The comfort of distant s.., p.19
The Comfort of Distant Stars, page 19
‘Do you think you will stay at Cornell after your PhD? I spoke to some of my contacts, and I understand that the best physics is being done on the West Coast.’
I didn’t respond.
‘You should think about it,’ he said.
We sat for a few minutes in silence. The sound of clinking plates and cutlery filled my ears. My father stared at me. A small smile twisted the corner of his lips. ‘I have something for you,’ he said, as if he had just remembered. He reached into a leather bag beside him. ‘It’s a gift from Umudim. Three of the village’s titled men delivered it to me a few years ago.’ He placed the object, wrapped in checkered red, white and black cloth, on the table.
I reached out and pulled the object to me. My father laughed. ‘How do you communicate with your professors and colleagues if the only words you speak are “Yes” and “No”? I suppose since language is my area, I find it hard to comprehend.’
The waitress stopped at our table and placed a large coffee in front of my father and a glass of orange juice before me. Then she reached into her apron, lifted a straw and laid it beside the juice.
As she walked away my father asked: ‘Have you spoken to your sister? I have been calling her. She has not responded to even one of my calls. So hard-hearted. If there is anything I have done to her, she should forgive me. I am not an ogre. I am getting old.’ His small eyes glistened behind his glasses with moisture as he told me the story of his own suffering at the hands of Obiageli, my sister and his daughter.
I turned away from my father and lifted the object from Umudim. I started to rise.
‘Please, sit down, Ezeani,’ my father said.
‘No!’ I responded.
‘Please, sit down. I haven’t spoken to you in years, my son. I know things are difficult, but the distance that has developed between us is heartbreaking. Has Obiageli been telling you things?’
I started to move.
‘Please, Ezeani,’ he said and reached for my hand. ‘I don’t know what your sister has told you. I want to be upfront with you.’
I pulled my hand away. Then I zipped up my polytetrafluoroethylene coat.
‘I was drunk,’ I heard him say as I passed the table, walked through the door at the Statler and back to my room at Telluride. The next morning, I unwrapped the package from Umudim. It was a short wooden carving. My Ikenga.
The Teaching of Jacob, the Newly Baptised
My brother and I checked out of the Statler the day after our outing on Skaneateles Lake. We spent the morning at the Sapsucker Woods Bird Sanctuary and then drove down to New York City. I would spend the summer between my final undergraduate year and the start of graduate school with him in New York. Outside of childhood, those two months would be the longest period of my life I would spend in the continuous company of another human being. I say this without excepting my marriage. There is perhaps something to note in the fact that this period, as was the period of constant companionship in childhood, was spent with the same individual – my older brother, Nnamdi. He took a leave of absence from his firm, and we spent each day, from the moment we rose to the moment we went to sleep, together.
There was one notable exception. One morning, my brother and I left mid-morning for the Metropolitan Museum. It was our habit that summer to go through the cultural and historic sites and venues of New York City. We took a very casual approach to our excursions, selecting almost at random an adventure for the day. ‘All this stuff is new to me too!’ Nnamdi said. ‘We are discovering New York together. I never paid attention to any of it.’
At the Metropolitan, after wandering through its extensive collection, we stumbled upon a touring exhibition of ancient Japanese wood furniture facing a garden of rocks, stones and fern trees built beneath a skylight. The garden exuded an almost palpable, serene beauty. The furniture was arranged in such a way as to align the viewer and draw them into the tranquility that emerges from a perspective that is intentionally limited, which is to say, focused.
A large placard said the guild of carpenters were so skilled it was an admission of failure to use a nail. We spent what seemed like hours seated on the aged furniture in the periphery of this garden, barely speaking.
As we were leaving the museum, my brother and I stumbled on an exhibition of Indian erotic carvings. On doors, in reliefs, enormous phalluses and endowed maidens copulated with bracing abandon. We spent an hour wandering back and forth through the collection. ‘This is the life force of humans,’ my brother declared, ‘the sex impulse. And don’t nobody tell you any different.’ I did not agree, nor did I disagree.
Unknown to me, our time at the collection would trigger an idea in my brother’s head. He would wander off to make or take calls as we walked to a restaurant where we enjoyed a late lunch. When we sat down at the diner, Nnamdi said: ‘I presume you are still a virgin?’
‘Yes, I am,’ I responded and smiled.
‘Well, I can’t think of a better day than today to change that,’ he said.
After lunch, he hailed a yellow taxi and told the driver to take us to the Sofitel Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street. At the desk he picked up a key and we rode an elevator up to a room.
‘Have some wine, make yourself comfortable,’ Nnamdi said. ‘I have something special for you. I’ll be right back.’ I sat on the edge of the large bed and sipped red wine out of a tiny screw-top bottle I took from the small fridge. Then I picked up a miniature bottle of whiskey, unscrewed the top and threw it down my throat.
When my brother returned, he walked in with a beautiful young Japanese woman. ‘Ichika is a college student. She loves New York.’
I stared. Ichika smiled at me. My brother placed a pack of condoms on the nightstand. ‘Have fun, kids,’ he said as he walked out of the room. I stared at Ichika. I could not believe how beautiful she was. Then she walked to the bed, stood above me and touched my cheek. Her hand was small, cool and soft. My nose filled with the fragrance of jasmine and lemongrass.
‘Relax,’ Ichika said, and then smiled.
The following morning my brother called Room 729 to summon me to breakfast. We ate together in the Sofitel’s dining room and, at his invitation, I regaled him with an account of the activities. ‘I got in. Then I moved it, back and forth,’ I said, smiling happily at the memory. ‘It really felt nice. We did it one more time before she left. The second time lasted longer. She said I was the best first-timer,’ I boasted.
And my brother smiled at me. ‘I am sure you are. Good work! That’s how you keep your metaphysics warm!’ He raised his palm up in invitation. I slammed it hard with a high-five.
‘Now, I can give you a few tips. Show you how to satisfy a woman,’ I said. And my brother laughed loudly.
12
PERPETUAL PERISHING PRESENTS
The Daughter of a Preaching Man
There is no such thing as absolute time; an event occurs only in relation to some other event. There is no such thing as absolute movement; a thing moves only in relation to something else. There is no such thing as absolute existence; a thing exists only in relation to the existence of something else. When one thing stands, another stands beside it.
Philip Bousquet was holding his wine glass up to the lamp, gently twirling the red liquid. The woman who would become my wife waited for him to continue, her left hand lying gently over mine on the table. Heidi’s features, her long sharp nose and the raised cheekbones, glowed in the soft light. Her yellow hair cascaded to her shoulders, the strands carefully coifed in a tightly packed lattice that shimmered. I gazed at her irises often, mesmerised by the beautiful wavelengths which escaped. Her lips were painted a deep red. The strong smell of her rich perfume bathed and comforted me. I stared at her hand and its deep brown freckles against the white tablecloth.
We sat with Professor Rayburn and my future father-in-law at the back of the restaurant, and noise from the small tables in the foreground rose and fell in waves that intensified and dissipated irregularly. ‘Your fiancé’s theory is sublime,’ Philip said. ‘He established that time is not a fundamental property of the universe. The most profound implication of his theorem is that the lattice of space and time is entanglement. Now, it seems so obvious. But the truth is that before Kobidi published, no one in physics believed that any such thing was true.’ Philip paused to take a sip from the glass.
‘Before The Length of Time, nobody would even dare to make such a statement,’ said Professor Rayburn, lifting a piece of fish on a fork to his mouth.
A waiter approached the table and tapped on a small white pad with a silver-coloured pen. Philip looked up at him.
‘The wine is from the Sauternes region in Bordeaux,’ the waiter said.
‘Just as I thought,’ Philip said, and grinned.
‘I am afraid I am still a bit lost,’ Heidi said. ‘Does Ezeani’s theorem tell what will happen in the future?’
‘Well, in a sense it might be thought to do that,’ Professor Rayburn responded. ‘However, I think a more useful way to think about it is that it tells us, mathematically, if any length of time is genuine. If it belongs to the actual universe, present, future or past. The theorem is like a key that translates a type of encryption which tell us how the universe is entangled by analysing connections in spacetime.’
‘You mean it tells us if the DVD is real or if it’s a fake?’ Heidi said.
‘Exactly!’ said Professor Rayburn.
‘Well, I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t lock you up, Ezeani!’ the judge said, and slapped my back with his large hand. He laughed.
My future wife laughed and said, ‘Dad!’ Then she squeezed my hand and smiled at me.
‘Ezeani knows I’m teasing, honey,’ the judge said, still laughing. Heidi squeezed my hand again. My terror subsided.
‘The fact that he was ever in danger of being locked up is crazy!’ Professor Rayburn said, speaking in an earnest and formal voice. ‘Kobidi is one of the most important and impactful theoretical physicists in decades.’ His eyes were open and wide. He shook his head and then looked down at his plate. He looked like someone who might cry.
At that moment Heidi seized my face, turned it towards her and kissed my mouth. ‘You are a star!’ she said. ‘My star!’
‘The thing to remember is that a length of time contains both space and time,’ Professor Rayburn blurted to no one in particular. ‘Time is a measure, a count, really, of the persistence of interaction. Of the endurance of entanglement, you could say.’
‘God’s work is amazing to behold,’ the judge said. ‘And his love is so abundant. Look at how much he reveals to you folks.’ He stopped and looked across the table.
‘In what way do you mean?’ Professor Rayburn asked.
‘You see, Professor Rayburn, I am a man of faith,’ the judge said.
‘Dad?!’ Heidi said sharply.
‘It’s OK, honey. Professor Rayburn is just curious. Professor, you are right to question why Kobidi was arrested and brought before my court. It is indeed strange. But what you might not see is the Lord’s will. Our Lord Jesus was himself brought before a magistrate.’
Philip Bousquet had put down his glass and looked across at Heidi’s father. Professor Rayburn’s eyes were fixed on the table.
‘Heidi is my youngest child, and I don’t think it’s much of a secret she is my favourite. Unlike her siblings she didn’t run off. She is a nurturer. And, truth be told, I worried about her spending so much of her life tending to me and the missus. It’s God’s wisdom, beyond human understanding, that Kobidi would be brought before my court. But if that hadn’t happened, these lovebirds would probably never have met.’ The judge turned to look at Heidi and me and nodded his head solemnly. ‘Heidi has finally found what God meant for her. And I think their love has been instrumental in enabling Professor Kobidi to express himself. That love is the root of these profound insights you speak of.’
Professor Rayburn looked up from his plate. It appeared that the judge’s words had cheered him up. He had a smile on his face. ‘You think God was playing matchmaker?’ he asked and then beamed a wider smile.
This dinner took place on the evening of my appointment as a tenured professor of physics at Cornell University. At this time Heidi and I had been engaged for almost a year. She selected the restaurant and arranged the invitations to the small group with the same efficient and assured energy she had taken to organising and directing my life. Heidi protected me, fought for me, and enabled me to focus on my work in physics; she sheltered me from the confusions, insensibilities, madness and moods that accosted me. And when the absurdities and confusions threatened to overwhelm me, Heidi would hold and comfort me until the anxiety and terrors passed, like dissipating waves.
On a crisp day, several months before I would be granted tenure, we ate lunch on a blanket in the Quad and Heidi raised a napkin to wipe ketchup from my cheek, then told me it was absurd for a professor at Cornell to continue to live at Telluride. This thought had never occurred to me. I had never considered where I should live, or the appropriateness or absurdity of one place in comparison to another.
‘I think we should get a house. There are a few places I have shortlisted. We can go and see them tomorrow afternoon,’ she said, and smiled gently at me.
We looked at three houses. When we walked into the third – the five-bedroom house behind the trees – I was overwhelmed with the feeling of home. It was like I had come upon a place in which I had once resided. This feeling was immediate and overwhelming. Heidi sensed my emotions and beamed. ‘I thought you would love it too! Yes, this is home.’ She squeezed my hand and then kissed my lips. The realtor, still in my line of sight, smiled and pulled a laminated folder from her large handbag. We wandered through the many rooms: the den, kitchen and study on its ground floor, the master bedroom and three bedrooms on its second floor, the small bedroom with sloping walls in the attic – converted, I was told, from a crawl service space. We came down the stairs onto the backyard porch on which I would, on a bright afternoon, many years in the future, receive an epiphany, and understand the true meaning of entanglement and the import of my life’s work.
I would live here till the end of my natural life. In those years, I was occasionally struck by the ways in which this house behind the trees seemed to be an amalgam of the two houses on the campus at Ibadan. There was the semicircular driveway that came through the hedges and trees; and beyond the back porch, the raised stone wall that led to a slope of rocks and boulders; and the green trees and grass that seemed to enclose the house and set it away from the world. As in the first house on campus in Ibadan, it was on the rocks that I would first observe Anyanwu. Only much later would I discover that he had moved into the room in the attic, coming and going as he pleased.
Before the end of that week, Heidi and I walked into a lawyer’s office and executed papers that established purchase of the house on Hanshaw Road. As I signed, I noted the large sum paid for the house. A number so large that I could not really comprehend it in any way consistent with my own experience of money. It is a measure of the ways in which Heidi secured and protected me that I did not have any use for this information.
Our engagement to be married was announced that afternoon in large paid advertisements in the Ithaca Journal and the Cornell Daily Sun. In its weekend issue, the Ithaca Journal ran a piece about us. In it we were referred to, several times, as ‘the couple’.
The restaurant at which we celebrated my appointment was located in a large house tucked down a lonely, wooded street on the edges of Ithaca. When the waiter produced a cheque in a black leather folder, Heidi tried to pick it up but her father grabbed it and would not listen to her entreaties that he relinquish the bill. The judge produced a shiny silver card and placed it into the folder.
At the door, Professor Rayburn grabbed his coat from the hands of an attendant. He rushed out without bothering to put it on. As I slipped my arms into the dark-grey cashmere overcoat Heidi had purchased for me, her father held out her own and she placed her arms within it.
Snow was falling lightly, and the air was crisp, cold and fresh. I could hear bird calls. The judge stood beside our car, kissed Heidi on each cheek and then shook my hand. ‘I am proud of you, son,’ he said. Heidi drove our large car out of the small parking lot onto the black road that glistened in the headlights’ beams, waves of light, refracted by the thin layer of water molecules floating on the melting snow.
As she pushed open the door of our house, Heidi threw her keys in a bowl on the shelf in the front hall. ‘Well, Professor Kobidi,’ she said, ‘welcome home!’ She pulled me to her and kissed my lips as she shut the door with the heel of her foot.
An Interview with My Sister
The black town car pulled into the short driveway. My wife reached for my hand and squeezed. As I placed my foot on the ground and pushed my head into the cold air, I saw my sister standing at the door in medical scrubs, a cream cardigan around her shoulders.
‘Welcome, Ezeani,’ she said, and then turned back into the house. I could hear the crunch of Heidi’s feet on the gravel. She held my hand as we climbed up to the porch.
I knew Obiageli was a physician and my assumption had been that she was wealthy or at least well-off. In the years I had lived with Heidi, I had developed a general sense of the material value of things like furniture. The objects in my sister’s house did not have the solid, substantial feel I had come to associate with the homes of my wife and father-in-law’s set. My sister’s living room was filled with mismatched things and had a temporary and improvisational air. Like the work of an amateur.
There were two large sofas, each too big for the room, suffocating the space. Against the far wall was a tall shelf and over it hung a large, framed picture of my mother. The living room floor was covered by a shaggy brown carpet with a colourful heap of plush puppets and a few plastic children’s toys in a corner.
