Lost and Wanted(15)
The thing I liked best about the hospital was the way that time seemed to stop there. I could ignore department meetings, student email, and articles for peer review. Sometimes I forgot to look at my phone for hours. At night I would climb into bed with Jack, being careful of the monitor (they attached it to his toe with surgical tape), move the gray cord, and rest my arm over his hip, to avoid making breathing more difficult. When he was getting oxygen, he would sleep with the mask, and I could hear the air whistling inside it. The pediatric nurses came often, and I preferred them to the doctors; they were so calm and unsurprisable. They opened the door in the dark, or slipped through the curtain in their scrubs and soft shoes. They were almost all heavy and maternal in shape, full-breasted and -hipped, with delicate hands that unceremoniously manipulated their equipment. I was terrified by the prospect of going home and having to operate the nebulizer myself, count the breaths per minute. In the hospital I knew that if Jack stopped breathing, even if I’d dozed off, someone would be with us in an instant.
10.
I have always liked to get up early, even before I had Jack. In my twenties I could do it without an alarm. I would simply think of the hour I wanted to awaken, and usually my eyes would open ten or fifteen minutes before that.
Those early mornings are the time I can do physics; in my office, everything else takes over, and while I can sit with a colleague and hammer out an idea—the way I used to do with Neel, my closest and best collaborator—I have to have done the real work beforehand, alone at my desk.
In the case of the Clapp-Jonnal model, my most significant insight came between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. I wasn’t technically at my desk but sitting with my back against the couch, looking at a preprint Neel had emailed me, if not actually reading it. I was drinking coffee and thinking about garden hoses. Specifically I was thinking of a hose my father had invented (but unfortunately never patented) sometime in the late eighties. Neither of my parents was a scientist, but my father was a mechanical engineer and a hobbyist inventor. He worked on a screened porch separated from our small living room by a set of French doors. My father’s hose was made of flexible fabric that crinkled when it wasn’t in use, then swelled to its full capacity when you turned on the tap. It was that swelling—the finite diameter of the hose, by comparison with the water flowing in one potentially infinite direction—that suggested the crucial geometry.
I was living near Porter Square in Somerville then, and I put on my running shoes. I shoved the piece of paper with the equations I’d scribbled into the armband with my phone—as if I could’ve forgotten them! It might have been faster on the T, but I couldn’t have stood there waiting. I ran right down Oxford to Harvard Square, past the Science Center, where I’d taken Physics 16 as a freshman and had felt grateful to know right away where I belonged. I ran south to the river in a light drizzle, over a glistening carpet of red and yellow leaves, past cars with early commuters inching forward with their lights on, and arrived at Neel’s apartment in Peabody Terrace, where he was a resident advisor to married students, just before six.
Neel was living with a girlfriend at the time, and I remember that Angie answered the door in a white terry-cloth bathrobe. There were things between me and Angie, having to do with my collaboration with Neel, Neel’s and my brief undergraduate romance, Angie’s perfectly symmetrical Japanese face, my red hair, big nose, and habit of interrupting, but that morning I put my arms around her: “Good morning—I’m sorry it’s so early—we did it!” I think that’s what I said. Neel was standing in the hallway leading to their bedroom in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, squinting at me, and when I thrust the paper at him, he had to go put on pants and find his glasses. Angie stood at the counter and made coffee while Neel, now dressed, sat at the kitchen table and went over it.
“Stop staring at me,” he told me at one point, but I couldn’t help it—I couldn’t wait to hear what he thought. I knew he was as excited and hopeful as I was, and also that there was a part of him that hoped to prove me wrong—so that he himself could be the one to dream up the final piece of the puzzle we’d been working on since we’d returned to Harvard as postdocs.
It took us two pots of coffee and three hours of refining. (Angie went to one of her classes at the Design School; we barely registered her.) I skipped a department meeting, and Neel didn’t go into his lab, but by nine we were on the phone to Arty Hofmann, our advisor. That five-dimensional AdS/CFT model—the Clapp-Jonnal—was born that morning. We joked that if only it had been a 3+1 model, we might have called it the “Clapp-4-Jonnal.” (Jokes about physics are maybe not quite as amusing for non-physicists.) We decided that it didn’t roll off the tongue like Kaluza-Klein, but was nowhere near as bad as the Friedmann-Lema?tre-Robertson-Walker metric.
We picked up frosted doughnuts on the way to campus. I remember that the sun had come out, as if it knew. I was thirty-two, and I tried to save the feeling as we walked to Arty’s office to show him our work. It was the way people describe falling in love but it was so much better than the reality of that. The model gave me a kind of happiness that didn’t depend upon anyone else; it could be carried with you. I thought that this was what religious faith must be like, the peace in knowing that there was something beyond the world you knew, and that your own inner experience would indeed endure.