Читать книгу A Model World - Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon - Страница 9

My friend Levine had only a few months to go on his doctoral dissertation, but when, one Sunday afternoon at Acres of Books, he came upon the little black paperback by Dr. Frank J. Kemp, he decided almost immediately to plagiarize it. It was lying at the bottom of a whiskey crate full of old numbers of the Evergreen Review, which he had been examining intently because he was trying to get a woman named Betty, who liked the poetry of Gregory Corso, to fall in love with him; he was overexuberant and unlucky in love and had just resolved—for example—to grow some beatnik facial hair. The little book was marked on the outside neither front nor back; it was a plain, black square. Levine picked it up only because he had been lonely for a long time and he idly hoped, on the basis of its anonymous cover, that it might contain salacious material. When he opened it to its title page, he received an indelible shock. “Antarctic Models of Induced Nephokinesis,” he read. This was the branch of meteorological engineering he was concerned with in his own researches—in fact, it was the very title he had chosen for his dissertation. Beneath this, Dr. Frank J. Kemp’s name was printed, and then the name Satis House—an academic vanity press in Ann Arbor; Levine had seen its discreet advertisement in the back pages of the Journal of Applied Meteorology. The date of publication was given, to his astonishment, as 1970, almost twenty years before Levine had had even the dimmest notion of the potential power of Antarctic models—a notion that, despite all his ascetic labor over the past year and a half, remained only partly elucidated. It was a radical conception of nephokinesis even today, and in 1970 sufficiently heterodox, no doubt, to have prevented Kemp from publishing his theory by any other means than paying for it himself.

Levine turned the page and saw that Dr. Kemp had, with a precision that struck Levine as tragic and fine, dedicated his work to the beloved memory of his wife, Jean, 21 May 1900—21 May 1969. Levine imagined the sorrowing, hairless scientist, slumped in a chair beside his wife’s hospital bed on a spring day in 1969, his head filled with polar wind. Levine was literally horrified—the hairs on the back of his neck stood erect—at the ignoble fate that had befallen the widower’s theory. It was like the horror he had felt, a few weeks earlier, when he had come across the row of bookshelves in the graduate library where the bound dissertations were kept—a thousand white surnames inscribed on a thousand uncracked blue spines, like the grim face of a monument. It was a horror of death, of the doom that awaited all his efforts, and it was this horror, more than anything else—he really was only a few months from finishing—that determined him to commit the mortal sin of Academe.

I had been browsing among the Drama shelves, looking for a copy of anything by Mehmet Monsour, the fashionable Franco-Egyptian theater guru, who was currently serving as guru-in-residence at the university’s School of Drama. I was at the beginning of an affair with a guru-prone would-be actress named Jewel, and I had come with Levine to Long Beach only in the hope of finding something that would please her; Levine had been irritable, paranoiac, and unwashed for the past several months, and in general, I confess, I tried to avoid him. When I found nothing at all Franco-Egyptian in the Drama section I went to find Levine, who had said something about going for lunch to a local taqueria that served goat. It was the sort of thing one did with Levine, and I was halfway looking forward to it.

“Levine,” I said, “let’s go get those tacos.” He was slouching against a fire extinguisher at the back of the store, completely absorbed in his reading, eyeglasses slipped down his nose, his mouth open. He suffered from a deviated septum and was a chronic mouth breather. His lank red hair covered one eye. He seemed unpleasantly surprised by what he was reading, as if it were a friend’s diary.

“What’s that?” I said.

Levine looked up, his face first blank, then irritated; he had forgotten where he was, and with whom, and why.

“That book,” I said, with a nod. “You look fascinated. You look scared.”

With a sigh Levine stared down at the black book, and bit his lip. “It’s going to be my dissertation,” he said. “Once I retype it.”

“You’re going to plagiarize it?”

“I’m going to rescue it,” he said. “It and myself.”

“Is it on the same subject? There are other books on Antarctic models of induced nephokinesis?”

Embarrassed, afraid that I must disapprove of him, he nodded his head. Then, with the childish look of apology he wore when at his most abject—he always looked this way around Betty—he opened the book to its fly and held it out to me.

“It’s only seventy-five cents,” he said.

He also said that he was too excited to eat anything, particularly goat, and so after he had paid his six bits we walked back to his car. As he pulled onto the freeway, Levine, when he saw that I was not going to censure him, began to expound on his dire plan, which was quite simply to retype Kemp’s book on approved thesis paper, in the approved thesis font, within all the prescribed margins; receive his degree; and move to Santa Fe or Taos several months earlier than he had thought possible, where he would set himself up as a maker of ceramic wind chimes. And no one would ever know of his deception, he felt certain of that. He was the only person in the world, besides the author, to have read the book.

“Someone read it,” I said. “Or else how did it end up at Acres of Books?”

“Kemp lived in Long Beach. When he died, someone sold off his things, and this ended up at Acres. And there was only one left to sell off, because he burned the rest. In despair. ”

I stared at him. He was driving as cautiously as ever, both hands on the wheel, never exceeding forty-five miles per hour. He always blamed his meticulous driving on his car, a blue Rambler American that had been his grandmother’s, but the truth was that Levine belonged to that large brotherhood of young men, often encountered in Academe, who are obsessively careful about two or three things—the arrangement of socks in their drawers, the alphabetical order of their jazz albums, the proper way to make a Bloody Mary—and slobs in every other regard. In any case he did not look particularly deranged, or desperate, as he wove his fantasies about New Mexico and the scattered estate of Dr. Kemp. He seemed completely certain of everything, in particular of success in his projected crime, and by the time we got back to the graduate-student housing complex, or Gradplex, he even seemed happy. I got him to invite me over to watch the Lakers game on his color television, for the first time in months. He had to retrieve the set from a closet, and, smiling, blow the dust from its screen in a small cloud. I think it was a nice evening for Levine. James Worthy scored thirty-five points, two with a reverse lay-up he sank while on his knees, and at half time Levine went into his bedroom, called Betty, and was successful.

The next morning at eight o’clock, Levine sat down at the kitchen table to begin retyping Kemp’s book onto the sheets of archival bond he had purchased, along with three typewriter ribbons, two bottles of Liquid Paper, and a large bag of yogurt-covered raisins, on his way home from Betty’s. The acid-free paper had a lifeless, creepy feel, like embalmed flesh, and he felt bad about consigning Kemp’s words to it. It was foggy and cool out, and, a rapid typist, he planned to be done by the time the coastal morning burned off and it was glaring, limitless afternoon. There was a pot of coffee on the stove, he had unplugged the telephone, and the package of white raisins sat near at hand. He flexed his fingers, rolled in the first sheet of paper, and began to type.

He soon ran into difficulty, however, when instead of just transmitting Kemp’s words mindlessly to his fingertips he made the mistake of reading them and grappling with the concepts they attempted to frame. This slowed his progress considerably, and by the time the sun emerged, around two o’clock, he was still mired in the second chapter, “Modeling on Cationic Residues Found in Austral Solstitial Winds,” in which the crux of Kemp’s thesis—that the ionized molecules of oxygen frequently found around quickly moving cumulonimbus clouds in the wake of a summer storm on the Ross Ice Shelf presented the likeliest model for nephokinesis—was forcefully argued.

Levine had skimmed through this chapter in the store the day before, paying more attention to the meteorologist’s literary style, to see if it at all resembled his own, than to the burden of the prose, and now he found himself entranced. It was a creative, dogged, well-supported, even ingenious argument, and he felt a surge of custodial pride at the boldness of Dr. Kemp’s mind. Levine had suspected—it had come to him in a dream, in fact—that Antarctic winds held the key to controlling the dreamy movement of clouds, but he had never really gotten beyond this one intuition. And here it all was! Laid down in charts and statistical tables, with almost a dozen sources that were entirely new to Levine. There was a massive Soviet study of cationic Antarctic winds, undertaken during the International Geophysical Year, which Levine had somehow missed, and there were as well the priceless results of three trips that Dr. Kemp had himself made to the Antarctic, aboard the Hodge, in 1963 and 1968. The argument and its advocate were made all the more poignant by the fact that the region in which Kemp had made the crucial measurements was the Bay of Whales, not far from Little America, on the Ross Ice Shelf—a region that had broken off from the continent in 1987 and was now melting. The Bay of Whales was no longer to be found on the map.

(“Isn’t that going to be a problem with your committee?” I asked him that night as we were on our way to dinner at Professor Baldwin’s. “Basing your whole theory on evidence that no longer exists?”

(“That’s all you guys do,” he said—which stung me. I was engaged at that time in the observation of those subatomic particles, such as muons, that lead very short lives. I protested that evanescence itself was in a way the object of my studies—But I’m getting ahead of the story.)

It was nearly sundown when Levine finished his dissertation. His eyes were strained, his back and his neck hurt, but there was a sweet taste in his mouth, for he had regained his faith in the stoic nobility of scientific endeavor, and his regard for the austere beauty of its method. His New Mexican plans, the tinkling of wind chimes in a sonorous breeze, all his months of fruitless research, were forgotten. He had never wanted to be anything but a scientist. He leapt to his feet and dashed out into the gray little Gradplex living room, furnished with only a stereo and a folding aluminum and rubber-lattice lawn chair. His roommate, a graduate student in English, had been expelled from the university earlier in the month, after brawling with a professor over the supposed ties to Benito Mussolini of a female Italian semiotician who was an old girlfriend of the professor’s, and now Levine had the place to himself. He lay down on the hard gray carpet and allowed the knuckles of his spine to crack and relax. A breeze blew in from the patio, through the screen door, and ruffled the hair on his damp forehead. Levine thought, as he had not since high school, about the way the breeze was composed of a trillion trillion agitated molecules that he could not see. He thought, with the wondering pedantry of a sixteen-year-old boy, about the way every object around him, including himself, his body, was made of invisible things. He got up, grinning foolishly, and went to the telephone.

Julia Baldwin, the wife of the head of his committee, answered the phone. “What is it?” she said.

“Is Professor Baldwin in?” said Levine, momentarily filled with doubt.

“Just a minute.” There was the sound of the receiver rattling as she let it drop. “It’s another one of your god-damned students,” he heard her say. Professor Baldwin mumbled something apologetic to her and then said hello.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Professor Baldwin,” said Levine. “It’s just—Well, I’ve been looking into solstitial winds at Ross, and I think—I think I may have stumbled onto something really big. And, well, it kind of scares me, sir, it’s so big. I’d kind of like to talk to you about it, if that’s all right.”

“We’re having company, Levine,” said Professor Baldwin. “One of my wife’s instructors is coming to dinner. What is it, this big, scary thing?”

Levine filled him in briefly on the nature of Kemp’s argument for Antarctic models, without of course saying anything about Dr. Kemp. He said that in his opinion a practical method of cloud control was now ten years closer than it had been yesterday. At first Professor Baldwin interjected such comments as “Yes, yes,” and “I see,” but when Levine had finished he was silent for a long time. Levine could hear Mrs. Baldwin, beautiful Julia, shrieking with laughter in the background.

“Perhaps you’d better come over,” said Professor Baldwin. “I’ll have to ask Julia. Hold on.”

Levine jumped up and down while he waited and watched the last red pennant fade from the evening sky. One of the things he loved best about meteorology was that its domain encompassed sunsets.

“Come in an hour,” said Professor Baldwin. “It’s fine. In fact, my wife has suggested that you invite your friend Smith. We have a whole salmon.”

“Thank you,” said Levine. “I’ll call him.”

It was, of course, this same Julia, or Jewel, Baldwin for whom I had hoped to find that volume of Franco-Egyptian dramatic theory, and I told Levine that I would be more than happy to accompany him.

There were coyotes out laughing and looking for pussycat in the foothills above the Facuplex when Levine and I came up the driveway to the Baldwins’ house on Froebel Lane. This entire neighborhood, with its skinny new trees on their crutches, its fresh-rolled lawns, its streets named for famous educators, had not been here six months before, and Levine and I had often walked up, carrying our binoculars and a six-pack of beer, to a couple of flat boulders that had stood not far from the present site of the Baldwins’ Japanese station wagon. Among a few other things, we shared a soft spot for birds and small animals, although he knew far more about them than I, and we had once been enchanted by the sight of two red rattlesnakes, somewhere in the vicinity of the Baldwins’ front door. I reminded Levine of this.