Charlize spent all Sunday morning working with Jakobus who had come down to Elizabethtown on how to protect the farm should the men return. She did not want to alarm her parents but she knew something had to done. She had seen too often these same tactics of harassment and intimidation used on white farmers who, at the end, had simply packed their furniture on the back of their bakkies and left the land and the farm they had toiled on for generations in the hands of ex-farmhands and black township dwellers with no farming background. 90% of the redistributed farms had failed, leaving idle nearly 15 million acres of once fertile farmland. As one black farmer put it after he had taken over the farm he used to work on as a tractor driver after the owner was murdered during a break-in, ‘I thought I'd be much better off. But I think it was better with Mr. Engelbrecht. We lived high with Mr. Engelbrecht. We got money from him and we could look after our children.’ He had sold everything shortly from tractor to chickens and was now hiring himself out on other white farms, herding other people's cattle and working as a gardener in the nearest town.
Her calls to the local police for protection had fallen on deaf ears as predicted. They were on their own. Kwanele and Stephen had suggested hiring a private security company but Charlize knew what that meant. It meant hiring men from the AWB, The Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging or in English,The Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a far right secessionist political organisation and former paramilitary committed to the creation of an independent Boer-Afrikaner republic in part of South Africa. The AWB flag is composed of three black sevens in a white circle upon a red background reminiscent of the Swastika flag used by the Nazi Party in Germany. Charlize knew that hiring them would have meant declaring an open war against the government, something she was unwilling to undertake.
At the end, they all agreed to take the wait-and-see approach. After the meeting was over, Charlize had locked herself inside her study all afternoon, hoping to have some work done on her current researches.
Charlize closed the lid of her laptop and pushed away the stack of research papers. She sighed in fustration. It’s of no use, she thought. There’s simply no rationale explanation to quantum mechanics. Physicists can tell a novice how it works but can never explain to him how it works. The behavior of atomic particles is a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way. Richard Feynman, a famous physicist, had said it all when he declared, ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ Einstein’s special and general relativity theories are counter-intuitive but explainable. String theory’s claims are completely outrageous but still explainable. It is only quantum mechanics that cannot be explained. Human intuition cannot conceive how a particle of light is also a wave, how a particle can be at two different places at the same time, how a particle can communicate instantaneously with another no matter the distance between them or how a particle can tunnel through an insurmountable barrier as in a human being walking through a wall.
Charlize looked outside the window. Dusk was slowly settling over Elizabethtown. Chopin’s Prelude in D minor played in the background. She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. She closed her eyes to take in Martha Argerich’s magnificent rendering of this wonderful and difficult piece. It opened with a thundering five-note pattern in the left hand which continued throughout the piece as the right hand played a powerful melody punctuated by trills, scales including a rapid descending chromatic scale in thirds, and arpeggios. The piece closed with three booming unaccompanied notes—the lowest D on the piano.
As the piece concluded, Charlize slowly opened her eyes and saw Hennie Swart standing by the study’s door, watching her through his thick eyeglasses, a big grin on his face, holding his laptop in one hand.
Charlize jumped up from her chair. “Hennie, come in! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
Hennie Swart was the computer nerd at the Institute and a misfit. They’ve met years ago in a lab and had developed a true friendship although Hennie was almost 10 years younger. It was Charlize who had gotten him his job with the Institute while he was working on his thesis for his Ph.D. in theoretical physics.
Hennie crossed the room and sat on the desk. “So, tell me. Is he really that smart?”
Charlize sat back in her chair. “You know I’m not smart enough to be the judge of that.”
– “Man, I wish I could have been there. The world’s leading theoretical physicist. I know all his books by heart, you know that?”
Charlize smiled. “I know he’s your hero.”
Hennie looked up at the sky through the window. “The final theory. The theory of everything…” He paused theatrically, pulled out a paperback from his jacket and tossed it on the desk.
– “Talking about the final theory, don’t ever read this book. It’s utter crap.”
Charlize picked up the book. It was Mark Alpert’s novel The Final Theory.
Hennie pushed up his eyeglasses with a finger. “How can a book like that be a bestseller? And all the raves and reviews from all the so-called book critics. A black female gun-toting top physicist and the ultimate theory hidden inside a gameboy? Gimme a break. And what about the plot? My bet is the author borrowed Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code outlines and plugged in physics—”
Charlize help up a hand cutting him off. “Hennie, did you come here just to rant about the book?”
Hennie stopped, looking embarrassed. “Sorry. No, I came here because there’s something I want to show you and if my theory’s right, I hope you can talk to your boyfriend Greene about it.”
Hennie ignored Charlize’s hard stare, opened his laptop and the screen came alive.
– “Remember the gravitional waves recently detected here in South Africa that everybody dismissed? Well, a friend of mine who works at the Arecibo Observatory had confirmed that the most powerful burst yet was detected here in Elizabethtown two days ago last Friday, somewhere along the road to Johannesburg. No, no. Don’t say anything yet, just listen. After his call, I went out for a drive on that road and found a bakkie parked by the roadside with a black guy just standing there. His two friends were on the ground moaning in pain and the guy just stood there. He was afraid to move. I called an ambulance and talked to the guy while we were waiting. He and his friends were on that road not far from the point of the last gravitational wave burst and he admitted having heard a huge noise like something ripping the air. Then he said they came upon a black woman and a sick white man. They offered to help the couple and that’s when his friends got attacked by something invisible. He said his two friends were covering their ears and screaming like wild animals before dropping on the ground like stones.”
– “And you believe him?” Charlize asked but something in the story made her uneasy. Details. Details from the story that came back to her like déjà vu. What were they?
Hennie snorted. “How dumb do you think I am? I’m pretty sure the three skollies saw a defenseless couple and tried to rob them.”
– “So what do you think happened?”
– “I talked to the other two after they’ve been treated. They said they heard an incredibly loud noise that felt like someone was jamming sticks inside their ears. The pain was untenable but their eardrums were not punctured. To me, it sounds like someone knew the threshold of human tolerance and directed a high frequency sound wave at them like a beam of laser. That someone didn’t want to hurt or kill, just incapacited the attackers.”
Charlize laughed. “Hennie. Tell that to the tabloids.”
– “That’s what I thought at first but then—”
– “But then what?”
– “The next day, I went back to the hospital trying to talk to the doctor who had treated the skollies when an ambulance brought in five unconscious black men bleeding from their noses and ears. Again, I waited to talk to them and they told me the same story. They were sitting in their cars talking when they all experienced those unbearably loud noises that knocked them out. I said ‘experienced’ and not ‘heard’ because the witnesses who saw the men wailing in pain inside their cars told the police they didn’t hear any noises except their screams. Liz, to inflict that kind of pain the sound intensity has to be between 120 and 130 decibels, that’s the sound of a jet plane. How can passers-by not hear a sound as loud as that of a jet engine but can hear the men screaming?”
– “And your thoughts?”
– “At first, none. Then I bribed the one that looks the dumbest and he spilled his guts to me. They were planning a robbery that same night. Their leader was also stalking the woman and they went along. Not long after the woman came out from a library with a man, they went into convulsion.”
Again, that feeling of something familiar gnawed inside Charlize. It was the library. But why should the library be important? Listening to the story, she was unpleasantly reminded of last night invasion on her farm.
Hennie went on. “Don’t you see, Liz? Skollies tried to rob a black woman with a white man and they got sent to the hospital. Skollies tried to rob an Indian woman with a white man and they too, got sent to the hospital with exactly the same symptoms.”
Charlize startled. “Indian? Did you say, Indian?”
– “Uh yes, why?”
– “It’s just—no, nothing I can put my finger on.” Indian woman, library, stranger. Why did these words seemed important?
– “So, what do you think?” said Hennie standing up.
– “I don’t know, Hennie. What would you want it to be?”
– “Damn you. Can’t you have a little imagination? Think someone from the future, someone from an alternate or parallel universe, someone from a dark matter galaxy with dark energy, someone coming through a black hole, someone from the planet Krypton transported here by a gravitational wave.”
– “You would like that, wouldn’t you?”
– “So, you’re not buying?”
Charlize stood up. “I’m gonna forget that we ever have this conversation. Are you hungry? Have you had dinner yet?”
Hennie beamed. “Who’s cooking? Ma Gugu? Hell yes, I’m staying for dinner and oh, I have some other theories about—”
– “Hennie, bly assesblief stil.” Afrikaans for shut up.
