24. The Right Words
24
THE RIGHT WORDS
Do not think me besotted:
Bend not again thy head
— SéANTHRúN CéITINN, “O WOMAN FULL OF WILE”
“ I can only tell you what we do,” Jonathan began after we had traded our empty mugs for wine and a bowl of mandarin oranges, the last edible food in the house.
We’d lapsed into the familiar cadence of academics—questions answered with questions, followed by highly quantified statements and hypotheses. I was pushing him more on the subject of his own peculiar Sight. Specifically, its connection to language.
The evening was setting in, the horizon beyond the ocean burnished a mauve reflection of where the sun lit up the clouds.
“I told you that sorcerers sort of…make requests to the energy we detect,” he said. “The problem is, the language used to do that is dead—or has been lost, for, gods, eons, as long as anyone can know. That’s why we started speaking, you know. It wasn’t to communicate more complex ideas. It was to use our magic. Plain folk just picked it up from us as we learned.”
I snorted as I returned our little picnic on the rugs. We both sat with our backs against the couch now, facing the fire, which was blazing again.
“How can you possibly know that?” I asked. “Can you See back forty thousand years to the beginnings of human civilization?”
Jonathan offered a sardonic smile. “I cannot. But once, someone like you could. And she shared it with the rest of us. Since then, we’ve tried to regain the knowledge we’ve lost.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then found I couldn’t. After all, how many unintelligible languages had I heard on a bad day? Who was to say, if that Sight was clarified, how far back I was actually Seeing?
Jonathan took a sip of his wine. “Call it the original language, if you want.”
“You mean a proto-language? Do you really subscribe to that theory? Isn’t it possible that something like, well, Thai, could have evolved separately from Latin?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter whether there were multiple languages that had the ability to speak efficiently with various energies or just one. My point is just that somewhere in history, the old tongue—or tongues,” he corrected himself at my glance, “were lost, along with the oral histories they conveyed. Fae history. We have some of the words in the oldest, what you call dead languages, but even those are millennia removed from the oldest. And we’ve lost the pronunciation, the correct cadence, all of the fluency that comes with being a native speaker. We know some of the words, but no one is ever entirely sure if they are saying them correctly.”
His voice was taking on the dreamy quality of a scholar lost in nostalgia. I laid my head on the couch to listen more attentively.
“We think some modern languages may be closer to the old tongues than previously thought. Goidelic forms, like Irish, are reasonably old. Greek. Hebrew. Arabic. And then there are the language isolates too, like Basque. The theory is that native speakers of the older languages can appropriate a greater command of the old tongue, and could possibly help to uncover its origins. It’s why you’ll find so many sorcerers in ancient language courses. I’m sure you have a few taking yours.”
Jonathan glanced over at me for confirmation, and I nodded. I had been a TA for a few introductory Irish courses over the years, which had in fact contained an odd percentage of young sorcerers. Most of them weren’t even Irish majors, but chemists and physicists. The occasional biologist.
Real grade grubbers too.
“Would you consider yourself more lawyer or physicist?” I wondered as my thoughts began to wander.
Jonathan chuckled. “I am a scientist. I have a law degree, but it’s certainly not what I do most of the time.”
“You just happened to pick up a JD, did you?”
“I find certain occupational degrees useful in navigating through the plain world of humans. Surely you can understand that.” Something in his voice told me he didn’t want to explain this odd statement anymore.
“I suppose. So what do you research when you’re not executing wills?”
Jonathan reached over his head and stretched in a distinctly feline manner. The room was pleasantly warm, and we both gazed peacefully at the beamed ceiling as he spoke. Under my bare fingertips, playing with the woolen skin, glimpses of other nights like this came back to me. Gran on the floor with a friend or two before Mom and I arrived. Maybe even a lover she’d never revealed.
My mind was pleasantly fuzzy—all I picked up was the joy of those evenings, as opposed to the details. I quite preferred it that way.
“I’m a physicist,” Jonathan was saying. “My home institution is in Rome, but I’ve been working at Harvard for the last six months.”
“Not Oregon?” I teased.
“No. Not Oregon.” His mouth quirked. “That was a snap decision. You thought I was a criminal.”
“Well, you sort of were.”
He chuckled. “I should have known better than to lie to my—to a seer anyway.”
I couldn’t argue with him. “So, particle physics, right? Can you tell me more or would it all go over my head?”
He rubbed his mouth. “That depends. Do you know what a singularity is?”
“The term sounds familiar. I watched Cosmos with my dad when I was a kid, but I don’t remember much.”
“Cosmologists use the term, but they’re more interested in what started the whole universe, what started everything. I work in particle physics, looking at the here and now. ”
I took a drink. “All I know about the beginning of the universe is how nothing came from Chaos. Or Chronos, depending on who’s telling the story. But that’s it.”
Jonathan tipped his head to one side as he watched the flames dance. “Myths and physics probably have more in common than we think. They both seem to be at the heart of the mystery of magic.”
“The mystery of magic?”
“The singularity,” he corrected me.
I didn’t respond. I was learning that he would either reveal what I wanted to know or he wouldn’t. He had already shared so much with me that I was feeling unusually patient.
“A singularity, in layman’s terms, is a mathematical term for anything that has to be measured in terms of infinity. It’s like this.” He grabbed an orange from the coffee table and tore open the skin. The rich scent floated through the room as he spoke. “I can divide an orange into eight pieces, see? Then what happens if I split one of these eighths in half?”
“It becomes a sixteenth. I may be a literary scholar, but I do remember fourth-grade fractions.”
“The question is, then, what’s the smallest piece of the orange that you could create, by continuing that process of halving, and halving again? It’s infinite, right?”
“The orange could be infinitely small,” I agreed.
“Correct. Grossly simplified, it’s essentially how particle physicists have tried to calculate the basic components of matter—of the universe. We figured out that an atom is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and we split them up to find elementary and sub-particles, and so on. The standard model includes sixteen. Seventeen if you count the Higgs-Boson.”
“Is that what you showed me on the mountain?” I wondered. “Some kind of particle?”
“Er, no,” Jonathan admitted. “I don’t know what I See. It’s clearly physical, but not something I’ve been able to render in my work. Yet.” He sighed. “No, we determine these particles theoretically, using mathematics. We calculate backward, back and back and back, smaller and smaller, trying to find that infinitely small point from which things began. Except an infinitely small point can’t be calculated, because that’s the nature of infinity.”
“Because anything you divide in half, you can still divide in half again,” I supplied and was rewarded with the same sort of nod a professor might give to a student’s epiphany.
“Exactly. The conundrum is called a mathematical singularity. It’s basically a representation of infinity that’s a placeholder for whatever actually happens there. But we’ve also figured out that once we come closer to that singular point, things start to go a bit mad. An enormous amount of energy is unleashed during those divisions, more than should be there according to the laws of physics. It’s like chaos.”
“Chaos. Hmm.” I picked an orange piece from his proffered hand and popped it into my mouth. The tart juice exploded onto my tongue, and I hummed with pleasure.
When I opened my eyes, I found Jonathan staring hungrily at my mouth.
Quickly, I wiped away any lingering juice. “Er. So you’re trying to figure out what it is, the singularity? You and Stephen Hawking?”
He rolled his eyes. “You realize he figured out nearly everything I’ve just explained to you.”
“Sorry, sorry.” I held up my hands in mock surrender, which made my guest smile. “Is he a sorcerer too?”
“Not having met him, I couldn’t say. Rumors abound, though.”
“So, why do it? I mean, I get the desire to play God, to understand the origins of time and space and, well, everything that exists. But for you, personally, why do it?”
He toyed with the edges of the carpet as he appeared to consider his response. “What if the singularity is in us? Or rather, what if that’s what we are speaking to, as fae? The beauty of physics is that the fundamental laws are the same everywhere, except in these moments that defy logic. Just like magic.”
He got up then and squatted by the fire, where he took a piece of spare kindling and stuck it into the flames. It smoked until the stringy cedar caught. He pulled it out and turned to hold it between us. We both watched the flame, held rapt by the dancing, multicolored light.
Jonathan’s eyes began to shimmer in that way that had become familiar on the mountainside. He murmured an unintelligible word that sounded somewhere between ignis and aqua , the Latin roots for fire and water. I watched as the flame died down and its smoke gathered midair, over our heads. When all he held was a charred stick, the cloud that had formed at the ceiling began to rain.
My gaze shot up as fat drops of water splashed my nose. I giggled—I couldn’t stop myself. More droplets tickled my eyelids and cheekbones before becoming a vapor that slithered back to the stick and immediately lit on fire again. The cloud disappeared. The flame flickered merrily as if it hadn’t just turned into a spontaneous sprinkle in the middle of the living room.
“Impressed?”
I looked over the flame at Jonathan, who was watching me with something akin to joy. His eyes were back to their luminous light green.
“Completely,” I admitted. “You just turned fire into water.”
“According to the laws of physics, that shouldn’t be possible. Not without some unbelievably strong energy that could physically change elements from one to another. Elements as different as carbon and hydrogen. So why did they listen to me? Why am I able to do that?”
He tossed the remainder of the stick into the fire and returned to his spot on the carpet next to me, though this time his thigh was maybe an inch from mine, close enough that I could feel the heat from his body.
“I have a theory that I’m trying to test,” he said as he rested his arms over one knee. “There are several projects at the Hadron Collider that are trying to recreate the Big Bang.”
“The one in Switzerland?”
He nodded. “That’s it. They want to know if the math is right, and maybe even to recreate the singularity. But I want to find the energy of magic, what’s beyond the physics of being. Maybe it’s the singularity. Maybe it’s dark matter. Maybe it’s superpartners—shadow particles to the standard model. I don’t know.”
“Anything so far? At the collider, I mean.” I wasn’t just asking. I was honestly fascinated, even if I didn’t understand it all.
“It’s shut down for upgrades. People seem to think we’re going to cause a black hole eventually.” Jonathan shook his head, rubbing one hand over his temple, as if the thought of that response gave him a headache. “There are too many sorcerers there for that to happen. But I wonder…if maybe I can find it…See what it is I’m talking to…perhaps I can figure out how to speak to it the right way. The way everyone once could. I wonder if it might tell me what to say.”
He looked up from the carpet, and his eyes were suddenly quite big. I was reminded of the look a few of my freshman students would get when they discovered something new. The look that I had undoubtedly had the first time I had read Yeats. Hope.
“It sounds childish, I know.”
“Not at all,” I replied as I stretched out beside him, my head propped up by one hand as I balanced on my side. “The world could probably use a little more of your brand of optimism.”
He rewarded me with a bashful half-smile that made my skin flush. He really was extremely handsome, even with a patchy, four-day stubble growing around his chin and the hollows under his cheekbones.
His face was maybe a foot from mine, and it was hard not to stare at the simple curve of his lips, which seemed all the more sensuous in the flickering light of the fire. Unbidden images of pressing my mouth to his raced through my head, followed by a number of other ideas that included taking off his shirt and pulling him on top of me.
It was death that did this to people, wasn’t it? I remembered reading somewhere that death was an aphrodisiac, junk psychology that said people subconsciously wanted to assert their right to life upon the loss of someone close.
Or maybe it was the wine. Or the heat of the fire. Or the miniature rainstorm in the middle of my living room.
But looking at him, with his half-smile spreading into an adorably full one, eyes closed like a cat napping in a band of sunshine, I was able to ignore any of my usual reservations.
I had felt lonelier in the last week than I had at any time in my entire life, confronted with just how isolated I was. There was no one left for me but my flighty, estranged mother and a friend I saw only sporadically. And apparently, this strange, moody sorcerer, who had just offered an intimate vision of the world that I had never imagined, had the ability to make that loneliness disappear.
Stretched out on Gran’s rug, he looked like he belonged in the house, belonged in the conversation. Despite our bickering, his enigmatic nature, and his mysterious connections to Gran’s death, I felt more at ease with Jonathan than I had with anyone for a very long time.
Jonathan’s eyes opened and focused on mine. I swore I could feel the same kind of desire emanating from his body, even through his continued efforts to barricade his thoughts. His gaze flickered over my face and settled on my mouth.
You can’t live unless you live , I thought.
He wanted it too. I knew it.
So I bent down and pressed my lips to his.