American Innovations

I set aside my dignity and called Jacob.

Without telling him why, assuming that he knew, I asked him to meet me for lunch. He excused himself with my-wife-this, my-daughter-that; I insisted that I wanted to thank him for how kind he’d always been to me, and I suggested an expensive and tastelessly fashionable restaurant downtown and said it would be my treat. He again said, No.

I hadn’t thought this would be the game he’d play.

“I have something of Ilan’s,” I finally admitted.

“Good for you,” he said, his voice betraying nothing but a cold.

“I mean work. Equations. And what look like billiard ball diagrams. I really don’t know what it is. But, well, I had a feeling that you might.” I didn’t know what I should conceal, but it seemed like I should conceal something. “Maybe it will be important.”

“Does it smell like Ilan?”

“I think you should see it.”

“Listen, I’ll have lunch with you, if that’s going to make you happy, but don’t be so pathetic as to start thinking you’ve found some scrap of genius. You should know that Ilan found your interest in him laughable and that his real talent was for convincing people that he was smarter than he was. Which is quite a talent, I won’t deny it. But other than that, the only smart ideas that came out of his mouth he stole from other people, usually from me, which is why most everyone, although obviously not you, preferred me—”

Having a “real” life seemed to have worn on Jacob.

At the appointed time and place, Ilan’s scrawl in hand, I waited and waited for him. I ordered several courses but ate only a little side of salty cucumbers. Jacob never showed. Maybe he hadn’t been the source of the letter. Or maybe he’d lost the spirit to follow through on his joke, whatever it was.

•

A little detective work on my part revealed that Ilan’s diagrams had something to do with an idea often played with in science fiction, a problem of causality and time travel known as the grandfather paradox. Simply stated, the paradox is this: if travel to the past is possible—and much in physics suggests that it is—then what happens if you travel back in time and set out to murder your grandfather? If you succeed, then you will never be born, and therefore you won’t murder your grandfather, so therefore you will be born, and will be able to murder him, et cetera, ad paradox. Ilan’s billiard ball diagrams were part of a tradition (the seminal work is Feynman and Wheeler’s 1949 Advanced Absorber Theory) of mathematically analyzing a simplified version of the paradox: imagine a billiard ball enters a wormhole, and then emerges five minutes in the past, on track to hit its earlier self out of the path that sent it into the wormhole in the first place. The surprise is that just as real circles can’t be squared, and real moving matter doesn’t cross the barrier of the speed of light, the mathematical solutions to the billiard ball–wormhole scenario seem to bear out the notion that real solutions don’t generate grandfather paradoxes. The rub is that some of the solutions are exceptionally strange and involve the balls behaving in extraordinarily unlikely, but not impossible, ways. The ball may quantum tunnel, or break in half, or hit up against its earlier self at just such an angle so as to enter the wormhole in just such a way that even more unlikely events occur. But the ball won’t, and can’t, hit up against its past self in any way that would conflict with its present self’s trajectory. The mathematics simply don’t allow it. Thus no paradox. Science fiction writers have arrived at analogous solutions to the grandfather paradox: murderous grandchildren are inevitably stopped by something—faulty pistols, slippery banana peels, their own consciences—before the impossible deed can be carried out.

Frankly, I was surprised that Ilan—if it was Ilan—was any good at math. He hadn’t seemed the type.

Maybe I was also surprised that I spent so many days trying to understand that note. I had other things to do. Laundry. Work. I was auditing an extra course in Materials. I can’t pretend I didn’t harbor the hope that eventually—on my own—I’d prove that page some sort of important discovery. I don’t know how literally I thought this would bring Ilan back to me. But the image that came to me was that of digging up a grave.

I kind of wanted to call Jacob just to say that he hadn’t hurt my feelings by standing me up, that I didn’t need his help, or his company, or anything.

•

Time passed. Then one Thursday—it was August—I came across two (searingly dismissive) reviews of a book Jacob had written called Times and Misdemeanors. I was amazed that he had completed anything at all. And frustrated that “grandfather paradox” didn’t appear in the index. It seemed to me implied by the title, even though that meant reading the title wrongly, as literature. Though obviously the title invited that kind of “wrongness.” Which I thought was annoying and ambiguous in precisely a Jacob kind of way. I bought the book, but in some small attempt at dignity, I didn’t read it.

The following Monday, for the first time in his life, Jacob called me up. He said he was hoping to discuss something rather delicate with me, something he’d rather not mention over the phone. “What is it?” I asked.

“Can you meet me?” he asked.

“But what is it?”

“What time should we meet?”

I refused the first three meeting times he proposed, because I could. Eventually Jacob suggested we meet at the Moroccan place at whatever time I wanted, that day or the next, but urgently, not farther in the future, please.

“You mean the place where I first met Ilan?” This just slipped out.

“And me. Yes. There.”

In preparation for our meeting, I reread the negative reviews of Jacob’s book.

And I felt so happy.

•

Predictably, the coffee shop was the same but somehow not quite the same. Someone, not me, was reading the New York Post. Someone, not Ilan, was reading Deleuze. The fashion had made for shorter shorts on many of the women, and my lemonade came with slushy, rather than cubed, ice. But the chairs were still trimmed with chipping red paint, and the floor tile seemed, as ever, to fall just short of exhibiting a regular pattern. Jacob walked in only a few minutes late, his gaze detained by one after another set of bare legs. With an expression like someone sucking on an unpleasant cough drop, he made his way over to me.

I offered my sincerest consolations on the poor reviews of his work.

“Oh, time will tell,” he said. He looked uncomfortable; he didn’t even touch the green leaf cookies I’d ordered for him. Sighing, wrapping his hand tightly around the edge of the table and looking away, he said, “You know what Augustine says about time? Augustine describes time as a symptom of the world being out of order, a symptom of things in the world not being themselves, having to make their way back to themselves, by moving through time—”

Somehow I had already ceded control of the conversation. No billiard ball diagrams. No Ilan. No reviews. Almost as if I weren’t there, Jacob went on with his unencouraged ruminations: “There’s a paradox there, of course, since what can things be but themselves? In Augustine’s view, we live in what he calls the region of unlikeness, and what we’re unlike is God. We are apart from God, who is pure being, who is himself, who is outside of time. Time is our tragedy, the substance we have to wade through as we try to move closer to God. Rivers flowing to the sea, a flame reaching upward, a bird homing: these movements are things yearning to reach their true state. As humans, our motion reflects our yearning for God, and everything we do through time comes from moving, or at least trying to move, toward God. So that we can be”—someone at a nearby table cleared his throat judgmentally, which made me think of Ilan’s also being there—“our true selves. So there’s a paradox there again, that we must submit to God, which feels deceptively like not being ourselves, in order to become ourselves. We might call this yearning love, and it’s just that we often mistake what we love. We think we love sensuality. Or admiration. Or, say, another person. But loving another person is just a confusion, an error. Even if it is the kind of error that a nice, reasonable person might make—”

It struck me that Jacob might be manically depressed and that in addition to his career, his marriage might not be going so well, either.

“I mean,” Jacob amended, “it’s all bullshit, of course, but aren’t I a great guy? Isn’t talking to me great? I can tell you about time and you learn all about Western civilization. Augustine’s ideas are beautiful, no? I love this thought that motion is about something, that things have a place to get to, and a person has something to become, and that thing she must become is herself. Isn’t that nice?”

Jacob had never sounded more like Ilan. It was getting on my nerves. Maybe Jacob could read my very heart and was trying to insult, or cure, me. “You’ve never called me before,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do, you know.”

“Nonsense,” he said, without making it clear which statement of mine he was dismissing.

“You said that you wanted to discuss something ‘delicate.’”

Jacob returned to the topic of Augustine; I returned to the question of why the two of us had come to sit together right then, right there. We ping-ponged in this way, until eventually Jacob said, “Well, it’s about Ilan, so you’ll like that.”

“About the grandfather paradox?” I said, too quickly.

“Or it could be called the father paradox. Or even the mother paradox.”

“I guess I’ve never thought of it that way, but sure.” My happiness had dissipated; I felt angry and manipulated.

“Not only about Ilan but about my work as well.” Jacob then began to whisper. “The thing is, I’m going to ask you to try to kill me. Don’t worry, I can assure you that you won’t succeed. But in attempting, you’ll prove a glorious, shunned truth that touches on the nature of time, free will, causal loops, and quantum theory. You’ll also probably work out some aggression you feel toward me.”

Truth be told, through the thin haze of my disdain, I had always been envious of Jacob’s intellect; I had privately believed—despite what those reviews said, or maybe partly because of what those reviews said—that Jacob was a rare genius. Now I realized that he was just crazy.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jacob said. “Unfortunately, I can’t explain everything to you right here, right now. It’s too psychologically trying. For you, I mean. Listen, come over to my apartment on Saturday. My family will be away for the weekend, and I’ll explain everything to you then. Don’t be alarmed. You probably know that I’ve lost my job”—I hadn’t known that, but I should have been able to guess it—“but those morons, trust me, their falseness will become obvious. They’ll be flies at the horse’s ass. My ideas will bestride the world like a colossus. And you, too: you’ll be essential.”

I promised to attend, fully intending not to.

“Please,” he said.

“Of course,” I said.

All the rest of that week I tried to think through my decision carefully, but the more I tried to organize my thoughts, the more ludicrous I felt for thinking them at all. I thought: As a friend, isn’t it my responsibility to find out if Jacob has gone crazy? But really we’re not friends. And if I come to know too much about his madness, he may destroy me in order to preserve his psychotic worldview. But maybe I should take that risk because in drawing closer to Jacob—mad or not—I’ll learn something more of Ilan. But why do I need to know anything? And do my propositions really follow one from the other? Maybe my not going will entail Jacob’s having to destroy me in order to preserve his worldview. Or maybe Jacob is utterly levelheaded and just bored enough to play an elaborate joke on me. Or maybe, despite there never having been the least spark of sexual attraction between us, despite the fact that we could have been locked in a closet for seven hours and nothing would have happened, maybe, for some reason, Jacob is trying to seduce me. Out of nostalgia for Ilan. Or as consolation for the turn in his career. Was I really up for dealing with a desperate man?

Or was I, in my dusty way, passing up the opportunity to be part of an idea that would, as Jacob had said, “bestride the world like a colossus”?

•