The Elementary Particles (24 page)

4

Annabelle died two days later, and from the family’s point of view it was probably for the best. When death occurs people tend to say shit like that, but it’s true that her mother and brother would have found it difficult to cope with prolonged uncertainty.

In the steel and white concrete building, the same place where his grandmother had died, Djerzinski became conscious for the second time of the power of emptiness. He crossed the room to where Annabelle lay. The body was the same one he had known, yet its warmth was slowly ebbing away. Now her skin was almost cold.

Some people live to be seventy, sometimes eighty years old believing there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason. This was not how it was for Michel Djerzinski. He had lived alone all his adult life, in a vacuum. He had contributed to the sum of human knowledge—that was his vocation, the way he’d found to express his talents—but love was something he had never known. And Annabelle, despite her beauty, had not known love either; and now she was dead. Her body lay useless, like pure weight in the light. They sealed the coffin.

. . .

In her final note she had asked to be cremated. Before the ceremony, they had coffee at the Relais H in the hospital waiting room; at the next table a Gypsy on a drip talked about cars with two friends who’d come to visit him. The lighting was poor—just a couple of bulbs in the ceiling, set into an ugly plaster relief that looked like huge corks.

They walked out into the sunshine. The crematorium was not far from the hospital building, in the same complex. The incinerator itself was a large white concrete cube set in the middle of an equally white courtyard; the reflected light was blinding. Currents of warm air wove around them like a multitude of small snakes.

The coffin was placed on a moving platform leading to the furnace. They had thirty seconds of silent thought, then one of the staff started the motor. The cogs that moved the platform grated a little; the door closed. It was possible to watch the blaze through a Pyrex porthole. At the moment the flames leapt from the huge burners, Michel turned his head away. For about twenty seconds, a red smudge persisted in his field of vision and then was gone. One of the staff collected the ashes in a small rectangular box of white pine and gave it to Annabelle’s elder brother.

They drove slowly back to Crécy. The sun shone through the leaves of the chestnut trees along the allée de l’Hôtel de Ville. He and Annabelle had walked along that same road after school twenty-five years before. A dozen people were gathered in the garden of her mother’s house. Her younger brother had come from the States for the occasion; he was thin, nervous, visibly stressed and dressed a little too elegantly.

Annabelle had asked that her ashes be scattered in the garden of her parents’ house; that, too, was done. The sun was beginning to sink. Like powder—a whitish powder—she settled as gently as a veil on the ground between the rosebushes. At that moment they heard the bells at the train crossing ringing in the distance. Michel remembered the afternoons when he was nearly fifteen and Annabelle used to come to the station to meet him and take him in her arms. He looked at the earth, the sun, the roses; the suppleness of the grass. It was incomprehensible. Everyone was silent. Annabelle’s mother had poured wine for a toast. She offered him a glass and looked into his eyes. “You can stay for a couple of days if you like, Michel,” she said in a low voice. No, he would go; he would go back to work. He didn’t know how to do anything else. The sky was streaked with sunlight; he realized that he was crying.

5

As the airplane dipped toward the clouds that seemed to stretch out endlessly beneath the sky, he had the feeling that his whole life had been leading up to this moment. For several seconds more, there was only the enormous blue vault and a vast expanse in which matte and brilliant white alternated, and then the plane dropped into a middle zone, gray and fluid, where his senses were confused. Below, in the world of men, there were fields and trees and animals; everything was green, damp and infinitely detailed.

Walcott was waiting for him at Shannon airport. He was a stocky man with rapid gestures, his pronounced baldness surrounded by a crown of reddish blonde hair. He drove the Toyota Starlet quickly past misty hills and meadows. The center was situated just north of Galway on land adjoining the village of Rosscahill. Walcott took him on a tour of the facilities and introduced him to the technicians who would work with him on programming the calculations of the molecular configurations for his experiments. The equipment was all ultramodern, the rooms immaculately clean—all of it financed with money from the EU. In a refrigeration room, Djerzinski took a look at the two huge Crays, built like towers, whose control panels glowed in the darkness. Their millions of parallel processors were simply waiting to integrate Lagrangian models, wave functions, spectral analyses, Hermite operators; this was the universe he would now inhabit. He folded his arms across his chest and squeezed them against his body but could not dispel the feeling of sadness, of inner cold. Walcott offered him a coffee from the vending machine. Through the windows it was possible to make out the lush slopes plunging toward the dark waters of Lough Corrib.

On the road down to Rosscahill they passed a long sloping field with a herd of fine-looking dun cows, somewhat smaller than average. “Recognize them?” asked Walcott with a smile. “Yep . . . those are the descendants of the first cattle you worked on, ten years ago now. The center was very small at the time and none too well equipped; we were really grateful for your help. The cattle are strong, they’ve had no trouble breeding and they give excellent milk. Do you want a look?” He parked in a lane. Djerzinski stood at the stone wall that enclosed the field. The cows were grazing calmly, rubbing their heads against each other’s flanks; two or three of them were lying down. It was he who had created the genetic code which governed their cell reproduction, or, at least, he had improved on it. To them he should be like God, but they seemed completely indifferent to his presence. A bank of fog rolled slowly down the mountain, gradually shrouding them as it went. He walked back to the car.

At the steering wheel, Walcott was smoking a Craven A; the windshield was blurred with rain. In his soft, discreet voice (its discretion in no way seemed indifferent), he asked: “I believe you had a death in the family?” So Michel told him about Annabelle, and about her death. Walcott listened, nodding from time to time or letting out a soft sigh. When Michel finished, he was silent for a while; then lit and stubbed out another cigarette and said: “I’m not Irish myself. I was born in Cambridge. I’m still very English, they tell me. People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things—even tragedy—with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end there’s only death.”

He turned on the windshield wipers and restarted the engine. “Most of them around here are Catholics,” he said. “Well, that’s all changing now. Ireland is coming into the modern world. Quite a few hi-tech companies have set up here to take advantage of the tax breaks and the low social-security payments. Round here, there’s Roche and Lilly. And Microsoft, of course; every kid in the country dreams of working for Microsoft. People don’t go to mass as much as they used to, there’s more sexual freedom than there was a couple of years ago, there are more nightclubs, more antidepressants. The classic story . . .”

They drove along the lake again. The sun emerged from behind the bank of mist, scattering iridescent glints on the water. “All the same,” Walcott went on, “Catholicism is still a powerful force here. Most of the technicians at the center are Catholic. It doesn’t make my working relationship with them any easier. They’re nice enough, very polite, but they think of me as someone apart, someone you can’t really talk to.”

The sun emerged from the fog, forming a perfect white disk; the whole lake was bathed in light. On the horizon, the Twelve Bens Mountains formed a palette of grays like images from a dream. The men said nothing. As they came into Galway, Walcott spoke again: “I’m an atheist, always have been, but I can understand why they’re Catholic here. There’s something very special about this country. Everything seems constantly trembling: the grass in the fields or the water on the lake, everything signals its presence. The light is soft, shifting, like a mutable substance. You’ll see. The sky itself is alive.”

6

He rented an apartment on Sky Road near Clifden, in an old coast guard house which had been converted into tourist apartments. The rooms were decorated with wheels and storm lamps, anything they thought might please the tourists; this didn’t bother him. In this apartment, as in his whole life now, he knew he would always feel as though he were staying in a hotel.

He had no intention of returning to France, but in the first weeks he had to go to Paris a number of times to arrange the sale of his apartment and the transfer of his bank accounts. He would take the 11:50 a.m. from Shannon. The plane flew over the sea, the sun blistering white on the water, the waves snaking and twisting like worms far below. Beneath this writhing mass, he knew, mollusks were breeding, and fish with sharp, fine teeth fed on the mollusks only to be devoured by bigger fish. Often, he slept; he had nightmares. When he woke, the plane was flying over the countryside. Half-awake, he would stare in astonishment at the uniform color of the fields. The fields were brown, sometimes green, but the tones always muted. The suburbs of Paris were gray. The plane fell slowly, gently nosing its way down, irresistibly drawn to this life, to the beating of millions of lives.

. . .

By mid-October the Clifden peninsula was completely covered by a thick blanket of fog rolling in from the Atlantic. The last of the tourists had gone. Though it was not cold, everything was bathed in a deep, soft gray. Djerzinski did not go out much. He had imported three DVDs, representing more than forty gigabytes of data. From time to time he would turn on his computer and study a molecular configuration, then he would lie down on his huge bed, his cigarettes always within reach. He had not gone back to the center yet. Outside the window, the mass of fog shifted slowly.

Around 20 November the sky cleared and the weather became colder and drier. He began taking long walks along the coast road. He would pass Gortrumnagh and Knockavally, usually continuing on to Claddaghduff and sometimes as far as Aughrus Point. This was the westernmost point of Europe, the very edge of the Western world. Before him stretched the Atlantic, four thousand kilometers of ocean between him and America.

According to Hubczejak, these two or three months of solitary reflection—during which Djerzinski did no apparent work, set up no experiments and programmed no calculations—should be considered as a key period during which the principal elements of his later work fell into place. The last months of 1999 were, in any case, a strange period for Western civilization as a whole, marked as they were by a sense of waiting, a sort of dull preoccupation.

The thirty-first of December 1999 fell on a Friday. In the clinic at Verrières-le-Buisson, where Bruno would spend the rest of his life, there was a small party for the patients and the staff. They drank champagne and ate paprika-flavored chips. Later that evening Bruno danced with one of the nurses. He wasn’t unhappy; the medication was working, and all desire was dead in him. He enjoyed the afternoon snack, and watching game shows on television with the others before the evening meal. He expected nothing, now, of the progression of days, and the last night of the second millennium was a pleasant one for him.

In cemeteries all across the world, the recently deceased continued to rot in their graves, slowly becoming skeletons.

. . .

Michel spent the evening at home. He was too isolated to hear the noise of the party in the village. Many warm, peaceful images of Annabelle flitted across his memory; and images, too, of his grandmother.

He remembered that when he was thirteen or fourteen he used to buy flashlights, and small mechanical objects he liked to take apart and put together again endlessly. And he remembered the airplane, with an actual motor, his grandmother had given him, which he had never succeeded in flying. It was a beautiful plane, painted in camouflage; in the end, it stayed in its box. Percolating through the slow drift of his consciousness, certain things seemed to characterize his life. There were people and thoughts. Thoughts occupy no space; people occupy a portion of space, and can be seen. Their images form on the lens, pass through the choroid and strike the retina. Alone in the empty house, Michel watched his modest parade of memories. Throughout the evening, a single conviction slowly filled his mind: soon he would be able to get back to work.

All across the surface of the globe, a weary, exhausted humanity, filled with self-doubt and uncertain of its history, prepared itself as best it could to enter a new millennium.

7

Some say:

“The civilization we have built is still fragile,

We are only just emerging from the darkness.

We carry with us still the terrible image of centuries of misery;

Would it not be better to leave such things buried?”

The narrator stands, gathers himself and recalls

Patiently but firmly he rises and recalls

That a metaphysical revolution has taken place.

Just as the Christians could visualize ancient civilizations, could form a complete image of these civilizations unassailed by questions or by doubt,

Because they had crossed a line,

A threshold,

They had stepped over the fracture;

Just as the men of the age of materialism could take part, unknowing, unseeing, in the ceremonial rituals of Christianity,

Just as they could read and reread the literature of their former Christian age, without ever abandoning their quasi-anthropological perspective,

Unable to comprehend the arguments which had inflamed their ancestors about the vacillations between grace and sin;

So, we now can listen to this story of a materialist era

As an ancient human story.

It is a sad story, but we will not be saddened by it

Because we are no longer like these men.

Born of their flesh and their desires, we have cast aside their categories and their affiliations,

We do not feel their joys, neither do we feel their sufferings,

We have set aside

Indifferently

And without the least effort

Their universe of death.

These centuries of pain which are our heritage,

We can now bring out of the half-light.

Something has happened, like a second chance,

And we have the right to live our lives.

Between 1905 and 1915, working almost entirely alone and with limited mathematical knowledge, Albert Einstein succeeded in elaborating a general theory of gravity, space and time, from a first intuition which was the specific theory of relativity. In doing so, he had a decisive influence on the future evolution of astrophysics. This risky, solitary labor—accomplished, according to Hilbert, “for the glory of the human spirit”—had no obvious practical application and remained inaccessible to the scientists of his time. It can be compared to Georg Cantor’s work to establish a typology of the infinite, which created set theory, or the work of Gottlob Frege, which redefined the basis of logic. According to Hubczejak in his introduction to
Clifden Notes,
it can also be compared to the solitary intellectual work of Djerzinski at Clifden between 2000 and 2009—especially as, like Einstein, Djerzinski did not have the mathematical resources necessary to test his idea rigorously.

His first work,
The Topology of Meiosis,
published in 2002, had a considerable impact. It established, for the first time, on the basis of irrefutable thermodynamic arguments, that the chromosomal separation at the moment of meiosis which creates haploid gametes is in itself a source of structural instability. In other words, all species dependent on sexual reproduction are by definition mortal.

Three Conjectures on Topology in Hilbert Spaces,
published in 2004, was a shock. Some interpreted it as a reaction against a continuous dynamic, as an attempt—with strangely Platonic resonances—to redefine an algebra of forms. While they accepted the significance of his conjectures, many serious mathematicians gleefully pointed out the absence of rigor in Djerzinski’s propositions and the somewhat anachronistic character of his approach. In fact, as Hubczejak confirms, Djerzinski didn’t have access to recent mathematical publications at the time, and it would seem that he wasn’t very interested in them. There is little information on his work between 2004 and 2007. He was a regular visitor to the Galway center, but his relationships with the staff were purely utilitarian. He had developed a working knowledge of Cray assembly code and could therefore dispense with the services of programmers. Only Walcott seems to have maintained a more personal rapport with him. He, too, lived near Clifden and would often come to spend the afternoon with Djerzinski. According to him, Djerzinski talked often about Auguste Comte, in particular the letters to Clotilde de Vaux and
Subjective Synthesis,
the philosopher’s last, unfinished work. Even from the standpoint of the scientific method, Comte could be considered the true founder of positivism. No metaphysical or ontological system of the time appealed to him. It is probable, as Djerzinski points out, that if Comte had been in the intellectual circle of Niels Bohr between 1924 and 1927, he would have maintained his position of intransigent positivism and allied himself to the Copenhagen interpretation. In any case, the philosopher’s insistence on the reality of social structures as opposed to the fiction of individual existence, his continued interest in historical processes and currents of public opinion, and his deep sentimentality lead one to think he might have been at home with a more recent ontological overhaul, the replacement of an ontology of objects with an ontology of states, established by the work of Zurek, Zeh and Hardcastle. Only the latter ontology was capable of restoring the practical possibility of human relationships. In an ontology of states the particles are indiscernible, and only a limited number are observable. The only entities which can be identified and named are wave functions and, through them, state vectors—from which arose the analogous possibility of giving new meaning to fraternity, sympathy and love.

They walked along the Ballyconnelly road; the ocean glittered at their feet. Far off on the horizon, the sun sank over the Atlantic. More and more often, Walcott got the impression that Djerzinski’s thinking was straying into uncertain, even mystical territory. He himself remained steadfast to a radical instrumentalism in the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon tradition, and influenced by the Vienna school. He was slightly suspicious of Comte’s work, which he considered romantic. Contrary to the materialism it sought to replace, positivism could, he insisted, provide the foundation for a new humanism; in fact, this would be a first, since materialism was antithetical to humanism and would eventually destroy it. Nonetheless, materialism had had a historic importance: to break down the first barrier, which was God. Man, having done this, found himself plunged into doubt and distress. But now a second barrier had been broken down—this time in Copenhagen. Man no longer needed God, nor even the idea of an underlying reality. “There are human perceptions,” said Walcott, “human testimonies, human experiences; reason links them, and emotion brings them alive. All of this happens without any metaphysical intervention, without any ontology at all. We don’t need concepts of God or nature or reality anymore. In experiments, it is possible to get a group of observers to agree on the basis of reasonable intersubjectivity; these experiments are linked by theories which should, as far as possible, be succinct and must, by definition, be refutable. There is a perceived world, a felt world, a human world.”

Djerzinski knew this position was unassailable: was the need to find meaning simply a childish defect of the human mind? On a trip to Dublin at the end of 2005, he first saw the Book of Kells. Hubczejak is convinced that this encounter with this illuminated manuscript of great formal complexity, which was probably the work of seventh-century Irish monks, was a decisive moment in the evolution of Djerzinski’s ideas. According to Hubczejak, his long study of the book likely allowed him—in a series of intuitions which in retrospect seem miraculous—to overcome the complexities of calculating energy stability in biological macromolecules. Without necessarily subscribing to Hubczejak’s statement, it is certainly true that the Book of Kells has, through the ages, elicited from its admirers a response akin to ecstasy. In 1185, Giraldus Cambrensis made the following description of the book:

The book is a concordance of the four Gospels according to the text of Saint Jerome, with almost as many drawings as there are pages, each decorated in wondrous colors. Here one can contemplate the visage of divine majesty miraculously rendered; there, the mystical representations of the Evangelists, some having six wings, some four, some two. Here we see the eagle, there the bull, here the face of a man, there that of a lion, and innumerable other drawings. In looking at them casually, it might appear that they are no more than idle scribblings rather than formal compositions. One might not see the subtleties, whereas all is subtlety. But if one takes pains to study the book attentively, to penetrate the innermost secrets of the art, one will find embellishments of such intricacy, such delicacy and density, such a wealth of knots and interlacing links in such fresh and lustrous hues, that one will unequivocally pronounce it the work not of man but of angels.

Hubczejak might be right when he affirms that any new philosophy, even one which claims to be axiomatic and founded on pure logic, is in fact bound to a new visual conception of the universe. In giving mankind the gift of physical immortality, Djerzinski has clearly modified our perception of time; but his greatest contribution, according to Hubczejak, is to have laid the foundations for a new philosophy of space. Just as the world of Tibetan Buddhism is inseparable from the prolonged contemplation of the infinite circular forms of mandalas, just as one can get an accurate idea of Democritus’s thought by watching sunlight burst upon white stones on a Greek island on an August afternoon, so one comes closer to the thinking of Djerzinski by studying the infinite architecture of cross and spiral, which are the basic ornamental forms used in the Book of Kells, or by rereading
Meditations on Interweaving,
inspired by it and published separately from
Clifden Notes
.

“Natural forms,” wrote Djerzinski, “are human forms. Triangles, interweavings, branchings, appear in our minds. We recognize them and admire them; we live among them. We grow among our creations—human creations, which we can communicate to men—and among them we die. In the midst of space, human space, we make our measurements, and with these measurements we create space, the space between our instruments.

“Uneducated man,” Djerzinski went on, “is terrified of the idea of space; he imagines it to be vast, dark and yawning. He imagines beings in the elementary form of spheres, isolated in space, curled up in space, crushed by the eternal presence of three dimensions. Terrified of the idea of space, human beings curl up; they feel cold, they feel afraid. At best, they move in space and greet one another sadly. And yet this space is within them, it is nothing but their mental creation.

“In this space of which they are so afraid, human beings learn how to live and to die; in their mental space, separation, distance and suffering are born. There is little to add to this: the lover hears his beloved’s voice over mountains and oceans; over mountains and oceans a mother hears the cry of her child. Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds, while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal.”

Hubczejak rightly notes that Djerzinski’s great leap lay not in his rejection of the idea of personal freedom (a concept which had already been much devalued in his time, and which everyone agreed, at least tacitly, could not form the basis for any kind of human progress), but in the fact that he was able, through somewhat risky interpretations of the postulates of quantum mechanics, to restore the conditions which make love possible. It is important here to evoke once more the image of Annabelle: though Djerzinski had not known love himself, through Annabelle he had succeeded in forming an image of it. He was capable of realizing that love, in some way, through some still unknown process, was possible. This was probably his guiding thought in the last months of his theoretical work, about which we know so little.

According to the testimony of those few people who visited Djerzinski in Ireland during those final weeks, he appeared to have made his peace. His anxious, changing expression seemed to have been stilled. He often took long, dreamy, aimless walks along Sky Road with only the sky itself as witness. The road snaked west across the hills, some gentle, others steep. The ocean glittered, refracting a shifting light onto the last rocky islands. On the horizon, the mass of cloud seemed luminous and confused, its presence strangely physical. He walked effortlessly for a long time, his face bathed by the delicate mist. His work, he knew, was done. In the room he had converted into a study, its window overlooking Errislannan Point, he had put his notes in order. There were hundreds of pages on an extraordinary diversity of subjects. The results of his actual scientific work were contained in eighty typed pages. He had not thought it necessary to include his calculations.

On 27 March 2009, in the late afternoon, he went to the central post office in Galway. He sent a copy of his work to the Académie des Sciences in Paris, and another to the British magazine
Nature
. No one can be certain of what happened next. The fact that his car was found near Aughrus Point led many to think of suicide—and indeed neither Walcott nor his colleagues at the center seemed surprised by this. “There was something about him,” said Walcott, “something monstrously sad. I think he was probably the saddest man I have ever met, and even the word ‘sadness’ seems inadequate; there was something broken in him, something completely devastated. I always got the impression that life was a burden to him, that he no longer knew how to make contact with any living thing. I think he held out for exactly as long as was necessary to finish his work, and I don’t think any of us will ever know the effort he had to make in order to do so.”

Djerzinski’s disappearance remains a mystery. When a body could not be found, rumors sprang up that he had gone to live in Asia, probably in Tibet, to compare his work with Buddhist teachings. This hypothesis is now discredited. In part because there is no trace of his leaving Ireland, and in part because the drawings on the last pages of his notebook, which some had interpreted as mandalas, were later found to be combinations of Celtic symbols much like those in the Book of Kells.