‘Newsflash, Ruprecht, they know about the origins of the universe. It’s called the Big Bang?’
‘Aha, but what happened before the Bang? What happened during it? What was it that banged?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Well, you see, that’s the whole point. From the moments after the Bang until this moment right now, the universe makes sense – that is to say, it obeys observable laws, laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics. But when you go before that, to the very, very beginning, these laws no longer apply. The equations won’t work out. If we could solve them, though, if we could understand what happened in those first few milliseconds, it would be like a master key, which would unlock all sorts of other doors. Professor Hideo Tamashi believes that the future of humanity could depend on our opening these doors.’
Spend twenty-four hours a day cooped up with Ruprecht and you will hear a lot about this Professor Hideo Tamashi and his groundbreaking attempts to solve the Big Bang using ten-dimensional string theory. You will also hear a lot about Stanford, the university where Professor Tamashi teaches, which from Ruprecht’s descriptions of it sounds like a cross between an amusement arcade and Cloud City in Star Wars, a place where everyone wears jumpsuits and nothing bad ever happens. Ruprecht has had his heart set on studying under Professor Tamashi more or less since he could walk, and whenever he mentions the Prof, or Stanford and its really first-rate lab facilities, his voice takes on a starry, yearning quality, like someone describing a beautiful land glimpsed once in a dream.
‘Why don’t you just go then,’ Dennis says, ‘if everything’s so whoop-de-doo over there?’
‘My dear Dennis,’ Ruprecht chortles, ‘one does not just “go” to somewhere like Stanford.’
Instead, it seems, you need something called an academic résumé, something that shows the Dean of Admissions that you are just that fraction smarter than all the other smart people applying there. Hence Ruprecht’s various investigations, experiments and inventions – even the ones, his detractors, principally Dennis, argue, purportedly undertaken for the Future of Humanity.
‘That tub of guts doesn’t give two hoots about humanity,’ Dennis says. ‘All he wants is to ponce off to America and meet other dweebs who’ll play Yahtzee with him and not make fun of his weight.’
‘I suppose it must be hard for him,’ Skippy says. ‘You know, being a genius and everything, and being stuck here with us.’
‘But he’s not a genius!’ Dennis rails. ‘He’s a total fraud!’
‘Come on, Dennis, what about his equations?’ Skippy says.
‘Yeah, and his inventions?’ adds Geoff.
‘His inventions? The time machine, a tinfoil-lined wardrobe attached to an alarm clock? The X-ray glasses, that are just regular glasses glued onto the inside of a toaster? How could anyone take these for the work of a serious scientist?’
Dennis and Ruprecht don’t get on. It’s not hard to see why: two more different boys would be hard to imagine. Ruprecht is eternally fascinated by the world around him, loves to take part in class and throws himself into extra-curricular activities; Dennis, an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic, hates the world and everything in it, especially Ruprecht, and has never thrown himself into anything, with the exception of a largely successful campaign last summer to efface the first letter from every manifestation of the word ‘canal’ in the Greater Dublin Area, viz. the myriad street signs proclaiming ROYAL ANAL, WARNING! ANAL, GRAND ANAL HOTEL. As far as Dennis is concerned, the entire persona of Ruprecht Van Doren is nothing more than a grandiloquent concoction of foolish Internet theories and fancy talk lifted from the Discovery Channel.
‘But Dennis, why would he want to make up stuff like that?’
‘Why does anyone do anything in this shithole? To make himself look like he’s better than us. I’m telling you, he’s no more a genius than I am. And if you ask me, this stuff about him being an orphan, that’s a crock too.’
Well, that’s where Dennis and his audience part company. Yes, it’s true that details of Ruprecht’s ex-parents remain vague, apart from an occasional passing reference to his father’s skills as a horseman, ‘famed the length of the Rhine’, or a fleeting mention of his mother, ‘a delicate woman with aesthetic hands’. And it’s true that although Ruprecht’s present line is that they were botanists, drowned while kayaking up the Amazon in search of a rare medicinal plant, Martin Fennessy claims that Ruprecht, shortly after his arrival, told him that they were professional kayakers, drowned while competing in a round-the-world kayaking race. But nobody believes he or anyone else, with the possible exception of Dennis himself, would do something as karmically perilous as lie about the death of his parents.
That’s not to say Ruprecht isn’t annoying, or that he’s not poison to a body’s street-cred. There are definite drawbacks to a public association with Ruprecht. But the bottom line is that for some inexplicable reason Skippy actually likes him, and so the way it’s panned out is that if you’re friends with Skippy you now get Ruprecht into the bargain, like a two-hundred-pound booby prize.
And by now some of the others have become quite fond of him. Maybe Dennis is right, and he is talking non-stop bollocks – it still makes a change from everything else they’re hearing these days. You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone ‘Give me the gun’, etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone’s asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don’t mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of ‘life’. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors – GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE – keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn’t necessarily need to be closed…
At the onset of this process – looking down the barrel of this grim de-dreamification, which, even more than hyperactive glands and the discovery of girls, seems to be the actual stuff of growing up – to have Ruprecht telling you his crackpot theories comes to be oddly comforting.
‘Imagine it,’ he says, gazing out the window while the rest of you huddle around the Nintendo, ‘everything that is, everything that has ever been – every grain of sand, every drop of water, every star, every planet, space and time themselves – all crammed into one dimensionless point where no rules or laws apply, waiting to fly out and become the future. When you think about it, the Big Bang’s a bit like school, isn’t it?’