Schrödinger's Ball

by Adam Felber

  Epilogue

  I RETURNED TO MY HOUSE, still unclear as to who I was and what exactly had happened to me. The facts were there, but they were coming to me slowly. I suppose I could have stopped moving for a moment and teased all the information out of my brain, but it was more comfortable just to act, to let it happen. Once or twice I found myself thinking in the plural again, but it felt like a shabby construct at this point. Which, in retrospect, it was.

  I left the car, got drenched again, and let myself in. I expected to see Dr. Schrödinger there, was looking forward to asking him to shed some light on my current condition, but he wasn’t in the entryway or in his customary position of unjustified and intrusive relaxation on my couch. After a moment I heard some movement in the kitchen, so I slipped off my soggy shoes and went to investigate.

  It was the girl, Dori. She was wearing one of my shirts and a pair of sweatpants. She was at the stove, cooking something. She looked at me and smiled, then turned back to the stove.

  “There you are! I figured you’d be home soon. And I knew you’d be soaked. Because you’re an idiot.” She said it affectionately, and with far too much familiarity for the friend of a friend. For some reason, though, she didn’t seem out of place.

  “There’s a towel and some dry clothes for you on the couch,” she said. Mechanically, I slogged into the living room and began to strip and towel myself off. The clothes, clean and dry, were welcome, as much as the rain had been.

  “I’m making you some soup,” came Dori’s voice, alarmingly close. I turned, half naked, to see her standing in the doorway. She did not seem to find the sight of her host seminude unexpected or objectionable. She was undeniably attractive, too, and obviously older than I’d first assumed she was back at the icecream parlor, and at least I found the situation uncomfortable.

  “Where’s Dr. Schrödinger?” I asked desperately as I hastily pulled on the rest of my clothing.

  “Who? Oh, you mean the Humdingers? I made another bunch in the lab today, but, you know, I think we’re going to have to start making them here, or the university is going to want to get a piece of the action or something. Randy says he can get some equipment, and if you would let me go into the lab in your garage I could start to set things up….”

  “No!” I cut her off. She was babbling—none of it made sense and all of it made sense and I couldn’t keep up. I went back to where I’d left my mental bookmark. “I meant Dr. Schrödinger himself. Where is he?”

  “You mean the guy? The physicist?” she asked, genuinely confused. I nodded. “Well, he died in, like, 1960 or something, didn’t he? Are you asking me where he was buried, or something? Is this a pop quiz?”

  She was being playful, but her words hit with force. A couple of things clicked into place. Dr. Schrödinger was indeed dead—died in Vienna, in 1961, to be precise. I’d told Dori that myself in class.

  Class. Dori. I was a professor. I taught physics. Dori was a grad student. She worked at the ice-cream place, too. She and I had always flirted, but I never did anything, of course, because … because … Dr. Schrödinger had come to me.

  “Are you all right?” She came over to me, sat me on the couch, and held my hand.

  “Look,” she said, “this has been a really tough weekend for you, okay? And we’ve all been worried about you, you know, coming back to work so soon….”

  “‘We’?” I asked, smiling with a stupid irony that she couldn’t possibly understand.

  “Okay, well, me personally of course, but all of us,” she said, and I realized she meant the other grad students, the TAs. She was relentless, forcing truths down my throat faster than I could swallow them, unaware, I suppose, that I’d spent the last week as an ephemeral, plural observer.

  “But, you know,” she went on, “when you came back and said let’s go with the Humdinger thing, we all thought it would be good for you, you know? And it would be an excuse for us—for me—to keep an eye on you, okay?” I nodded. I tried to smile. I couldn’t stop her, even though part of me knew what was coming.

  “But I gotta say, maybe it was too soon. Hey, not that I regret what happened this weekend, you know, between us. No way, believe me, I do not regret that. But I want you to know that I don’t expect anything from you, all right? And if you need to take some more time off, you know, disappear for another couple of weeks, it’s okay. We can all cover for you. We’ll cover the undergrads, and Professor Muldower will cover us. And you probably got plenty more time on your bereavement leave or whatever they call it.”

  That did it. Several body blows followed by a knockout punch. I was back. It was all back inside me—my dead wife, the accident that I had survived without a scratch, the way her family blamed me, the fact that it was my fault (even if it was an accident), the usual survivor’s guilt coupled with the fact that we hadn’t been getting along coupled with my new feelings for this woman right in front of me coupled with several days of unabated drinking and the pills that I’d been given to keep me calm but that should not be taken with alcohol.

  I had been, as my students would say, severely fucked up. I couldn’t tell you exactly when I stopped being a single individual, when I became a pluralistic observer. Now, it was painful to come back, having watched an older, funhouse version of myself in Dr. Schrödinger for the previous few days. As psychotic breaks go, though, it was less destructive than some. There was at least that to cling to as I returned to a sad and guilt-ridden existence. Had I happened upon a genuine, evolutionary explanation for psychosis? I was pretty sure I’d be better off if I didn’t pursue the matter, though. It wasn’t my table, anyway.

  And there was something else, I now remembered, something very, very bad. I got up, headed toward the inside door to the garage.

  Dori misinterpreted my abrupt action. “I can go if you need to be alone, you know. It’s no problem. I totally understand.”

  “No!” I said, whirling around, before I even thought about it. Then I thought about it. “What I mean to say is, I’m not sure I’d be in any condition to be inclined to be a, um, lover, as it were. But your presence would be …”

  “Appreciated?”

  “Yes.”

  “No problem.” There would be problems, though. I’d seen to that by rushing things with her, or by letting Dr. Schrödinger rush things, or however one would put it. But I had a more pressing need at the moment. I rushed off to the garage, unlocked the door, and switched on the light, scarcely daring to breathe.

  In the garage was the wreckage of what had been my “lab.” My chemistry was fairly amateurish, more or less a “hobby” that just so happened to dovetail nicely with the largely theoretical physics that was my profession. A shoddy dodge, really, and no doubt a sadly transparent retreat from what had become an unsatisfying marriage … I fought those thoughts off. Understand—it was an accident, of this I’m sure. It just didn’t feel like one.

  What was here in the garage, though, wasn’t an accident, and my stomach heaved with the thought of what I’d done. There would be no forgiving myself for what was here, no way to make up for it if …

  How long had it been? Forty-eight hours. Maybe less, but definitely more than a day. It was hard to say. It was hard to recall exactly what “Dr. Schrödinger” had done, especially when I “wasn’t with him,” but I had some memory of this thing: this horrible, unthinkable thing.

  I approached what had been a well-organized lab table. Everything had been swept aside, the floor was a mess of bottles and vials, some spilled, some intact. On the desk, though, was what I knew would be there: a box.

  I listened, hoping to learn something, and there was no sound. Which meant very little, and, besides, there was no time to waste. Whatever I found out, the longer I waited, the lower the chances of a positive outcome would be, the more likely that I would prove to be, along with everything else, a murderer.

  It was a small box, really, cruelly small. It had once housed a seventeen-inch computer monitor. It did not house a monitor
anymore. It housed an experiment that was never meant to be real, and that possibly had deprived me of one of my truest companions. Werner. I couldn’t bear the thought. I had no choice.

  I opened the box.

  The funeral was brief, well attended, and slightly less somber than you might think. This was due to all the uncertainty, principally. The service was handled by a Unitarian minister, a colleague of Leonora’s. His eulogy was tasteful and appropriate, occasionally pretty, and was of very little pertinence to us here. It spoke of the tragedy of dying young, of the meaning of a life that, however short, touched so many, and of the inscrutable mechanisms of God’s largely benevolent universe.

  Leonora was flanked by the many people who cared about her. Jack Kennedy stood somewhat nearby.

  The three remaining friends kept mostly to themselves. As a group they were still bewildered by what they’d been through. Unlike the throngs who had gathered outside Johnny’s house, they couldn’t just discount the coroner’s report as shoddy work. Something had happened, though they were stymied as to what exactly it had been.

  From the moment when Arlene had found Grant and Deb entwined in the rain, from the moment they had risen and begun their fruitless search amid the lightning bolts and thunderclaps, from that moment on, Arlene had stuck by what she’d seen. She was the only one watching Johnny just as the truck hit, and she’d seen Johnny, in that instant, simply disappear.

  After failing to find him and trekking to his house and hearing the news, Grant and Deb were inclined to believe Arlene (though at first they’d been frustrated by her unhelpful attitude toward the search—she saw it, rightly, as pointless). Believing her didn’t shed light on anything, of course, but it was a decent enough patch for the yawning hole in their narrative of that night.

  For Grant, who was wont to see Mandelbrot sets swirling in the soap scum atop his bathwater, the events of the weekend seemed to have a shape, though he could not yet tell what it was. He knew, however, that by an extremely implausible string of coincidences and events he had somehow been thrust into the situation he’d always wanted but was fundamentally incapable of finding his way into on his own. It was so improbable, in fact, that the always agnostic Grant now found that he believed in something. He didn’t know what it was, he was far from putting a name on it, but everything that happened was undeniably a baroque mechanism that had achieved a devoutly desired end. Grant’s gut was telling him that there was some sort of Intentionality behind all that, while another part of him quietly whispered that he was bound to feel that way, that winners always do.

  Either way, he was in a strange place. He’d lost his best friend under bizarre and tragic circumstances. At the same time, he was embarking on a relationship that thrilled him, ennobled him, and scared the living shit out of him. His emotional plate was full. He tuned in briefly to what the minister was saying—the phrase “the power of belief” drifted through his mind. He found it interesting, filed it away for calmer times, when he would set about trying to connect it with something. It would be a long time before he found that it was best connected to everything, and to nothing at all.

  Deb already missed Johnny horribly. He’d always been, quite simply, beautiful. She’d never probed or tried to get inside the sweet calm that lay under his exuberance; she’d just loved being with the whole package. To her, in retrospect, he hadn’t really been that different during the weekend, just larger, brighter, more himself than ever. The sudden lack of him was palpable, especially because she made absolutely no attempts to shield herself from the grief.

  And then there was the Grant thing. Deb had never invested herself in a real, serious romantic relationship before, and already she was getting a sense of the deeper joys that might lie in store for her. Glorious and long-burning feelings that she was delighted to be getting an inkling of, focused around the person who had become her absolute favorite in all the world. She’d always thought that her future involved something like this, but it hadn’t been time. Now it was time, Deborah Johnstone was taking on a Relationship, and she was determined to enjoy every moment of it, nurture it, and get it right. Maddeningly, inevitably, she would.

  For Arlene, for now, things sucked. Pure and simple.

  She’d be all right, one may suppose. But in the span of a weekend she’d lost a dear friend, a new lover, and a beloved cat, and had found herself on the outside of the new Perfect Couple, who had been her individual friends. If there was any bright side at all, she thought, it was that her usually neurotic and despairing mind now really had something to despair about. Perhaps. At the very least, she had more dark feelings to write about. And though she wouldn’t know it until later that day, she had a new kitten, courtesy of Grant and Deb.

  The service ended, there were more tears, and there were sandwiches back at Leonora’s house. Sometime later, the three friends found themselves in the afternoon sunlight on Leonora’s front lawn, waving to Johnny’s family, retreating to the curb, and saying some private goodbyes. They hugged and parted, Grant and Deb going one way, Arlene the other.

  There’s no finality to that, of course. The three of them would be at the Abbey the very next evening, and they’d be seeing a band in Central Square a few nights after that. On their way home from that, the three of them would be flashed by a homeless woman in the most startling of ways, and that would lead to …

  But endpoints are where you put them, and we’ll put one right here. The friends parted, the day ended, and Johnny Felix Decaté was laid to rest.

  Oh—one more thing: As she walked away, impossibly enough, deep inside Arlene a zygote was growing at an amazing rate, dividing and dividing and sorting itself out in the ludicrously complex dance that brought us all here in the first place. And at the very same time, nothing was growing inside Arlene at all, because its presence was, naturally, impossible. It was simultaneously there and not there.

  A conundrum, then. And, as always, there is only one way to find out.

  Now that I’m out of the box, I can’t believe I was ever in that friggin’ thing. Man oh man, that was weird. I was gettin’ pretty strange in there, I don’t mind saying.

  But eventually the light came and there was the guy! My favorite guy.

  Everything’s pretty much as it was, though someone definitely messed with my scrunchy mouse while I was gone. The guy spends more time with me, which sometimes requires the mighty claw of Enough Already, but I can deal. And I don’t sleep in the sock drawer anymore, which is pretty understandable under the circumstances.

  Back there, in the box, things got a little weird. I was thinking some pretty crazy stuff, some pretty heavy stuff, some stuff that seemed pretty important while I was inside. I remember I was all like, “If I ever get out of here, I’ll be a better cat.” “Maybe the box is an illusion, or maybe I am.” “Maybe I deserve to be here, or maybe this is just the kind of price you gotta pay for all the good stuff that came before.” Jesus fucking Christmas! Man, I was serious.

  But that’s all way behind me now. I don’t think about those things now. Why would you, unless you’re in a box?

  Appendix

  The Real Erwin Schrödinger Stands Up

  I’M NOT THE MOST QUALIFIED GUY to explain quantum physics or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to you. But you probably guessed that already. There are scores of places in your local library or on the Web where you can read lucid, well-written layman’s explanations of how exactly a particle can’t be a wave and a wave can’t be a particle and how a cat can or can’t be simultaneously alive and dead.

  If this book was concerned with anything remotely scientific, it was concerned with explaining the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment badly. Now, that’s a task I am eminently qualified to perform. But, seeing as I’ve devoted so much energy to making a difficult concept even more difficult while simultaneously presenting a not altogether flattering fictionalization of an eminent physicist, perhaps I ought to, in fairness, offer some accoun
t of what Schrödinger and his Cat were really all about.

  The soup of interconnecting and poorly misunderstood concepts surrounding Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and quantum physics is blurry and hard to define, not unlike the electron probability cloud proposed by Heisenberg himself. Or was that Schrödinger? Or Bohr? It’s complicated.

  Back in the mid-1920s, both Heisenberg and Schrödinger were hot on the trail of the electron. It was important work: Any physicist worth his salt had realized that the classical model of the atom was incomplete, that a more complete model was going to tell a peculiar story about the nature of our world, and that something very strange was going on with electrons. There had to be—if electrons behaved the way larger matter did, there was a big, big problem.

  See, the law of conservation of matter tells us that it takes energy to make things move. If electrons have mass and are moving around the nucleus of an atom, they’re using up energy. So their orbits ought to be decaying. In other words, if classical physics applied to electrons, then atoms ought to be collapsing all the time, which would put a serious crimp in everyone’s vacation plans. This was the problem Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger set out to solve, principally by calculating, theorizing, and yelling at one another a lot.

  Heisenberg got there first, by a matter of months. His description of quantum mechanics using “matrix algebra” in 1925 was what eventually won him the Nobel Prize. Schrödinger finished his version in January of ’26, producing what’s known as the “wave equation.”

  The odd thing about those two explanations was that Heisenberg’s wasn’t very popular. It didn’t have a beat you could dance to, from a physicist’s perspective. Schrödinger’s, though it came afterward, was much clearer and easier to understand, and it was an instant hit. Schrödinger was good at explaining things, which is probably what led to the whole mess with the Cat.

  After the two physicists published, more high-level squabbling set in. A jealous Heisenberg took potshots at Schrödinger’s equation. Schrödinger, in a move of colossal intellectual passive-aggressiveness, proved that his and Heisenberg’s theories were mathematically identical. By 1927, Heisenberg had synthesized their work (and that of Einstein and Bohr) and unleashed a pop hit of his own: the uncertainty principle. What this boils down to is that when you look at a particle’s waveness it loses its particleness. And vice versa. The act of looking shapes the reality, said Heisenberg. At the quantum level, human perception shapes what is and what isn’t. And, according to Heisenberg, that was the end of the story. Heisenberg and Bohr were convinced that everything had been explained as fully as was possible, that certain things were just plain inscrutable, and that physicists ought to concentrate on improving their tans and picking up chicks.