First Light by Charles Baxter
She leans back, alarmed by the fatigued irony in his voice, and pours herself a glass of burgundy. He holds out his own glass, and in silence she fills it, noting without meaning to that his hand is shaking. The mantel clock fills the silence with its woody hollow tick. “Lighten up,” she says, in an ineffectively cheerful tone. But it’s not as though he’s a good listener, or pays attention to any advice or instruction she gives him. He is always half-absented from whatever room he inhabits; he is here, but he is also out there, where the neurons spin and snap.
“You know I was in Los Alamos.”
“Of course. Everyone knows that.”
“I did some of the calculations. A group of us, under Feynman. I was very very young. They wanted that: quick minds.”
“It’s not so unusual,” she says, wanting to head off this topic. “There were a lot of people who—”
“—Up there on the high elevations,” he says, having tuned her out, “in that military monastery, what devotion we had! And Oppenheimer—he was effective in bringing people together to work out solutions. He was like Jay Gatsby: he saw the possibilities. He even acted like Gatsby. Polite. Courtly. Self-obsessed. And of course we all thought we were doing this service, this patriotic calling. Because everyone thought the Germans were building a fission bomb, too. But the problem was, you know, it was often fun working out the complexities of the thing. You do get to love your own mind after a while.”
“—I know all this, Carlo. Everyone knows that—”
“—You don’t know. Listen to me. It was like building a huge, complicated toy,” he says, gazing down into his wine and taking two deep breaths. “It was as though all of us had been brought there to have this toy built, and it wasn’t until the thing had actually exploded that grown men saw that it wasn’t a toy and started to vomit into the bushes. Well, they’d been drinking, of course. The celebrations. The … unpalatable celebrations. We had made this wonderful thing, this sexy contrivance, all for the sake of Death. It was him we served.”
She looks out past the dining room into the living room, dusty and neglected, without any primary colors except for the pictures on the walls. The two dogs thump their sleek tails underneath the table, and when she drops her hand to her side she feels a long wet tongue licking it.
“It’s all done,” she says. “It’s history now.”
“Well, it isn’t history, is it, if it lives with you. Those things live with everybody. They force you to think about them, those bombs. You live in their shadow and they steal your soul, just suck it up, like that.” He snaps his fingers. “They make everybody feel crazy. They replicate themselves. The big babies. They have their own baby boom.”
She thinks: what’s the use even talking to him?
“Someone has to have a bad conscience,” Carlo Pavorese says, standing up, bread crumbs falling from his shirt onto the floor, where Trayf and Tummler lick them up with loud slurps. “That was the job the gods gave me. Come back in a few days. I’ll be cheerier.” He walks into his study. After a minute, Dorsey hears one of the Joe Venuti records being played softly on Carlo’s phonograph. She decides to leave him alone in there, and she walks to the door, accompanied by Trayf, who puts Dorsey’s hand in her mouth, playing with it.
It happens now that at certain times of day she cannot remember where she is. Working to finish her dissertation, she must stop and think about where she is located: I’m in the science library, I’m in Kearsley Hall, I’m at home. When she is at home, in the apartment, she works. She calls friends. She receives phone calls. She is encouraged: her work is going well, and she is almost finished. But what is this, happening to time? Some days, completing the thesis, she works for so long that when she looks up at the window, it is not noon, as she thought, but night, and she has passed through the day without knowing, exactly, that it had been there. Sometimes it’s supposed to be night, but it’s early morning instead. She forgets to eat. It’s a rare pleasure to forget to eat, to go without food and not to miss it. This is the pleasure of monks and contemplatives. She sees with delight that she is losing weight, and, after being invited again, she shows up at Carlo Pavorese’s house, in her new, more slender self.
As unobservant as he is, he notices that she is thinner and feeds her T-bone steak. “Oppenheimer, you know, lost so much weight at Los Alamos that by the time we tested the bomb he was down to 115 pounds. He had what I think you would call an hysterical personality, and his wife didn’t help matters much. And of course he smoked constantly. He treated his body as if it were an appendage to his mind, a stalk. I heard people there say that he looked like a faun: you know, the delicate features, the long ears, the liquid lantern blue eyes. Some said bird, but no, it was not that either. I heard someone else say that he was cultivating the look of what the Jews call a tzaddik, a holy man. He had a great yearning for God, Oppenheimer did. And after all, he called the first bomb test Trinity, didn’t he? So here’s a man who yearns for God and manages to get the first A-bomb built. This is a joke, of course, a cosmic joke, but no one is laughing, at least not yet.”
“Carlo, can we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” he says. “What do you want to talk about?”
“What about the trees in your backyard?”
“What trees?” he asks. “I never noticed any.”
The telephone rings, and though she’s not sure what time it is, she is certain that it’s night, because it’s dark.
The voice is slurred and uninflected. “What’s the matter with you?”
When she hears her brother’s voice, she is instantly awake. “Hugh! My God, how are you?”
“I’m drunk,” he says. “I snuck in this bottle of Jim Beam and I’m sitting down here in the basement at my workbench, and Laurie doesn’t know that I’m here, because, you know, she went to bed. I guess she was tired or something. Maybe she was bored. Maybe she was tired of being bored. People go to bed when they’re bored. Are you ever bored?”
“I’m almost never bored,” Dorsey says. Though her brother’s tone is woozy and alcoholic, it’s friendly. “So how is Laurie?” she asks.
“Ever the same,” Hugh says. “We make love but she won’t kiss me. Why is that? Are you sure you aren’t ever bored? I get bored.”
“I’m too busy to be bored. Hugh, what did you mean when you asked me what the matter was?”
There is a long pause at his end of the line, and she can hear him making oral sounds, like lip-smacking. “What?”
“You said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ You didn’t even say hello.”
“Sorry sorry sorry. Very rude of me. I will remember from now on always to say hello.”
“Hugh.”
“What?”
“You said, ‘What’s the matter?’ ”
“Well, what is?”
“Nothing’s the matter.”
“Oh, no. You can’t pull that stuff on me. You can pretend to your smart brainy friends that you’re all right, but seeing as how I am your brother, you cannot fool me, for I see through your little stratagems.” Dorsey realizes, as she has before, that when her brother is intoxicated he has considerable powers of eloquence, and the thought comes to her that perhaps he isn’t as unintelligent as he sometimes makes himself out to be. Maybe his lack of intelligence is a hoax. Maybe he’s only pretending to be average. “I see through your stratagems,” he repeats. “I know your mind. I have this feel—” he laughs softly, a broken and compressed laugh—“this feel for what’s going on inside it. So what’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on. I’ve just pretty much finished my dissertation, and I think I’ll probably take next year off before I start to teach. There are various little jobs, informal post-docs that I can pick up, and—”
“No no no no no nope,” he says. “Not what I meant.”
“Huh?”
“Who’s the person?”
“What person?”
“Must I reveal what I know?” he asks. “Very well
“What did he look like?”
“Look like? I don’t remember what he looked like. I hadn’t ever seen him before. I don’t have a good memory for people I meet in dreams. I forget them right away. Am I way off base here? Am I losing my mind? So who’s this tall person you’ve been seeing?”
“How should I know? He’s in your dream.”
“Maybe he’s a big tall ugly guy,” Hugh laughs. “Maybe he has bad teeth.”
“This is all news to me,” Dorsey says.
“Well, I thought I’d check. Of course it’s none of my business, who you hang out with, who you see. Don’t think that I’m scouting here, or checking on you in any way at all. If you thought that, you would be wrong. All I want to do here,” he says, and his voice seems to fade out for a moment. “… not checking on you, just sort of concerned,” he says.
Dorsey, in bed, tries to relax herself.
“Who d’you have to look out for you?” her brother’s voice says. “Who’s around to check?”
“I can take care of myself,” Dorsey tells him, falling back in the bed, so that her head is on the pillow and her eyes are closed. It strikes her that none of this may be as sinister as it seems.
“The man in my dream did not actually like you,” Hugh says. “It was more intense than that.”
“You’re imagining things,” Dorsey tells her brother. “How’s the weather in Michigan?”
“Snowing here,” he tells her. “It comes down by the yard. By the bolt. Three feet in one hour, one full yard of snow.”
“No snow here. I miss it. We do get a few clouds now and then.” She chuckles, with effort.
“It must be nice having all that sun.”
“No, actually, it isn’t.” She waits. “In fact I don’t like it at all. I’m almost sick of it. Have you ever heard of anyone getting sick of the sun? It seems almost molelike, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” Hugh says. “I’ve gotten sick of the sun many times. There have been many days in my life when I could not look at the sun for one more minute, that’s how tired I was of it. You certainly have to endure a lot of light to get through a lifetime,” he says disconnectedly. “Well, kiddo, I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Call me,” he says. “Call me the minute you need any help. I think that’s what I’m here for.”
Long after he has hung up, she continues to hold the telephone in her hand. A lucky guess, she thinks. He made one lucky guess.
In a mood of exasperated pastoralism she drives Carlo Pavorese all the way over to Mount Tamalpais. During the drive up he squints at the sunlight and studies the trees—pine and fouquat and poplars—with an expression of skepticism that could easily be taken for disbelief. Dorsey glances at him long enough to make herself sure that she has actually spied this look of rationalist withdrawal on his face. There’s no mistaking it: the entire landscape has become a baroque configuration of shadows, of atoms and molecules that have achieved a certain form and are arrayed in distinct colors but are not, for that reason, worth thinking about or even worth looking at. The sky is an unsubtle primary blue, as if colored with school paint and lit with a six-hundred-watt bulb. Dorsey sees a beautiful downward sloping meadow facing the Pacific, the meadow’s upper ridge clustered with live oak, and for a moment she sees this scene as he does: the blues and the greens and the other colors disappear and she gradually understands that when he gazes out at all this he sees a generalization of matter. He sees nature as a field of generalizations. He sits on the passenger’s side and mutters impatient sentences to himself. He means that the mountain itself is just a junkpile of soil and rock. And she sees that particularity—two hikers, a man and a woman both with blue backpacks, and hiking boots and cut-offs, walking past the blue spruce and jack pines, the various flowers and grasses—all this particularity bores Carlo Pavorese to death. They are specific examples of already established principles. The world is a construct of meaningless variables. When she stops at a parking space, he will not get out. He regrets being in the car; he regrets having been persuaded to come. Mount Tamalpais is an intellectual failure, a chic hangout for nature admirers; it cannot satisfy his thirst for the absolute.
As she prepares for her dissertation defense, Dorsey can feel the world losing its grip on her. Something eerie and unmeasurable is beginning to happen to her sense of sequences. They’re somehow experiencing—or she’s experiencing—time lapses, a shuffling of space into time, and when she tries to take inventory she finds she’s missing whole days, shoplifted from her memory. For no particular reason that she can see, the transitions are being left out between the days and the weeks. Brant Wachtel has been her boyfriend; now he is gone; now she sleeps in the apartment on Revere Street alone. But no: she awakens, and Brant is still here, sleeping beside her, stretched out naked—this is California and he shuns pajamas—breathing wetly, his curls tumbling down the back of his neck as they always have. She met Brant in a record store, over the bin for cut-outs, and she returned his first glance because of those curls. But when she wakes up again Brant isn’t there. Could he have come in for a few hours, and left? Is he here, or not? And then, it seems, almost at once, she herself is not in the apartment but is back on Mount Tamalpais, outside the car, holding, of all things, a dandelion: wet stalk, yellow flower, jagged green leaves, clumped root system. She is trying to sell the dandelion to Carlo Pavorese, sell him on the idea of the dandelion. It’s free, but he still refuses to buy it. I won’t buy it at any price, he says; I won’t buy it if you give it to me. But look at how beautiful it is, she tells him. Look at the systematic logic contained in the structure of this plant. You look, he says. You’re the aesthete. I have better things to think about than dandelions.
After her successful dissertation defense in a room filled with the best scientific minds that the famous university can keep on its payroll, she is at Carlo’s, having a drink at a party in her honor. She’s looking at a painting downstairs she doesn’t remember having seen before.
The painting shows a long hallway, hung with mirrors on both sides, leading to a door; this door is open and leads to a further, smaller hallway, hung with (in perspective, smaller) mirrors, and leading to another door, also open; through this door one can glimpse a tiny receding hallway, and at the end of this hallway is another door. But this door—almost at the vanishing point—is closed. She suspects that Carlo did this painting himself, at some early time of his life, but he’s busy in the kitchen, pouring drinks for the other guests, and she’s not about to ask him.
One of her friends, Danny Anderson, a fellow graduate student, comes down from the upstairs bathroom, fixing his trouser fly, and sidles up to where Dorsey is standing in the hallway, making polite talk to one of her examiners, an old gentleman who has been inquiring about her career plans. As soon as Dorsey is alone, Danny whispers, “Doesn’t he ever dust in here? Somebody should buy the man a rag.”
“Carlo doesn’t care about dust,” Dorsey says.
“I noticed you were looking at those receding doorways in that painting he has in the kitchen. He certainly has a lot of what I guess you’d call art in this place, all these various butterflies broken on sundry wheels. Did you see the Hopper reproduction he has upstairs?”
“He doesn’t have any Hopper reproductions.”
“Well, I don’t know what it is, but I was sneaking around, and I saw something. Come take a look. Get your mind off your career and relativistic gravity for a minute.”
She follows him upstairs. In the Pavorese room, to
Danny Anderson’s hand is on Dorsey’s shoulder. She decides to let him leave it there.
In the picture, the father’s trousers are blown backwards by the same breeze. There they are: four figures viewed laterally, in expectant American postures. Four figures looking at the rising sun, immobilized by the painter at the horizon. The family is spaced so that no one touches anyone else.
“I told you so,” Danny says. “What’s this thing called? Four People Going Blind?”
“I never saw this before,” Dorsey tells him, shifting her shoulder so that Danny’s hand falls off it.
“I wonder what he’s working on.” He picks up some of the papers on Carlo’s desk and begins to examine them.
“Danny! Leave those things alone.”
“I was just wondering what the old boy was up to. Let’s go check out his basement.”
“No. He’ll catch us.”
“No, he won’t. He’s too busy. It’ll only take a minute.”
“I’m supposed to be with the other guests,” she says. “I should be circulating.”
“One minute.” He grabs her hand for a moment, and she feels the chill his drink’s ice cubes have made on his skin. “Come on.”