She means to live as small and unobserved as if unbeautiful.
She is beautiful still, a deepened beauty, all but submerged to most sight, the cold disenchantment in her extraordinary eyes, the fatalism limned in her mouth. And then there is the limping branded leg and the hands and arms with their discolorations in the shape of rising flames, and these, too, have cast her out from the golden net of others' dreams.
Do you dream of me, Dana?
If her beauty is ever glimpsed at all, over the years, it is usually by someone of her own gender. A rare expression of concealed spirit will rise suddenly into her features, and a female colleague or some still softly opening undergraduate will be caught amazed in the thought that she is beautiful.
Her beauty is largely lost on the men. The distances she keeps are frozen wastelands. Gazed at from the other side and she is stiff and hard and bloodless, so that men shiver.
—She's beautiful, he thought, and then he shivered.
For seven years on seven, she has drifted, from one obscure teaching post to another, from this mediocre college to the next: there are so many.
She is not a well-liked teacher. Her students call her "mean" and "creepy," sometimes even "spooky." At the slightly better schools, where some wit lives, they call her Professor Maladjusted or Dr. Malady. She is always meticulous in the distances she keeps, and there is little sympathy flowing in either direction across the space. Those who don't enter her classes science-phobic become so soon enough.
Even her voice sounds as if it comes from a distant and an unlit land, low without being soft, with that suggestion of a hiss that has grown more pronounced in her solitude.
She wants no pity, though. If you show her pity, she'll freeze you dead.
She works on in her obscurity, limping from place to place and never publishing. Some years ago, she sent some papers out, choosing only the very best journals. She sent four papers out and, some months later, they all came back, churlishly annotated. She read the referees' reports with little outward passion, noting that the same orthodoxy that had frozen her father out was still holding firm.
It was not only the content of her papers that brought down on her such lofty contempt, but her style of expression. More than one of the assigned readers had commented that she did not write like a physicist, and, oddly, hadn't intended their remarks as praise. She still holds fast to the doctrine her father had instilled in her, that the very best physics is very good poetry, so that when she can, she always chooses metaphor over mathematics.
One speaks of the "reality problem" in quantum mechanics and it is simply this: "What is quantum mechanics about?" Is there a "there" out there? Some have been tempted to offer a paraphrase of the Bard as an answer: We are such dreams as stuff is made of. We present instead a picture, wherein psi—the dream field, as it were—stands on a par with "stuff."
The referees had been too scornful to take in her results, some of which had been entirely original to her, and had been rigorous and real. They hadn't seen what she'd achieved at all.
She reads their uncomprehending remarks with no detectable reaction, except that for several weeks or months or years, she does no more work on quantum physics, only limping on her way, the departments she visits and the students she teaches barely differentiable to her each from each.
It is a kind of purgatory for her, this cruel trajectory she traces from one mediocre department to the next. It is the perfect purgatory for such a person as she, so mind-proud and so alone.
Her contract up, she flees to yet another in the series of academic outposts, crisscrossing the country, east and west, and north and south.
Like an electron in a cloud chamber, she barely registers at all, and how could one be certain she'd been there? She teaches her courses and then she flees. No students come to speak with her. And even in those remote rural collegiate settlements, where colleagues fiercely bond in incestuous arrangements born of desperation, she is left alone, her need for absolute solitude laid bare.
— She's beautiful, he thought, and then he shivered. He was a physicist, quite young, an open, affable soul, one felt it on first contact, so that even she seemed slightly warmed.
— I'm afraid you'll find the students here indifferent at best. Don't be discouraged. But don't come in with expectations of inspiring them to heights of pure science. They're "uninspirable," if that's a word.
Something moved in her, so that she smiled slightly and thought to answer in something of her old way.
— Mmm. I don't know that "inspirable" is even a word.
— She's beautiful, he thought, and then he shivered.
For seven years on seven, we have lived quietly, succeeding in avoiding all notice, living and partly living, limping on in our purgatorial peregrinations.
Until we arrive here.
And how is it, after all, that it is here that we finally arrive?
Is it a matter simply of the laws of probability dictating that, covering the field of mediocrity as thoroughly as we do, our passing through here is just as likely as our having passed through all those other theres? Or is it some more directed influence propagating itself across the space of possibilities?
One would think that I would know, yes, one might think.
There are many towns around these parts named after the heroic past of a dead antiquity: Ithaca, Utica, and Troy; Rome, Syracuse, Corinth, Phoenicia, Attica, Carthage; Homer, Hannibal, Cicero; the mythical memories entangled in the geography of upstate New York.
At first, she goes along in her old ways, barely taking note of those around her, teaching her classes and then vanishing from sight. But slowly, slowly a change is being wrought.
She learns the names of some of her best students.
She has lunch with a colleague in her department and goes for a walk with another, who decelerates his pace to join her limp. One night he takes her out to dinner and the two of them drink wine. He takes a great deal of time deliberating over the bottle, not wanting to err. They read the overwrought characterizations of each vintage together, so many adjectives squandered on squeezed grapes, he quite solemn at first, until she relaxes him with her skepticism, and they pick an unsuitable wine for the sheer absurdity of its descriptive prose.
She learns the names of her worst students and has them come to her office for extra help.
The dinner companion asks her out again, his name is Wallace Low, he is widowed and balding, portly and courtly. His understanding of physics is pedestrian, his jokes quite possibly even worse, but she smiles at all of them and twice I see her laugh.
She learns the names of all her students and I see her laugh aloud in class one day and they all laugh with her.
Has an unnaturally wholesome influence entered the field around her? Or is it a matter rather of a sinister something having been withdrawn, the metaphysical blight diminished? One would think that I might know, yes, one might think.
And little by little it is all coming back: the physics that had burned through the hours of our days and nights, the hours of our lives.
The mysteries of the particles and waves; the gnostic field of knowing that links each to each: all must merge in Einstein's truth, but who can see it, who see how? There are problematic quantities spinning wildly off to infinities, infinities intruding where they cannot be tolerated, and how might they be subdued and who might see how? Not Einstein himself, who had declared, some years after accomplishing the revelations of his general relativity:
I will devote the remainder of my life to thinking about light.
— I've been thinking.
I despaired in general when she spoke those words, drawing the fire away from the pure forms of math that I knew must someday yield up the sought solution.
— The wave function...
— Yes, Dana, what?
— Maybe psi is the mathematical expression for mind.
A light like lunacy had gone on in his eye, and I had wondered yet again how it was that these two could be the scientists they were and yet entertain such thoughts, could believe that mind or spirit might be lurking in the equations, when the properties of matter in motion are the only properties that there are, so I had wondered and so I had erred.
She pulls out the old yellow lined pads of paper she used to hold on her lap while the three of us worked, notebooks filled with her old quantum scribblings, packed up and toted along through all her weary crisscrossing. She stares at the pages of faded equations, the tangle of starry triangles that she had drawn around them.
There is some way of seeing we have not yet seen, a seeing still unsighted in the long corridor of links, and without it even the most powerful mathematics gropes blind.
The deepest truth we have ever known about the substance of light is that it is itself invisible.
So it is that she has come here, to my Olympia.
And all things linked are.