DISPATCHES : WEEK OF FEBRUARY 5th

My Name was Luka

Well, the mystery of Luka's disappearance has been solved. I went back to my office to find a note on my door ― it was on all the doors ― beginning, Dear Faculty, Staff and Students: We deeply regret to inform you that Professor Susan Luka suddenly and unexpectedly passed away last night...

It was like falling, that shuttering first moment of weightless terror. And I felt something cold and sharp pass through me.

Briskly, I tore the note off the door and locked myself inside. I sat down at my desk and finished reading the letter.

Apparently, Luka had fallen into the subway well last night just as an inbound train approached and was killed instantly. Authorities suspected she'd taken her own life ― friends agreed she was overworked, and perhaps had harbored a certain loneliness as a single, middle-aged woman with no children. A memorial service will be held tomorrow, it said. Please join us if you wish to share your grief.

I went to the lab, which was empty. Everyone had taken the rest of the day off, exhausted with shock.

But what I felt was much worse than shock or grief.

This was no suicide. You know it, I know it.


Certainty

Cinder-grey clouds sealed the morning sky. The traffic on the freeway advanced in a steady, synchronized medium-slow, headlights bleeding into the fog. I had the heat up all the way. The smudged, half-evaporated frost on the windshield softened the edges of the world beyond, smeared its colors; I switched on the wipers, which only decreased my visibility.

A thin grout of last night's dream clung to me in a similar way. Not the images or the situation, just the feeling, the dazed and porous melancholy. Like the hum in your feet after you've sprung from the diving board.

Perhaps there is no such thing as memory. Only residual attention.

The front wipers crunched over crusty ice patches, slightly out of phase with the back wipers. Periodicity. The key word. It's what it's all about. How many of the world's mysteries are solved simply by answering how often things repeat? They're endless. Perhaps far out in some astronomical exponents we'll find rhythms in the spacing of primes, or a secret repetition buried deep into the shadowy terrain of π.

In 1787, Ernst Chladni discovered that scattered grains of sand on a plate would form splendid geometric patterns when the edge was bowed. Harmonies would arrange themselves graphically in response to the vibration produced; there it was, the innate visual correlate to musical tones.

I had a similar revelation myself. It was about a year ago, when my binding models suddenly worked. The computational systems I'd created for hippocampal post-synaptic integration nets blipped to life, and I felt an intense lightheadedness, a rolling frisson like a post-come afterglow, watching the interplay of all the inputs and outputs, the labyrinthine circuitry of recognition fields and dynamic transmissions. It lasted for days, that slow warm sweet feeling.

Of course it's not the same, not as tactile or kinetic as real live particles taking shape in response to a real stimulus in real time ― no, my work is only a simulation, it's manifestly abstract, and the more you abstract something, the more variables you ignore and the less "real" or in any case, precise, your results become. It's not like seeing the phosphorous light up before you. It's not like the corpse gets up and walks around.


Ever seen a dead body? Luka's funeral was this afternoon. Her parents are pious in the olde sense of the word ― they believe in rites and resurrections and all that ― and because of their allegiance to Catholic mandate, insisted on an open casket.

I've only been to one other funeral ― my dad's. Can't imagine how awful it would have been if it hadn't been closed casket. What a barbaric practice. The thing that strikes you is not only that the human body in front of you isn't alive, but that it looks as though it never could have been. It's not just lifeless, it's inanimate. The embalmed flesh is floppy and waxed like a sausage casing. It looks fossilized, ambered. Ready for display.

Am I rationalizing? There's a word for this, for whatever I'm doing. Not dealing. What does it mean to deal? How does one deal? Sit Shiva? Truth is, I'm not feeling much. Just a slightly hollow, shaky feeling, which has more to do with my own safety than a sense of loss. I barely knew the woman. Do I not know how to mourn?

Others do. The Professor eulogized her. They'd worked together on a number of papers over the years. I can see them together, his grumbling basso-profundo discordantly harmonizing with her lispy mezzo-soprano. Discussing nothing but Glutamate. A match made in purgatory.

The priest talked about purgatory. Do people really believe in purgatory anymore?

Sniffles became increasingly audible throughout the service. Little quick whispers fluttering through the cathedral. Other speakers came and went, a couple of hotshots. That's the word we use in science to connote rock-stardom ― hotshot. Pierre Chevis flew in from Caltech, said a few unintelligible words. R. S. Mudhushadhana (or Dr. Mud, as he's often called) put in a cameo, offering a robust English-accented anecdote involving a centrifuge. Such elocution! To top it off, there remain a few South Indian inflections to his speech, those magnificent rolling R's, which dignify everything he says. He could be reciting ad copy for toilet paper and it would sound like the Bhagavad-Gita.

As it is wont to do, my mind wandered. Who was Wilder Knotts? What was his connection to my father, if any? Things were crystallizing. Threads were being woven. I could sense a fusing together, though of what exactly it was impossible to say. Mendeleyev wrote that he "felt" the structure of the periodic table before actually arranging the atomic weights -- he'd even left blank spaces where undiscovered elements would later find their place. Was I on to some shadowed truth or was this all an elaborate fiction? Do schizophrenics question the validity of their paranoia? I thought of the note left in the cigarette box. I hadn't made that up. I thought of Benchley's warning ― where was this guy now? No, my father was part of this somehow. Perhaps I could go through some of his files and see if there's any mention of Knotts...

Just then the altar boys opened the tall entrance doors. Candlesmoke from the chandeliers swam like barracudas into the draft as Luka's coffin was wheeled down the aisle.

Afterwards, I saw Theo at the reception. I have to admit he looked adorably disheveled in his suit and tie, like a kid getting his Bar-Mitzvah, but I wasn't in the mood.

"Good funeral," he said. "I mean, not good. Just, you know."

"Not now, Theo."

He shrugged.


Home

Do all alarm clocks bleep in groupings of 4? Who made that decision? I turned off the alarm this morning to hear a radio ad for some clearance sale at a local department store. They used the recording of Martin Luther King saying, "Free at last!" to call attention to their low low prices. Is nothing sacred.


Things at the lab have swiftly returned to normal.

"'...and in this ever changing world in which we live in...'" Devi sang.

"'In which we live in?'" blurted Steph, suddenly. "That's redundant. You don't live in a world in."

"I didn't write it for God's sake."

"There's a world in which you live. You live in the world. You're already there."

How did I find myself in this life? In this bizarre environment with these bizarre people?

"Haven't you ever heard of Paul McCartney?!" spat Devi.

"Haven't you ever heard of grammar?" retorted Steph.

The Professor entered in his horseman's stride, his somberly seasoned gait. At the sight of his face, the tenor of irreverent mirth fell to a simmer, awaiting judgement.

"In which we're livin'," he said, after a pause.

"Say what?"

"It's a contraction. 'The ever changing world in which we're livin'." He sighed. "You're both wrong."


Get thee to an airport

I took my lunch on the road. Brown-bagged it. Took the Subaru up Route 6 to the airport.

Recommendation: spend an afternoon in an airport sometime, specifically at a time when you're not flying. Psychologically, the whole place transforms. It's like seeing Muzak performed in a concert hall. Framed wallpaper. You realize you've been unconsciously tuning out the these places your whole life. Try to imagine even one airport you've been to. You can't. You amalgamate them in your memory just like taxis and clouds and uncles.

Seriously though, go to a terminal. Crack open an overpriced Corona in the middle of the afternoon and just watch what happens. Note the hexagonal patterns in the carpet, the abundance of light. Note the solid primary colors, the absence of diagonal lines.

The length airport designers go to make the space as anonymous, as unyielding to the traction of memory, as possible. These spaces are temples in reverse. The point of an airport is the hyper-awareness of space and time; one surrenders herself to this when she enters ― that's the contract ― everything else, the Starbucks, the Orange Julius, the Sunglasses Hut, is peripheral. But remove the planes, the psychological weight of having to know what gate and when to board, and she will feel a subtle but mellifluous ebb, a post-modern transcendence. Have a smoke in the smoking room. Watch the rhythms of traffic through the glass. Here we are; this is what we do.

After riding the monorail, I went to the US Bank at Delta and requested my safety deposit box. The narrow-eyed teller smiled and led me through the green-carpeted back hallway to a viewing room, sneezed into his armpit, and dashed off to the safe. Antiseptically clean, the little white-walled booth was not unlike an isolation chamber for the acute mentally ill. I sat down at the table under the buzzing fluorescent lamps and waited. The teller returned moments later slightly red-nosed, holding a long heavy metal drawer. I'd never seen a safety deposit box before. It looked a bit like an artifact from another time, or a theater prop of some sort, whitescratched and tarnished with speckles of crystalline mold. He unlocked the lid with a tiny key and slipped out the door, leaving me alone with my father.

The contents of the box smelled like an old blanket rumpled up in a closet, saturated with years of sleep. I carefully removed the top sheet, which was jaundiced and brittle to the touch. The text was type written, slightly misaligned in that pre-computer way. A Sloan Grant from 1974, stiffly worded, detailing a transfer of some cash for some private research. There were a bunch of these documents, as well as banking statements, lists of stocks and bonds, the deed to some property in Montana that now technically belonged to me. There were several photos with that tight, bleached Kodachrome look, waxy and faintly glowing. Buddies from the Pacific, mostly Asian men with straw hats and explosive smiles. My then-mustachioed dad wore an army vest ― or some sort of official-looking forest-green fatigue, in any case, carefully ironed, sleeves rolled.

Mom was there too, in a short, blue and white sundress, holding a cigarette on a porch somewhere. A pretty lady; not quite beautiful, though deceptively photogenic ― always something to watch out for. People who look too good in photographs are always hiding something ― don't trust them. I felt nothing at her image, not even resentment; if you'd taken a Galvanic Skin Response it would've barely measured.

There were a number of personal letters and postcards whose inkwork had faded into near-invisibility. Knickknacks of this and that kind. Dad's driver's license, his keyring, a pair of silver cuff links, bifocals.

The journal was packed in there also, the only thing I couldn't bear to go through. Its eggplant-colored jacket plucked a very particular wire in me. That document of a failing mind, that map of oblivion, I just couldn't even open the damn thing.

The smells were airborne: leather, wool. Smells are actual molecules of objects. What we smell ― the chemical signature of any scent ― is the frequency of its molecular vibrations, literally the time paths taken by networks of electrons as they orbit their nuclei. I wondered what these tangled ellipses looked like as I breathed them in.

Finally, there was a white folder sealed in plastic. I opened it to find a peculiar set of stapled documents, most of it blacked out with a marker. I didn't like this. As a girl, I'd once explored an abandoned chapel near the old baseball field and had discovered in the narrow bell tower a horrible room full of satanic graffiti ― pentagrams and swastikas and strange words I didn't understand. These official blackenings gave me the same ugly contaminated feeling. The remaining fragments read like a DADA poem. A few words repeated, like "transformation" and "therapy" and "function," but it was difficult to get any sense of what the document was documenting. A report of some sort? A contract? There was a baleful aura to these lacerated pages that led me to wonder if they suggested something far worse. At the very bottom was a red stamp reading...

...beneath which were three blacked-out names. Holding the sheet up to the light revealed the number of characters in each X-ed out name:

The last one was easy enough ― Richard E. Bloom, my father. But the others? I tried some of the names that had come up during the past few days. Pablo Pascal... Carter Benchley...Wilder Knotts ― yes ― it fit for the second name. The first on the list was anyone's guess. Was this un-detectivelike? I kept thinking of the so-called Bible Code, that hoax a few years back claiming that the Old Testament predicted world events according to some cockamamie algorithm. Again, I found myself gnarled at the crux: how to tell the real from the unreal, the apparent from the probable?

My cell phone rang. Blocked ID.

"Catherine speaking."

"Yeah, hi, Catherine." A lumpy liquid voice. "This is Gus from Susan Luka's lab?"

"Oh... hi, I'm so sorry."

"Thanks. So, you guys were doing some work on something, right?"

I imagined him for some reason in a green turtleneck, clicking and unclicking a pen.

"Why do you ask?"

"Apparently she left something for you. There was a file we found on her computer with your name on it."

Titillation, ebullience. "Really?"

"Bloom, right? The switchboard gave me your number. I hope you don't mind."

"No, no, that's fine."

"I burned all the files onto a CD if you wanna come pick it up."


Shouldered the Subaru out of the airport parking lot. The freeway was sticky with pre-rush, so I crept into the breakdown lane which was pocked and rippled and humming loudly, and shot by the traffic to my left. (Miranda calls this mischievous act, "riding the snake.") Bits of dusty fallout bellowed in my wake. Ce n'est pas une lane.

The sky was fallow of sun, just a deft emulsion of smoked chrome. Bruised and ample cloudsmears frilled to the west in forked tendrils. I felt a lull; the off-gassing of my unfinished dreams. I need to start getting more sleep.

Luka's lab, not so clean anymore. Boxes were all over the floor, service guys breaking things down. A red-faced woman was sobbing at her desk. Gus was not wearing a green turtleneck but a frumpy black sweatshirt and red Converse sneakers. He was early-20s, stubbled, impish.

"Catherine, right?"

His voice was more slushy than on the phone.

"The same."

"One sec."

Gus wheeled aside a dolly stacked with wooden crates and slid his hand inside a coat pocket that was flopped over the back of a chair. What was his secret talent and corresponding affliction? He had to have both to work with Luka, all her cronies did. They were savants, witch doctors in chem smocks, palsied magicians. It was the Special Olympics of science.

"I think this is it, yeah." He removed a clear jewel case and handed it to me. My name was scrawled in half-cursive on the CD with a blue Sharpie ― Gus's handwriting, I assumed.

"I really appreciate it," I said.

"You're lucky," he said with a snicker.

"Hm?"

"Some guy from the bank was here, left just before you arrived. Dude with this sorta pencil-mustache and pinstripe suit representing Susan's estate. He was rummaging through all the stuff for valuables like a thief. He took a whole bunch of other disks but I happened to have put yours in my pocket, so."

Gus handed me the disk.

"Hm," I said.

"Yeah," he said.