“When we gaze at the night sky,” he says, “we are looking at fragments of the past. Not only in the sense that the stars as we see them are echoes of events that occurred light-years distant in time and space: everything up there and indeed everything down here is a fossil, a leftover from the first picoseconds of creation, when the universe crystallized out from the primal homogeneous plasma. In the first picosecond, conditions were scarcely imaginable. If we could travel in a time machine back toward this explosive moment, we would find ourselves in a universe replete with energies we do not understand and strangely behaving forces distorted beyond recognition. The farther back we probe, the more extreme these conditions become. Current experimental facilities can take us only a short way along this path. Beyond that point, theory is our only guide.” After this he continues, in a language that sounds like English but is not, because I can’t understand one word of it.
Luckily there is something to look at. The room darkens and the screen lights up, and there is the universe, or parts of it: the black void punctuated by galaxies and stars, white-hot, blue-hot, red. An arrow moves among them on the screen, searching and finding. Then there are diagrams and strings of numbers, and references to things that everyone here seems to recognize except me. There are, apparently, a great many more dimensions than four.
Murmurs of interest ripple through the room; there are whisperings, the rustling of paper. At the end, when the lights have come on again, my brother returns to language. “But what of the moment beyond the first moment?” he says. “Or does it even make sense to use the word
I go to the reception afterward, which offers the usual university fare: bad sherry, thick tea, cookies out of a package. The numbers men murmur in groups, shake one another’s hands. Among them I feel overly visible, and out of place.
I locate my brother. “That was great,” I say to him.
“Glad you got something out of it,” he says with irony.
“Well, math was never my totally strong point,” I say. He smiles benignly. We exchange news of our parents, who when last I heard from them were in Kenora, and heading west.
“Still counting the old budworms, I guess,” says my brother.
I remember how he used to throw up by the side of the road, and his smell of cedar pencils. I remember our life in tents and logging camps, the scent of cut lumber and gasoline and crushed grass and rancid cheese, the way we used to sneak around in the dark. I remember his wooden swords with the orange blood, his comic book collection. I see him crouching on the swampy ground, calling
“Remember that song you used to sing?” I say. “During the war. Sometimes you whistled it. ”Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer‘?“
He looks perplexed, frowns a little. “I can’t say I do,” he says.
“You used to draw all those explosions. You borrowed my red pencil, because yours was used up.”
He looks at me, not as if he doesn’t remember these things himself, but as if he’s puzzled that I do. “You can’t have been very old then,” he says.
I wonder what it was like for him, having a little sister tagging along. For me, he was a given: there was never a time when he didn’t exist. But I was not a given, for him. Once he was singular, and I was an intrusion. I wonder if he resented me when I was born. Maybe he thought I was a pain in the bum; there’s no doubt that he thought this sometimes. Considering everything and on the whole though, he made the best of me.
“Remember that jar of marbles you buried, under the bridge?” I say. “You would never tell me why you did it.” The best ones, the red and blue puries, the waterbabies and cat’s eyes, put into the ground, out of reach. He would have stamped the dirt down on top of the jar, and scattered leaves.