I almost choked on my saag paneer. “It’s right down Mass Ave from where I live!” I said. “We could walk there from here in less than half an hour.”
Tristan grinned and reached for his pocket. “We can call even faster than that.” He punched a number into his phone, reading off the computer screen. As it connected and began to ring on the other end, he gave me a sideways grin, like a child about to be awarded a prize for solving a riddle. I smiled back.
But the moment wore on and his smile faded until finally he hung up. “Huh. No answer.” He looked at his phone as if it had insulted him. “Not even an answering machine. That’s weird. Nobody does that these days.”
“Maybe he’s a Luddite,” I said.
“An MIT physics professor who tried to patent groundbreaking technological inventions is a Luddite?”
“He was rebuffed,” I pointed out. “He overreacted and now he’s a Luddite.”
“Lunchtime’s over,” said Tristan, standing and reaching for his Yankees sweatshirt. “We’re going for a visit.”
THE ODAS LIVED on a street of grand houses, most of which, judging by appearance, had been built in the late 1800s. But theirs stuck out like a pilgrim at a White House dinner. A plain, gable-roofed three-story, it was older than the others by well over a hundred years. Its garden outshone every other yard on the street. It was full of flowers and herbs and ornamental shrubbery, with the efficient use of space associated with Japanese gardening.
We rang the bell. The door was answered by an older woman. Caucasian, not Japanese. In fact, downright WASPy, including her reception of us.
“Rebecca East, I presume,” Tristan said, holding out his hand.
“Rebecca East-Oda,” she corrected him. She was in her seventies, with a salt-and-pepper bob and Laura Ashley sweater, and she was the epitome of a particular New England Congregationalist bloodline that manages to simultaneously suggest cool, contained patrician and indefatigable peasant stock. The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you’d just hate to disappoint her.
Luckily she did not explicitly request us to do so. Tristan explained that we were here to talk to the professor about an old project of his from his MIT days. She pursed her lips uncertainly. “It’s important,” said Tristan.
“Frank does not like to talk shop much in his retirement,” she said.
“We won’t take long, and he’ll be glad we came,” said Tristan.
She gave him a wary look. “He’s napping at present, why don’t you come back tomorrow.”
Tristan opened his mouth again, but I clutched his arm, dug my fingernails into his wrist, and spoke over him:
“Please pardon our rudeness, but we would be deeply indebted to you if Oda-sensei would consider giving us a moment of his time.”
She studied me with guarded amusement. Then her eyes flicked meaningfully at Tristan—as if making sure he noticed that I was the one she was responding to—before looking at me again to say, “I will see if he’s awake.”
When she was gone I glanced up at Tristan. “When speaking Japanese,” I said, “it is impossible to grovel too much or too often.”
“She’s not Japanese,” he grunted dismissively.
“I just demonstrated to her that I understand her husband’s culture,” I said. Goodness how I appreciated being the more informed one, for a change. “Which suggests we will be respectful, which is obviously important to her or she wouldn’t have deflected you to start with.”
“Women make everything so complicated,” Tristan said in mock dismay.
“If you’re going to get sexist on me, this won’t work,” I said. “The first thing you learned about me is that I am a woman. Eighty-six that attitude.”
“You’re all right, Stokes,” he said, and roughed up my hair as if I were his kid sister. I smacked his hand away. Before the roughhousing could progress any further, we heard Rebecca East-Oda’s clogs clunking back down the stairway.
Diachronicle
DAY 221 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 1)
In which we meet Dr. Oda. And his wife.
SHE LET US INTO THE house, which had the subtle smell of old wood and old wool—as I used to imagine Victorian homes smelled in Victorian times, before I was recently alerted to the painful truth that actually, at least here in London, they stink of whale oil, patchouli (woven into shawls to keep worms from eating the fabric in transit), and backed-up sewers. I am now convinced everyone here goes to church for the incense.
But to our story: Rebecca diverted us immediately to the front room on the right, which had been a formal dining room back in the day but was now her husband’s study. The double-hung windows let in plenty of light; the two inner walls were lined with bookshelves (except where the fireplace was), most of them packed with piles of papers, journals, and folders in no discernible order. Dr. Frank Oda, seated at a desk that faced toward the street, was a slender, cheerful, absentminded-looking Japanese-American gentleman. Rebecca introduced us and offered to serve us tea, in a tone suggesting she’d be perfectly happy if we weren’t staying long enough to drink it. Tristan, socially tone-deaf, accepted her offer.
The professor, smiling, invited us to sit on a couple of Harvard chairs that faced his desk, hastening to remove tattered copies of Anna Karenina and Geometric Perspectives on Gauge Theories (Dr. Frank Oda, ed.) from one of them. We sat, and Tristan immediately launched into an explanation of what we were trying to do (although not why we were trying to do it) and how we had encountered his rejected patent application online. Professor Oda’s expression settled into thoughtfulness.
“Rather than inventing the wheel, we thought we’d ask you if you could explain your work to us, and why it did or didn’t work,” said Tristan.
Oda gave him a considering look. “You’re not with DARPA, are you?”
“No,” I said quickly, reassuringly. “This is a different kind of project altogether. I’m a linguist,” I offered, as proof of how benign we were.
He shook his head, frowning. “I do not understand the point of your research, then,” he said.
Tristan smiled that Boy Scout smile of his. “I’d need you to sign a nondisclosure agreement before I can tell you any more about what we’re doing. I was hoping this could just be a casual conversation about what you were doing.”
Oda smiled back. “I should share information with somebody who won’t share information with me?”
Tristan upped his smile to Eagle Scout. “You’re not willing to talk physics with a fellow physicist in the name of science?”
“If it is applied physics, he would like to know what it’s being applied to,” said Rebecca East-Oda from the study door.
The professor smiled at her. It was such a sweet smile. “It’s all right, Rebecca,” he said. “They’re kids. They’re curious. I like curious. And if you’re here to ask, let’s make it Darjeeling.” She nodded and left; he returned his gaze to Tristan. “As you must have read in the patent application, I was trying to interrupt the collapse of the wave function—specifically in living neurological tissue.”