An Elegant Theory Read online

  “Perhaps we’re focusing on the wrong thing here, Dr. Zahn,” Dr. Hamlin said. “How did this event make you feel?”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “I can assure you that I am not.”

  “I was the epitome of a proud father. What do you think? I was covered in piss. My son suffered second degree burns. He got taken to the hospital in handcuffs. He caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage. I was just peachy. Ecstatic even!”

  “Have you always used sarcasm as a coping mechanism?”

  Dr. Hamlin leaned back in his chair, delighted with himself, like he had, in just twenty minutes, figured out Coulter and his family. This was what had bothered Coulter most about every psychiatrist he had seen thus far. He wanted to vet them before they met Isaac, make sure they weren’t some whackjob. But that was the thing. They were all whackjobs, as if this characteristic was a prerequisite of the profession, like unkempt beards and breath that smelled of pipe tobacco and mentholated breath mints.

  “I’m sorry,” Coulter said, suppressing the urge to smack this pompous bastard. “I just want to know if there is something I can do, a prescription, psychoanalyses, something, to fix him.”

  “You think your son is ‘something’ that needs to be ‘fixed.’” He used finger quotes. He actually used finger quotes.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Dr. Hamlin leaned forward and puckered his lips. “Tell me, Dr. Zahn. How demanding are you that Isaac performs well in science?”

  “Science particularly?”

  “School in general.”

  “Like any parent I hope he does well,” Coulter said. “Why? Do you think his pyromania stems from me pressuring him to do well in school?”

  “I don’t think you’re the cause. I think I’ve already mentioned that.”

  Coulter crossed his legs and felt a pinching on his left thigh. Reaching into his pocket, Coulter found a book of matches. “Sean Cummings,” it said. He’d picked it up at lunch today to give to Isaac for his collection, despite the fact that both arms were bandaged from burns. He didn’t even remember doing it on purpose. It was instinct, to give his child the materials needed to start a fire.

  “I think it would be helpful if next session I sat down with the entire family,” Dr. Hamlin said. Coulter twirled the book of matches between his fingertips, imagining he smelled that familiar sulfur wafting through the air. “And I’d especially like to speak to Isaac alone.”

  “Sure,” Coulter said, even though he knew he’d never see Dr. Hamlin again, or any other psychiatrist for that matter. “Same time next week?”

  Depression is a fluid continuum, hard to pinpoint or articulate. There’s shame. Guilt. Fear. Self-loathing. All swimming around without sufficient cause. That’s obvious. But to say one person is something, in this instance depressed, and one person is not, seems to indicate a dividing line, a threshold that one must cross. If you are on one side of the line, you are emotionally stable. If you are on the other, you are disturbed. You need help. You will not be okay on your own. How do I quantify that? By how many times I thought per day about death? It seemed about as good an indicator as any.

  I was a lot at that time, thinking about death. It wasn’t that I was suicidal; it was more a fascination, like seeing a new device for the first time, an iPad say, or Google Glass, and wondering exactly how it worked. At the lab, I fantasized about dipping my face into liquid nitrogen. It would flash freeze, and my brain wouldn’t be able to transmit electrical impulses to regulate my breathing or my cardiovascular system. Within seconds both would stop, and I would die. I would lose my balance, whether I was sitting or standing, and I would topple over. When I hit the ground, my head would shatter into frozen shards of flesh and tissue. I also considered placing the proton laser on a timer, something short, perhaps five seconds or so, just enough time for me to stand in front but not enough for me to lose my courage. The beam wouldn’t shoot a hole in my chest like in a sci-fi movie. There would be burns, of course, but nothing as catastrophic as that. Instead, my body cavity would act as a furnace, and my organs would heat until they boiled. The smell would be horrid, and it would only be a few moments until I was discovered.

  At home, the technical details of how I would kill myself became more difficult. First, Sara was there. As she got later into her pregnancy, she went out less, to markets or simply to walk about town. Not being employed, she had few commitments. She would shop for groceries. She would prepare for the baby, buying onesies and little plastic tabs to keep the cabinets from opening all the way. I would have to be more discreet at home. I wouldn’t simply be able to take the toaster into the bathroom, plug it in, and jump into the shower. There would be questions, interference. I would have to answer for what I would do. Secondly, I didn’t have the tools I had at work. More could go wrong. There would be more of a mess to clean up. I would have to slit my wrists in the bathtub or overdose on sleeping pills. I would leave behind puddles of blood and excrement and vomit. Worse yet, I could be found before I died, resuscitated and forever unable to apologize for my actions, Sara’s and my relationship marred thereafter by mistrust.

  Of course, beyond thinking about my death, there were other manifestations of my depression: I picked at unhealed pimples, turning them into gnarled knots of scar tissue; I washed my hands so frequently they remained pink and cracked from exposure; I talked to no one; I suffered from insomnia. For that I tried Ambien and warm milk, antihistamine and hydrocodone. I tried eating a greasy meal before bed and working out. I watched television. I read. I tried to lie still and clear my mind of all thought, but nothing worked. After a while, I gave up on forcing myself to go to sleep. Instead, I would work until I collapsed from exhaustion, sitting at the dining room table, my head resting upon my laptop’s keyboard. I would awake to a start, only having been asleep a few hours, with Sara scrambling some eggs, not even acknowledging the fact that I hadn’t slept in the same bed with her for several weeks.

  “Morning,” she would say. “You’re late for work.”

  This was how I found myself at the lab at 4:00 am, my head resting atop the mainframe computer’s keyboard. The monitors had gone dark hours ago. I rose up and stretched, trying to alleviate the dull ache lodged in my shoulders and neck. I tasted copper, licked my teeth, and noticed a little blood. I must have bit my lip, I thought. How strange.

  Everyone else had gone home hours ago. Only security guards roamed campus now, idling along the streets in their sedans, a tattered copy of Dickens and day-old donuts in the seat next to them. But that would change soon. Lab techs and graduate students would start clamoring in around 5:00, sleepy-eyed and smelling of coffee. I had class at 8:00 and again at 11:00, then office hours in the afternoon, so the only opportunity I would have to work on my dissertation would be in the next few hours—no point in going home now.

  The computer itself was housed below ground, dozens of towered servers aligned in neat rows inside a refrigerated room. Upstairs in the lab, six monitors and a keyboard provided access. Students and faculty used it to solve Einstein’s field equations or to model hypothetical particle collisions. I was using it to compute matrices of Calabi-Yau manifolds and to project string frequencies to determine if they produced certain universal characteristics such as the force of gravity and Planck’s constant. It gave simple “yes” or “no” answers to a small subset of variables, determining whether or not that manifold had the required shape to allow the frequency in question to exist. The model then narrowed down the various manifolds that satisfied the requirement and then moved on to another subset and another and another until no manifolds remained in the original, random configuration. Once I reached zero manifolds in the possibility queue, I randomly generated another matrix of manifolds and repeated the process.

  I tapped the Return key. Numbers filtered down the matrices, cascading like soapy water down a shower curtain. In experimentation, the scientist is supposed to be an objective observer. He
may design the experiment, account for controls and sound methodology, but then he should withdraw. Granted, this wasn’t an experiment, only research modeling, but the idea is the same: the scientist should not in any way determine the outcome. When faced with such an astounding possibility of failure, however, this becomes difficult. If the needle in a haystack metaphor could be used, the needle would be the size of a single cell of a human eyelash and the haystack would be the size of the Andromeda galaxy, a flawed methodology to say the least that would take me over 400,000,000 years to stumble upon the correct answer. It was also time consuming and boring and, in the end, worthless. After two hours of modeling, not one manifold made it past the first subset of universal variables. For my dissertation to be passable, I surmised, it would have to at least pass 118 subsets.

  After logging out of the mainframe, I packed up my things and headed down to the radiation lab to take a shower in the decontamination unit. A creepy place, it was located in the basement and had no windows. The shower unit had glass walls and stainless steel floors. Every time I came down here, I imagined being surrounded by a group of epidemiologists, decked out in nitrile rubber hazmat suits. They would be decontaminating me, then readying me for isolation and my impending death from some slowly incubating virus.

  The water, despite being only one temperature, tepid, felt good. It washed the grease off my face and relaxed my tense muscles. It rinsed the blood from my mouth and helped me regain some faculty of my senses. I wasn’t quite awake, but I was getting there, still in that moment caught between dream and reality, the world streaming in a fluid manner like I was walking across the bottom of a pool. Still lingering, though, was the remnants of my dream, the effect it had on my nervous system as it convinced my brain that it was actually occurring. In my dream, I had been held hostage by a group of domestic militants, known for their savagery. They were torturing me, not for any information, not to gain some strategic advantage over their enemies, but just for fun. I was tied up, bound to a wooden chair at the edge of the North Canadian River outside Oklahoma City. The water ran shallow and was stained red from clay. It tasted gritty and coppery, thick with limestone sediment. I knew this because they kept dipping my head back into the water. I fought each time they did so, thinking that if I could just wriggle hard enough, I could break free and run to safety. I never could, though. I was just on an endless loop: they would dip me underwater, I would fight for my life, and just before I was to lose consciousness, they would bring me back up for a few, short gasps of air.

  Finished with my shower, I got dressed and headed upstairs to my office. It was a small room, tucked between the men’s washroom and a janitor’s closet. It always smelled of urinal cakes and Pine Sol. I booted up my computer and logged my results from the night before. I poured through the data, each manifold that had been created by the model, and pinpointed the universal characteristic that had not been met, gravity or the electromagnetic force, whatever it had been, and attempted to determine why it had gone wrong, then I would eliminate that possibility from the modeling code. It was a painstaking process that went slowly and had a high propensity for error, but I knew no other way in which to proceed.

  I continued on in this way for hours, perusing my data sets, waiting for my early class to start, when Holly, the physics department administrator, burst into my office. I was startled at first for I didn’t realize how much time had passed. The clock on my computer monitor showed 8:30. I was late for class. Three and a half hours had gone by, but it seemed no longer than five minutes. It was a strange phenomenon of sorts, losing so much time. It wasn’t that I had blacked out or had one of my vivid daydreams, but time didn’t seem to contain the same properties as it usually did, instead streaming much faster, as if my velocity through space had slowed to a perpetual stop.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir,” Holly said.

  “I know. I’m heading that way,” I said, meaning class.

  “You do? Oh. I was told no one has been able to get in touch with you.”

  “Who’s been trying to reach me?”

  “Dr. Brinkman. Your wife.”

  “My wife?”

  “Yes. She’s in the hospital.”

  Immediately I checked my phone. I had turned it off the night before so as not to be disturbed while working, and in the interim I’d received twenty-four voicemail messages, six of which were from Sara and the rest from a number I didn’t recognize. Dozens of scenarios popped into my head—my wife had gone into labor prematurely, killing both she and the baby. Or only Sara had died, the baby in ICU, isolated in an incubator and barely clinging to life. An intruder had beaten Sara and raped her. She had been in a terrible bus accident. She had contracted HIV during a botched blood transfusion. She had tried to kill herself and was awaiting a psych evaluation.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you need a ride?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Please.”

  Holly didn’t know anything, only that Sara had been admitted. She didn’t know her condition or the cause of her illness or injury. She didn’t know if she was alive or dead or all alone, drugged up and confused—she only could respond with a scared, dumb look and say, “I don’t know, I don’t, I’m sorry.” I couldn’t get in touch with anyone either. I called Dr. Brinkman and Sara, both of whom didn’t answer. I phoned the hospital, but I remained on hold, the low hum of a saxophone ringing in my ear. When we reached the visitor’s parking lot, I hung up the phone and sprinted into the hospital.

  I found myself in a large foyer. There was seating over to the right, the kind found in airports, two rows of chairs bolted to a center foundation, and an information kiosk directly ahead of me. Two young women worked there. The first clacked at a keyboard. She had her mouth open, her head perched forward like an ostrich as she studied the screen. The other was on the telephone telling someone that she didn’t care if she lived with the patient, “only blood-relatives and spouses can visit—it’s the law,” and smacking her lips every time she pronounced a “P.” When I approached, the one clacking on the keyboard stopped and turned toward me.

  “My wife,” I said. “She was admitted here last night. Sara Zahn.”

  She clicked the information into the computer, then clicked her tongue. I couldn’t help but think it was a derisive cluck, as if she saw on her computer screen that I was the deadbeat husband who no one could reach all night.

  “Here she is. Room 376.” She pointed toward the elevator. “Third floor and to the right. Can’t miss it.”

  Despite her assurance to the contrary, I still managed to get lost. The hallways were frequent and confusing, the signs indicating the direction of the rooms had faded to an off-white sheen. The nurses and doctors were too busy to help. It wasn’t until an orderly escorted me to her room did I finally find Sara, sitting up in bed, eating scrambled eggs. Oxygen tubes had been inserted into her nostrils, and an IV stuck into her arm.

  “About time you made it,” she said between bites.

  She chewed with her mouth open and refused to look at me, her head angled in exasperation.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am so sorry.” I went to her and tried to take her hand, but she snapped it away.

  “I’m trying to eat here.”

  “I got here as soon as I could.”

  “Eight hours late. Not too bad, I suppose.”

  “You look good. I thought—I thought you might have—I don’t know what I thought. But you look good. You look like you’re fine.”

  She glared at me, then returned her attention to her eggs, stabbing the fluffy scrambles with the fork’s plastic tines. “Trying to get out of here already?” she asked. “Are you late getting back to the lab?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what did you mean?”

  “I meant to ask what is wrong.”

  She nodded toward the foot of the bed. “Chart’s down there,” she said.

  Preeclampsia, extremel
y high blood pressure, dehydration, exactly what Dr. Remington had warned us about. They had her on a saline drip and hydralazine.

  “I thought I was dying, Coulter.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry really isn’t good enough.” She jabbed the fork into a biscuit, the handle sticking out and oscillating back and forth. “In fact, apologizing like that is kind of a bastard move. Cowardly at best.”

  “I understand. I do. Let me explain—”

  “Really?” she asked. “You’re going to delve right into your defense without even asking me what happened? How I’m doing? If anything is wrong with our baby?”

  “I—”

  “Please just go. I can’t look at you right now.” I remained sitting. She rimmed her applesauce cup with the plastic spoon, getting the bits that had dried into a film along the edges, and plunked it into her mouth. “I’m starving,” she said. “All we had to eat at the apartment were olives, and I couldn’t keep them down.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She sighed and set down the cup onto the tray. Nearly empty, it tipped over, and the spoon fell to the floor and skittered across the linoleum. I went to pick it up, but Sara stopped me by raising her hand.

  “It started out like heartburn,” she said. “I took some Tums, but it kept getting worse. It got so bad I couldn’t swallow. I was nauseated. I dry heaved for a while. Then I threw up. It felt like a hole was burning in my throat, and I was getting scared that something was wrong. That’s when I called the first time, but it went straight to voicemail. When you didn’t answer, I decided to get in the tub, thinking the hot water might relax me, but that didn’t work either. Soon my chest constricted, and I was having a hard time breathing. My muscles began to spasm. I thought I was having a seizure. I called again. Again you didn’t answer. I started to hyperventilate. Then I really started to be afraid because I knew I didn’t have anyone else to call. I have no friends here. I have no colleagues. No family. If you wouldn’t come, no one would. I would be completely alone.”