Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone

(written with Barbara Lamar)

The question of whether the waves are something “real” or a function to describe and predict phenomena in a convenient way is a matter of taste. I personally like to regard a probability wave, even in 3N-dimensional space, as a real thing, certainly as more than a tool for mathematical calculations.... Quite generally, how could we rely on probability predictions if by this notion we do not refer to something real and objective?

Max Born, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance

Hanging onto the desk’s edge, I eased myself back, then slumped down again while the floor got itself on an even keel. I’d drooled on the interdisciplinary dissertation I was meant to be assessing. Psychoanalytic cinema theory, always such fun these post-postmodern days. Ob(Stet)Rick’s: A/OB[GYN]jection, Blood and Blocked de(Sire) in CASA[BLANK]A. I closed my eyes again, feeling ill.

Lissa was shocked. I wasn’t all that pleased myself. Slightly reproachful, she said, “Dr. Watson, your appointment with the committee chair.” I squinted at the blur of my watch, did a sweep of the cluttered surface of my desk. No glasses in immediate view. You need to be wearing them in order to see where they are, but if you’re wearing them you already know where they are. That was the kind of pseudo-paradox this grad student’s dissertation was cluttered with. The inside of my head gonged.

“Yeah.” I tried to clear my throat. “Thanks, Liss.”

“Ten minutes. Shall I bring you a cup of coffee?” Delivering coffee was explicitly not part of Lissa’s job description as administrative assistant, but I seemed to bring out the motherly instinct in her, although she is too young by a generation and a half to be my mother.

“Sure. You’re a sweetheart.” Inside my head a Hell’s Angels convention was thrashing their hogs and tearing the town apart. Probably shouldn’t have brought that bottle of Jack Daniels to the office. Only meant to take a swallow to calm my nerves.

I shoved the (th)esis on to the floor, where it landed with a (th)ud, then dug through the random drifts of paperwork on my desk. My reading glasses were three layers down. I jammed them on my face. Where the hell had I put the notes for the meeting? I was stern: Lee, my boy, do this in an orderly manner. Here was the title page from Jerry Lehman’s chapter on the effects of adrenergic stimulants on the signification behavior of non-autistic children. I was supposed to be reviewing the damned thing. Two months behind so far but I’d catch up, soon as I got things worked out with Beverley.

Map of Vancouver. Another unfinished dissertation I was supposed to be supervising: Queer Lear, Queen. Brochure advertising whole-house entertainment systems. Article from the Irish Journal of Post-Psychoanalytic Semiotics I’d been meaning to read.

“Here you go, Dr. Watson. Fresh from the microwave.” Lissa set the cup down on a small bare spot on the credenza behind me. Even before I took the first sip I could tell it was stale, left over from 7:30 in the morning. What the hell, this was medicine.

“Can I help you look?” She glanced at her watch; her voice held a tinge of panic. Funny, I wasn’t a bit tense, and it was my career that was on the line. Up for promotion to associate professorship, financial security and independence for the rest of my life. Fat chance.

“I’m looking for the notes I need for the meeting with Patterson. It would be six pages stapled together.”

“Handwritten?” Good girl. Woman. Person. She was already attacking the mounds of papers.

“Printed.” I leaned back in the leather chair Bev had given me three, no, five years ago, sipping my awful coffee. All the time in the world. I’ll be okay, I told myself. I’ll be fine, soon’s the caffeine takes hold.

“I can’t find them anywhere, Dr. Watson.” Lissa pushed her hair back from her forehead, sighed. “Are you sure you brought them to the office?”

I goggled my eyes sadly behind my goggles and shook my head. I wasn’t sure of anything these days, except that if I let myself think too hard it hurt too much. “It’s okay, Lissa. I can wing it.” I stood up and the floor was steadier. “Better get going.”

“Like that?”

I glanced down at my Dept. Of Psychoceramics tee shirt with a pang. A gift from daughter Mandy the year before the dreaded menarche hormones kicked in and she went from adorable to teen werewolf. Lissa was right. It was a little frayed around the edges, and maybe the sentiment wasn’t ideal for the inquisition. “Not to worry.” I kept a suit jacket hanging behind the door for emergencies. Buttoned up snug, started out, stepping lively, a man who knows where he’s going and what he’s doing. But when I got out to the hall, away from the safety of my own office, I stopped short. Professor H. Patterson would expect me to say something at least moderately intelligent. You didn’t get to be a committee boss in the Department of Psychosemiosis and Literature at the University of California at Davis without expectations of that sort. And I realized I didn’t have anything remotely clever to tell her and the committee. Furthermore, I didn’t give a shit. There was a probability of about 0.5 that canceling the meeting now would end my career. On the other hand, if I went in there half crocked...oh c’mon Watson, not half, 80% at least...truthfully, the probability was close to 1.0 that I’d be out on my ass with no further ado, and so much for tenure, increasingly a dead letter. What the hell.

“Lissa?” I looked over my shoulder, tried for my most pleading, boyish look. “Do me a favor?”

“Call Professor Patterson and tell her you’ve had a stroke.”

“Something like that, yeah. Um....” Mental wheels turned sluggishly. “Tell her they called from my daughter’s school and there’s been a crisis and I had to go right away.” Like anyone would call me about anything connected with my child.

“I didn’t know you and Bev had kids.”

“One. Not Bev’s, from a former...marriage.”

“You’re a dark horse, Dr. Watson.”

I grabbed my helmet and cantered off for the Department’s outer door as fast as I could without tripping over any of my legs, and en passant grabbed a square, flat package from my inbox. No return address. Another orphan film from my mysterious benefactor, had to be. My spirits lifted as I made my escape to a brilliant afternoon that smelled of sage and ripe crabapples.

§

My apartment was dark and empty, though, shades drawn against the afternoon light, as it had been for the five months I sulked in it. My estranged wife Beverley used to find me pathologically optimistic, but that was before she threw me out. I could picture the mocking way she’d raise her eyebrows at me if she could see how eagerly I opened the mailbox and scanned the bills and junk mail for her handwriting. No such luck; instead, there was a letter from Virta and Crump, P.C., Bev’s lawyers. I tossed it on the deal-with-it-later pile along with a couple of month’s worth of bills and headed for the fridge. Nothing like a cold beer to take the edge off incipient depression.

The package was indeed an orphan film. The label on the slightly rusty metal canister read “#11: Reverend Willard D. Havard, New York City, January 10, 1931.” No accompanying letter or card. Now that I was living on my own, the movie screen and the old Bell & Howell Filmosound projector had become a regular feature of the décor, so there was no need to set up. I took a swig of beer and began threading the film through the machine.

Orphan films are movies that have been abandoned by their owners, sometimes because of copyright problems, more often because they didn’t seem worth saving. But films that seemed worthless soon after they were made—old newsreels, for example—are now priceless windows into the past. I’m easily entertained and can spend hours absorbed in some unknown family’s home movies from the 1950s. Whoever was sending these mystery films seemed to be a connoisseur with finer tastes than mine. He or she was sending stuff from the earliest days of simultaneously recorded picture and sound.

Film #11 was only a little over 3 minutes long. At the beginning, a tall bearded man with a Santa Claus belly was delivering a sermon on a street corner. The sound was scratchy, and you could hear car engines and horns honking in the background, but still you could make out most of the Reverend’s pitch.

“On my way down here today, I saw a little girl, couldn’t of been more than five or six. This little child was standing on the sidewalk selling chewing gum and mints. I asked myself, brothers and sisters, why is this little girl standing here selling chewing gum instead of sitting at a desk at school? Is she just trying to get some spending money? Is she helping to support her family?”

He had a certain charisma. It took an effort to redirect my attention from the Rev. Willard to his audience, if you could call eight or ten motley hobo types plus a couple of young boys an audience. One of the kids gave the other a rough shove as I watched; this was returned with compound interest, and soon they were rolling on the sidewalk like a couple of tomcats.

The Reverend reached the climax of his presentation. “As I was telling you earlier my friends, God sends us trials and tribulations to give us a chance to shine in His Light.”

A fellow about my age had passed in front of him, turned his head quickly to the camera and then away. Startled, I blinked, but he was gone. The scuffling boys seemed so intent on their struggle that they’d lost track of where they were. One landed with a thud on an ancient duffle bag. Its elderly owner thwacked both the kids across the shoulders with his cane. Indignant, for a moment they stopped fighting, then the sound track of the film clearly picked up the shorter kid yelling at the taller one, “Your mother’s a [something] slut.” And they were rolling on the ground again, just as the Reverend Willard reached for his tambourine, which had been passed from hand to hand. The full weight of both boys slammed against the Reverend’s shins; he went down on his massive butt, the tambourine went flying, scattering a few coins across the sidewalk. Instantly the boys stopped their scuffling. The taller kid, closer to the lens, grabbed a couple of coins. The other, grinning, ducked down so his face was visible under an armpit, and did something that flashed white and was gone. Instantly, then, both boys ran swiftly and gleefully out of the frame, their differences apparently forgotten. And that was it. The end of the film.

I rewound a short way and played the last few seconds again. There had been something familiar about that fellow walking past, something that prickled the back of my neck.

No mistaking it, once noticed and reviewed. It gave me the strangest shiver. I watched that segment of the film again, and again, and once more again. He was me. I mean, the guy bore an uncanny resemblance to yours truly. Allowance made for the antique style of his clothing and his cap, the very spittin’ image. That was undeniably me in the 1931 movie. The year before my grandmother was born.

I saw something else that creeped the hell out of me: just before the scuffling lads rammed into the Reverend Santa Claus, my double turned his head, caught the eye of the photographer, and winked at him. In effect, through the recording lens, at me.

What the fuck?

My hangover was gone, and my lethargy. Adrenalin can do that. I wanted to look more closely at this fragment of images from the past without risking the fragile orphan footage any further. It took me an hour setting up the old mirror box that reflects the image from screen to camcorder lens (I’d bought it on eBay, they don’t make them any more), and then saved the digital feed to my hard drive. Doing this properly would require a bunch of money and a professional transfer house tech, lifting off the dust and other crap from eighty years of careless storage, paying frame by frame attention to brightness and other parameters. Maybe I’d get to that, but my grant money for orphan restoration had just about run dry, and I wanted something quick and fairly easy.

I opened the vid and went straight to the appearance of the guy who looked like me. And the kids, horsing around. I ran it twice, then went to the kitchen cabinet and opened another bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Your mother’s a toboggan-time slut,” the smaller kid had yelled, or something like that. And then he reached into his raggedy gray shirt and pulled out a sheet of glistening white paper, except that it looked more like an impossibly thin, flexible iPad, held it up for just thirty frames, jammed the thing back under cover again, and they were away.

The iPad that wasn’t an iPad held several...what? Hieroglyphs? No, mostly Roman and Greek letters, upper and lower case, with some other items that might have been Arabic or for all I knew Assyrian. And a few numerals, subscripts and superscripts, and brackets. Equations, okay. The only equations I’m familiar with are the bogus propositions of Jacques Lacan, psychiatrist and Freud-fraud. I did a screen capture of the clearest frame, pushed it up to 400%. Blurry, but I felt sure a mathematician would have no trouble recognizing it. Or a physicist, or cosmologist, or the creature from Bulgaria, whatever.

The trouble with Google is that you can’t easily search for equations, or at least I couldn’t. I tried to cut and paste the bit-mapped string of symbols and that didn’t get me anywhere. I went laboriously into Word, found the symbols one by one, but half of those on the screen were unknown to Microsoft, far as I could tell. I plugged in the fragment of the single equation whose parts I could find and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

This first and simplest equation popped onto the monitor, embedded in an only moderately incomprehensible paper on a site called arXiv, which I assumed was an archive for people from the Other Culture who couldn’t spell, like Bev’s current creature.

|ψ> = Σ (ai exp(jφi) | xi,yi,zi,νi,ωi >)

It was dated 2009. The paper was titled “Ordinary Analogues for Quantum Mechanics,” by one Arjen Dijksman, and it began: “Upon pondering over the question ‘What is ultimately possible in physics?’, various interrogations emerge. How could one interpret ultimately? Is there an ultimatum, a final statement in physics, after which one could say ‘Physics is finished’? Are there issues, for instance fundamental principles, beyond which we could not go past? How can we describe the boundary between the possible and the impossible in physics? Anyway, does such a boundary exist? And if so what is at the edge?”

I ran the whole video file again, and this time the Jack Daniels didn’t keep me warm. The kid hadn’t shouted “toboggan.” My skin crawled. Jesus Christ. He’d said “teabaggin’.” And the emphasis was subtle, but it wasn’t “teabaggin’-time slut.” It was “teabaggin’ time-slut.”

Teabaggers in 1931? Give me strength. Had they even invented teabags that long ago? Back to Google, fingers stiff and clumsy on the keys. Yes, a form of silk tea- bag was used as early as 1903, but today’s rectangular teabag came along as late as 1944. Let’s not be too literal, Lee, let’s try a lexical search.

Before the current burst of radical crazies calling themselves the Tea Party, mocked by their foes as “teabaggers,” the term had another and more scabrous sense. Urban Dictionary told me “teabagging” meant “To have a man insert his scrotum into another person’s mouth in the fashion of a teabag into a mug with an up/down (in/out) motion.” I squeezed my eyes shut. Oh-kay. Whatever floats your boat. But that had to be a recent coinage, didn’t it, post-1944 at least? Maybe not. Old slang from society’s undergrowth tends to seep up again and again, then vanish for a time. But “time-slut.” And the arXiv abstract. Urchins didn’t know about quantum theory in 1931. Maybe nobody did. I felt my ignorance yawning at me.

I was in a sort of numb dissociated state, trying to remain amused at this obvious Photoshopped fake someone had shoved in my pigeon hole to mess with my peace of mind, but increasingly angry at whoever treated me with such scorn. Even if, face it, I was a barely controlled drunk two or three steps away from the same skids as those bums in the 1931 movie.

But that was the point, it wasn’t a 1931 movie, of course, it was a bricolaged fake. Well, maybe not the whole thing. Mostly it looked highly authentic to my well-seasoned eye. They’d rendered my face into the image of the young man, and somehow worked in that iPad thing for a few frames. Maybe in the original the kid had waved a newspaper headline, or a cloth cap. So why the hell bother? Who was trying to tell me something, and what? A disgruntled student? A post-postmodern gag to piss me off, get my goat? One of Bev’s sardonic tame “artists”?

I shut the machine down, carefully backing everything up first to the university cloud, and biked over to the other side of town to see Bev. Virta and Crump and impending divorce be damned. I just couldn’t cope with this shit by myself, and besides I was developing a suspicion or two.

§

When I first met Bev Peacock during my guest lectures at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, her father owned a small chain of health food stores with corporate headquarters in Sacramento. Bev took a couple of summer courses at UC Davis, including my sessions on Julia Kristeva and other psychoanalytic deep thinkers on their way to superannuation. During her last two years in Chicago, emails fled between us; we talked on the phone at least twice a day. By then, I was separated from Sheila, and visited Chicago when I could, strolling with Bev in Lincoln Park, visiting the art museum where I spent more time looking at her than at the daubings. Everyone could see we were in love, for the first two years, anyway. As I sank ever deeper into gloom at the gibberish I was required to teach, Bev discarded her dreams of great art. The renunciation changed her, bit by bit; she built her separate life, embarrassed to be seen with me: my moods, my drinking, the way I dressed.

Barry Peacock sold the health food store chain six months after Bev and I married, netting $6.2 million. Barry and Ruth wanted their daughter to enjoy at least part of her inheritance while they were still around, so they bought the house in Davis for a little over a million dollars. The house remains owned by the Beverly Peacock Watson Separate Property Trust, but I had no claim to it under California’s community property law. And now I was doubly alienated: evicted, replaced by the atom-tweaker from Bulgaria.

§

I leaned my Koga StreetLiner against a pillar of the porch and dropped my helmet into the saddlebag. I felt queasy about leaving the Koga unlocked, even in this neighborhood, but one of the reasons Bev threw me out was my habit of parking bicycles in the house. The creature opened the door and gazed down at me benignly. He drew in a deep, energizing breath, then wrinkled his patrician nostrils at the eau d’Jack.

“Lee. I see the flesh seems a little weak today, but the spirit smells strong.”

I winced. I hadn’t drunk that much, although I’d weaved a little on my ride; it was probably just as well no cop had pulled me over to check my sang froid. My sang réal. I sniggered. “And how’s your cat today, Schrödinger? Alive or dead?”

Tsvetan Toshtenov, D.Sc. (Ruse) blocked the doorway. “Both, actually. As a matter of fact, we’ve just done a....” He shook his head. “Of course you don’t want to know. What do you want, Lee? I assumed Bev had a restraining order.”

“Ha ha, very droll.” I made myself small and went under his arm, then galumphed down the hallway . Two small boys glanced up from their Playstation 4 and gazed at me impassively. So now she’d moved in the entire family. Those faces. Something went ping in a buried part of my brain but I was too aerated to catch it even though I half-stumbled for an instant. It would come back to me. I jinked through our bright metal-clad kitchen warm with the odors of Bulgarian fare, and made for the studio out back. “Honey, I’m ho-o-o-ome,” I yodeled.

It wasn’t a studio, of course, despite the artfully placed and prepped canvas on its easel awaiting the first lick of oil. It had been waiting for years. When I’d married Beverley and moved in here with her, she was in the last drawn-out ebbings of her passion to be a painter, heading step by inexorable step toward curatorship and a safe doctorate in Mapplethorpe and de Kooning (Elaine, naturally, not Willem). These days she organized elegant or bizarre installations, events, displays, online video performances. If anyone was likely to know a scamp capable of torturing me with a fake orphan movie, at her instigation, it was Bev. She of all people knew my own passion for orphan footage. Yet it seemed a bit beneath her, and perhaps beyond Bev’s currently limited quotient of whimsy.

“Drunk! For heaven’s sake, Lee.” My wife rose from her persuasive replica somethingth-century oak Chateau Something credenza and advanced in her forceful and menacing way toward me. “What are you doing here?”

“Hardly drunk,” I said without conviction. “The sun’s well and truly over the yardarm, Bev.”

“I had a call from Hattie Patterson several hours ago. She wondered if I knew where you’d got to.”

“Why would she expect you to know?”

“We are still married, Lee. Have you signed the documents yet? Hattie said you didn’t show up at the faculty meeting convened to consider your candidacy, and it had something to do with your daughter. Is Mandy okay? Oh, wait, of course she is—I should have taken it for granted you were lying.”

The spring, such as it was, had quite left my step. I looked for somewhere to sit, and found a deck chair rather ruined by splashes of house paint leaning against one wall. As I started to open it, Bev gave a strangled cry.

“Not that, you idiot. Good god, man, it’s an early Rauschenberg.”

I backed away smartly. So it was, or could be. How the hell did Beverley get her hands on something like that? She was loaded, but not that loaded, or Virta and Crump, P.C. were lying through their teeth. Of course that was the specialty of divorce attorneys. Or maybe she’d brought it home from some exhibition for a couple of weeks of private gloating. I opened my mouth to ask, an instant too late.

“Come on, inside the house with you, and then please leave. I don’t want the children to see a drunkard shambling about.” She shepherded me out of the studio and along the small vegetable garden and ample green lawn where we had once rolled naked. Her creature was waiting in the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. He passed it to me and I burned my mouth.

“That place is the death of the soul, Bev,” I told her. “You know that much yourself. I mean, it’s not as if you stayed around to build your academic....” I trailed off, blowing across the top of the mug. A teabagging time-slut? I couldn’t imagine Bev and the creature from Bulgaria engaging in reckless sports of that kind. Not that she and I hadn’t enjoyed, when we were first together, our share of—

The two little boys crouched in the next room noisily killing aliens and cavorting in three-dimensional havoc with imaginary super-weapons were not her children, not ours, but Tsvetan’s, and nobody of my acquaintance had ever seen their mother, save the creature himself. Beverley had met him at a soiree of daubers and their hangers-on. He’d pronounced himself a cubist. No doubt Bev raised an eyebrow. Hardly au courant. No, no. Forgiving urbane laughter over a simple error. A QBist. A Quantum Bayesian. Whatever that was, I’d never bothered to ask. As for his prior woman, the mother of his brats, maybe she was a time-slut. Whatever that might be. After all, how else— Ridiculous, I told myself, slurping and blowing. I’m delusional. This is worse than the DTs. Those kids can’t be older than five and seven. I couldn’t remember their names. Something eastern European. Ivaylo and Krastio? But the little one did look horribly familiar. I could all too easily imagine him whipping out an advanced display unit from under his shirt. In five or six years from now. Christ.

“I’m sure you’d like a drink,” the creature said, and handed me a large glass not quite brimming with a deep, rich pinot noir. I remembered those glasses; they’d been a wedding gift from my aunt Hilda. I considered quaffing it in one hit and then flinging it into the fireplace, but that doesn’t really work with a top of the line gas cooking range. I sipped in a gentlemanly manner, sat at the new kitchen table, and told them in a not especially accusatory tone about the Rev. Willard D. Havard and his unusual sidewalk congregation.

“You can access this video, presumably?”

“If I’d brought my laptop with me, Bev, I’d be delighted to show it to you.”

The creature was gone; he was back almost instantly with a gleaming titanium-shelled Apple. He pushed it in front of me. The university log-in box was displayed.

“Oh hell, why not?” I pulled my orphan out of the cloud and ran it as they stood behind me, watching with a blend of avidity (Tzvetan) and amusing contempt (my faithless wife). At the end of the three minutes I said, “Again?” and reran it. Then I found the screen capture and blew it up on the rather nice large display.

“Well. That’s obviously ket quantum notation. Dirac didn’t invent it until 1939, so clearly this film isn’t from 1931, did you say?”

“Sweetheart,” Bev said in a strangled voice, “didn’t you notice? Those were Wolf and Chris.” I looked up; her face was totally pale, and her eyes were fixed on Sweetheart. “Those were your boys, grown up.”

“Distant relatives, perhaps.” Tsvetan was doubtful, but I trusted Bev’s curatorial eye, and I imagine my own face was as bloodless as hers. “In 1939, my own parents and their siblings were still under Hitler’s boot.” Or working for the Gestapo, I didn’t quite mutter aloud. I had no reason to think badly of the man’s antecedents. For all I knew they had indeed been subjected to the banality of evil. “Show me that equation again, I thought I recognized it.”

“I found it here.” I opened the arXiv paper.

“I’ve heard of Arjen,” the QBist said thoughtfully. “Young Dutch theorist with an interest in the foundations of physics, lives near Paris. He’s a serious scholar, wouldn’t have anything to do with a silly game like this, I assure you. Here, let me find his number.” He had his iPhone out, with a finger sweeping.

“Please don’t,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right. It’s a prank by one of Bev’s students.”

My wife’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”

“Who else has the skills to paste my head on some ancient young geezer’s body, let alone do something to the appearance of the boys? Age shifting or whatever the forensic cops call it.”

“Anyone over the age of ten,” Bev said frostily. “Mandy, for that matter, or one of her friends. Have you been upsetting your daughter, Lee?”

“Oh for god’s sake, I wasn’t making it a personal accusation. My point was—”

“No, that’s right, she’s made it clear she doesn’t want you in her life any longer. Sensible child.”

I shoved the chair back with a nasty screeching sound. That wouldn’t have helped the parquet floor. Tsvetan slipped into its seat like a large muscular eel and started pounding the keyboard. I noticed that he used only four fingers, but his typing was faster than I could manage with ten. Then again, scientists don’t have to stop and think what they’re about to be writing, it’s all formulae and algorithms and canned knowledge, isn’t it. Unless they’re Einstein. Or Dirac, whoever he was. Dirac, I thought, sniggering silently to myself. Diracula.

“We’re hungry.” Two little boys with the same face as their father and no resemblance to Bev stood at the open door between the kitchen and the hall. They were amazingly well-behaved, nothing like the scapegraces they’d been in 1931. But it was them, they, I knew it, on the orphan footage. Had been. Would be. No question. Time was out of joint big time. I thought I was going to throw up.

“In a moment, darlings. This man was just leaving.”

I shook my head sadly at the perfidy of women, children and creatures, swigged down the last of the red in my glass (my glass!), put the glass, stem first, in my jacket pocket, and walked in a dignified fashion to the front door, pursued by imprecations.

§

I warmed up some refried beans, which I suppose made them re-refried, and googled quantum theory, grinding my teeth from time to time. It was the sort of thing I’d have expected Carl Jung to get excited about, and of course he had been involved in a sterile collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli before Pauli came to his senses and decided synchronicity was a lot of hogwash. Bohr thought nothing was until it was observed, which might not have appealed to Freud, who thought all sort of unobserved items got up to no end of mischief. Granted, the way to eradicate and heal the mischief was to haul out the unobserved into the open, but then Bohr and Heisenberg (it said on my screen) insisted that you couldn’t really get away with that, or only a bit at a time. I gave up, washed my plate, made some coffee, and called Mandy. That meant dealing with her mother first, but somehow I got through that ordeal and onto my sweet daughter.

“What do you want?”

“Don’t you mean ‘What the fuck do you want, Daddy dearest?’? Don’t answer that. Can’t a man call his own—”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Mandy, did you or one of your friends make that video of me? And the Toshtenov boys?”

In the background I heard someone incredibly famous and fatuous, someone observed at every moment of the day and night by hundreds of millions if not billions, of whom I knew nothing beyond their unlikely names. Beyoncé, or Lady Gaga, or Rihanna, or Bran’Nu. (I try. It makes my brain itch, but I do try. Fourteen year olds are feral.) Talk about quantum observers and ontological status. If anyone existed on the planet because of being observed, they were it. Talk about the evil of banality. After a long moment, my daughter said: “What?” Another silence. I waited. Then, with acid adolescent contempt: “Who would make a vid of you?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out, my good-natured offspring. Okay, look, I’ll send you a tinyurl. The orphan’s short.”

“What?”

“Just let me know what you think. Okay? This is really important to me, Mandy.”

“Whatever.” She clicked off.

I fiddled about with my notes for the next day’s lecture, thoughts skittering everywhere, and finally abandoned that as a really pointless exercise. Manfully, I kept away from the Jack Daniels. My daughter didn’t call back or email me or text me or instant message me or tweet me, hardly to my surprise, but it was a bit disheartening. My Tivo was showing me a light, so I watched the ep of Californication it had grabbed while I wasn’t paying attention (“Mr. Bad Example,” which seemed somehow oracular), then had a shower, took a sleeping pill, and went to bed. At five in the morning I woke up with a headache and a woman standing in my dark bedroom. She said something.

“Hmngh?”

“She put it on the web.”

I climbed out of bed naked, clawing for my trousers. The woman didn’t shift her gaze from my face. “Who the hell are you and how did you get—”

“Went viral.”

I clapped my hands and the bedside lamp came on. The woman was medium height, with a dark razor-brush ’do, and looked incontestably Bulgarian: long elegant nose, broad brow, widely spaced eyes. I had fancied to discern the creature in the immature features of the boys Wolf and Chris, but now I found the other half of the taller kid’s genome, if not his half-brothers’s. Good god, was the creature devoted to spreading his seed across the world? I said, “You’ll be the time-slut, then.”

She said, “Beg pardon?” All the women I’d met recently appeared to have formed a secret club dedicated to taking umbrage at everything I said to them. Except Lissa, I thought muzzily, and rubbed grit out of my eyes.

“I apologize, Mrs. Toshtenov. Having a hard time lately, not thinking all that clearly. Forgive me for being naked in my own bedroom.”

“Is nothing haven’t seen before.”

“No doubt.”

She clucked her tongue. “Radka. Not married. Am mother to Ivaylo.”

I nodded. “Wolf.”

“Means ‘wolf,’ yes.”

“You sent me a message,” I said, and finished getting dressed. “Then my bad-tempered daughter put it on YouTube, I take it. If that was your intention, why not just do it yourself? I thought it was fake, but now I—”

“Not much time,” Radka told me. She bounced on her toes, almost vibrated with tension. “Listen. Am professor theoretical physics, Sofia. Not yet, soon. Listen, listen, keep mouth shut. Bohr wrong, of course. Bohm, wrong. Heisenberg not even wrong. QBists, half right.” She went out like a light. I hadn’t clapped my hands. A young woman in her early twenties stood several inches to the right of Radjka’s last jitter. Her hair was cropped close, a sort of tie-dyed version of the Bulgarian fashion statement. I recognized her at once.

“Mandy,” I yelped, and took a hesitant step, afraid to embrace her. The ghost of Christmas Future.

She stayed still, also vibrating. “Amanda. Hello, Dad. No, stay there. Everyone’s observing this, see, that’s the point. Everyone. Everything. Forever, probably. Well, near enough.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed again and put my head in my hands. “I hope you’re not going to tell me the Reverend Willard sent you.”

“What?”

“Oh my god, are we back to that again?” I peeked through my fingers. Amanda sent me a wry grin.

“That was then. See, I do remember. Oh, I suppose it’s now, too, if you look at it that—” She cleared her throat. “It’s an entanglement excursion,” Amanda told me. “Probability waves bouncing around an attractor, making the droplets walk, you know? We’re just walls of flesh, Daddy, wrapped around bars of bone. And tangled.”

A fragment of an old Bob Dylan song twanged in the back of my defeated skull. “Tangled up in blue.” I let some words slip out, out of key but maybe that’s how you have to sing Dylan: “All the people we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now.”

For a moment I thought my daughter was going to say “What?” again, but she caught herself and grinned again, more broadly this time. “Some are mathematicians,” she said. It made me happy. Mandy the teen brat despised Dylan. “Tzvetan, for one. Go and talk to him.”

“I thought he’s a phys—” I started and she winked away. The creature of science stood in my bedroom, regarding me from a superior vantage. I couldn’t quite keep my eyes on him. After-images flickered around the man. Christ, that’s all I need, I told myself. Epilepsy. Or migraine, was it? Auras, battlements, fortification figures on the retina or, rather, deep inside the screwed-up brain. Jerry Lehman’s chapter had something on the topic. I couldn’t recall what. I’m so slack, I thought. And I used to be the boy wonder of psychoanalytic semiotics, back when that was the sexy thing to be a boy wonder in. “Can I help you, Dr. Toshtenov? It’s rather early, a mug of coffee? Heart starter? I was just talking to your....” Your what? I trailed off.

“Radka,” he said. “Yes. No coffee. Sit down, Dr. Watson. I can’t stay long, and we have a lot to cover.” Tzvetan Toshtenov, with surprising levity (of a rather heavy-handed kind, I supposed, although I had no notion what it meant), wore a tee-shirt urging me to Please adjust your priors before leaving the QBicle. “What do you know about quantum entanglement and Bayesian probability theory?”

I gave him a sour look. “If we’re going to play one-upmanship, Schrödinger, what do you know about, oh, the imbricated relationship between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary?”

He looked at me suspiciously. “As in imaginary time? The teh dimension? Yes, that’s relevant.”

“As in the Lacanian orders of—Oh, never mind. Think of them as the three rings of a Borromean knot. That’s three tangled rings that fall apart if one of them is cut. Like the middle rings in the Olympic symbol, but more so, or maybe not quite.” I knew I was babbling, but I could see where that item of gibberish had popped up from: the entanglement Mandy mentioned. Future Amanda. And Bob Dylan.

“Chain. Borromean topological chain,” the creature said, looking mildly astonished. “That’s exceptionally astute, Watson, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“No, it’s a knot.” He looked pained, as if once again I’d fallen in his estimation, and I quickly babbled: “Lacan argued that psychosis is what happens when the Borromean knot unravels, unless it’s held in place by a fourth ring.”

“A sinthome,” Tzvetan the mathematician-physicist-smartass said. “Exactly. An extra link to the ring chain, a double curve. One ring to rule them all, as my boys would put it.” He smiled fondly. “A bond through teh supertime. That’s what holds the chain together. Holds everything. Do you see, Watson? Everything is nothing but uncertainties, latencies, probability pilot waves perhaps, vapors threaded in fog—until it is observed into definiteness and clarity.”

“They teach you this stuff in Bulgaria, do they?”

He was gone. “Ha ha,” I said weakly. “I unobserved you.” I lay down and covered my eyes with one sweating forearm. Obviously I was ripe for the laughing academy. My Borromean chain had been pulled, and I was sliding down the cloaca maxima. I just wanted to go back to sleep, but when I made a feeble attempt to clap the light off there was already too much morning illumination coming in through the blinds. A voice said, from the center of the room, “Watson, come here, I need you.” Bev’s voice. Our old joke, and thank you, Alexander Graham Bell. She wasn’t there. I put my socks and loafers on and started for the front door and my bike. Everything happened at once.

It wasn’t the Rapture, and it wasn’t the Cloud of Unknowing. This was the Cloud of Knowing Too Much, the silver lining of the dark night of the soul blazing like a thousand suns, like the Buddhist ten thousand things, the unity and diversity of everything bonded into its clasp, and I stood at the middle of it all but that was also at the edge, and at every point in between. Walls of flesh, bars of bone, gates of light, opening.

Mandy in my trembling arms, so tiny, so ugly, so incomprehensibly beautiful, eyes squeezed shut, head still slightly deformed by the terrible passage through her mother’s body to this cold, brilliantly lit place. Sheila, holding up her arms for the baby, her own face shiny with sweat, exhausted, exultant. I bent to kiss her, Mandy cradled—An old lady with frosted hair and a look of synthetic peace on her harsh face, stretched in an open coffin. I bent and could not bring my lips to touch hers. The eyes of a hundred students locked to mine or skittering away or dully drooped to their laptops as I stood at the fulcrum of the lecture theater teasing them with text and context. “There is no outside-the-text,” I said. “So we are told inside a text by Derrida: Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. So we carry that meaning outside, away from his text, reading it, observing it from as many angles as we can, remake it as our text, or discard it as waste, order into ordure, or vice versa, as supplement, so that it becomes, paradoxically—” With Beverley, young love redividus, I stood, I stand, I will stand before paintings, etchings, constructs, texts that are all at once or seem to be, even as the eye skips and snacks and rebuilds, Picasso’s wonderful African contortions, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, his cubism, his late hideous, marvelous Nude Woman with a Necklace, and of course the once-fashionable distortions and visual paradoxa of Dali, Escher, Magritte, the decompressions into art that denied itself as art, Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, the comic antics of Warhol and Koons and a thousand others, Dadists, Fauves, frauds, Freudians, unpeelers of pretense and its practitioners, and through it all the slowly ebbing passion, the curdling of my cynical eye observing everything into nothing.... All of this a millionfold, birth, copulation, and death.

“Bev,” I said, “help me,” and tears flooded down my face. I took a step and stood in the morning kitchen of our old house, our renovated house, the Edenic garden from which I’d exiled myself. Two little boys looked up from their bowls of cereal. Observing my manifestation from nowhere, the younger let out a piercing scream. The older yelled, “Tátko, that man has come back,” and flung a spoonful of milk-soaked Rice Krispies at me, splashing my pants, like Luther hurling his ink bottle at the Devil. If it had been ink, a text in potentia, a zany part of my mind thought, it could have written a long bill of particulars, my crimes, every one. “Hush,” I said. I held out my open, tear-wet hands. “Your daddy invited me here for breakfast, boys. Look, here he is now.”

I am seated at the table, Bev’s table, now his table. The boys have been driven to school. Tzvetan is saying, “I have to thank you most humbly, Dr. Watson. I couldn’t have done it without your tip. And the boys, of course. But that’s later.” Nobody is in the room to look at us, but we are observed. The very air hums with the intensity of their gaze. Their gaze contributes, their gaze elicits, their gaze is the terrible look of a million million angels, more, vastly more, without judgment or pity, it seems to me. They do not act beyond the activity of their Tat tvam asi, their spectatorship. This is just the blather of my discipline, which I hardly credit any longer, but that is the function, obviously, of my own reciprocal gaze, and the mirror that is...well, the universe, the specular everything. And—

Appalling compression, emphatic dark clarity, in the infinitely protracted nothingness that awaits a first crystalline instant of precipitation. It is an eye in utter darkness. Something breaks, ruptures, breaches, raptures, bursts forth into its going and coming, fecund, a spray of light flung into the endless sphere of eyes gazing from within and without, making manifest, tumbling faster than light into categories that render themselves under that impossible gaze from the far ends of itself, from everywhere, forever. The sky foams with explosions boiling with a froth of stuff that swirls and settles and catches new light, a heaventree of galaxies, photonic dust etching their eidolons upon the eyes that watch and select and shape and build. My own eyes are there also, watching the lights redden and dissipate and fall away into night unendurably cold and empty. But that is the way of the thing, that is the story, all the eyes can do is witness until they are folded back into the great silence and void. Tzvetan is murmuring in my ear: “My experiment with single particle self-interference proved that a macroscopic extended object can be made to deviate through an instability threshold and surf its own pilot wave. But it can only do that because we chose to place it in that apparatus. We observe it from our own Bayesian priors, and its activity is objectively determined by the interaction between us and the particle. This is not mystical, Watson, stop curling your lip. It is the basis for everything that ever happens, to eternity and infinity.”

I am aghast at the hubris. “So we’re...engineering infinity?”

“No,” he tells me, sharply. “Precisely not. We are nothing until we are observed by the universe. Infinity is engineering us.”

Amanda handed me an old musty suit and a cloth cap. Of course I had seen them before. The world shimmered slightly, as if it were uncertain of itself. Two youngsters came into the studio—oh, that’s where I was—dressed in Depression era knickerbockers suitable for urchins. The younger boy pushed a flat, flexible machine under his gray shirt, and winked at me.

“You’re sending yourself a message, Lee,” he said. “This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for.”

I sent my daughter out of the room and dressed, dazed. “Who is going to send the orphan film to me?” I said.

“The universe,” my ex-wife Bev told me at some time in the near future. She looked plumper, and a lot happier. Was she pregnant? Did the man pepper the planet with his offspring? “But I’ve found out who sent me that Rauschenberg, Lee, and I thank you. Of course, it will be a lot cheaper to buy it in 1951.”

The universe looked at me, and I looked back, and found myself blinking in bright snowless winter afternoon light in New York, an older New York with far fewer of the great mirroring skyscrapers that will someday be built. Were. Up ahead, I saw the Reverend ranting, and I strolled past. Some nameless amateur cinematographer was cranking a Ciné-Kodak, and as I passed him I remembered the kid’s cheeky wink and slipped the fellow one of my own. The two boys were horsing about, an irritated old geezer slapped out with his cane, but Krastio, the younger, had his eye focused on the middle distance. An intent, lovely woman in a long dowdy 1930s dress appeared out of nowhere at the entrance to a laneway. Quantum tunneled, I suppose Tzvetan would call it. Nobody but the younger boy and I saw her, except everyone and everything, forever. Krastio yelled out hoarsely to Ivaylo, “Your mother’s at teh—begin time slot.” He pulled out his display and flashed a page of equations to the rolling film. I walked briskly past, and took Radka’s hand. The universe observed us in silence amid the rumbling noise of the city.