The Fourth Circle (18 page)

So I walked on, wrestling with an increasingly tormented anxiety, alone as no other creature has been since the Creation: no living soul around me, no green blade of grass, no beast wild or tame, not even birdsong, which consoles the greatest pain. So oppressed was I by this terrible loneliness that I longed to see any creature at all, be it the worst spawn of the Unclean One, that this curse be undone; but nobody joined me in my monotonous, dreary walk, to share my suffering and apprehension.

And when, after countless paces, I felt hopelessly crushed, believing that my ultimate destiny—to trudge forever round in this hellish circle without an ex-it—had finally caught up with me, hope germinated a strange faith, as happens in dreams for no reason, that I would be able to leave the circle when I had reached a certain place. I could not for the life of me, though, say where that was because wherever I looked, naught but the same waste lay before me: naked, barren, such as probably existed only before the first word of God, before light shone forth over the darkness.

Still, this new faith that I would find a way out of the circle did not diminish in the gloom, and I walked on more resolutely, like a man earnestly bent on some
fruitful task, albeit no goal stood before me yet. But now I knew, in a vague, misty way, that the goal would reveal itself as soon as I reached the rugged horizon, just where that great sun of Hades had set a few moments before (or was it long ago?) to point out the hidden way.

Even when I realized that hasten as I might, the edge of this nether world grew no closer, but remained always near but unreachable, as if I were walking on a sphere that had no end and no beginning, and not on a flat underground plain that must needs end somewhere, I did not lose my new supple stride.

Moreover, I acquired in the next few strides first the sinewy persistence of middle age, and then the physical attributes of an even younger age, viz., the strength and delight of a youth brimful of sap. My dreamlike return to a past long since left behind continued on its marvelous course unchecked: I sank down into the well-spring of youth, filled now with a boy's unrestrained delight that impelled my ever-quickening step into a wild run toward the goal, the firm outlines of which were now beginning to take shape.

As I thus raced over the landscape of Hades, no longer fearful about being dead, my gaze fell for a moment on my hands. And lo, instead of dried veins and wrinkled, scaly skin, I beheld the sturdy hands of a little child that as yet knew no sin, the fingernails bitten to the quick as mine used to be when I was quite small (or so my mother once told me).

The memory of my mother put a sudden halt to my frenzied running, and I stood dumbfounded amid the dusty wastes of Hades, which had not changed a jot. Yet I perceived that I had finally reached the unknown goal, come full circle, back to the beginning of all beginnings, alone no more. On all fours I wriggled out of the now enormous robe, emitting cooing, wordless sounds, innocent and naked as we are only at our birth. Then from my still quite toothless mouth the first cry rose, announcing the painful entrance of yet another servant of God into the Vale of Tears, in a hillside cabin, next to the hearth fire, amid blood and slime and the tired sobbing of a woman, rising straight from her torn womb.

But my pain as well as my mother's faded quickly when our trembling hands rose to meet in that blessed touch that is the only consolation under the whole vault of heaven.

SARAH'S ON DUTY again tonight.

I don't know how she managed to change her shift again. She was supposed to be on duty three evenings from now. Probably Brenda and Mary are not vying for the privilege of attending me at night. Both are married and Brenda has children; very likely they prefer being with their families at that hour rather than keeping watch over a paralyzed patient, although we recently doubled the fee for night duty. Money is not the only incentive for Sarah, who is actually free of any family ties, to take care of me at a time when everyone in the household is asleep and no one enters my room until morning. She has additional reasons, but no one knows of them except the two of us, and I couldn't reveal them even if I wanted to.

This cursed disease, thanks to which I can't move a finger any more! Until a few months ago, I was able to move two fingers on my left hand— the middle and fourth—enough for me to press the keys of my computer and communicate with my environment by synthetic voice; now I can't do even that. The doctors say the illness can only get worse. They no longer hide it from me. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. But how? What more can go wrong with my sensorimotor system if I haven't a single muscle left capable of movement?

The worst thing about paralysis is that it damages you only on the outside: putting a sound mind in a sick body. Inside, you remain totally intact. Moreover, my brain has never worked so clearly as it does now that I'm quite incapable of movement. My head swarms with the most marvelous models of the Cosmos; I'm advancing toward the Grand Synthesis, but what's the use when I can't communicate any of it? I'm a sort of vegetable genius. And, oh, I have so much to say! I have finally grasped where old Albert went wrong; I know what misled Feyn-man; I have removed Penrose's main misconception. I'm at the very edge of the Unified Theory. A few more nights, perhaps, if Sarah doesn't start again, though I suspect she will....

Penrose came for a brief visit several weeks ago, and I only then saw from his expression that I must be in pretty bad shape. I tried my hardest to convey to him what I had finally cleared up about the closed strings, to tell him that the first vibrations of their harmony are finally reaching me, the rondo played by the very
building blocks of the Universe. I also wanted to ask him to calculate something for me on the big computer at the University; I'm wasting endless hours fiddling with tensors in my head, denied even the use of pencil and paper, when the work could be done in fifteen minutes on the latest wonder from Silicon Valley. If they don't have physicists like the British, the Americans at least know their way around technology.

But all that emerged was a series of awful rattles, with a lot of slobbering and ugly grimacing—the usual, in fact. Most of the time this doesn't make me despair: I'm used to it by now. But when Penrose stood up to go, without having understood anything whatsoever and, visibly embarrassed, patted me on the head, as he might have a mentally retarded child or an intelligent dog, I actually felt for the first time like a helpless cretin.

The members of my family whom I see every day try not to talk too much in order to spare me similar embarrassment. They come to my room, report to me briefly on current events, but expect no response. Generally speaking, the children's behavior comes closest to normal, thereby confirming my own normality.

It's different with the nurses. They are more in my company, and it's difficult to spend hours with someone in complete silence, even someone in my position.

Their endless chatter doesn't bother me, especially Brenda's, full of commonplace rubbish, because it does not require my attention; I even find I can think better when they're here. It's the tone they use when addressing me that gets on my nerves, patronizing for some reason, as if they were dealing with a baby or a mental deficient. Well, maybe that's how they see me. Poor Sir Isaac, he must be turning in his grave. What a humiliating blow to the long and glorious tradition of Cambridge physics!

From the outset, Sarah was different. Not only was she far more reticent than Brenda or Mary, she admitted quite frankly that she had accepted the arduous task of being my nurse primarily because I used to be a famous physicist. (I still am actually, but perhaps that isn't quite so obvious.) This flattered me, of course, especially because Sarah's predecessors were largely indifferent to this fact but also because she is a rather pretty girl with a wonderful smile and lush, seductive curves that are very noticeable in her tight nurse's uniform. It may seem that these qualities are rather beside the point in my case, but there are some habits and desires that a man is reluctant to relinquish.

In the beginning it seemed that Sarah was about to introduce some changes in the night nurses' usual treatment of me. Their main preoccupation was to create the illusion that I was asleep so that they themselves could secretly take a nap. In the morning they would, without batting an eyelid, claim that they remained
awake by my side the whole night, looking me brazenly in the eye as if I could confirm or deny their claim. Even had I been able to do so, I would hardly have bothered debunking their little tricks. It actually suited me to have the nurses sleep; I could then concentrate on thinking, spared their constant fidgeting and fussing about me—except when they snore, which happens from time to time.

There is nothing so fatal to the music of the spheres now being conceived in my head as the gentle buzz of female snoring.

At first I thought that Sarah suffered from insomnia, since I never saw her fall asleep before me although I could stay awake for a long time. Once she put me to bed, she would not bother me at all but devote herself to reading, not raising her eyes for hours from the cheap sentimental novels she devoured. I discovered the type of reading matter it was because she frequently, before going home, left the books on my night table. Who could have thought then that this was not all just coincidence?

It seemed a little odd that a girl of her looks should content herself with these banal surrogates for love, but since I had no opportunity to talk to her about it, the motives that lay behind this inclination remained a mystery to me, like almost everything else related to Sarah. In contrast to most other nurses, who, if they stayed with us for any length of time, would relate their entire life's story without the slightest encouragement, convinced that in me they had a listener full of curiosity and understanding, Sarah did not seem to exist outside the walls of my room, so little did I know about her private life or her past.

In certain moments, as I was drifting off to sleep or waiting in that limbo that always precedes the solution of some difficult and important equation, I had the impression that Sarah in fact did not exist at all, that she was only the product of my overburdened imagination.

The conversion from books to television seemed perfectly natural, and I could not see in this, either, any part of a well thought-out plan. Tear-jerking serials were on the air from time to time, and Sarah seemed very happy when she discerned on my distorted face permission to occasionally turn on the TV, although normally I watched it only very rarely and then almost exclusively cricket matches, having played cricket in my youth in time-honored Cambridge tradition, before this damned illness caught up with me.

As a matter of fact, Sarah read what she wanted in my face since I was not only incapable of forming a grimace of agreement but also, because the TV would only hinder my thinking, unwilling to do so. In fact it turned out not too bad in the beginning: Sarah considerately turned the sound completely down and the screen around, moving her chair from my bedside to a place near the window, so
that I learned about the program only from the vari-colored reflections on her face in the semidarkness of the room. Whether I wanted it or not, I began to watch that face for increasing periods, following the dramatic changes on it, not infrequently spiced by tears, influenced by twists in the third-rate melodramatic plot on the screen.

Sarah noticed that I was looking at her and came to yet another erroneous conclusion about my wishes—again because it suited her, although at the time I couldn't see this. She apologized, turned the screen back toward me and moved her chair close, sure that I must, naturally, also want to watch the soap operas she so enjoyed. So I became an unwilling watcher of countless tear-jerking plots set in tasteless scenery, unable to turn my head away or even to lower my eyelids. It is true that I could still somehow manage the latter, but I refrained, primarily for fear that Sarah's feelings might be hurt. Without being aware of it, I was already enmeshed.

Fortunately, sentimental serials were not aired too often, so this enforced watching did not, at first, detract much from my research, which was now entering its final stage. In the vibration of strings—that basic form of matter, actually indivisible as the ancient Greeks in their simple way believed atoms to be—a fundamental cyclical structure was appearing, repeating itself all the way through to the circular structure of the Universe, simultaneously infinite and finite, corresponding to the cyclic flow of time, without an arrow, without the paradoxes of cause and effect or any apparent beginning in the Big Bang. A structure in which the four primal forces of nature finally became one, accepting gravity, rejected for so long, into their sisterhood....

I felt—I suspected—that I was on the threshold, that just one step separated me from shaping a final theory, but all my previous experience told me that such a line cannot be crossed in a straight walk, that enlightenment—a dazzling bolt of lightning that would drive the last wisps of darkness from my mind and leave me in a clearing of pure light—was necessary. However, enlightenment was certainly not what was streaming from the cathode tube, and Sarah soon thought of a way to compensate for the relative scarcity of the shows she yearned for in the regular TV program. The answer, simply, was video.

One evening she brought with her a largish bag, and with the sweetest smile from her repertoire, which included that beautiful little dimple that would appear on the point of her chin, she regaled me with the news that she had obtained a supply of cassettes of romantic classics. I do not know what meaning she took at that moment from the usual rictus on my face, but I tried my hardest to give an impression of utter despair. It was soon clear that this was a flop when, chattering
with unwonted animation, she began to arrange the cassettes next to the VCR, which so far had been used only once—when I was shown that sentimental film about me by Spielberg.