The Presentiment
from Nectar Fragments
http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail~bookid~36297.aspx
You all know me. Am I the sort of man to be beguiled by omens, led astray by presentiments? Of course not. As soon expect me to consult a witch or oracle or street-corner fortune-teller about the results of my experiments! I am a scientist to the bone, as was my father before me, and though my fame will never equal his – one genius in the family is enough, I always say! – my record as I approach my sixtieth birthday is, if not brilliant, solidly respectable; the contributions I have made to our understanding of the universe are not the stuff of newspaper headlines and Nobel Prizes, but they are hardly trivial either; Nobel-class work does not get done without the support of work like mine, as the late Dr. Eisenfeldt (to cite but one example) very generously acknowledged in his Nobel acceptance speech three years ago.
Enough. I am not here to burnish my reputation, which is solid enough among people I respect, or to grovel for popular adulation, which means nothing to me. My only point is that I am above all a man of science, dedicated to and shaped by the disciplined use of reason in the pursuit of knowledge – which makes all the more incomprehensible the strange thing that has happened to me lately.
What strange thing? Well... a dream. A recurring dream. A nightmare. There is a horrific explosion, followed by a roaring fireball. Piercing screams, agonized wails, fearful moans. I wake up, screaming myself. Three nights in a row I have had this dream. Three nights in a row the screams in the dream have wakened me, and my screams in turn have wakened my wife, who bends over me with a look of concern and wipes my perspiring face with a damp cloth.
***
The dream stopped. It has been a week since it recurred. My wife is relieved. “You were just tired,” she says. “You need a vacation. God knows it’s been long enough. Well, just ten more days...”
In ten days we are leaving for India and the Maldives. There is a scientific conference in Bombay, at which I am to read a paper, and then – two weeks, two whole weeks, in the Maldives! Two whole weeks with nothing to do but dive among the coral reefs and exotic fishes of the Indian Ocean, where life itself is said to have begun!
It was Marion’s idea. It occurred to her as soon as I mentioned the conference. Bombay suggested the Maldives to her as rapidly as, in a word-association test, car might suggest truck, man boy, physics atom, and so on. We have been diving for something like forty years – we met, in fact, at diving school, and in our younger years traveled all over the world - Hawaii, Australia, India, Africa, South America – in search of the ultimate diving experience. Marion used to say as a joke that we were as passionate about diving as we were about each other.
How long has it been since our last dive? Five years? No, seven. It was seven years ago, in 1998, that we went to Belize, and since then, what with one thing and another – there was Marion’s illness, of course, not life-threatening but draining, and my work, and Marion’s work too, for she owns a chain of cosmetics shops and is nothing if not a hands-on manager.
And so when I announced that my paper on the wave/particle dichotomy had been accepted for presentation at the Bombay conference on the physics of light, Marion’s imagination leaped immediately to the Maldives, where we had been some twenty-five years earlier, swearing we would go back again someday soon, but somehow we never did. Again: one thing and another.
Just ten days more, as Marion said. Today is June 8; we leave June 18. Three days of sightseeing around Bombay; the conference is the 22nd and 23rd; then, on the 24th – the Maldives!
***
The dream again. My God! Identical in all its details, but never, never had it been so vivid, so horrifyingly vivid before! What is this? Is my mind unraveling? “Marion,” I said when I had calmed down sufficiently to speak, “we’re not going.”
“Not going? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you see? This dream, it...”
“It what?”
“It’s a warning, a warning! Listen to me. When have I ever in my life had a recurring dream like this? Never. The same dream, night after night after night – do you mean to tell me it has no significance? And listen: this time for the first time, it was clear – the plane we were on was bound for India!”
“Paul, I’m not going to listen to this! You’re exhausted, you’re upset, you need a rest, we both do...”
“It was bound for India, Marion! The stewardesses were Indian, they were wearing saris...”
“Sh. Lie down.” Gently she forced my head back down onto the pillow. I closed my eyes. I felt her get off the bed, and I heard her receding footsteps; a moment later she returned with a cold cloth, which she lay on my forehead. It felt good, so good. “Let me put on some music,” she said. I heard her fiddling with the CD player, and then the soft, sweet strains of Mozart’s Night Music filled the room.
“What time is it?”
“Nearly three.”
“Do you know that as a youngster I was considered to have musical talent?”
“Yes, dear, I know.”
“Real talent. Serious potential. I could have become a musician.”
“Yes.”
“But I chose physics instead.”
“The choice had to be made.”
“Did I make it, or did my father?”
“You did, of course.”
“It’s more complicated than you know. Family life generally is. Do you know, I’m glad we never had a family. I’ve had moments of regretting it, but overall, I’m glad.”
“Sh. Sleep.”
“’To sleep, perchance to dream,’ as Hamlet said.”
***
Mozart – that’s the answer. We’ll fall gently to sleep on the wings of Mozart’s harmonies, and there will be no dreams. So at least I concluded the next morning, waking up refreshed and restored, the sunlight streaming into the room… “Waves or particles?” Marion joked as she gave me a light peck on the cheek. Over breakfast she suggested I take the day off after my bad night, but I protested there was no need, I felt fine, and anyway, I had classes to teach, last-minute preparations to see to. She didn’t insist. She too was busy, they were introducing a new product line. “Shall we meet for lunch?” she suggested.
“Actually, I’ve arranged to have lunch with Jeff.”
“Well, I’ll see you at home then. You’ll be back the usual time?”
“Yes.”
And so we parted, she in her car to her occupations, me in my car to mine.
Do scientists become mentally ill? The question suddenly occurred to me as I drove along the familiar streets to the university. What was strange, apart from the abrupt, out-of-the-blue manner in which the thought struck me, was that so simple a question had never, never once, entered my head before. At first blush the answer is obvious: as human beings, scientists are subject to human diseases; mental illness is a human disease; ergo… As well ask whether scientists catch colds. But probe a little more deeply. Mental illness is not a disease like any other, it is a specific kind of disease, a failure of reason. And the scientist is not quite a human being like any other, he or she being distinguished precisely by the acute development and constant exercise of the rational faculty. Wouldn’t that afford some protection at least (granted, not total protection) against (to put it vulgarly) cracking up?
There are other ramifications. Supposing a scientist is mad, but doesn’t know it. Is that impossible? Clearly not; why should it be? Supposing, moreover, that he is a genius, whose eccentricities are overlooked on that ground, whose past discoveries seemed mad at first but were later confirmed - an Einstein, in short. Supposing Einstein had gone mad later in life, and proclaimed… well, anything – that dreams are the true reality and waking life is illusory, for instance. Einstein’s great name would lend credence to the wildest notions. And mankind would begin to act accordingly, dismissing waking life as illusory, adopting dreams as reality.
What was that noise? It seemed to be coming from the engine. A new car, barely a year old, an Audi, supposedly one of the best cars on the market, already assailing me with mysterious noises. What could it be? An irony: I, a physicist, have no more knowledge of car engines than an infant. Machinery in general. Nuts and bolts. Not my field. Is my field too narrow? Is that possible, given that my field is the universe?
***
Jeff. Lunch with Jeff. Our relationship is somewhat peculiar. As children we were best friends – no twin brothers were ever closer. That lasted from kindergarten until college, when he went his way and I went mine. No problem, it happens. When I moved west I didn’t even phone him to say goodbye, not because we were enemies but because we were strangers. And so we remained for a good thirty years, until, one day, the phone rang and guess who? He too had moved west. How about lunch?
The phrase that occurred to me, as soon as I laid eyes on him, was, “You haven’t changed a bit!” I didn’t utter it, because as boys we had prided ourselves in eschewing clichés – they were for "ordinary people" – and this one would have made him wince. Besides, it would have rung false to him. He would have patted his spreading middle, pointed to his graying goatee, and said in that tone of humorous, friendly disgust which was peculiar to him, “You gotta be kidding, Feldman!” But no, I wasn’t kidding. Superficial changes there were, of course, but we could have crossed paths in a crowded street, me not knowing he was there and not having so much as thought of him in years – and I would have known him instantly. Instantly!
“So!” He put down his beer glass, rose from his table (I am speaking of that first reunion of ours, eight years ago) and with perfect unself-consciousness, oblivious of the people around us, embraced me. “Tell me what secrets of the universe you’re unlocking this week, unmindful to your peril of the warning contained in the myth of the Tower of Babel!”
He was, of all things, a Biblical scholar. Had there been signs in his youth of his ultimate calling? It’s easy enough to see them in retrospect – the occasional bouts of melancholy that contrasted so sharply with his habitual vivacious, often lewd, good humor; a brief infatuation in high school with the eighteenth-century Hasidic masters he’d encountered in the famous book by Martin Buber, a stint on an Israeli kibbutz, and so on. Still, it’s not at all what I would have expected of him. If at sixteen someone had asked me, “What do you figure Jeff Horowitz will be when he grows up?” I would have said, “A businessman. A wheeler-dealer.” Probably anyone who knew him back then would have said the same, in view of his preoccupation with money, his restless, scheming intelligence (long, long before it became a commonplace of the eBay age, I remember him devising a scheme to rent his forehead out for advertising; nothing came of it, but that’s the kind of imagination he had), his impatience with anything that smacked of slow, steady accumulation as opposed to the quick, brilliant stroke that nets a fortune all at once. Evidently I had misread him; what I had thought peripheral to his character was central to it, and what I had thought central was peripheral.
***
Our friendship now was nothing like what it had been. We met for lunch once a month or so, no more. Now and then he would send me an email; now and then I would send him one. Other than that, nothing. I’m not quite sure why it turned out that way. Shortly after he moved here he invited me and Marion to his house for dinner. We met his wife, Rose; she was his second wife, his first marriage having ended in divorce years before. Maybe the problem was Rose being so much younger than we were. She was nice enough, but of a different generation, which would have been all right if she had been his daughter, but she wasn’t his daughter – in short, somehow Marion and I couldn’t find our footing with her. Having been invited there, it was naturally incumbent upon us to return the invitation, which we did, but I think all four of us were relieved when at last the evening came to an end, and since then, not only have we not met en famille, we have hardly so much as mentioned our families.
The restaurant we meet at, always the same one, is a nice little pub downtown called the Tudor Rose, more convenient to his university than to mine, mine being out in the suburbs, but that’s no problem; it’s a delightful little place, all wooden tables, wooden benches and wooden walls, the waitresses in flowing red gowns and (presumably) Tudor-style bonnets, the background music consisting of nothing more intrusive than twanging lutes.
I saw his car in the parking lot as I pulled in. He would have ordered a beer; he and the waitress would be on the best of terms. He loses no time. As in high school, so now: he had a way with people that I, shy, awkward and morose, could only envy. Quips and sallies roll off his tongue when he’s in the mood; when he isn’t, if the occasion seems to call for it, he can fake it so you’d never know. Yes, he would have made a good businessman. A good prime minister too, for that matter. Biblical scholarship! And yet, he’s good at that too. He’s shown me articles he’s written for scholarly publications, and they are – if I’m any judge – magnificent: light and deep at the same time, light the way Mozart’s music is light, deep in the sense that as you read you feel new worlds of thought opening up in your mind, still taking shape long afterwards. I am thinking of one article in particular, on the prophet Hosea and his prostitute wife, that I would love to assign to my students. Unfortunately we have divided the world into faculties, fields, specialties, and it simply would not do. Hosea was not a physicist. (Once, shyly and maladroitly, I did point it out in private to a student I have particularly high hopes for, and was momentarily crushed – stupidly, I admit – when he showed no interest.)
“Hey!”
I was blinking furiously in the entrance, my eyes not yet accustomed to the relative dimness inside, when he called me over.
“I saw the strangest thing on the way here,” he said before I had even sat down. “A group of kids, seven-eight years old, were playing tag in Samson Park, when suddenly this one boy detaches himself from the game and goes off by himself. There’s something about small children – I can’t resist pausing to watch them. No matter how bad things are in your life, or in the world at large… you see kids playing and you think to yourself, ‘There’s hope!’ Anyway, what do you suppose this boy was so busy doing? – for he was busy, I do assure you. Gathering dandelion fluff!”
“Dandelion fluff?”
“It was like… how shall I say it?... like it was gold or something, but only he could see that. To everyone else it looked like dandelion fluff; only he could see it as it really was… Hm! Don’t let me get carried away here. Guess where this young lady is from.”
“This young lady” was our smiling waitress, who was now standing over us.
“Did they really show so much cleavage in Tudor times?” Jeff inquired with a grin. It was the grin I remembered from our childhood – roguish, mischievous, and at the same time so innocent somehow… it’s hard to put this in words… so good-naturedly boyish. Any man of sixty who could still grin like that… well, I don’t know, maybe he deserves to get away with murder. The waitress must have thought so too. “That’s what they tell me,” she smiled.
“Bit chilly, no?” said Jeff.
“Nah! You get used to it. What can I get you gentlemen?”
“From Montreal,” said Jeff to me, as if no interruption had occurred. “Not only that – from Nectar. And not only that – ye gods! from Ben Gurion Drive! Six houses down from mine! Can you believe it?”
“Is it true?” I asked, addressing the waitress for the first time.
“Yes.”
“Well well.” I felt myself flush. Such a remarkable coincidence surely called for something more imaginative than “Well well.” Jeff, as usual, supplied it.
“My friend is an astro-physicist,” he explained (he knew better, of course), “and is no doubt mentally calculating, even as we speak, which is more mathematically improbable – two strangers from Ben Gurion Drive in Nectar meeting by chance in Vancouver, or the inhabitants of a planet in another solar system speaking English. I think I’ll have the ham steak. Feldman?”
“Eh? Same,” I said, too distracted to study the menu.
“And two Bradors, to remind us of our ‘hometown a million miles away,’ as the song says.”
***
“Listen,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”
“Well?”
The ham steaks were delicious, the fresh green salad out of this world, the beer cold and refreshing, and now, as we lingered over our coffee, I thought to myself, Yes, everybody should hold on to at least one childhood friend through a lifetime. Who else but someone who has known you all your life can really know you, really understand you? Perhaps I had had one Brador too many – I generally never permit myself more than one at lunch, and here I was after two awash in sentimental contentment. A fine thing it would be if I got stopped on the way back to the university for drunk driving!
“Listen…” I told him about Bombay, the Maldives, the dreams. “If it were you,” I wound up, “would you cancel the trip?”
“Funny you should ask.” He grew thoughtful. I waited for him to explain. But the silence grew. What was he thinking about? About my predicament, or something totally different? I became aware of the lute music, the clinking cutlery, the buzz of conversation around us. Suddenly there was the sound of shattering glass accompanied by a sharp but muted cry. “Oh dear,” said our waitress, who happened just then to be approaching. “That table’s unlucky. Yesterday someone sitting there dropped a glass too. There you go, sirs,” she said, laying down our bills. “Would you care for more coffee?”
“Yes, I think we would,” said Jeff in an odd, musing tone of voice better suited to a far weightier question. “I think we would.
“I’m working on an article,” he resumed, after a pause, in the same tone. “Remember you once asked me if I believed in God? I’m afraid my answer was somewhat incoherent. Have you ever read Dostoevsky? He says somewhere – in one of his letters, I think it was – ‘All my life I’ve been tormented by God.’ That’s true of me too – on a much smaller scale, of course, befitting my much smaller gifts. My parents, as you know – ah, thank you, my dear.” He fell silent as the waitress refilled our cups, resuming as soon as she moved on. “My parents were religious. I grew up in a Jewish household, a Jewish atmosphere, without it meaning much to me as a child. In fact, it made me squirm. Like outgrown clothes that are too tight. Nectar, with all its streets named after Jews... Ben Gurion Drive, Sholom Aleichem Avenue, Maharal Crescent... It was embarrassing! Didn't you find it embarrassing? No? To me it was... I don't know, like wearing a yellow star or something. Not the aptest comparison, I admit. Outgrown clothes... Still, when they’re the only clothes you have, you can only take them off at the cost of going naked, you know what I mean?”
“No, I’m not sure I do.”
“When I was sixteen I asked my father, a propos of I’m not sure what, if he believed in God. He said no. ‘No!’ I said. I’m sure I wasn’t as astonished as I pretended to be; I must have suspected something, or I wouldn’t’ve asked the question, right? But anyway, I affected great surprise. ‘No! Then why fast on Yom Kippur? Why keep kosher? Why go to shul on Saturday morning?’ ‘Because I’m a Jew,’ he said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think I’m the opposite. I believe in God, but I’m not a Jew.’ Mostly that was just me being argumentative, trying to get my father’s goat – which was easy enough to do, he not having much of a sense of humor, as you may recall. I think I only realized after I said it that it was actually true.”
Once again he fell silent. Was that it? Was he merely pausing to collect his thoughts, or had he finished?
“What about the article you’re writing?” I prompted him at last.
“Article? Oh. Hm. I wonder if anything’ll come of it. I spent two hours working on it this morning before breakfast, and wrote… not a word. Not a single word.”
“Well, that happens.”
“The premise is this: that man’s view of the world changes the world. It’s not a question of do we perceive the world correctly or incorrectly. It’s a question of intensity. Do we perceive the world intensely enough to confer reality upon it? The one God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob existed because Abraham, Isaac and Jacob willed him into existence. The thousands of Hindu gods exist among different people for the same reason. Likewise the Olympian gods of the ancient Greeks, who were immortal; the I-forget-how-many gods of the Norse, who were mortal; the elusive kami of the Japanese who seem to be neither gods nor human, neither mortal nor immortal…”
“Go on.”
“Too many of my colleagues study only Judaism, only the Biblical texts. What about the Vedas? The Analects? The sutras?”
“Yes, I see your point.”
“What is reality? The more I read, the further I go into my studies, the more I seem to see that ‘reality,’ so called, is what time and space were to Kant, if I understand Kant correctly (and who would be bold enough to make that claim! Did Kant understand himself, I sometimes wonder) – reality is a category in the human mind. Beyond that, beyond the human mind, there is no reality. You physicists are barking up the wrong tree. There is no reality. There are only visions of reality. Unfortunately, in our day there are no visions either. Or… hm. Who knows? Maybe it’s fortunate. Maybe it’s for the best. What do you say, my dear – is it for the best, or not?”
“I’m sure it is,” smiled the waitress. “At least, I’ve never had any reason to doubt it.”
“Why should you, at your age?”
“Wait.”
About to move on – she was on her way to another table with a stacked tray – the waitress turned to me in surprise. So did Jeff. I had taken no part in their banter until then; they might well be surprised at my sudden intervention.
“Are you… are you…you’re not…”
“Not what?”
“Nothing.”
Under different circumstances she might have pressed me; as it was, burdened with her tray, she frowned slightly and hurried past.
“Not what?” Jeff demanded. “What was that all about?”
I forced a smile. “You were saying there are no visions. Well, I think I just had one. A vision. It’s nothing. She suddenly looked familiar. A passing fancy, that’s all.” I looked at my watch. “We’d better go. I have a class at two.”
***
Was it a passing fancy? Of course. What else? The person the waitress seemed suddenly to resemble was… me. We are in the realm of nonsense now – or madness. What is she – my long-lost daughter? I don’t have a long-lost daughter. Maybe I do have one, without knowing? No. My love life hardly admits of complications of that sort. Other things aside, I am unable to father a child. When years went by without Marion becoming pregnant we had ourselves tested. Sure enough, my sperm count is low. It was a disappointment of course. We considered adopting, but couldn’t make up our minds. The years passed, and so did our desire to be parents. We had grown used to things as they were.
***
There were no dreams last night. There was no sleep last night. I lay awake, eyes open, staring into the pitch darkness, thinking of the girl. The waitress. Not so much thinking of her, as of the impression she made on me. It was a little like – no, very much like – the time (years ago) I saw my brother after a long absence. I came to the airport to meet him, and the first glimpse of him so startled me I think I actually cried out; I’m not sure, but I saw heads turn in my direction. What startled me was the feeling I had of looking at myself. The moment passed, sobriety returned, and studying his face calmly I could see that the resemblance between us was no more pronounced than that between any two members of a family. The human mind is a curious instrument, susceptible to unaccountable impressions; fortunately, that same mind is able to reflect on those impressions, subject them to rational analysis, and dismiss those that fail to stand up to it. The odd thing about the waitress, or about the “unaccountable impression” she made on me, is that it was not, as it was in my brother’s case, a first impression. I had been observing her for some time – that is, not observing her in the sense of paying close attention to her, which I certainly had not been doing, but I had seen her, had been regarding her more or less indifferently for some time, faintly irritated, perhaps, though for no good reason, by Jeff’s banter with her – no good reason, I said, but maybe there is a reason after all, not “good” in the sense that it does me credit, for it surely does not, but good, or at least adequate, as an explanation: the truth is I have always been a little jealous of Jeff’s easy charm – well, let that be. The point is, I had been aware of her for some time without being in any way struck by her appearance, and then suddenly it hit, with such force that I was unable to conceal my agitation. Her face was mine – not mine in the sense of a mirror image, of course; how could it be? She is a young, pretty girl and I am an old man! But… well, as I said: in the sense of a pronounced family resemblance. “A passing fancy,” I had said to Jeff, but the fancy had not passed, and here I was, lying awake at three o’clock in the morning brooding over it, thinking that I must somehow contrive to see the girl again – but how? I could of course go any time to the Tudor Rose, for lunch or coffee or whatever; there would be nothing even faintly suspicious in my doing so, no need to conceal my presence from the girl or anyone else… I could even – and perhaps this was the best plan of all – say to Marion over breakfast something like, “You know, that place I meet Jeff at is really very nice, why don’t we have lunch there today?” If I went alone she – the waitress – might –probably wouldn’t but might – think I’d conceived some sort of unpleasant senile crush on her – all the more so in view of my discomposure as we left – but if I’m there with my wife? That would be innocence itself. Yes, I decided, that is what I would do.
***
Marion was willing enough, and the arrangement was made, but that morning on the way to work a most extraordinary thing happened: I was involved in a traffic accident. I’m not quite sure how it happened. From what the police said, it seems the other driver cut across me to make a left turn; she should have waited, but I was not blameless either; if I had been paying more attention, said the officer sternly (he looked young enough to be my grandson) I could have braked in time. “Well, I didn’t sleep last night,” I blurted out, at which the officer looked at me (I thought) strangely. He nodded slightly, and scrawled a brief note on a pad of paper. Had I said something I shouldn’t have? The truth is, in over forty years of driving I had never once had an accident; this was my very first; I was as flustered as a schoolboy, and no less ignorant as to how to conduct myself. The flashing red light of the police car glowed eerily pale in the bright June sunshine.
Ruefully I examined my car. It was the first luxury car I had ever owned. I bought it last year after I was made a full professor. Marion encouraged me. “You can afford it,” she said. “Why not indulge yourself a little? You won’t live forever, you know.” But I was never happy with it, never felt at home in it as I had in the old Honda Odyssey. Driving the Audi was a little like talking to the stranger sitting next to you on a plane – you have nothing to say to one another, but your eyes chance to meet, he smiles vaguely, you mumble some inane comment, he answers in kind, and before you know it a relationship of sorts is established, the most dreadful relationship in the world as far as I’m concerned; on long flights it can be sheer torture. That’s rather a labored metaphor to describe how one feels about a car – no doubt it occurred to me because of an experience I had five months ago when I flew to New York, by no means the first experience of its kind – but anyway, there it was, my luxury car, my “indulgence,” with its left fender bashed in, and I found myself muttering to it under my breath, “Serves you right, you damned…”
The driver of the other car approached me. “My father’ll kill me,” she murmured. She was a child. “How old are you?” I blurted out. Seventeen, she said; she had only had a driver’s license for three weeks.
“Why aren’t you in school?” I demanded, rather more brusquely than necessary, I fear – it was the teacher in me, taking a reflexive stand against waywardness and indiscipline.
“I hate school.” Her father would kill her not only for damaging his car, it turned out, but for not being in school and for taking the car without permission. “I was going to go to the highway and pretend I was leaving home forever, heading east to start a new life. It was just a fantasy, a harmless fantasy…” She smiled through tears. “An escape fantasy.”
“Do you really want to escape?” I asked, more gently this time.
“No maximum security prisoner ever wanted to escape more.”
I looked at her in surprise – not so much at what she said but at the way she said it. She may have hated school, but she was clearly intelligent, and knew how to express herself with force and originality.
“Why? Do your parents treat you badly?”
“No. Oh no.” She was about to explain, but the young police officer sauntered over. A tow truck was on its way for the girl’s car; as for mine, he said, handing me back my license and registration, it could be driven and I was free to go; a report would be sent to the insurance company. “As for you, young lady…” She had been driving without the registration. Officially she was under suspicion of having stolen the car. Her father was out of town and would have to be contacted. In short, the “young lady” was in for a rough time. We exchanged glances as I got into my car and started the engine; hers seemed to say, “Save me!”
***
It occurred to me as I sat in the Tudor Rose waiting for Marion that she would see the car, parked half a block away, and think God knows what. The restaurant was not crowded, and I took the same table Jeff and I had had the day before. The waitress smiled a greeting. Yes, I thought, it’s true, I had not imagined it, the resemblance was unmistakable. We could have been father and daughter. Did she notice it? She didn’t seem to – but what sign would she give, if she did notice? She could hardly be expected to raise the subject to me – it would be impertinent. Would it be of me to raise it to her? Perhaps not, if I could find the right tone, but…what was the right tone? Unlike Jeff, unlike Marion, I never learned how to talk to people. The only tone I know is that of teacher to student. What a failure my life has been, I thought – and I didn’t mean my failure to be a Nobel-caliber scientist. What a failure. Better to be a farmer, a laborer, a man of no distinction whatsoever, no knowledge whatsoever of the nature of time, the essence of matter and energy, the origin of the universe, than to be unable to say to a waitress without causing offense, “Have you noticed how alike we look?”
“So you’re from Nectar,” I heard myself say as she began laying the table. She’ll think I’m making advances, I thought – an old man smitten by a pretty young woman; she’s probably laughing at me, or making a superhuman effort to hide her disgust. “My wife’ll be along in a few minutes,” I said, meaning she should set a place for her too; meaning also, of course, to establish my innocence. “How long have you been in Vancouver?”
“Three weeks.”
“Ah. You’re new here.”
She made no answer. The subject didn’t interest her. My conversation was banal, boring. Jeff could joke with her about cleavage, but I –
“My God, what happened?”
I started, perhaps even gasped. Marion, of course. She had seen the car. Her alarmed presence seemed almost to push the waitress aside as she seated herself. “What happened?” she demanded again. “Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine,” I muttered, “keep your voice down, it’s nothing…”
“What happened?” the waitress blurted out. It was none of her business, of course, but who could blame her, under the circumstances, for being momentarily forgetful of her place? She had been shocked out of her indifference. Marion turned a frigid glare on her. The waitress’ face flushed scarlet as her skirt. A moment ago she had made me feel like a fool; this was revenge of a sort, and for a fleeting instant I was pleased, only, when the instant passed, to feel more foolish than ever. The waitress hurriedly finished laying the table and slunk away.
I told Marion about the accident. “No need for hysterics, no one was hurt – but that poor girl…” I told her about the poor girl. “It’s funny,” I said. “I too, when I was her age, used to enjoy taking my dad’s car out on the highway, imagining I was… well, like she said, it was an escape fantasy.”
“What did you want to escape from?
“Oh…childhood. Convention. The law of gravity. My Nectar self. I used to head west, she was heading east… hm… and we collided on Cariboo Road. Oh, sorry.” The waitress was back, and we hadn’t even looked at our menus. “The ham steak’s really good,” I said to Marion.
“Is it? Well, ham steak then.”
“Two ham steaks. And a Brador for me…” Marion ordered coffee.
“Tell me,” I said, leaning forward. “Is it my imagination, or does that waitress look like me?”
“Look like you? Why on earth should she look like you?”
“She’s from Nectar. She lived on Ben Gurion Drive, six houses down from Jeff.”
“Paul…”
“I know. You think I’m mad. I need a rest.”
“You’re not mad, but you surely do need a rest. So do I.”
“Well, just four more days.”
“Four more days. My God, I can’t wait to slip into that water and feel myself going down, down…”
“A fish among fish.”
“A fish among fish. Yes. That, more than anything, is what I long to be.” She giggled. “For two whole weeks, a fish among fish, and yet human at the same time! That, to me… can there be anything better?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a bird among birds?”
After a moment’s reflection, she shook her head. “No. A fish among fish.”
“Well, that’s what we’ll be then.”
***
“Ed Saunders,” he said, thrusting out his big meaty hand. Marion, exhausted from the day’s diving, had gone upstairs to bed, leaving me alone with this bronzed American gentleman, the very picture of burly, full-blooded, youthful health and good spirits. “Scotch rocks,” he said to the bartender. He glanced interrogatively at me; I nodded, and there we were, drinking buddies, pals, comrades. Where you from, how long you staying, how many times you been here… soon we knew everything there was to know about each other, we were one, neither age nor point of view divided us. Though up to an hour before I would have died rather than make the slightest, most veiled allusion to it, I suddenly found myself regaling this stranger-turned-lifelong-friend with the whole story of my presentiment, and how I had been on the verge of tearing up my plane ticket in obedience to it. “Has anything like that ever happened to you?” I asked. No, he said, nothing, ever. “I can laugh about it now,” I said, “but at the time – let me tell you, there was nothing funny about it! It was a horrible, horrible feeling. Fortunately my wife would have none of it, she put her foot down, and here we are; otherwise…”
“Otherwise what?”
“Well… otherwise I wouldn’t be here! Wouldn’t that be punishment enough for my foolishness?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Being in that blue, blue, blue water, for hours at a time, among the fish, the coral, the… the creatures of the deep… well, let me put it this way: it’s the closest thing I know to a religious experience!”
“You don’t say. Hm.”
“Can we doubt the existence of other worlds, after that?”
“Other worlds?”
“I’m drunk and talking like an idiot. Don’t mind me.”
“No, I… other worlds. Funny you should say that.”
“Funny?”
“Not funny ha-ha, funny peculiar. But you’re right, diving does… hm… put you in touch with other worlds.”
He was a novelist, he said, and had come here less for the diving than to work on a novel – his second, his first having been enough of a commercial success (he gave a good-natured self-deprecating laugh at this, his white even teeth gleaming against the bronzed background of his face) to allow him to quit his job as a car mechanic – “something I can always go back to if the muse fails me.”
“Why should it fail you?”
“She,” he corrected me. “She. Why? Because she’s a whore, and – no, I take that back, I take it back. I mean, it’s true, but telling the truth is no way to win her favors, is it? Yo, bartender! Scotch rocks, two.”
“It’s not going well?”
“This morning, in an access of despair or whatever you want to call it, I pressed ‘delete’, and…well, where do two hundred pages of a novel-in-progress go when you press delete? You’re a physicist, maybe you’re the man to answer that question.”
“Can’t you start again?”
He seemed not to hear me. We sipped our scotches in silence for a time, and then I heard myself ask, my voice seeming to come from very far away, “What’s it about, your novel?”
“What’s it about? Well, you mentioned other worlds…”
“Science fiction?”
“Not exactly. An imaginary world whose inhabitants are recognizably human, but they are not born, do not die, do not reproduce, do not eat…”
“What do they do, then?”
“That’s just it. The whole concept of ‘doing’ is foreign to them. They just ‘are’.”
“Is it enough, to just ‘be’?”
“It’s enough for them. They don’t even have a word in their language for boredom, and the earthling who… hm… I had him arriving in a spaceship, but you’ve given me an idea; I’ll have him dive to the other world, it’ll be a world under the sea and he’ll dive to it, how’s that, eh? Yeah, that’s good! What was I saying? He’s the one who introduces them to boredom, because he’s bored, you see, and he infects them with his boredom… Bartender! Pen and paper, quick, hurry, please. I gotta get this down. The muse…what? I don’t care what kind of paper, what difference does that make? And another scotch. Paul? You good for one more?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Writing is not, of course, a spectator sport, and yet I watched him, entranced, so complete was his absorption in what he was doing, so totally had he forgotten my existence, though I sat right beside him, our knees practically touching. After a time – how much time I don’t know – I stood up. Time for bed. Good diving requires a good night’s sleep. “Goodnight, Ed,” I said. “It was nice meeting you.” He did not answer, but went right on with his writing.