The Place of Quarantine

Chapter 11

“I was born on an island by the sea, but it was nothing like the sea here. There were cliffs and seafronts and beaches – but not at all like the ones here. There were idle vacationers, stalls and cafés all along the promenade and indifferent, ruddy-brown hills with villas scattered over them like lumps of sugar.

“My arrival into this world was celebrated triumphantly and opulently. That morning, my relatives unceremoniously broke into the ward where my mother lay, having barely recovered from giving birth. They picked me up in their arms, pinching my cheeks with their dirty hands, poking and dandling me until I was screaming hysterically. They wanted to make sure I was one of them, a member of their tribe – I did not yet have the strength to genuinely disappoint them. My first days at home were just the same, with a series of feasts, which knocked my parents off their feet in a frenzy of hospitality, to share their joy with our huge family, although there was not yet much cause for celebration. Like all newborns, I was nothing more than a conglomeration of biomass, an assemblage of macromolecules, and no one back then could predict with certainty whether I would develop into anything more. Nobody knew, but my family believed in me – as all families believe in their babies all over the world. And I lived up to their expectations: when I was six, the main event of my lives took place, no matter how many of them I’ve ended up living. No one noticed and appreciated its true merit, and I myself only understood it much later – and at the time only felt it as a slight shock…”

I recount this to Elsa as we are walking along the seafront under the burning sun. This is the third week of my stay in Quarantine. During that time, much has changed and much has become familiar. You can get accustomed to any place – especially when there are no alternatives.

The environment doesn’t seem hostile to me anymore; I no longer flinch at every extraneous sound and don’t see a trap in every word or sign. My subconscious is working hard, and this effort is yielding fruit: little by little, I adapt to the fact that I have been reborn and some kind of life awaits me after Quarantine. I reflect on that and pose questions – to myself, and to Nestor – although for the time being almost all of them remain unanswered.

My relationship with Elsa has also become different. It happened abruptly, right after an accident that gave us a serious fright. It was its incongruity that startled us – as if the well-oiled mechanism of this place had suddenly failed. As if some external threat had intervened in the serene, smooth-running course of things.

It all happened on one of our first outings together when a seven-story building we were walking past suddenly began to topple over. It collapsed downward – as if a powerful explosive charge had blown away its foundations. There was a roar; huge lumps of concrete flew down from above and rolled from our left directly at us and beyond – toward the balustrade and the sea, and other terrified passers-by. We were enveloped in a cloud of dust that filled our nostrils; I heard screams from all sides. Elsa also seemed to be screaming…

Before I had time to think, I grabbed her hand and dragged her forward, expecting to be hit at any moment, realizing there could be no escape or salvation for either of us. But we escaped – half suffocated, half blind from the dust. Coughing and catching my breath, I looked around: a dirty cloud behind me was rising up to the sky. Then it began to dissipate and soon disappeared without a trace: there was no sign of any debris or suffering victims on the promenade. Everything looked exactly as it had before, except for an empty gap in the row of buildings like a missing tooth.

Credit to my roommate, who recovered quickly. Soon, albeit somewhat neurotically, we were making jokes about the incident and each other. “Now, you are a real hero,” said Elsa with a shake of the head and recounted a story about one of her boyfriends, who had been mugged with her in the center of New York.

“Do you know what that hero did?” she chuckled. “He ran away like a startled deer, leaving me on my own. Just shouted at me to catch up with him – and then claimed later he had acted like a man. That he was showing initiative, leading the way… At that moment, I decided I wasn’t going to live with him anymore – and that was one of the wisest decisions of my life!”

After the incident with the building, her remoteness evaporated completely, as if a switch had been flicked inside her. We even began to make physical contact: occasionally Elsa would take my hand in hers, touch me on the shoulder or even brush against me with her thigh. It didn’t get any further than that, though – the ethereal nature of our bodies hadn’t changed. Nevertheless, I found out a lot more about her first life – in great detail, she talked about her parents’ estate with its horses and polo grounds, about her student days in Arlington and her first job in the local mayor’s office… She would recall these past episodes in large chunks and immediately share them with me. I listened to her, slightly envious – my own recovery wasn’t going that well. I have had some progress, however – a few things have returned, and besides, I’ve learned to cherry-pick my dreams to gradually fill in the blanks. By myself, without Nestor – although, of course, in the early days he provided a lot of assistance.

He has also made mistakes, though: the dreams he chose for me about the Russian millionaire Brevich were no help. My mind was unable to follow a logical chain toward the past, as Nestor had expected, and this clearly bothered him. “No more ‘starting at the end and moving toward the beginning,’” he announced. “We will focus on your childhood and on mathematics – we need to move sequentially, with no detours!” So that’s how we are now progressing – with varying success.

Occasionally, I still think about Brevich, but in vain. A few random details emerge for a moment: a hot night in a hot city, a large gloomy bar, drunken faces. Then my memory blurs into a wall – a hot wall. Neither Tina nor the slightest trace of my theory and mysterious particles float to the surface. Nestor’s hints about the field of the conscions are like an excruciating itch – at times it becomes so unbearable I have to shut my eyes and cover my ears with my hands. Then I pester him again with questions, but he just brushes me aside with vague allusions. Some of which I am now sharing with Elsa.

The seafront is gradually filling up with people. Today we went out early, among the first to do so. I continue my story, “For no reason, I started shivering and broke into a cold sweat. Then my head began to spin and my temperature rose. My mother put me to bed with a moist towel on my forehead. Everyone thought I’d become sick – with flu or something worse – but they were worrying in vain. There was nothing wrong with my health. What had happened to me was what the majority of my contemporaries experienced sooner or later. What you and everyone else here in Quarantine went through as well. I attained consciousness – true consciousness. I detached myself as a form of living matter from all other species, genera and families – in the broadest sense, far beyond the bounds of recognized taxonomies. To borrow a popular term, I became a human being!

“No, it was not the angels who helped me, nor benevolent holy spirits or any of the gods invented by humankind. My consciousness was awakened, brought to life by a very real field of particles. I don’t know the details, but my Nestor insists that the flow of the conscions, propagating through space, has interacted and resonated with my brain – and fallen into a trap. I have integrated as an individual into the structure of the universe!”

I’m feeling inspired; it seems to me I am propounding matters of great significance. Matters important to both of us – and not only in a global, cosmic sense. There is a much more specific implication: this morning it was finally explained to me why Elsa and I are sharing the same apartment and what is expected of us in this regard.

We are a localized team, so to speak, a small crew united by a common goal. I was informed about this by a rather grumpy Nestor today. He was silent for a while, pursed his lips, then finally said, “Well, I suppose it’s time to get down to the main issue. So far, you’ve just been relaxing here, like in some health resort. Mostly sleeping and dreaming…”

He was being unfair; my dreams were taking up as much time as was stipulated by the Brochure. When I was awake, I tried to work, tormenting myself with negligible progress – and, I should add, without much support from my mentor-counselor-therapist. Nevertheless, it seemed to me we had become used to each other, found a common language – and over the last few days Nestor had been quite nice. But today he has changed abruptly.

Yet, arguing with him is useless. “Well, to the main issue, then,” I shrug. “I thought it was the theory of the conscions, but if you now think otherwise…”

Nestor grins, “And what can you tell me about the theory of the conscions?”

“Not much,” I admit. “Only what I’ve heard from you: imprints of consciousness, vortexes of some sort, images of memory on the metabrane – and that I supposedly discovered it all…”

Nestor interrupts me with an impatient gesture. “Children’s fairy tales,” he says. “Who are they going to convince? Myths and legends – who is going to believe you and believe in you, me perhaps? I don’t think so; I’m not that gullible. I need a theory, a proven theory – then I will agree you’ve reached one of your goals. Then I will be able to check a box on the task list I have in front of me.”

“I’ll let you know – as soon as it’s ready,” I answer dryly. “I’m trying my best to make progress.”

Nestor purses his lips again – evidently underwhelmed by my efforts. Then, after a pause, he repeats, “Now, to the main issue!” – and leans forward, so that his face fills the entire screen.

“I suspect…” he says insinuatingly. “I suspect you, Theo, still don’t sufficiently appreciate the significance of a phenomenon staring you in the face – every day, just as my task list does at me. I suspect you accept it as a given and categorize this given as a chance occurrence, thereby nullifying the importance of a fact that you should have thought about a long time ago. With your analytical mind… I’m surprised, surprised!”

He leans back and regards me like a schoolboy who has flunked his spelling test again. “You mean…” I begin, but Nestor does not let me finish.

“Exactly!” he exclaims. “Yes, precisely that. How naive it is of you to think you and your roommate have ended up here in the same apartment by coincidence, without any underlying reason! Extremely naive; indeed it smacks of willful blindness. But you’re not blind, Theo – not by a long stretch…”

I demand an explanation. Nestor explains. Tersely and not very clearly.

“You have to work together,” he says, staring at me intensely. “To reveal the causal connections – at least, one of them. Your memories must intersect at some point in space and time, and this point needs to be found – you cannot just wait for it to appear on its own. That’s the main issue – and you both need to make more of an effort to resolve it. You need to apply yourselves, to search diligently for a path, to try, try and try again. And remember, Theo: honesty, uncompromising honesty – that’s what will lead you out of this impasse!”

And on that note, we part. Now, on the seafront, I am making an honest effort to “search for a path” – or, at least, so it seems to me. Elsa, however, is not overly impressed. She waves her hand, interrupting me. She is clearly annoyed, “Are you incapable of remembering anything normal – like where you lived? Like what sorts of women you had – why you’ve been telling me nothing about your women? Or how you spent your childhood? Maybe you were a bad boy – and now you’re ashamed? Maybe you used to tear the wings off butterflies and torture cats?”

I can only shrug. In my opinion, I’m talking about the most normal thing in the world. But I’m not angry with Elsa; it’s not easy for her either. It would appear her Nestor has not been very kind to her this morning.

Elsa came into the living room after me and immediately said, “I’m sorry, but do you mind if we skip the fried eggs today? I’m not in a good mood – most probably I’ll get them all wrong.”

She was wearing a modest knee-length dress, flat shoes and no jewelry. Her hair was tied back in a low knot. She looked like a corporate lawyer or a PA to some big-shot executive.

“Okay,” I responded in a deliberately cheerful tone and sat down at the table, opening my notebook. Elsa, instead of settling down on the couch with her needlework, went to the window and pressed her forehead against the windowpane. It was clear she was out of sorts.

“Everyone is always demanding something of me,” she said dully. “And when they stop demanding, it turns out I’m the one to blame.”

“What happened?” I asked but got no answer. She stood for several minutes, angrily examining the landscape beyond the glass, then paced around the room, stopped at the kitchen sink and began to wash the plates, which were already perfectly clean.

“It’s very calming – have you ever tried it?” she said turning to me. “I always used to do this when I’d quarreled with someone – or worse.”

“No, I haven’t, but I’ll take your word for it,” I reply and suggest going for a walk.

So, here we are walking along next to the sea, hand in hand like a happy couple. The small waves disintegrate into slithers of light; it’s painful to look at them. But we aren’t looking over there – like everyone else, we are peering at the people we meet, searching their features in the hope of recognizing a familiar face. A false hope, a naive expectation. We are surrounded by strangers – most of them are middle-aged, no older than fifty. I have already learned from Nestor that this has nothing to do with their age when they died. The external appearance of the people in Quarantine is formed artificially from scraps of visual memory, regenerated during their second birth. And also from their files – which, in my view, are not particularly useful.

After a pause, Elsa says in a conciliatory tone, “All right, I was only joking. I don’t really think you used to torture cats. I’m just irritated – we’ve wasted so much time! Although I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Whatever the case,” I reassure her, “it is not your fault.”

Elsa shakes her head. I’m already well acquainted with her overdeveloped sense of responsibility. “Yes, probably,” she says, “but still: it’s not at all clear where to begin. As far as I understand it, I need to be fully open with you, not concealing anything. Like with a doctor or a shrink – and not keep any secrets as I would with a boyfriend or a husband. I’ve already told you a lot, although not everything of course – but I didn’t know!”

We arrive at a café with a terrace. As usual, all the tables are occupied. The quarantiners, ensconced in wicker chairs, closely examine the passers-by. In their tall glasses, variously colored drinks: all sweet, cool and fizzy.

“Ah,” says Elsa. “I so miss alcohol!” I agree, understanding her well.

A singer with a guitar sits on the sidewalk leaning against the railings, tanned to a nut brown, with long hair and sunken eyes. We stop at the balustrade a couple of paces away from him to listen. Several other people stand next to us; a middle-aged man smiles at me, and I nod back amiably.

“Oh, what are we drunken bums gonna do now?” he sings in a hoarse baritone. “How can we live now that Elsa has gone? Our bar bereft of her big breasts and thighs…”

“Did you hear that?” I say with a grin. “He’s written a song in your honor.”

“So you think my thighs are big, do you?” Elsa says, offended.

“Joke!” I rush to reassure her. “You know your legs are your strong suit.”

“That’s what everyone used to say!” she declares. “Until they met my sister, of course. And did you notice how honest I’m being with you?”

A young woman passes by, alone, without a companion. She walks, smiling to herself, not paying attention to anyone around her. Some look her up and down and follow her with their gaze. I also watch her go.

“A newcomer,” says Elsa. “A new arrival who has just moved in and is living all alone. I was exactly the same – I used to go down to the sea and wander around aimlessly… It seems so long ago – like an eternity. And my Nestor seemed so sweet back then!”

Obviously, her morning session with her Nestor has been a bit of a drama. I even feel a little schadenfreude. Although, most likely it’s just jealousy.

“You know,” Elsa looks up at me, “somehow after this morning’s session, I don’t want to leave Quarantine at all. I sensed so much indifference toward me… Do you think they’ll kick us out as soon as we find this connection between us? This invisible link – I didn’t really get what it’s all about.”

I hasten to calm her, “No, the Brochure stipulates otherwise. Although it doesn’t contain a word about any invisible link.”

The singer starts a new song, “How can I love you with all my heart when I know there’ll be another life? And I don’t know whether I’ll meet the one I loved so much in my past one…”

“How true!” Elsa exclaims. “Don’t you think? It’s a good thing I didn’t love anyone in my previous life. Let’s go.”

We wander farther along the promenade, squinting in the sun. “‘How can I love you with all my heart…’” purrs Elsa, nestling into my shoulder. I smell a faint trace of the perfume she’s wearing today – something subtle, exciting, bitter.

“Generally,” she says, “to fall in love, you have to choose someone accessible, who is in close proximity. Maybe there just weren’t the right people around me. And here – the only accessible man is you. It would be so easy to choose you! It’s a pity I can’t allow myself to do that – everything here is so artificial, unreal. I don’t feel like getting deeply emotional; it would be better if we just remained friends. Ha-ha, imagine you are, you know, a nice guy, the sort that girls always just want to be ‘good friends with.’ Although, with our bodies here, that doesn’t make much difference. And in return, I promise I won’t pester you with questions about your feelings – like, whether you love me or not and, if so, how you’ll prove it… Do you like this deal?”

“Suits me,” I nod and smile at her with a slightly insincere grin.

“Today I talked to Nestor about it – about accessibility and so on,” Elsa continues. “But he just kept returning to the same thing – that you and I being together was no accident. I even thought: maybe he just wants to find out what’s going on between us? In general, he’s become a real bore, the sort of man you know you’ll never sleep with – from the first moment you set eyes on him!”

She laughs ambiguously and falls silent. We walk on for another couple of hundred meters and, without saying a word, turn back.

“Well, what about you?” Elsa turns back to me. “Have you remembered anything about your Asian girl with the red streak in her hair? Tell me about her – I’ll understand. And I’ll tell you something else about Nancy or Dave in turn. Or, do you still want to talk about those particles and fields of yours? I’ll try very hard to listen, honest!”

Chapter 12

That evening I tell Nestor, “My roommate hasn’t been herself all day. Her counselor has started behaving differently – what is this, some sort of Nestors’ plot? Or a conspiracy, more like?”

Nestor mutters, “Conspiracies, conspiracies… Anyway, you should try to adjust to her. You should appreciate her, think what this is all about. Adapt as you go along, maybe even set an example – although, of course, expecting that of you is a vain hope. You are extremely focused on yourself – like all creators of theories.”

He is calm and benign – there isn’t a trace of this morning’s irritation. We exchange a few more pleasantries, then Nestor says mysteriously, “Symmetry… I would suggest you focus on symmetry. At least on the word itself, if not on the overall concept. This is my advice to you – perhaps the best I’ve given this week!”

On that note, our conversation ends; I soon fall asleep and have a dream I have chosen for myself. There are no concepts or clever words in it; I am whisked away to an island with black sand, to the childhood of my first life, to the instant when I first became aware of my “individual self” and, instantaneously, its brief and finite nature. Yet again, I see my confusion, my fear – the fear of death that will someday come for me – I remember how it used to torture me at night. I remember how I bit my pillow, lying in a sweat, unable to move until some noise outside would bring me back to reality, forcing me to wake up. Then I fell asleep, and in the morning, in the bright light of day, I recalled this fear in a detached way, like a bout of illness that has been left in the past. I remembered it and – in a mature, truly adult way – reflected on the instability and incredible transience of everything. And I concluded: mortality can only be justified by some great achievement – and fantasized vigorously what this achievement might be, what awaited me, what would be my mission.

I did not share these thoughts with anyone – neither my mother nor her relatives, whom I spent most of my days with. My home life was not a happy one. It was at that time my stepfather appeared in my life, a puffy, balding man with moist breath and an oily gaze. We took an immediate disliking to each other. I avoided him as much as I could, and for about a year we managed to coexist without incident, but then my mother had to go away for a couple of days and, having gotten drunk he decided to reach out to me – in the crudest sense of the term.

It happened in the evening, in the kitchen, where I was warming up my dinner – a stifado stew and braised beans. My stepfather came up from behind and put his hand under my clothes, but I managed to twist away and throw the contents of the pan in his face. He stepped back with a yell, then recovered a little and was about to rush at me, but I had already grabbed a knife, a trusty heavy-duty santoku, and he thought it best to leave me alone. I spent the night with the knife in my hand and told my mother everything when she asked the reason for my stepfather’s burns, but she didn’t believe me and started screaming, accusing me of malicious lies. I didn’t blame her – seeing the terrible helplessness in her eyes. After that, I was twice taken to a psychiatrist but not in earnest and, in my opinion, without any definite purpose. And then through my stepfather’s uncle’s connections, I was brought to Athens, to the office of a very attentive functionary. He had a number of conversations with me, and before I knew it I found myself in a very different country, full of wind and rain and devoid of sun…

I spent my entire adolescence there, in a boarding school on the shores of a leaden sea. Then I got into a good, reputable university, but those years fly past incoherently in my dream, and once again toward morning it’s dominated by the same balding man, his scream and his lascivious, twisted mouth. I do not want to look at him; I already know where this evil memory is leading – and try to push it off, drive it away. It retreats but I wake up understanding that its time will come.

In the morning, Elsa greets me warmly. “I’ve made it up with him,” she says first thing. “He’s become nicer, changed his tone. Nevertheless, I’ve forgotten nothing – it’s now clear: if we were on earth, nothing would have worked out between us. He just doesn’t satisfy my list of traits.”

I look at her in some bewilderment.

“Nestor,” she explains and pulls a face, “You are so slow sometimes! Maybe you also wouldn’t have passed muster for my list… Come on then, tell me what you dreamed about.”

I share my dream without concealing anything – omitting only a few details. “That’s interesting,” Elsa says politely. “Interesting but completely foreign to me. By the way, for breakfast I made you a mushroom omelette. I’m afraid it’s slightly burned – I’m sorry. I’m not very good at omelettes – I used to try to surprise Dave and then another man but could never manage to get them right. Once Dave even shouted at me – in San Jose, on the first day of our vacation…”

She talks about her short break with her boyfriend. It’s all as alien to me as my Greek island is to her. Then we go to my bedroom to see what the weather has in store for us today. Outside, there are clouds, wind and the same gray, inhospitable sea I caught a glimpse of in my recent dream. We decide to give our walk a miss and settle ourselves down as usual: I at the table with my pencil and paper, she on the couch with her needlework.

I draw a sloping pebble beach with gulls hovering overhead. Then, skipping to another country and another time, I sketch two spired towers – this is the town hall opposite the university building. The towers are the same, indistinguishable – “Symmetrical,” I say aloud, causing Elsa to glance up at me. I continue, “They are translationally similar. The symmetry of translation… The energy-momentum tensor remains conserved…”

This inkling of recognition is so strong that I know it is no deception. I scribble something meaningless and indiscriminate under the towers and suddenly, of its own accord, my hand produces a familiar equation. I’ve seen it before and it makes sense – I understand its meaning well. I’ve been tinkering with its variations for a long time – since my youth. Since my first romantic jousts at the mysteries and conundrums of the universe. I freeze, and yes: the veil falls from my eyes, scraps of formulas line up in a logical chain. This is a breakthrough, perhaps the most important since my arrival at Quarantine. Sensing my physics finally returning to me, I take a new sheet of paper and scribble and scribble…

Nestor was right: the notion of symmetry has occupied me since childhood. He was also right about my physics teacher, a heavy-drinking descendant of impoverished Russian aristocrats – I remember his stooped figure and trembling hands. He was kind and deeply in love with his science; he would tell me stories about my own ancestors, about Euclid and Plato, who took great pride in symmetry, as they took great pride in beauty, and he would add with a grin, “In general, modern science has not moved on from them that much; it’s just gone a bit deeper into the details.” He would bring me books – I understood almost nothing of their contents, but occasionally I would experience insights, glimpses. Certain symbols and words would suddenly become meaningful, and I was suffused with a premonition of immeasurable depths of meaning – I knew that sooner or later they would submit to me. Then there was boarding school, where the physics that had been hiding behind a looking-glass, like an amorphous figure, began to turn into something with firm contours and later – to disintegrate into parts that were closely connected. The equations no longer seemed like cryptograms with a hidden code – it was the richest of languages, perfectly intelligible to the initiated. Then it was time to go to Bern, to the university – and there everything that had seemed like a piece of unread prose suddenly turned into poetry consisting of the most complex forms, the true manifestation of the harmony of the world. I finally felt the power of proper, pure mathematics, fused to my chosen science like a Siamese twin. The presaged depths of meaning started to emerge – reaching them required the greatest effort, but the most precious rewards waited there. At least, that’s what I wanted to believe.

As Nestor had correctly noted, my path to the secrets of nature had started out from the very first moments of the universe. Specifically, from the asymmetry of baryons[10] – the predominance of matter over antimatter, which resulted in the emergence of the “material,” out of which all heavenly bodies, including our planet and everything on it, were made. At the university, I finally learned how this was formulated in modern physics – at a lecture on baryogenesis, which was delivered by Professor Kertner. We listened to him with bated breath – the story he recounted was a gripping one. It turned out baryon asymmetry was still unexplained, and Kertner revealed intriguing details to us: he hypothesized on the nonconservation of the baryon charge and exclaimed, “But why is the proton so stable then?” He cited examples of parity violation and immediately demonstrated why this does not suffice to explain the superiority of matter over the antipode. He placed particular emphasis on quarks – wrote out the main equation of chromodynamics on the blackboard, circling a part of it with his piece of chalk and in his excitement almost shouted, “Here it is, the possibility of a violation of balance that could explain everything! Here it is, the chance, but nature rejected this chance! We know this, if for no other reason than because the neutron, as its name suggests, really is neutral, despite everyone’s efforts to prove it has at least the slightest dipole moment.[11] We call this the strong CP problem – at least, we had sufficient sense to acknowledge the strength of our incomprehension… I’m joking here, of course: it’s only ‘strong’ because it refers to the strong interactions inside the nuclei. But the play of words is amusing – sometimes words reveal more than we initially plan…”

During the lecture, I became tremendously agitated. I felt the professor was addressing me personally, looking directly into my eyes. It was as if together we were lifting the curtain, looking into the innermost secrets of the world – and I realized I could no longer remain on the sidelines. I needed to give a sign, a signal – that I would also shoulder the responsibility for all this. Burning with bashfulness, I caught up with the professor at the door of the lecture theater and asked where and how I could learn more about the asymmetry of baryons. He gave me a sideways glance, nonchalantly directed me to a postdoc by the name of Gunter Stadelmann and promptly forgot about my existence.

Gunter did not have any time for me and was incapable of explaining anything anyway. He could only write out formulas on paper and poke his finger at them, accompanying this gesture with inarticulate scraps of phrases.

I said to him, “I want to understand why there ended up being more quarks than antiquarks.”

Gunter grinned, “Well, you won’t understand it right away.”

“I know, I know,” I waved my hand. “What I meant was: a baryon charge – yes, okay, but what about the combined parity…? Let’s accept, the problem really is ‘strong,’ but there should have been attempts to somehow explain, to understand!”

Then I fell silent and blushed painfully, but Gunter looked at me with some interest. His grin grew wider; “However, yes! Parity, quark…” he nodded. “There were attempts. What do you know about it?”

I confessed I knew almost nothing. Gunter thought for a while, rummaged in the cupboard and threw three heavy volumes onto the table in front of me. On top of them, he added several academic journals and said, “Read these. And here, have a look at the Lagrangian, for example…” He scribbled down the already familiar equation on a piece of paper; I sighed and thanked him hurriedly. My eyes were burning and my entire being was singing.

Needless to say, I gave myself up to work with all the fervor of youth. And was immediately possessed by a great dream – to succeed in doing what no one else had done, to find the first causes of the apparent first causality, to explain why the proton is stable and the neutron is neutral, why nature behaves precisely in this way. I was working hard, ploughing through integrals and tensors, complex functions and covariant derivatives – and learning to see through the walls, through the leaden shells of ignorance, the basalt strata of incomprehension. The goings-on in the very interior of matter, inside the atomic nuclei and their fragments, resonated in my soul like the most harmonious music. I was astonished at the way concise mathematical constructs described the incredible intricacy of reality – much of which didn’t look real at all. Quarks, their generations and the mass difference, their complex color space… Gluons,[12] carriers of the strong force, also differing in color… Freedom in close proximity and captivity at a distance, the inability to break out of the mysterious confinement… I read about quantum chromodynamics as if it were a gripping detective thriller, I raved about it to everyone, including my friends and the girls I met. This repelled the friends and especially the girls – which didn’t upset me in the slightest.

Above all, I was fascinated by the most fundamental part of the theory – the concept of gauge fields. Its power was striking: a mere handful of hypotheses about the invariance of certain properties gave rise to equations that described the entire dynamics of the microworld. Fields and forces were needed only to compensate for imperfection, to return symmetry to its proper pedestal. It was the triumph of mathematics in its most prominent form, and I spent many hours wrestling with calibration transformations, Feynman diagrams and action integrals, Green’s functions and Gell-Mann matrices. I tried to get a feel for the finest minutiae, the significance of each variable, each parameter, sign, index – and finally, after months of furious labor, mastered at least a part of this extremely difficult mathematical apparatus. I mastered it – and ran on ahead, immediately rushing to test it in practice.

My all-consuming dream and ambition pushed at my back; I couldn’t wait to make big strides toward it. Far from knowing everything required either from the books lent to me by Gunter or from the relevant scientific articles, I nevertheless understood where the roots of the “strong” CP problem lay. Its source was a special anomaly, a nonlinear term in the Lagrangian function, describing the dynamics of quarks. The anomaly explicitly violated the combined parity and this, as Professor Kertner had told us, seemed natural: here it was, a trick of nature that had led to the emergence of matter. But practice showed: this was not so. For the entire theory to hold true, the nonlinear part would have to become negligibly small. This could only be achieved by zeroing out its multiplier, a certain angular parameter, denoted by the Greek letter theta. The CP problem was reformulated as follows: Why is the theta angle incredibly close to zero?

“Revealing!” I thought, remembering my childhood, the ruins on the hill and the inscriptions in the ancient language. Even back then I had imagined hidden meanings in the Greek alphabet – and now it had been reduced to a single letter for me. The theta angle had its own secret; it could not be just a simple constant, chosen at random by the universe. Its smallness should be a consequence, not a cause – a consequence of unknown processes invisible to anyone. The apparent simplicity would have to be a collision of complexities – an elaborate mechanism competing with an even more elaborate one, a struggle not for life but death, mutual death in battle… And I, putting aside any further study of my books, began to ponder over the mystery of theta.

At first, nothing worked out; my calculations showed only one thing: mathematics allows for an infinite number of possible worlds with various nonlinear multipliers. Why had nature chosen zero or a vanishingly small value? Equations provided no answer; then I began to search for the connection between variations in the theta angle and the other properties of the whole system, all the interplay between gluons and quarks – and soon noticed that theta’s different values do not just simply emerge but only do so along with “phase rotations” of the quark fields. All these rotations were permitted, they were equal, if only… And then it dawned on me: they were only equivalent if the quark field didn’t interact with something that might compensate for the rotation, causing the quarks to get stuck and gain mass. It was like Higgs’s famous example – and I fearlessly expanded the Lagrangian with a new term, transformed it into the canonical form, compared its structure to the structure of the nonlinear anomaly and saw that they essentially coincided. Moreover, after calculating the real functionals, I found exactly what I expected: the most probable, the most stable state of the system – its energy minimum – is obtained precisely when the rotations of the new field together with the quark field fully compensate the anomalous vortices. My new angle of theta derived from the old one – from any old one! – as a result of the compensating interaction, must be strictly equal to zero in our real, not an imaginary, world. Well, how about that for a solution!

A new interaction and a new field meant the emergence of a new particle. I saw it in my Lagrangian – there it was, in square brackets, concealed in a standard mathematical transformation… Squiggles on a piece of paper had been converted into reality, living for a micro-moment and obscured from everyone. From everyone except me; this particle had evidently failed to hide itself from me. Well, it needed to be named… I thought about it a little and chose the most natural name. I called my particle the “Theodorus boson,” or the “theonon” for short.

I gave it its name and repeated it aloud to myself, over and over again, in every way possible. I repeated it – and I swelled with pride. I’m only twenty, and, see, I’ve already solved one of the greatest problems of physics. Recognition awaits me – yes, for sure – and maybe even a Nobel prize – right away! And then – what will be next? It was scary to imagine the prospects opening up before me…

Neglecting my studies completely, I tidied up the sketches of my theory of the theonons as best I could and, burning with impatience, showed it to Gunter. He glanced at it briefly and said with a laugh, “Ah, the queen’s approach…” I shook my head, puzzled. He rummaged around in his cupboard, slipped me a few photocopies, and then, on the move, pointed out a series of errors and incorrect assumptions that blew my “theory” out of the water. I wanted the ground to swallow me up, my pride turned to ignominious shame, but Gunter was impressed all the same. He looked more closely at my formulas and muttered, “This is elegant, yes. And here: that’s a bold transformation – and a correct one, it seems. You’ve been very deft with the pseudoscalar field…”

The articles he gave me described Peccei-Quinn theory. They introduced the concept of axions, hypothetical particles designed to solve the strong CP problem in much the same way as I had chosen. The axions had not yet been found, but no one could deny their existence either. I saw this as an encouraging example: a lot of wriggle room was permitted in modern physics – for all its seemingly unassailable harmony. Its buildings contained secret doors, disguised windows, passageways and loopholes, allowing one to penetrate into a hidden world full of mysteries and to find there – what? Something that had hitherto been unknown before me.

This was my first attempt at creation, at thinking outside the box – and overall it was a positive experience; I had been blessed with beginner’s luck. I was crestfallen, but I was happy – especially as the next day Gunter Stadelmann invited me to work with him. He spoke with Professor Kertner, and I was officially added to the staff of the scientific group at the department of theoretical physics.

Gunter was working on the problem of color confinement – trying to understand why quarks do not “wander around on their own,” but are always combined in twos and threes in accordance with certain color schemes. Nobody knew why. No one had so far succeeded in explaining the phenomenon mathematically or “deriving” the confinement from the known fundamental laws. There were a few hypotheses, and Gunter was investigating one of them – the screening of color charge. The plan was that I would be doing the same when I was ready, and I began to prepare myself – in earnest! Having just soared to the heavens, I was brought back down to earth again, but the heat of the stars had not melted the wax in my wings. I was full of desires and energy.

Moreover, as Nestor had noted, I had moved one step further regarding the evolution of the world: from immeasurably high energies and quark-gluon plasma[13] to the slightly cooler “hadron phase” of the universe, when constituent particles, including all known protons and neutrons, were formed from quarks. The hadron universe was structurally richer than the quark-gluon one, and the equations describing it were much more complicated. Now there could be no neglecting a single nonlinearity or feedback. The approximations that worked well in the extreme case of free quarks failed at low energies, leading to singularities,[14] which, one way or another, needed to be eliminated. This was achieved using elaborate procedures – the most complex mathematics, which I had not yet mastered. To be up to the job, I needed to improve my theorist’s skill-set to the highest level in the shortest possible time – and I succeeded, although it was not easy. I did it – and began to see the light, casting off my blinders, as if I had climbed up a hill in the middle of a boundless forest and could make out a part of the landscape. I started to understand what I was doing and why, how it related to the general structure of the world. It was the happiest of sensations – I became free and all-powerful. I myself could formulate scientific tasks and assess their complexity, significance and place in the big picture. For the first time since childhood, I felt like a kid left on his own in a toy store.

And I really was left on my own. Seeing how tirelessly and fearlessly I grasped at everything, Gunter was at first taken aback but then resigned himself to my restlessness and even began to encourage it. Sometimes he very tactfully warned me about hidden dead ends or, more often, suggested shortcuts, but on the whole, he agreed with my somewhat chaotic free-ranging search. Also, it became clear that I was very good at solving equations – almost better than he was himself. I was helped by an unmistakable sense of what works and what doesn’t that usually only comes with experience, but which I developed almost immediately on my own. Therefore, I would get results quickly and efficiently without wasting time. Even Professor Kertner became interested in me a year later and began to invite me to his private seminars.

I was oscillating between very different models of quark interaction. I tried computer simulation and analogies with quantum liquids and even superstring theory. I saw how the familiar equations of chromodynamics miraculously appeared in other formal systems that seemed to be very different. This promised some new perspectives, connecting physics to other sciences that I knew little about. I felt it was too early for me to approach these distant realms. So, having toured diverse regions and spheres, I returned to where I had started – to the Lagrangians and gauge fields, to the magical power of abstract mathematics that gives birth to the physics of the world. I had made a circle, one of many, and returned to my starting point – but already as a different man.

Symmetry, like a guiding star, drew me toward it again, but now the noisy raptures of childhood gave way to a silent piety, an understanding of its supreme role. From the images and forms – in my teen years – to the symmetry of properties – in boarding school – to the preservation of parity and the reversal of time… At the time, I believed I was approaching the summit, when in fact I was still tramping away in the foothills, not daring to raise my eyes from my feet. The real ascent only began at the university, when I learned about the invariability of the laws of nature in different metrics and reference frames. And then came the time when I was able to properly appreciate the turning point in the physics of the twentieth century, a revolution in consciousness, a change of perspective. Like in the fairy tales, symmetry was turned into a handsome prince – from being merely a consequence, an interesting property, it became the origin, the essence. If previously it had been noticed by observing nature, now symmetry itself predicted how all real, observed nature would behave. Assumptions about its new forms became the primary source of physical theories!

Realizing this fundamental difference, I no longer felt a childish, but a mature, adult delight in the true beauty that determines everything. I realized: what interested me most was its rationale – how and why it arises, how it then manifests itself. The life of beauty was a struggle – a struggle against imperfection. To preserve it, every point of space required “compensation,” “calibration” – and out of this requirement came all the physics of the modern world, all the fields and the particles carrying them, all that is visible and tangible around us… I decided this was precisely what I wanted to focus on. And that was exactly what I told Gunter Stadelmann.

By that time, Gunter had made quite a lot of progress himself. His manipulations with quark colors were original and very promising. Naturally, he assumed I would also concentrate on his developments. Nevertheless, he did not oppose me.

Our conversation took place on a cold autumn day. “Well, yes, yes,” Stadelmann chuckled, twirling his fountain pen in his fingers, and asked with a grin, “You have your sights on something global, don’t you?” I just shrugged. He nodded, as if he understood, and suddenly suggested, “Shall we get some fresh air? Grab an umbrella…”

Through the miserable, drizzly rain, Gunter took me to the Albert Einstein Museum. It was deserted; we spent about an hour wandering around the small apartment in which Einstein had created his first theories. I examined the copies of his letters to scientific journals that had not taken him seriously. I imagined how, rejected by official science, he would write out his formulas on the kitchen table while his wife rocked their child in the adjoining room, behind a shaky screen. It was here that he experienced to the fullest that very revolution, that pivotal moment – but without anyone prompting him: he was the first. The first who dared to think differently. He had started with symmetry and obtained from it new laws on the dynamics of the universe. It was the turning point. In a sense, the point of no return.

Then we went to a bar and, for the first time, got drunk together. I excitedly and verbosely tried to prove to Gunter what Albert Einstein’s secret had been – and Gunter tried to prove the same to me. He – Einstein! – had been told that he had not been fit to pursue serious physics – yet he was unable not to think about it or, more to the point, was incapable of not feeling what was overflowing his soul. The notion that he perceived with his whole being – a symmetry, a similarity, the covariance of space-time – set him on his course and did not allow him to waver from it. The cornerstone change of the paradigm before Einstein was beyond the power of the human mind – or maybe simply before him, no one had been feeling with such passion? Passion protected him from the horror of looking into the bottomless depths. It allowed him to embrace the unembraceable while at the same time keeping the whole picture in mind. Thoughts lined up in a closed loop; an idea flashed – and was caught in this loop. And he, Albert Einstein, tamed the idea, formulated it, expressed it aloud…

It was me who used the word “passion,” and Gunter agreed with it. We became comrades-in-arms on that day; it marked the moment of our solidarity. Of course, the symmetries and similarities in our science were not the ones that Einstein was thinking about. We were dealing not with global space-time but with the invariability of equations under shifts and rotations, interchanges between “left” and “right” particles and so forth. This invariability was hidden deep in mathematics; it could not be directly observed, and, despite being in step with the experiments, our theories were not completely accurate. We worked with approximations in different energy scales, and the most interesting thing was concealed from us: when changing from scale to scale, from magnitude to magnitude, not only the form of the equations but also their internal properties changed. The world, “cooling down,” moving from high energies to low, became less symmetrical – spontaneously, by itself, without outside interference. Matter acquired new shapes; new structures arose in it – this was progress, movement forward, but nature had to pay for this, renouncing part of the perfection.

It was the spontaneous violation of symmetry that became the focus of my interest. I wanted to get inside, to find out how it happened and at what expense. What was this mechanism of transition in which matter becomes different?… Thus, I concentrated on the jump from free quarks to “color slavery,” from plasma to hadrons, when fermion[15] loops start to appear in the equations and it is no longer possible to disregard the nonlinearities of the gluon fields. Loops meant bound states – mesons, protons and neutrons. They described the world we are familiar with, coinciding amazingly with reality. It was wonderful, but there was also a strangeness: the symmetry of the initial high-energy formulas was lost – and as a result, we had half as many composite particles as we might have had, and some of them were inexplicably massive. The inexplicable to me was like a red rag to a bull – I scowled at it and charged headlong into the fight.

My goal was again utterly ambitious – Gunter turned out to be right. Just as I had two years earlier, I wanted to create my own theory, to find the first principle, to look into the deepest of abysses. I wanted to understand, right down to the smallest detail, how mysterious metamorphosis takes place, who participates in it, changing the world when crossing the boundary beyond which quarks can no longer live alone. There were many options, and I chose the most difficult of them. Again, as in the struggle with the theta angle, I began to introduce into the equations new degrees of freedom, fields and particles unknown to anyone. They lived immeasurably briefly, leaving no trace behind in the most sensitive detectors but fulfilling their kamikaze missions, permanently changing the properties of the matter that we see and from which we are made. They had perished but had bequeathed a result, and I set myself the task of restoring justice, of unveiling them, of at least giving them names, if not the rewards they deserved…

Similar approaches had been tried before me. They belonged to the “technicolor” theories, using the unobservable, “technical” fermions, which were making the vacuum nonempty, forcing the real quarks to slow down within it. I worked tirelessly, introducing newer and newer terms into equations, varying the degrees of freedom and gauge fields. Multitudes of new particles arose in my formulas – they were exotic, living only for a very brief moment, but in that instant they succeeded in breaking the symmetrical initial state of the whole system of gluons and quarks, making some heavier and destroying others, giving impetus to stability before disappearing from the scene…

I fumbled about with “technicolor” until my graduation from the university. My efforts didn’t lead to a full theory, but some results were worthwhile. I was noticed and criticized to keep me in order, and I began to feel I had rightfully joined the theoreticians’ community – a peculiar caste, living in its own peculiar world. And of course, I now considered myself an expert in that very passage through a special point – in the spontaneous violation of the symmetry of the processes of the microcosm hidden from our eyes. Later this concept played a crucial role, and at that time I was only secretly proud – of myself and with myself, not quite understanding why. From that pride, I came up with new words – not without reason: the spontaneous “violation” was not a violation at all upon careful examination. Similarities in the equations did not disappear forever but had been carefully hidden, as if concealed up a magician’s sleeve. The higher symmetry of the laws of nature was here, but we were only allowed to touch a single version of the implementation of these laws. This far-from-novel idea would give me no peace for some reason. I savored it from all sides, enjoying it as if I had been the first to come up with it. And I gave my own name to the process of spontaneous violation: I called it the “cunning trick” – like coding it with a cipher, a secret message to myself. A message that could be read and unraveled when needed.

Meanwhile, the time came to defend my master’s thesis, which I did brilliantly. Gunter was pleased with me – and soon we discussed our future. He received an invitation to Heidelberg, to one of the world’s leading laboratories, and Professor Kertner promised to arrange for me to go there as well. It was not easy, but he used his connections and kept his word.

Overall, it seemed that a bright, cloudless future was waiting for me.

Chapter 13

Here in Quarantine we have been enjoying clear, cloudless weather for the third day in a row. Nevertheless, Elsa and I don’t go down to the sea but sit at home. We were recently caught unawares by a new glitch in the reality here – a hurricane, knocking over the trash cans and tearing the roofs off the stalls. It flew in suddenly and almost knocked us off our feet; we took refuge behind the balustrade and waited for the strongest squalls to pass, clutching frantically at the railings. Others who could, did likewise – the seafront was emptied in an instant, garbage hurtling along the shore, the wind howling and whistling nastily. The sound was full of hopelessness, despair – and Elsa wandered around with a gloomy face all evening.

“I don’t understand,” she told me. “Are they provoking us or, rather, are we provoking them, and they’re just reacting as best they can? Or is it one and the same thing?”

I just shrugged – I’m not as sensitive to the instability of the environment as my roommate. In her first life, Elsa also perceived the slightest hint of instability as a personal affront. I am well aware of this, along with many other things – I have already learned a lot about her. Over the past week, she has recounted to me in great detail her adolescence, her fairly insipid youth and the years she spent growing up, which were not marked by a great deal of variety either. We laughed together at her short-lived passion for collecting – when she was fascinated with oddly shaped items. She could spend hours looking at some strange stone, imagining where it had come from and the places it had been, and then suddenly turn against it and throw it away. Then she became captivated by chemistry – mainly because of her love for smells, through which she seemed to perceive the world. Soon enough this passed as well, Elsa got into college, studied English philology, read a lot of books and even attempted to do some writing herself. Some of her articles were published by a local newspaper, and her desk drawer was filled with scraps of verse – mostly about solitude and the world’s imperfections. Sometimes she wanted to misbehave but her obsession with being a “good girl” did not allow her to go far. She tried to find excitement in something moderately extreme – surfing, rafting, skiing and even parachute jumping – but nothing took her fancy. After every adrenaline trip, she would settle back into her favorite armchair with a sense of relief and a cup of hot chocolate and wonder what her acquaintances saw in all this nonsense…

Not so long ago she suddenly asked, “Could you draw me that picture of yours with the tangles of yarn? The ones that were floating in the ocean – which you and your Nestor were philosophizing about.”

I obediently drew the image and tried to explain something, but she stopped me and gazed at the drawing for a long time without saying a word. Her strained, frozen expression even frightened me a little, but then Elsa brightened up and became her old self again.

“I can’t understand why you’re so obsessed with this,” she said. “What’s the use of your intertwined worlds if you still can’t travel beyond your own thread? I don’t see worlds here at all but something else – and I now realize why this yarn annoys me so much. I’ve always imagined my life differently – easier, as if charted with straight lines. Each segment – a defined stage without any deviations. One attempt after another to live the same way as other people – and to derive satisfaction, if not pleasure, out of it!”

I joked in reply, “So that means going in straight lines, sliding over the surface, never penetrating the depths? Moving from marker to marker, from beacon to beacon – do you not think this is a case study of you?”

My words made Elsa angry and she sulked all evening and all the next morning. She was unfriendly at breakfast, playing the role of waitress and asking sarcastically, “Seeing as you’re so smart, what would you like to order, maybe some fancy delicacy or other? Today we have very good stewed penguins!” Then she began to whisper something barely audibly, and when I asked her to repeat herself she chuckled, “Are you a bit deaf? Then read my lips!” And she muttered something indistinctly while I looked in confusion at the blurred spot where her lips should have been.

But then the hurricane happened, forcing her to forget the perceived insult. Now we are on good terms again; our apartment is a safe refuge and there’s no dragging her away from it despite the sunny weather. We sit at the table, I work on my equations, and Elsa, after borrowing a piece of paper, writes some words, short sentences, and then crosses them out one by one.

“It’s pointless!” she announces suddenly. “It’s not working out. I wanted to surprise you, but for some reason, my memory won’t let me do this.” Then she explains, “I was trying to remember my poem – the only one that ended up being half-decent. In fact, it was so half-decent that I got frightened, crumpled it up and threw it away. And I never wrote poetry again!

“It was about the good girls,” she adds after a pause. “And, in general – about how I see the world and everything on it. Although it was only eight lines long – can you imagine? At the time, I realized writing was not for me. I can’t stand digging deep down inside myself.”

Elsa gets up, opens the fridge, takes a bottle of ice-cold cola and offers it to me, “Do you want one?” Without taking my eyes off my notes, I shake my head. She goes up to the window with the bottle in her hands and raps her fingers against the glass, “Hey, hey!”

I look up. “It’s another squirrel,” says Elsa. “They seem to have multiplied recently. Reproduced virtually as a result of illusory coitus…”

I look at her, at her silhouette, gracefully inserted into the rectangle of the window and suddenly ask, “What do you think would have changed in your life, if you’d known for sure there would be another one?”

Elsa shrugs, “Nothing. Except, perhaps, I might not have been in such a hurry to throw away that poem of mine. I would have paid a lot more attention to it. But all in all… I always thought I’d enjoy myself while I was young. Later – put up with getting old; then grow really old, begin to get ill and hate my body. Finally, I’d die, and life as such would be over. And then, I’d probably go to heaven – this was what I believed with all my heart. Now, I’ve been promised something like a new beginning, with all the hassles that go with it, and, once again, I have to trust – not Nancy, but Nestor and the Brochure. And so, will it continue? Will I have cause to hate myself time and time over?”

I know she is poking fun at my question, and I grin, “Just think that you’ll always be young.”

Elsa snorts, “What am I, a complete fool?”

Then she picks up her needlework and sits down on the couch. She sews with a fine stitch, inclining her head slightly. I contemplate to myself: What would have changed in my first life had I known that the end was not the end? On the whole, not very much – only, perhaps, I would have had a reason to try even harder. To be more motivated – knowing that what you have achieved will not be lost so soon, that there is a chance at another future around the corner. One chance, then another… That’s no small thing. A step or two closer to immortality.

Yet I had tried as hard as I could as it was – I doubt I could have done more. In much the same way as I couldn’t have straightened my path in life, avoiding diversions and false steps. When the future seems clear it is always deceptive – I learned that from my youth. And experienced it fully after my university studies before moving to Heidelberg.

Yes, my future seemed enviable, but confusion reigned in my head – and the problem was not in the formulas, not in integrals and matrices. What troubled me was the everyday life that existed around me, beyond mathematics, outside the university walls. My feet weren’t planted firmly enough on the ground; I seemed to be dangling in a void. There were plenty of footholds – society offered them in abundance. But its offers were increasingly irritating me – and most of all I was frustrated with the city of Bern, the sated self-satisfaction that it embodied.

After a certain time, its essence – despite Einstein and the university – began to corrode my mind. I looked around and saw a deformed space like a reflection in a distorted mirror. A bourgeois perspective of the world irrevocably collapsed into a cone. The indestructible walls of the shopping arcades and the boutique windows that stretched into the infinitesimal distance were actually being condensed from infinity into a small neighborhood, which was becoming increasingly claustrophobic. Its borders shielded against passion and madness, from every chance accident imaginable. The world narrowed rapidly, like a power series; it converged to zero. I began to be afraid of falling into a vortex, into the area of its convergence, to become infected by the world, as if it were a serious, incurable disease.

Like all students, I was poor, and my contact with bourgeois life was infrequent. But it did sometimes occur; one such occasion took place a month after my thesis defense – and it changed my life. Gunter and his wife had invited me to dinner to celebrate my newly acquired status. I was grateful to them, but as soon as I entered the restaurant, I realized my resentment had reached the boiling point and would not be easy to control.

Gunter was not aware of any of this. He was proud of himself, proud of me, pleased with everything. As for me, I was sitting on tenterhooks. The finest foie gras melted in my mouth but tasted of nothing. I drank exclusive red wine from Pauillac province, and it seemed my glass was filled with sour, blood-colored water. I saw: the state of symmetry, when all paths are open and all possibilities are equal, was at the very point of disappearing. I was at the edge of the funnel leading to the bottom of the parabola, into the energy abyss. It was the surroundings that pushed me there – gently, but resolutely, uncompromisingly…

Gunter’s wife must have sensed something – and she looked at me furtively, as if assessing me, trying to fit a label. Her glances hinted at what would soon be controlling me: all the other looks, words and conventions that form the basis of this world. They – like pseudo-Goldstone bosons,[16] like magnons[17] in a ferromagnet or phonons[18] in a crystal – create a viscous field of collective opinion, fetter everyone with chains, preventing them from escaping from their eternal local vacuum.

I, in turn, assessed her too. I knew she was a good wife: she was smart, beautiful and supported Gunter in every respect – because he never attempted to step beyond the borders. But I saw her protective shell – the invisible “bourgeois bitch shield.” It fit her to a T, hugging her figure, emphasizing her finest charms. She and all the women nearby were wearing it – for protection against those who did not want to play by the rules of their sated, self-regarding lives. Against those who didn’t agree – as a matter of course – to become their property, to be tamed…

In the middle of the meal, Gunter proposed a toast to our future success. “No one shall be our equal!” he exclaimed. “Let the whole planet acknowledge that quarks have unconditionally submitted to us – we will look into their souls and capture their hidden essence. We may even be dubbed the Lords of the Quarks – Mr. Gunter ‘Quark’ Stadelmann and Mr. Theo ‘Quark’ Stamatis!”

For some reason, this touched a nerve with me. The very word “quark” suddenly became unpleasant. I frowned and told them a story about an actor who had never made it in Hollywood but had, nonetheless, won fame and fortune. It was a Pampers ad that had made him his money and catapulted him into the big time. The whole world loved him; he was even given the nickname – “Mr. Pampers…”

“In my opinion,” I said, “we are no different. And Pampers for some reason remind me of quarks!”

Gunter laughed politely – thinking I’d had one too many. His wife, however, was not so easily fooled. A distant threat dawned on her; she narrowed her eyes and said in a velvety voice, “Theo, Theo, you need to get married – do you have a fiancée? I know a few very nice girls who would suit you.”

I thought to myself: here – I am being pushed into the same lot as Gunter. He doesn’t seem to mind – but how would I find it? To penetrate under the invisible shield, one has to ask submissively. One has to lower his eyes and acknowledge his role. The role of a beggar – this self-satisfied world can never allow a man to exhibit his strength. Only one thing is ordained for him: to provide a comfortable way of life – for those wearing the protective shells who hold him in their possession. A woman of bourgeois society knows she is always right. Her principles are unshakable – because the comfort of her world is so complete. Her set of rules and opinions are localized in an energy pit, from which they cannot be shifted by any external force. The pit is as deep as her comfort level is high – they are, like the sine and cosine, functions of the same variable. What was this variable? I couldn’t say. I only knew that I didn’t want to depend on it, ever.

The impression made by that dinner did not dissipate the next day; I felt it had settled onto my soul for the long haul. I tried to get used to it, to live with it – and then took it away with me on a short vacation. The purpose of the trip was twofold: I really needed a rest and also considered it my duty to see my mother – for the first time in years. Thus, at the beginning of July, I hired a car and drove through half of Europe to Greece, the country where I had been born and which I now barely remembered.

For about a week I wandered aimlessly around Athens. I took in the litter-strewn streets, the dusty squares full of Albanian pickpockets; I climbed up to the Acropolis along with the tourist crowds. I dispassionately registered the cries of the traders in the fish market, the procession of fans from the Olympiacos stadium, a short violent fight next to a bar… The city was boiling with life; I imagined my desk, my notebook with my formulas – and a chill I had never experienced before ran down my spine. It seemed that something important, the real essence of life, would pass me by – was already passing me by! And I didn’t know how to catch its shadow…

The meeting with my family was scheduled for Saturday. My mother and stepfather came to Athens – the idea of going to the island and socializing with a noisy crowd of doting relatives was unbearable for me. I had brought Swiss chocolate and cheese and tried my utmost to be nice, but the meeting was still a failure. We did not know what to talk about, and besides, I noted how weary my mother had become, how her eyes had faded and her shoulders stooped. This, of course, did not improve the mood; I was sorry for her, but I could not help her and said goodbye at the first occasion. She went to a department store – to buy gifts for her relatives – but my stepfather latched onto me, saying he wanted to buy me a drink and have a talk “man to man.”

This was the last thing I wanted, but I couldn’t find the courage to turn him down. We drank tsipouro in a bar nearby, ordered another one, then another. My stepfather looked at me ingratiatingly; he confessed he wanted to make it up to me, to leave our “little misunderstanding” behind us, to return us to a semblance of a family. I understood what he really wished – to insinuate himself into what he believed was my “success,” into my career, about which he didn’t have a clue. He thought I was definitely on the way up, and he was trying to create a foothold – to somehow use it later to his own advantage…

After another round, anger and contempt finally began to well up inside me – toward him, toward his loser’s nature and his cheap hypocrisy. I told him we would have a reconciliation, but he must truly confess so that the whole world would hear. So that God would hear – I knew he was outwardly pious, like most Greeks. I don’t know what came over me, I had no plan, but my words rang out firmly – and, to my surprise, my stepfather accepted the challenge. His eyes flashing greedily, he gave a crooked grin and muttered, “I agree.” And asked me, finishing the remains of his brandy, “Where? And how?”

Without a second thought, I said, “On Wolf Mountain. At the summit – there’s a church where, according to rumors, sins are forgiven.”

We paid, and I took him to Lykabettos – up a winding path with steps. My stepfather staggered; he was drunk; large drops of sweat flowed down his face. I watched him with detached curiosity, wondering if I wanted his heart to fail right there and then. We reached the top without incident, however. My stepfather, panting and pouring with sweat, went into the church, knelt down and, gazing heavenward, began to whisper something. This lasted for a few minutes, then he heaved himself up, went outside and said, “God forgave me; I feel it!”

There was triumph in his voice; he evidently imagined he had deceived and outwitted me. Suddenly, my rage grew to unimaginable proportions.

“No,” I shook my head. “No, this is not enough. In addition to God, you must be heard by people, the whole city!”

“Well, what are you proposing?” he asked, knowing I was running out of arguments.

“Address them from here,” I nodded to the observation deck near the church. My stepfather stood silently as if failing to understand. “Address them!” I repeated insistently; it was as if I was being pressed by someone else’s will.

He shrugged, grinned and went to the railing. “From here?” he said impudently. It was clear to him that I was not going to outplay him, that I was driving myself into a trap.

“No, it’s too low,” I said. “Too little effort; it’s unworthy of this moment. Climb a bit higher – as high as you can.”

He nodded, gave me the thumbs-up and climbed onto the concrete base of the railings. They barely reached up to his knees. I already knew exactly what was about to happen, what would probably now come to pass. I understood, but there was nothing I could do – to restrain either myself or this alien will.

My stepfather turned toward the city stretching out beneath him. A gust of wind blew; he swayed slightly but then straightened himself, raising his hand upward – like a great orator, a Pericles or a Gorgias. I thought: here, it was a hint – but only a hint, no more. The external will did not intend to take things too far. I confess, I even felt something like regret – and then my stepfather cried out asking for forgiveness in front of a group of astonished tourists. His exclamation attracted the attention of the souvenir seller who was sitting with his hawker’s tray right there next to the church. He turned around, saw my stepfather standing on the fence and, waving his hand, shouted at the top of his voice, “What are you doing? Get down right away!”

My stepfather glanced at him with the same self-confident smirk – when suddenly another gust caused him to lose his balance. He made an awkward movement, his knees seemed to give way and he disappeared, hurtling downward with a scream that seemed to contain more surprise than horror. Everyone rushed to the railing. My stepfather lay far below, on the rocks. A dark stain was spreading out from his head.

Then the police arrived; the long, tedious interrogation lasted until evening. By the time I left the police station, it was already dark. I wandered around the city, not seeing anyone around me, and then, close to midnight, found myself in a small bar in Plaka. I ordered a drink, noticed a young woman with straight black hair nearby and struck up an idle conversation with her. For some reason, she didn’t push me away, and a quarter of an hour later I realized she lacked the “bourgeois bitch shield,” which I already couldn’t imagine the entire opposite sex without. Her name was Camilla; she was from Mexico. Her two-week tour of Europe was coming to an end in Athens.

I told her, “This afternoon my hatred killed a man.”

“I just don’t know how I am going to live with that,” I added.

And I said some other things as well, but all this made no impression on Camilla. She did listen to me attentively, however, and told me in return about her family business. I did not understand everything; her English was peppered with Spanish, which I barely knew at the time. It did become clear to me, though: in her world, death was treated without piety.

She liked me; we spent the night together – at first I was depressed and restrained, but afterward somehow I forgot everything and cleaved to her flesh, dissolving in it again and again. Then I dozed briefly – in the darkness of forgetfulness, without dreams. Then, next morning, I saw her next to me – and was amazed at a sense of closeness that I had never known before with anyone.

We went down to breakfast together. Camilla chatted about this and that, and I looked at her unceasingly. When we were getting up, something clicked in my brain; my world had altered, and I with it. As if someone had changed the backdrop in a theater – I suddenly saw myself in a different reality and Camilla next to me in it. My former life was forgotten in an instant.

That same evening, we flew together to Mexico City. On the plane, I wrote a long letter to Gunter Stadelmann – as if attempting to explain but in fact trying to convince myself of something. I almost believed at that moment that science was not my true path. There was too much left out beyond the brackets of our formulas; the calculations were precise but took far too long – I did not have enough time for them. They would not lead me to the root, to the core, to what destiny had really planned for me. Witnessing the death of my stepfather was a sign: physics could not relieve me of my fears. Maybe this meant it was time to stare them in the face?…

Gunter was not impressed with my letter – he never forgave me for deserting him. As for me, I joined my girlfriend’s family business. They lived in a large hacienda on the outskirts of the capital. Officially, they described their activities as “import-export,” but in fact, it was the usual smuggling – the illegal flow of goods into and out of the country. I told her father: I want to be in Mexico, to be with Camilla. I’m willing to do almost anything, but I refuse to shoot people. We agreed to this, and I was taken on to their staff.

I spent four years in Mexico. There I became a man, conquering my weaknesses or, at least, a large number of them. I often had to travel to the border, “to resolve issues” with suppliers. I learned not to be afraid of heat and swamps, poisonous spiders and snakes. With Camilla, I learned not to fear women – and to respect, to appreciate them. Did I learn not to fear death? Probably not. But I got to know what it was like to be close to it.

I would have lived there for longer, but suddenly the equations of quantum chromodynamics began to appear in my dreams – almost every night. Then they started to come to me during the day as well – my tranquility was gone completely. It became clear: Mexico City was only an episode, which was coming to an end. Physics was authoritatively calling me back, and I could not lie to myself any longer. It really was my path – no matter where it was to lead me or whether I had a mission or not. I understood this and decided to return to Europe.

Before leaving, I wept bitterly, burying my face in Camilla’s knees – although for a long time now I had not been inclined to dramatic gestures. She smelled of copal incense and sweet sweat; she smelled of home. She could not leave with me; her place was here with her family. To part with her seemed inconceivable, impossible. I knew I was losing my guardian angel, and I felt the onset of a loneliness like none I had ever dealt with. But Camilla let me go calmly. She said, “I expected that sooner or later you would be drawn back. And now I see it’s time for you to go!” And she looked directly at me with her shining black eyes. And struck a chord that I would later never forget.

On my return, I wrote to both Stadelmann and Professor Kertner. Gunter did not answer me, but the professor responded and helped. Through his good graces, I got into Hamburg, to a respected university with a good physics department – and, as a result, moved on to the next stage in the evolution of the universe: from strong interactions to the separation of electroweak ones. The group, which agreed to take me despite my years of absence from science, was getting ready to process the results coming out of the upgraded Tevatron collider – humanity’s first serious attempt to catch the elusive Higgs boson. Like many other laboratories around the world, we worked our way through a huge variety of particle interactions, their births and decays, their transformations into one another – hoping to reveal the detectable trace of the mysterious boson that theoreticians needed so badly. It would be proof that one of the main pillars of their castle was not imaginary but real.

It’s hard to convey the enthusiasm with which I got down to work. Even the tritest cliché wouldn’t have been an exaggeration: I just put my nose to the grindstone and gave it my all. I worked fiercely; nothing distracted me – neither entertainment nor socializing beyond the confines of science. Camilla was with me – albeit unseen – for quite a while. Even when her image began to fade, she still helped me immensely. She was my inspiration, then – a shadow of an inspiration, and later – only a memory of an inspiration that had once been. But even a memory is better than nothing.

Three years later, I received my doctorate, having done work on refining the mass of the Higgs boson and its derivatives. By that time, after all the delays, the collider finally went into operation, and our group joined one of the collaborations analyzing its data. It was the most tedious but necessary work: day after day, week after week, we calculated and recalculated, checked and rechecked the probabilities of the events and reactions that might be caused by the presence of the Higgs boson. Almost the entire brainpower of the world’s particle theorists was focused on capturing it, on minutely studying an imaginary map of the area where it might be – in order to drive it into an ambush, in some hollow or clearing by a river. And once there, immobilize it and force it out into the open, to be presented to the world…

The routine boredom did not bother us – everyone understood the significance of the project. At first, I, along with others, worked with genuine excitement, but soon I began to have my doubts. Something was wrong – the hype the populist media had created around the boson began to grate. The fervent determination to catch it right away, by whatever means possible, was irritating.

“Now, there’s no way anyone could admit the boson might not exist at all. It would probably be easier to invent it,” I joked at lunch one day, but no one smiled. The stakes were huge; the expressions on my colleagues’ faces made it quite clear: this subject was no joking matter. And then in the evenings, almost secretly, I began to assess to what extent the rebels might be right – those who suggested that the Higgs boson, most probably, did not exist in nature.

My calculations convinced me: the rebels were in with a chance. Everything that our sensors might detect could be explained in a different way, without the presence of the notorious boson. Its place could well be substituted by certain kinds of composite fields…

I showed my rough estimates to Professor Kertner. To my surprise, he did not try to dispel my doubts but, on the contrary, strengthened them by sharing his own. “Yes,” he said, “let them discover something that behaves the way a scalar Higgs particle would behave. Let them publicly say that the mechanism for the separation of weak and electromagnetic forces is thoroughly understood, that victory is ours. But do you not think, Theo, that when the universe is cooling down, too many different symmetries are broken independently of each other? Chiral, conformal, electroweak – and each has its own mechanisms and particles. It’s not economical – and, at least for me, there is a certain concern that crops up. There even arises the question: What if all the forces were separated for one and the same reason? Imagine an army of additional fermions that began to interact with everything in a row right after the era of the quark-gluon plasma. At low energies, they cannot be seen singly, but their bound states – yes, why not? Maybe the Higgs boson, even if it is caught, is only a special case, one of?…”

I remained quiet, knowing where this conversation might take me. I kept silent and sensed a decision growing within me – which nobody was going to like. Especially Professor Kertner, who had twice taken it upon himself to support my career!

“By the way,” the professor continued, “have you read the latest articles on the theory of ‘technicolor’? I suspect you will be overcome by nostalgia. The world has moved forward – now we know how to change the energy scale smoothly. There are no more meaningless leaps – read the latest papers. This may be a key to unraveling the mystery!”

I beseeched him, “Professor, stop tormenting me – are you doing this on purpose? I know, I can’t let you down again!”

“Forget it,” Kertner said with a frown. “Life is short. And the productive part of a scientist’s life is even shorter. You’ll have about fifteen years before you will no longer be able to create anything new. You should not be worrying about other people’s feelings.”

I could see he was speaking earnestly about something he rarely expressed out loud. I heard in his words regret for his own fate in life, which seemed to be so successful. I immediately remembered the university, Gunter, the feast of ideas from endless conversations, all the intellectual freedom of those years. And I cleared my throat and said in a voice I could barely control, “Professor, I want my own theory and nothing else. I’m stuck in a swamp – and cannot believe I have no mission, so to speak. Sorry for sounding so melodramatic, but my goal, whatever it may be, cannot be reached by taking tiny steps. I have to make a bold leap…”

My words sounded incredibly foolish. “I’m sorry,” I added, but Kertner merely shrugged. The next day I went to the head of the group and announced my departure. Having once again committed an act of scientific treachery – from an outsider’s point of view.

I quickly managed to get a new job – at the same university but in the neighboring wing – and found myself in a completely different world. Compared with the collaboration and the grinding toil of the scientific rat race, it was a haven of peace and quiet. I was forced to teach but accepted this as an unavoidable evil, the price to be paid for my freedom. I had a lot of time left for research, and I hitched myself to my formulas like a faithful old workhorse to its harness. Fatigue did not exist for me; I did not allow myself to notice it. I just clenched my jaw and ploughed my way through the maze of the most complex transformations – onward, ever onward.

Chapter 14

“Good morning,” says Nestor. “I have an idea. Why don’t you show your roommate a couple of equations?”

“Why?” I ask. “What will they do for her? She’ll just get bored, immediately and irrevocably.”

“Give it a go,” Nestor continues. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And she, in turn, might teach you how to embroider…”

He laughs his strange laugh. Only then do I understand he is joking.

“It’s always nice,” I say sourly, “to start the day with a good, funny joke.”

“That’s true,” Nestor nods and purses his lips. “But seriously, you never know what might prove useful. If I were you, I wouldn’t be so quick to knock my jokes. After all, as far as I can see, you still haven’t made much progress.”

“We are trying,” I mutter. “You can put that in my file if you want!”

I’m upset because, in my opinion, we really are making progress. Elsa and I spend ages patiently listening to each other’s memories. We have even plotted charts on paper; we mark the points and shade the squares; we are looking for a chance moment – a chance intersection in our first life, even if it was only for a brief instant. In a word, we are not standing still, and Nestor knows this full well. He knows, but almost every day he nevertheless reproaches me for being idle.

“And how is your physics going?” he asks.

“It’s progressing,” I reply curtly. “I’m minimizing the set of technical fermions.”

“A jolly time,” Nestor nods and adds, “Although, of course, not the brightest in your life. Yet you are still a long, long way off…”

“Listen,” I say with irritation, “really, I…”

Nestor stops me, raising the palm of his hand. “Don’t be angry,” he says in a conciliatory tone. “I’m not berating you. My remarks aren’t meant to be a criticism but rather a stimulus. Think hard about the word – ‘stimulus’; it might help you jog your memory. And don’t get so upset: no one is hurrying you; no one is reproaching you for not returning our hospitality, so to speak.”

“Yeah, right?” I raise my eyebrow ironically. “Well, it feels like I am being reproached – specifically by you, Nestor. And by the way, talking about hospitality: Could you finally let me in on a little secret? How is everything set up, what are the principles of physics at work here? Or, to be more precise, the Quarantine Principle?”

Nestor frowns, “It’s a long story. And there’s no point – this ‘secret’ would only make sense to an expert, and you have no relevant expertise. Just accept that here, in Quarantine, you are present as an entity, some sort of essence of yourself. Everything that is visual is merely an illusion, as it is everywhere, always.”

“I may not be an expert, but I still want to know!” I insist. “It’s important to me; I need the details. Tell me something at least; I’ll pick it up easily – I’m good when it comes to science.”

“Everyone thinks so at first…” Nestor grumbles.

I sense that the session is about to end, and I hurriedly add, “Hold on, hold on! Don’t go yet; tell me how the entities are structured, what is their meaning? For example, Elsa seems to emanate a vibe, a certain female heat – is that an essence? Or is that also distortion, fake? If so, then I have to admit, it’s been done very well. Sometimes I dream that in one of my lifetimes I will succeed in dragging her to a hotel room, plying her with whiskey and screwing her brains out!”

Nestor looks at me and says nothing. I continue heatedly, “Well, if you can’t tell me about the fundamentals, then talk to me about your world, about the second life. How it works – are there physical bodies? At least I want to know, will I still have my beloved, manly prick?”

“This is the fifth time you’ve asked this,” Nestor replies seriously. “And my response is always the same: there is something.”

With that, our conversation comes to an end. I go to the living room, greet Elsa and give her one of my sheets of paper, covered with the quantum field theory equations.

“Here,” I grin. “My Nestor suggested you take a peek at this.”

Elsa obediently looks at it, then puts the piece of paper on the table. “Gibberish!” she exclaims angrily. “It seems your Nestor is a bit crazy. He doesn’t seem to understand at all what may be of interest to an ordinary girl.”

“Maybe he doesn’t,” I say, going over to the window. “As for me, I understand perfectly – one of my girlfriends explained it to me very well…”

Outside the window is a forest, an impassable thicket. I start to tell Elsa about Hamburg. She interrupts me – “Stop! I’ll bring our spreadsheet!” – and runs to her bedroom. “It’s not really a spreadsheet, it’s just a diagram,” I mutter to her departing back.

Yet I must give her credit: this is her idea – to put the coordinates of our memories down on paper. She looks after them jealously and takes the chart with her to her room at night. “I want them near at hand,” she explained to me. “It’s always useful to have something nearby in case they accuse you of being lazy. I think my Nestor now sees I’m not really into him anymore. And when a man loses hope, he can become very exacting!

“Dates!” Elsa commands as soon as she returns to the living room. “Dates and places…”

Then I relate to her: how I used to walk to the university along the muddy streets of the Turkish quarter – savoring the smells from the coffee shops, hurrying to be in time for my first lecture, after which precious hours of freedom awaited. How I used to work on my formulas till late and then cycled along the empty sidewalks – and the city seemed to become more tolerable to me. I would return – soaked and happy – and sit down again at my desk, despite the grumbling of my girlfriend, Gertrude. I lived with her for about a year after I had finally decided I’d forgotten Camilla forever. I hadn’t really, but I felt I needed the stability and order that Gerti had provided in abundance until one day she collected her things and disappeared from my life.

It happened suddenly, although it had probably been brewing for a while. One evening, on my return home, I began to talk to her about the fermionic vacuum before I’d even closed the front door. I had been thinking it over on the way home and was unable to keep my thoughts to myself.

“Yes,” said Gertrude, “it’s all very interesting, but you know, I’ve finally realized I want to live with a normal person.”

“Well, then you probably need to find a normal person,” I replied jokingly, but somehow the joke fell flat. She gave me a long look and nodded, “Right. I’ll just have to find someone else then.” And she left me forever, although for a while I couldn’t believe she was serious. I just couldn’t accept it – I phoned her, wrote to her, tried to get her to meet up and talk…

“I’ve got it!” Elsa declares. “You’re all the same – you, your Nestor… Let’s go for a walk; the sun is out again.”

She carefully folds up our spreadsheet-diagram, which has several new points on it, and says angrily, “They are annoyed we’re not making much progress. But what do they expect from us – we’re not fully fit. After all, we are in Quarantine!” And then she grins, “It’s so strange: at the word ‘quarantine’ you imagine being locked behind doors, isolated, almost like prison – but in fact, this is the closest you can get to freedom. You can do – almost – anything you want, and you – almost – don’t owe anything to anyone. You show you’re making an effort, fulfilling your little debt – and that’s all; you can go and do what you like. If, of course, you don’t get blown away by the wind or crushed by a collapsing building…”

We go out onto the seafront, which is as crowded as ever. Elsa takes me by the arm – with pride and what seems to me a proprietorial satisfaction. We wander aimlessly, not talking, only glancing at the people we meet, catching each other’s eyes and hastily looking away. Like playing a familiar game that never gets boring.

I’m still hurt slightly by the memory of Gertrude, who’d rejected me so unceremoniously. “You know,” I say to Elsa, “when I was at the university, when I first started studying science, I always hankered after sex. After two or three hours with my equations, I’d be overcome by an unbearable desire.”

Elsa looks at me slyly. I continue, embroidering my story somewhat, “In the evenings at student bars, after a few drinks, I’d tell the girls about gluons and quarks, looking deeply into their eyes and sending them the thought signal: ‘I want you! I want to do this and that to you!’ It acted like an explosive mixture. They sensed my thoughts – and went with me to my place. They themselves dragged me to bed; they demanded, ‘More, more…’ I couldn’t express how grateful I was to them. I called them princesses while they were with me. And then they returned to their humdrum lives, turning back into secretaries, hairdressers, salesgirls…”

“Well,” Elsa replied, “I’m glad you got so lucky. And now I understand – you showed me your scribbles this morning not just to impress me and to pretend to look smart. You did it because you’re a pervert, some special kind of pervert. You should continue like this – I might get interested. I have to confess, I’m a bit of a pervert myself – I’ve always wanted a man to not only give me oral pleasure but do exactly this and this – she whispers in my ear what she has in mind. “Can you imagine such a thing?”

“Very much so,” I grin. “I think most girls want the same. And those who don’t at first usually develop an inclination for it later.”

“Is that so?” Elsa pouts her lips. “Are you calling me average and ordinary again? All right then, so be it, but I love myself just the way I am!”

“In a certain way, I love you too – just the way you are,” I say in a conciliatory tone, speaking the truth. “And believe me, I am sure the way you like it is unique – it does have some special flavor of perversity…”

The singer with the guitar has no audience today. He sits silently, hunched over and looking sullenly at his feet. Nevertheless, we stop – it has become a tradition for us. The singer nods to Elsa, totally ignoring me. Then he strikes a chord and starts, “Oh, infamy! Oh, the boundless vanity of pride! I tried to break free of every net. And end up here – what a laugh…”

I freeze as if in shock; something pierces me like a needle. Turning toward the sea, frowning, I try to hold onto a thought that is slipping away. And the singer sings:

“I will sweetly self-destruct, drink bourbon by the quart, to deaden my longing for Elsa. I’ll smoke several packs a day – let my lungs burn and decay. Let my liver die – anyway, I have so many lives to come. Don’t let Elsa return – my longing is dearer to me than she is while there are packs of smokes and endless gallons of whiskey…”

“Infamy!” I repeat and then say to Elsa, “I’m sorry, I need to go home.”

“We’ve only just come out,” she sighs in frustration but nevertheless obediently follows me.

I look at the nearest clock – there is still time before the next session with Nestor.

Elsa mutters, “You’re lucky of course I’m a bit submissive in a sense…”

I repeat, “I’m sorry,” and glance with the utmost tenderness at her profile.

Back at home, I rush over to the table and start scribbling – the sheet of paper is rapidly covered with formulas. I recall how it was – and when, where and what. Why I left Hamburg, bidding farewell to science – seemingly forever. How I got disillusioned with the whole world and even conceived a hatred – not so much for the world, but for myself.

My theory, explaining in detail how the division of the fundamental forces occurred, was ready in a year and a half. Many things fitted into place: the quarks’ flavors,[19] their masses, the unusual decay of the kaons[20] and other oddities that had seemed inexplicable – before me, I repeated to myself, inexplicable before me. Now, the explanation had been found – without the elusive Higgs boson and almost without any fine-tuning. Clearly, I was impatient to bring it to the public’s attention, and I did – a bit too hastily. I rushed and shamefully overlooked a singularity in one of the functions, which reduced everything to nothing, requiring a revision of most of my approach…

The mistake was picked up almost immediately – and was then savored by the scientific community for several weeks. My former Hamburg colleagues were especially zealous in their criticism – they still had not forgiven me for my “betrayal” for the sake of my vainglorious goal, which had led me to commit such a blunder. Others were also caustic in their remarks – my article really was ambitious in the extreme, laying claiming to far too much all at once. I even suggested that all physics, as we now know it, has become what it is under the influence of certain external fields, originating in invisible dimensions, in global metaspace. My equations allowed for such a hypothesis – and of course, this attracted attention and elicited an additional stream of ridicule. Then everything died down, the story became an amusing but forgotten incident, and I was left in smoldering ruins, a void, of no interest to anyone.

Probably, certain fragments of that work would have made sense. If someone had brought a team of a few eager postdocs together, they would have put it into proper shape within a year, and its true value would have become clear. But, of course, no one was going to waste their time on this. My theory was declared dead, dumped into a shallow grave and sent to oblivion. And the fault was all my own – in my rush to prove that mine was the correct path, I took too big a step. My legs had parted ways and now I was sitting in a dirty puddle. Perhaps because I had been too eager to be first, to get ahead of others.

My downfall was devastating, monstrous – and I could neither cope nor find a justification for it. I had no one to complain or to apologize to: Gertrude had left, Gunter didn’t want to know me, and Professor Kertner had been working in the States for six months; I had lost contact with him. We did not correspond and, truth be told, it was too embarrassing to discuss with him what had happened. After suffering alone for a week or two, I decided to give up science.

The decision was easy – it was plain to see. I no longer wanted to think about great missions and grandiloquent goals. I desired only one thing: to be of use to the world. My skills, my trained mind should not be wasted – and, having prepared a detailed resume, I sent it to head-hunting firms all over Europe. The first to respond was an agency from Switzerland, which offered a choice of three potential employers. One was in Bern – to me it seemed to be a sign. I wrote back that I was ready to come in for an interview.

Thus, the next big change in my life took place – I had come around full circle and ended up at one of its starting points. I soon realized I had done the right thing: now my work was quickly, almost immediately, rewarded with appreciation. My results were put to use right away; they were trusted, they were highly valued – and, in turn, I tried as best I could.

Our middle-size company was engaged in the microbiology of the brain – with an emphasis on the methods of its control. We had a “client,” about which the management spoke with significant expressions on their faces. It was believed its name should be kept secret, although the aims of our operations were obvious. Obvious and not completely harmless – which did not bother me in the slightest.

I was paid good money for my math, and my skills were in great demand. My colleagues – biophysicists, neurophysiologists and psychologists – had only the most basic mathematical tools at their disposal. And the need for them was enormous: we had been accumulating a huge amount of data. On the condition of anonymity, difficult patients – schizophrenics and epileptics with electrodes implanted in their brains – were brought to us from clinics throughout the country. They were valuable specimens; with their help we could measure what was going on inside the brain, in the neocortex, responsible for the higher nervous functions. With the other subjects who were mostly healthy, it was only possible to work on the surface of the cranium, but the amount of information was increasing rapidly anyway, and there were problems processing it. Our researchers were drowning in it, hopelessly lost in the dark. It was my job to significantly improve the situation.

They gave me two programmers to help and were prepared to be patient, but they didn’t have to wait long. Within three months, meaningful patterns – periodic curves, clusters of stable form, contours of distributions with pronounced maximums – began appearing on the graphs and diagrams. I removed the statistical noise, normalized the scales and put the data types in order, abstracted them, representing everything in a single way – with wave packets, averaging the activity of neurons at any distances and for any timeframe. Thus, we acquired a universal language describing what happens in the brain. Then I reorganized the information space, redefining it in other coordinates. The Hilbert transforms were very helpful – they allowed me to reduce the number of variables and select the main ones, reflecting the true dynamics of the whole system. My programmers also applied themselves diligently – and the terabytes of figures, which my colleagues had lost all hope of sorting out, were reduced to gigabytes, quite manageable and visualized in an appropriate way. Both previously accumulated and newly arrived data were now quickly transformed into images that were comprehensible to the eye. The scientific team took heart and rushed to rethink their hypotheses, and I acquired a reputation as the local genius who could solve problems regardless of their complexity and nature.

These first months I worked extremely hard, only taking breaks to sleep. But gradually, my methods were put into action and the need for my participation was reduced. Powerful computers digested the massive volumes of numbers, the printers diligently excreted graphs, and my colleagues were quite happy. From time to time, someone would ask me to recalculate something with different algorithms or with better accuracy, but this wasn’t difficult and didn’t take much time. I even began to get bored – but after a chance conversation with Tony, my boredom evaporated entirely.

Tony’s group was researching memory. They studied the brain’s reactions to external stimuli – pictures, words, melodies, both new and already familiar. The task was to find out exactly how memories are kept. To understand the storage mechanism and then learn to reach into people’s heads with an invisible hand and take control of the process.

Things going on in the memory were now being described using the same universal language – the wave packets calculated by my programs. At first, the biologists got excited – it seemed their eyes had been opened. The parameters of the electromagnetic waves really did change from stimulus to stimulus. The brain reacted differently not only, say, to smells and photographs, but also to different smells and different photographs, while identical stimuli, in contrast, led to similar reactions, to similar charts and images on the screen…

The correlation was obvious, yes, but other problems immediately emerged. Brain reactions were similar but not completely alike. The correspondence between the stimuli and the patterns of the amplitudes and phases in the wave packets was not definite, and besides, the dynamics of these patterns puzzled everyone. It was impossible to explain why very different parts of the brain suddenly began to work in unison: the waves coming from them changed their amplitudes together and became synchronized – their phases seemed to “cling” to each other. This was contrary to the traditional view of the direct responsibility of certain neurons for certain fragments of memory. Memories were “blurred” almost throughout the entire neocortex – at least, that is what the experiment was asserting. And, what was even more inexplicable, the synchronization was established instantly – significantly faster than the neurons could “reach out” to each other.

Tony’s group reacted in a way that was typical in corporate science: they closed their eyes to the inexplicable and tried to eke out a practical result from what they thought was more or less clear. In their heads was one and the same model: a fragment of memory is a group of neurons and their connections, a static imprint of the experience that can be identified and influenced. They put the inability to identify these groups down to inaccurate data – and rushed from one technique to another, endlessly changing the ways of recalculating. Therefore, I worked with them more often than with others.

One evening, Tony came to see me – tired, his eyes sad – and informed me of another setback. I began to ask questions purely out of sympathy, and we ended up talking until evening. It was then that I first heard about the problem of the spatial diffusion of memory and the instantaneous coordination of actions in different regions of the brain tissue when we try to memorize or recall something.

I asked, “Why not?” Tony explained, “Because it’s just not physically possible.” He drew me a detailed anatomic diagram of how an external stimulus – for example, a picture – is transformed into a signal that arrives in a certain place in the brain, to a local neuron group. Then, how the cells of this group fire messages to one another through synaptic connections[21] – and the more often the same picture appears before a person’s eyes, the stronger these ties are, and the memory of it is more reliable. I nodded; everything made sense. “But,” Tony said bitterly, “unfortunately, look here and here…”

We studied the printouts together – yes, there was no doubt: the behavior of the electromagnetic waves calculated during memorization-recall did not in any way confirm his model. Instead, large communities of neurons from different areas of the brain – not small localized groups – were working in concert. And it was not at all clear who was commanding them, who was giving the go-ahead and then monitoring the amazing synchrony of actions.

I asked, “What have other people found? Maybe it’s only a matter of the accuracy of your measurements, and your instantaneous correlation is a decoy, a phantom?” Tony was offended, “We’re not complete simpletons!” Then admitted, “At least, no more than anyone else.” And he explained that this consistency had already been observed for decades, but no one had come up with a worthy explanation. Neurons “communicate” through electrochemistry – these processes have been studied well. It is known for certain that chemical reactions are way too slow, and the fields from ion currents are way too weak, to manifest themselves so quickly and at such distances. Therefore, everyone simply accepts as a reality that another means of “communication” exists, but no one has had time to find out what kind that might be.

“In any event, I don’t have the time,” Tony added irritably. “It’ll have to be left to those who are engaged in real science! The pure scientists who like to boast that their hands have not been sullied by money and their souls by mammon. They have time on their side; they’re not constantly being prodded in the back, but I – I need to solve the tasks set me by the management. For example, how to influence memory using an external high-frequency field. How to implant an electrode in a specific place and remove unnecessary recollections. How…” He moaned a bit more and then left. Perhaps he felt better afterward.

Once on my own, I postponed all business for the day and sat pondering. I pondered at home as well, until late evening, and then long into the night, lying awake, unable to sleep. I did not come up with anything intelligible, yet I realized the problem was of great interest to me, something I had not experienced for a long time. My gut feeling told me it contained a huge layer of the unknown. And what’s more, I had time! By morning I had decided how I was going to proceed.

First of all, I had to figure out how the brain and memory work from the point of view of advanced science. I buried myself in articles and books and soon became convinced the phenomena Tony had told me about really did exist. Everything was as he said: nonlocal, instantaneously established correlation had long been observed in experiments. All these years, people had tried to ignore this – because no explanation could be found. The scientific mainstream, supported by all recognized experts, was still searching for “memory imprints” – the same ones that Tony’s team was looking for. “Imprints” were understood to be small neuron groups responsible for specific memories. Money had been allocated for it and the media talked about it, conveying the concept of imprints to the curious wider public. Thus, everyone was moving in the same direction – without even trying to raise their heads, change their perspective or take a different viewpoint.

At the same time, the specifics of the interaction between neighboring neurons had been meticulously analyzed. Scientists had investigated to the finest detail how dendrites and axons[22] are arranged, how synapses work, how the connections between the brain cells are established and strengthened, creating the aforesaid imprints. It was all very fine but, from my point of view, did not bring us any nearer to understanding memory. Local groups of neurons – both inside and outside the imprints – certainly played some role, but only an intermediate one. Their function could not be the central one – not least because the imprints themselves were not all that stable. The brain tissue showed amazing plasticity, evolving and living a complex life – the brain was constantly reacting to the outside world, adjusting to it. Streams of stimuli, signals from receptors, led to the reorganization of neural connections, and it was impossible to predict in advance exactly where and how they would change – or, perhaps, disappear altogether. No neuron group – including “memory imprints” – could survive for even a month in a static, unchanged form. But our memories are tenacious – many of them remain for decades…

Thus, the following picture evolved. Experiments had shown that memory is nonlocal. From our own experience, we knew that memory is stable. Neuron-synaptic models explained neither the nonlocality of memory-recall nor the stability of the memory. And although researchers, with incredible stubbornness, continued to look for answers within the framework of the classical imprint doctrine, it was clear that this path led to a dead end.

In particular, I became aware of two things. First, when studying how memory works, one must consider neither individual neurons nor their local groups but the brain as a whole. Nothing can be explained by moving through the synapses from neuron to neuron; the neurons do not engage in the recall process one by one, interacting just with their neighbors; they all work at once, each cooperating with each other regardless of their location. And second, the mechanism of the nonlocal interaction of neurons was the key to unraveling the mystery. The spatial correlation Tony observed, which instantly arises during memorization or recall, is not a secondary effect that can be dismissed but the very essence of the phenomenon. This mechanism is triggered by an external stimulus – a smell, a word, a face in a crowd – but then acts by itself, providing some dynamic that is unknown to us. A fragment of memory is not an element of structure. It is not an imprint involving a particular group of neurons; it is some kind of dynamic process.

I began to read the articles again – looking now for alternatives to the generally accepted approaches. For about a month, I had rifled through everything that had been published recently – in an attempt to find allies who would understand the problem the same way I did. There were almost none; for the vast majority, memory was associated not with dynamics but with static, structural elements. Some had tried to interpret the plasticity, the reorganization of synaptic connections, as a dynamic mechanism of memorization – but this, in my opinion, was naive and did not explain anything.

I almost despaired, nearly resigning myself to the fact that the mystery of memory is unresolvable – and then a work published as long as thirty years ago caught my eye. I glanced at the annotation and was astonished. And felt something vital had slotted into place.

A long, long time ago, the author had taken a step that I had lacked the spirit to take. He had seen what I saw: the same long-range correlations throughout the brain, the same stability of memories, the independence of memory from the fate of individual cells. He, like me, and contrary to the prevailing views, had realized that we need to step away from electrochemistry and locality – to accept that neurons and synapses are not enough. Yes, they play a part in memorization but only by acting together with something else… All this was familiar – the same thoughts tormented me as well – but the author had gone a step further and had made a breakthrough. Assuming there is something different, he disengaged himself from specifics. He began to seek an explanation in pure mathematics – firmly believing that a consistent mathematical theory always corresponds to some kind of physical one that, perhaps, we are not yet aware of. He looked at the problem from above, with an unbiased eye, asking the question: What in principle could be the explanation for the properties of memory regardless of the known components of the brain? And he saw what it might be and was not afraid to proclaim it out loud.

I cursed myself roundly for having wasted so much time in vain. Now, in hindsight, it seemed I had always sensed what it was all like but had not dared to admit it. It had just been too strange to think about quantum fields and the condensate of bosons in warm, wet matter. The word “quantum” should be forbidden, forgotten: the human brain was a macro-, not a micro-, world. Neurons and biomolecules were too large and distant from each other to be considered quantum objects… But what if we assume some other hypothetical “agents” exist in the brain and live in accordance with quantum laws? They needed to be extremely small; there might be an almost infinite number of them – and here the physics I knew so well could come to the rescue. More than once it had manifested itself where there seemed to be no place for it – throwing a bridge between the micro and macro, explaining how the micro-level order becomes macroscopic, observable with the naked eye and stable for centuries. Just take crystals for example – no one would consider a diamond to be something imaginary and unsteady…

I finally sensed where the key to the mystery lay. The order that comes out of disorder, the asymmetry that comes out of symmetry… I said in a low voice, and then repeated out loud, “This is it, the ‘cunning trick’; it has raised its head and is peeping out from under the covers.” I myself had been uncovering it many times – even if in another medium and at other energy scales. I could not break free from my science, no matter how I tried!

I hurriedly looked through the article – some of its notions seemed naive in the context of modern science, but the main idea had been stated clearly. I knew exactly what now was required of me. The author was long dead, but I was alive, and I was capable of doing much. I sat down at the table, wrote out on a piece of paper the Hamiltonian of a quantum system consisting of many interacting particles and immediately sensed a feeling of utmost harmony enveloping me. Once again, I was back where I belonged and doing what I do best.

Chapter 15

My colleague, in his article published long ago, had only outlined the basic principles. Memory, he wrote, is formed by two related mechanisms, not just one based solely on neural cells. Neurons enter into the game first: responding to external stimuli, they begin to “fire” electrical impulses. But their role is auxiliary – through their activity, they only help other participants living in the microworld. Neural signals trigger not the classical but quantum dynamics of the hypothetical micro-objects that fill the entire space of the brain. Disordered initially, they transform into a state of stable order and maintain this order, like atoms in crystals, exchanging quasiparticles – collective excitations, the waves of some sort of field. These quasiparticle-waves create an oscillatory background that affects the neurons and in turn regulates and coordinates their work. This dynamic interplay between neurons and micro-objects is a fragment of the memory, and the collective oscillations are some kind of code that, once it emerges, is stably stored in the brain. It condenses in the lowest energy state, the so-called ground state, and can then be reactivated by a familiar stimulus – forcing the brain to enter into the same dynamics, “recalling” what was remembered earlier.

Thus, the brain – or, more precisely, the part of it responsible for memory – was considered as a single whole, where all components simultaneously interact with each other. This fundamentally differed from the traditional models based on the individual elements of the whole “seeing and hearing” only their nearest neighbors. The two main things – the nonlocality and stability of memory – were now explained in a natural way: first, the oscillations of quantum micro-objects were distributed throughout the entire brain, so that each point instantly received information from the other points regardless of the distance between them; and second, these oscillations require almost no energy in their ground state. They do not die out like classical macrowaves; they are capable of living in the brain for a very long time: in ideal conditions, forever…

The author did not attempt to identify these micro-objects; he just postulated that they existed. And he demonstrated with precise mathematics how their presence could cause the observed memory properties. I repeated his calculations – everything was right. Out of disorder – suddenly, spontaneously – order arose, reducing the dynamic symmetry of the system and leading to the emergence of quasiparticles, bosons of a certain type that preserved this order, kept it in place. If those oscillations-bosons really modulated the way neurons work, then all the oddities on Tony’s diagrams would have been logically explained. And the neurons played their role too: they gave a push, they initiated the spontaneous symmetry breaking, thus launching the mechanism for the formation of order. Probably, I thought, among these neuron activators there are very important ones, sitting at key points – could they be the “imprints of memory” that mainstream science was so preoccupied with? Yes, you can damage memory by killing individual neurons – but the memory is still not stored in them; they are just a means, a trigger…

Within a week or two I was assured of the potential power of the combined neuron-quantum paradigm. I was assured – and right then hit a wall, got stuck by the fundamental question: But what exactly are these “quantum micro-objects”? I was not going to accept anything mystical; they had to be perfectly natural, habitually material… At first, I didn’t have a clue and even began to fear the puzzle would remain unresolved. But pretty soon I found a solution – or, to be more precise, it had been found before me.

It turned out the thirty-year-old theory had undergone some development. Several people had picked it up during a surge of interest a while back, and one came up with a very simple idea: the mysterious “micro-objects” were nothing other than water molecules, which as everyone knows make up ninety percent of the brain. After reading about this, I was amazed at how obvious his guess had been – and wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me. In hindsight, it was all so clear: of course, water molecules are small enough and possess a dipole moment, which has rotational symmetry. This rotational symmetry gets broken – crudely speaking, the dipole vectors become aligned in one direction. An order emerges and the released energy is transformed into joint vibrations, which eventually pass to their ground state and remain there – always ready to be excited again. It’s so natural to assume this if you simply write down the levels of organization of living matter: cells – macromolecules – water!

Surprisingly, this was the last significant breakthrough in the “quantum” model of the brain. Soon, related articles stopped appearing: no one wanted to spend time either in criticism of this theory or in its progress. The interest of the scientific world dissipated, having barely been piqued – due, I’d guess, to the overall complexity of the model as well as the impossibility of its practical verification. Without an experimental proof, the chances of the benefits – generous grants and publications in prestigious journals – decrease rapidly to naught. Fortunately, I needed neither publications nor grants. I sensed the approach’s potential and could afford to spend time on it. As much time as it would take.

And I proceeded further: I had to move from the ideal, infinite and cold “brain space” isolated from information noise to a real case – to a finite brain that lives in a certain thermal regime and is bombarded by signals from a multitude of receptors. Water dipoles appeared before my eyes as if they were alive. And indeed they were – first, they oscillated, vibrated all the time; and second, they supported memory, thought, the essence of our lives. It might seem their orderliness was fleeting, unstable. They had many enemies – thermal effects, quantum fluctuations, the constant discordance of signaling neurons. But some things worked in their favor too – for example, the unique property of quantum field theory, so-called negative entropy: quantum order was energetically more favorable than disorder! The breakout of symmetry “released” part of the energy, like setting a ball in motion down a hill; this reinforced the stability of the ordered patterns – and, so, strengthened the memory, prevented it from dissipating, dissolving. And it gave additional strength to me; I felt that the microcosm was on my side!

Of course, in a limited, not infinite space, the life of the quantum condensate, which coded memory, became finite, and the Goldstone bosons acquired the prefix “quasi” – they gained mass and used up energy, albeit only a little. And the areas of coherence, of the synchronous operation of remote neurons, also became different, ranging from extensive to very small ones, from large parts of the brain to only a few hundred cells. Much, though not all, depended on the subject of the memorization – on how much the brain allowed itself to “concentrate” and linger on something. How long the neurons have been signaling about that something – say, a pungent smell or a beautiful face – into the water matrix, into the space of the dipoles, expanding the limits of their influences. The “reminders,” repeated stimuli, were important too – they supported coherence and widened its boundaries… All this, taken together, brought the theory closer to reality: the brain modeled on paper began to live, to change its states, constantly moving from symmetrical to asymmetrical phases, not freezing in one infinite, perpetual order, as in eternal ice or a hard crystal. Some fragments of memory vanished in a few moments, forgotten, erased by fluctuations; others were remembered for a long time and recalled easily, always ready “at hand.” Everything looked as if it were in my own head – maybe not exactly but quite similar!

Then I went on to study the connection between dipole waves and neurons, to establish the link between the quantum micro and the classical macro. It was necessary to at least demonstrate the possibility of the interaction, to reveal its probable mechanism. The search for “intermediaries” between neurons and water dipoles took a while – I had to read a lot of scientific books and articles to get to the tiniest details of the structure of the neural cells. Finally, I understood: the answer was hidden in microscopic threadlike protein structures – countless intertwined filaments creating their own intricate networks, distinct from the network of neurons, both inside and outside the brain cells. Excitations of the electromagnetic field propagated along them, giving a push to the ordering of the water molecules, and this order was “felt” by other filaments, in other cells as far away as you like. Thus, neurons, without knowing it themselves, sent each other instantaneous signals at great distances, coordinating their work. The coherence of water dipoles determined the correlation of the work of the neurons, which was established very quickly and was preserved for a long time!

Dutifully, I paid a lot of attention to the temperature effects – they represented a great danger. Quantum condensate in a warm, living environment – it sounded suspicious, even a bit wild. Everything turned out all right, however. The concentration of bosons, collective oscillations, was sufficient to withstand thermal energy, to erect a barrier between the symmetrical and asymmetric. They did not allow memory to be erased, to return the brain to a state of forgetfulness, an empty sheet. Moreover, a significant part of the water matrix was penetrated and permeated with the same protein filaments. Their elements possessed their own dipole moments and, involuntarily, helped to fight attempts at reestablishing disorder – as if “sensing” that a coherent state is the most advantageous one and protecting it, providing a screen, a defense…

In about six months it became more or less clear to me: the idea proposed thirty years ago did not contradict the observed facts nor the biophysics we now know and accept. My calculations indirectly confirmed: it is quite possible that our brain functions precisely in this way and our memories are not static “imprints” but resonances of dipole waves interacting with neurons throughout the neocortex. It is in these waves, in the excitations of the dipole matrix, with a lifespan of a couple of seconds to dozens of years, that everything we remember is encoded.

I tried to talk about this with Tony once or twice, but with little success; he showed almost no interest. I think he did not understand much – quantum field theory was too alien to him. But at the same time his sad, yearning look pushed me onward. I felt responsible: for the quantum model of the brain, which, having been someone else’s, had now become my own; for the efforts of Tony, his group, for everyone else, daring to try to get close to the most important of mysteries – how we remember and think. There was no high-flown ambition behind this; I only knew I had to give it my all and keep advancing. And there were plenty of advances to be made – so far, despite my model’s strong points, I could not solve its main problem: why new fragments of memory, while “entering” the brain, do not make the old ones disappear forever.

The system of water dipoles coding the memory had one undeniable property: its states could not pass into each other. Once the dipole matrix had fallen into an energy minimum and been placed into some kind of order, it could not be “reordered” in any other way. The system needed to jump “upward,” to again approach toward symmetry, toward disorder – and only then to slide into another local vacuum, having encoded something new. The problem was that the old code was erased during this process. Mathematics demonstrated that two different orders – two different memories – could not exist simultaneously without interfering with each other.

This appeared to draw a fat red line through my theory, but I did not allow myself to become discouraged. I knew the model was correct, I felt it with every fiber in my being – but at the same time I could see no way out of the impasse. Of course, one could consider the spatial division of ordered areas, but this assumption seemed far-fetched. It was clear to me that each memory could be encoded on as large an area as you like – it could even be the entire brain at once; otherwise, the whole point of the concept would be lost. The brain cannot be divided into many small principalities, each of which is responsible for its own allotted recollection. No, as I had already told myself many times, the solution lay not in the structure but somewhere in the dynamics. It was obvious that I hadn’t fully understood the dynamics; I was missing the most important part.

Until a decent idea presented itself, I decided to bring the model closer to reality – in particular, to take into account thermal energy exchange with the environment. The brain is a very thermostatic system, its temperature being almost constant – therefore I did not expect any surprises from the thermal exchange. Nevertheless, I decided to pay some attention to this aspect.

It was not easy to introduce this into my equations – and I felt a bit unsure. Quantum field theories, as a rule, deal with isolated systems, whose total energy remains constant. They prefer not to bother with dissipation, but there had still been attempts to formalize it properly. And one of them gave me the impetus to make a breakthrough.

The approach was based on the idea of describing the environment subjectively, as it is “seen” by a quantum system immersed in it – for example, by the brain. This subjective image was represented by a similar system with the same number of components but reversed along the time axis. The system seemed to interact with its own reflection in the mirror of time – strange as this sounded, the authors showed that the energetic balance with the environment was strictly maintained in this way.

Initially, I did not give this work much attention until suddenly I began to feel something nagging at me from the inside, some elusive idea that was about to surface. It revealed itself when I was in the shower, getting warm under the hot water. “Here it is: heat exchange,” I muttered to myself ironically, groping around for that slippery train of thought. Then I sighed and drew an unhappy smiley face on the steamed-up wall of the shower cubicle – and looked in the mirror, where my emoticon was reflected. For some reason, I rubbed out the downward smile and drew it back the other way up. The picture in the mirror changed accordingly. The face with its curved smiling mouth continued to look at me with displeasure – as if irritated by my stupidity. “It’s still looking at me in the same way,” I thought to myself. “Maintaining its balance – its, ha-ha, emotional balance… But on the wall, the face has become different!”

I jumped out of the shower, hastily dried myself and ran to the table. I began to write things down – using words rather than formulas and scratching the paper: thermal transfer means doubling the degrees of freedom. The ban on the transition of stable states into each other refers to a duplicated system. To the totality – to the brain plus the environment – and not just the brain alone!

Adding an exclamation mark, I looked for a while at the sentences jumping out at me. Then I got dressed and sat down to work – calmly, realizing that the decisive step had already been taken. It just needed to be described mathematically. I doubled the number of oscillation modes holding the system in an ordered state, adding “reflections” coming from outside, and – observing the energy balance – equalized the contributions of the direct and reflected quanta. This gave me a basic equation specifying the constraints on all the dynamics. The solution turned out to be easy; I singled out those parts that corresponded to the states of the brain – as one would expect, these were different patterns of excitations. Different states of memory, independent of each other, arising every moment and living of their own accord. The brain was creating them, adjusting to the surrounding environment, which is always different. Thus, the brain was getting enriched by experiences, as if by frames on a photographic film. And the state of the entire system – the brain plus the external world – was localized in proximity to the same energy minimum, rising slightly above it and falling into it again!

I realized: the capacity problem in my model had been resolved. Different quantum condensates – different modes of dipole waves, encoding a multitude of memories – coexist simultaneously, like a myriad of colored shades in a single beam of white light. They are waiting for their time to be activated, at the signal of certain neural groups, to become dominant for a brief moment – as a fleeting recollection or thought – or perhaps for a long time, if the corresponding stimulus is persistent enough. Then they are replaced by others – “coded” in the dipole matrix or emerging anew. The brain works tirelessly, gathering new experiences and adding them to those that have already been accumulated, and none of them interfere with each other. And the guarantee for this is the ever-changing surrounding world, which the brain senses through receptors, cerebral fluids, the capillaries and blood vessels. The brain interacts with its environment constantly, every moment while it’s alive – this interaction is the substance of its existence, like the existence of any other type of living matter!

Everything fell into place; my quantum model became logically complete. It was amazing – to see through abstract formulas how memories were created and stored, how they gradually blurred and died. How they were activated, summoned into life – some more willingly than others, but for each of them, at least a little bit of work was required. It was natural – otherwise, it would be impossible to dwell on a single notion. Consciousness would simply jump from one recollection to another; the process of thought would become impossible. At the same time, the transition between energy minimums was fast and fluent: interaction with the outside world provided agility and flexibility of thinking… Flexibility of thinking… Thinking …

And here, at this point, on that very word I felt like I had been doused with icy water. The delight of comprehension turned into confusion and vexation – I sensed, almost physically, that once again I was hitting a brick wall. Yes, I understood – in general – how we remember but still had no idea how we think. My model described in detail direct links between external stimuli and brain responses, but this was only suitable for very basic functions. For animal instincts and the ability to survive – but not for an intelligent human being, capable of fathoming thoughts immeasurably beyond our feral needs.

From scattered fragments of memory I needed to advance toward the connections between them, to the transitions of one to another, and then to associations, categorization, abstractions… I knew this was a huge step, one could say a leap across the abyss. Reflecting on this, I felt I was failing – and, in addition, other memory issues remained unclear. I could not understand what makes us able to distinguish subtle details with such confidence – for example, how we recognize a familiar face in the crowd, having only glanced briefly and obliquely at it from a distance. How a few carelessly sung notes allow us to recall the entire melody; how a chance phrase in a conversation reveals all the weaknesses of a companion – even if we had never heard those exact words from him…

The stimuli are never identical; they can be similar but no more than that. How does our brain nevertheless infallibly and instantaneously choose the correct memory without getting it confused with others? I was convinced that a certain general principle was behind all this, according to which the states of the brain are organized and interconnected – so that navigation between them is carried out with astonishing efficiency. And I didn’t even have an inkling of this principle, this underlying fundamental law. I had no decent ideas – until… Until I met Kirill.

Chapter 16

I’m sitting in the armchair in front of the screen, glancing at my watch for the hundredth time. Something strange is happening: the evening session has been delayed – and not through any fault of my own. The screen is dark, Nestor is not there, and this is completely inexplicable.

At seven minutes past five, I begin to panic. It seems to me that my mentor will never appear. That no one will appear – with difficulty I suppress a desire to rush into Elsa’s bedroom and make sure she is still here. I force myself to calm down – this is ridiculous, of course. It’s just my nerves, my tortuous attempts to move on with my physics, to recall more…

“Everything’s fine, fine,” I mutter aloud, and at that moment the screen comes to life. Nestor seems the same as usual; he is focused, neatly dressed. I look inquiringly, but it doesn’t even occur to him to apologize. I’m not offended, however; I’m too glad to see him. I even forget my determination not to ask for any assistance and instead of greeting him blurt out, “Nestor, I need help!”

“Yes, of course,” he says and inclines his head to one side. Now that my theory has begun to take on features, Nestor has changed again; he has stopped nagging and has turned into an efficient manager. “What do you need – my opinion? Information? Friendly support?”

I explain, trying to sound calm, “I’m at an important stage, but I’m treading water. I know there is a key – it goes by the name of Kirill. The key is in the word – it is a key word, leading to a key idea that isn’t coming to me. Leading to a thought about thoughts – what do you say about this?”

I am being deliberately inarticulate, and Nestor, of course, recognizes this. He looks down and says importantly, “Well. The name Kirill is in your file.” Then he adds, “You’re right about the key. You are approaching something – it’s a serious moment. I can help you but please bear in mind that by doing this, I’m taking a risk. I’m risking giving you a false hint, confusing you. Fooling you with a thought about thoughts. And at the same time – no matter what I do, you’ll achieve your goal, stumble across the focal point. A paradox? – Yes, it’s a key paradox. Yet at the moment you won’t understand its essence…”

He is evidently mimicking me with his choice of words. “Of course I won’t; I’m not smart enough,” I say, offended.

Nestor nods, “Perhaps, that is so! But don’t worry, no one else in your place would understand either. You only have to believe: a false hint is a false idea… A false idea doesn’t have the right face. A false face, a lying face, ha-ha-ha!”

As I fall asleep, I think with irritation – it’s easy to talk in riddles, to shroud everything in fog. To make someone lose their train of thought – why do we not lose track of our thoughts all the time? Even in spite of all the hints… I reflect with the last ounce of my strength, and then I fall into the darkness. Into the dream Nestor has chosen for me, a dream about Bern – as I knew it in my maturity, not in my youth.

The city had not changed, but I had become different – and immediately realized I was no longer afraid of its sated, self-satisfied quagmire. Its essence now lay not in the gleam of the store windows, not in its bourgeois well-being, but in the fine rain, the tedious drizzle that poured down from the sky day in day out, without ceasing. Passers-by huddled under the arcades, in the twilight of the covered galleries, caught in the shopkeepers’ clinging tentacles. The central part of the city seemed to be ensnared in an invisible enticing web. Rain and shopping galleries – it was a combined idea, a conspiracy against consumers’ wallets.

It was crowded under the arcades but the streets themselves were empty. I was wandering alone along the wet sidewalks, the hood of my raincoat up. The city had little to offer me; it no longer had any riddles or secrets. There was neither Gunter nor Professor Kertner, and the intoxicating spirit of learning was long gone. Only a trace of Albert Einstein remained.

One time, I went into the university and was struck by its shabbiness. In the building where my old department had been located, everything screamed of lack and want. Ascending to the second floor, I peeked into the library and read the timetables for the seminars. Their subjects were impressive; researchers here were still engaged in serious matters. And the world continued to allocate to them pittances, crumbs, spending the rest on toys for the crowd… I went out into the street, to the observation deck named in honor of Einstein – and for the first time noticed it overlooked railway tracks covered with litter. In front of me were the dirty concrete and the unsightly graffiti – and beyond sneered a wealthy city with no desire to know anything about science in general, let alone a small gathering of theoretical physicists breaking into the very secrets of the universe.

On the weekends, I would sometimes go to Einstein’s apartment to gaze at the two cramped rooms and the rickety dressing screen, at the baby carriage for his small child who probably cried at night. I looked at his ads offering lessons for three francs an hour, at a blunt reference letter from a professor from Zurich stating that Einstein was not an able student, that physics was too complex for him and he should try doing something else… Afterward, I always felt the need for broader horizons, a wide-open space – so I turned toward the Theaterplatz and headed out onto the bridge, to the river, where there was a lot of light, despite the cloudy sky. I’d walk in the riverside park for a while; then I would return to the enclosed web of galleries and arcades, to the traps for the deep-pocketed, to the crowds of tourists and the bourgeois insularity of their views. And there, as if to spite my surroundings, I would think again and again about the might and power of the human mind. For the umpteenth time, I would try to imagine how analogies and associations are created. How the leaps are made from specific details to generalizations, to abstractions. Why do thoughts that seem to be inspired by very different motivations converge? Why does our brain not get lost in a maze of constantly changing states but confidently finds a way to a correct conclusion?…

I knew the questions but had no answers. Understanding would not come; all hypotheses seemed fruitless. I despaired, I was angry with myself. And then – then I met Kirill.

It so happened that in the evening, after dinner, I went to the bar of one of the hotels. The place was crowded – the hotel was hosting a symposium of cardiologists. With difficulty, I found an empty table, and a few minutes later a stranger joined me. He looked slovenly and somewhat arrogant, but I didn’t have the strength to turn him away.

He sat down and introduced himself, “I’m Kirill.” Then he awkwardly shook his head and dropped a napkin on the floor. I told him my name in reply and out of politeness asked, “You’re probably a cardiologist?”

Kirill immediately started up, “Certainly not! I’m a mathematician!” And he asked with evident sarcasm, “And you I suppose are a doctor?”

After hearing I was a theoretical physicist, he nodded indifferently and lost interest in me. I was struck by his vain posturing. “And what do you specialize in?” I asked in an equally indifferent voice, showing I couldn’t be bothered about him either.

Despite this, Kirill’s eyes lit up. “In a subject that’s more natural than all others!” he declared hotly. “In something that keeps the whole world running. You probably know about dynamic chaos – which is, in truth, deterministic, not chaotic; it obeys an indisputable order. I’m trying to enlighten these ignoramuses on how the human heart actually works.”

His tone was comical, but I saw that his posing was not without foundation. “We, in some ways, are allies,” I told him. “So, how’s your enlightenment going?”

“Not particularly well,” Kirill admitted and had just started complaining about his colleagues when a waitress brought him a coffee. He immediately made a scene with her, claiming he had ordered something else and appearing even more unpleasant than before. He was sarcastic and rude, knowing the woman couldn’t answer him back. I felt ashamed and almost decided to pay up and leave, but the dispute ended, Kirill returned to his science and his manner changed abruptly. I glanced at him and was amazed at how utterly inept he was in every respect – except for his highly trained mind.

“You, of course, will immediately start looking for a contradiction!” he exclaimed. “Determinism is predictability, reproducibility; chaos is exactly the opposite. You think I painted myself into a corner – but no, I did not! The behavior of a nonlinear system appears chaotic at first glance; it seems random – but that’s only because we aren’t attentive enough. It’s just that a tiny initial difference – a micron – quickly leads to a huge divergence in what happens later. You’ve probably heard about the so-called butterfly effect. I’m sure you are no stranger to pop culture…”

He accusingly jabbed his finger at me, but I didn’t take offence; I was listening with ever-greater interest. “So, it turns out,” Kirill continued, “you launch a double pendulum a thousand times, and it produces a thousand completely different curves. You may think this is a matter of chance, and you hastily put a label on it – but you’re wrong: the randomness of the pendulum is not real; it is a phantom, a ghost. What’s the difference, you may ask, between two kinds of randomness, imaginary and authentic? You’ll ask, and I will answer: the difference, the principal disparity, is causality. It is precisely the presence and absence of causality that distinguishes between traditional and deterministic chaos. When a system behaves erratically under the influence of unrelated events, this chaos is true, it is real. It can only be averaged out by statistics, which, you will agree, is not interesting: statistics emasculates the essentials. But, when connections between events emerge – as the literati say, things happen for a reason – ‘chaos’ becomes predetermined; it can be studied; one can look into its depths. And there, in the depths, amazing events take place – always, everywhere, in the heart, in living… Real chaos is death, but deterministic chaos is life!”

I listened to this unkempt man, I looked into his eyes, in which at that moment the cosmos was reflected, and it seemed I was hearing great music, the purest of melodies. And the reflected cosmos resounded, it lived – in accordance with some higher order. I sensed that this mode of existence is the most precise, the truest.

“But!” Kirill exclaimed. “But, looking into the depths, you cannot restrain the nature of disorder, even if the most comprehensible reasons explain it. The first to understand this was Poincaré, a Frenchman, who was objecting to another Frenchman, Laplace. You may remember that the latter asserted: if we learn all the connections between the heavenly bodies, then we’ll be able to calculate at any moment their mutual positions and influences on each other… He thought he was singing a hymn to the human mind, but in fact he was only underlining its, the mind’s, overconfidence and naivety. And Poincaré demonstrated this with just a few bodies – three were enough. The disorder immediately raised its head and, with a flick of its mighty tail, sent Laplace’s dreams crashing to earth. Understandably, Poincaré became pessimistic – no predictions are possible in unstable systems, he declared. And I quote: ‘An absolutely insignificant reason, eluding us in its minuteness, can cause a substantial effect that we cannot foresee. We have a random phenomenon before us…’ – and here he was not quite right. But it was tough for him: he did not have a computer; he could not study phase portraits over and over, as we do. And yet he – a great man – proposed that a nonlinear dynamic regime, a deterministic chaos, is recognizable in its own way! He described – romantically, in the French manner – what an attractor, a portrait of chaos, an image of nonlinear dynamics, might be.

“Of course, you know what an attractor is?” Kirill looked straight into my face. “A state of equilibrium, for example – simply a point; periodic motion – a closed curve, a so-called limit cycle… Now we know: ‘chaotic’ systems also have attractors, their ‘disorder’ converging toward certain trajectories. Only these attractors are atypical – they are strange, and so they are called: strange attractors. Nonlinear dynamics is nonperiodic – therefore the phase trajectories do not intersect. The nonlinear regime is unstable – thus the system easily jumps from one section of the attractor to another. Here again, it is appropriate to recall the butterfly effect – and it’s funny that strange attractors sometimes resemble butterfly wings, but the most amazing thing is how correctly Poincaré described them. ‘Something like a lattice, a fabric, a net with infinitely tight loops; none of the curves should ever intersect themselves but should coil themselves up in a very complex way to intertwine an infinite number of times…’ Think about it – sounds like poetry, right? And he saw it all with just his inner vision, without having a powerful processor or a multipixel screen!”

Scorching myself, I swallowed hot coffee, my third or fourth cup already. In my head, the parts of the puzzle were quickly falling into place. And Kirill carried on, “Deterministic chaos is a rule, not an exception! It is everywhere, it imposes itself on us, and we – we turn our heads away, pretending not to notice. We are trying to remove the noise, smooth up the fluctuations, linearize – oh, it’s a terrible thing, linearization! Linear approaches, linear minds… Of course, it’s easier like that – otherwise you would need art, not just craft. You yourself know very well that nonlinear equations in general cannot be solved…”

He decried the short-sightedness of the world, and I nodded back, sensing, almost physically, that I was finally about to understand – both memory and thought. Understand how the brain builds chains of reasoning, categorizes and generalizes, moves from subject to object, associating one with the other. I had just heard of deterministic chaos for the first time, and yet I had become immediately convinced it was the source of the order I needed. I didn’t know anything about attractors, but somehow I realized it was they that act as the navigators in the brain’s manifold states.

We stayed up very late. I barely asked any questions and made no notes; I just listened. The next morning, I realized that I remembered and understood everything. The concept of an attractor was obviously connected with the principle of minimal energy. I roughly estimated the properties of phase trajectories, minimizing the free energy of my system. As expected, they satisfied the conditions of deterministic chaos. The superposition of the brain’s stable states was an attractor of a certain type – the same strange attractor Kirill had been talking about. An intricate figure Poincaré had described, much more complex than ordinary circles and spirals…

I immersed myself in chaos theory – wondering how I could have gone so long without it. Little by little a new picture of the dynamics of the brain was emerging – and I sensed it was accurate and true. The brain, recalling a familiar smell or word or, say, reanalyzing an idea that has already been formulated, “moves” through states that are close to those that had once been formed and “encoded” in the quantum condensate. The brain’s accumulated experiences, as well as the thoughts linking them together, are mapped into a hierarchy of converging trajectories: attractors in the space of states, attractors in the space of attractors, attractors in the space of attractors within the space of attractors, and so on. It was categorization, abstraction through the hierarchy of attractors, that explained both the incredible sensitivity of the brain to external stimuli and the flexibility of human thinking, the ability to form thoughts through associations and analogies. Events that evoke memories – for example, the flash of a face in the crowd, or the slightest trace of a smell – did not lead directly to the goal. They only defined the regions of the “attractors’ landscape” at different levels of abstraction. And then the brain “swirled in,” as if through a funnel, into the desired area of the phase space, entered the required dynamic mode deterministically and purposefully, obeying the laws of chaos, which was not chaos but the highest order. Order, defining the laws of thinking!

The recognition path went “down” from categories to specifics, but specific memories and thoughts could also “ascend” toward abstractions – and not necessarily to those with which the thinking process had started. The smell of wine could remind one of a wine stain on a tablecloth; this, in turn, might elicit the color of the dress worn by a woman once loved; and that might lead to thoughts of love, infidelity, loyalty and betrayal, transience and the meaning of life. From information to fragments of knowledge; from words to meanings – this was the essence of cognition, the essence of the mind’s power. Now I could imagine the details of this process with ease, as the most natural thing. Neurons fired signals, providing the boundary conditions, allowing the “fall” into the necessary attractors, the re-creation of familiar dynamic modes. The corresponding types of dipole waves resonated, “jumped up” to higher energy levels – and in turn affected the neurons, controlling their signals. Or, if the information was new, then no resonances would emerge; the entire system of neurons and dipoles would pass through new chains of states, new attractors would appear and their codes would be added to the quantum condensate. That’s how everything we think, rethink and remember is created and summoned to life.

The question arose: What provides the “mobility” of thinking – transitions from one memory to another, from image to image, from word to word? How does our brain “reselect” attractors, moving from thought to thought? The answer came easily – I just had to take a close look at the properties of encephalograms. The coherence of neural groups would arise almost instantaneously. The unity would be created in large regions, live for a couple of hundred milliseconds, then disappear for a dozen milliseconds, then reappear, but in some other areas – these were the very same patterns Tony’s group was observing. Now I understood their meaning perfectly. There were pauses in the stream of “thoughts,” moments of a loss of coherence – a return to disorder, thanks to which the brain could move freely from attractor to attractor at any level of abstraction. Dynamic modes replaced each other abruptly, in rapid leaps. This opened the way for analogies and associations, generalizations or, conversely, for concentration on particulars. This also ensured a constant readiness to respond to a new stimulus, to accept a new challenge from the outside world.

Soon it also became clear to me what the purpose of the brain’s plasticity was, of its relentless, scrupulous restructuring of neural connections. The aforementioned “memory imprints” were, in fact, a “map of the terrain,” the result of the adaptation of brain tissue to the prevailing order of thoughts, to the types of the mind’s work that currently were the most important. Speed and clarity of thinking were provided by optimal initial conditions – the “push,” after which the ball rolls down the hill in the right direction. Neurons, sending signals to the system of water dipoles, provided this push – helping to choose the correct subspace of attractors and to “leap” swiftly to the most suitable among them. Synapses, neural connections, formed a “landscape of attractors,” delineated boundaries, placed survey markers. Each individual brain seemed to adapt anatomically to the most frequent, intense memorization, recollections, reflections. It adapted to them but did not imprint them – contrary to the popular “neural doctrine.” Synaptic connections only represented the extent to which a particular brain is adjusted to the realities, agile and able. Memory and thinking are the prerogative of a trained brain, not a brain “full of neural records” in contrast to an “empty” one!

This explained so much! This allowed human beings to develop themselves, to become smarter, to improve their “picture of the world.” The more often each specific brain passes through a particular dynamic process, the easier it can return to this process – this is learning, training. The more often you think about something, the longer you remember it, the less effort you need to come back to this subject. And, after coming back to it, to move forward toward new hypotheses and ideas…

So, the concept of deterministic chaos put everything in its place. The main principle of the dynamics of the brain was now completely clear. I knew, I felt: a thought, a memory is a “strange” attractor and it cannot be otherwise. And of course, I wanted to look at the thought-attractor eye to eye. I set out to re-create it on paper or on the monitor screen – to get a phase portrait of the process underlying intelligent life.

Of course, this was a very ambitious task. A consistent whole would need to be deduced from fragmentary, incomplete specifics. I began reconstructing the phase space from data sets – combining and comparing the amplitudes and phases of the neural waves at different moments in time. And I made a bold assumption, which turned out to be correct: I proposed that the form of the attractor should be the same at all levels of the brain’s functioning – when responding to stimuli like smells and sounds, when converting memories to words, and when abstracting, generalizing. That helped; similar structures started to appear in the streams of data. For a long time, I could not visualize them properly, but I finally found the solution – the coordinate structure in which the encephalograms obtained from different patients under different circumstances were projected into similar curves. Taken together they formed a picture – an attractor, localized in an enclosed space. I investigated this as far as was possible – and yes, indeed, it was “chaotic,” it was “strange”: the system never repeated itself; the line did not intersect but gradually filled a certain region, interwoven in the most complicated way. This was a portrait of the dynamics of the mind, the crown of evolution. I gave it a name – the “face of thought.” I printed it, hung it over my desk and looked at it for a long time as if trying to reach even further, deeper. And then I got on the tram and went to Bern University.

I climbed the long stairs to the physics faculty building and went to the back entrance, leading to the Albert Einstein observation deck. I looked around, glanced down at the graffiti and railroad tracks. Then I came up to the memorial plaque, made a curt bow and said, “Thank you. You gave me the courage.”

And apart from Einstein, there wasn’t really anyone I could talk to. I realized this especially keenly when I wandered one day into Tony’s group’s seminar. They were discussing the same old problem: Why does one and the same stimulus – in this case, a smell – elicit brain reactions that are not one hundred percent similar? Why is the correspondence between the stimulus and the neuron activity only approximate, albeit statistically significant? Why does the intensity of the stimulus change almost nothing?…

The biologists were arguing fiercely and tirelessly, but I could see they were going around in circles. It was not in their power to escape from it – and I could not resist, I intervened. In a few words, I tried to convey to them what was now for me completely obvious. Somewhat inconsistently, hastily, I spoke about the water matrix and the dipole waves, the quantum condensate and memory codes, the landscape of attractors and the role of neurons, the navigators in its labyrinths. I explained that the brain’s response can never be the same, and its clarity and intensity are determined not by the force of the stimulus but by the brain’s internal dynamics. A few molecules of perfume can lead to the same reaction as a whole bottle poured onto the floor. A casually dropped word can cause a torrent of memories – more powerful than a persistent repetition of the same phrase. Stimulus is not a pump that supplies energy into the neurons’ network. No, it is only a trigger that launches an internal mechanism…

Of course, they did not understand me; they looked at me wildly, as if I, when speaking about the most familiar things, were using words that made no sense. As if I were presenting them with entirely incomprehensible nonsense. I proposed that they at least let me clarify what I was saying in more detail. But no, they did not want clarification; they had no desire to leave their comfort zone. Then I made my apologies and left – once again feeling an immeasurable loneliness.

That evening, I decided that my theory must be published. It had to become accessible to those who, at least at some time, would be worthy of it. Those who might be able to gain from it the impulse to push onward, even if it were only to happen in thirty – or three hundred – years in the future.

Chapter 17

We have an early morning; I am sitting at the table watching Elsa cook the fried eggs. A few minutes earlier I had had a minor quarrel with Nestor – over nothing in particular. It’s my fault – the last two days I’ve been wound up and my nerves are on edge. Everyone knows the reason – Nestor, Elsa and me as well. I’m at yet another impasse and my counselor hasn’t yet found a way of helping me.

What’s more, he is, as usual, playing around with allusions and innuendo. “It’s important. More important than you think,” he said in response to my story about deterministic chaos and the “face of thought.” And he added with exaggerated regret, “It’s a pity you don’t know why yet.”

This annoyed me, of course, and then he also hinted at his role in choosing the dream about Kirill. He made it sound as if the whole theory was in some way down to him – which made me even angrier. I said something to him in reply, to which he merely nodded and then switched off the screen in silence. Now I am sitting, dissatisfied with everything, and looking gloomily at Elsa.

Fortunately, my grumpiness doesn’t bother her in the slightest. She puts the frying pan on the table and says jokingly, “What else do you want? Tea, coffee? A dance? Maybe a blow job?” And adds with a snicker, “You know, not long ago, I had a very sensual dream. But I couldn’t recognize the setting – I mean the place and the time. That’s why I didn’t tell you about it, I’m sorry. You’re angry about something – not at me, I hope?”

I dig into the fried eggs, which really do taste good. “No,” I say to Elsa, “I’m annoyed with myself – and, it seems, I’m still not angry enough. Tell me something, provoke me, make me really mad…” And I continue my thread of thought using highly technical terms, knowing that she doesn’t like them, “Excite some dipole wave in my memory, drag it out from the bottom of the parabola. It’s sleeping there in the energy minimum, encoding the recollection I’m hunting for.”

Elsa is animated, “Aha, that is, you want me to tell you something nasty, and you’ll then invent a story about me?”

I shake my head, “No, you’ll only act as a catalyst, as an external stimulus, and afterward my brain will move along the chain of associations – somewhere in the distance, probably, away from you.”

“Aww,” Elsa pouts. “And there I was thinking…”

“But,” I continue, “if you keep repeating the same thing to me every day, then, at some point, my neuron connections will readjust themselves. My brain will be returning to you with its thoughts over and over again, no matter what you talk about!”

“Well,” says Elsa, taking my empty plate, “how could I turn down such an offer? I can tell you this: in my first life I was also often mad at myself. Basically, when I was being carried away in the wrong direction – and everything I did was misguided. For example, I once cheated on Dave to convince myself to break up with him…”

She talks about a chance encounter with a traveling salesman from Texas. She didn’t like anything, especially the way he pestered her with his caresses, which weren’t to her taste – but she tolerated it, wanting him to climax and leave her alone. For a long time, this didn’t happen, and when it finally did, in response to his questions, she confessed that it hadn’t been that great.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” the Texan asked. “Why didn’t you push me away?”

“I didn’t want to bother you,” Elsa answered honestly.

“You put up with that for my sake?” He was amazed and started making a long-winded apology…

“He really felt guilty,” Elsa tells me; “he was very uneasy. I had no idea that Texans were so self-conscious. I became uncomfortable myself; I suddenly felt I had complete power over him, albeit for only a minute. I could have forced him to do whatever I wanted – buy me a handbag or some shoes, for example… It was an unpleasant feeling, I realized then: having authority over a man was not for me. Too much gets dragged up from the hidden depths – I looked down there and did not want to look any more. After that, I didn’t allow myself to be generous with my lovers – it’s like winning with the help of an unfair trick. Unselfishness is too powerful a weapon, with too rigid a trigger!”

Elsa turns on the water and sets about washing the dishes. I reflect on her story. I like it; for all its banality, it has a hint of the absurd that appeals to me.

“Your turn,” says Elsa. I tell her about my last girlfriend from Bern, a Turkish bus driver. She was insatiable; her temperament shook me time after time. I once asked her as a joke, “You probably like a man with a large ‘appendage’ – after all, you’re the commander of a pretty big apparatus yourself?” And she laughed, “Well, no, I’m quite happy with your average-size willy…”

Elsa looks at me slyly, “Well, if you’re talking about such things, I’ve got something else to admit. I sometimes thought I would end up empty-handed, so to speak, at the core moments, because my clitoris wasn’t sensitive enough.” She giggles. “But on the other hand, I didn’t believe it could have been otherwise: good girls should be vaginal, not clitoral – for some reason, this notion remained stuck in my head. Perhaps, as you mentioned, those were my neuron connections, right? So, in general, I was a bit of an oddity, yes… Well, are you pleased with me? Did I help you free something from out of the bottom of your parabola?”

Then we move to the window and stay there together for a while. Elsa asks, “Could you clarify with your Nestor again that they won’t force us to leave here after we do what they want? The instructions in the Brochure are all very well, but I’d still like to double-check. And I don’t really trust my own Nestor anymore…”

I nod in silence. Elsa adds thoughtfully, “There’s something in what you said to me once about always being young. I’m not growing old here in Quarantine, and, likewise, I don’t have to live through the idiocy of youth again when you never understand what’s what. I’m in my prime here – why should I have to leave it?”

I put my hand on her waist and send a tantric message of tenderness. It even seems I can feel her response, the heat of her blood. The flow of her blood… and then something dawns on me suddenly. I say, “Elsa, you are priceless!” And rush to find a pencil and paper.

The future publication of my theory had to be approached carefully. I knew that my quantum model deserved a long life, but I clearly saw the dangers it might face once it stepped out into the spotlight. It required protective armor against unfriendly arrows – I understood that well. First, I had to delineate the model’s boundaries – its territory, its claims – without detracting from its value but also avoiding any superfluous assertions. And second, I needed experimental support – not necessarily direct and explicit, but I did have to have at least something tangential. Otherwise, the whole concept remained a hypothesis, a mathematically proven fiction.

In terms of the boundaries, everything was clear. The theory explained the underlying mechanisms of the formation of memories and thoughts but did not say much about the global, principal meaning. It answered the question “how?” without touching on the “why?” In other words, I didn’t even get close to the subject of real reasoning, real consciousness – which places humankind apart, distinguishing it from all other species. Memory and the ability to think, to construct at least basic logical chains, are not the exclusive prerogative of Homo Sapiens. The key moment is self-awareness and self-perception, stepping into the loop: “I perceive,” “I perceive that I perceive,” “I perceive that I perceive that I perceive…” Cogito me cogitare,[23] as the great philosopher put it. The human mind for some reason turns away now and then from the external world and concentrates all its power on itself. The human mind reinterprets itself, reworks the knowledge it already possesses. It is this trait that immeasurably increases its strength, allowing it to escape beyond the boundaries, the narrow limits of reacting to the environment and to step out toward infinity, to the point where there are no limits. This is what allows humanity to stand proudly.

In the loop “I perceive,” “I perceive that I perceive” and so forth, there was some sort of closed circuit, a constant feedback, a back-and-forth exchange – but consisting of what and with what? Or, sometimes I would think to myself with a chill running down my spine, consisting of whom and with whom? Nothing from my theory provided me with any clues. I decided not to torment myself with this just yet, faintheartedly leaving the issue to philosophy and not physics, and busied myself with another, vital question – a link between my theoretical calculations and at least something that could be observed in an experiment. And I soon concluded there was only one way – energy exchange. A comparison of energy flows computed from my equations with the real data accumulated by our firm.

The energy of the brain was being studied by a special laboratory. I knew its boss, Albert, who had a shaved head and looked like a thug. At the company he was known as “the man who lives in the bloodstream.” It was specifically blood – bright, arterial, nourishing the cerebral vessels, and dark, venous, cleansing the brain of carbon dioxide – that served as his research environment. Using the most modern equipment, Albert’s staff could accurately determine the oxygen consumption at any area in the brain at any moment in time. I often helped them with the analytics and had direct access to their data. Thus, I had irrefutable experimental evidence showing when, where and how much energy is spent in the brain tissue.

Good news immediately emerged: the form and duration of the energy cycles – both the experimental and theoretical ones – matched very well. Their amplitudes, describing the amount of energy consumed by the brain, also coincided perfectly at certain stages of the brain’s work – but only certain, not all. This news was bad: my model was supported by experiments only during periods of routine brain activity. When the brain had to work hard – being confronted with something difficult that required more than the usual effort – its energy requirements increased greatly. In my model, they increased too – but to a much lesser extent. The model did not explain where the energy went.

Of course, this was an unpleasant surprise. I didn’t believe the theory was wrong, but the mismatch meant it was at least incomplete. I checked the calculations again and again but was unable to find any mistakes. I soon understood, however, that those periods when the brain had been subject to a serious workout had not been reflected in the encephalograms I had used to calculate the model’s parameters. Tony’s laboratory had discarded stressful situations as being too extreme and confusing the general picture.

Realizing this, I went to Tony and persuaded him to repeat the measurements on several patients, offering them complex logical tasks. He didn’t understand why I needed this but agreed, sensing he owed me a favor. For several days, his group was busy with my request and the resulting encephalograms confirmed: when engaged in active thinking, the “analytical power” of the brain really jumped up. The groups of neurons signaled to each other much more intensively – this was not surprising; I was expecting exactly that. I also expected that the connection between the neurons – the coherence of electromagnetic waves, their phase entanglement – would become more firmly established, reliable and stronger. But for some reason, the experiment didn’t show that: the areas of correlated neurons did not change in size, and the correlation itself became different – more diminished than pronounced, as if slightly blurred. It was there, no doubt, but I was bothered with a sense that it was just an echo of more significant correspondences and connections. I felt I was merely looking at a screen on which shadows danced and all the important actions were going on behind it.

Signaling neurons seemed to be trying to convey a message – to someone, somewhere. Their “perseverance” increased by an order of magnitude, which obviously explained the excessive energy I had observed. As for the “fuzziness” of the correlation in the neurons’ joint work, this hinted at the complication of a conveyed message: if previously the neural cells had been beating it out on a drum, now they were collectively playing a harmonious, exquisite melody. What did it mean; why did the brain need this?

I reasoned: in the terms of my model, neuron groups’ “messages” represented the initial conditions for quantum processes. The complexity of the messages meant that the conditions were becoming more intricate, and the increased intensity of neuron firing made them more stable. This stability, in turn, implied that some stricter order was maintained in the system, that the system remained in a state of reduced entropy for an extended time. I could assume that the collective excitations of the water dipoles were reaching increasingly higher energy states – and so the thoughts became clearer, more precise. Most probably, this was indeed the case, but this was not enough. The calculations showed that the excess consumption of energy could not be explained in this way. In addition, I suddenly realized: the protracted orderliness of the water matrix should expand the “territory” of the neural correlation, involving more neurons in the joint work. But this did not happen either: synchronization became more stable and lasted longer, but it was localized in the same areas. Finally, I focused on this particular anomaly – at least it represented a strict fact.

I made an obvious assumption: if I do not see a “quantitative” increase in the correlation – reflecting content, knowledge – that means I’m not looking properly. It should exist in some more sophisticated form, and I need to take a more focused look. I saw only one source of sophistication – the incredible complexity of the brain structure. And I began to read articles and books, trying to understand why the brain is arranged in such an excessively complex way, what the essence of this excess is and its meaning. And most importantly – by what laws is this complexity organized?

This time, the breakthrough came of its own accord. Without any external factors – there was no publication dug up from the annals, no chance meeting with some unpleasant character, not even a puzzled smile in the shower. I just sensed and absorbed the collective opinion that had been set down in one form or another practically everywhere. For a long time, it had been expressed repeatedly and quite clearly. Many others, most likely, had had nothing to apply it to. But I definitely did.

The anatomical structure of the brain, its extremely intricate, irregular form, possessed the same property as other irregularities around us. They concealed self-similarity, independence from scale – the very things described by fractal mathematics developed in the last few decades. This fact was interesting in itself, but to me it had a special, extraordinary importance. My phase portraits of cognition, the “faces of thought” – like all strange attractors appearing in chaotic dynamics – were manifesting exactly the same properties…

One morning, I just took a blank sheet and wrote down an idea that had suddenly become obvious to me. The phase trajectories of memory and thought were converging to fractal-like figures. The brain, while developing, also evolved into a fractal-like structure. In both cases, time created order in chaos according to some sort of fractal principle. So, it was natural to propose: Perhaps this was one and the same principle?

I began to investigate the fractal-generating functions, searching for those that might be applied to both the configuration and the dynamics of the brain. Those that would reveal strict regularities in an apparent irregularity and allow for a formal comparison of their features. It soon became clear that yes, I was right, the properties of “geometric” and “dynamic” fractals were similar – or at least very close. The same types of formulas described completely different things – the geometry of the brain and the dynamics of its work. This was an important stage in the development of my theory, although at first I didn’t realize its fundamental importance, only sensing a hint at it. But even a hint was enough to understand that fractals were a universal language through which I was being sent a prompt. And there was no brushing it aside.

The next step was obvious – the prompt had been formulated very clearly. I saw a hidden – fractal – order in the formation of the structure of the brain, one, and in its movement from state to state, two. This was related to the brain as a single system, as a whole. So why not get inside the whole, to the level of neurons and dipole waves – three! Neural coherence – knowledge, thought – is also nothing more than regularity arising from disorder. Maybe fractals would help me to identify the concealed part of it, for which I had been unsuccessfully hunting? Perhaps I could take a peek behind the screen on which the shadows were dancing, and confront the actors face to face?

There were several ways to explicitly introduce a fractal principle into my model. I chose the most direct one: I changed the coordinate system, representing each of the coordinate axes by the set of values of a certain fractal generator. A “certain” one, but not quite: following the logic of the emergence of my idea, continuing to assume that the same laws govern both structure and action, I linked this function to my “face of thought” through its main property – the dimension of the generated fractals. The resulting equations looked scary at first, but soon I adjusted to their complexity and, with the help of some advanced methods, managed to simplify them, to transform them into a convenient form. And then they revealed to me their hidden meaning.

Under specific boundary conditions – if the protein filaments, the means of contact between the micro and the macro, were intertwined in a certain way – the system of water dipoles would acquire a topologically nontrivial order, “packaged” into fractal structures. The “quantity” of order became large – it could be infinitely large – but in three-dimensional coordinates it remained localized in the same modest limits. The coherence propagated inward along the fractal trajectories. Thus, a small area of the brain encoded an almost unlimited amount of knowledge…

I pictured this visually: water dipoles were not just lining up in the same direction. Their vectors, like needles, formed the most complicated, highly organized figure, which flickered and trembled but remained stable for a fairly long time. I knew that this was it. The excess energy was spent precisely here – on the transition of regions of the brain into a new ordered state. Obviously, in addition to the usual coherence, an additional order was established and maintained in the brain during active work, reflecting the same dynamic regimes, the same memories and thoughts, but in a different way. And again, the question arose: Why did the brain need this?

There was no answer. I continued to work away using the most complex mathematics. It was natural to call this emergence of a new order “fractal symmetry breaking.” This required, first, the nontrivial initial conditions and, second, overcoming a large energy barrier. The two corresponded perfectly to the incredible complexity of the brain and with the excessive energy consumption due to the more intensive neuron work. The symmetry broke down, and then, as always when this breaking occurs, the emerged order – my fractal order – was maintained by quasiparticles of a certain kind, the joint oscillations of dipoles – that very same flickering and trembling of the highly organized figure. The “cunning trick” – it was so familiar to me. I had mastered the methods of its analysis perfectly. And here as well: I saw the quasiparticles in the products of matrices; I could almost grab them with my hand – but no, something prevented me, forbidding the path from the imaginary, illusory constructs to real ones. Solutions to the equations of motion for my quasiparticles were physically impossible. Their calculated speeds turned out to be greater than the speed of light.

So, fractal coherence was excessive but did take place. Quantum oscillations that preserved it could not exist but existed nonetheless. These two facts were obviously connected with each other. But how, how? Only one explanation came to my mind. Something had to slow down the quasiparticles, act as a “brake” on them. This meant they were interacting with something – and that was their key role. Through them – through the quanta of dipole waves maintaining the fractal order – the human brain was interacting with some unknown field!

I formulated this concept on an ordinary gray, rainy day. In my office, I just sat down at the desk, looked at the formulas and added another integral to the right side of the main equation. And then muttered, grinning, joyfully like a child, “Interaction, interaction… The geometry of the macroworld is translated into the microcosm… Here’s your interfusion of scales, no matter how speculative it may sound!”

So, once again, the components of the most complicated puzzle had been put in place, set into their grooves and perfectly attached to each other. So many things were clarified at once, in a single stroke! The essence of my model, its quantum nature, had manifested itself in all its might. The step into the microcosm not only explained the stability of memory, the sharpness and flexibility of thought. This step opened a door in the solid wall put in place by classical physics. This new interaction… It occurs only when the water dipoles are ordered fractally. This, in turn, becomes possible when the initial conditions – neural impulses – are specifically nontrivial: and here is, we repeat, the “excessive” complexity of the brain tissue. The synchronization of the neurons that we observe in encephalograms is only the beginning of the process. The brain focuses on a certain thought, and if the concentration is strong enough, a fractal order appears in the matrix of water dipoles, reflecting this thought. Where an order arises from the symmetry breaking, there are quasiparticles, quasi-Goldstone bosons – and they, as we see, perturb a certain external field. The brain exchanges energy with this field and this means… This means it is exchanging information!

I swayed in my chair in a euphoria of insight. Color spots flashed before my eyes in which all the answers were encrypted. Exchange, feedback, consciousness, true consciousness… I strained with all my might, trying to retain the words and meanings, to link them together, to take a step beyond them. It was an enormous effort, and I seemed to be close, right next to something vitally important – but suddenly my thoughts became confused, exploding like fireworks. My head spun, and I passed out – right behind my desk. Then I woke up, covered all over in a sticky sweat, and realized I could not get up. My temples were burning with fire; I had a fever. Helplessly, I’d fallen face first onto the table and stayed there half sitting, half lying until lunch. One of my colleagues found me and called an ambulance.

The doctors said I was suffering from flu plus fatigue and nervous exhaustion. I stayed in the hospital for almost a week. On the second day, one of my bosses visited me and gently but insistently recommended that I take a vacation. He was right – I had not had a break for nearly two and a half years.

In the luxurious ward overlooking the river, I finally sensed just how much my quantum model had drained me. I could not think of it; my mind protested; it seemed I was almost going crazy. Sometimes, at night, hyperspace filled with a shimmering substance – the unknown new field – appeared before me. Strange voices sounded in my ears, repeating in different ways, “I perceive that I perceive that I perceive…” I woke with a start and lay awake until dawn, trying to think soberly – and they were gloomy thoughts. The repetition of what had passed – a “new field” had already been in my life, and more than once. There were also hints of other spaces, and behind them – past failures, defeat, ignominy. I knew that above all I did not want to be this ashamed again – either before others or myself.

After leaving the hospital, I tried to play with the model a little more. I transformed in different ways the equation with the new term on the right – randomly changing the set of quantum degrees of freedom, giving the mysterious field a chance to reveal itself, to “catch” my quasiparticles, to increase their mass, to restrain their mad dash. What I ended up with was nonsense; divergences emerged everywhere. When I tried to remove them, new, even more frightening ones appeared. I didn’t know what to do. And most importantly – did not want to know.

Realizing this, I resigned myself and put in a request for a vacation – as if turning my face back to the ordinary world, to the city I had so often despised. Turning and announcing to them – I’m yours, forgive my pride, grant me your little pleasures. I wanted to go somewhere far away – and I chose Thailand, having read travel stories on the web. Soon, I was sitting in the cabin of an airliner, heading east. I looked down at the banks of clouds and thought about almost nothing. Only imagined the sea, the sun and – affectionate and graceful Thai women.