Lost and Wanted(50)

Still, there’s always the moment when my mother tells me that I look tired—can’t I take a break for a few months, and take care of myself? There’s the moment when I have to interrupt some holiday activity to take a call, and my sister picks up the slack with my son, something she seems to do more naturally than I manage to do with her daughters. And the moment when one of my nieces climbs onto her father’s lap after dinner, puts her head in the hollow of his shoulder, the look on Jack’s face when this happens. Every Christmas I suggest that we might host in Boston the following year, and am greeted with the reflexive financial argument from the adults (six plane tickets as opposed to two) and the now-reflexive argument from Jack: I like it better here.

This year would be different, though. Because I was going to Europe for four days just after Christmas, Jack and I would go to California the week before. We would fly back on the twenty-sixth with my parents, who had agreed to take care of Jack while I was away. That made the holiday feel slightly more balanced than usual. Although I wouldn’t have said it to any of my family members, I was looking forward to staying in an Austrian hotel on my own for three nights, to talking to a European audience genuinely interested in physics, in an institute housed in a medieval castle. And I was looking forward to the following semester, in which I had a break from teaching; I would be returning to that luxurious schedule, and to having Terrence and Simmi in the apartment downstairs.



* * *



—

    I was Christmas shopping with Jack at the mall in Porter Square when the next message arrived. In general I do everything online, as close to the holiday as I can reasonably complete it, but Jack likes to go to the toy store and choose gifts for his cousins himself. I’d been trying not to let the phone distract me when I was with him, and so I’d left it in my bag; now I tipped the bag slightly to read the illuminated screen while listening to Jack debate the merits of various boxed crafting activities that the girls in his class enjoyed. The toy store became more segregated by gender every year, much more so than when I was a child.

Do scientists believe in God?



More than any of the other messages, this one made me want to call Neel. During our years working together at Harvard, we’d had a running argument about Einstein, and when Walter Isaacson’s biography came out, two years after we published the Clapp-Jonnal, we both read it. If we had a difference of opinion, it was about Einstein and free will; Neel regarded Einstein’s determinism as an extension of the “cosmic pantheism” he’d gotten from Spinoza. There was an intricate and beautiful order to the universe, and we were smart enough to perceive only glimmers of it. The appreciation and investigation of this divine symphony, however, was the noblest of human pursuits.

My feelings were a little different. I loved the way Einstein detached Judeo-Christian tradition and the idea of an anthropomorphic God from morality, but I thought he was a little quick in his rejection of free will, which I fundamentally didn’t understand. Neel had once spent several hours arguing that Einstein’s determinism was really just a profound faith in science. Everything, including human behavior, was governed by “causal laws.” I thought that this was nonsensical, as well as morally dubious, since it seemed to me to absolve human beings of all the responsibility for our actions.

    I wrote back to my correspondent immediately, as I had the last time:

Some do. A lot of people think Einstein did, but if you read his letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, you’ll see that he didn’t think very highly of organized religion. He called himself a “religious nonbeliever” because he definitely thought there was more out there than just us. He said he had “unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”



For the first time, I got a reply to my reply:

Is the earth going to crash into the sun?



I had a sinking feeling. The questions had seemed, until this moment, quirky but smart, the product of a perhaps eccentric, but sincere reader. This disassociated rejoinder made me revise that assessment: I thought it suggested someone who wasn’t mentally stable. Instead of offering the reassuring answer to that question, with an explanation of angular momentum, I decided to move on to the question of the phone:

There’s a reward for this phone. $500. I’ll transfer it to you via PayPal if you email me a receipt from the post office.



This was met with a winged stack of money, which I took as an indication of interest. I wrote back:

But I need the receipt first.



The next question seemed obvious: Why should the person at the other end trust me to pay them, if they actually put the phone in the mail? I thought I would simply tell the truth. They couldn’t be sure that I would pay, but since the old phone had little value in itself, and was clearly valuable to me, it was a reasonable chance to take.

    But there was nothing. I waited a few minutes, giving whoever it was a chance to consider, and then tried what I’d decided was a last resort:

Otherwise, the owner has told me that he’ll file a police report.



This turned out to be a tactical error. Whoever was on the other end went silent, and I didn’t get another message from Charlie’s phone for almost two months.