry, that the monsters in the dreams aren’t real, what do I get? Abuela says theyare real. I wish you wouldn’t tell her stuff like that, okay?”
“You want me to lie to my granddaughter?”
“It upsets her. She’s too young to be worrying about all that.”
“And what about you? Are you also too young?”
Paz took a deep breath. “I don’t want to start with this now, Mamí. Santería is your thing, we’re not going to get involved in it. Not me, and definitely not Amelia.”
“What kind of dreams?” asked his mother, ignoring this last, as she did any statement she chose not to hear.
“That’s not important. We don’t want you telling her stuff like that.”
She shot him a sharp look; it was that “we.” Mrs. Paz had always imagined that when her son finally brought home a daughter-in-law, she would be a girl amenable to direction, as was only right. Instead, she got an American doctor with insane ideas about child rearing. A doctor! Theman should be the doctor, and the woman should take care of the children, emphasis on the plural, and listen to hersuegra with respect, or else how was society to continue? But this daughter-in-law had been so bold as to state, on more than one occasion, that if Margarita insisted on inducting the girl into “your cult” she would have to reconsider letting her spend so much time with her grandmother, and all because a few little charms, anide for her small wrist, the sacrifice of a few birds in order to cast the child’s future and protect her from danger…absurd, and especially after all she had done for them. It did not occur to her to wonder why her son had chosen a woman precisely as stubborn and hardheaded as his mother.
She sighed dramatically and threw up her hands. “All right! What can I do, I’m just an old woman, it’s perfectly all right to ignore me. I never expected after the life I’ve lived, to end up being despised like this, but let it be! I won’t say another word to the child, ever. Take her away!” Here she removed a bright silk hankie from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.
“Come on, Mamí, don’t make me crazy. It’s not like that and you know it…”
“But,” she said, and now fixed him with her terrible eye, “but there is something.” Here a gesture, hands like birds, conjuring the unseen.
“What something?”
“Something”-darkly-“there is something moving in theorun, I don’t know what it is, but something very powerful, and it has to do with you, my son, and with her. Yes, you think I’m stupid, but I know what I know.”
There seemed to be nothing to say to that, so Paz kissed his mother on the cheek and went out.
“That’s a good rose,” he said to his daughter, “but you need to slice the petals thinner so they’ll flop over and be more like a real flower. Look, watch me.” With which he picked up a parer and an icy, crisp radish from the pan and in eight seconds whipped it into a blossom.
Amelia looked coldly at the proffered garnish. “I prefer it the wayI do it,” she said, showing yet again how close to the tree fell the fruit among the tribe of Paz.
Some hours later, Paz was again sweating over a grill, but now he had taken on a load of his own banana daiquiri and was feeling pretty fine. The grill stood on his own patio, and on it sizzled and smoked several racks of Cuban-style barbecued pork ribs, marinated in lime juice, cumin, oregano, and sherry. Amelia had set the picnic table for five, a seafood and endive salad had been prepped and was now cooling in the refrigerator, in company with two magnums of fairly drinkable Spanish white and a dozen little pots of flan. He had a tape going,guajira music, Arsenio Rodriguez, that floated out through the windows of the Florida room and mixed with the sweet smoke from the grill. Paz before marriage had hardly ever cooked at home, and his social life had consisted of presex activities only. Lola had become more social since the M.D. came through, and they had people over almost every week. He didn’t mind cooking for these events, nor did he mind Lola’s friends. She did not hang out with people apt to patronize him. Before his marriage, Paz had acquired virtually all his knowledge of the intellectual world from pillow talk. He dated bright women only, showed them a good time, provided plenty of athletic sex, and afterward sucked out their brains, for although he was natively bright, he had no patience for sitting in a classroom listening to the professorial drone, or for poring over texts, or for being tested. He had an extraordinarily retentive memory, which was fed only via the audio channel, and could produce, during these dinner parties, remarks that were surprising from the mouth of a high school grad cook and former cop. He was inordinately pleased when this occurred, as was his wife, the intellectual snob. At such times he could see it on her face: look, he’s not just a stud.
He heard the clicking of a coasting bicycle, and Lola rolled into view in the driveway. Amelia came shouting up to show off the garland of yellow allamanda blossoms she had constructed and also the dollar earned at the restaurant. Then a kiss for Paz. She looked around, sniffed luxuriously.
“That smells great. You’re being the perfect husband again.”
“Not perfect. I grabbed Yolanda’s butt in the reefer before lunch.”
“Oh, I totally understand about that,” she said. “I know how men are-you haven’t had a piece of ass in what, seven hours?”
“Seven hours and thirty-two minutes,” said Paz, “but who’s counting?” She laughed and went off to shower and change her clothes. Paz drank some more daiquiri and painted more sauce on his meat.
Bob Zwick was a blocky, confident man with a Jewish Afro of some length and an unrepentant New York accent that in social situations he rarely let rest. He had graduated from MIT at sixteen and thereafter had spent five years working on M-theory with Edward Witten at Princeton. Having plumbed the secrets of subatomic structure as far as he wanted, he had surprised everyone by switching fields to molecular biology, had picked up another Ph.D. (Stanford) in that, and then, feeling the need for a little break, had come down to Miami to work on his tan and get an M.D. at the university. There he had met Lola, had hit on her instantly, as he did on very nearly every woman who crossed his path, been laughingly rejected, and become her friend. Zwick, it had to be said, neither pressed his suit beyond the first no, nor held a grudge. Paz would not have picked him off a menu as a pal, but he got along with him, had even taken him out on the boat to fish a time or two. He found Zwick entertaining in a headachy sort of way, like daiquiris.
Dressed this evening in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt that said PRINCETON COSMOLOGICAL CO.INC.CUSTOM UNIVERSES,WE DELIVER, he strode in, embraced and kissed the hostess, snatched up Amelia and whirled her around to the giggle point, shook hands with Paz, and introduced his current girl, a leggy blonde with a bony sardonic face. She was wearing a sleeveless top and a long skirt of some nubbly clinging stuff, in lavender. Paz felt a little flutter in his belly, but she didn’t bat an eye.
“Beth Morgensen,” she said, extending a cool hand. “You must be Jimmy Paz.”
“I am,” he said and wondered if she had told Zwick, and more important, whether she would let it out this evening.
“What is that, a banana daiquiri?” said Zwick. “I want one. Beth, this guy makes the best banana daiquiris in the galaxy. These are galactic-level daiquiris.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Morgensen, who had, in fact, consumed any number of them during the months eight years ago when she had been one of Jimmy Paz’s many girlfriends. He produced the drinks, along with a salver of boiled shrimps with small pots of various sauces, and avoided her gaze.
They drank around the picnic table and talked, their shoulders swaying helplessly, their fingers tapping to the music, and Paz rose several times to replenish the blender, helped by Amelia, who liked squeezing limes and breaking bananas into the beaker. On the last of these trips, he ran into Beth Morgensen, coming from the bathroom. Paz sent Amelia out with a full blender. Morgensen watched her trot off.
“Well, Jimmy Paz,” she said, looking him over boldly, “all domesticated with a kid and a wife. Who woulda thunk it? I guess I blew my chance.”
“I didn’t know I was in the running. You were aiming for a full professor, as I recall.”
“Silly me, then. How long have you been married?”
“Seven years, around there.”
“Oh, the danger period.”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty happy.”
“She must be a kaleidoscope of delight, then.” She moved closer, placed her arms on his shoulders, did a little hip grind to the music. “It’s hard to believe,” she said, “that you’re into fidelity. Not the Jimmy Paz I used to know.”
“People change, although now that I think of it, you were always a cheap date. A couple of scoops and you were slipping out of your panties.”
“True enough. Would you like me to slip out of them now? Only you would know.”
Paz gave her a false little smile, a faked laugh, and eased away.
More drinking. The shrimp peels piled up in the bowl. Zwick was holding forth on the mystery of consciousness and how he intended to penetrate what he called “the last great unanswered question in science.” Paz said, “I thought that was string theory. I thought it was getting relativity and quantum mechanics to work together, quantum gravity, the Theory of Everything stuff.”
Beth screamed in mock horror. “Oh, no! You asked him about string theory! Wake me when it’s over.”
“Yes, theoretically,” said Zwick, and in a Germanic accent, “tee-or-et-ically, but that’s all it’s ever gonna be, these patzers will be crashing gold nuclei into each other forever, and maybe,maybe, they’ll get hints of something, and maybe, they’ll get something from the telescopes, peek a little at the big bang a zillion light-years away, but they’ll never be able to deliver the confirming experiment. Not like the quantum work, not like relativity, where you have fuckingthousands of confirming experiments.” And he went through several of them in detail, a short course in both quantum electrodynamics and general relativity, using shrimps and utensils as particles (or waves) and napkins to model the Calabi-Yau spaces in which the putative seven extra dimensions of space-time were wrapped in the unimaginably small compass of the Planck length. He was a superb teacher, funny and with a consummate grasp of the subject. Even Amelia seemed to be following the spiel before she drifted off to play with the cat.
“Yes, but you haven’t said why none of it makes sense, why no one can actually generate our sensory world out of all that craziness,” said Morgensen. “Instantaneous action at a distance, time stretching, cats being alive and dead at the same time, all of that. I personally think you guys just made it up.”
“Because you’re a primitive creature and not a scientist,” said Zwick. “A lovely though primitive creature.”
“I beg your pardon: Iam a scientist.”
“No, you’re a pseudoscientist. Sociology is a pseudoscience, using statistical methodology to massage a set of lies. It’s like phrenology. It doesn’t matter how accurate you are with the fuckingcalipers or whatever, the underlying theory is crap, as are the data sets. Science is physics: theory, analysis, experiment. Everything else is dogshit.”
“And see who gets another crack at my milk-white body,” said Morgensen, “probably not Mr. Dogshit here.”
“And yet from another perspective,” said Zwick instantly, “we see that sociology is actually thequeen of the sciences, profound, illuminating, un-dogshitlike…”
“But according to you, string-theory physics is dogshit, too,” said Lola.
“No,” Zwick replied, “it has the shape of real science, it mathematically predicts stuff we know to be true already, but it’s really unlikely to be anything but a kind of, I don’t know,theology, which is why I bailed. It’s gotten absolutely medieval, guys spinning out theory that there’s no hope of ever confirming because there’s not that much energy in the universe, I mean to get down to the strings or the dimensions wrapped up in the Planck length. And the cosmos stuff, yeah, but it’s like looking for a cat in a blacked-out room. Dark matter? Dark energy? Please! But biology, especially neuro, is where physics was a hundred years ago. We’re generating volumes of new, real information just like Rutherford and all of them. We can look inside the brain now, actually watch it thinking, just like they discovered how to look inside the atom. Magnetic resonance imaging technology and the cyclotron are machines of the same order of importance. Plus, we have genomics now, which means we can trace the genetic switching that creates learning, that creates behavior, down to the molecular level. So psychology is out the window. I mean it was always crap, but now we know it’s crap. There’s no psych to ‘ology’ on.”
During all this Paz had been quiet, sucking it in along with a lot of Bacardi, and having obsessive thoughts about Beth Morgensen. He hadn’t thought about her for three minutes in over eight years, but now she seemed to have moved in and taken a lease on large tracts of his midbrain. What she was like in bed, how different from the Lola, the wife, how light the relationship had been, how much fun, how little like warfare. Although he knew that it was relationships just like that in their many dozens, in their ultimate ennui, that had driven him into matrimony. But still…
More to clear his mind of this garbage than because of any real engagement, he said, “Bullshit. There’s no way you can know that.”
“Well, not now, but we will. The whole field is being systematized, physicalized, which is the characteristic of all real science. We’re moving toward a real understanding of the neural code, the way the brain actuallyworks, in exactly the way that we really understand how the underlying properties of quarks establish the qualities of elementary particles, which establish the qualities of chemical elements, then molecules, then life, and so on.”
“Never,” said Paz.
“Why, never? What’s your argument?”
Paz stalled by doing a superfluous check on the grilling meat. A woman’s face and body floated into his mind, long and white, frizzy brown hair, pointy nose, slanted gray wolf eyes, small hard breasts, Silvie the philosophy major and the theory of logical types.
“The theory of logical types,” Paz said, “Alfred North Whitehead.”
Both women were delighted to see Zwick brought up short by this. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” he demanded.
“Because a set can’t be a member of itself,” said Paz, drunkenly confident. “Say that total knowledge we have about any given subject is a set, set A. And say all the things science or people, the culture, knows is another set, set B. Any number of set A’s will fit into set B, by definition. We know everything possible about how to make flan, about the mass of the particles, about the number of barbers in Cincinnati, right? But the set ‘understanding consciousness’ is a set of a different type. It’s not another set A. It’s larger than set B, which is actually made up of all human minds. For the human mind to understand consciousness would be a violation of the theory. That particular A just won’t ever fit into the B, ever.”
Zwick stared for a moment, rolled his eyes, and said, “That is complete and utter horseshit.”
“Plus,” said Paz, “the mind is not necessarily a product of the brain. You can’t disprove dualism, and if you deny it, it’s just another belief. It’s not science.”
“‘The mind is not a product’…what is this, the Middle Ages? Thereis no mind. What we interpret as consciousness is an epiphenomenon of an instantaneous electrochemical state generated by a piece of meat. It’s an illusion devised by evolution to organize and coordinate sensory data with actions.”
“Then who am I talking to, and why should I believe you any more than you believe in spirits?”
“Hey, the proof is let me go into your skull and make a couple of tiny cuts and there won’t be a you anymore. Trust me on this, pal.”
“I do trust you, but it don’t mean shit. I could go in there and shoot my radio while it’s tuned to Radio Mambí. The radio won’t make noise anymore; does that mean that Radio Mambí just ceased to exist? Not that that would be a bad thing.”
“What, you think that there’s a substance called ‘mind’ that’s somehow floating in the ether and our brains just pick it up?”
“Not necessarily, but it’s just as logical as saying that mind is determined by the meat. And it would account for demons and dreams and clairvoyance better than your way.”
“Jesus! Thisis the Middle Ages. Where to begin? Okay, first of all, any dualism falls before Occam’s razor-that is, it adds an unnecessary level of complexity to a phenomenon that can be fully explained-”
“Fuck Occam and fuck his razor,” said Paz, and then, “Wait a second, hold that thought!”
A tiny clock had just rung its notional alarm in Paz’s nonexistent mind, and he got up and snatched the cover from the grill, revealing racks of glistening, steaming ribs at the precise moment at which they were perfectly done.
“Let’s eat,” said Paz, and everyone applauded.
During the actual dinner, Lola turned the conversation artfully away from cosmological themes, drawing Beth out about her work, which was a study of the lives of Miami street prostitutes, or girls who let boys kiss them for money, as they explained to Amelia, and herself supplied numerous amusing anecdotes about life as a neuropsych resident in the emergency room, her current duty, and also about going through med school with Zwick, his complete incompetence at any healing task, apparently a man who had never once found a vein on the first try, and often not on the twelfth either. Zwick took this good-naturedly enough, asserting that he’d only become a doctor to be able to do fiendish experiments on human beings and had no guilt about it at all.
They drank nearly half a gallon of the Spanish white, and after they cleared away and served dessert, Paz brought out a bottle of Havana Club añejo rum, and they sipped off that for a while until the child got cranky and had to be dragged off to bed.
“I’m scared to go to sleep, Daddy,” she said when he’d got her under the covers at last.
“You’re so tired you’ll be asleep before you know it.”
“Yes, but what if the dream animal comes back?”
“It won’t. It’s bothering another little girl tonight.”
“Who?”
“A naughty girl, probably. Not like you.”
“But what if another animal comes?”
“Well, in that case, would you like to borrow myenkangue? No dream animals are going to mess with that.”
“Uh-huh. Abuela made that for you, didn’t she. To protect you from the monsters.”
“That’s right.”
“Mommy says it’s just superstition.”
“Mommy’s entitled to her opinion,” said Paz blandly and slipped the charm on its thong over his head. He tied it carefully to the bedpost. “Don’t open it, okay?”
“What will happen?”
“It might stop working. Now, good night.”
“I want a story.” She got one and held out for just three pages ofCharlotte’s Web.
Back on the patio, Paz slipped an Ibrahim Ferrer CD into the machine and stood listening to the mellow voice singing an old bolero, music from the great age ofson, the 1940s, his mother’s music. It was velvet dark now, insects buzzing in the trees, jasmine floating in the air, the only light coming from citronella candles in yellow glass jars on the table. He put an arm around his wife’s shoulders and led her into a close dance. From a distance, from out in the dark yard, he heard the sound of Zwick and Beth having an argument.
“What’s all that about?” he asked into her ear.
“She’s drunk and belligerent. He doesn’t respect her mind enough. He doesn’t think people who want to have serious careers should have kids. She was looking at Amy like she wanted to kidnap her. The biological clock is running down on old Beth, and a tenure-track associate professorship don’t seem to be filling the void, nor do brilliant heartless dudes like Bobby Zwick, the poor bitch.”
“You’ve been there.”
“I have. With guys like that, too.” She gave him a hard squeeze.
“What I get for being a dummy.”
“You’re not a dummy, dummy.”
“But not as smart as Zwick.”
“No, but you’re cuter. I’m not sureanyone is as smart as Zwick. Although that line about Whitehead threw him a little. You never fail to amaze me.”
The sounds of argument faded, succeeded by some weeping, some softer talk; then, the faint creak and rattle of a rope hammock.
“Uh-oh, do you think they’re doing it back there, in our hammock?” Paz asked.
“I hope so. They can warm it up for us. God, when was the last time we did it in the yard?”
“Not since Amelia learned about doorknobs.”
“Go have children,” Lola said.
Zwick wandered back and sat at the table and poured himself a couple of fingers of old rum. Paz and Lola joined him.
“Where’s the girlfriend?” Lola asked. “Strangled?”
“Passed out in the hammock. It’s all your fault, Paz, you and your daiquiris and your añejo and your ontological speculations. Did you know that physics is a patriarchal conspiracy to promote a dominant worldview? As is medicine.”
“Well, when you solve the mystery of consciousness it won’t matter,” said Paz. “You can recode everyone’s brain.”
Zwick laughed, a little more elaborately than the comment deserved. “Yeah, and what if that changes physics? Listen, you want me to tell you the secret of the universe?” He mimed a paranoid looking over both shoulders. “Don’t tell anyone. Okay, so let’s say we have these vast pillars of physics, relativity and quantum electrodynamics, and they’re both as elaborately confirmed as anything in the world. Maybetoo elaborately confirmed, out to a part per billion or more. Now, you’re a detective, right? What if I told you that every time there’s been a physical breakthrough, we’ve found a piece of abstract math that’s just tailor-made to fit the new concept? Einsteinjust happened to find Riemann geometry to fit general relativity. And the quantum boysjust happened to find matrix algebra and tensors. And when they first proposed string theory, itjust happened to fit Euler’s beta-function, a two-hundred-year-old piece of math that had never been used for anything before. And Calabi and Yau’s canoodling with hyper-dimensional geometriesjust happened to describe how the extra dimensions required by string theory are curled up. Not to mention the fact that a whole bunch of universal constantsjust happen to lead to a universe where conscious life evolves, and if one of them was changed even a tiny bit there’d be no stars, no planets, no life. What would you say to a case like that?”
“I’d look for a frame-up. Or it might just be a slam dunk.”
“Yes! Butwhich? That’s the killer question. Now let’s say they confirm string theory physically. Let’s say it’s Hawking’s conjecture that black holes radiate outside their event horizons, and we find a black hole small enough to study and string theory predicts that radiation exactly. Then we know it’s true, hallelujah! Physics has the theory of everything at last, except…except what if we made it all up? Observation is a slender reed when you come right down to it. Thousands of astronomers observed the skies and fit their observations into the Ptolemaic system, making loops and littler loops to save the appearances until the whole thing collapsed, but string theory can’t collapse because it’s a theory of everything, everything is already accounted for, and confirmed by a zillion observations. But observation itself is a product of consciousness, andwe don’t know what that is!”
“Why you’re a doc now.”
“Why I’m a doc. So let’s say I’m wrong, John Searle and all of them are wrong, consciousness is not a little trick of the brain, let’s say it’s its own thing, a basic constituent of the universe on a par with space-time and mass, that only occasionally comes to rest in brains but has its own life, maybe down in the Calabi-Yau spaces or out in some connecting universe. That’s your substance dualism, yes? You and Descartes. Then you could have your gods and demons, hey? Your miracles.”
“But you don’t believe that,” said Paz. His throat was suddenly dry, and he poured himself a little of the fruit juice they had laid out for the child.
“Nah, this is just drunk talk. But let’s say itis true we did discover the secret of consciousness, just like we discovered the secret of the physical world, and then there would be these two new pillars of knowledge, the exterior and the interior worlds reaching up to the heavens, and then some Einstein would come along and figure out how they locked together. Then what? We might hear a buzzer, likeennnnnhk! And across the sky in humongous letters, GAME OVER. Or we might learn not only how to observe the quantum world but to actually change it. Actually manipulate the intimate fabric of space-time and mass-energy!”
“This is not going to happen soon, is it?” asked Lola. “Because I just dropped off a big load of dry cleaning.”
Zwick snatched up a candle and held it under his chin, and in a horror-movie voice intoned, “We would be like GODS! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
And they all laughed, but each was a little uneasy in the laughter, each for a different reason.