36 Arguments for the Existence of God (5 page)

“I’ll tell you exactly how. Art is supposed to increase our
mindfulness
. Pascale wouldn’t know mindfulness if it bit her on her skinny French ass.”

This last phrase, which might easily be perceived as not only anti-Gallic but, even more egregiously, intolerant of a woman’s right to choose the shape of her own body, was a testament to just how angry Mona felt, on Cass’s behalf, or how hard she was trying to get Cass to feel some anger on his own behalf. (She never succeeded.) But her assertion about the mindfulness function of art was straight out of her textbook. Mona had done her doctoral work with Arlene Unger, who makes the concept of mindfulness central to her existentialist psychology. The concept was central to Mona as well. She worked it in whenever she reasonably— or even unreasonably—could. Mona, who was quick to ask the first question at lectures, always began her query with the phrase “As an Ungerian, I’m wondering.” You could tease Mona about almost everything—her bisexually frustrating love life, her Omaha, Nebraska, upbringing, even her weight—but mindfulness was off limits. Mindfulness was Mona’s religion.

And Mona had indeed been mindfully present to Cass during the long
ordeal with, and without, Pascale; mindfully eager for every blood-smeared detail, which she had picked clean with raptor-zeal; mindfully condemnatory of the mindlessness that had left Cass so battle-of-the-sexes-scarred—“I hate to say it, Cass, but you’ve been pussy-whipped. So have I, if it’s any consolation”—that she, Mona, repeatedly wondered whether he’d ever be able to love a woman again.

Mona was facing stoically forward now, but Cass knew her well enough to read the silent reproach in her back. He knew what it must be costing Mona not to give way to temptation and swivel around backward to see what was going on
now
, and he felt remorse in a highly theoretical sort of way, which is to say that he supposed that somewhere, in whatever part of the brain was supposed to be involved in moral reactions—did Lipkin say it was the right orbitofrontal cortex or the left?—his neurons must be making desultory guilty gestures, and perhaps eventually he would register the muted activity.

Lipkin was now affirming the unthinkability of the unsayable, which prompted Lucinda to tickle Cass’s ear with a whispered “Ah, the all-too-common Wittgenstein Fallacy.”

It was as if she were prescient. The next words out of Lipkin’s mouth were “as we have learned from Wittgenstein.”

“Ah, the all-too-common As-We-Have-Learned-from-Wittgenstein Fallacy,” Cass shot back, winning from Lucinda a smile of such splendor, along with a playful elbow dig in his side, that he might have died happy at that moment, asking nothing more out of life than this.

When the unthinkable had happened, when everything had become unsayable for Pascale, she had clutched at Cass, her beautiful and terrible eyes gone even more terrible. One moment she was complaining that her right arm felt like “a little sharp-teeths bête, bite, bite,” and the next she was staring at him wildly, unable to utter a word, a soundless howling in her eyes.

The doctors had argued back and forth over whether the clot should be removed. Poor Pascale, with her repudiation of probability, was now caught in a deadly matrix of risks. Dr. Micah McSweeney, the neurologist with a love of literature—whose scruples about mixed metaphors had caused him to allow the loss of his right leg in a kite-surfing accident to determine his entire piratical presentation, had alone stood firm against
surgery. McSweeney stood on a peg leg and wore a kerchief knotted over the top part of his head. Was the neurologist bald underneath? Was the jaunty kerchief another prosthetic? Cass would never know. The important point was that McSweeney had read Pascale’s poetry, and he knew that to operate was impossible. He, too, knew what he knew with savage certainty.

During the long days of sitting beside Pascale, her wild poetry silenced within her and her convulsively tragic eyes trying so hard to communicate some essential message to him, her icy child-sized hands clutching and unclutching his large warm palm, Cass had felt himself achieving a new and revelatory penetration into the nature of love. His adoration of the afflicted darling of his life, his own tormented wife, sank so deeply into his being that he felt it must be transforming him on the cellular level.

He had first laid eyes on her on a cold December evening at a reading she had given at the crowded Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. The Grolier had been crowded with books, not with people. He had been one of only three attending the reading of her newly translated book, and he was pretty certain that the other two, a man and a woman, had come in to get out of the cold. The man kept loudly blowing his nose into what looked like a torn scrap of a brown paper bag, and the woman noisily unpacked a sandwich, the aluminum foil making a racket. Cass had wished that he could reach out his enormous hands to ward off these insults from the eyes and ears of the poet, her smoky voice struggling beneath the foreign tongue and barbarities.

But though he had fallen in love with Pascale because of her words, it was only now, in her writhing wordlessness, that he knew how entwined their two souls were. They inhabited this silence with an intimacy so complete it all but matched a person’s own intimacy with himself. The two of them were alone together inside this silence, with all the world outside. Her brilliant words, counter, original, spare, and strange, had entranced him, but also distracted him, distanced him even as they pulled him in. Perhaps words always do. We depend on them to read each other’s souls—what else do we normally have?—but it’s only in cases like this, when the other is simply given to one, soul to soul laid out before one like a scene before the eyes, that one really knows who the other is.

He had spoken of all this and more to his stricken wife, sometimes in words, but more often in the soundless communion to which they had been both reduced and elevated.

And then, one evening, after the supper tray—loaded with the home-cooked food he brought her—had been removed, she had spoken, vindicating McSweeney, who alone had known what Pascale’s own passionate desire was in regard to the question of whether to operate or not, while Cass had wandered lost in the matrix of risks.

“I must of necessity break your heart.”

Meaning: I have lain here in my silence and I have fallen in love, as you, too, have fallen in love in my silence. It is symmetrical,
absolument
, in the abstract.

Meaning: There
fore
, it is necessary to love Micah McSweeney.

Meaning: There
fore
, it is impossible to love you.
A tout à l’heure
, devoted Cass. You have served the muses well, in your time.

For all these years, it had been impossible for Cass to think of Pascale, her starved-wolf eyes and the long coarse black hair that always held an intoxicating fragrance that he had thought of as the scent of ethereality itself, without a gasping contraction round the ventricles of his heart.

Lipkin must have miscalculated the length of his talk. It was nearing the end of the hour, and he obviously still had a lot more material to get through. He was powering through his PowerPoint at a maniacal clip.

“Oh dear, don’t tell me he’s going to throw in the Milgram experiment now, too? Lipkin, Lipkin, where will this end?” Lucinda was laughing deliciously in Cass’s ear.

Lipkin had clicked up onto the screen the famous picture of Adolf Eichmann in his bulletproof glass booth, the three Israeli judges, in their heavy black robes, sitting above him like buzzards. The top of the screen was labeled “Only following orders.”

And, sure enough, remarkable Lucinda had been right that Lipkin was using Eichmann as a segue into the famous Milgram experiment about following orders that had been conducted at Yale in 1961, a few weeks after the Nazi SS-man, who had been hiding out for ten years in balmy Argentina, was kidnapped by the agents of the Mossad and smuggled back to Jerusalem to go on trial for his enthusiasm and efficiency in loading Europe’s Jews into trains.

“I think,” Cass whispered back to Lucinda, “that Lipkin’s performing his own psychological torture on us.”

Cass was perhaps getting just a bit punch-drunk. This gibe fell a little flat and, if you thought about it, didn’t really make that much sense.

“It’s amazing, the sputum that passes for science in these parts,” Lucinda responded. This witticism was all the wittier given that Lipkin was a spitter, but it had made Cass’s grin go a little shaky around the corners, since it touched a sore spot. Did Lucinda know what his own specialty was? Was she aiming a gibe at him as well? Given her camaraderie, it was hard to believe, but his experience had been that those occupying the more technical reaches of the field could be pretty dismissive of people like him. Sebastian Held, for example, who was a Mandelbaum wannabe, was downright rude. Did the enchantress beside him have similar tendencies? There was nobody who went further in the direction of the technical than Lucinda Mandelbaum.

Her first book,
Mathematical Foundations of Game Theory with Applications to the Behavioral Sciences
, based on her doctoral dissertation, had formulated the famous Mandelbaum Equilibrium, and she had been trailblazing ever since. After receiving her Ph.D. from Stanford, she had spent the next three years at Harvard’s dauntingly elite Society of Fellows, had garnered the Distinguished Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, and the Troland Award in cognitive psychology from the National Academy of Sciences, awarded to an under-forty scientist.

By the time Lucinda went on the job market, post-Society, she received offers from every top department in the world that had an opening, which had been her goal. She had accepted Princeton’s offer. All the other job candidates in the field that year who got hired elsewhere were aware that they were employed only because Lucinda Mandelbaum hadn’t wanted their jobs. That was three years ago, and her productivity had not suffered since. Only last year,
Newsweek
had included her in their cover story of “Thirty-Five Scientists Under Thirty-Five Who Are Remaking Their Fields.” She had stared out of the pages, one of only six women, and the single representative of the “soft sciences” among the cosmologists, molecular biologists, and computer scientists. Of the thirty-five who had been featured, it had been, unsurprisingly, Lucinda’s striking face that
had been reserved for the blowup photo on the first page of the article, her pale-gray eyes staring straight at the reader as if daring him to be the one to look away first, her measured mouth only hinting at her victory smile.

Game theory is the attempt to use mathematics to capture the relative rationality of different strategies in various situations, where how well a person fares isn’t just a matter of his own decisions but of the decisions of the other players. It’s a theory that analyzes behavior in terms of rational agency, meaning the theory assumes that each agent wants the biggest payoff, or utility, for himself. Each agent wants to balance a minimum of expected loss with a maximum of expected gain. Lucinda Mandelbaum is famous for having found applications for game theory everywhere, not just in economics and statesmanship and warfare, which are the most obvious places to look, but in areas that don’t seem to involve rational agency at all. All living things, down to the level of the so-called selfish gene, are following strategies that people like Lucinda are elucidating.

Given Lucinda’s area of expertise, it was ironic that she should be sitting here in the auditorium of the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center, chatting up Cass Seltzer under the illusion that he was someone else entirely. Even Lucinda could—wincingly—admit that she was here only because she, of all people, had let her enemies outplay her.

Of course, Lucinda had her share of enemies. Everybody does, since life, as she can demonstrate, is often a zero-sum game, where one person’s win is another person’s loss. But a person like Lucinda attracted not only more enemies, but enemies of a different kind, namely griefers: people who wished her grief for no other reason than to wish her grief. Lucinda was unabashedly ambitious, she was unapologetically successful, she had always played hard, and … she was a woman. A beautiful woman. The imbalanced distribution of natural gifts seems unfair because it is; and people will always try to make things fairer by giving grief to the gifted. Griefers present one of the complications in the rational-agency model.

The trouble for Lucinda had begun when Shimmy Baumzer, the president of Frankfurter, wanting to restore the university to those refulgent days when it had been able to boast on its faculty such international figures
as Jonas Elijah Klapper, had used that article in
Newsweek
as a strategic plan. He made fabulous offers to each and every one of those Thirty-Five Scientists under Thirty-Five Who Are Remaking Their Fields, from Aashi Alswaan, computer scientist, to Simon Zee, cosmologist.

Lucinda had only intended to use the generous terms—not only a whopping salary but a minimal teaching load—to improve her situation at Princeton, playing one institution off against another. This was standard academic strategy. Instead, it was Lucinda who had been played, and she couldn’t believe that her being a woman wasn’t relevant.

David Prentiss Cuthbert, who was the chairman of the Princeton Psychology Department, had frankly had enough of Lucinda Mandelbaum, whose aggressive intellectual style had always been off-putting to him, and most especially after the
Newsweek
article had appeared. Lucinda hadn’t even tried to pretend to be embarrassed by the hype. If she could have had that damn article shrunk down and laminated to wear around her tyrannical throat, then she would have. So, while Cuthbert had encouraged her to press her demands and to threaten to leave if Princeton failed to match Frankfurter’s offer, he had also gone to the dean and told him that, “between the two of us, Bill, I wouldn’t be sorry to see her go. Her demands are infinite. I spend more time trying to keep her happy than I do the rest of my department put together. If I’m going to run this department, I have to assume that no one is indispensable.”