Nothing happened.
Martin said, “Somewhere in Chile.”
She waited for more.
He said, “I’m sticking with Einstein no matter what the theorists have disclosed or predicted or imagined concerning gravitational waves, supersymmetries and so on. Einstein and black holes in space. He said it and then we saw it. Billions of times more massive than our sun. He said it many decades ago. His universe became ours. Black holes. The event horizon. The atomic clocks. Seeing the unseeable. North-central Chile. Did I say this?”
“You said everything.”
“The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.”
“Somewhere in Chile. You said this.”
Max faked a yawn.
“Let’s return to here and now. What we have here is a communications screwup that affects this building and maybe this area and nowhere else and nobody else.”
“So what do we do?”
“We talk to people who live in this building. Our so-called neighbors,” he said.
He looked at her and then stood and shrugged and went out the door.
The two sat quietly for a moment. It occurred to her that she didn’t know how to sit quietly with Martin.
“Something to eat.”
“Maybe at halftime. If halftime ever comes.”
“Einstein,” she said. “The manuscript.”
“Yes, the words and phrases that he crossed out. We can see him think.”
“What else?”
“The nature of the handwritten text. The numbers, letters, expressions.”
“What expressions?”
“ ‘The force that the field exerts.’ ‘The theorem of the inertia of energy.’ ”
“What else?”
“ ‘World point.’ ‘World line.’ ”
“What else?”
“ ‘Weltpunkt.’ ‘Weltlinie.’ ”
“What else?”
“The way the facsimile pages become less pale but only briefly until the book nears the end.”
“What else?”
“A slipcase, a hard cover, pages ten inches by fifteen inches. A big thing, I heft it, I turn the pages, I scan the pages.”
“What else?” she said.
“This is Einstein, his handwriting, his formulas, his letters and numbers. The sheer physical beauty of the pages.”
This was erotic in a way, this exchange. His responses were quick, his voice suggesting the eagerness of someone who has retained what truly matters.
She kept looking straight ahead at the blank screen.
“What else? What else?”
“Four words.”
“What are they?”
“ ‘Additional theorem of velocities.’ ”
“Say it again.”
He said it again. She wanted to hear it one more time but she decided they ought to stop now. Teacher and student in a reverse coupling.
Martin Dekker. His full name, or most of it. She closed her eyes and said the name to herself. She said, Martin Dekker, will you live alone forever? The blank screen seemed a possible answer.
Then she turned and looked at him.
“So where is he? Where are the others?”
“Who are the others?”
“The two empty chairs. Old friends, more or less. Husband, wife. Returning from Paris, I think. Or Rome.”
“Or north-central Chile.”
“North-central Chile.”
Max came back and went directly to the window across the room, looking down on empty Sunday streets. They talked about the doors he knocked on and the doors he bypassed. This became the main subject, doors as paneled structures worth describing, scratched, stained, recently painted. This floor, near neighbors, why get involved. One floor down, five doors, three responses, he said, holding up his hand, three fingers extended. Floor below that, four responses, two mentioned the game.
“We’re waiting,” she said.
“They saw and heard what we saw and heard. We stood in the hallway becoming neighbors for the first time. Men, women, nodding our heads.”
“Did you introduce yourselves?”
“We nodded our heads.”
“Okay. Important question. Is the elevator working?”
“I took the stairs.”
“Okay. And did anyone have an idea about what is happening?”
“Something technical. Nobody blamed the Chinese. A systems failure. Also a sunspot. This was a serious response. A guy smoking a pipe. No, I did not tell him that smoking is not allowed in this building.”
“Since you yourself. An occasional cigar,” she said to Martin.
“A sunspot. A strong magnetic field. I stared at him.”
“You gave him your death-penalty look.”
“He said the experts will make adjustments.”
Max stayed at the window, repeating this last remark in a whisper.
Diane waited for Martin to speak. She knew what she wanted him to say. But he didn’t say it. So she attempted a playful version in the form of a question.
“Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”
She forced a brief stab of laughter and waited for someone to say something.
-3-
Life can get so interesting that we forget to be afraid.
In the van, through the quiet streets, Jim waited for Tessa to look at him so they could trade looks.
There were others crammed into the vehicle, two flight attendants, a man talking to himself in French, a man talking to his phone, shaking it, cursing it. Others, moaning. Still others, quiet, trying to retrieve what had happened, who they were.
They were a wobbling mass of metal, glass and human life, down out of the sky.
Someone said, “We came down. I could not believe we were sort of floating.”
Someone else said, “I don’t know about floating. Maybe at first. But we hit hard.”
“Did we miss the runway?”
“A crash landing. Flames,” a woman said. “We were skidding and I looked out the window. Wing on fire.”
Jim Kripps tried to remember what he saw. He tried to remember being afraid.
He had a cut on his forehead, a laceration, bloodless now. Tessa kept looking at it, almost wanted to touch it; maybe she thought this would help them remember. To touch, embrace, speak nonstop. Their phones were dead but this was no surprise. One of the passengers had a twisted arm, missing teeth. There were other injuries. The driver had told them that they were going to a clinic.
Tessa Berens. She knew her name. She had her passport, her money and her coat but no baggage or notebook, no sense of having gone through customs, no memory of fear. She was trying to bring things to mind more clearly. Jim was here and he was solid company, a man who worked as a claims adjuster for an insurance company.
Why was this so reassuring?
It was cold and dark but there was a jogger in the street, a woman in shorts and a T-shirt moving at a steady pace in the lane reserved for bicycles. They passed others here and there, hurrying, remote, just a few, no one sharing the barest glance.
“All we need is rain,” Jim said, “and we’d know we were characters in a movie.”
The cabin attendants were quiet, uniforms in slight disarray. Two or three questions directed their way from others in the van. Faint response, then nothing.