I knew I should have called Jean last night, but it was very late when I got home. And now it was very early. But Jean was a morning person, and I couldn’t put it off any longer. If I’m lucky, I thought, she’ll be jogging and I can leave a message on her answering machine.
I wasn’t lucky.
“What’s wrong?” Jean asked as soon as she heard my voice. A normal reaction, I told myself, when a call comes before seven on a Saturday morning.
“Matt had a slight reaction to his medication. They kept him at the hospital overnight for observation. Nothing serious; I just thought you’d want to know.” I had no idea why I downplayed Matt’s condition. Certainly not because I was at ease with it.
“I’ll be there by noon,” she said, and hung up.
I glared at the receiver, as if it had rudely broken its electromagnetic connection to Cape Cod on its own. “You’re welcome,” I said.
Matt looked much better. I’d stopped at the nurses’ station first, and learned that he’d had a good night. If he promised to rest for a couple of days I’d be able to take him home after the doctor checked in.
I took a seat next to his bed, happy to see the diagnostics had been turned off.
“I miss our tutorials,” Matt said. “Tell me something technical.”
“This is because we can’t leave here until Dr. Rosen comes by, isn’t it?”
He gave me a sheepish smile and looked up at the clock, next to the tiny television set hanging from the ceiling. “We have at least a half hour.”
“Okay, then,” I said, rubbing my hands together and assuming a professorial voice. “Today we’ll discuss tachyons.” For relief from all the chemistry and pharmacology I’d had to study lately, I brought up a pure physics factoid. “They’re small particles that have a strange property—when they lose energy, they gain speed. And, the slowest a tachyon can go is the speed of light. Also, I think ‘tachy’ means ‘fast’ in some ancient language. How am I doing?”
“Tachyon.” Matt stretched out the syllables, seeming to like the sound of the word. Then he snapped his fingers. “That’s what I had. Tachycardia. Rapid heartbeat. That’s what caused the fainting.”
Of all the particles of physics, I’d picked the one that matched Matt’s reaction. “Maybe there is something to the idea of being on the same wavelength,” I said.
Matt smiled. “And I almost know what a wavelength is. Is this tachyon one of those particles no one has actually seen yet, but there are a million papers written that predict it and how much it weighs, and everything about it, so when it shows up, we’re ready?”
I gave him an approving look. “I didn’t know you’d been listening.”
“I hear everything,” he said.
“I know. It’s what you do.” I reached over and tucked the thin cotton blanket around him, taking the opportunity for a long, if awkward, embrace.
“Remember when I first met you—you’d come up with all those facts, like Einstein’s birthday, or some atomic number?”
“March fourteenth, and the number is six for carbon,” I said.
He laughed. “Aren’t you going to draw me some pictures?”
I took a pen and small notebook from my purse and sketched the standard graphic of a carbon atom, or any atom—the familiar solar system model with negatively charged electrons orbiting a positively charged nucleus. It always bothered me to perpetuate a model that had been superceded in the 1920s, but the old representation was easier to picture than the “clouds of charge” of the new physics. I consoled myself with the fact that for some phenomena, the solar system paradigm still worked.
“Aren’t you going to tell me how no one model accounts for all behavior, and you’re using the simple model to make a point?”
“Like human behavior,” I said. “Your field.”
Matt knew my deep-seated belief that we would always have better physical models than human models. I thought of Wayne Gallen, and how psychology couldn’t possibly describe his behavior using the same model as the one for Matt Gennaro’s behavior.
“Tell me about Buckminster Fuller. A good quote, maybe.”
“Fuller was only five two,” I said.
He laughed, and raised his arm in the air. “Let’s hear it for short men,” said the five-foot-seven detective.
“Here’s a quote, as near as I can remember it: ‘When people discard the notion that ownership is important, they will not be burdened with possessions. The less we own, the greater our mobility.’”