Night Train Read online

  I said, well, no, I seem to make do okay without it. But please.

  What we see out there, the stars, the galaxies, the galaxy clusters and superclusters, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. That’s just the snowcap on the mountain. At least 90 percent of the universe consists of dark matter, and we don’t know what that dark matter is. Nor what it adds up to. If the total mass density is below a certain critical point, the universe will expand forever. The heavens will just go on getting emptier. If the total mass density is above a certain critical point, then gravity will eventually overcome expansion, and the universe will start to contract. From big bang to big crunch. Then—who knows?—big bang. And so on. What has been called the eighty-billion-year heartbeat.

  I’m trying to give you an idea of the kinds of things Jennifer thought about.

  I asked him if Jennifer actually went up in the telescope much. He smiled indulgently.

  Bubble, bubble, Hoyle and Hubble. Allan Sandage needs a bandage. Ah, the cage at midnight, with your flask, your parka, your leather ass and your iron bladder. The seeing! Detective—

  Excuse me. The what?

  The seeing. The seeing? Actually it’s a word we still use. The quality of the image. Having to do with the clarity of the sky. The truth is, Detective, we don’t do much “seeing” anymore. It’s all pixels and fiber optics and CCDs. We’re down at the business end of it, with the computers.

  I asked him the simple question. I asked him if Jennifer was happy in her work.

  I’ll say! Jennifer Rockwell was an inspiration to us all. She had terrific esprit. Persistent, tough, fair. Above all tough. In every respect her intellect was tough. Women...Let me rephrase this. Maybe not at the Nobel level, but cosmology is a field where women have made lasting contributions. Jennifer had a reasonable shot at adding to that.

  I asked if she had an unorthodox side, a mystical side. I said, You guys are scientists, but some of you end up getting religion, right?

  There’s something in that. Knowing the mind of God, and so on. You’re certainly affected by the incredible grandeur and complexity of revealed creation. But don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s reality we’re investigating here. These things we’re studying are very strange and very distant, but they’re as real as the ground beneath your feet. The universe is everything religions are supposed to be, and then some, weird, beautiful, terrifying, but the universe is the case. Now, there are people around here who pride themselves on saying, “All this is just a physics problem. That’s all.” But Jennifer was more romantic than that. She was grander than that.

  Romantic how?

  She didn’t feel marginalized, as some of us can do. She felt that this was a central human activity. And that her work was... pro bono. She felt that very strongly.

  Excuse me? The study of stars is pro bono?

  Now I’m going to speak with some freedom and optimism here. All set? In broad terms it makes sense to argue that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were partly powered by the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. And Brahe and Kepler and others. You’d think that it would be desolating to learn that the earth was merely a satellite of the sun and that you’d lost your place at the center of the universe. But it wasn’t. On the contrary. It was energizing, inspiring, liberating. It felt great to be in possession of a truth denied to each and every one of your ancestors. We don’t act like we know it, but we’re now on the edge of an equivalent paradigm shift. Or a whole series of them. The universe was still the size of your living room until the big telescopes came along. Now we have an idea of just how fragile and isolated our situation really is. And I believe, as Jennifer did, that when all this kicks in, this information that’s only sixty or seventy years old, we’ll have a very different view of our place and purpose here. And all this rat-race, turf-war, dog-eat-dog stuff we do all day will be revealed for what it is. The revolution is coming, Detective. And it’s a revolution of consciousness. That’s what Jennifer believed.

  But you were fucking her, weren’t you, Professor. And you wouldn’t leave Betty-Jean.

  I didn’t actually say that last part. Though I kind of wanted to, by then. One of the things I knew about Bax Denziger: He’s a twelve-kids-and-one-wife kind of guy. Still, for all his TV ease and brightness, and his high-saliva enthusiasm, I sensed uneasiness in him, reluctance—qualms. There was something he did and didn’t want to reveal. And I too was in difficulty. I was having to relate his universe to mine. Having to, because Jennifer had linked them. And how about my universe, also real, also there, also the case, and with all its primitive passions. To him, my average day must look like psychotic soap opera—crazed surface activity. Jennifer Rockwell had moved from one world to the other, from revealed creation to the darkness of her bedroom. I pressed on, hoping that he and I, both, would find the necessary words.

  Professor, were you surprised when you heard?

  Consternated. We all were. Are. Consternated and devastated. Ask anybody here. The cleaning ladies. The Deans. That someone so...that someone of such radiance would choose to extinguish herself. I can’t get my head around it. I really can’t.

  She ever get depressed that you knew of? Mood swings? Withdrawal?

  No, she was unfailingly cheerful. She got frustrated sometimes. We all do. Because we—we’re permanently on the brink of climax. We know so much. But there are holes in our knowledge bigger than the Bootes Void.

  Which is?

  It’s more nothing than you could possibly imagine. It’s a cavity 300 million light years deep. Where there’s zip. The truth is, Detective, the truth is that human beings are not sufficiently evolved to understand the place they’re living in. We’re all retards. Einstein’s a retard. I’m a retard. We live on a planet of retards.

  Jennifer say that?

  Yeah, but she also thought that that was what was so great about it. Beating your head against the lid.

  She talked about death, didn’t she. She talk to you about death?

  No. Yes. Well not habitually. But we did have a discussion about death. Quite recently. It’s been in my head. I’ve been playing it back. Like you do. I’m not sure if this thought was original to her. Probably not. But she put it... memorably. Newton, Isaac Newton, used to stare at the sun? He’d blind himself for days, for weeks, staring at the sun. Trying to figure the sun out. Jennifer—she was sitting right there where you’re sitting. And she quoted some aphorism. Some French guy. Some duke. Went something like: “No man can stare at the sun or at death with a, with an unshielded eye.” Now here’s the interesting part. Do you know who Stephen Hawking is, Detective?

  He’s the ... the guy in the wheelchair. Talks like a robot.

  And do you know what a black hole is Detective? Yeah, I think we all have some idea. Jennifer asked me, why was it Hawking who cracked black holes? I mean in the sixties everybody was going at black holes with hammer and tongs. But it was Stephen who gave us some answers. She said, why him? And I gave the physicist’s answer: Because he’s the smartest guy around. Jennifer wanted me to consider an explanation that was more—romantic. She said: Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life Hawking could see.

  Well, I thought: That isn’t it. Just then Denziger looked at his watch with what seemed like irritation or anxiety. I said quickly,

  “The revolution you talked about. Of consciousness. Would there be casualties?

  I heard the door open. A broad in a black sweatsuit was standing there, making a phone call. When I turned again Denziger was looking at me. He said,

  “I guess it wouldn’t neccessarily be bloodless. I have to talk to Hawaii now.

  “Yeah. Well I’m in no hurry. I’m going to smoke a cigarette out on the steps there. Maybe if you get a moment you’ll walk me to my car.”

  And I reached for the tape recorder and keyed the Pause.

  With my arms folded to promote warmth and
thought, I stood on the steps, looking at the quality of life. Jennifer’s life. Jennifer’s life. The fauna of early spring—birds, squirrels, even rabbits. And the agitated physicists—the little dweebs and nerds and wonks. A white sky giving way to pixels of blue, and containing both sun and moon, which she knew all about. Yes, and Trader, on the other side of the green hill. I could get used to this.

  The naked-eye universe. The “seeing.” The eighty-billion-year heartbeat. On the night she died, the sky was so clear, the seeing was so clear—but the naked eye isn’t good enough and needs assistance... In her bedroom on the evening of March fourth Jennifer Rockwell conducted an experiment with time. She took fifty years and squeezed them into a few seconds. In moments of extreme crisis, time slows anyway: Calm chemicals come from the brain to the body, to help it through to the other side. How slowly time would have passed. She must have felt it. Jennifer must have felt it—the eighty-billion-year heartbeat.

  Students straggled by. No, I don’t have to take a test tomorrow morning. I’m done with being tested. Aren’t I? Then why do I feel like I feel? Is Jennifer testing me? Is that what she’s doing—setting me a test? The terrible thing inside of me is growing stronger. I swear to Christ, I almost feel pregnant. The terrible thing inside of me is alive and well, and growing stronger.

  Blinking with his whole forehead, Bax Denziger staggered out into the light. He waved, approached—we fell into step. Without any prompting he said,

  “I dreamt about you last night.”

  And I just said, “You did, huh?”

  “I dreamt about this. And you know what I said? I said, ‘Arrest me.’ “

  “Why would you say that, Bax?”

  “Listen. The week before she died, for the first time ever Jennifer fucked up. She fucked up on the job. Big.”

  I waited.

  He sighed and said, “I had her defending some distances in M101. Princeton were kicking our butt so bad—they were killing us. Let me keep it simple. The plate density scan gives you a bunch of numbers, millions of them, which go into the computer to be compared and calibrated against the algorithms. The—”

  Stop, I said. The more you’re telling me, the less I understand. Give me the upshot.

  “She changed—she changed the program. I see the reductions on Monday morning and I’m like ‘Yes.’ I’d been praying for data half that strong. I look again and I see it’s all bullshit. The velocities, the metallicities—she’d changed all the values. And blown a month’s work. I was up there nude against Princeton. Without a stitch on.”

  “Not an accident, you’re saying. Not an honest mistake.”

  “No. It was like malicious. Get this. When Miriam phoned and told me, my first reaction was relief. Now I won’t have to kill her when she comes in. And then just awful, awful guilt. Mike, it’s been bleeding me white. I mean, am I that brutal? Did she fear my anger that much?”

  By now we were in the lot and skirting around the unmarked. I’d fished my keys from my pants. Denziger looked as though mathematics were happening to him right then and there. As though math were happening to him: He looked subtracted, with much of his force of life, and his IQ, suddenly taken away.

  “It’s just a single element. In a pattern of egression,” I said, looking to give him comfort with something that sounded technical. “You know Trader?”

  “Sure I know him. Trader is a friend of mine.”

  “You tell him about Jennifer’s stunt?”

  “Stunt? No, not yet. But let me tell you something about Trader Faulkner. He’s going to survive this. It’ll take years, but he’ll survive this. From what I gather it’s uh, Tom Rockwell who has the biggest problem here. Trader’s as strong as an ox but he’s also a philosopher of science. He lives with unanswered questions. Tom’s going to want something neat. Something that...”

  “Measures up.”

  “Measures up.” As I climbed into the car he gave a bushy frown and said, “That was a good joke she played on me. I keep getting into these professional brawls because my preferences are too strong. She always said I took the universe much too personally.”

  Tom’s going to want something that measures up. And again that thought: She was a cop’s daughter. This has to matter. How?

  ARE YOU HERE TO MEET JENNIFER ROCKWELL?

  The Mallard is the best hotel in town, or it certainly thinks it is. I know the Mallard well, because I’ve always had a weakness (what’s wrong with me?) for the twenty-dollar cocktail. And for the twenty-cent cocktail, too. But I never resented the extra: It’s worth it for the atmosphere. A double Johnny Black in elegant surroundings, with a sleepy-looking cocksucker, in a white tux, slumped over the baby grand: That was my idea of fun. Fortunately I never came in here when I was really smashed. For a two-day climb, give me York’s or Dreeley’s on Division. Give me a long string of dives on Battery. The Mallard’s the stone mansion in Orchard Square. Inside it’s all wooden panels and corporate gloom. Recently refurbished. A high-tech shrine to Great Britain. And with a lot of duck shit everywhere you look. Prints, models, lures—decoys. Those little carved quack-quacks, which have no value except rarity, sell for tens of thousands. I got there early, equipped with Silvera’s literature on Arn Debs. I sat at a table and ordered a Virgin Mary, heavy on the spice.

  Arn Debs subscribes to Business Week, Time, and Playboy. Naturally I’m thinking: Why did Jennifer give him my number? Arn Debs drives a Trans Am and carries a $7,000 limit on his MasterCard. Right now I have to assume that she wanted me to cover or middle for her—which I guess I would have gone ahead and done. Arn Debs has season tickets to the Dallas Cowboys. Probably I’d cover for any woman on earth, in principle—with one exception. Arn Debs rents action movies by the shitload. With one exception: Jennifer’s mother. Arn Debs is a registered Republican. Nobody seems to worry too much about Miriam: Maybe we assume that, with her background, catastrophe is all wired in. Arn Debs wears a bridge from eyetooth to eyetooth. Here’s another read: Jennifer gave him my number because he was bothering her and she wanted me to roust him. Arn Debs has three criminal convictions. Two are for mail fraud: These are out of Texas. One is for Aggravated Assault: This rap goes way back—to when he was just an up-country boy.

  Jennifer screwing up on the job: This could play two ways. A rush of blood, maybe. Or a kind of personal inducement. Giving her one more reason not to see Monday...

  Now wait a minute. The Decoy Room was a zoo when I walked in here. But eight o’clock has come and gone. And I’m thinking, No: It’s that fucking room-emptier at the near end of the bar. How could I miss the guy? I had him d.o.b.’d at 1/25/47. Six-three. Two hundred and twenty. Red hair. I guess I just couldn’t feature it: Him and Jennifer, in any connection. And I’d been watching him, too. There was no escaping Arn Debs. Until around eight fifteen he was sticking to beer—out of deference to his boner. Then he despaired and switched to scotch. Now he’s swelling and swearing and sneering at the waitresses. And boring the barman blind: Asking the kid about his love life, his “prowess,” as if it’s the feminine of prow. Jesus, aren’t drunks a drag? Barmen know all about bores and boredom. It’s their job. They can’t walk away.

  I hang fire till the kid dreams up some chore for himself in back. Then I stride the length of the room. Everyone says I like to dress as a beat cop. As the beat cop I once was. But my jacket is black cotton, not black leather or sateen. And I wear black cotton pants, not the issue serge. And no nightstick, flashlight, radio, hat, gun. The man’s wearing cowboy boots under his slacks. Another giant. Americans are going through the roof. Their mothers watch them grow, first with pride, then with panic.

  “You Arn Debs?”

  “Who the fuck wants to know?”

  “The law,” I said. “That’s who the fuck wants to know.” And I opened my jacket to show him the shield pinned to my blouse. “Are you here to meet Jennifer Rockwell?”

  “Maybe and maybe not. And fuck you whichever.”

  “Yeah well she’s dead,
” I told him. And I made a quelling gesture with my raised palms. “Easy now, Mr. Debs. This is going to go just fine. We’ll sit in the corner there and talk this thing through.”

  He said quietly, “Get your damn hand off of me.”

  And I said quietly, “Okay. You want to come and listen while I call the house? Do your wife and daughter know about Jennifer and you? Do they know about that spot of pain you had in August ‘81? With what’s her face—September Duvall? That was a rape beef, wasn’t it. Copped to Agg Assault. This was when you were still living up in Fuckbag, Nebraska. Remember?

  “Eric?” I called to the barman. “Let me have a Virgin and a double Dewar’s for the gentleman over at my table.”

  “Right away, Detective Hoolihan. Right away.”

  What I’m looking at here, I think (and he’s sitting opposite me now, crowded into the nook by the window, with a hollow duck practically perched on each shoulder), is a semireformed shitkicker, in a good tweed coat and twills, who likes to get it wet at both ends whenever he’s out of town. Table for two booked at the French restaurant upstairs. Tex tan, dark glasses ready in his top pocket, and a head of tawny hair he’s real proud of—I’m surprised he’s not called Randy or Rowdy or Red. High, wide, and handsome, with itty-bitty eyes. A card-carrying tailchaser who’s that close to being a fruit.

  I said drink up, Mr. Debs.

  He said well this is a hell of a turn for the evening to take.