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This past October, I paid a visit to the apartment where Einstein lived, on 49 Kramgasse Street, in Bern Switzerland. In one of those small rooms, he figured out his theory of time. A narrow, winding staircase led up to the apartment, three stories up. Lola had warned me not to go there. Old memories might get stirred up, she said, with time out of whack in that particular place. In fact, while walking around on the creaking wood floors, I did have memories of Lola, but three years into the future, when she’d cut her hair and dyed it blonde and was dating some polished drunk from Denver. It pained me, picturing Lola that way, and gave me a headache as well, but it was a bad day for my head all around, starting with a dream I’d had about my mother, her standing by a window looking out at me, trying to signal me about something, then closing the curtains as if she didn’t care one way or the other, then that morning when I misplaced my vaccination certificate and spent two hours retracing every step I’d taken the day before, including some shops that were closed, with me stupidly peering in the shop windows, then Donkey sending me a message that he needed a few bucks, could I send the money Western Union because his bank account had been shut down, and, of course, he was too ashamed to tell me that he’d been gambling again. You’re on your own, I wrote back. Right away, I felt guilty, and my head was like a hollow coconut with somebody screaming inside of it.

 I put my palm down on a table in the sitting room and decided that some of Einstein’s molecules were still there, and I felt a quiver go through me. He probably worked at that table, turning the world upside down at age twenty-six. What was I doing at age twenty-six? I remember going out to an abandoned railway car sitting weirdly in the middle of a field with nothing nearby, as if it had been dropped down from outer space. How it got there, nobody knew. I was with my girlfriend. She had red hair. Come to think of it, I wasn’t twenty-six, I was seventeen, we were both seventeen, and we climbed into the railroad car, which contained sacks of flour leaning against the ribbed metal walls, fine white powder floating in the air, and we took off our clothes and rubbed each others’ bodies with the flour until we were both completely covered, even her red hair now white. We were two ghosts, living in the moment.

I could see my reflection in the glass face of a grandfather clock against the wall. When I moved, my face squeezed into a spaghetti noodle and twisted sideways, but it was still me, more or less. The curator of the Einstein house, a tall thin man with a reddish wool vest and shoes that clapped on the wood floor, told me the clock hadn’t worked for decades, even though I thought I could see its minute hand moving minutely.

I wondered what Albert thought when he came up with his radical theory of time, turning the world upside down. Did he believe it? As far as I know, he didn’t do any experiments. He just sat at that table and thought and used some math and decided the world of appearances was a carnival illusion, like Neo in “The Matrix” when he discovers that everything he thinks is reality is just a giant computer program, played through electrodes attached to his brain. How could Albert have believed his calculations? And then, when they were astoundingly proven true, he must have thought he was God. Or at least a disciple, to be able to figure out by pure thought that time was not a solid, dependable thing but could bend and expand and scrunch like a slinky. Twenty-six years old. What guts, or arrogance, or supreme self-confidence. Or maybe trust in the invisible. You’re sitting at the table, thinking about electricity and magnetism and who knows what else and you write down a few marks on a piece of paper and suddenly you see underneath all of it, the blood and the planets and the oceans and sunsets and the embryos curled up in the wombs and ashes to ashes and you’re looking at the countenance of God. A fierce wind has raged over the land, turning ocean to sky and sky to ocean, and infinity has been compressed to a dot, and the mountains obey.

I walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains, staring at the cobblestone street three stories down, thinking of the first time I met Lola, that look she gave me and I gave her. We were sitting on benches at a train station, the late afternoon light slanting through the air, food wrappers on the tiled floor, and it was like the future was already present. I could smell the skin on the back of her neck even though she was on the other side of the hall, I could feel her fingers on my chest. Lola had warned me not to go there. Old memories were stirring. I watched on the sidelines as she started her jewelry business, supporting both of us for a while until it was not bearable for either of us. Could that too have been foreseen in the train station? Donkey once told me that he could tell in advance whether he would win or lose a bet, but that didn’t stop him from making the bet, as if the future were already pasted on a long strip of celluloid film stretching out to the sky, and we sometimes have the privilege of seeing a few frames ahead but cannot change a thing.

What could Albert have been thinking when those final mathematical equations stared out at him? Was he actually creating a new world with those black marks on paper? Or was he simply discovering a secret already known, a tiny dark rift in the hum of the universe? Because you have to be going at fantastic speed to notice the rift. He noticed while sitting at rest in a chair. I stood at the table and tried to imagine the twenty-six-year-old kid working there with pencil and paper.

Arrogance, but majesty too, and humility. What other worlds lay behind the veil, unknown to us? I would have been frightened myself. But I wouldn’t have taken it seriously. How can you decide with pencil and paper that air is not air, that earth is not earth, that blood is not blood? How could a person take seriously the notion that time is a slinky? I would have crumpled up the paper and gone for a walk. Like when socks are missing, I don’t try to remake the universe to explain the phenomenon. I get on with my life. Things happen. That said, I should have found out what my mother was signaling me about, because now, these many years later, I think that it was probably important, something I could have done something about. She was so unhappy the last part of her life. But maybe I couldn’t have helped, even if I knew, like trying to alter the frames in the film.

I watched as the light oozed through the curtains, slowly sliding across the floor. A tiny splinter of wood appeared in the light, glowed for a few moments, then drifted back into shadow as the earth turned on its axis.