just pick it up?”
“Not necessarily, but it’s just as logical as saying that mind is determined by the meat. And it would account for demons and dreams and clairvoyance better than your way.”
“Jesus! Thisis the Middle Ages. Where to begin? Okay, first of all, any dualism falls before Occam’s razor-that is, it adds an unnecessary level of complexity to a phenomenon that can be fully explained-”
“Fuck Occam and fuck his razor,” said Paz, and then, “Wait a second, hold that thought!”
A tiny clock had just rung its notional alarm in Paz’s nonexistent mind, and he got up and snatched the cover from the grill, revealing racks of glistening, steaming ribs at the precise moment at which they were perfectly done.
“Let’s eat,” said Paz, and everyone applauded.
During the actual dinner, Lola turned the conversation artfully away from cosmological themes, drawing Beth out about her work, which was a study of the lives of Miami street prostitutes, or girls who let boys kiss them for money, as they explained to Amelia, and herself supplied numerous amusing anecdotes about life as a neuropsych resident in the emergency room, her current duty, and also about going through med school with Zwick, his complete incompetence at any healing task, apparently a man who had never once found a vein on the first try, and often not on the twelfth either. Zwick took this good-naturedly enough, asserting that he’d only become a doctor to be able to do fiendish experiments on human beings and had no guilt about it at all.
They drank nearly half a gallon of the Spanish white, and after they cleared away and served dessert, Paz brought out a bottle of Havana Club anejo rum, and they sipped off that for a while until the child got cranky and had to be dragged off to bed.
“I’m scared to go to sleep, Daddy,” she said when he’d got her under the covers at last.
“You’re so tired you’ll be asleep before you know it.”
“Yes, but what if the dream animal comes back?”
“It won’t. It’s bothering another little girl tonight.”
“Who?”
“A naughty girl, probably. Not like you.”
“But what if another animal comes?”
“Well, in that case, would you like to borrow my enkangue? No dream animals are going to mess with that.”
“Uh-huh. Abuela made that for you, didn’t she. To protect you from the monsters.”
“That’s right.”
“Mommy says it’s just superstition.”
“Mommy’s entitled to her opinion,” said Paz blandly and slipped the charm on its thong over his head. He tied it carefully to the bedpost. “Don’t open it, okay?”
“What will happen?”
“It might stop working. Now, good night.”
“I want a story.” She got one and held out for just three pages of Charlotte’s Web.
Back on the patio, Paz slipped an Ibrahim Ferrer CD into the machine and stood listening to the mellow voice singing an old bolero, music from the great age of son, the 1940s, his mother’s music. It was velvet dark now, insects buzzing in the trees, jasmine floating in the air, the only light coming from citronella candles in yellow glass jars on the table. He put an arm around his wife’s shoulders and led her into a close dance. From a distance, from out in the dark yard, he heard the sound of Zwick and Beth having an argument.
“What’s all that about?” he asked into her ear.
“She’s drunk and belligerent. He doesn’t respect her mind enough. He doesn’t think people who want to have serious careers should have kids. She was looking at Amy like she wanted to kidnap her. The biological clock is running down on old Beth, and a tenure-track associate professorship don’t seem to be filling the void, nor do brilliant heartless dudes like Bobby Zwick, the poor bitch.”
“You’ve been there.”
“I have. With guys like that, too.” She gave him a hard squeeze.
“What I get for being a dummy.”
“You’re not a dummy, dummy.”
“But not as smart as Zwick.”
“No, but you’re cuter. I’m not sure anyone is as smart as Zwick. Although that line about Whitehead threw him a little. You never fail to amaze me.”
The sounds of argument faded, succeeded by some weeping, some softer talk; then, the faint creak and rattle of a rope hammock.
“Uh-oh, do you think they’re doing it back there, in our hammock?” Paz asked.
“I hope so. They can warm it up for us. God, when was the last time we did it in the yard?”
“Not since Amelia learned about doorknobs.”
“Go have children,” Lola said.
Zwick wandered back and sat at the table and poured himself a couple of fingers of old rum. Paz and Lola joined him.
“Where’s the girlfriend?” Lola asked. “Strangled?”
“Passed out in the hammock. It’s all your fault, Paz, you and your daiquiris and your anejo and your ontological speculations. Did you know that physics is a patriarchal conspiracy to promote a dominant worldview? As is medicine.”
“Well, when you solve the mystery of consciousness it won’t matter,” said Paz. “You can recode everyone’s brain.”
Zwick laughed, a little more elaborately than the comment deserved. “Yeah, and what if that changes physics? Listen, you want me to tell you the secret of the universe?” He mimed a paranoid looking over both shoulders. “Don’t tell anyone. Okay, so let’s say we have these vast pillars of physics, relativity and quantum electrodynamics, and they’re both as elaborately confirmed as anything in the world. Maybe too elaborately confirmed, out to a part per billion or more. Now, you’re a detective, right? What if I told you that every time there’s been a physical breakthrough, we’ve found a piece of abstract math that’s just tailor-made to fit the new concept? Einstein just happened to find Riemann geometry to fit general relativity. And the quantum boysjust happened to find matrix algebra and tensors. And when they first proposed string theory, it just happened to fit Euler’s beta- function, a two-hundred-year-old piece of math that had never been used for anything before. And Calabi and Yau’s canoodling with hyper-dimensional geometries just happened to describe how the extra dimensions required by string theory are curled up. Not to mention the fact that a whole bunch of universal constants just happen to lead to a universe where conscious life evolves, and if one of them was changed even a tiny bit there’d be no stars, no planets, no life. What would you say to a case like that?”
“I’d look for a frame-up. Or it might just be a slam dunk.”
“Yes! But which? That’s the killer question. Now let’s say they confirm string theory physically. Let’s say it’s Hawking’s conjecture that black holes radiate outside their event horizons, and we find a black hole small enough to study and string theory predicts that radiation exactly. Then we know it’s true, hallelujah! Physics has the theory of everything at last, except…except what if we made it all up? Observation is a slender reed when you come right down to it. Thousands of astronomers observed the skies and fit their observations into the Ptolemaic system, making loops and littler loops to save the appearances until the whole thing collapsed, but string theory can’t collapse because it’s a theory of everything, everything is already accounted for, and confirmed by a zillion observations. But observation itself is a product of consciousness, and we don’t know what that is!”
“Why you’re a doc now.”
“Why I’m a doc. So let’s say I’m wrong, John Searle and all of them are wrong, consciousness is not a little trick of the brain, let’s say it’s its own thing, a basic constituent of the universe on a par with space-time and mass, that only occasionally comes to rest in brains but has its own life, maybe down in the Calabi-Yau spaces or out in some connecting universe. That’s your substance dualism, yes? You and Descartes. Then you could have your gods and demons, hey? Your miracles.”
“But you don’t believe that,” said Paz. His throat was suddenly dry, and he poured himself a little of the fruit juice they had laid out for the child.
