All the Lights of Midnight by Mark Z. Danielewski

All the Lights of Midnight: Salbatore Nufro Orejón, "The Physics of Eror" and Livia Bassil's Psychology of Physics

Mark Z. Danielewski [As set forth by I. Maldonado in the presence of Ricardo Justiniano who translated; Abel Izquierdo who retranslated; Sergio Gutierrez who joked about Air Force Hawker Hunters; Elena Huidobro who recalled a matter of Mapuche cosmology; Xavier Arellano who drank espresso and slept in his chair; Antonia Muños who spoke quietly of Violeta Parra's suicide; Dario Hernandez who had plenty to say about hidden variables and wave mechanics and summer swims; Serena Ortiz who arrived late but still told (again) of her stay at Villa Grimaldi; Hector Corrilla who knew nothing about pair production let alone gardening but had personally met Dyson; Gabriel de Benavides who brought with him a charango but spoke only of street names; Sabastian Vasquez who at one point quoted bitterly, "Hay que guardar silencio y olividar"; and Miguel Sepúlveda who sobbed once but still wrote it all down——all down at the Abelian Cafe on Spring Street on the evening of February 13, 2001, between those ever uncertain hours of dusk and dawn.]

conviction that mathematics and physics reside beyond the influences of familial and social circumstances. Purportedly both fields still maintain an autonomy undisturbed by tear or bloodstain; integers, Greek letters, even the naked back of an integral all shimmering beyond anything human. By contrast a musical composition, no matter how technical, would never be deprived of the emotional beginnings characterizing its creation, even though its language too remains so nonspecific as to verifiably sustain any relation other than to itself. Except, of course, music fulfills in its hearing, its experience. Law as well achieves preeminence in the name of ethical and social systems somehow by and for the people but still apart from the people. Though Law too necessarily fulfills in a hearing. Our citadel of equations, however, claims no need of its own experience, its own human hearing. Its view is so total, the way by which its builders come and go—their lives, their IT REMAINS A LONG-STANDING

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Mark Z. Danielewski loves, their ends—is absolutely irrelevant. In Livia Bassil's powerful and brooding Psychology of Physics (Lagrangian Rose Press, 2000), words such as "total" and "absolutely" are carefully scrutinized, while a word like "love" absent in the absorber theory, quantum electrodynamics, or the double-slit experiment fills her pages like some ancient ether as unsubstantiated as it is perhaps irrefutable. By itself the prologue is a breathtaking accomplishment. More questioning than conclusive, Bassil's dexterity with syntax, the breezy compression of biography and detail can only leave one longing for the so much of the world she's contained and hence the so much more of the world she's omitted. In a mere thirty-eight pages Bassil peers into the lives of this century's greatest scientific minds, whether Meitner, Noether, Hawking, or numerous others, daring with each mention to demand what effect living has had upon the integrity of an experiment or peer-reviewed theory. Quietly she asks us to consider Schrödinger at the second battle of Isonzo in July of 1915 or imagine Tomonaga in the ruins of post-World War II Tokyo. She prods us at least to wonder whether or not the loss of Einstein's daughter, Lieserl, could have possibly "put the bend on Lorentz." And what of Feynman, who in 1945, twenty years before he won the Nobel Prize, lost his wife and childhood sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, to tuberculosis? "Even if we concede that experience cannot alter the commutative properties of multiplication," Bassil delicately ponders, "how certain can we be that it has not already altered what figures or equations were chosen to be multiplied in the first place?" Unafraid of all she implies and perhaps in anticipation of the accusatory declamation "what for?" surely to come her way, Bassil concludes her prologue with this brief but clear statement of purpose: "It is a political imperative for any and all free thinkers to mistrust any institution claiming to be beyond the motions of our own impulses. For without listening to what influences us, how can we ever dare to hear what is beyond what our influences continuously insist we hear?" Of course in the chapters that follow, Bassil leaves the common greats to concentrate exclusively on that genius from Chile, Salbatore Nufro y Cuevas Ruvias Orejón Sandino, otherwise known simply as Nufro, the pale, some say misshapen, man who once stood unsteadily before an audience at M.I.T. delivering a proof with such force and vitality, one associate later declared him to be "the Byron 78

Mark Z. Danielewski of Field Theory." No one ever denied it—his dark eyebrows; the fantastic flutter of fingertips whenever numbers were discussed; the complicated wines he preferred; the black sweaters he always wore; the ranging trips he would take from meadow to mountain; the weeks he would lie alone in his study, suddenly infirm and deadly— all describing in near perfect opposition a man who was as defeated as he was unbeatable; rooted as he was motive; as driven by silence as he was determined by the music of his homeland. Rumors still persist that he was the only professor who had ever made a student swoon over mirror symmetry. Nufro first became known in the United States for his early work on quantum electrodynamics, studying with the likes of Julian Schwinger, carrying on a well-documented correspondence with Freeman Dyson, and writing some highly illuminating papers on perturbation technique. Had he done nothing more, his efforts in the area of gauge theory would have assured him a place in the pantheon of quantum mechanics. As is well known, though, it was his unpublished paper "The Physics of Eror," written in 1978 at the age of twenty-three, eventually resulting in the formal Particle Alternatives published almost ten years later, which shocked Nufro into the spotlight. In it he showed how a particle's "choice of path" actually determined "the property of the destination" despite classical expectations when taking into account decoherence and path integrals; a claim which the world at large initially viewed as incoherent but which a tiny cadre of physicists viewed as nothing short of miraculous. For the reader unequipped for the complexities of Nufro's discovery, Bassil expertly and somewhat poetically lays out the theory in terms any high school student could understand: "With 'The Physics of Eror' Nufro brought to the world all its possibilities. Into every college textbook on quantum theory he introduced the concept that not only was every path between 'origination point/particle S' & 'destination point/particle M' actual and present but the observance of a path out of the so-called classical trajectory could go so far as to renegotiate the very nature of the destination point/particle 'so that M could change to F.'" As one of Nufro's colleagues explained: "Observance was once again the key. What should have been a photon, thanks to an alternative path, could suddenly end up an electron or proton. Hell, you could potentially wind up with a monkey and a cat dressed in white tails sitting around a table discussing La Nueva Canción Chilena, sipping tea. That caused quite a stir. The macro 79

Mark Z. Danielewski set gets quite ripe when the quantum crew interferes." But perhaps another chronicler of the physicist's life provided the simplest, albeit weirdest, example: "Nufro went ahead and proved mathematically that if you swim to an unknown boat out in the bay who you find owns it could be vastly different from who would have owned it had you taken a canoe there instead." Some theorists still insist that quantum possibility dilemmas, particularly Nufro's, will eventually be resolved with advances in the area of hidden variables, much like Zeno's paradox was resolved with the mathematics of limits. In that spirited debate lie volumes. Bassil, however, has no interest in speculating on the future of quantum theory nor for that matter is she concerned with Nufro's presence in the United States, only fleetingly touching on the young South American's arrival in New York City and the paper he would soon after scribble down at the Abelian Café on Spring Street. That much of Nufro's history is already well known; as certain, perhaps, as our own knowledge of the modern world. After all, New York still stands as does the Abelian Cafe. Bassil's quest is rather to examine what stood before and more importantly determine those paths that ultimately led Nufro to the autonomous purity of his particle alternatives. Born near Los Angeles, Chile, Nufro grew up wandering the banks of the Bíobío River not far from the falls of Salto del Laja. His father was a civil engineer. His mother a common gardener from Isla de Chiloé who raised her son on stories of the Trauco and La Pincoya, a blonde nymph who was said to emerge from the sea at sunrise and dance on the beach. Supposedly, if she looked inland, the ocean would seethe with fish. If, however, she looked back at the waves, all fish would vanish. Even when Nufro's family moved to Santiago, his mother continued to keep alive the rich cultural legends of the Chilean Southland. The delicious detail Bassil musters for her project can hardly be anticipated here, be it Nufro's early determination to knit his own sweater, dying the wool in crushed cinnabar imported from the Hunan province in China, while at the same time deriving a series of odd probabilities to anticipate and then even determine stitch patterns; or his efforts to create a game combining chess and poker; or most notably his substantial musical ingenuity: "By fourteen, he was playing the guitar feverishly, regularly busking deep into the A.M. winds at the Mercado Central. It didn't matter if he was working his way down Paseo Ahumada strumming Vals a mi padre or 80

Mark Z. Danielewski singing Ha cesado, la lucha sangrienta near the Palacio de la Moneda, he was always learning and tinkering with new arrangements, new material, visiting peñas similar to Violeta Parra's famous La Carpa de la Reina, mingling with artists and activists, accompanying anyone who was around, often a wide array of musicians with bombos, quenas, and of course zampoñas." Off folk and Andean baroque, Nufro earned book money. Though soon enough Bach and everything else were left behind in favor of his own improvised works, which became increasingly more difficult to hear, until rumor has it by the age of fifteen he declared to several musicians from the Technical University peña, some of whom would go on to join Inti-Illimani, "I have played it all," after which his fingers moved but never touched, string and fret retaining their accustomed distance, Nufro packing more and more shreds of homemade sweater into his ears so he "could hear." Increasingly irritated by their son's behavior, his parents grew more outspoken in their condemnation of his "pranks." They were not alone. Few could understand what exactly Nufro was perceiving. Soon even his friends withdrew from his strange concerns, turning to the much more accessible musical tastes of Victor Jara or Roberto Bravo. Then at seventeen, Nufro met someone who would not go: Françisca Yepun de la Viña Escalera. "Yepun," as young Françisca was happy to explain, was her Mapuche name meaning el lucero de la noche or "evening star." [Yeln = to carry; Pun = night.) Supposedly, though likely apocryphal, one of the first things she told Nufro to do was pick her up: "Manage that Musician Boy and you'll carry all the puns of this whole wide world .. . me." Nufro easily lifted her and then went even further, walking the Alameda, all the way from the University to Cerro Santa Lucia, with the giggling girl in his arms, Nufro the whole time singing in her ear A la mar fui por naranjas. As Bassil writes: "[Françisca] was bright with the sentiments of the time, surging with devotions for all an artist was supposed to mean to the poor and the silent and the weary and the forgotten and the persecuted and the ill. Upon her ankle she wore slender chains of gold. In her hair flowed silks of many colors. She beguiled him. But he beguiled her too, and whether it was his blue eyes or the stab of madness in him, Françisca found in Nufro the conscription her own future as a painter had always anticipated." Or so she thought. What really awaited her then awaits us all even now in Bassil's 81

Mark Z. Danielewski book, the merest viewing of which will with awful force cast upon Nufro and his work the same shadow Heisenberg's political affiliations cast today. Somehow in the early days of Pinochet's rise to power, Nufro was seduced by a radical political organization known only as SENDA, a self-proclaimed descendant of such groups as the mythic brujeria from the South and the secret society Logia Lautarina, which back in 1818 is said to have ordered the execution of three famed Chilean revolutionaries: Jose Miguel and the Carrera brothers. Confirmed by the VEM™ Corporation, SENDA openly kept council with several members from the Catholic prelature Opus Dei. Most significantly, though, SENDA worked directly with DINA, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the Chilean security force that under Pinochet's authority was responsible for the murder and disappearance of thousands, including eventually Victor Jara, who sang famously in his song La luna siempre es muy linda: "Recuerdo el rostro de mi padre como un hueco en la muralla." Seeking to ensure the place of the new regime, SENDA worked constantly to insinuate itself into the world of political dissidents throughout the country. Supposedly Pinochet was referring to SENDA in 1975 when he proclaimed that not a leaf in Chile moved without him knowing it. What attracted Nufro in the first place to such criminals remains a mystery, even to Bassil, despite page after page of tireless examination. One point, though, becomes clear: It was not long after Nufro's parents left Santiago for the North that Nufro handed his guitar over to Françisca—"Paint the strings solid to the frets," he said—and began an even closer association with SENDA, hiding it at first from Françisca and then by the spring of '74 revealing it like "a poisonous petal pushing up to kiss a new world." On June 11th around 4 A.M. Françisca confronted Nufro on the corner of Los Pescadores and Covarrubias, not far from the Estadio Nacional, where he had arranged to meet several SENDA members. Words quickly lost their shape in the blast of shouts and screams. He struck her. She spat her blood on his cheek. And then it was over, Françisca gone, folding like an evening into a different evening of exactly the same name, edgeless and beyond illumination. What followed Nufro himself would later describe tersely as "two and a half years of lunacy." And perhaps it could have remained just that, a silly crusade in the name of distant associations carried out with flyers, phone calls, and coffee-talk noise, were it not for the Maldonado family (no relation to Supreme Court President Luis 82

Mark Z. Danielewski Maldonado); for unfortunately still interred with them lie all the horrible consequences the political exacts on unready youth; when motives derived from matters as slight as a neglected dinner invitation, loosely paraphrased public statements, unsuspected familial rudeness somehow one day become a police concern, black roots suddenly visible in a bitter winter rain, heralding low-bent rumors of headlights and pistols and knife blades and rifles and shadows lurching in wail, bewildered even, stumbling in the confusion of so sudden and unexpected an end, no matter that the crossed-stars of melipal still wheeled above the smoldering back of villarrica or down by the Valdivian waterfront fishermen ate crudos and drank glasses of pisco and told sour jokes, not one of them suspecting what was happening so close by, how they had fallen, the uncompromised remainder of all who would not could not hold till daybreak. And if even upon those amber-glazed tiles the murder of three generations of farmers could escape judgment, there was in addition to the old couple and their sons an infant—Izarra Maldonado—limp in a deep granite basin, nothing more than her own beautiful becoming drowning in the shadow of her own slowly unfolding rose. Nufro had not been there. Enough evidence surfaces in Bassil's chapters to assure us of at least that. But there is also enough evidence—equal evidence—that he was the one who carried the sealed note, which, though hidden from his eyes, conveyed sentence upon a family, all of whom would perish that night with the exception of young Incendio Maldonado, who was overseas at the time. It is thus Bassil's contention, in view of such horrendous involvements, that in spite of its integers and functions and motionless Greek letters, the pristine autonomy of "The Physics of Eror" was deeply influenced by Nufro's profound desire to undo the paths of his past. Though obvious to many has been the cunning error inherent in "Ero r " (for who could possibly ignore all the Latinate implications especially in light of the quantum subject matter?), Bassil's assessment still proves far more comprehensive. By concentrating on the story of Nufro and Françisca, Bassil reveals how Nufro's use of the letter M to indicate the point/particle of destination in his formulae suddenly takes on new meaning when M, perhaps for Maldonado, transforms to F—the first letter in Françisca's name. The point/particle of origination proves just as curious. Where A or other would have sufficed, Nufro chooses the letter S or the initial of his own first name: Salbatore. 83

Mark Z. Danielewski Bassil's list of letters and symbols along with their possible historical counterparts grows from there but is still nothing compared to the most intriguing discovery of all: the results of her own inspection of the actual tea-stained page on which Nufro first scribbled out "The Physics of Eror." No spelling error, she finds, but a transcription error and a pen shy of ink. It seems the superscript " r " was not an "r" but rather—followed by a near invisible gutter pressed into the paper, void of pigment—the beginning of an "s." In other words, not "Ero r " but "Eros." It appears then that Nufro's quantum miracle, autonomous before the call of all human influences, was first and foremost a love poem for Françisca, the woman he spent a lifetime regretting he'd left. To her credit, Bassil, while delighting in the romance of this story, never goes so far as to let Nufro escape the mistakes of his past. The shadows remain. The specter of the Maldonado family possesses her book. One of course wishes it didn't. In some ways one wishes there were no "Psychology of Physics" and hence no "Physics of Ero r " and so no brutal evening on the outskirts of Valdivia. Just a different path, a different way, where perhaps for a moment you and I might be free to imagine, if only fleetingly, scenes of alternate possibilities: quantum theory deprived of one of its most breathtaking discoveries, undone on the corner of Los Pescadores and Covarrubias, where in spite of that treacherous clan a different choice is made, her lip unbroken, his cheek unstained, the two of them fleeing for wholly other places, perhaps south to Isla de Chiloé in search of the ghost ship Caleuche or west to Te Pito te Henua to eat oranges and swim above the black reefs, or even east over the Andes, as far as Peninsula Valdés, where they might linger now, forever in the shadowmatter of their dreams, Françisca with color in her hair and slender chains of gold upon her ankle, Nufro beside her, ears red from the wind, unpainted guitar on his knee, while beneath his fingertips the notes of strange coastal moans bind all the lights of midnight with the powerful prophecy of a song.

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