Babylon and Other Stories

A Theory of Entropy

What could reach them here was the mail, and Claire took the boat across the lake to Bob's store to pick it up. The first of the summer people were in, browsing through the aisles, stocking up on canned goods and batteries. From behind the counter Bob nodded and passed her a rubberbanded stack, her bills and Car-son's heavy magazines—Science, Journal of Organic Chemistry— saying, as he did each time, “A little light reading for you, Claire?”

“Puts me to sleep,” she said. Around her children tugged their parents' sleeves, begging for candy and to be taken fishing.

“Hold on a minute. Something for you in the back,” Bob said. He came back with a bundle in his arms, a padded envelope nearly as square as a box. She didn't have to look at the return address to know that it was Carson's book.

She piled the bills and magazines on top, then slid it off the counter and pressed it to her chest for balance. Bob was frowning at a boy handling a box of fishing lures with larcenous fingers; when she left, he raised his hand briefly without looking away from the boy.

The dock was not ten yards from the store. She threw a tarp over the mail and, gunning the engine, glanced back at it. She never opened his mail, although he sometimes asked her to, and anyway he opened it in front of her, showed or told her everything — he had no secrets, he always said. But these were her scruples. The boat skittered a little as she maneuvered around driftwood. On the other side of the lake a motorboat roared and circled. Underneath it and closer in, a smaller sound almost evaporated as it reached her: the hoot of a loon.

Carson came into the kitchen, where she was snapping beans. He dipped his hand into the bowl and sat down at the table with a handful. “She wants to come here,” he said.

“Here? Why?”

“Because she knows I won't go to the city.”

She turned. His legs under the table stretched the length of it: he was over six feet tall, strong-shouldered, rangy. Long fingers with thick knuckles, like knots on wood. To relax he built furniture, including this table.

“To work on the book,” he said.

“I thought she already did.” Claire set the bowl in the sink and ran water over the beans. “Isn't that what came today, the edits?”

“She says we have a lot more to do. That the book isn't quite coming across. She thinks a few days of hammering it out in person could do it. So, can she come?”

“You're asking me?”

“It's your place,” he said.

She looked at him. She loosed a clove of garlic from its paper and set it, along with an onion, on the table for him to chop.

Carson studied entropy. Claire didn't understand his work and had given up trying. It was entirely theoretical, divorced from the data sets and experimental designs on which he had built his early career in chemistry. He produced it, as far as she could tell, whole and unprecedented, a rabbit from the black hat of his mind. Sitting in his office at the back of the cottage, he wrote page after page of thoughts with a blue marker on lined yellow pads. What she knew of entropy came from a college textbook that she'd bought, in a vain effort to educate herself, after they met. Entropy is a thermodynamic function measuring the disorder of a system. The greater the disorder of a system, the higher its entropy. Disorder equals randomness.

Or it used to, until Carson came along. He developed a new way of looking at entropy, of evaluating the whole idea of order and equilibrium. He charted the paths of molecules through systems and began to wonder if entropy veered toward simplicity, if there was order within disorder, whether disorder had a quality of inevitability to it and was, in fact, the lawful tendency of a non-equilibrial universe. Possibly, Claire thought, entropy was a scientific term for fate. But she never said so to Carson, who would tell her gently that science was science, not metaphor.

At the beginning, in the city, he'd tried to explain the model to her, defining its basic elements, then moving on and almost immediately losing her, his logic twisting along a corridor she could not follow. He drew outlines, equations, the universe in boxes and arrows. The blanker she looked, the faster he talked, reaching into his brain for examples to teach her by, striving to share his clarity. He stretched his hands wide, carving the air: his words a map to show her where he was. Claire was no scientist at all — simply a freelance designer who'd failed math in high school. Instead of listening to his words she became distracted by the passion in his voice, the shaking timbre of it, by how he peered under the surface of things to discover some elusive knowledge of the world. She forgot to pay attention, and attraction overruled. Eventually, they both gave up on explanations.

She had known Carson for a year when he published the first diagram of his model in Science and was suddenly acclaimed in the nonscientific press. Scientists made pilgrimages to his office at the university, besieged him with letters, never stopped calling. Some of the letters and calls came from Jocelyn Gates, who acquired manuscripts for a popular publisher. She wanted him to write an account of his work for the general reader, which she said could be the biggest scientific best-seller since the Origin of Species.

The other members of his department assumed that he signed this contract for the usual reasons, the temptations of money and self-inflation. But he had been seduced, Claire thought, by different riches, the only treasure he really craved: time away from the university, from grant writing and the company of difficult colleagues, from the obligations to students and administrators. Time to think. He could take leave from the university, write the manuscript, and meanwhile chase the magnets of his own ideas. In interviews he always said, “There is so much left to be done.”

When he decided to write the book, Claire offered him her cottage on the lake, and her presence with it. They had been here two years.

Even in May, the nights were cold. Under the blankets she moved closer to Carson, whose body gave off heat constantly, no matter the season, as if it were electric. She turned her back to him and brought his arm around her. From where she was lying she could see out the window to a clutch of birches on a rise behind the house, the bark silver in the light from stars.

“How old is this woman?” she asked.

“Claire,” he said, his tone a reminder that he hated any sign of insecurity. Carson was generally even-tempered, but frustration sometimes sparked from him in angry fits. What he liked best about her, she knew, was the idea he had of her strength. He liked being indebted to her for the favor of this house, and it was important for him to think she didn't need him.

“Old?” she said. “Or young?”

“She's not much younger than you are. Twenty-nine.”

“How do you know? I mean so specifically.”

“She told me. She took one of my classes at one point, apparently, and mentioned what year she graduated.” His hand twining hers began to sweat, and he unclasped and moved it to her shoulder. His cheek scratched her face. “Don't be jealous,” he said in her ear. “I hate it.”

She flipped onto her back and looked at him. His eyes were open, colorlessly glinting in the darkness. “All right,” she said.

Jocelyn Gates arrived on the noon bus. She wasn't what Claire was expecting, although she hadn't realized she'd been expecting anything at all. Her long, wavy hair had been dyed an unnatural brownish red that looked like dried blood. Behind thick brown frames her eyes were blue. When she stepped off the bus she flung her backpack over her shoulder, like a student, and her eyes found Claire's immediately.

“Are you Claire Tremble?” she said. “I'm Jocelyn.”

Claire stepped forward and shook her hand. “Is that all you have?” she said, nodding at the backpack.

“Dear God, no,” Jocelyn said as the bus driver lugged a large suitcase in their direction.

Claire looked at it.

“It's mostly manuscripts, I swear,” Jocelyn said. “Carson said there'd be a boat. There is a boat, isn't there?”

“That's the boat,” Claire said, pointing.

“Oh. Should I—”

“It's fine. But you might have to sit on it, that's all.”

“I can do that,” Jocelyn said.

Claire reached for the suitcase, but Jocelyn shook her head firmly, hefted it up, and gestured for Claire to walk on ahead. When they reached the boat, Jocelyn lowered the case down on its side then got in and straddled it. With the extra weight they sat heavily in the water, but Claire judged it would be all right. Jocelyn sat precariously, her white hands clutching the gunwale, spray from the lake misting her glasses. After a minute or so the boat seemed to adjust itself and moved slowly but smoothly through the branches of spruce trees clearly mirrored in the water.

Jocelyn leaned over to trail her fingers through their rippling needles. “It's beautiful here,” she said.

“I know.”

“What a wonderful place to write a book,” she said, and inhaled with deep satisfaction, as if catching the scent of unborn books in the wind. She caught Claire's eye. “Thank you for letting me come.”

Carson was waiting for them on the dock, a surprise, since he regularly worked every day until five and would brook no interruption, which habit had led Claire to offer to pick up the girl in the first place. Yet here he was, reaching out a long arm to catch the prow and rope it to the dock. Then he grabbed Jocelyn Gates's hand and pulled her up. The two of them laughed and moved from handclasp to shake. Jocelyn would not permit her suitcase to be carried for her, so she trudged after Carson up the hill to the house. Halfway there she paused to readjust her grip and said again to Claire, who was behind her, “It's so beautiful here.”

“Yes.”

“A refuge,” she said, her eyes glowing, blue coals. “I hope I won't disturb your peace.”

“Don't mention it,” Claire said.

Because the desk in Carson's office was small, the two of them settled on the kitchen table, where they could spread the manuscript out in stacks. Claire shut the door to her office and tried to work, but on a trip to the washroom she heard them already arguing. She couldn't make out the specific words, only the general grievance in Carson's voice, and from this tone she suddenly heard her own name rising and realized he was calling her.

She stood in the doorway.

“This woman,” Carson sputtered. His face was flushed but Jocelyn's was not. “She wants me to tell my story. She wants me to sell the material. Would you tell her, please, that science is not a story? Will you please agree with me on this so I'll know I'm not insane?”

Claire looked at Jocelyn, who smiled politely.

“I think I'm the wrong person to ask,” Claire said, and Carson groaned. “I mean, you know I'm no scientist.”

“So? You still know that a scientific theory is a model, not some fairy tale.”

“Well, yes, and I'm not saying that it's fiction. But I do kind of think — sorry, Carson — that science is a story we tell ourselves about the world. In a way.”

Carson said, tight-lipped, “It's not just any story.”

“The important thing here, Carson,” Jocelyn said, “is that we tell it well.”

Over the next three days Carson and Jocelyn worked on the book. They fought often and loudly while Claire, in her office, didn't even pretend to work and just listened. For some time it seemed they couldn't even agree on terms or the meanings of words. She heard Carson's voice, strained and hoarse through the walls. “Order and disorder are only categories. They don't hold up, statistically.” Jocelyn's voice flowed quietly under his. She was trying to simplify Carson's theories, to put his arguments into the plainest terms. They could be expanded later, she told him. The book was a pyramid requiring a foundation, a wide and basic layer.

Claire thought of the phrase Carson, quoting Jocelyn, had used to describe this process: hammering it out. This was certainly what it sounded like, voices striking hard as metal, Car-son's strident, hers relentless, pounding his science into flatness like nails into wood. Claire was afraid for him to see his work— so famously abstract — popularized and, inevitably, reduced. Moreover, for him to cooperate in the reduction. And she was surprised by Jocelyn's persistence, her conviction that his ideas could be explained to the average reader. She kept on hammering.

“So all things tend naturally toward a simpler state,” Claire heard her say.

“Where do you get this naturally?” Carson sounded anguished by her lack of precision. “Where? You're creating some kind of animism that isn't inherent in the work.” Claire pictured him spreading his palms, trying to explain. “There is no naturally. Things can only happen according to the physical laws of the universe.”

“So explain those laws to me.”

“Look, miss, I didn't realize that you came up here for a scientific education. I thought you came here to work on my book.”

“I'm your reader,” Jocelyn said without a pause. “Explain it to me.”

“Maybe you're not my reader,” he said. “Maybe I have no readers. The kind of people you're talking about don't want to know about my work. Couldn't understand it even if they did.”

“They want to.”

Other times, as Claire passed through the kitchen, she saw them working smoothly, heads together, one nodding, the other speaking, in a low and constant and rhythmic tone, like two birds on a branch. In the evenings she and Carson cooked dinner for their guest. By tacit agreement they all three avoided the subject of science, instead discussing politics or weather, the natural beauty of the region, the improvements Claire and Carson had made to the cottage in order to live in it year-round. Conversation stayed polite and almost distant, with none of the contention or excitement that echoed through the rooms during the day.

Claire took the boat across to Bob's, and Jocelyn asked to go with her. She needed to use the phone to check in at the office.

“Although I'd rather not,” she said at the dock, hands on her hips, looking out at the water. “The office seems a bit unreal at this point.”

“It'll seem real enough once you get back,” Claire said.

She raised an eyebrow. “I guess,” she said.

“Whenever I go back to the city,” Claire said, “I feel like I could take up my old life again in a minute, and this is the place that seems unreal.”

Jocelyn nodded. “Do you ever miss it there?” she asked.

Claire wasn't sure whether this question was sincere or merely conversational. Possibly it was an editor's technique, a way of seducing writers, giving them the sense that she was curious about them, or about the knowledge they could provide. Claire took a breath and looked out over the lake. A string of starlings lassoed themselves into a circle, twisted, formed into a symbol that looked, for a second, like infinity. “Sometimes,” she said.

“You grew up here?”

“In the city. This was our summer place.”

Jocelyn reached over and touched the water. “Can you get across the lake in the winter?”

“Usually,” Claire said. “If not, well, we have a lot of food stored.”

“Must be a long winter.” When Claire didn't answer, Jocelyn added, “But beautiful.”

Inwardly, Claire rolled her eyes. Of course it was beautiful, but beauty had little to do with it. She had come here not just to be with Carson but to prove she could live here. Putting up food, trying to get Bob and the rest of the village not to look at her as one of the “summer people,” insulating the cottage, chopping wood, all the other chores — the chores had everything to do with it. “My parents built the house,” she finally said. “We were always working on it. They never intended it to be lived in year-round. But Carson needed a quiet place to work. And I can work from anywhere.”

“Lucky for him,” Jocelyn said.

“Not lucky. Just something I was able to do,” Claire said. She felt Jocelyn's gaze on her. “I was glad to be able to offer it.” She was speaking unwillingly but couldn't stop, the words being reeled from her as if the other woman held a line. She felt she had to explain, to give Jocelyn the correct impression of her life, the necessity of it bearing down on her with a pressure like physical weight. “This isn't a sacrifice for me,” she said. “I like living here. I don't just see to Carson's needs. It's not like he's the, you know, reclusive man of genius and I'm the handmaiden.”

“The handmaiden?” Jocelyn started to laugh, shaking her head, then clamped her hand over her mouth. “I'm sorry. I'm not making fun of you. I've just never heard anybody use that word in conversation before.”

“Oh, God,” Claire said, “you're right.” Her tension cracked and she could feel laughter breaking the surface of her skin, bubbling up through it as if it were water. “I don't know where that came from.”

At the store Bob handed her the mail.

“Got a visitor with you, eh?” he said, looking at Jocelyn, who stood at the pay phone frowning at an open engagement book and making notes in it.

“That's summer for you,” Claire said, and shrugged. She bought a chicken and some bread, then crossed the street to the vegetable stand. When she came back Jocelyn was still standing next to the phone, no longer talking, just standing, her face tilted to the sky. She had removed her glasses, and her pale skin, exposed to the sun, seemed doubly naked.

As if she'd recognized Claire's steps, she opened her eyes with a smile already present in them. “Ready to go, handmaiden?” she said.

“You stop,” said Claire.

They took the boat back in silence. It was late afternoon, the sky changing to gray, and the water they passed through was planed in shadow, alternately clear and opaque, plants rising up from the deep into occasional visibility. As she docked, Claire looked up and saw Carson moving past a window, his silhouette dark in the light, the line of his neck, the curve of his shoulders. For one instant she didn't recognize him, didn't feel the familiar jolt of his presence. A blankness swept inside her. When she met him she memorized those outlines, raptured by the shape of him, a desire she could not ignore. Now she stood on the dock and looked at him and some emotion drained from her in a trickle like grains of sand marking the passage of time. Jocelyn walked up the hill in front of her, and Claire thought of the woman's questions and her own answers. Whatever she'd said to Jocelyn, she had changed her life because of him, her drastic desire for him. It wasn't possible — or was it? — that after making such a change, the feeling could dissipate, could disappear.

It made her wonder if she knew just what that feeling was. From the moment she met Carson she knew there was a part of him that she could never reach, the part devoted to an abstraction she would never touch. And then the move to the cottage, the distance and isolation and cold. She hadn't been coerced into anything. But what she had chosen was difficult, in fact was chosen for its difficulty. If she'd made a mistake, it was to believe that things struggled for — the cottage, Carson, their life here — had to contain more value than things fallen into with the simple force of the inevitable. A belief engineered by pride.

That night she lay awake, Carson breathing heavily beside her, Jocelyn inaudible in the guest room. She tried to remember as much as she could about his work, her thoughts circulating in a dull frenzy, as they would the night before an exam. All she could think of were the examples from the textbook. Dye dissolving into a glass of water; a dense red drop issuing a cloud of pink. Picture a truck crashing into a wall, she remembered. This is the world in spontaneous action, growing in disorder. Picture a mirror shattering on the floor.

They were almost finished, Jocelyn and Carson, with the final chapter, framing the conclusion. Claire could feel their exhilaration. She made a pot of coffee and joined them at the table with a cup.

“I think that we have an opportunity to extrapolate here,” Jocelyn said. “From the level of chemical processes, the ones you've established, to larger ones.”

Carson shuffled the papers of the manuscript on the table, then ran his hands over his face up to his forehead. From repetition of this gesture his eyebrows had risen into unruly tufts, adding to his look of worry. “I'd like to resist leaping to unwarranted conclusions,” he said.

Jocelyn exchanged a smile with Claire. “I appreciate your caution,” she said, “but this isn't a scientific paper. You don't have to worry about peer review. This is the time for you to make wild claims about the potential of your model to explain biology, economic and social phenomena, the very nature of human existence. Say that the second law of thermodynamics has been forever broken. You can be speculative. Be sexy.”

“Listen,” he said. “You must know by now that physical laws can't be broken. I only uncovered them a little further. They were always there.”

“Come on, Carson,” Claire urged. “Have a little fun with it.”

“Claire.”

“What?”

“I'm a scientist, not a comedian,” he said, sounding stricken. This made both women laugh, and Jocelyn wiped a tear from her eye. Carson shook his head. “You two,” he said. “Ganging up on me.”

She remembered when, in a bar near the university, a colleague of Carson's, an older man, wheezy and red-faced and drunk, rambled on about great discoveries in science, the leaps and bounds of thought. This was a popular subject among scientists, Claire had noticed, as if by discussing the personality of genius they could associate themselves more closely with it. This man said there were two kinds of thinkers, those who led — who thought the new, the fully original — and those who followed in the existing tracks. The searchers and the followers, he called them.

Carson had snapped, “It's true there are two types of thinkers: people stupid enough to believe there are two types of anything, then everybody else.”

“Sore subject, Carson?” his colleague said.

They finished the final edit at seven o'clock, so Claire fixed a late dinner. She lit candles and set a bouquet of wildflowers in a jelly jar on the table.

Carson lifted his wineglass and declared a toast. “As Claire and many undergraduates can attest, I've never been successful in spreading my ideas outside of a narrow group of scientists,” he said to Jocelyn. “I know it's been like pulling teeth to get this book out of me, and I thank you for it. And I'm very glad it's over.”

Though he was smiling, Claire sensed how strongly his relief tugged him: that tomorrow Jocelyn would leave, silence would return, and he would retire to his office with three months left of his leave from school. Three months completely devoted to real work. He lapsed into quiet, and a general exhaustion seemed to spread from him across the table. By nine the candles had burned low and the talk had dribbled to nothing.

At midnight, rising to go to the washroom, Claire passed the guest room, saw light through the door, and, without thinking, knocked. Jocelyn sat up in bed surrounded by sheets of paper, one pencil stuck in her hair, another in her hand.

“Don't you ever stop working?”

“I couldn't sleep.” She waved for Claire to come in.

Claire sat down at the foot of the bed, on a folded quilt her mother had made. She traced the line of a square with her thumb. The pieces came from blankets, rags, and old clothes that her mother had stitched together on rainy summer days, having collected the scraps through the year in a box in the kitchen. Something to pass the time, she called it.

“What are you working on?”

“Paleontology,” Jocelyn said. She put down her pencil and stretched, her neck's tendons visible and strong. When she reached up, the sleeves of her T-shirt fell back, showing the very smooth skin at the underside of her arms. “It's a new theory of dinosaur life. Dinosaurs are very big sellers.”

“I don't know how you do it,” Claire said. “Understand all these things.”

Jocelyn rubbed her eye. “Well,” she said, and smiled, “they're still dinosaurs, right? They still disappeared.”

“I guess that's true.”

“And anyway, I don't have to completely understand it.”

“You don't?”

“Not at all. I just get it as clear as I can, then I move on to the next book.”

Claire looked at the manuscript on Jocelyn's lap. Neat penciled notations lined the margins. Suddenly she was horribly conscious of having interrupted her work. She felt herself flush. “I'm sorry for intruding,” she said, getting up and walking to the door.

Jocelyn gathered up the pages and moved them aside. “No,” she said. “You didn't.”

She practically missed the bus. In the morning she came out of her room with her bags packed, but at the last moment Claire couldn't find her. She went out the back door and saw Jocelyn crouched in a clearing behind the house, staring at a trillium, its single white flower nodding in the grass like some reminder of snow.

“Jocelyn, we really should leave.”

Jocelyn stood and turned around. The slope of her shoulders was outlined in gold by the sun as it arrowed through the pine branches. Her blue eyes looked jeweled. In the sharpness of the light Claire could see the fine down of hair on her cheek. Silence swooned between them.

“I'm sorry to go,” Jocelyn said.

Carson's book appeared the following spring. There was no preface, no page of acknowledgments. The book launched itself into being from the first page, his voice transposed into type: I begin by stating that we live in a non-equilibrial universe, and that the state of disorder we know as entropy is itself an order of the universe that we have not, up to now, been able to recognize. Claire could hear him saying it, picture his palms spread wide. In the bookstore she flipped through the pages, ran the tips of her fingers over the glossy jacket. This new model of entropy could change the way we look at the organization of the universe, the way we think about its future and ours. She turned to the back flap and touched the black-and-white picture of his face, her fingertip leaving a print behind.

Then she put the book back on the shelf, tapped it into place, and walked quickly to the front of the store, where, because, Jocelyn was waiting for her.