Zig Zag

  "She owns a beauty salon two blocks from here," laughed Elisa. "My father was a physicist, but he died in a car crash five years ago."

  Maldonado looked genuinely distraught.

  "I'm so sorry."

  "Don't worry, I hardly knew him," Elisa replied easily. She climbed out and closed the car door. "He was never home." She bent down to look in at Maldonado. "Thanks for the ride."

  "Thanks for your help. Hey, if I have ... more ... questions ... could we, uh ... go out sometime?"

  "Sure."

  "I have your phone number. I'll call you. Good luck tomorrow on the first day of class with Blanes."

  Maldonado waited courteously for her to reach the door to her building. Elisa turned to wave.

  And froze.

  Across the street, a man was staring at her.

  At first, she didn't recognize him. Then she saw his graying hair and big gray mustache. She felt a chill, as if her body were full of holes and a gust of cold wind had just blown through her.

  Maldonado drove off. Another car drove by. Then another one. Then the street was empty, and the man was still standing there. I must be confused. This man isn't wearing the same clothes.

  Suddenly, he turned and walked around the corner.

  Elisa stood staring at the spot where he'd been just a few seconds ago. That must have been another guy; they just looked the same.

  Nevertheless, she was sure that this man, too, had been watching her.

  05

  "THIS is not going to be a fun class," David Blanes said. "We're not going to talk about amazing, extraordinary things. We're not going to answer any questions. If you're looking for answers, go to church or back to school." Nervous laughter. "What we're going to see here is reality, and reality has no answers, and it's not particularly amazing."

  He stopped abruptly when he got to the back of the room. Must have realized he can't walk through walls, Elisa thought. She stopped looking at him when he turned back around, but she was hanging on his every word.

  "Before we get started, I want to clear something up."

  Taking just two steps, Blanes strode over to the slide projector and turned it on. Three letters and a number appeared on the screen.

  "There you have it: E = mc2. Probably the most famous equation physics has ever produced. The relativistic energy of a particle at rest."

  He clicked to the next slide. A black-and-white photograph of a young Asian boy, his left side destroyed. You could see his teeth through his cheek. People whispered. Someone said, "Jesus." Elisa couldn't move. She shuddered in horror at the image. She was also riveted.

  "This, too, is E = mc2, as they know in every Japanese university."

  He switched off the projector and turned to face the class.

  "I could have shown you one of Maxwell's equations and the electric light of an operating room where someone is being saved, or the Schrodinger wave equation and a cell phone, which enables a doctor to save the life of a suffering child. But instead I chose Hiroshima, which is slightly less optimistic."

  When the murmuring died down, Blanes went on.

  "I know what a lot of physicists think about our profession, not just contemporary physicists, and not just bad ones, either: Schrodinger, Jeans, Eddington, Bohr—they all agreed. They thought all we worried about were symbols. 'Shadows,' Schrodinger used to call them. They think that differential equations are not reality. Hearing some colleagues speak, it's as though theoretical physics was just playing house with plastic building blocks. This absurd idea has gained currency, and now people seem to feel that theoretical physicists are little more than dreamers locked away in ivory towers. They think our games, our little houses, bear no relation to their everyday worries, their interests, their problems, or their welfare. But I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to take it as a ground rule for this course. From now on, I will be filling this board with equations. I'll start in one corner and end in another, and I promise you I'll make good use of the space because I have small handwriting." People laughed, but Blanes wasn't joking. "And when I'm done, I want you to do the following: look at those numbers, all those little numbers and Greek letters on the board, and repeat to yourselves, 'This is reality,' repeat it over and over..." Elisa swallowed. Blanes added, "Physics equations are the key to our happiness, our fears, our lives, and our deaths. Don't forget it. Ever."

  He jumped up onto the dais and raised the screen, grabbed a piece of chalk, and began scribbling on the left-hand side of the board, just as he'd promised. And for the rest of the class, he made no mention of anything besides complex noncommutative algebraic abstractions and advanced topology.

  DAVID Blanes was forty-three years old, tall, and appeared to be in good shape. His gray hair was receding and thinning on top, but it just made him look interesting. Elisa had also noticed some things that weren't as obvious in the many photos she'd seen of him: the way he half closed his eyes when he was concentrating; his pockmarked cheeks, no doubt the result of teenage acne; his nose, which was so bulbous in profile it was almost comical. In his own way, Blanes was sort of attractive, but only "in his own way," like so many men who are not famous for their looks. He was dressed in an absurd explorer getup, with camouflage vest, baggy pants, and boots. His voice was hoarse and quiet, and didn't seem to fit his constitution, but he gave off a certain air of authority, a certain desire to rattle people. Maybe, she thought, it was a defense mechanism.

  Everything Elisa told Maldonado the day before was 100 percent true, and now that was becoming obvious. Blanes's disposition was "special," more so than the other big names in the field. But it was also true that he'd had to take a lot more flak and faced a lot more prejudice than the others. First, he was Spanish, which meant that for an ambitious physicist (as she and her classmates were all perfectly aware) he was already a fish out of water and at a serious disadvantage. Not because of any discrimination, but because of the pathetic state of physics in Spain. The few achievements made by Spanish physicists had all taken place abroad.

  Then, Blanes had made it. And that was even more unforgivable than his nationality.

  His success was the result of a few hurried equations that fit on one side of a piece of paper. That's what science comes down to: a collection of short, timeless strokes of genius. He'd written them in 1987, while he was working in Zurich with his mentor, Albert Grossmann, and his colleague Sergio Marini. They were published in 1988 in the prestigious Annalen der Physik (the same journal that, more than eighty years earlier, had published Einstein's article on relativity) and shot him to an almost ridiculous level of fame. The kind of bizarre celebrity that only very rarely do scientists achieve. And that in spite of the fact that the article, which proved the existence of time strings, was so complex that few specialists, even, understood all of it. Despite its mathematical perfection, it would take decades to obtain any significant experimental proof.

  Be that as it may, European and North American physicists reacted to his findings with awe, and that awe filtered through to the press. The Spanish papers didn't get too excited at first (Spanish Physicist Discovers Why Time Only Moves Forward and Time Like a Sequoia, Says Spanish Physicist were the most common headlines), but Blanes's popularity in Spain derived more from the spin put on the news by less-respected publications, which had no qualms about making declarations like "Spain takes lead in twentieth-century physics with Blanes's theory,"

  "Professor Blanes affirms that time travel is scientifically possible,"

  "Spain could be the first country to build a time machine," and so on. None of it was true, but it worked. The public ate it up. Magazines began to put his name on the cover next to naked women, associating him with the mysteries of time. One esoteric publication sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their Christmas edition with the headline Was Jesus a Time Traveler? and then, in smaller type below, "David Blanes's Theory Disconcerts the Vatican."

  Blanes was no longer in Europe to gloat (or take offense). He'd
practically been beamed over to the United States. He gave lectures and worked at Caltech, and, as if he were following in Einstein's footsteps, at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where great minds strolled through silent gardens with plenty of time to think and plenty of paper to write on. But in 1993, when Congress voted to terminate the Superconducting Super Collider project in Waxahachie, Texas, aborting construction on what would have been the biggest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, Blanes suddenly cut short his honeymoon with the United States. His comments became somewhat notorious in the American press shortly before his return to Europe. "This country's government would rather invest in arms than in scientific development. The United States reminds me of Spain, in that it's a country full of talented people ruled by disgusting politicians." Since he'd insulted both countries and their governments equally in his comparison, his assessment managed to offend everyone and please almost no one.

  After concluding his U.S. tour, Blanes returned to Zurich, where he lived a life of quiet solitude (his only friends were Grossmann and Marini; the only women in his life, his mother and sister—Elisa admired this monastic existence) and his theory took a real beating, since people had stewed for ages and the results of their long-festering ire appeared regularly in print. Curiously, some of the most vehement rejections of his theory came from the Spanish scientific community. Endless university experts came out of the woodwork to blast the "sequoia theory," as it was being called at the time (in reference to the time strings coiled within particles like the tree rings within a sequoia's ancient trunk used to date them), claiming that it was a beautiful theory but totally inaccurate. Perhaps because he was from Madrid, critics there took a little longer to get going, but perhaps for the same reason, once they did, they really let loose. One famous professor from the Complutense even called his theory "a fantastic pile of poppycock with no basis in reality." Things weren't much better abroad, although at least specialists in string theory like Edward Witten at Princeton and Cumrun Vafa at Harvard claimed that it could still turn out to be an intellectual revolution comparable to the one set off by string theory itself. Stephen Hawking, from his Cambridge wheelchair, was one of the few who came out in Blanes's defense (albeit not wholeheartedly) and helped circulate his ideas. When they asked him about it, the famous physicist would answer with one of his typical ironic quips, emitted in the cold, inflexible tone of his voice synthesizer. "Though many people want to chop it down, Professor Blanes's sequoia still provides plenty of shade."

  Blanes himself was the only one who kept quiet on the subject. His strange silence lasted almost ten years, during which he ran the lab that his friend and mentor Albert Grossmann (now retired) had left in his charge. Due to its great mathematical beauty and fantastic possibilities, the sequoia theory still interested scientists, but no one could prove it. So it slid into the "let's see" category that science so often uses to place ideas in history's freezer. Blanes refused to speak in public about it, and many people assumed he was embarrassed by his errors. Then, in late 2004, his course was advertised—the first one in the world he'd ever give about his "sequoia." He had chosen Spain, of all places, to teach it: Madrid, to be exact. As a private institution, Alighieri would cover all the costs and was willing to accept the scientist's rather odd demands: that the course be taught in July 2005, in Spanish, and that twenty places be awarded strictly on the basis of scores on a rigorous international exam on string theory, noncommutative geometry, and topology. In theory, they'd only accept graduate students, though graduating seniors would be allowed to take the exam if they had a letter of recommendation from their theoretical physics professors. That was how people like Elisa had been able to give it a shot.

  Why had Blanes waited so long to give his very first classes about sequoia theory? And why now? Elisa had no idea, but she didn't really care, either. What mattered to her was that she was there. She felt lucky to be in that unique position, in the kind of class she'd only dreamed about.

  By the time that first session was over, however, she'd changed her mind considerably.

  SHE was one of the first to leave. Without even stopping to stuff her notes into her backpack, she slammed her books and notebook shut and sped out of the room.

  As she was walking down the steep road toward the bus stop, she heard a voice.

  "Hey ... Excuse me ... Can I give you a ride somewhere?"

  She was so pissed off she hadn't even realized there was a car beside her. Victor "Lennon" Lopera was poking his head out from within it, like an awkward turtle.

  "Thanks anyway, but I've got a long ways to go," Elisa said disinterestedly.

  "Where to?"

  "Claudio Coello."

  "Well... I could take you if you want. I... I'm going back to Madrid, anyway."

  She didn't feel like talking to him, but she thought he might distract her.

  She climbed into his messy car, which smelled like mildewed upholstery and was littered with loose papers and books. Lopera drove the way he spoke, slowly and cautiously. But he seemed pleased to have Elisa as a passenger and gradually began to warm up. As with all great introverts, his chatter would at one point suddenly get out of control.

  "What did you think of what he said right at the start, about reality? 'Equations are reality' ... Well, if he says so ... I don't know, I thought it was pretty reductive, a real positivist oversimplification... I mean, that right there is rejecting the possibility of revealed truths and intuitive truths, the foundations of religious belief and common sense, for example ... And that's not right... I mean, I suppose he says it because he's an atheist... But in all honesty, I don't think religious faith has to be incompatible with scientific proof... It's just on another level, like Einstein said. You can't just..." He stopped at an intersection and paused, waiting for the road to clear before he drove or spoke again. "You can't just convert metaphysical experiences into chemical reactions. That would be absurd ... Heisenberg said..."

  Elisa tuned him out and stared at the road, grunting from time to time. But then later, he murmured, "I noticed it, too, you know. How he treated you, I mean."

  She felt her cheeks burn, and thinking about it made her want to cry all over again.

  Blanes had asked a few questions in class, but he called on someone sitting two seats to her right to answer them every time. Someone who raised his hand as soon as she did.

  Ric Valente Sharpe.

  Then, at one point, something happened. Blanes asked a question and she was the only one to raise her hand. Yet instead of calling on her, he prodded the rest of the class to answer. "Come on, what's wrong? Afraid they'll take away your degrees if you're wrong?" A few tense seconds went by, and then Blanes pointed to the same seat once more. And Elisa heard that smooth, soft voice, the almost amused tone, the slight foreign accent. "There's no geometry that's valid on that scale because of the quantum foam phenomenon."

  "Very good, Mr. Sharpe."

  Five years in a row at the top of her class had turned Elisa into a fiercely competitive woman. There was no way to be number one in the world of science if you didn't possess a predator's instincts, the desire to pick off you rivals, one by one. And that made Blanes's bizarre disdain for her totally insufferable. She didn't want to expose her injured pride, but she couldn't hold it in anymore.

  "It was like he couldn't even see me," she muttered, holding back her tears.

  "Well, the way I see it, he couldn't stop seeing you," Lopera replied.

  She looked at him.

  "I mean, it seems like ... I think he saw you and thought, you can't have a girl who looks so ... well... you can't be both ... Well, I mean, no matter how you look at it, it's sexist. Maybe he doesn't realize you're the one who came in first on the exam. He doesn't know your name. He thinks Elisa Robledo is ... well, that she couldn't be like you."

  "And what am I like?" She didn't want to ask that question, but she no longer cared if she was being cruel.

  "Well, there's n
o reason it's incompatible, really...," Lopera blathered on, without addressing her question, as if he were talking to himself. "Though genetically it is unusual ... Beauty and brains, I mean ... They don't often go together. Of course there are exceptions, Richard Feynman is very good-looking, right? That's what they say, anyway. And Ric is, too, in a way, don't you think? A little?"

  "Ric?"

  "Ric Valente, my friend. I've called him Ric ever since we were kids. I pointed him out at the party yesterday, remember? Ric Valente."

  Just hearing his name was enough to make her gnash her teeth. Valente Sharpe, Valente Sharpe ... The name took on a mechanical sound in her brain, like an electric saw shredding her pride. Valente Sharpe, Valente Sharpe...

  "He's good-looking and very smart, too, like you," Lopera went on, oblivious, it seemed, to her feelings. "But he also knows how to wrap people around his finger, you know? He's a real snake charmer with his professors ... Well, with everyone, really." His throat gurgled in what was seemed a bizarre laugh (Elisa would hear that laugh for many years to come, and would come to find it charming, but right then she found it repulsive). "Girls, too. Yep, girls, too, yessiree."

  "You act like you're not friends."

  "Like we're not...?" She could almost hear Lopera's hard drive whirring into action as he processed the banal comment. "Of course we are ... Or, at least, we were ... We met in grade school, and we were going to go to college together. But Ric ended up getting one of those killer scholarships and went off to Oxford, lucky duck, to Roger Penrose's department, and we sort of fell out of touch ... He wants to go back to England when Blanes's course is over... if Blanes doesn't take him back to Zurich, that is."

  Lopera gave a fleshy smile with that last sentence, and Elisa disliked it intensely. Her darkest thoughts crept back and she felt totally and utterly dejected, almost comatose. Blanes will choose Valente Sharpe, obviously.