VI

The universe might ultimately be—there is some evidence—coherent.

But it is also, and just as rigorously, cold. There are equations at the heart of it, but they are written out in a frozen fire, and the heart at the heart of the heart includes no sense at all of anything remotely resembling pity.

Such was the world according to Dana Mallach, who held that reality was both deeply rational and just as deeply unmoved, and she claimed to have had the gist of this truth from as far back as she could remember.

"Even when I was the smallest child, Justin. Of course I hadn't possessed the language for expressing what it was I so absolutely knew. Instead I had all those sleep problems."

Every night, she had wandered the house, arising two or three times before dawn to leave the frilly white bedroom at the end of the long black corridor, her dilated pupils frantically sifting the dark for intruders, flesh or phantom. She would pad softly on her bare feet the long way to her parents' bedroom, never awakening them, at least never intentionally. She would open the door, inch by inch so that it would not creak, wanting only to see that they were there, that they were safe, that they had not fallen victim to the hideous possibilities that ought not, for pity's sake, to have been possible at all, though she knew that they were, it was the gist of the truth. She wanted only to observe without disturbing, validating that they were untouched, for the time being unharmed.

Dana still described her childhood terrors to Justin with palpable anguish, and he would listen with both tenderness and respect, for Justin had never experienced anything like these early vastations. The world, to the child of him that he had been, had seemed as straightforwardly self-evident as his meticulously constructed truth tables for first-order logic. Every proposition is either true or false, and no proposition is both! It had never occurred to him, as a boy, to imagine the worst.

"That just proves I was a much more imaginative child than you were, my poor Justin."

She smiled up at him, so seraphically that he knew for certain she meant him a slight.

"I was plenty imaginative as a kid," he answered her, while seizing a fistful of her light-spun hair and holding it hard away from her face. He could see the skin being pulled up near her temples. She did not flinch, though her eyes shone too bright, and he let the fistful drop.

"Mmm, of course you were. We were both amazing children, there's no question. Only your brilliance expressed itself in fabulously untrue theories and mine took the form of sleep problems. You were brilliantly in error and I was brilliantly insomniac."

It was Justin now who barely slept, while Dana slept lightly beside him. Justin had learned how to still himself relentlessly, so that even in his sleep he never stirred even the most minor of muscles beside her. He often stayed up half the night watching her closed eyes, watching as they shivered over dreams.

—Do you dream of me, Dana?

And if she said yes, could he then have been happy? Could she be believed? She had an inner life, that was the sorry truth. She had a mind, and it was the source of his absolute uncertainty. It was a torment to need so desperately to know the contents of her mind, the hidden variables behind her words and silences and laughter, the varieties of intent behind her murmured mmm's.

Justin had never known anyone as mind-proud as Dana. Mind-proud as other women are house- or husband-proud. It was just like her to dress up even her early-childhood phobias so that they took on the brilliance of infant metaphysics, to drape elaborate ratiocinations over her spooks. It was so very like Dana to deform her early neurosis into puerile prescience that sometimes Justin found himself, in the very act of disbelieving Dana's version of herself, loving her all the better for her fabulations, for her need for these, childlike and vain.

But there were other times when he became impatient with the hidden strain of irrationality that ran through her thoughts like a poison through her system, the soured metaphysics she had imbibed from her earliest hours, from her mother, who had been a drunk. It was when her vagaries seemed to bear the taint of Dotty that Justin couldn't abide them. Everything that he had managed to learn about her dead and much-loved mother offended him, the sort of woman, silly-drunk on vanity, who drew the bitter ire from the sweetness of his mother. His mother had wasted no pity on women like Dotty.

Dotty had carried her drunken death within her like a softening fruit, even though she'd been no simple drunk, possessing spiritual leanings that had set the light craft of her mind to list. Would they had gone down with her, those obscure longings for the light, would they had died a full and fitful death in Dotty.

The faculty of disbelief in Dotty had gotten jammed, and everything was getting through. She had been an epistemological calamity. The distinction between truth and falsity had been misplaced, she had forgotten the difference altogether, until death itself made the indifference complete.

A portrait of the mother manqué and her very young daughter, done in oils, reigned above the mantel of the library fireplace, Dotty staring off into a distant place from where she might have imagined her slanted illumination to derive. His own mother would have stared at him and not at the mystic faraway.

He could not but know what a mother is meant to be. Bent at an awkward angle over the red Formica of the kitchen counter in the early evening shadowing of winter, spreading the Fluff and peanut butter onto spongy bread, the worn leather of the French volume at her pudgy elbow, her eyes lustering at each protracted tremor in the echoing chambers of Marcel's lacerated, overworked heart.

Dotty was made to be mocked. He wished for Dana to mock at her in unison with him. Their voices joined in sweetest mockery would have made a music he might love. Husband and daughter, in their bereavement (groundless), made the woman over into a false guise. Mallach was grotesquely mawkish on the subject of his dead wife.

"My wife was a most extraordinary manner of woman," he had told Justin the day that he had danced out the motions of light for him. They had walked through a frozen field, circling round and round a famous pond, its surface going from silver to lead to iodine as the winter's early dusk drew in.

It was only Justin and Mallach, Dana having stayed at home, and there was an Olympian loftiness to their stride that day, a day of glorious physics.

They had caught a glimpse of the form of forms, and the subsiding bliss left Mallach in an exalted mood of revelation, so that he had spoken to Justin of her, of his dead wife.

"She made me suffer horribly, you know. She drove me to the brink and even over, and I was grateful to her for it. I owe my best ideas in science to my life with Carlotta."

Justin had stared at Mallach, groping for words through his sense of uneasy disbelief.

"You owe your scientific ideas to her? But she wasn't a physicist. She didn't know any science."

"No, Justin, you misunderstand. It was in my life with her, in its intensity. That was what made it possible for me to think as I did in those days. I'll never be able to think with the same intensity again."

Mallach saw the woman as a seeker of their sort, when she was not. He could not see her as clearly as Justin saw. How did Justin know they falsified their Dotty if he had never met her living? How could he be so certain? He was. Insubstantial as she was, she still left marks behind that Justin, at least, could read.

He had no doubt. Her books alone revealed the fool she'd been, the drunken, soft-brained fool. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Tantra and the Sacred Fire, Madame Blavatsky Still Speaks, Meditation for the Muddled Masses, for the Huddled That Have Gone to Muddled Masses.

Meditation, requiring as it does a process of sustained concentration, he imagined would have been infinitely beyond her, though he gathered that she had mastered so well the Zen art of emptying her mind that it became for her a state constant and involuntary.

She was a drunk. She died a drunk. She drove her car into a township tree, and left her daughter motherless at nine.

"My mother died too, you know."

She said this once, quite coldly. It was only once out of all the many times that he had spoken to her of Schubert's Unfinished and the drunk who had come hurtling out of the configuration space of possibilities to dislodge his parents from his world.

He had dreamed night and day that a fairy girl would turn to him and speak, in the language of pity and with the voice of an answering angel, and he would tell her and she would know.

"My mother died too, you know. I realize it was both your parents, which is unspeakably tragic, but still, I was very young, far younger than you."

"Are we comparing tragedies now? Are we going to compete here, too?"

"It's not a matter of competing, Justin. My God, how odd that you'd even think it was. It's just that there's something in your way of speaking of it to me that seems oblivious to the fact that I lost my mother, too."

"No, Dana. No. It's not the same. My mother was killed by a drunk. Your mother was the drunk. She might have killed someone else. Have you ever thought of that? She might have killed someone else that night."

"But she didn't. No one died that night but she."

"But someone else could have. That's not irrelevant. You seem to think it's irrelevant, Dana. Admit to me that it's not."

Dana looked away, her blaze extinguished, though she had been so fierce the moment before, a girl of furious light, she said nothing more now, so that he knew that there was more.

"What is it? What did she do?"

Dana would not look at him. He could not bend that ray to meet his own.

"Don't try to hide it from me, Dana. You know that you can't do it."

"There was someone else with her in the car."

She spoke very quietly, still looking away. He could not bend her.

"Who? Was it you?"

"No, not me, and not my father. Someone else. I don't know who. A man."

"Was he killed?"

"No." It was impossible to read the expression off her face at the angle at which she held it away from him. Her voice, too, low and affectless, yielded as little as possible.

"Does your father know who it was?"

"Of course. Of course he knows."

"But he wouldn't tell you?"

She finally looked at Justin, with icy fury, as if she held an accusation out, and her voice came out as an undisguised hiss.

"No, Justin. I would never ask."

Those two were preposterous in grieving her. Foolishness was not disfiguring in Dana, but in Samuel Mallach it was grotesque. He was a quantum genius. He was a consummate fool.

"My wife was a most extraordinary manner of woman."

No, she had been nothing of the kind, you poor deluded cuckold. That was what Justin would have loved to declare, in that darkening field, with a Mallach gone blasphemously silly. There is nothing extraordinary in the least in a vain and dimwitted woman making far too much of herself and inducing others to do the same.

Justin knew about these things from Proust. He knew about the sufferings that the worthless Odette, whom his mother had despised, had inflicted on the connoisseur of beauty, M. Swann. Swann had overlaid the shallowness of Odette with qualities that were entirely of his own making. Justin knew all about Carlotta Mallach from Odette de Crecy, the vilest creature, his mother had told him, in the entire seven volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu. Cynthia Childs had hurled harsh epithets at Odette in her girlishly sweet voice. She had called her a man-eater. She had called her a slut.

It angered Justin that both Mallach and his daughter got that dotty woman so consistently wrong. (He called her Dotty to himself, a Childsish joke, he called it that, too.)

"I owe my best ideas in science to my life with Carlotta," Mallach had declared, and Justin had not known whether to laugh or cry at the extravagant pathos of his tone.

Dotty's books were sacred relics in this house. In the library, there is still a shelf reserved for Dotty's tomes.

Dana had stood across the room from him, beside this window. It was winter. There was a noisy fire going, its crepitation syllabizing the angry silence.

They were vexed with each other, they had argued. They were both in a mood to be cruel. Justin saw the set of her mouth and read the coldness gathered in her eyes, and he wanted to strike the certainty out from her. He could feel the desire glowing at the ends of his hands. She seemed grotesquely her mother's daughter, garishly fatuous, an unforgivable distraction from their work. He told her this, precisely, and saw her stare back, stricken.

"Your mother had her try at destroying your father, she gave it her best, and now it's your turn."

All semblance of certainty vanished, she stared back, ravished, his beautiful girl again. But he still was not appeased, somehow there was a lag in his appeasement.

He seized a random volume from the Dotty shelf, releasing a soft dense flurry of tiny white slips, wingless birds in flight, spiraling downward from between the vapid lines. Dana let out a strangled cry, so unlike her it was chilling and nearly tragic. He was appeased, though it was too late, for she was already sinking onto her knees in a heart-rending motion, so that he was more than appeased, he wished for it to stop, which it did not, and in the midst there of Dotty's tumbling topics, she cried out aloud:

"No!"

Stooped down to gather them up, illegible as they were, cupping them in her chaliced palms, she was inconsolable at the disarrangement of deranged jottings.

Still, he could not forgive the husband and daughter their grieving. They made Dotty out to be a largeness largely unknown, but what they took for the murkiness of depths was only a drunkenness of the soul. Zen and theosophy; astrology and numerology; tarot cards and Madame Blavatsky; electromagnetic diets and communications with the dead. It was all a form of drunkenness in her. Dana's mother had taken her eight-year-old daughter to a'séance and scared the child almost as witless as she. Dana mentioned it to him once, though soon regretted it. He tried to dig the details out from her, and she grew sullen.

"You're saying that she took you with her to those ridiculous hoaxes? A child who could never sleep through a night? Or did your sleep problems only start after being dragged by your mother to these entertainments?"

"I've always had problems sleeping."

"But not anymore."

She was angry and wouldn't answer, but still it was true. With Justin beside her, Dana Mallach could at last submit to sleep and he would lie beside her and watch her dream.

Do you dream of me, Dana?