Roger's Version Read Free

certainly the least I can do,” I told him. “Do give her my love when you see her next.”
    “Also, if I may say, you could visit her yourself. Here she has been in your neck of the woods for over a year, and—”
    “And she has not once sought to reach me. Surely there is a message there. Now, was there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?”
    “Yes.” He leaned melodramatically forward. His corneas had a fishy shine, vertically speared by the reflected shape of the tall pointed window at my back. “God.”
    “Oh, really?”
    “Sir, have you been following any of the recent developments in physics and astronomy?”
    “Only in the vaguest way. The moon shots, and the rather marvellous photographs of Jupiter and Saturn.”
    “Begging your pardon, but that stuff is utterly trivial. Even our whole galaxy, relatively, is a trivial case, though symptomatic, you could say. Professor Lambert …”
    A long pause while his pale eyes lovingly glittered at me. “Yes?” I seemed compelled to answer, like Lazarus awakened.
    “The most miraculous thing is happening,” my visitor proclaimed with a painful sincerity, probably overrehearsed. “The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they’ve really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. They hate it, but they can’t do anything about it. Facts are facts. And I don’t think people in the religion business, so to speak, are really aware of this—aware, that is, that their case, far-out as it’s always seemed, at last is being proven.”
    “That sounds charming, Mr.—”
    “Kohler. Like the plumbing.”
    “Kohler. What kind of God is showing through, exactly?”
    The boy seemed shocked. His tufty, rather nibbled-looking eyebrows lifted. “ You know,” he told me. “There’s only one kind of God. God the Creator, Maker of Heaven and Earth. He made it, we now can see, in that first instant with such incredible precision that a Swiss watch is just a bunch of little rocks by comparison.”
    While tapping out my pipe on my square-edged glass ashtray with its chipped corners, I took the opportunity to glance behind me out the window; its neo-Gothic panel of ornamentally leaded transparency contained, from bottom to top, the lank grass and reddening oaks of the quad, and then a construction site throwing up dust behind a chain-link fence (our neighbor the University Chemical Research Annex expanding),and then an autumnal sky loaded with radiant, baroque clouds. Clouds are strange: at times they seem gigantic sculptures, bulging with three-dimensional form like those musclebound marble Berninis gesturing halfway up Saint Peter’s walls, and at other times, the exact copies of these same clouds, mere smudges of vapor, virtually nonexistent. They are with us, and yet not with us.
    My visitor waited for my gaze to return to him before he asked me, “How much do you know about the Big Bang theory?”
    “Very little,” I told him, with I suppose some agnostic smugness, “except that it is evidently correct.”
    He affected pleasure at my answer, using that hoary teacher’s trick, positive reinforcement for the sluggish student. “Right! And believe me, sir, the scientists have had a hard time with it: they’ve been betting on eternal, unchanging matter ever since Lucretius. But they’ve had to swallow the pill, and now they’re finding out it’s even bitterer than they thought.”
    How had I become captive, I kept asking myself, to the milky effrontery, the assaultive verbalizing earnestness, of this youth? Verna, I remembered, and behind her, a cloud of odorous memory, Edna, my semi-sister, my shadow in blood.
    “There are three main problems with the Big Bang theory,” my visitor informed me, sketching with his oversize hands as if with blackboard chalk. “The horizon problem, the smoothness problem, and the flatness problem. Uniformity: