Tizita Page 4

  Which is why, when my cellphone went off to the tune of Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue”—the ringtone I’d assigned to Sammie—I hastened out of the room to take the call.

  As soon as I stepped out, I saw Katrina coming down the hall, Tom and Amir grinning behind her. Her ponytail bobbing, she carried a Petri dish with a large pale-colored muffin on it. A small, lit candle protruded upwards from its center like an erect nipple. Breast on a platter, I thought. That was what I got for having wild sex first thing in the morning.

  The phone was still ringing. I took the call. “Sam, love, I think I’m in the middle of a birthday surprise.”

  I heard that infectious giggle on the other end. “No worries. Just rang to sing you happy birthday.” Which she proceeded to do, at least the first six words—terribly out of tune, as usual. Laughing at herself, she gave up. “Oh, hell. What a waste of Mum’s genes.” Her mother Aadita’s voice was exquisitely elastic; it was almost indistinguishable from one of my favorite singers, India’s famed fusion artist Nine Virdee, with whom Aadita had familiarized me. “Anyway, call me later. Many happy returns of the day, girl.”

  I walked beside my birthday muffin back to the lab, letting my kindly colleagues assume that the wide grin on my face was for them alone, and not the girl who, sitting with me on a front porch in the pouring rain, had taught me everything I needed to know about friendship.

  Not that Stanley and Amir and Tom and Katrina and Gunther and even Bob Ballantine were chopped liver in that department. Actually, they weren’t chopped liver in any department, they had hearts and kidneys and brains and bladders, too, but I’ve long since learned that most people aren’t as intrigued as I that some words have both literal and idiomatic meanings and that chopped liver is as good a metaphor for insignificance as piss-ant or small potatoes.

  Anyway, getting back to my physics pals, I soon discovered they’d chipped in for half a year’s worth of yoga classes at Golden Bridge as a birthday gift. Better still, they indulged me while I ran through my ideas about the applicability to P.D. of Gerardus ’t Hooft’s speculations about holographic theory. My fellow Nobelist had suggested that the whole universe could be understood as two-dimensional, our perception of three dimensions being a function of an information structure “painted” on the cosmological horizon.

  “Hang on a mo,” I added, my enthusiasm building. I ran over to my laptop and brought up an article in Scientific American. “Here it is. Jacob Bekenstein making the argument that the physical world is comprised of matter and energy, yes, but also information. Information tells matter and energy what to do with themselves, like a robot in a factory that needs instructions telling it which bits of metal and plastic to weld.”

  I flipped my laptop closed and threw a meaningful look at Stanley. “Same with a ribosome in a cell, which can’t synthesize proteins and get power without information brought from the DNA in its nucleus.” I grinned. “Don’t you just love it? That’s where P.D. comes in, just as soon as we perfect getting the information to the cell to trigger the shift from light to dark matter.”

  Gunther looked pretty excited himself. His wandering eye added a slight air of lunacy to his demeanor as he broke in, “I like it. Simplifies our job. Makes me think of Wheeler’s insistence that information, not energy and matter, is the basic building block of life.”

  I could tell Bob was itching to take part. “Wheeler’s from Princeton, right?” he asked, left eye twitching madly.

  I couldn’t help but wonder how many ocular anomalies one physics team could display. “Right,” I said. “You know, don’t you, that he was the first one to publicly refer to black holes?” But my mind was already racing ahead. I went up to the blackboard and tentatively chalked out what I saw as the problem. “I’m not so sure, Gunther, that it’s all that simple. How’re we going to send the message to dematerialize and rematerialize without catastrophically altering the mass and energy of our subject?”

  Gunther broke in excitedly, his untethered eye wandering even more wildly. “Well, if the team at Max Planck can actually create an optical cavity with two laser beams for a water bear, they might be able to adjust the frequency of the beams so that the laser photons absorb the vibration energy of the water bear around its mass center, slowing it to a ground state and allowing it to both appear and disappear into a void state.”

  Tom frowned. “You’re assuming the void state awaits it somewhere outside the water bear, but Fleur’s idea is to harness the water bear’s cellular voids and create an internal energy exchange between dark and light matter.”

  I nodded, wondering whether the application of dematerialization would rest on Gunther’s water bears, science’s more recent superstars, prized for their relative indestructibility. Tiny little creatures—most of them no longer than a millimeter—they’re sometimes called moss piglets, which is my favorite name for them, since they move their chunky little bodies across moss and lichens in slow motion, supported by eight tiny, pudgy feet.

  Stanley gave a happy little hop. He liked nothing more than group riffing on a mind-stretching theme. Amir made him even happier by offering, “But maybe that’s where Eridanus comes in. If Mersini-Houghton’s right, we just instruct our object to shift itself into one of its parallel universes.”

  “But, wait,” interjected Katrina, nervously tapping her pencil against the arm of her chair. “You’re assuming that the other universe has similar physical properties, which it can’t. At least, I don’t think so. Unless ....” She scratched her scalp just below her shiny ponytail, in the process pulling pretty little wisps free. “Unless it’s all part of some larger guiding wave.”

  Stanley smiled slyly and clapped his magician’s hands. “Looks like we’ve got lots to think about, boys and girls.” He gave a froggish croak. “Fleur, didn’t Gwen tell me she and I were taking you out to Rose Cottage for a birthday lunch?” God, banana bread for breakfast, English tea for lunch, dinner that night at Casa del Mar. My birthday was guaranteeing my hips would be more grabbable than ever when Assefa returned.

  But thoughts of Assefa returning, no matter how deliciously erotic, meant Assefa had to go away first, which sounded like a dangerous stretching of an invisible cord between us. That night, as I struggled to slither my butt into my best black dress, I struggled even harder with a serious case of dread. I had to force myself to muster a cheery grin as a silk-suit-clad Assefa greeted me forty minutes later when I approached his Commodore Sloat Drive door, though fake melted into for-real once he brushed his generous lips against my cheek and nibbled at the diamond stud in my ear.

  But the lively spirits that marked the beginning of our dinner began to fade as alcohol coursed through our bloodstreams and our tummies expanded—mine, of course, minus the foie gras lumping up inside the other three. The conversation at the table got looser, which is, I suppose, why Sammie spoke aloud the question we’d all been secretly asking ourselves. “How can two men disappear on a road only 217 miles long without anyone noticing anything?”

  “Well,” I countered, “it’s not like some straight throughway. Isn’t a lot of it wild mountain land?” I darted a look at Assefa, who I could see retreating into himself.

  He responded glumly, “I know so little of my homeland. I hate it. All I remember are little bits of life—isolated scenes—mostly inside our compound. My cousins—they’re still there, you know? Bekele and Iskinder. They were older. Iskinder taught me to play Kelelebosh with rocks. It is a little like your jacks.” Your, I thought. He’s already distancing himself. “A school chum or two would visit sometimes. There was a girl ....” He caught me staring at him and seemed to shake free from a memory. “For all I know, my father going missing is calling me back to my roots.”

  Sammie laughed, “Roots? I’m a Jew living in diaspora. Jacob, too. Jews have no roots except for some land we stole from a group of other now-displaced souls.”

  Jacob lashed out, “Didn’t steal. It was all down to you Brits. They raised expectations with
the Balfour Declaration. It was only a matter of time until the U.N. passed the Partition Plan.” Which got everyone going on one of those impossible arguments about who the true underdogs were, the Palestinians or the Israelis.

  I barely kept track of the points my dinner mates were attempting to score. All this talk about roots was making me nervous. I told myself to relax. Sammie had gone back to England several times since we’d made friends when she was twelve and I thirteen, and more recently she’d traveled to India for her grandmother’s funeral. Dhani had taken Angelina back with her for a visit to her parents in Delhi. Mother had even accompanied Cesar to Guatemala to visit the town where his coca-addicted mother had been born. They’d all returned safe and sound and just as before. But I found myself saying, “Don’t go!”

  Everyone looked taken aback by the non sequitur. Shifting gears the quickest, Sammie jumped in indignantly. “Fleur, that’s not fair! He’s got to find his dad.” Having lost her own father as a child, she was a sucker for people connecting with their fathers and had cut me off for a while after I refused to attend my own father’s funeral.

  “You’re right, you’re right.” I didn’t repeat my request, but I meant it—meant it as our cab took us back to his duplex, meant it when Assefa bent down to kiss my forehead goodbye at the crack of dawn the next morning. It didn’t help my peace of mind that he was adamant about wanting to go to the airport alone.

  “I can’t stand teary goodbyes,” he repeated, nuzzling my neck.

  As soon as his cab turned the corner from Commodore Sloat to Schumacher Drive, I fled to Stanley and Gwennie’s, where I found my mentor seated at the kitchen table in his pajamas, absent-mindedly petting Jillily while he pored over the paper Bob had given me the previous day. When I flopped down beside him, he immediately proceeded to speculate on its implications until he finally threw up his hands and asked irritably, “Why do you keep looking at your watch? You’re not bored, are you?” He had a salt and pepper beard now, which—combined with a slightly bent frame that resembled an old TV antenna—made it difficult to forget that he wasn’t getting any younger.

  I wanted to say, “Bored? Who could be bored by the idea of a holographic universe?”

  Instead, I burst into tears.

  I hadn’t lived with Stanley and Gwennie for the past decade without Stanley learning how best to comfort me. He scooted over, and his arms encircled me with the kind of confident firmness that only two other humans had ever known how to execute. The second was Adam, but Nana had been the first. She’d been gone for nearly a year, but she’d left her heavy imprint on my heart and across the landscape of my skin, which retained a cellular memory of her chicken peck kisses and Mack truck grip.

  I was pleased to get a whiff of Stanley’s sunflower-seed breath while we hugged.

  “It’s Assefa,” I sniffed. “What if I never see him again?”

  He pulled away and skewed his head at me. “But that’s ridiculous, child. No matter what happens, he’ll surely come back to you.”

  Just then, as if we both had a sixth sense, we turned to see a bird crash into one of the kitchen windows. My heart sank. It was a young crow. Corvids were ubiquitous in SoCal. This one balanced on the window apron for a moment, visibly stunned, then gathered itself and took off again, a survivor, joining a cackling trio of others on our next door neighbors’ oak.

  “What the hell?” Stanley muttered.

  Then we turned to each other and burst out simultaneously, both of us laughing—though mine was definitely more of the nervous variety—“A murder of crows!”

  Chapter Two

  Fleur

  WHAT I HADN’T told Stanley was that I’d been awake since 3:00 a.m., the hour my yoga teacher Siri Sajan called the Amrit Vela, or Time of Deathless Consciousness, the best hour to meditate. Except I wasn’t meditating. I was imagining Assefa on his long journey away from SoCal. Waiting with him in a chaotic line at LAX’s international terminal to check in for his Emirates flight. Glued to his side as he fought his way to the Great Hall—past women in serapes and burkas and saris, men in kurta pajamas, African print vests, shemaghs and kufiyas. I fantasized nursing Coronas with him at a crowded bar between a wrinkled-suited Dallas businessman bound for Russia and a pair of German newlyweds who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

  Would he think of me then, or merely feel inside his leather bag for his passport and ticket, wondering if he should take his Ambien before or after his meal, worrying whether he’d managed to sleep for at least a few hours at the Holiday-Inn-like-no-other during his layover in Dubai?

  I prayed the rental car would be waiting for him once he arrived at Bole Airport. And, even if it were, then what? Would the son of émigrés have any clout with the alleged laissez-faire local police or the more feared Federals? Without their help he’d be pretty much consigned to trying to follow the trail his father and Zalelew would have taken. Or—far worse, from my perspective—he would see if he could locate the young woman the men had bumped into at the airport. Her name was Makeda. I’d gotten that much out of Assefa as he was dropping off to sleep.

  “What’s her name?” I’d whispered in his perfect, shell-shaped ear.

  “Who?” he’d answered drowsily, a tiny bubble of spittle moving toward the edge of his goatee.

  “The girl in Zalelew’s postcard. The one they saw at the airport.”

  “Makeda,” he’d mumbled. And—again—“Makeda,” before a little snore escaped him. I knew it was my own fault, but still: my lover had fallen asleep on my birthday with another woman’s name on his lips.

  You’d think that, as a scientist, I wouldn’t be so superstitious. But what I began to think of as “the Makeda episode” continued to haunt me during what ended up being a late-nighter at the lab. Despite my exhaustion, I found myself detouring past Abeba and Achamyalesh’s house on my way home. It looked as if all the lights in the house were on. Abeba would be anxious to hear her son had safely arrived.

  I pulled my Prius to the curb and hesitantly walked up the concrete path. Abeba flung open her front door before I could even ring the bell.

  “Come,” she cried, grabbing my elbow. “I thought you were the doctor. I am waiting for him. He promised me he would come right away.”

  “Why—what is it? Are you okay?” I cried, as she installed me on the faded gold velvet sofa, my tailbone making uncomfortable contact with a gimpy spring.

  Glancing at her watch, Abeba responded, “It’s Medr. I heard a terrible groaning coming from his room as soon as I hung up from Assefa’s call.”

  God help me, but for all my love of the old man, my instantaneous response had nothing to do with Medr. “His call? Assefa called?”

  Was it a look of disappointment that Abeba shot me from under those thick Assefa-like lashes before she lifted her wrist again to see what time it was. “Yes. It was after Assefa assured me he’d arrived safely in Dubai that I went to Medr’s room.” She glanced back down the poorly lit hall. “He’s sleeping now. I just checked. But I am worried. It is so hard when he does not speak.” It finally struck home that Abeba would never have called for a doctor if she didn’t have serious cause for worry. I was overcome with shame. Oh, God, let him be okay.

  The doorbell rang, and Abeba and I both sprang to the front door. The formally attired doctor who stood there looked startled by the force with which Abeba had flung it open. He recovered himself and gave her a quick hug, his face nearly as dark as the burnished leather bag he carried. Gently letting go, he asked, “How is he doing?” I saw a flash of curiosity in his eyes as they lit upon me. I automatically smiled, then felt like a fool. Who smiled at a moment like this?

  “He was asleep the last time I looked,” Abeba said, already halfway down the hall. The doctor nodded briefly as he brushed passed me.

  As soon as they were out of the room, I reached for my purse and dug a hand into it, my fingers crawling around brush, wallet, keys, errant scraps of paper bearing various quantum computations, a
cosmetic bag, and a crackly container of chewing gum, until I managed to wrestle out my iPhone. “Fuck me,” I muttered, uselessly punching buttons. Who let her battery go dead when her fiancé was traveling halfway around the world?

  Disgustedly flinging the bag onto Achamyalesh’s favorite easy chair, I tiptoed up the hall, unsure whether I’d be welcome. I stood in the doorway, watching Abeba try to help the doctor lift Medr to a sitting position. The room was saturated with the sharp smell of bunna. Had Abeba tried to revive her father-in-law with a cup of strong coffee earlier? I debated whether or not to step inside and offer my help, but Medr seemed to come to, pushing away his daughter-in-law’s hands and cautiously settling his skinny frame at the edge of the bed. The doctor said something I couldn’t hear, and Medr began to loosen the top button of his pajamas, evidently responding to the doctor’s request. When Dr. Sitota lifted his stethoscope to Medr’s chest, I averted my eyes, taking in the photos of Assefa’s USC graduation on the opposite wall.

  I’d been in this room just once. Assefa had insisted on introducing me to his grandfather the day we got engaged. That time, Medr had been sitting in a straight-backed latticed chair in the corner of the room, a footstool pulled close to the chair for his long, leather-slippered feet. He’d looked as though he might have dressed up for my visit, wearing stunning turquoise, silk V-necked pajamas with red and yellow trim. He didn’t smile when we were introduced, merely stared at me like a dark ghost. Loss had mapped his face like a rugged continent. He was speechless, of course. But he’d surprised both Assefa and me by reaching up to cup my chin in his sculptured hand. After that, you couldn’t have dragged me away. I asked Assefa to bring me a chair from the kitchen, which he did, lingering for a moment while I settled myself beside the old man.