Entanglement
© Steven Boykey Sidley 2012
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Chapter 1
Professor Jared Borowitz sits on the stage in an auditorium. It is warm, summer stumbling in early. There is the usual sibilance from the audience, exuberance wrestling decorum.
Jared is distracted. Yet another address to a group of graduating college students is not a prospect that fills him with much passion. Perhaps long ago, but not any more.
There was a time when he would scan the flushed and eager faces of his incoming students to try and identify the one winner who would supply him with the intellectual raw material to allow him to sculpt and mould in his academic image, but he never got it right, and ended up expending energy on no-hopers and sloths, before recognising the unlikely kid on the fringes who was actually going to get it, perhaps, one day. He has come to recognise that his patience for teaching has become threadbare, and he now suffers classes heroically, if only for the requirements of his good academic standing.
Not that he cares enough to have actually turned down this commencement address. It is what it is, this world. Illogic, chaos and superstition reign, and these students, fresh-faced and pregnant with the excitement of degrees conferred, will, with few exceptions, soon seep into the conformity of the great bell curve. Frankly, he would rather be in his office across the quadrangle, alone, feet on desk, surrounded by the comforting smells of ageing books and academia, and reading a physics journal, or a novel, or the sports page, or even a comic book, for god’s sake. Anything, rather than this, really.
As he waits for the dean to wind up his opening address, he looks down at his notes again. His speech will be for himself – no one out there really gives a shit, and he questions the extent to which that includes him.
He wonders when he became such a grouchy malcontent. Not as in ill-tempered, irascible, friendless, bitter and isolated (he is none of those, he congratulates himself). But rather as in disinterested in much beyond his own comforts and peculiarities. Which, he muses optimistically, are broad, deep, and spread thick with gravitas, but probably not of much interest to these students, whose naiveté and undirected energy disincline them to grapple with weight of any kind.
He wonders, too, whether this attitude that he now often catches himself carrying is noticeable to Katherine. Must be, he concludes. Observing human behaviour is her job. She’ll never comment on it, because they both know he doesn’t flex easily, and it’s probably not worth the effort. Ah well, as long as she still loves him, of which he is reasonably sure.
He glances down at the audience at the thought of her, and seeks her out. She is seated amongst the academics and guests in the third row. She is looking hard at him, a half grin sloping up from the side of her mouth. It’s a good look, critical but affectionate, a specialty. He must be more attentive to her, he resolves, without much commitment.
He smiles back, and gives a tiny little wave. She winks and directs her attention back at the dean, still winding down, relentlessly.
She is pretty, he realises again, as he does daily. He considers this for a moment, framing her amongst the surrounding faces and comparing her features with others. Nothing obvious, just the directness of the stare from pale blue eyes, a startling smile, the sudden animation of eyebrows into surprise, or disapproval, or mirth, or some internal mechanism more complex. And, of course, a lithe body of which he has never tired. Got lucky this time, he thinks, as he has often over the past 7 years. Don’t fuck it up.
Jared considers himself. Handsome in a world-weary, don’t-give-a-shit sort of way. Fit and healthy, at least for his mid-forties.Theoretical physicist of some reasonable repute, but well past the sort of mental gymnastics that would propel him into the brave new world of scientific celebrity, which he views occasionally from afar, not without a dark twinge of jealousy. Tenure. Financial security, but not great wealth, which suits him, given his distinct lack of interest in the temptations of discretionary income. Great group of friends, with enough intellect to engage, humour and infuriate him, with their certainties and grandiloquent opining.
What the fuck am I so grumpy about? He is about to consider this when he becomes aware of 500 people staring at him. He realises that he has been introduced. He gathers his notes and walks over to the podium, shaking the stiffened hand of the relic dean on his way.
He stands at the podium, and looks out. He has done this many times, graced as he is with sonorous voice, operatic projection, and the ability to drop long weighty pauses at exactly the intervals that are required to raise or release tension and expectation. He has often thought that he could have been an actor, a thought that always fizzles out with the realisation that a life spent trying on other personalities probably diminishes one’s own.
He looks at his notes and sighs. He puts them in his pocket.
‘I had a lovely long speech planned. Brimming with clichés about the responsibilities of a privileged education, your role in the future of the planet, the good that can be harvested, and so on.’
Jared looks up, shakes his head and smiles grimly.
‘But I think I can make it much shorter, so as to hasten the celebrations that you all must be anxious to start.’
He glances at Katherine, whose eyebrows are now up in a bemused attitude of uh-oh.
‘The world is full of fools. Brimming with fools. Up to its eyebrows in fools. Dictators, drunk drivers, genocidalists, tyrants, liars, useful idiots, fakirs, conspiracy theorists, homeopaths, wife abusers, child neglecters, supernaturalists, UFO-believers, card cheats, identity thieves, religious fundamentalists, white supremacists, movie queue jumpers, soothsayers, astrologists, robber barons, creationists and intelligent designers, rapists, history revisionists, and so on.
‘Grandiose fools, little fools, dangerous fools, harmless fools.
‘A bloated spectrum of foolishness, boorishness, cruelty and ignorance. Our species. Our fools.
‘A lovely thought, I am aware, as you leave here and head out into this world after your years here, trying, as you did, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, to uncover some small kernel of wisdom.
‘The award-winning biologist E.O. Wilson said “people would rather believe than know”.
‘Well this institution now commits you to live amongst those people, and the whole stinking morass of human foolishness, where we gamely hope that what you have learned here will be in some way a bulwark against the tide, and offer the small life raft of critical thinking skills and knowledge with which to make this world, on average, a little less foolish.
‘I will certainly be accused by some of you, and some of my colleagues – silently or with loud insult – to have been negative, pessimistic and, well, just a downer, on what should be a happy day for the young student heading out there to join the real world.
‘Perhaps you will be right. Perhaps every new piece of human brutishness showing its ugly face to us on a daily basis has simply worn me down to a desiccated husk of negativism.
‘But perhaps not. Perhaps with this address, some of you will not simply be absorbed into mediocrity and worse, perhaps some of you will rise above, and fight the foolishness, and in the famous words of Howard Beale, even though you are still young and full of wonder, declare – “I’m mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more.”
‘I am Jared Borowitz and I thank you for your time.’
Chapter 2
As he steps down and heads back to his seat, to the sound of somewhat embarrassed applause, he tries to calculate the level of opprobrium to which he will be subject, and turns to find Katherine in the audience. She is shaking her head, with both eyebrows arched dangerously, but she is also grinning slightly. He reckons that he will escape this one relatively unscathed.
His attraction to Katherine, other than the obvious lust that she continues to engender in him, was always related to her moral certainty. For him, morality was more a subject for dinner-time debate, thrashing around the well-worn philosophical dishrags of relativism versus absolutism, in all their disguises, and often finding himself able to argue any nuance of these positions theatrically and convincingly. His ideal intellectual standpoint, if he is truly honest, is extreme moral relativism, this being a requirement of his scientific bent. We are machines, formed by genetics and unpredictable and arbitrary external events; we possess neither will nor control, and therefore moral certainty is a myth, a human concept moulded to assuage a frightened and bewildered species.
Of course, coming down on this radical man-as-machine side of the argument had its disadvantages. It upended his sense of outrage. In fact, a sense of outrage should be disallowed if one carried one’s moral relativism to its absurd extreme, and yet he felt it daily, simply by scanning the newspapers, where human brutishness was in bright relief.
But Katherine felt no need to join this debate. She was inviolableon the matter of right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, even inconsiderate vs. nice. She didn’t bother to distinguish between a genocidal dictator and the guy on the freeway who cut her off. There was a right way to do things and a wrong way. And if everyone followed the right way, we would all be much happier, she said. She saw no need for a protracted definitional debate on what was meant by right. Jared found it both endearing and difficult to counter. So he allowed Katherine her moral soapbox, and sought not to impede her own very well-developed sense of outrage. In fact, he was perfectly happy to temper his own philosophical to-ing and fro-ing on this matter, and submit to her, as ultimate arbiter, at least until he discovered god, which was as unlikely as a cold (or any) day in Hell.
His atheism had been entrenched since he was 5 years old. He had an older and more wayward friend at that time, who had lured him into the underbrush in a large undeveloped field near their home, and then proclaimed that they were going to learn to smoke, producing a crumpled pack of cigarettes and matches with a flourish. It was the dry season, and the discarded match, still alight, sparked the dry grass, which jumped riotously into flame, unimpressed by their furiously stamping little feet.
The ensuing conflagration required fire departments from 2 different stations to prevent damage to surrounding homes. Jared and his friend had been terrified to the point of child-imagined Armageddon, with visions of burnt homes, dead people, jail, and even a possible 1-month grounding as parental punishment. They raced home as the fire spread and hid in the basement, lips trembling, eyes wide, skin drained. His friend, knowing that they were likely not going to elude detection, demanded that they drop to their knees. ‘We must pray,’ he said, in a tiny tremolo. ‘God will help us, He will know what to do.’ Jared, who had never really thought about god much at all, other than the bewildering and sometime scary references he had occasionally come across in nursery rhymes, TV and magazines, thought about his friend’s earnest request for a second, and as he watched him sink to his knees in supplication, he burst out laughing, and couldn’t stop. He knew,with great certainly, that it was about the most absurd idea that he had ever heard.
So long had this non-belief been a part of his life that he had finally moved from the keen anti-god proselytising of his twenties (wielded like a heavy axe) to a far more comfortable recognition that those who believe will not have their minds changed, ever, even though they could be painted trenchantly and mercilessly into dialectical and logical corners. Some debates were simply not worth the intellectual effort, and his musings about the nature of right and wrong and good and evil had also recently started to fall into this category; he no longer sought to convince anyone, or at least he sought not too hard.
Jared is sitting in the university cafeteria reading the paper when Katherine arrives, tray laden with salads and other healthy tidbits. It is his habit to eat here, rather than in the academic lounge. He enjoys the buzz of young conversation, the raucous laughter, and the bright, shiny young things, only vaguely aware of their sexuality. His own college days had looked much like this, save for fashion details and a vastly different palette of skin colours. An endless romp, punctuated by short, sharp periods of study. Daily life then, but in hindsight, a paradise.
Katherine slides into the seat opposite. She regards him silently for a moment.
‘Jesus, you were a barrel of laughs. How to turn a couple of hundred kids from happy to suicidal in 5 minutes,’ she says, holding his gaze.
‘Hmm, I suppose. Anyway. They are probably all going to end up watching reality TV, taking homeopathic pills, praying to a god that they actually believe is listening to them, and cheating on their spouses,’ he says, looking away, but gratefully accepting the light wrist slap.
Her eyebrows spike again.
‘Cheating on their spouses? I seem to remember you doing that to your ex. A lot. You are a hypocritical dick, you know that?’
‘Yeah, well. At least I didn’t prostrate myself in a place of worship the next Sunday,’ he says, shrugging.
‘Oh, right, that makes it OK then,’ Katherine says, sarcasm thick.
Jared steals a tomato from her plate. This is not a conversation that he wants to take forward. He doesn’t cheat on her. She knows it. Like the stock market, past indiscretions are no indicator of future behaviour, he once tried to convince her. He wasn’t entirely convinced himself, but finds that 7 years later he is still unsullied by infidelity, and is surprised and pleased by that fact.
He remembers an earlier life, married to Gwen. He was the rising academic star, leaving her exhausted in the wake of his great expectations. Her reaction to the promise of his career was increasing distance and bitterness. His reaction was infidelity.
Glorious, wet and guiltless infidelity, with every impressionable student (or reasonable facsimile) who would submit. Of course, she claimed, in the final and inevitable ugly undoing, that his inability to zip up preceded and catalysed her distance and bitterness. He supposed that she may have had a point.
But that was then.
‘So, what are we doing tonight?’ he asks, a deft sidestep.
‘Well, you can go into the cellar and mutter about the stupidity of your fellow humans. I intend to go out for dinner with Ryan and whatever new mad-as-a-hatter girlfriend he has acquired. You may come if you can find something nice to say about something, anything, even if it is the waitress.’
Jared grins sloppily at this riposte, at this magical woman.
‘You are pretty smart for a psychologist, you know that? Any chance you feel like going home and being rudely violated by an atheist?’
Katherine rolls her eyes melodramatically and stands up.
‘Sorry, gotta go heal people. Don’t be late.’
As Jared watches her leave, he wonders whether he could still blow this relationship. He also wonders suddenly and jarringly if she could perhaps tire of him and his pretensions, conceits, his inflexibility and cragginess. Perhaps he will spot her one day, entering a hotel with a hard-bodied young lacrosse player, in the furtive pre-lunch hours. She will own up when confronted. She will say, yes, I wanted to taste innocence and abandon. And nowI need you to forgive me. He wonders whether he could. He decides that he would, eventually, and relaxes, relieved only in the abstract.
Chapter 3
Jared finishes Katherine’s leftovers and heads back to his office. The college grounds, bathed in mild sunlight, sparkle like a movie set – scrubbed, cut and pruned, attended by severe and silent structures projecting the solemn attitudes of their histories. They jar harshly with the clashing colours and excited jabber of their inhabitants, who stream chaotically out of halls and doors, making their way to summer holidays, greatly removed from the earnest business of study.
He makes his way to the Physics block, and walks through empty corridors to his corner office, a perk anointed him years ago when all things were possible, when his senior colleagues whispered quietly about his Nobel chances.
Jared does not dwell on the slow stagnation of his career. It cannot be said to have been a failure. There are many published papers bearing his name, which while not revolutionising the field, have moved it forward satisfyingly, albeit in small metrics, justifying his tenure. Moreover, he has respect amongst peers worldwide, and is a well-liked teacher, with crowded classes bolstering his reputation.
He is unfazed by the mismatch of his performance against others’ expectations. He got into this discipline to understand, not to innovate. His first exposure, as a child, to the concepts of infinity and eternity, and the big bang, the reported weirdness of very small things, scared him. The only way to allay his fears was to ask people who understood. His father (who, he assumed, understood all), an owner of a small chain of luggage stores, could not help, but shared his awe, powered by his Talmudic approach to debate and the importance of curiosity. His mother, a petite dynamo of cooking and laughter, was no better, kissing him on the head and calling him ‘mein kleine tzadik’ – my little wise one.
So he started to read, early – biographies of Einstein, science magazines. And watch breathless TV shows, semi-fictionalised accounts of the great Solvay Conference of 1927, which even now can move him to tears with its cast of geniuses (Einstein, Schrödinger, Born, Bohr, Curie, Heisenberg and the rest) teasing apart with humour, anger, envy and rapier mathematics, the secrets of the large and small universes, through great artistic feats of intuition and logic, fused together into impenetrable bulwarks against the ignorance of ages.
But while his fear subsided, the mysteries grew greater, with a dawning realisation that the language spoken by his heroes, and the language he would have to learn, was mathematics.
So he foreswore the transitory pleasures of sport and girls (both of which he had the gifts to exploit and conquer), and settled down to the ascetic and isolated life of the teenage bookworm.
He remembers his father calling him into the dining room for a ‘talk’. He was about 16. His father was wise, kind and voluble. Started with nothing. Built a life, a family, a little financial security, and remembered with pain the poverty and lifelong bewilderment of his immigrant parents, pining after their Lithuanian shtetl.
‘Jared, I want to know what is going on with you?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘All you do is read. You have no girlfriends. You don’t even have male friends.’
‘I like reading. I don’t have time for the rest.’
‘Why do you like reading?’
‘Because I want to understand.’
‘What do you want to understand?’
‘Why.’
‘Why what?’
‘I want to understand why.’
‘Why what?’
‘Why we exist.’
‘So read the Torah and the Talmud.’
‘I did. It didn’t explain how the universe came to be. It didn’t explain anything, really.’
‘That’s how, not why.’
‘I want to understand both.’
‘We can never understand both. Only god can.’
‘Then why doesn’t he tell us?’
‘That’s his business.’
‘Not good enough.’
‘Do you believe in god?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because then I have to ask how god came to be. It is an insufficient explanation. It is a red herring. It is called infinite recursion.’
‘Such big words for a little pische.’
Jared said nothing. He wanted to convince his father, carry him over the glass-strewn wasteland of superstition, and take him to an oasis where knowledge could be clearly separated from hope.
His father continued, ‘When I was your age I was playing ball with my friends in the street. I was dreaming about the girl next door. I was reading comics.’
‘I know, Dad. Sounds like a blast.’
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘So why don’t you get out and have some fun? This is the best time of your life, Jared, trust me on this.’
‘That was fun for you. What I do is fun for me.’
‘But you don’t do anything but read.’
‘Yes. I know. That is what makes me happy.’
‘A boy needs friends.’
Jared shrugged. On this he knew his father was right. But the neighbourhood kids and those in the schoolyard showed scant interest in him, and he in them. They had nothing to talk about.
‘Only if they are lonely.’
‘Aren’t you ever lonely?’
‘Never.’
He was lying. Loneliness was a condition that he had grown used to, like the ugly yellow wall colour in his bedroom. It usually bothered him only in the abstract, except after his favourite recurring dream, where he found himself pleasurably in company of people like himself, probing, questioning and debating with breathtaking wit and erudition until great and sparkling discoveries heretofore hidden by daunting complexity were revealed – a cure for cancer, an infinite and abundant source of power, the ability to outstrip the speed of light. Awakening from these dreams, he often felt a dull pain. Loneliness.
His father shook his head. ‘Jared, you are smart. So are a lot of kids. But you are also a good-looking kid. You are easy to talk to. You can throw a ball. I don’t get it.’
‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
‘You don’t have to be sorry. Maybe you should come to synagogue with me. There are lots of nice kids there. Some girls too. Good lookers.’
‘I think I would rather spend the time reading, Dad.’
And so it went. For an hour. Desperate communication across the howling canyons of differing world views. But his father heard him and never brought it up again.
He loved his only child fiercely with a saddened and bursting heart.
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