Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

He turns up in Toronto to give a lecture, at a conference, notifying me in advance with a postcard of a statue of Paul Revere, from Boston: Arrive Sun. 12th. My paper is on Mon. See you. I attend the lecture, not because I have high hopes for it on my own account—the title of it is “The First Picoseconds and the Quest for a Unified Field Theory: Some Minor Speculations”—but because he is my brother. I sit nibbling my fingers as the university auditorium fills with the audience, which is composed largely of men. Most of them look like people I wouldn’t have gone out with in high school. Then my brother comes in, with the man who will introduce him. I haven’t seen my brother for years; he’s thinner, and his hair is beginning to recede. He needs glasses to read his text; I can see them poking out of his breast pocket. Someone has upgraded his wardrobe for him and he’s wearing a suit and tie. These alterations don’t make him appear more normal, however, but more anomalous, like a creature from an alien planet disguised in human clothing. He has a look of amazing brilliance, as if at any minute his head will light up and become transparent, disclosing a huge brightly colored brain inside. At the same time he looks rumpled and bewildered, as if he’s just wakened from a pleasant dream to find himself surrounded by Munchkins.

The man introducing my brother says he needs no introduction, then goes on to list the papers he has written, the awards he has won, the contributions he has made. There is clapping, and my brother goes to the podium. He stands in front of a white projection screen, clears his throat, shifts from one foot to the other, puts on his glasses. Now he looks like someone who will turn up, later, on a stamp. He is ill at ease and I am nervous for him. I think he will mumble. But once he begins he is fine.

“When we gaze at the night sky,” he says, “we are looking at fragments of the past. Not only in the sense that the stars as we see them are echoes of events that occurred light-years distant in time and space: everything up there and indeed everything down here is a fossil, a leftover from the first picoseconds of creation, when the universe crystallized out from the primal homogeneous plasma. In the first picosecond, conditions were scarcely imaginable. If we could travel in a time machine back toward this explosive moment, we would find ourselves in a universe replete with energies we do not understand and strangely behaving forces distorted beyond recognition. The farther back we probe, the more extreme these conditions become. Current experimental facilities can take us only a short way along this path. Beyond that point, theory is our only guide.” After this he continues, in a language that sounds like English but is not, because I can’t understand one word of it.

Luckily there is something to look at. The room darkens and the screen lights up, and there is the universe, or parts of it: the black void punctuated by galaxies and stars, white-hot, blue-hot, red. An arrow moves among them on the screen, searching and finding. Then there are diagrams and strings of numbers, and references to things that everyone here seems to recognize except me. There are, apparently, a great many more dimensions than four.

Murmurs of interest ripple through the room; there are whisperings, the rustling of paper. At the end, when the lights have come on again, my brother returns to language. “But what of the moment beyond the first moment?” he says. “Or does it even make sense to use the word before, since time cannot exist without space and space-time without events and events without matter-energy? But there is something that must have existed before. That something is the theoretical framework, the parameters within which the laws of energy must operate. Judging from the scanty but mounting evidence now available to us, if the universe was created with a fiat lux, that fiat must have been expressed, not in Latin, but in the one truly universal language: mathematics.” This sounds a lot like metaphysics to me, but the men in the audience don’t seem to take it amiss. There is applause.

I go to the reception afterward, which offers the usual university fare: bad sherry, thick tea, cookies out of a package. The numbers men murmur in groups, shake one another’s hands. Among them I feel overly visible, and out of place.

I locate my brother. “That was great,” I say to him.

“Glad you got something out of it,” he says with irony.

“Well, math was never my totally strong point,” I say. He smiles benignly. We exchange news of our parents, who when last I heard from them were in Kenora, and heading west.

“Still counting the old budworms, I guess,” says my brother.

I remember how he used to throw up by the side of the road, and his smell of cedar pencils. I remember our life in tents and logging camps, the scent of cut lumber and gasoline and crushed grass and rancid cheese, the way we used to sneak around in the dark. I remember his wooden swords with the orange blood, his comic book collection. I see him crouching on the swampy ground, calling Lie down, you’re dead. I see him dive-bombing the dishes with forks. All my early images of him are clear and sharp and Technicolor: his baggy-legged shorts, his striped T-shirt, his raggedy hair bleached by the sun, his winter breeches and leather helmet. Then there is a gap, and he appears again on the other side of it, unaccountably two years older.

“Remember that song you used to sing?” I say. “During the war. Sometimes you whistled it. ”Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer‘?“

He looks perplexed, frowns a little. “I can’t say I do,” he says.

“You used to draw all those explosions. You borrowed my red pencil, because yours was used up.”

He looks at me, not as if he doesn’t remember these things himself, but as if he’s puzzled that I do. “You can’t have been very old then,” he says.

I wonder what it was like for him, having a little sister tagging along. For me, he was a given: there was never a time when he didn’t exist. But I was not a given, for him. Once he was singular, and I was an intrusion. I wonder if he resented me when I was born. Maybe he thought I was a pain in the bum; there’s no doubt that he thought this sometimes. Considering everything and on the whole though, he made the best of me.

“Remember that jar of marbles you buried, under the bridge?” I say. “You would never tell me why you did it.” The best ones, the red and blue puries, the waterbabies and cat’s eyes, put into the ground, out of reach. He would have stamped the dirt down on top of the jar, and scattered leaves.

“I think I recall that,” he says, as if not entirely willing to be reminded of his former, younger self. It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he’s lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he’s forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

“Maybe they’re still down there,” I say. “I wonder if anyone ever found them, when they built that new bridge. You buried the map, too.”

“So I did,” he says, smiling in his old, secret, maddening way. He still isn’t telling, and I am reassured: despite his changed façade, his thinning hair and provisional suit, he is still the same person underneath. After he has gone back, to wherever he’s going next, I think of getting him a star named after himself, for his birthday. I have seen an advertisement for these: you send in your money, and you get a certificate with a star map, your own star marked on it. Possibly he would find this amusing. But I’m not sure that the word birthday, for him, would still have meaning.

Chapter 60