"Let's get out of here, we're surrounded," he whispered.
Elisa had to hide her smirk with a napkin when the waiter actually came to take their order.
SHE was still giggling when she got home that night.
Javier Maldonado was a great guy. Really great. He'd made her laugh all night, telling stories about professors and classmates, including Espalza and his tendency to pick up anything young with boobs. Hearing those banal stories had been like a breath of fresh air for Elisa, after having spent too long in a sea of books and equations. And what was more, when she'd finally had enough, he picked up on it instantly and took her right home. He hadn't driven, but he rode back with her on the metro to Retiro, the closest stop to her house. His mischievous face stayed with Elisa as she got off the train, and she kept picturing it on the walk back.
She came to the conclusion that although it was unfair to say she'd come very far in her relationship with Maldonado, she had taken a few steps. She was no fool; she'd been through this before. One of the advantages of her solitary lifestyle was that she'd learned to depend solely on herself. She'd been out with a few boys, especially when she just started college, and she thought she knew what she wanted. What she had with Maldonado was a friendship for now, but things seemed to be moving along.
The apartment was dark and silent. When she turned on the entry-hall light she saw a note her mother had taped to the doorframe: "I won't be back tonight. The cleaning girl left you some dinner in the fridge." The cleaning "girl" was a robust forty-five-year-old Romanian, but her mother had called every maid she'd ever had a "girl." She turned the living-room light on and the entry-hall one off, wondering why her mother felt the need to inform her of the obvious. Marta Morande took every weekend off; even the society pages knew that. Most times she didn't come back until Monday. There were plenty of gentlemen who invited her to spend a few days at their luxurious abodes. She shrugged. What did she care what her mother did?
She turned the living-room light off and the hall light on, knowing there would be no one there. The "girl" had Sundays off and always spent Saturday nights with her sister in the apartment she rented in the outskirts of Madrid. Elisa loved those nights when she had the whole house to herself, knowing she wouldn't be interrupted by her mother's annoying presence or the maid hovering around.
She walked down the hall, turned the corner, and headed for her room. Out of the blue, she recalled the "mustachioed conspiracy" and laughed out loud. Watch, now there'll be another one waiting in my room. Or hiding under the bed.
She opened the door. The coast was clear of mustaches. After closing it behind her, Elisa hesitated for a moment and then locked it, too.
Her room was her little bunker, her fortress, the place in which she lived and studied. She'd had many a fight with her mother about it, insisting that she mind her own business and keep out. She'd been cleaning her own room, making her bed, and changing her own sheets for ages. She didn't want anybody rummaging through her things.
Elisa kicked off her shoes, took off her jeans, threw them on the floor, and then turned on her computer. She thought she'd check her e-mail, since no messages had gotten through while the phone line was down.
As she logged on, she wondered what to do that night. She wasn't going to study, she knew that for sure. She was tired, but didn't feel like going to bed yet. Maybe she'd look at some of the erotica she kept on her hard drive, or visit a chat room or one of her "special" pages. Electronic sex had been the fastest and most antiseptic way for her to handle her long period of hibernation while she studied around the clock. She decided she really didn't feel like it right then, though.
She had two unread messages. The first was from an electronic math journal. The second one had no subject line and showed the little paper-clip icon, indicating it was sent with an attachment. She couldn't place the address:
[email protected].
It had "virus" written all over it. Deciding not to open it, she selected the message and hit "delete." Immediately, her screen went dark.
For a second, she thought it was a power outage, but then she realized that her lamp was still on. She was going to crawl behind her desk to check the cables when suddenly the screen came back on; one photo filled it entirely. A couple seconds later, it clicked to another one. Then another.
Elisa sat there, speechless.
They were black-and-white drawings, old-fashioned looking. She guessed the style dated from the early twentieth century. They were all pretty similar: nude men and women, with other nude men and women sitting astride them, riding them. Beneath each one, in red capital letters, the question "Do You Like It?"
She watched the little parade of images, unable to do anything to stop it. Her keyboard wasn't responding; the computer seemed to have a will of its own.
Bastards. She was sure that, somehow, despite all her precautions, it was a virus. Then she froze.
The slide show ended, and the screen now showed a black background with big red capital letters that resembled bloody claw marks. She saw the sentence before another electronic flicker made it disappear, and then her regular e-mail page came back up.
The message was gone. As if it had never existed.
She contemplated the words and shook her head.
That can't have referred to me. That was some random ad.
What it said was:
THEY'RE WATCHING YOU
07
THE following Tuesday, she again heard from "mercury-friend." Configuring her e-mail software to block the address did nothing. She turned off her computer, but when she rebooted, the message opened automatically and filled her screen with similar drawings and identical words, though this time rather than early twentieth-century artworks, they appeared to be modern graphic art: airbrushed bodies and three-dimensional computer-generated reproductions. They were still all men and women, this time walking or running, wearing boots and harnesses and carrying other people on their shoulders. Elisa stopped looking.
She had an idea. She searched the Web for mercuryfriend.net and was not surprised to find that it had unrestricted access and she could get onto the page with no trouble. Tons of banners for bars and clubs with bizarre names flashed on a hideously loud purple background. Abbadon, Euclid, Gobbledygook, Mister X, Scorpio—they all seemed to be very colorful places offering live shows, opportunities for swingers, and outrageous "hosts" and "hostesses." So, that was it, then. Just as she'd suspected, it was some sort of ad. Somehow she had inadvertently given those pigs her address, and now they were bombarding her with spam. She'd have to find a way to deal with it; maybe she'd have to change her e-mail address. But she was relieved to know that there was nothing personal in the messages.
She'd made her peace with the Mustache Mob, too. She'd hardly even thought about them since Maldonado had calmed her fears. Hardly. A couple of times she'd seen gray-haired men with mustaches on the street and felt a little shiver run through her. Sometimes she could spot them from a long way off. But she understood that, subconsciously, her brain searched them out. None of them seemed to be spying on her or following her, and by the time the weekend rolled around again she'd even forgotten about them. Or at least stopped thinking they were somehow meaningful.
She had other things on her mind.
ON Friday, she decided it was time to take a different tack in Blanes's class.
"How do you think we might solve this?"
Blanes pointed to one of his equations, scribbled on the board in his tiny chicken scrawl. Elisa and the rest of the class were more than used to his writing, though, and they could read those symbols as easily as if they'd been written as words and not numbers. They expressed the fundamental question of the theory: How can we identify and isolate finite time strings if they have only one end?
It was a mind-blowing concept. Mathematically, it could be proven that time strings only came to an end on one side. To use a simile, Blanes drew a line on the blackboard and asked them to imagin
e that it was a loose thread on a table: one end would be the "future" and the other the "past." The thread would move in the direction of the future, which he indicated with an arrow. He couldn't do it any other way, since according to the equations, the "end" of the past, that is, the left-hand end of the thread, simply didn't exist (this was the famous proof of why time moved only in one direction, which had brought Blanes so much fame). He represented this fact by drawing a question mark. There was no loose end that could be identified as "past."
The most incredible thing about it, however, the thing that defied logic, was that despite the fact that the string had only one end, it was not infinite.
The "past" side ended, but that end wasn't an end.
That paradox made Elisa's head spin. She loved it. She always got that feeling when she had insights into how weird and wonderful the world was. How was it possible that all of reality, the most personal things in our lives, could be made up of something as crazy as tiny little strings whose ends weren't ends?
At any rate, she was convinced she knew the answer to the question Blanes was asking. She didn't even have to write it down. She'd worked it out at home, and she had the answer in her head.
Swallowing hard, yet sure of herself, she decided to take a chance.
Twenty pairs of eyes were glued to the board, but only one hand shot up.
Valente Sharpe's.
"Tell us, Valente," Blanes smiled.
"If there were curls in the middle of each string, we could identify them, even isolate them using discrete quantities of energy, if that energy were enough to separate the curls. What I mean is..." There followed a torrent of mathematical language.
No one said a word. The whole class, including Blanes, was left speechless.
Valente, however, wasn't the one who had answered. As if he were a ventriloquist's dummy, he'd opened his mouth, but another voice two seats to his left had interrupted him and stolen the show.
Everyone stared at Elisa. She looked only at Blanes. She could hear her heart beating and feel her cheeks burning, as if she'd whispered sweet nothings rather than math equations. She awaited the consequences of her actions, feeling his half-closed eyes on her (it was a typical Blanes look that reminded her of Robert Mitchum) and yet managing to remain unbelievably calm all the same. Her hotheadedness, which under normal circumstances she thought of as her number one defect, now worked to her advantage: she was sure she was right and was prepared to fight for it, regardless of who her opponent was.
"I don't recall having called on you, Miss...," Blanes said in a tone as inexpressive as his face, though she felt a hard edge to his comment. The silence grew thick.
"Robledo," Elisa replied. "And you didn't see me raise my hand because I didn't. I've been trying every day for over a week and you never seem to see me, so this time I decided to speak."
Everyone turned to watch Blanes and Elisa, as if they were tennis pros in a match that had come down to the final seconds of the deciding set. Then Blanes turned back to Valente and smiled.
"Please, go ahead, Valente," he asked again.
Valente, sitting there primly, with his thin lanky body and white skin, looked like an ice sculpture seated at a desk. He answered immediately, in a loud, clear voice.
As she watched his emaciated profile, Elisa had to admire one simple detail: even though Valente gave the same reply as her, he did it in his own way, using his own words, somehow making it seem as if that was what he'd been thinking all along, before he'd even heard her, even making a slight mistake with his variables that Blanes quickly corrected. Defending his territory, like me, she thought, pleasantly surprised. So now we're tied, Valente Sharpe.
When Valente finished his elucidation, Blanes said, "Very good. Thank you." Then he looked down and stared at a spot between his feet.
"This course is for theoretical physics graduates," he proceeded quietly, his voice hoarse. "For adults. If any more of you are planning to have childish outbursts, I would kindly ask you to leave the room first. Please keep that in mind." Then, looking up again, this time neither at Valente nor Elisa but at the whole class, he added in the same hushed tone, "Aside from that, Ms. Robledo's solution is brilliant."
She felt a chill. He's naming me because I was the first one to say it. She recalled something one of her optics professors used to say: "In science, you're allowed to be a complete asshole; just make sure you're the first asshole." She didn't, however, feel any great pleasure, or even glee. In fact, a wave of shame swept over her.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Valente Sharpe's inexpressive profile. Congratulations, Elisa. Today you were the first asshole.
She looked down and shielded her eyes with her hand to hide her tears.
WHEN Elisa got home, she was so flustered by the morning's events that she didn't even care about the new e-mail from mercuryfriend in her inbox. Since she knew the attachment would kick into action and fill her screen no matter what she did, she just went ahead and opened it. The slide show began.
She was about to look away when she noticed a difference.
Mixed in among the erotic drawings were others: a man walking, hunched over under the weight of a stone on his shoulders; a World War I soldier carrying a girl in a little chair on his back; a male dancer on another man's shoulders ... Finally, in the same red letters on black background, appeared a new, enigmatic proclamation: "If You Are Who You Think You Are, You'll Know."
What was that about? Uncomprehending, Elisa shrugged and turned off her computer. But she had a strange feeling and stood motionless in front of the screen a few more seconds.
She decided it must have been some random detail, something she'd forgotten and was trying to remember. Sooner or later, it would come to her.
Next she took off her clothes and took a long, hot shower to help her relax. By the time she emerged from the bathroom, she'd forgotten all about the message and was thinking about what had happened in class. Blanes's scorn spurred her on. The harder I try, the more he hates me. Without even getting dressed, she spread her towel on the bed and stretched out on it with her notes and books, planning to make a few calculations that she thought might help her with the project she had to hand in.
There were only five days of class left. The last one was planned to coincide with a two-day international symposium at the Palacio de Congresos that some of the world's best physicists would be attending, including Stephen Hawking and Blanes himself. By that date, each student had to hand in a study examining possible solutions to the problems thrown up by the sequoia theory.
Elisa tried out a new idea. The results were unclear, but just knowing she had a path to follow made her feel better.
Unfortunately, she lost her cool in no time flat.
Leaving her room to get something to eat, she bumped into her mother, who was dutifully doing her best to make Elisa's life difficult.
"Well! I didn't even know you were back. You just lock yourself up in your room and don't even say hello..."
"Well, now you know. I'm back."
They'd met in the hallway. Her mother, impeccably dressed and perfectly coiffed, smelled like the kind of perfume that has full-page ads in fashion magazines, ads generally picturing naked women. Elisa, on the other hand, had thrown on an old robe and knew she looked like a mess. She guessed her mother would comment on it, and she wasn't wrong.
"You could at least put on some pajamas and brush your hair. Have you had lunch yet?"
"No."
She headed for the kitchen, barefoot, and remembered to tie her robe shut when she saw the "girl." Dishes of food, covered in Saran Wrap, were (as usual) artistically prepared and presented. That was how Marta Morande, baroness of Piccarda, insisted things be done. Elisa had given up on requesting simple food that she could eat with her fingers to save time; trying to go against her mother's wishes was like banging her head against a wall. Today was risotto. She ate until her stomach stopped grumbling, and then suddenly was struck by another
idea. Elisa played with her fork as she sat in the kitchen drinking water, stretching her long, bare, tan legs while her brain tackled the equations in question from various angles. She was unaware of Marta Morande's presence and only registered that her mother was standing there when she spoke.
"... a very nice person. She says her friend's son was one of your classmates at college. We talked all about you."
She stared at her mother, glassy eyed.
"What?"
"You won't recognize her name. She's a new client, and very, very well connected..." Her mother paused to pop one of the diet pills that she always took with a full glass of water at lunchtime. "She asked me if I was your mother. 'They say your daughter's a genius,' she said. I know you don't like it, but I was very proud to brag about you. Of course, I didn't have to do much bragging; this woman already thought you walked on water. She wanted to know what it was like to live with a mathematical mastermind..."
"Oh." Elisa suddenly realized why her mother was so happy. She cared only about her daughter's achievements when they came in handy at the beauty salon. Especially when she could use them to show off in front of a new "client," and even more so if she was "very, very well connected." It bugged her that the word "mastermind," lexically speaking, referred explicitly to men. Who ever said "mistressmind"?
"'And not only that,' this woman said, 'but I've heard she's gorgeous.' I told her you were. 'She's the perfect girl,' I told her."
"Save the irony."
Leaning against the fridge, Marta Morande turned to look at her. "I'm being serious..."
"Well, don't, please."
"Can I just say something?" Elisa didn't answer. Her mother stared at her. "When people talk about you like that, like this woman did today, I feel so proud. It's true, I do. But I can't help thinking what it would be like if, on top of being perfect, you just made a little effort to look the part..."
"Why bother when you're around?" Elisa replied. "After all, you're ... what does your Christian psychology book call it? 'Virtue incarnate'? I wouldn't want to step on your toes."