Antiphony by Chris Katsaropoulos Page A

So, he can try now to brush this aside. There is an entry point back into the overview of Perturbation Theory that he was planning to use as the introduction to his speech, and he begins his talk again with this: The idea that even though he can never prove every term of the Theory, he can get to the point where the only remaining unknowns are infinitesimal, a negligible variance that he can choose to ignore for all practical purposes. The analogy he uses is simple. Just because a centimeter cannot be carved into slices as fine as the smallest possible slice—the Planck length—doesn’t mean that a centimeter does not exist. Once he gets going, the words really start to flow. The knowledge was inside his head all along; how could he have ever believed otherwise? The missing notes do not matter; they were only a crutch he thought he needed. He has lived this research every day of his life for the past seven years, and now that he is on the right track, all the key points begin to build on themselves, one after another, a logical, orderly progression from his initial assumptions right up to the final,crowning equation that appears behind him, taking up the full width of the screen, on slide number 32.
    The time has flown by. The digital clock flashes red on the console inside the podium:
    1:57
    0:00
    He has managed to deliver the presentation that he has been envisioning for months, despite the rocky start. Or has he? The clock still mocks him, with its triple zeros. He takes a drink from the glass of water the moderator kindly fetched during the stir and commotion that his invocation of God swept over the room. One last push now, to the finish.
    Theodore realizes that he has not really seen the audience for some time; he has been speaking to them and yet apart from them, locked within his own private world. The past forty-five minutes have vanished as he has been absorbed into the concentration and focus required to describe every nuance of his research and mathematical proof. It has been like one of the hours he passes lost in conversation with Pradeep or Victor Fieldman, his mentor at the Institute, in which his mind achieves a momentum of its own that somehow separates itself from the physical structure of the brain and exists, together with these other minds, floating in a nebulous segment of space out
there
—he imagines it in a place up near the ceiling of his office or near one of the chandeliers in this giant room—in an abstract world of its own creation. He has reached the highest point. He thinks of this speech as a kind of symphony he has been conducting. He has led these people through one movement and then another and another, up to the crescendo of hisfinal equation, and now he must bring them down, gently, back to the ground of the real and tangible world. His eyes skim over the crowd of people spread before him, and several pairs of eyes meet his, as if they have been waiting for him to acknowledge that they exist. They seem to be eager to make a connection with him, to show him they have been paying attention to everything he has to say. And then, as his eyes drift towards the back of the room, he sees her. Ilene. She did not go to the cooking class after all—she has been here all along. And even across the wavering expanse of space between the podium where he stands and the chair where she has been sitting, faithfully watching him throughout the past hour, his eyes lock onto hers and he can see what his mind has not allowed him to recognize as he delivered this speech. She must know, sitting in the audience, she must feel it, what he could not let himself understand. The look in her eyes lets him know, as much as she tries to hide it, that he has committed a blunder so terrible their life together will never be the same again.
    E VEN T HE G RANDEST disappointments and failures are often assuaged by small comforts. After a weekend spent with Ilene together tortured by the saturating