Pulse Page 2

  “That your brother, Daniel?”

  “How did you know?”

  Simon blew on his tea and took a sip. “There’s a resemblance.”

  “Really?”

  “More than you think. I assume you don’t play football?”

  “Too skinny.”

  “Still, you’re an athlete. I’d guess runner. Long distance, maybe? Mile in the spring, cross-country in the fall?”

  “You haven’t been reading about me in the papers.”

  “It’s your shoes.” Simon nodded at Daniel’s running shoes, blue nylon with yellow laces and white racing stripes down the sides. “Tigers. Japanese racing flats. Bad sneakers, but great if you’re a runner.”

  “You’re not supposed to wear them as sneakers.”

  “Exactly. Then there’s your body type. All legs and lungs. You’re not as good at longer distances, but the strength will come. And then you’ll be very good, if you want that.”

  Daniel returned the paper to the table. “I like to run.”

  “But not race? Compete?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Hmm.” Another sip of tea.

  “Tell me about theoretical physics.”

  Outside, a spasm of rain drummed against the windows and was gone. Simon put down his cup and pulled a pipe from his pocket. “You mind?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “Love a good pipe. This one’s a Dunhill Bulldog. Here, you can see the markings on the bowl.” Simon turned the pipe over. On the underside were stamped the words:

  DUNHILL

  MADE IN

  SHELL BRIAR

  ENGLAND4

  “What does the ‘4’ mean?” Daniel said.

  “That’s how Dunhill dates their pipes. The baseline for this series is 1960. Add on whatever number is stamped there and you have the year the pipe was made.”

  “So this one’s from 1964?”

  Simon winked as he packed the bowl and lit it with a wooden match. When he had it going to his satisfaction, he sat back again and took a couple of puffs. “Beautiful draw.” His mumbles were lost in a layer of smoke and the scent of ripe berries. Daniel didn’t mind a bit and allowed his mind to float. There was a banging on the stairs below and then it grew quiet again. Simon’s voice cut through the fog.

  “What were we talking about?”

  “Theoretical physics.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have a specialty?”

  “Most of my work’s in the field of quantum mechanics.”

  “The study of subatomic particles.”

  Simon pulled the pipe from his mouth and pointed the stem at Daniel. “They teach you that at Latin School?”

  “I read it somewhere.”

  “I study the quantum state. Specifically, I focus on a phenomenon known as entanglement. Ever heard of that?”

  “No.”

  “Einstein first flagged it in the 1930s. Called it ‘spooky.’”

  “Is it? Spooky, I mean?”

  “Hell, yes.” Simon leaned forward so his long face was bathed in licks of red from the fire, except for the circles around his eyes, which were black with white at the very center. It should have been frightening, but Daniel felt entirely at home, as if he’d been in the room with the smell of tobacco and old books, the glow of the turf and windows closed to the weather outside for most, if not all, of his sixteen years. That was how Daniel felt as he took another sip of his tea and wriggled his toes in his Tigers and waited to hear about the professor’s research.

  “Imagine,” Simon said, pausing to issue a stream of smoke from one side of his mouth, “that you have a charged electron isolated in this room, sitting on this very table between us, and another electron sitting on the edge of the Milky Way, a hundred thousand light-years away.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, imagine that the two particles are entangled—that is, in an entangled state.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Hell of a question. Let’s think of it this way. If I rotate the electron sitting on this table, say, a half turn to the left”—Simon used a thumb and forefinger to spin his imaginary electron—“its entangled companion will turn that exact same amount to the right.” Simon sat back to gauge the effect of his words.

  “So the two particles are communicating?”

  “No. Well, yes and no. That’s the spooky part. In our hypothetical, if the two electrons were actually communicating, even if they were communicating at the speed of light, it would still take a hundred thousand years for that signal to travel across the galaxy, correct?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “In an entangled state, however, the change between the particles happens instantaneously.”

  “So the signal is traveling faster than the speed of light?”

  “It would appear that way. And your Latin School physics tells you what?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Then what’s happening?”

  “No one’s sure. What we do know is this—for the period of time that our two particles are entangled, they move in concert regardless of the distance between them, as if they were two parts of the same body. For all intents and purposes, they are.”

  “Are what?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Even though they’re on opposite sides of the galaxy?”

  “You’ve studied Einstein’s special theory of relativity.”

  “E = mc2.”

  “Mass converted into energy, the two being essentially interchangeable. I suspect, and I’m not alone, that entanglement is more of the same, except at a level and in a world we don’t fully perceive or understand.”

  “A world? You mean some other world?”

  “The universe isn’t about the lumps of matter we can see, Daniel.” Simon shook his head, trailing more smoke from his mouth and narrow, probing nose. “Stars, planets, animals, people, rocks. Abhorrent, obvious things. No, the universe is about everything we can’t see—energy. Beams of the stuff running through everything that is, connecting all creation in an infinite number of impossible ways. Ways that violate what we know, or thought we knew, about the physical world. That’s the piano one has to play if one wants to understand quantum mechanics. That’s the piano I play, and entanglement is merely the opening chord in the symphony, the first glimmer of what lies underneath. And there’s so much underneath. You take Latin?”

  “Everyone at Latin School takes Latin.”

  “The word conscire. Translation?”

  “‘To know.’”

  “Literal meaning?”

  “‘Scio’ and ‘con.’ To know with.”

  “And it’s where we get our word consciousness?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Pull out your dictionary and look it up. Conscire, ‘to know with,’ provides the root concept for our idea of consciousness.”

  “I’m not sure where you’re headed.”

  “It’s right there in the word. The very act of human consciousness is a communal effort, a shared experience. To know with someone. In fact, I contend it would be entirely impossible for a human being to be ‘conscious’ as we understand the term without at least one other sentient being at the other end to record that fact.”

  “Because the signal would have no recipient?”

  “The signal. That’s exactly right. Human consciousness is nothing more or less than a signal, a pulse of energy, and entanglement describes the process by which that energy is transmitted, received, and sometimes manipulated.”

  “Manipulated how?”

  “Einstein again. Energy cannot be destroyed. Either it is transformed into some other state or it gets passed along. You feel anger, you feel hatred, fear, envy. You must learn, we all must learn, to change it into something productive. If not, it will fester and spread, infecting everything and everyone it touches.”

  “Can you prove any of this?”


  “You sound like you don’t believe me.”

  Daniel shrugged. “I thought science was supposed to be all about proof.”

  “Have you ever heard of Einstein’s thought experiments?”

  “No.”

  “He was your age, sixteen, when he first started thinking about chasing a beam of light. He’d sit in his high school physics class and imagine riding up alongside it. If such a thing were possible, Einstein thought, surely the light would appear to be at rest, frozen in time. Later, he’d say it was his first insight into what would become the special theory of relativity.”

  “I’m no Einstein.”

  “The point is there was no blackboard in the beginning. No long strings of numbers. No concrete proof. Just a young man and his willingness to open himself up to the tension of the universe and everything it holds. The easy and the difficult. The light and the dark. The good and the evil that lies within it.”

  For the first time in a long time, Daniel thought about the playground in Dorchester and the feeling when he’d slipped inside Joey Watts’s skin. And then Joey was there, sitting in the room along with Jeannie Jameson, dripping water and smelling of the quarry, staring at Daniel with her slack mouth and her fish eyes.

  “What is it?” Simon was peering at him through a lazy circle of smoke. A smile sharpened the edges of his lips.

  “Nothing.”

  Simon nodded and puffed, the mutter of Kenmore Square traffic distant in the street below. When the apartment buzzer rang, it was sharp and raw, scattering Daniel’s soggy childhood pals and nearly knocking him off the couch. Simon padded over to the front window.

  “Oh, hell.” He slammed the window open and leaned out. “I told you tomorrow. Hang on.” Simon went back behind his desk.

  “Maybe I should go get my stuff,” Daniel said.

  Simon looked up. “Sorry, it’s this student. He dropped out of Harvard and is heading back to California. Guy’s nuts for computers. Stays up all night writing source code. You know anything about that? Never mind. I told him I’d give him something to play with. You say you’ll be back tonight?”

  “If that’s okay?”

  “Sure, sure. Listen, tell this guy to come up when you go downstairs. Name’s Gates.”

  Daniel started to respond, but Simon was already deep in a notebook, making some calculations. From a bottom drawer, he’d pulled out a small black box with a blue X taped across the top. Simon looked up from his work and noticed Daniel staring at it.

  “Prototype for a portable computer. I call it a laptop. You ever heard of internetworking?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “Right now, it’s just a few universities connecting on mainframes. But this thing”—Simon tapped the top of the black box—“this is the game changer. Of course, it’s child’s play compared to what we were talking about, but Gates asked if he could take a look. You got your keys?”

  Daniel nodded, but Simon was gone again, popping open his prototype and typing on what looked like a keyboard. Daniel left the apartment, walking back down the stairs slowly. Gates’s first name was Bill. He was grad-student thin with horn-rimmed glasses and a wild mop of ginger hair. He offered a friendly if curious smile and brushed past as Daniel told him to go up. Then Daniel was alone on the street.

  * * *

  He jogged across Commonwealth Avenue and cut through the Kenmore Square bus shelter. On the corner a man was grilling hot dogs at a stand painted mustard yellow. Business was good, the line five deep, customers with bills in hand, shifting back and forth in the cold, going up on their tiptoes to get a look at the dogs cooking shoulder to shoulder with thick links of Italian sausage and German bratwurst. Next to the stand sat a spaniel mix at full attention, back muscles aquiver, head tracking the cook’s every move, a long drool of saliva swan diving off his lower jaw toward the pavement.

  Daniel closed his eyes and thought about his new roomie, the slightly crazy, slightly scary professor from Harvard. Maybe they were all wack jobs in Cambridge. Or maybe it was just physics. No wonder Daniel liked the stuff. He smiled to himself and breathed through his nose, exhaling as a door in his mind swung open. He found himself untethered, adrift in a cream of fog, dark shapes zooming up and whispering past. Ahead a light flickered and grew, dissolving the fog to a thin mist. It was Albert Einstein, Albert the teenager, skimming his way toward Daniel across a surf of colors and numbers, grinning and waving as he rode his beam of light to his destiny. Daniel moved closer, looking up at young Einstein, who held out his hand. Daniel reached for it and fell, weightless, nameless, tipping head over heels into a space devoid of form. Einstein was gone, his beam of light transformed into a ripe, juicy sausage, dripping golden fat and oozing smoke and heat.

  Hot dog.

  Sausage.

  No, hot dog.

  No, sausage.

  Daniel sat at the bottom of a well, a dog’s-eye view, staring up at the man from the stand as the man stared down, something pinched between his fingers. It smelled like gristle and grease and meat. Glorious, wonderful, amazing meat. The prospect of it moved through Daniel like a current, wiggling his body from head to toe and back again. Then the man tossed the scrap into the air, and Daniel rose as it fell, jaws snapping, saliva streaming, belly in full growl.

  He opened his eyes. To one side of the hot dog stand the spaniel’s butt was up, tail waving as he feasted on leavings the cook had thrown his way. Otherwise, nothing had changed. Unless everything had. He circled closer, scratching the dog between the ears and running a hand across his flank. The dog paid no attention, but a woman in line did. She was staring at Daniel kind of funny, like maybe he’d been barking or howling or foaming at the mouth or something. He flashed a quick smile and hurried down the block.

  On the next corner stood New England Music City. Daniel stopped in front of the plateglass windows and stared at the Andy Warhol cover for Sticky Fingers. Next to the album was a pair of dice and the sheet music for “Brown Sugar.” Beyond that, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life or any other. When she smiled, all thoughts of Einstein, Simon Lane, and a dog’s life went right out the window. Daniel waved and hustled inside.

  3

  LIKE MOST things in the city, South Boston was all about geography. The place was surrounded on three sides by water and hermetically sealed on the fourth by six lanes of expressway. A virtual island in a city full of them, Southie was the cousin who drank all the beer at your wedding, threw up in the punch bowl, and tried to fuck your sister for good measure on the way out. No one wandered into the place by accident. You were there cuz you grew up there or you knew someone. And that someone you knew better know the guys you were talking to. And they better be on good terms. Sort of like hitting the trifecta at Suffolk Downs, except if your horse didn’t come in, there was likely to be a pack of crazy fucks trying to cave your roof in with a piece of pipe or a hockey stick. And that was if you were white and Irish and looked the part. If you were black, well, black people didn’t actually go into South Boston, not unless they were under federal order and sitting in the back of a yellow school bus. And wasn’t that just fun as fuck.

  William Barkley Jones hit his blinker and hung a left. He didn’t give a good goddamn what anyone did or didn’t do in South Boston, or anywhere else for that matter. He was a black man with a badge and a gun. He was also six-five and north of two and a half bills. If the I.R.A. wanted to go to war, so be it.

  Barkley parked on D Street and watched as his partner came out of a corner grocery store. Tommy Dillon was five-nine and a buck sixty soaking wet. Still, he had the strut, the swagger, the I’m from Southie and if you don’t like it, fucking try me attitude that defined his life and wrote the moment and manner of his death in windswept strokes of gray. But that was for another day. Today, Tommy was sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup and carrying a paper plate wrapped in tinfoil. He climbed in the passenger’s side along with the smell of breakfast.

  “Cocksucker bookie had a st
roke last week. Can’t get outta bed.”

  “So you’re taking him scrambled eggs?”

  “And chopped-up bits of sausage. Prick’s a hundred and fucking six. Gums this shit down for dinner. Say a prayer he chokes.”

  Barkley chuckled and started up the car.

  “You think it’s funny?”

  “More like humiliating.” Barkley swept away from the curb. “How much you owe?”

  “You sound like Katie.”

  “How much?”

  “A hondo. Bet the Pats last week. Took it right up the ass.”

  Barkley grunted and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “What?”

  “You know you got the monkey, Tommy.” Barkley’s partner had spent six months in rehab a year back. Gambling, booze. The department didn’t know about the coke. If they had, they probably would have shit-canned him, but Barkley covered. And Tommy’s wife, Katie, nursed him through the rest. Tommy thought he was out the other side. Barkley wondered if it wasn’t past time to look for a new partner.

  “Jesus, B. It’s a hundred bucks and a plate of eggs.”

  “If that’s all it is . . .”

  “That’s all it is. Come on. He’s in the South End.”

  They cruised a block that looked just like the last four—three-deckers, two families, all jammed up one against the other. Irish everywhere, mayonnaise faces playing hockey in the street, sitting on the front steps, hanging on the corner, big eyes, hard eyes, flat eyes, gypsy eyes, pointing at Barkley, one little fuck giving him the finger as the big-shouldered car cruised past.

  “Assholes,” Tommy said.

  “Forget it.” Barkley blew through a red light and turned onto Dorchester Street. The city was in its third year of forced busing; the protests that started outside high schools in Charlestown and South Boston had metastasized into a pitched battle between a federal judge determined to integrate Boston’s public schools and the city’s white working class, just as determined to protect their turf and not be told what to do with their kids by the government . . . or anyone else. Last spring Bostonians watched, some in horror, some in grim satisfaction, as a gang of white kids attacked a black man outside city hall, charging at him with the pointed end of an American flag. A photographer from the Herald caught the moment and splashed it across the front page. A couple of weeks later, some black kids in Roxbury pulled a white guy from his car and cracked his skull open with a paving stone. A crowd chanted “Let him die” while the cops arrived and EMTs loaded the guy into an ambulance. As the summer of 1976 ground on, the city burned in a blaze of its own making. Residents stuck to their block. Those who did wander into the wrong neighborhood kept their car doors locked and, if they were smart, didn’t stop for nothing until they were back on safe ground. For Barkley and Tommy, it didn’t really matter. They were homicide detectives and business was good—people killing other people for all kinds of fucked-up reasons. And a bunch of kids going to school in yellow buses didn’t change one stroke of that.