“What if it were one percent stronger? Or maybe just a teeny-tiny bit stronger?”
“Well, there are always some tolerances, but in this case they’re very narrow.”
“What about gravity?”
“Gravity’s a little different. Gravity’s very weak, you know. Ten to the minus thirty-eighth times that of the strong force. When you pick up that fancy fountain pen that you carry around, you overcome the gravitational force of the entire Earth with no trouble. You can fool around a bit with gravity.”
“You mean we could get lighter or heavier?”
“Not so as you’d notice. But I do like to let things slide sometimes, just a little, to keep the physicists on their toes. That’s why they keep getting different results for the Big G. It’s a moving target.”
“The Big G?”
“The gravitational constant.”
“Astronomy One-o-one is about as far as I got,” I said. “And Lucretius.”
“Now there was an interesting chap. Everything explained in terms of natural phenomena. No room for intentionality. Nothing can be created out of nothing.”
“I read Lucretius to Paul when he was dying.”
“It’s really marvelous, isn’t it. And these astronomer chaps are quite clever. I have to get up early to keep a step ahead of them. You couldn’t have made it up. You couldn’t, I mean.” Made what up? I wanted to ask, but God kept on talking: “Look, there’s only one person left in line. You haven’t got much time.”
I looked. It was the little girl in the summer frock. “She doesn’t even look like she’s twelve. Not even old enough to sin. What kind of sins could she have to confess?”
“Don’t you remember when you were that age?”
“Forget it.”
“Go, go,” he said, “before it’s too late. The little girl’s the last one. She’s going in now.”
The little girl entered the confessional. But I didn’t get in line. I looked down at The Roman Republic. There were no women in the picture except a statue in the lower left corner of a woman carrying a small amphora in her right hand and holding out a bowl with her left.
“That little girl,” I said, “always takes her time. What’s she got to confess?”
“You don’t want me blabbing your secrets,” he said, “so I don’t suppose she wants me blabbing hers.”
“What secrets?”
“You had an affair in Rome, didn’t you? With an Italian. Guido Bevilaqua.”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“I’m putting it as a question. More polite.”
”Yes, but that was ages ago. I thought you were talking about Jimmy.”
“I am talking about Jimmy. Why do you think I’m here? You’ve got a lot to answer for. You should go to confession.”
“You too! You’ve got a lot to answer for. You’re the one who should be going to confession.”
“You need to worry about yourself, not about me.”
“And if I don’t?”
“It will eat away at you.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“There’s something perverse at the center of the universe that wants to destroy goodness. Are you part of that something? Or are you going to take a stand against it?”
“I didn’t want to destroy goodness,” I said. “I wanted to destroy Jimmy.” He was getting my back up.
The little girl finally came out and gathered up her books. She tied the sleeves of her sweater around her waist. Then Father Viglietti came out of the center closet and walked over to the side aisle, where I was sitting, in front of a plaster statue of the Virgin.
He took one look at me and saw what needed to be done. “Esne parata potum habere?” he asked. Ready for a drink?
I nodded.
“Ego quoque,” he said. Me too.
The Sportsman’s Bar had been renamed the Seminary Street Pub, but it was still an old-fashioned bar that had once been a speakeasy. I didn’t mind the stale beer smell, which a lot of people find offensive, any more than I minded the smell of manure in a barn. It was part of the atmosphere, the earthiness.
I was anticipating the taste of a Schlafly’s dry-hopped ale as I slid into a booth. I’d have two bottles, Father Viglietti would have an old-fashioned, maybe two. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. I stretched my legs out on the fake-leather seat and leaned back against the wall.
Father Viglietti brought the drinks from the bar. “Sperasne umquam ut ignis descendat in aliquem?” he asked. He positioned our drinks on the table before sitting down. Do you ever want to call down fire on someone?
“All the time,” I said. “Students, politicians, Donald Trump. Working on a sermon?”
“Modo cogitans,” he said. Just thinking. “James and John want to call down fire on a Samaritan village that doesn’t give Jesus a warm welcome.”
“What does Jesus say?”
“He doesn’t go for it.”
“That’s a surprise.”
“Tu eos progredi dixeris?” You would have given them the go-ahead?
“Probably not. But tell me something. Do you suppose God speaks Latin?”
I was upset by the little colloquium in the church, but I was excited, too. Feeling that push was coming to shove. I thought I’d crossed a line when I killed Jimmy, crossed the border into another country. Now God was standing at the border, waving me back. “Turn back, O Man, forswear your foolish ways.” Maybe I was still in my old country after all. Maybe I could still turn back. Go to confession, make satisfaction. Or I could tell God to go to hell, that I wasn’t going to enter that confessional, certainly not with Father Viglietti behind the door.
“Hoc est in manu hominis cui loqitur.” Depends on whom he’s talking to.
“Does he speak to you in Latin or English?”
Father Viglietti laughed.
“I’m serious,” I said.
“It’s not as if he uses words,” Father Viglietti said.
“Hmm,” I said. I pushed The Roman Republic across the table toward him.
We had our differences, of course. He used the church Latin pronunciation favored by Father Adrian. I used the classical pronunciation I’d learned in high school and at Knox. He preferred Horace, I preferred Catullus. He admired the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana. I regretted the fall of the Republic.
I got up to get more drinks. He had the game open and was looking at the instruction book when I got back to the booth. “Iesu, Maria, et Ioseph,” he said. “This is worse than the tax code.”
Speaking in Latin slowed us down. We spent an hour looking over the rule book, forty pages of fine print with no clear explanation of how to set up the game, how to get started.
I’d finished my beer. Father Viglietti was nursing his old-fashioned. If I’d had a third beer I’d probably have confessed right there in the booth, but I didn’t. We caught up on the events of the day. It was a good year for the USA: not much was happening; we weren’t at war with anyone; people were coming off the welfare rolls; Seinfeld had launched a new season; the Bulls had won the NBA and were gearing up to do it again. We didn’t talk about God or the meaning of life, though I did tell him my fantasy about the people standing in line for confession, how at first they seemed so ordinary that they couldn’t possibly have anything interesting to confess, and then, when I looked again, how extraordinary they appeared.
We clinked our empty glasses.
“Trahens nubes gloriae?” he asked. Trailing clouds of glory?
“Aliquid tale,” I said. Something like that.
A waitress came over to the booth and asked if we wanted more drinks. Father Viglietti said no, we were fine. I always felt safe with Father Viglietti. I admired him, and Paul had liked him, too. He was a man who knew how to affirm the value of human life without hitting you over the head with the promise of rewards or threats of punishments in an afterlife. But maybe that was just part of his strategy.
God’s agenda was to get me to go to con
fession. His strategy, at least at the beginning, was to appeal to natural law. My agenda was to test my own strength, to measure it against, say, Raskolnikov, whose name came up more than once in our second colloquium. My strategy was to distract God by appealing to his enthusiasm for the cosmos, for the actual physical universe, which he loved the way a boy loves an elaborate model train layout that he has put together with great care on a Ping-Pong table in the basement.
The pattern emerged clearly in our second colloquium.
I got myself settled in a pew with my Oxford Catullus. I’d been working on a translation for several years, but sometimes I just liked to sit down without a pencil in my hand and just graze a little. I first read through all the carmina of Catullus in Professor Davenport’s class on the third floor of Old Main, back in the spring of 1962. Sixty lines a day, three days a week. No attempt at literary appreciation. I see now that that was a good thing. Without the pressure to appreciate, our responses were genuine. If you liked it, you liked it. If you didn’t, you didn’t. No need to pretend. All you had to do was sort out the impossible syntax. I liked it, and I think I brought a lot of Catullus’s passion to my affair with Paul.
“You’ve heard people arguing,” God said, interrupting my thoughts. “You’ve read Plato’s Euthyphro.”
“Not since I took Professor Connor’s Greek class.”
I noted some of the same people in the line. I suppose they’d committed the same sins over again during the week. Masturbation, fornication, evil thoughts. The same little girl too, wearing a different dress, waiting for everyone else to finish.
“Do people argue about numbers? No. How many eggs are in that basket? You don’t argue about it; you simply count the eggs. Do people argue about where the Empire State Building is? They might, but if you said it was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, you’d be wrong. If by New York you mean an imaginary city in your own head, that’s one thing. But if you mean the actual city of New York, then you can go there and see for yourself. It’s on Fifth Avenue between West Thirty-Third and West Thirty-Fourth Streets.”
“Where can you go to ‘see’ right and wrong?” I asked.
“You don’t have to go far. Just look around you. Everyone knows the difference between right and wrong. You can’t imagine a society in which people praise soldiers for running away in battle, friends for betraying friends, police officers for lying and murdering—”
“Excuse me, Pater,” I said. I didn’t know what else to call him. “Jimmy deserved to die. He threatened me. He threatened my daughter. He pushed her out of a moving truck! And did you hear what he said to me on the phone? I didn’t tell Stella. I didn’t tell anyone. He said that if I didn’t take Stella to the truck stop that night, he’d make what happened to her before look like a Sunday school picnic.”
“Sunday school picnics can get pretty rough,” he said, “but I take your point. You could have gotten a restraining order.”
“And the chandelier?” I said. I didn’t know the word for chandelier in Latin, so I said lucerne.
“Candelabrum,” he corrected me.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s even harder to understand, in a way. An inanimate object. Baccarat crystal. Totally smashed. I never told Paul. I never told Stella, but I think she knew. We were in Paris once—Paul and I—and a man tried to sell us a chandelier. ‘Maison de Baccarat,’ he kept saying, ‘le premier maison du monde.’ I looked up Baccarat on line. There was a Baccarat crystal chandelier like ours for sixty thousand dollars. I had no idea. Sixty thousand dollars.”
“Yes, but yours was not put together by Baccarat. Yours was put together by sailors who bought crystal dangles and fitted them up on a compass frame. So it wouldn’t be worth nearly that. It’s worth about five thousand dollars, but you’d be lucky to get that. But forget the chandelier. Why do you think you have a legal system? Do you want to go back to a tribal revenge model?”
“An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”
“You ought to know, Frankeska, that the code of Hammurabi was a way of limiting damages, not augmenting them. If someone poked your eye out, you could poke his eye out, but you couldn’t kill him.”
“That’s comforting, but how do you get from the Big Bang theory to ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”
“You can see the Big Bang, you know. If you turn on your TV to a station that’s not broadcasting, ten percent of the static that you’ll see will be the microwave background.”
“I don’t have a TV. I mean, we have a TV to watch DVDs, but it’s not hooked up to cable.”
“Of course. I forgot. You’re above the common herd.”
“I don’t have a microwave, either.”
“You can hear it, too. Not the Big Bang—the Big Bang didn’t make any noise. There was no air to vibrate, nothing—but the early universe had a series of overtones . . .”
“The music of the spheres? Pythagoras?”
“Not exactly, but close. Like a musical instrument. The early universe was like a tube with holes in it. If you blew through it, you’d get a sound and a series of overtones with shorter wavelengths. You can still hear them.”
“Why can’t I hear them?”
“The sound waves are too long for the human ear. Baryonic oscillations. The astrophysicists know they’re there. They just haven’t figured out how to detect them yet, but it won’t be long. Another four years. You might tell that former student of yours, Alan Teitlebaum, that if he wants to get in line for some serious kudos he should leave Princeton and go to Carnegie-Mellon. That’s where the discovery’s going to come from. They’ve put a tenure track offer on the table. Give him a ring.”
“Wouldn’t that be cheating?”
“I like to stir things up every once in a while. I tipped off Penzias and Wilson at the Bell Labs and they scooped Princeton.
“Who were they?”
“They were the ones who discovered the cosmic microwave background. They didn’t get the prize till later. They contacted Robert Dick at Princeton, and that’s what Dick said to his team: ‘We’ve been scooped.’”
“You intervened?”
“Get off your high horse.”
“Alan’s got some kind of big fellowship at Princeton, he’s not going to want to go to Pittsburgh.”
“He’s a Lyman Spitzer Fellow. They’re going to name a telescope after him. Lyman Spitzer, that is. Not Alan.”
“Lyman Spitzer,” I said, “Paul knew the Spitzers at Princeton. He and his wife, first wife, used to house sit for the Spitzers. House on Lake Carnegie. Really beautiful, but just cement block walls. No plaster. I have some pictures. Somewhere.”
“They’re in the garage, in a box labeled Princeton. But the box is turned, so you can’t see the label.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I suppose you know exactly where the missing Catullus manuscript is, too.”
“The one that was found under a beer barrel in Verona? The Verona codex? The priests hid it under a false catalog number in the Biblioteca Capitolare. Too steamy for them. That’s why no one can find it. Then they moved things around and it got buried in the reading room under a collection of liturgical manuscripts. On the south wall, next to the door. Bottom shelf. Verona Cod. MS DCCLXIX (olim 765). It’s in a solander box.”
“They had a moonrise party . . . the Spitzers. Everybody drank a lot of wine and Paul and his wife—his first wife—jumped into the fountain . . . a lot of other people, too.”
God interrupted: “The line is getting short, Frankeska.”
I could see that the confession line was down to one person. The same little girl. I’d started to think of myself as the little girl. But my last confession was at Santa Maria in Trastevere. I was tempted, but I wanted to know what the music of the spheres sounds like.
“Hurry up. This is your last chance.”
“I want to hear them, the oscillations. The music of the spheres.”
“All right.”
God made a sound. Not too
loud, not too soft. Not a sound that’s easy to describe, a sort of blatting sound, but musical, too. Somewhere between a major and a minor third, shifting from one to the other.
“That’s it?”
“It’s like a computer simulation. Otherwise you couldn’t hear a thing.”
Someone came out of the confessional on the right and the little girl, always last in line, disappeared into the one on the left.
“It’s not too late.”
“No way. Jimmy was a miserable piece of shit.”
“So are most people. That doesn’t mean you can just wipe them out.”
“What about the flood?”
“The flood. If I’d known how much flak I’d get about the flood . . . Funny, because I never used to get flak about the flood.”
“Make that sound again.”
God obliged. I lost track of time. Father Viglietti was shaking my shoulder. “I’m starting to worry about you, Frances. You were making a funny noise, and I think you were talking to yourself. Are you all right?”
“Sum excellens, Father.” Just fine.
“Esne parata bibere?” Ready for a drink?
“Certe.” Of course.
“Ego quoque,” he said.
Our little ritual.
That summer—the summer of 1997—God and I covered a lot of ground: the categorical imperative, natural law, existentialism, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, the expanding universe, the curvature of space. I was especially interested in the curvature of space because I simply couldn’t get my mind around it. But it turns out that space is not curved after all, or if it’s curved, the curvature is only local.
“The human mind,” God said, “can imagine almost everything. It can imagine—by analogy, of course—temperatures of millions of degrees, and billions of light years. But there are two things it can’t imagine: space-time curvature and quantum mechanisms. All the images are misleading. Real scientific understanding is based on mathematics. You can’t visualize these things. But fortunately you don’t have to worry about either one. Newtonian physics will do just fine. Imagine,” he went on, “that you’re standing on a flat plane, or plain, either one, in a dense forest. You walk out one hundred meters into the forest and then you walk in a circle around your starting point and count the trees. That will give you your circumference, right?” He spoke as if I’d disputed the truth of 2πr.