Entropy

“Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, or national politics, of any civil disorder.” 

Callisto has designed his apartment to be its own ecosystem, unaffected by the outside world. Yet it is the very self-contained regularity of his environment that makes it vulnerable to entropy, as he himself is aware. He knows entropy to be the flaw in a system, and he knows that no system is perfect. In hiding out in his apartment, he is merely trying to stave off the inevitable. 

“But for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Leery at omens of apocalypse, Callisto shivered beneath the covers.” 

It seems absurd that Callisto would see an omen of the apocalypse in a steady temperature, and on one level, it shows the extreme brittleness and claustrophobia of his world. His existence in his apartment is so well-ordered that the slightest signs of disorder strike him as apocalyptic. Yet on another level, his paranoia is prescient, an alertness to underground realities that Meatball and his friends continue to evade. 

“‘I say,’ he called out a moment later to no one in particular. ‘I say, there seems to be a girl or something sleeping in the sink.’ He took her by the shoulders and shook. ‘Wha,’ she said. ‘You don’t look too comfortable,’ Meatball said. ‘Well,’ she agreed.” 

This passage is one example of this story’s frequent moments of slapstick, deadpan humor, which does not so much contradict the story’s underlying pessimism as show it in a different light. The disorder in Meatball’s apartment is the same disorder that so preoccupies Callisto in his apartment upstairs; the difference is that Meatball and his friends do not take it as seriously. 

“He had known all along, of course, that nothing but a theoretical engine or system ever runs at 100 percent efficiency […] It was not, however, until Gibbs and Boltzmann brought to this principle the methods of statistical mechanics that the horrible significance of it all dawned on him; only then did he realize that the isolated system—galaxy, engine, human being, culture, whatever—must evolve spontaneously toward the Condition of the More Probable.” 

Gibbs and Boltzmann were responsible for applying the idea of entropy to thermodynamics: the study of the conversion of heat into energy. Their thesis (broadly stated) was that all heat systems have parts that seemingly exist for no reason. Callisto is taking their scientific theory and applying it to all systems. This causes him to see imminent breakdown in the world, from which no one can escape.   

“The architectonic purity of her world was constantly threatened by such hints of anarchy; gaps and excrescences and skew lines, and a shifting or tilting of planes to which she had continually to readjust lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray of discrete and meaningless signals.” 

While Aubade and Callisto live in a carefully regulated environment, this environment does not really shelter Aubade. She is such an isolated and psychologically delicate character that she can only be her own moving shelter, regulating her emotional state in the same obsessive way that Callisto tends to his trees and birds. Her delicacy also means that she directly feels the sort of entropic breakdown that Callisto merely suspects.  

“‘Ha, ha. I wish you’d been there. Oh Meatball, it was a lovely fight. She ended up throwing a Handbook of Chemistry and Physics at me, only it missed and went through the window, and the glass broke.’” 

This is another slapstick moment from Meatball’s apartment party, which also has an underlying meaning. Meatball’s friend Saul is describing a fight that he has had with his wife, Miriam: a fight that is in large part about communication theory. The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is an allusion to Callisto’s concerns about entropy, and the shattering window foreshadows the story’s final paragraph, in which Aubade puts her hand through a window. 

“Meatball shuffled around. ‘Well, now, Saul,’ he muttered, ‘you’re sort of, I don’t know, expecting a lot from people. I mean, you know. What it is is, most of the things we say, I guess, are mostly noise.’” 

Meatball is not an articulate character, especially when compared to Callisto, his upstairs neighbor. Yet his inarticulacy also makes him strangely resilient, well-adapted to the general chaos and meaninglessness of his environment. As this statement shows, he is resigned to nothing around him making any sense. 

“‘When Dave was in the army, just a private E -2, they sent him to Oak Ridge on special duty. Something to do with the Manhattan project. He was handling hot stuff one day and got an overdose of radiation […]’ She shook her head sympathetically. ‘What an awful break for a piano player.’” 

This is a flippant bit of dialogue between some guests at Meatball’s party about a serious topic. While Callisto is preoccupied, in his upstairs apartment, with the aftermaths of World War I and II, for Meatball and his friends war and destruction is more of a background reality, taken for granted almost as much as the weather is. 

“That precious signal-to-noise ratio, whose delicate balance required every calorie of her strength, seesawed inside the small tenuous skull as she watched Callisto, sheltering the bird.” 

In this phrase there is an implicit parallel between Aubade, who is psychologically precarious, and the bird, who is wounded. Both Aubade and the bird have failed to thrive in the careful shelter that Callisto has built for them, and both symbolize the underlying disorder in all systems that is this story’s theme. 

“And how many musicians were left after Passchendaele, after the Marne? It came down in this case to seven: violin, double-bass. Clarinet, bassoon. Cornet, trombone. Tympani.” 

Callisto is remembering the musicians who died in World War I, resulting in incomplete orchestras and quartets, and therefore in a new kind of music. Meanwhile, the Duke di Angeles quartet mimes playing a song downstairs in Meatball’s apartment. Their mimed song is a real-life parody of Callisto’s memory and shows the generational distance that exists between Callisto’s world and theirs.  

“‘No,’ Meatball was still saying, ‘no, I’m afraid not. This is not a house of ill repute. I’m sorry, really I am.’” 

Even when his party is crashed by a group of thuggish US Navy men who believe his apartment to be a brothel—and who refuse to be dissuaded from this belief—Meatball remains mild-mannered and polite. This passage shows his equanimity in the face of unreasonableness, and how different his attitude is from that of Callisto, his upstairs neighbor. 

“Meatball chuckled. ‘Back to the old drawing board,’ he said. ‘No man,’ Duke said, ‘back to the airless void.’” 

Meatball and Duke are discussing the piece of silent music that Duke and his quartet have just performed, and with which they are apparently dissatisfied. Both Duke and Meatball seem well-aware of the absurdity of this double performance, as their jokey exchange illustrates. At the same time, the phrase “airless void”—even if it is in implied ironic quotation marks—shows a seriousness at the heart of their joke and touches upon this story’s theme of voids and meaninglessness. 

“So he decided to try and keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos […] This is what he did until nightfall, when most of the revellers had passed out and the party trembled on the threshold of its third day.” 

While Meatball’s environment as compared to Callisto’s seems volatile and chaotic, it is strangely stable. Meatball does not shut down his party at the story’s end; he merely manages it so that it can keep going, presumably indefinitely. This is the inverse of how Callisto’s story ends: on a note of disruption and violence, in what has previously been an ordered and peaceful environment.