There was no doubt about that. Ranting, grumbling, grousing, to no one in particular, she wandered the streets of Brooklyn at night and howled, and in the daytime begged for a few morsels. Every family has a nutball on the tree, or at least the promise of one. Perle was one of ours.
She was notorious because she was not only odd but odd in the oddest way. She had a mastermind insanity, all worked out and pinpointed down to the tiniest crackpot detail. She read about science and followed the new theories and thought that every new twist in the tale pertained exactly to her. She made notes in some private code that explained nothing to anyone but herself. Some pages of hers ended up in the album and for a long time I tried to decode them in case they led to the treasure. But I gave up when I always found myself right back where I started. Perle was from beyond the rim, she thought and claimed, a traveler in the continuum and light years older than anyone else.
And this in a neighborhood where if anyone had ever heard of the name Einstein, it referred to the furniture store owned by the guy with the boney daughter he failed to see why no one would marry. A very different kind of relativity.
At an outdoor restaurant one day, Perle cornered some patrons trying to take in the afternoon sunlight, and began to harangue them about the past, the future, the unimaginable distance from Flatbush to the end of time and all that.
They barely listened, like most folks, and just smiled and tried to shoo her away while they returned to their chatter about wine and why not.
But Perle, crazy as a loon, was undaunted. She paced and left, returned and left, and told them about her travels to the distant stars and what she found there. Knowing they did not mean to ignore her, she plopped herself down on the sidewalk and explained how there were many many universes out there, some like this one and some terribly different. Tragic ones, hilarious ones, ones based on gluten and others on liquid light, ones in which gravity was replaced by hilarity, universes being born and dying like snorts in a bar. Most of them were beyond our abilities to dream.
But there was one, she said, that really made an impression on her. She paused to give her listeners time to beg her to continue but they never did. No one was interested but the ability to ignore little details like that is one of the benefits of losing your mind.
And so Perle went on to explain that this particular universe she had in mind was grand and vast, much larger than this one and filled to the brim with matter and dark energy and sparking stars and atoms flibbering and all sorts of schmutz, both white and black. Spiral galaxies and nebulae, planets hot and cold, moons yearning, and dust, and water longing to be become vapor. The works, in other words. A very crowded place.
But there was no life there, she said. Not a whit of it, not a speck. No life at all. Complex, whirling, being, insistent, mangling…but not a single iota of life anywhere to be seen. At this Perle stopped dead in her tracks and turned to the four people sitting at the table to whom he had been speaking whether they knew it or not. Her gaze finally caught their attention
“No life at all,” she repeated. “Well…what do you think?”
One of the women, just at that moment raising her glass, was a professor who was also the sister of one of my uncles who told this story. No one knows what she taught but it was not physics. And definitely not psychology since she thought that perhaps here was a chance to get rid of this annoying woman once and for all.
“About what exactly?” she asked.
Perle, assuming she had missed the entire lecture, went through it all again about a rich, thick, stocked, grand, full universe…but with no life in it.
“Is that worthwhile?” she finally sputtered, fed up with the time it was taking to answer a simple question.
The professor, trying to be cool and collected and clever all at the same time said somewhat snidely: “Worthwhile to whom?”
“Yes!” Perle replied. “Yes, yes. That is just what I thought too!”
And then she was gone in the time it took to notice a discarded paper bag lying much further down the street.
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