healthy, gay, still good-looking, and single, in Sheffield, in England at the age of 38.
'That looks great, Mum.'
'Don't be daft.' Michael kissed her cheek. 'You haven't shaved,' she complained. 'You're not washed.'
'After, Mum, after.' He sang along with the carol in a false and booming voice.
His mum sniffed. 'Roll over Pavarotti and tell Demis Roussos the news.' She held up food on thick white plates. 'You sit there. Go on, these plates are hot.'
'May the Lord make us truly thankful,' Michael said, finishing Grace before he had begun it. He tucked in.
After breakfast, looking in the bathroom mirror, Michael was satisfied. Dammit, I am good-looking. I really am. I look my age, that's all. It was as his Mum had said: intelligent, hardworking, kind. But also, he had to admit, kinda chewy, kinda chunky. Michael, just believe it. You're sexy, OK?
He looked back at his own flushed, still olive face, with its stubble and expression of slightly dazed delight. You're in the best place. You're in the best me.
They opened their presents. Mum's was a hand-written note.
They sipped sherry and ate Christmas cake, and about noon her friends called, all ladies of her age, all interested enough in Michael. He felt chipper. 'My last project's finished more or less,' he told them. 'I'll think of something else to do.'
On Boxing Day they went to PC World and he got a deal so good he was jealous of his mum: laptop, printer, Microsoft Office and five other bits of software including an encyclopaedia for eight hundred pounds. He took AOL because of its supposedly simpler operation, found its browser didn't let you increase the typesize easily and spent the day with his mother who tutted and felt stupid because she didn't get it. It was late at night when finally she sent an e-mail to his home address. 'And how do I send you an answer again? And how do I find it when I want it?'
He left the next day, a simple hug and a kiss.
She said, patting his shoulder, 'If you do move again, you know, change countries or the like, try to remember to let me know.'
'I will Mum, I promise.'
And not long afterwards, Michael found himself settled in on the train. The weather was changeable, turning between sun and rain. Outside the windows, the sky seemed lower and the world got smaller, lost in drizzle. It was a grey and indistinct world. Maybe that's why he felt fear and misgiving close in over him. He thought of the dirty Camden flat awaiting him, cold and dark. He thought of his project.
What, really, do I do next? The thought of going back to teaching filled him with dismay. It's just daily life, Michael; it's like that for everybody. He would finish revising the article, and it would end like this: chicks don't make new pathways to see and interpret light. They are born with them.
And what did that mean?
Michael remembered the flower. It was moving and unmoving at the same time, like a bridge half built while its CADCAM model was whole and alive. That was him, that beautiful powerful thing. That was us all. Where was it?
It would be where there was no time. And where would that be?
Mathematics said there were eleven dimensions in all. Four of them existed only in time. The three dimensions of space were created by the big bang. They were expanding outwards. That expansion was simply time, flowing in one direction only: towards the future.
But.
That would mean there were seven dimensions outside time. They would be just as small as they were before the big bang. They would be a point. No height, width or depth. They would be like the smallest dot made by the sharpest pencil. But that dot would be everywhere. It would be at the core of everything around you. It would be in the core of you. You live there, but don't know it. Everything in your life flows in one direction only, into it.
A word came to him: neurophysics. The extension of the self into the universe.
He knew something was there. He had once stood in its presence or rather, had not stood. He had thought there, like someone hovering on the outside of a black hole, just escaping before being sucked into its powerful maw.
How would you research something like that? Was anyone else doing any work in it? Michael began to get restive. His hands, still in gloves, moved to assuage a sudden urge for movement in his gut. He wanted to get up and find out. He wanted a library, a bibliography, and a database to search.
How would anyone research something like that? Well, how do they do black holes? They do thought experiments, they work through the logic of the mathematical descriptions, and they model the maths on something else. It's mathematical metaphor, really. Like Einstein, proving atoms exist in a paper on molecules in tea. He just used the same maths that would describe ping-pong balls.
I said it was like standing on the edge of a black hole.
Heaven collapses into a point, where gravity can no longer work, because there is no space, and time cannot work because there is no expansion. Our eternal lives happen in something like a black hole. Mind you, only
Why not use the same mathematics to describe it and see what happens?
Michael went even more physically restive. He did a little jump in place. Does neurophysics exist? Did I just make that up, or did I read it somewhere? And if I did make it up, I could really be on to something, I mean I could, I could do that, I could take all that mathematical work, and just see what happens. And I wouldn't have to cut up any chickens to do it. I could just go ahead and do it, and if I was wrong, then that's great too, a negative result is still a result, we've still learned something.
Suddenly the train was too small and too slow. All he had to read was a John Grisham novel, and he wanted to throw it out of the train, or chuck it into the steam furnace like the boat in
And don't tell me it's not empirical. I've been there, buddy, I died to get there, and I saw it, and I'll know it when I see it again, described in numbers.
Michael settled back in his chair and slapped his own thigh. Outside, light rain was falling, like stars on grey farm outbuildings with tin roofs, pulled down by gravity, gravity which he had read in one paper could be described mathematically in the fifth dimension as electricity. The rain fell and dried and was exhaled as vapour. As a child he thought that was how the earth breathed. He loved the idea, the vapour going up like his own breath on a cold day, and turning into mountains of steam in the sky. The perfection of the system. It was perfect, the world was perfect, life was perfect, this rain and those farm buildings, ancient but with new roofs, were perfect.
Gravity twists reality out of nothingness, what physics calls quantum vacuum.
Is that what made his Angels?
If so, his mind, reaching into eternity, can twist his dead father back into being. What does it mean that he can twist those different selves so far that he can slip into another life? It means there are parallel universes. Universes you can stub your toe on and have a black toenail the next day. And parallel selves, with parallel flesh you can touch?
So gravity is thought? How can a black hole make anything?
And Michael jumped up yet again.
Well, because we know that matter going into black holes is ultimately ejected again as new creation, white holes.
So, I can take those equations too, for white holes, and see if they tell me how my real self can make Angels.
I can account for this, I know I can. I can account for the rain. I can account for the yearning between stars. Somewhere there in all that process is yearning between people as well.
Michael took a taxi from the station, an extravagance to slice through the rain, to get home. He ran up his stairs unwinding his scarf, and threw it and his coat onto the sofa, and took down his Stephen Hawking and his Daniel Dennett. He did a search on Amazon and ordered books. He began to think about how he could organize his days, teaching, marking papers, researching at night, like Einstein in the Patent Office. He would be invisible, unknown, effective. He felt fulfilled, abundant, forgiving. He had an answer to the question: What do I do next?
