Fatal Flaw Part 31

"It doesn't make me happy, you coming in with an eye like that. Miss Prouix is a favorite of mine. Whenever I see her, it brightens my day. We all need a little bit of sunshine. I'd hate for anything to disturb her equilibrium."

"That's not what I'm here for."

"That doesn't mean it won't happen, does it? The supervisor said you had some questions for her."

"That's right."

"And I'm sure you'll be careful in digging for your answers."

"Yes, I will."

"Does she know you?"

"No. But I knew her sister."

"Well, then, go on and introduce yourself, Mr. Carl. She's over there, by the far wall."

A bright golden beam fell through the window, illuminating the slim woman on the coach in a halo of sunshine. She was leaning toward the gla.s.s, one leg curled under the other, one arm resting on the sofa's back. She was holding a book, thin and black, but the book was closed, and her face pointed toward the light. I remember quite clearly the bright golden light, but I'm wondering whether the magical beam exists now in my recollection much more vividly than it did that day. Maybe it was overcast, I seem to remember that it was. Maybe the light is an inventive trick of my memory, but I am not inventing that the woman on the couch was the very image of Hailey Prouix. And I am not inventing the emotion that clutched at my chest when I saw her there, across the room, gazing out the window, bathed as she was in gold.

What is love? It is a question that runs like a silver thread through this whole sorry tale, an elemental question that at each point seems to provide a very different answer. But if you had asked just then, as I stood beside t.i.tus and saw Roylynn Prouix within that golden glow, I would have told you that love is a Pavlovian response to certain very specific stimuli. Because if I was feeling something for Hailey Prouix's sister, and I was, and I believe that what I was feeling was a shimmer of love, then it was based nothing on her, because I had never met her, and it was not a communal emotion flowing back and forth between us, because as of yet she didn't even know of my existence. It was instead an unavoidable remembrance of how I had felt before when I had seen that same face.

I glanced nervously at t.i.tus, who smiled rea.s.suringly and urged me on. Slowly, I made my way across the room to Roylynn Prouix.

She turned her face to me and smiled as I approached. It was a lovely smile, but different from her sister's. Where Hailey's had always been filled with a sad, calculating irony, this smile was guileless and genuine. I had adored Hailey's calculating smile, which evidenced so many strange depths, but after the mult.i.tude of ways I had been twisted and turned since first I saw it, I found Roylynn's all the more radiant.

"Miss Prouix?" I said.

She continued to smile without saying anything, and I began to worry.

"My name is Victor Carl."

No response, just that smile. Was there anything behind it? Was the guilelessness I had so admired just an instant before nothing but a lobotomized emptiness? I stared for a moment, overcome with a brief horror at what I imagined might be lacking in the woman before me.

"You, I suppose, are the visitor I've been told to expect," she said finally, in a voice curved by the same accent as affected Hailey's voice in her unguarded moments.

I breathed a great sigh of relief that someone was at home in the mansion. "Yes, that's right. I am so sorry about what happened to your sister."

The smile faded, she looked away to stare again out the window. "Thank you," she said quietly.

"I knew her in Philadelphia."

She turned quickly to peer at me. "Really. Tell me, was she happy in Philadelphia?"

It was a setup for a joke, but I resisted. "It's hard to say, she was a complicated woman, but I think there were moments of happiness."

She smiled again. "Well, I'm glad to hear that at least."

"Did she keep in touch with you?"

"Oh, yes. We talked frequently. She often called to see how I was doing, to ask about my day. She was always a very concerned sister."

"So you knew about Guy Forrest."

"Pardon?"

"Guy Forrest. Guy and your sister were living together. They were engaged to be married."

"No, she never mentioned him. I'm sure she would have, if she was really planning to marry him. But generally when we talked, she was more interested in how I was doing."

"Mr. Forrest was indeed engaged to your sister. There was a proposal, an acceptance, a ring. But now the state has accused him of killing her."

"Really? I hadn't heard. That is truly shocking. But I'm sure this Mr. Forrest did no such thing. Men didn't kill Hailey, they killed for for Hailey." Hailey."

I was taken aback by that comment, and the cheeriness with which it was dispensed.

"Sit down, Mr. Carl," she said, gesturing me to a spot at the other end of the couch. "No need to stand over me like that."

"You should know, Miss Prouix, I'm a lawyer representing Guy Forrest in the murder case. I've come to ask you some questions."

"It's not contagious, is it, being a lawyer?"

"Excuse me?"

"I won't start babbling in Latin or start charging for phone calls if you get too close, will I?"

"I can't guarantee it, but no, I don't think so."

"Well, then, I think maybe we can risk it." She gestured again to the other end of the couch, and I sat.

She shifted to face me, still holding her thin black book, dog-eared and dirty, still smiling, kindly now, with a deep a.s.surance, and I thought suddenly that her being here had to be a mistake. Had to be. She was smart and charming and funny and full of kindness. It was quite a shift from my thinking her lobotomized only a few moment ago, but my whole experience in that place had proved disorienting, and the emotions I was feeling, the Pavlovian love that still clutched at me, made me certain. I didn't want at that moment to talk about Hailey or Guy or even poor dead Jesse Sterrett. My basest instincts kicked in and I wanted to talk about her. I wanted to chat her up like I would chat up a cutie in a bar.

"What's that you're reading?" I asked.

She took tighter hold of the black volume in her lap. "It's my favorite book. I read it over and over."

"It must be something fun," I said, twisting my head to read the battered spine. "Well, maybe not. A Brief History of Time A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking." by Stephen Hawking."

"Do you know of him?"

"Hawking. Isn't he that guy in the wheelchair?"

"Yes. He's marvelous. I think I'm a little bit in love with him, though I hear he's terrible to his wives. He has Lou Gehrig's disease, and he was supposed to have been dead years ago, but instead he sits in that chair and lets his mind wander out to the far edges of the universe. And the strange thing is that in writing about what he sees there, it is as if he is writing the story of my life."

"Your life?"

"Do you care much for physics, Mr. Carl?"

"E equals MC squared and all that?"

"Yes, and all that."

"No, I don't, actually. I don't understand it. But how is that the story of your life?"

"You know that the universe is expanding at tremendous speed. Of course you do. Can't you feel it? I can, every moment of every day I feel everything rushing away from me."

I thought suddenly of the way the points of darkness had rushed away from me during my sleepless nights and the terror that engendered. What must it be like to feel that every moment of every day?

"All this...disintegration," she said, "is an aftereffect of the big bang."

"The big bang?"

She leaned forward now, as if she had something urgent to relate to me, as if she were proselytizing about some great new religion that would save my soul. "The big bang. The very beginning of time, when the universe was formed out of a single great explosion. Before that, nothing happened that mattered, because it had no effect on what happened after. And after, nothing was ever the same again, because the explosion just kept hurtling everything far, far away."

"And that happened to you?"

"Yes. Of course. I thought you said you knew my sister. It happened to her, too. But at some point all this hurtling away is going to stop. It's slowing down already and the force of gravity is at work every moment and someday, someday soon, the universe is going to stop expanding and slowly, slowly begin to contract. And then the contraction will speed up, speed up, speed up, until boom." She smashed her palms together. "The big crunch."

"The big crunch?"

"Yes. And that will be the end of everything. The end of all time, because nothing that happens afterward will be affected by anything that happened before."

"And that's coming soon?"

"We can only hope," she said with a bright smile and a twinkle in her eye.

I wondered just then if she was putting me on. She must have been, and I smiled back at her even as I was feeling a confusing sadness.

"Is that what happened to Jesse Sterrett?" I said. "The big crunch?"

She seemed taken aback at the name. She turned her head and stared for a moment out the window.

"Is he in your book, too?" I said.

Without looking at me, she nodded and then looked down, opening the battered book in her lap. The pages were badly smudged, as if each had been fingered hundreds of times. She paged through the volume, stopping now and then, her attention caught by certain pa.s.sages, in the way that some page through the Bible. She stopped finally and lifted the book to show it to me.

Chapter 6: "Black Holes.".

"I think maybe," I said, slowly, as if to a child, "we should put away the book and just talk."

"Do you know what a black hole is? It is something so ma.s.sive, something with a gravity so dense, that nothing can escape it, not even light. That's why they say it is black. Generally it is a star that collapses in on itself. It has to be just the right size, and then, when it is done burning, it just contracts into the tiniest ball of matter. Anything that comes too close falls in and gets ripped apart before disappearing forever."

"And you say that's what happened to Jesse Sterrett?"

"Yes, of course. He fell into a black hole."

"Jesse Sterrett died in the quarry in Pierce. You think there was a collapsed star in that quarry?"

"No, of course not. Just because I'm in here doesn't make me crazy. But a black hole doesn't have to be formed only by a star. Anything with sufficient density can be a black hole. There are things called primordial black holes, formed in the very first moments after the big bang, formed of the very first pieces of the universe. It's right here in the book. Little bits of matter that have compressed into the tiniest shapes and float around the universe wreaking havoc. Think of something the ma.s.s of a mountain compressed into something no wider or longer than a million millionth of an inch. Think of that. A dark force from the very dawning of our universe. And they could be anywhere, anywhere, deep in outer s.p.a.ce or just behind the moon or around the next bend in the road. They could be anywhere, floating here, floating there, leaving nothing but destruction. Anything that comes too close falls in and gets ripped apart before disappearing forever. The ma.s.s of a mountain in a million millionth of an inch."

I stared at her pretty face as she spoke, I gaped sad and incredulous, but at the same time, for some reason, I remembered the strange force that roared through Hailey and me in the middle of s.e.x. It had seemed then, that force, something powerful, insatiable, devastating, ancient.

"And that's what killed Jesse Sterrett," I said, "a primordial black hole?"

"Yes. And Hailey, too."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's in the book."

"It doesn't make any sense."

"Of course it doesn't. Not yet, at least. No one's been smart enough to come up with a unified theory that explains everything. It is what Einstein spent his life searching for. It is what Stephen Hawking is traveling to the edges of the universe to figure out. One elegant equation that answers all the questions. Stephen Hawking is so close to figuring it out, they are all so close. And I am close, too. I know it. Each day I read over what he says here in this book and I feel myself growing closer and closer to an answer, closer and closer to figuring it out. And when I do, everything will become clear. Everything. Do you want to help me? Won't you help me?"

"I don't know anything about physics."

She reached out and grabbed at my shirt. "You said you knew her. You said you knew Hailey."

"Yes, I did."

"And you were asking questions about Jesse Sterrett. So you know more than you think you know. You are closer than you ever imagined. Will you work with me? Will you help me?"

She was shaking the fistful of cloth still in her grip. I took hold of her wrist and gently pulled her hand off of me. "That's what I'm trying to do. If you could only answer some questions..."

"All your answers are here." She waved the book with her other hand. "Whatever it is you want to know."

Just then a shadow appeared to my right. "Is everything all right?" said t.i.tus, his deep voice filled with a solicitous concern.

I noticed then that I was still gripping Roylynn's wrist. I let go. She turned and smiled at t.i.tus with the same bright smile she had given me only moments ago.

"Mr. Carl is going to work with us to find the unified theory," she said.

"That's good," said t.i.tus. "That's very good."

"t.i.tus has helped me so much already," she said. "We're getting so close, aren't we?"

"Yes, we are, we surely are."

"The world will be stunned when we figure it out."

"Yes, it will," said t.i.tus. "You'll be getting yourself a n.o.bel Prize."

"We," said Roylynn. "You and everyone else who helped."