Sequence Six: Ephemerons

If I go to sleep anxious or angry, I dream about my stepdad, Cedric. Usually they're unkind dreams, parables of resentment dished up by my subconscious. I call them my Vignettes of Fury at The Boomers.

The dream I woke up from this morning was a classic of the genre: Cedric was throwing me a birthday party. The guests were all old women with whom he was flirting in his disgusting, smarmy way. There was no cake as far as I could tell, but there was a tasty meat entrée that Cedric was carving into slices and dishing up to the blue-rinsed crones who crowded around the table.

The entrée was me.

I had a vision of myself on a silver tray, surrounded by roasted vegetables, a golden brown offering to the doddering horde. I looked pretty tasty; the image, I now realize, was cribbed from Peter Greenaway's movie The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Cedric sliced into my thigh: I felt the click of the carving knife against my femur, a tiny bone-inducted sound that was exquisitely horrible. There was no blood, only clear juice – running and running, even as steam gathered and rose from my flesh. There was no pain, either. Was there some form of psychological juice running clear and hot through my nerves in its place?

Marc was already gone when I opened my eyes to our cheerfully sun-washed bedroom. There was no one to tell about this nocturnal rendition. But Cedric's letter was there, on my desk in the corner, right by the window, right where I'd left it a few days ago. His pleading, smarmy letter, his flowery paean to my charity and my inherent goodness, a wordy perfume splashed all over the stinking fact of his rapacious usury, so typical of his entire generation.

Cedric is an alcoholic. He's also a womanizing prick, but that's not why he needs me. His drinking has left him with a gnarled fossil where his liver used to be -- so sclerotic and trashed that there's simply no hope for him unless he gets a transplant. The fact that he's a heavy drinker has relegated him to the bottom of the recipient lists; but his whiz kid hepatologist has a new method, very experimental but very promising, that involves taking just a slice out of a donor's liver and fast-growing it in the lab. When the new organ is about one-third grown, it can be installed in the recipient – and all without the need for some compatible tissue donor to fall off a cliff or run head-on into a dump truck. The whole procedure takes maybe three weeks. Cedric has maybe twice that long. His entreaties and cajolings are starting to veer between tearful and apocalyptic.

Actually, "apocalypse" is a good word for this whole sordid mess. Cedric's letter sits on top of a stack of other correspondence: Letters from cousins I hadn't seen in years, pleading his case. A sheaf of papers that have to do with another old fucker, Dr. Absinthe, who used to be my doctoral advisor. A letter from Cedric's young hepatologist himself, a jittery guy named Randall who phoned me once to talk about Harold Quivey's case.

Harold who? I asked him.

Your father, Randall told me.

You mean Cedric?

Randall laughed, and I joined him, both of us realizing at once that "Cedric" was an assumed name. If you knew him, you'd get the joke, too. "Cedric" has an élan, a pizzazz – sexy and sly – that "Harold" lacks. Cedric wasn't gonna get laid using the name "Harold," if for no other reason than he looks like a Harold – a well dressed Harold, but still: His face would look right at home atop a janitor's uniform, or under an accountant's visor. But for all his tedious looks and his even more tedious personality, Cedric has one burning mission in life, and that is to score. Of course he took the name Cedric. That's the name of a man who doesn't have to be interesting or generous or gallant to get into a woman's skirt.

Okay, I told the surgeon, that was a shock, but okay, we're talking about the same guy. He's my stepfather.

Not according to his potential donors list, Randall the hepatologist told me.

That was two big revelations in one go. That cocksucker. He eventually married my mother, but he never copped to being the guy whose jam fermented into me. Not until now, when he needs to reap a little bit back of what he sowed. But why in the hell should I give it to him? What, he thinks he's entitled to hack and fillet me at his convenience? I don't agree.

My former doctoral advisor, Dr. Absinthe – my pet name for him, he's actually called Dr. Abslun – had similar ideas. You know, in German, they call your advisor your Doktorvater, your "Doctor-Father." Like my stepfather, who turns out also to be my sperm-donor-father, Absinthe thought that he was entitled to bits of me – in his case, the fruits of my mind. Absinthe had one or two minor ideas about four decades ago, and they got him tenure, but with the shadow of mortality creeping over him Absinthe wanted something more, some new amazing insight that would electrify the world of theoretical physics and restore him to the heights of his profession.

And I, foolishly, blundered into his lab, and shared some notes with him on a theory that he promptly claimed as his own.

Let me sketch this out briefly. There are, I believe, six elemental components to the cosmos: Space and time, matter and energy – the four everyone hears about. They are as familiar to us as the four fundamental forces that make the universe work: The strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity. But there are two other elements without which we would not have the universe as we know it: Event and consciousness.

You can quibble about consciousness; I know that it sounds dippy-trippy. But the more I stare at the equations, the more I see something looking back out at me, something that I don't generate so much as channel. I'm just the light bulb here, and the thing making my neurological filaments glow comes from someplace else. Consciousness is the electricity of the universe.

The sixth element... someone should propose to Luc Besson that he could use that as a movie title – maybe as a sequel to that flick he made with Bruce Willis. Pardonnez-moi, I am on a tangent, I know that I do this sometimes and I'll try to stop. The sixth element is event, and with that you cannot argue. Change one single event in all of cosmic history, and you have some other universe, not ours. It's an idea as old as quantum physics itself. Just ask Everett about his so-called "many worlds" principle. Everett was the guy who said that every time there's more than one possible outcome, the universe replicates itself into endless variants in order to accommodate all outcomes: An ever-branching miasma of parallel universes. Well, not parallel, actually, more like ever-diverging. Our specific universe depends not only on the mass and energy it contains, but also on the exact configuration of mass and energy throughout space and time -- that is to say, the history that led to the distribution of mass and energy as it is at any given point in time. That is to say, every event that ever took place, no matter how small. The trick is that at the quantum level, event – like everything else – gets smeary and uncertain.

And that's the kernel to the idea that fucking Absinthe didn't steal.

What that old buzzard-humper took from me was related, though – at least, mathematically. You know that the universe is forever expanding, right? Sure you do. Every point of space in this immense universe is stretching out, making the universe more and more immense, so that the galaxies are, by and large, rushing away from each other at a faster and faster rate. I was trying to prove that this cosmic expansion is, counter-intuitively, the root cause of that mysterious, stubborn fundamental force, gravity: That black sheep that refuses to come into the barn so that all the forces of nature can live as one big happy General Unified Theory. But before I could prove my theory of gravity – and, after that, enjoy my GUT feeling, and be The Guy Who Solved The Puzzle of The Universe – I needed to explain why space is expanding.

My answer to this was ephemerons: Tiny particles that fall through the fabric of our universe like raindrops passing through a veil of smoke. Except, you see, the veil of smoke is four-dimensional: A three-dimensional surface wadded and crumpled into a fourth dimension. Ephemerons pop in and out of existence within a billionth of a second, but there are so many of them passing through our universe all of the time that they constitute an ongoing, ceaseless, and universal phenomenon... kind of like a foam that crackles and swells everywhere, forever.

You might have heard of the old word for ephemerons. They used to call it dark matter, without knowing what it was. I explained it. And that rat-fucker Absinthe is the one who stands at podiums around the world glorying in it. Fucking Absinthe, who is going to wear a Nobel Prize medallion around his thieving turkey neck some day, because I asked him to look at my notes and verify a squiggly, niggly little calculation. Absinthe is the hero who put all the pieces together and made gravity behave. He's the GUT guy. Except, he's not – because I am.

I know I have no one to blame but myself. If I'm honest, I didn't need my doctor-father to verify those uncertain equations so much as gape and marvel at my brilliance... turn to me with a proud smile and a look of wonder... congratulate me... I don't know. Be the "father" part of the doctor-father he should have been. But he did none of that, he was none of that. Instead, he was a fucking thief, and to make matters worse he got me tossed out of my Ph.D. program. To preserve his reputation, cover his tracks, and dine out on my work, he destroyed my academic career.

I don't know why I didn't see it coming. Absinthe may be a fucking pirate, but he's not stupid. He could see what my work meant: He could see that taken two steps down the road of logic, my theory explained gravity. As this rain of dark matter falls through our universe, it has an energetic effect – that's right, dark matter generates dark energy. That's the force that drives the expansion of space and makes the universe swell up all over. Only, here's the thing: While space is expanding, the matter embedded inside of space is not expanding – it's staying the same size and the same density.

Imagine that you take a piece of spandex and you glue spangles to it and then you pull the spandex at all four corners to stretch it out. The shiny spangles don't grow, but they do pull the material into rills and distortions. Mass does the same thing to space. We experience that distortion of space as gravity; the bigger the rock, the harder the resistance to cosmic expansion, and the steeper the distortion. Hence, you are heavier on Jupiter than you are on Earth's Moon, because it takes more effort to move through the distortion that the gas giant's mass has created in space. Oh, and in time, too, as General Relativity proved.

But no planet, no sun, no galactic super-cluster is big enough to reverse time and give me back my ideas and the brilliant career that I tossed over the side when I told Absinthe to his face that he could get fucked and left his lab, thereby cementing his version of the story: That I was unreliable, erratic, generally weird. Well, I am generally weird. But I prefer to take that as a credential of my genius.

As much of a boost as Absinthe got from drinking my intellectual blood, it was a stupid and short-sighted thing for him to do. I have other work to finish, and another theory... something even bigger than the unifying theory of gravity. And I have the time I need to iron out the wrinkles, get someone to take my work seriously, publish my new work. So here's my new plan: I'll go get a job in the U.S. patent office and I'll work out my equations and some day, when I take the next step, I'll have a Nobel Prize of my own.

Sorry. Inside joke, there. Another of my little diversions.

Absinthe could see two steps through the quantum fog, but that's all he could do, the dimwit. My bulb is a little brighter: I can see all the way to the end of this trail. It explains more than the forces that run the universe – it explains the universe itself. The whole thing. The shape of it, the nature of it, the overlapping fields that define and cushion it. Everett's means of accounting for how the universe accommodates all possible outcomes was imaginative but unwieldy: In point of fact, the universe can spin out all permutations of event without splitting, amoeba-like, into endless iterations. As I see it, the universe really is "one song," a self-contained entity that houses endless riffs and marvels, variants upon variants. It's all right here. I just need to finish the theorems that illustrate how all the pieces fit together.

This project may explain the universe as a whole, but it's also the only thing giving coherence to my private inner cosmos. If I go to sleep troubled or pissed off, as I usually do – and do you blame me? – I have dreams about my stepdad. They're cruel and mocking dreams. They illustrate how I'm nothing to the people who run the world, those withering frauds, nothing but a source of food, intellectual or otherwise. When I wake from such dreams, the only thing I can do to calm myself and center myself is get back to the equations, like the Dunkin Donuts man making the donuts – all day, every day, never ceasing, donuts like ephemerons dunking themselves through the cold black coffee of space, ideas conjoined to ideas and ciphers to ciphers.

But life intrudes. It's sometimes hard to focus with all other things going on, things like eating, breathing, relationships... I can't quite tell where I am when I'm working, and I can't quite figure out my work when I take a day or so just to exist. Today's one of those days when I can't console myself by cooking up equations. I have some literal cooking to do. I have a party to plan, because thirty years ago today I was born into this universe... and that goddamn liver-eating Cedric didn't celebrate my birth or step up to claim me as his own.

Happy birthday to me.

For David Grinspoon