On Obsession and
the Uncertainty Principle
“It’s dark,” Charade says nervously. “Where are we?” She gropes across runnels of blanket … not blanket, it seems; something softer, cushiony, something that limits. She feels for his pillow but cannot reach it. “I can’t move, I feel cramped. Where are you?”
“Here,” Koenig says. “Here. You shouldn’t have come — I’m working. But I’m glad you did.”
“I can’t seem to move.” She is fingering a ridge that runs down her left side: a seam? a zipper? the inside edge of a dream? She is feeling for clues, not panicky yet, breathing deeply, in, two, three, and out, two, three. “I can’t see a thing. Where are you?”
“Here.”
“I can’t move.” I’m pre-moth, she thinks. Larval. Her arms feel useless as unborn wings. A thought presents itself: this could be a dream of death, or death itself, the last prescient moment. She takes a frantic gulp of air, cries out, thrashes at the sides of her cocoon.
“Shh,” he whispers. “Shh. We’ll have the janitors rushing in.”
“I can’t move!”
“Keep still.” He gropes for her mouth, puts his hand over it, gently. “I can’t find the zipper,” he whispers. “Wait. I think — Got it.”
The sleeping bag shucks itself off, Charade lifts her arms and holds him. “Where are we?”
“Building 6. My office. You don’t remember? I keep the sleeping bag here for all-nighters. I lose track when I’m working on something. I’m glad you found it. Did you get some sleep?”
Charade shakes her head, squeezes her eyes shut and rubs them. “I felt so desolate,” she says, remembering, “when you weren’t at the apartment.” She sees only darkness on darkness, black lines branching like an intricate subway system, spectral capillaries. She cannot remember how she got here.
“I’m glad you managed to get in.” Nevertheless he is puzzled.
She says bemused. “I’ve never been able to find my way around MIT.”
“You certainly startled me,” he says.
“You work in the dark?”
“No. I must have dozed off. The janitor must have turned out the light.”
“It’s odd,” Charade says, “but now that my eyes are adjusting, I feel as though we’ve spent the night here before. But we haven’t, have we? Isn’t this the first time?”
“You’re very forgetful,” he says. “You’re a bit weird like that. Sometimes you make me wonder whether you even … Of course we’ve done it before, we’ve often done it. But you startle me every time. I can never figure out how you get in.”
“Well …” she says, making an effort to remember. “It’s so far back, that first time I met you, that I can’t quite …”
“I know. I’ve been trying to pin down when that was. I can’t remember not knowing you. It was before March break, wasn’t it? Before reading week even.”
Charade laughs. “Before reading week! I should certainly say so! It was back in the fall term. I came here in the fall. Actually, if we’re going to be really precise about this, it was late summer, late August.”
That’s right, he thinks with a shock. It was before the fall, and classes were just beginning.
Charade huddles against the wall, feels around for the sleeping bag, and pulls it up against her. “It’s cold in here.”
“Yes,” he says. “Well, old buildings. Here, let’s … we can both fit inside it …” He cocoons them together, snakes the zipper along its tracks, slides a hand between her legs. “Isn’t that better?”
Parthenogenesis, no, that wouldn’t be the word, he thinks. Is there a word for it? — the ability to fit sexual needs into the cracks of thought and will, without undue hindrance to the obsession in hand.
These seemed to be his stages: intense thought, intense fatigue, then the euphoria: a sort of white-out, the mathematics moving toward the new shore at full speed like a crested wave. Then the girl. That is the point when she appears. Then the sexual frenzy, then breakthrough. That would come next.
Consider Heisenberg …
“I suppose,” Charade murmurs into the post-coital calm, “when you think about it, my mother would have had Nicholas and Verity and Kay on her mind while she was giving birth to me, and they would have got into my bloodstream. So it’s only natural that I’d think of them whenever … well, all the time really, but especially when we make love … and it’s only natural that history and literature would absorb me from the start, two sides of the same coin, right? If I can sift through all the official fictions of the past carefully enough … Sometimes I think the meaning’s out there, waiting, like a new star, just waiting for me to focus —”
“Yes,” he says, “that’s how it is. It’s there, I already know the answer I want, I can feel that it’s right, I just have to work out the physics and the mathematics of it … I just have to come from the right direction. The solution’s millimetres away, I can feel it coming like an orgasm. I feel as though your next shudder will put it in my … I think of Rutherford and Bohr, that’s the way they worked, that’s the way it was for them. I think of Heisenberg when he had his hooks in the skin of an idea.”
Charade smiles and holds his hand up to the glimmer seeping in from the window. “White-fingernail people. What were you going to say about Heisenberg?”
“In 1923 in Munich —”
“1923?” She frowns and closes her eyes and taps her forehead. “The Uncertainty Principle. Nobel Prize, 1933. Right?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Very good.”
“I’ve been doing my homework. Anyway, history’s one of my obsessions.”
“Obsession,” he says. “That’s the sine qua non.” He laughs. “In 1923 Wien tried to flunk Heisenberg on his doctorate. That was in Munich. Of course, the world is full of academics like Wien, official guardians of the rules. And the Wiens have their ways, they are powerful blockers and delayers and inflicters of damage. Two years later Heisenberg was ill, he was a wreck.”
And still the habits of electrons were at him, clawing at him ruthlessly as heartburn. Help, Heisenberg said to his doctor, and was ordered off to an island in the North Sea. Koenig can imagine it: the way Heisenberg paces up and down the beach and thinks. He thinks. This is how his breakthrough comes: first the passion, then the hunch, then the computations: spectral lines, frequencies, quantum mechanical series … and the famous matrices.
Koenig likes to think of that night when Heisenberg worked without stopping, his theory growing faster than the sunrise. Just a kid too, twenty-five years old, crying Lights! lights! and there was light.
And suddenly Heisenberg is walking out into his own morning, his own shoreline and he’s paddling in it — the ripples of it, an entirely new theory — and climbing its rocks. He actually did that. He wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Koenig knows it by heart: I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea.
“Do you see, Charade? He thought of it as a new dawn, and I think of it as flesh that’ll swallow me up. One night I’ll have it, the complete shape of the question, and here you’ll be in my arms.”
“Really?” she says dryly.
She doesn’t like this.
[They kiss], she thinks. She has, sometimes, the sense of watching her life on his stage. Or on his monitor. Click, click, she thinks. Access file, close file. [Curtain falls, is puckered here and there with behind-the-scenes activity, rises again.] Click, click.
“Well,” she says, “if obsession is nine-tenths of the game, I’ll find them. Just as I found Aunt Kay.”
It was obsession, she supposes, in the first place, that brought Verity’s name swimming up out of newsprint in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Almost two years ago,” (Was it?) she says, (Can it be almost two years?) “I was reading for a history exam. Sydney Uni.” She closes her eyes. “There’s a bowl of soup in front of me, a spoon in my right hand, Sources of Australian History in my left. And pages of the Herald … someone else, one of my roommates, has left pages of the Herald strewn around on the table and floor. And then impact. Just a filler item in the Personals, which I never read, but it leaped out and smacked me between the eyes. See, I carry it around in my wallet, it’s getting hard to read.”
She rummages for her handbag in the dark. She finds her wallet, extracts something, smooths it out, a quarter page with hand-torn edges dominated by an advertisement for IXL mango and passionfruit jams. There is a yellow slash of outline (felt marker) at the third item down in the Personals:
Would anyone having any information on the whereabouts of Verity Ashkenazy (probably now married, married name unknown, but possibly Truman), who was a student and graduate student at the University of Queensland in the mid 50s and early 60s, please contact K. Sussex, Box 3211, Toronto, Canada.
“Can you imagine the effect?” Charade asks. “It was like … like getting a phone call from God.”
“I’m not surprised,” Koenig says. “Iron filings to a magnet, there are precedents all over the place in science. Coincidences cluster round obsessions, we expect it. Synchronicities, we say.”
“There I was,” Charade says, “in that ratty student apartment with cockroaches scuffling under the sink …”
She hears the furtive rubbing of one filthy little insect leg against another, she hears the atoms of air colliding, she hears time stop. Her heart is tolling like the frantic bell that rings in peace or war. Giddiness washes her.
She assumes she has experienced a fleeting hallucination and turns her eyes back to her textbook. Sources of Personal History, she thinks. Tench’s Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson in New South Wales. Tench is recalling the anguish over dwindling rations, the passionate hopeless waiting for ships from England.
1790. Here on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until the sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail. At every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart bounded, and the telescope was lifted to the eye. If a ship appeared here, we knew she must be bound to us; for on the shores of this vast ocean (the largest in the world) we were the only community which possessed the art of navigation, and languished for intercourse with civilized society.
To say that we were disappointed and shocked, would very inadequately describe our sensations.
So, Charade thinks. The fleeting speck on the horizon. The false sail. And she looks calmly, sardonically, ruefully back at the Sydney Morning Herald.
It is still there.
Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of Verity Ashkenazy … please contact K. Sussex … Canada.
She cannot concentrate, she cannot keep still. She leaves the apartment and walks and walks. She gets on a bus, gets off at Circular Quay, takes the ferry to Manly, takes it back again, and out again, over and over, her eyes on the furling wake, “which was green and white”, she says, “and coiled like a scroll.”
“A helix,” Koenig says.
“Yes, or a helix. But it changes quite abruptly, you know, when the ferry crosses the Heads. And I found myself obsessed with finding the point where it changed. You know, when you’re coming in from Manly, there must be a line that could be drawn from North Head … and then on the way out again, from Circular Quay, there must be a line from South Head. And between those two lines, the Pacific changes all the rules. You’re not really in Sydney Harbour any more. And for some loony reason I decided if I could find that point of change … I must have stayed on the ferry for hours. And then, you know, there was something else … suddenly, that space between the Heads, it was inside me. There was this roaring and buffeting and I couldn’t stand it, it was deafening, it made me seasick, and I got off at Manly and I ran and ran, and I got on a bus and then off it, and I found myself at Collaroy Beach and I just walked along the sand till it got dark.”
“Like Heisenberg.”
“What?” Charade blinks.
“Like Heisenberg on the beach. The breakthrough.”
“Breakthrough?” Charade turns the word over, puzzled. “But I was terrified,” she says. “Terrified. If they were turning out to be real after all … what if they were, you know, just ordinary? What if I were to find them and they were nothing special? Just ordinary people. Nothing.” She pauses.
She sighs and asks him: “Do you think it’s all a fraud? Knowing anything. The possibility of knowing anything.”
“Yes,” he says. “A useful fraud. In science, first we know, then we prove. It could be brilliant intuition, it could be ego — but it seems to work. Heisenberg and Schrodinger each knew they were right, each knew the other was wrong: wave packets or particles? orbits or matrices? endemic uncertainty? Each forges a proof that proves he’s right and the other’s wrong. They took the Nobel together in 1933 and had trouble, I suppose, being civil.”
“Is it all a joke, then?” Charade asks, appalled. “A century from now they’ll be quaint historical examples. There’s no such thing as truth, not even in science.”
“No,” he says. “Not a joke. It’s all we’ve got.” Our fallible ways of knowing, he thinks, and the enterprise of making maps to link up questions and answers. “They always turn out to be faulty,” he says. “Eventually. But they throw up answers after all. And they reshape the questions too.”
“Yes,” Charade muses. “I think that’s true. They knew they would find a Great South Land for all the wrong reasons. But they found Australia just the same.”
“The weird and wonderful routes to truth,” he laughs. “The marvellous routes.”
“Yes,” she says. “Yes. Aunt Kay’s for instance. Summoning Nicholas and Verity up from … And you don’t even remember her.”
“You keep saying that. I wish you’d tell me what you mean.”
“It’ll take nights and nights.”
“Mmm.”
“And how can I … ? I’ll have to go back to the beginning.”