The Cosmological Constant
I had a dream, or rather a very specific premonition that came to me in a dream. I awoke with the unsettled feeling one has when one has a dream that’s a little too real. I shuffled around the apartment in a daze and then, hours later, came across the prophesied letter. Les must have retrieved it from the mailbox.
My dream replayed. The letter said exactly what I thought (knew?) it would. The crisp stationary was a slightly different shade of white.
I consider myself a rational being. I was educated in the hard sciences. I have the German’s surly disposition towards mysticism: I’m not swayed by self-serving preacher-men and psychics, nor does magical thinking hold much interest for me. Certain phenomena in quantum physics notwithstanding, I do not believe in spook-like actions at a distance. But physics and metaphysics failed me here.
So I did what any sane, reasonable person would do when faced with an urgent metaphysical dilemma: I drank heavily. Emma, recently returned from Europe, told us of her adventures as we sat in a godforsaken Upper West Side bar. “Did you have an Italian stud at either end, or what?”
Emma laughed. “No. They were all too young. And too clingy.”
“That’s a shame. If a guy wants to get laid it’s better not to give a damn.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“But then not giving a damn defeats the purpose of the exercise, doesn’t it?” I was like this all night. Speaking in koans.
We wound up in Emma’s living room. She straddled Leslie, applying warming gel between my fiancée’s legs. In the dim light of the bedroom Leslie said to me: “I want to see you fuck her.” And I did. And Les watched, stroking my balls as I took out my frustrations on our playmate’s cunt. I turned into a raging hardon. I’d annihilated the self.
Later on Leslie told me: “You fuck like crazy when you’re angry.”
It’s a straightforward biological mechanism: anger produces testosterone, which in turn produces the aforementioned raging hardon. And the letter produced the anger. And the dream produced the letter. A deterministic universe, as logical as a clockwork orange.
The next morning Emma woke up late for work (the poor girl had to go in on a Saturday) in spite of my nudging and prodding. I discovered, much to my dismay, that I’d developed a rather profound kink in my neck. Leslie was kind enough to feed Emma’s cat, upon which Les and I said our goodbyes and strolled home in the sunlight. My Dinner with Andre had arrived in the mail, so she popped it in and we curled up on the couch together.
WALLY: And I mean, you know, it’s the same with any kind of prophecy or sign or an omen, because if you believe in omens, then that means that the universe—I mean, I don’t even know how to begin to describe this—that means that the future is somehow sending messages backwards to the present! Which means that the future must exist in some sense already in order to be able to send these messages. And it also means that things in the universe are there for a purpose: to give us messages. Whereas I think that things in the universe are just there. I mean, they don’t mean anything. I mean, you know, if the turtle’s egg falls out of the tree and splashes on the paving stones, it’s just because that turtle was clumsy, by accident. And to decide whether to send my ships off to war on the basis of that seems a big mistake to me.
ANDRE: Well, what information would you send your ships to war on? Because if it’s all meaningless, what’s the difference whether you accept the fortune cookie or the statistics of the Ford foundation? It doesn’t seem to matter.
Viewing the film (for the first time in twenty years) it occurred to me that the way you approach life depends very much on whether you identify with Andre the wide-eyed mystic or Wally the jaded realist. And though once I might have sided with Wally, at that moment I wasn’t sure what to think.
I wasn’t terribly thrilled about going out that night—aside from being brutally hungover, I obviously had a lot on my mind—but I didn’t want to cocoon at home either. Les and I met the date at a wine bar in the East Village and stayed just long enough for the fumes from the fryolator(!) to burn our eyes, sending us fleeing to the comfortably air-conditioned Niagara. Try as I might, I couldn’t work myself out of a fugue state. The girl seemed distant—mercurial was a word that kept coming to mind, although it might not have been the right word—yet I might just have been projecting a bad vibe. My neck was still stiff from the previous night. I felt as if I were being pulled under by the cosmic undertow.
Later on, at the warehouse party, I asked the girl whether she’d be interested in having carnal relations on a semi-regular basis (there ought to be a less juvenile and retarded term for this than ‘fuck buddy’). Ordinarily I’m not one for such formal proposals but that night I was hardly my usual charming self. The girl was intrigued. Later on I found Leslie dancing by herself and I held her for a moment before we took to the street to find a car. The girl joined us and as we rode back into Manhattan, fluff-talking about nothing in particular, I rested a hand upon each of their thighs.
A couple days later I was on the train and I thought Am I dreaming? I wanted to tap the guy standing next to me on the shoulder and ask him “Do you think any of this is real?” but he probably would have thought I was nuts. When Leslie got home from work we talked about Kant (we were in the same philosophy class back in school) and I felt a little better. Even if reality is an illusion, I reasoned, there must be some basis for the concepts we share as a species (e.g., that we inhabit three spatial dimensions plus time) and therefore our scientific intuitions about the nature of the universe need not be invalidated by occurrences we (as of today) lack the proper tools to understand. That is, unexplained occurrences don’t necessitate the existence of dragons and fairy-dust.
That evening I visited the park and found some smooth rocks to sit upon for a while. When I got up to leave I spied a book propped up against a tree trunk. “This is the Dream” read the book’s title. Not a dream but the dream. Whose dream? I wondered.
Because right now I’d just as soon forget about dreams altogether.
More: Threesome | Emma | Philosophy | Science | Mysticism | Film
