by Laurel Brett
No matter how many people thought I was crazy, I’d hold onto the reality of the Daphnes now. Caroline was my life, but the Daphnes were my signposts, directing me toward real engagement with life.
However, things could not go on like this. Caroline was too concerned about her biological clock, and I keenly felt the pressure she exerted when she spoke about the adventures she had with Tom. I didn’t know exactly how things stood between them, but I would have to do something soon.
I began rereading the book that had brought Ur-
Daphne and me together, hoping for an answer I might have missed. I could just about follow the math that led up to the Schrödinger equation, but that was as far as I could get. I had an acute wish to be a physicist, although when I went to one of the guys at New Paltz for some insight, he didn’t understand quantum physics any more than I did. He was unperturbed, and explained, “To be a race car driver you don’t really need to understand exactly what’s under the hood of the car.” He was happy just manipulating the math he did understand, and teaching it to each new crop of beginning physics students. He left the unanswered questions of the universe to someone else.
Although it was a superstitious idea, I decided to return to the scene of our first encounter, the Bookmasters on Columbus Circle. I stopped by Jerry’s beforehand, for the first time since he’d gotten out of rehab.
“Hey, kid.” He’d come to the door in a silk robe and slippers, even though it was already past ten in the morning.
“Are patients coming soon?” I asked.
“No. I’m free for about three hours.”
“You seem to have a lot of time of your hands these days. Are you having trouble getting back into your practice?”
“No. Why would you say that?” But he turned away as he answered.
“How about a walk? Twenty blocks to Columbus Circle?”
“Not that stupid Bookmasters,” he groaned. “Still with that Schrödinger business?”
“Yup.”
“How’s Caroline?” he asked.
“Fine. Having a flirtation with someone else.”
“You’re being dumb. Maybe I should make a play for her. I don’t have a professional connection to her anymore. She’s an incredible woman. That would serve you right.”
“Shut up, Jerry. I can’t help it if she can’t stand my Daphne investigation.”
“Of course. I forgot. You have to solve the mysteries of the quantum universe. And while you’re at it, find out if there really is free will, and then make sure you’re quite sane.”
“I don’t think analysts are supposed to talk like that.”
“I’m not your analyst. Just give me a minute.” He went off to change.
I had become a sucker for spring. The crocuses and daffodils were everywhere, and the West Side cherry blossoms were poised to open any day. When we got to the bookstore there were a few high school kids buying Regents exam study guides, and a geezer or two leafing through magazines. We both headed over to psychology. I picked up Ulric Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology, which had been published in the past year, and Jerry found something too—Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, a book that had been around since the early fifties. It seemed like a book I should be familiar with. Meeting Daphne had prompted a new interest in personality theory. Before now, Jerry and I had both dismissed any approach not narrowly defined by our loyalties to psychoanalysis and behaviorism, though it seemed our horizons were widening.
“You’re interested in Gestalt now?” I asked.
“Yeah, Fritz Perls is shaking up therapeutic practice. I’m too stuck on Freud, as you’ve always said.”
“Hallelujah! Ding dong, the witch is dead.”
“Hey, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Jerry said. “Freud is still Big Daddy. What do you have against Freud anyway?” Obviously, he knew what I had against Freud—his discussion of internal drives without empirical evidence.
The book on cognitive psychology was a groundbreaking look at perception and thought beyond the mechanical investigations of behaviorism, so with my quarry in hand, I left Jerry in psychology and walked over to the physics section. Among the volumes, a book with a bright red spine caught my eye. It was a recently published overview of quantum mechanics. I immediately went to the index and found the Schrödinger references. I got goose bumps when I read this: Schrödinger and Simultaneous Realities. I raced to the entry.
According to this volume, while lecturing in Ireland, where the scientist repatriated, Schrödinger had announced that although the audience might think him crazy, his equations led to the strong possibility of simultaneous realities. So here it is in black and white! Schrödinger had actually predicted the possibility of simultaneous incarnations of Daphne. I wished for magic powers that could summon the four girls to the store right then and there. I closed my eyes, but of course, no Schrödinger girls appeared.
I called Jerry over and showed him the entry. “For god’s sake, Garrett!” he bellowed.
I jumped back in surprise and hit my elbow on one of the bookshelves. Why do they call it the funny bone? My elbow really hurt. I let out a small yelp of pain, but he was undeterred.
“I am so sick of this shit. We’ve been talking about this for months now. You are letting a great woman get away while you are off on a Don Quixote quest for mysterious girls who are going to reveal to you the nature of reality. Give me a break! Are you in love with these girls?” His voice boomed so loud that the clerk asked us to leave. That had never happened to me in a bookstore before.
“Wait for me outside,” I said. “Give me your book. I’ll buy it.”
I was angry as I walked out, and the tinkling bells that alert the clerks to new customers annoyed me. I was rehearsing the complaint I’d make to Jerry when I found him around the corner of the building, but seeing him like this jolted me into the awareness that something really was wrong. He’d never just gone off on larks in the middle of the day. He’d always been too busy. And his clothes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him in sneakers and a sweatshirt.
“Don’t you have patients to get back for?”
“I have time,” he said dismissively. He crossed the street and ambled over toward Columbus’s statue. Columbus Circle was a sleepy place, without any of the bustle of Times Square. Besides the famous landmark, it was just a traffic loop. Pigeons marked their territory and there was a flurry of flapping wings as I followed him to the Columbus monument.
“This is the heart of the heart of the city,” he remarked. Then his mood changed, and he impatiently said, “Let’s go home.”
Being three inches taller, I had no difficulty matching his stride.
When I was abreast of him he said, “I lied. Things aren’t okay.”
“No kidding. Do you still see patients?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“What are you doing for money?”
“I saved a lot. I mean, a lot.”
“What happened to your practice?”
“I hate psychoanalysis without the booze. People’s problems are just so boring. And they repeat themselves. Like you’ve been doing for almost a year now. Move on, kid. And did you notice that even Schrödinger thought he himself might be crazy? And what was the deal with moving to Ireland with his scandalous ménage à trois? Booted out of Germany and Austria, probably. Isn’t there a story where he chases around a fourteen-year-old girl? Sounds very Apollo-and-Daphne, doesn’t it? And that’s the guy you want to emulate?”
I ignored his outburst. “I thought you loved being an analyst.”
“I was drunk. The patients were more interesting then. Now I know why Freud did cocaine.”
“Wasn’t that for research?”
“Don’t be such a stickler.”
“You can’t get interested in your patients while you’re sober?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“What are you going to do?”
&n
bsp; “That’s why I’m reading up about Gestalt. It’s interactive and might keep me more engaged.”
“Don’t you need training for that?”
“That’s the thing. I’m thinking about going out to California. To Esalen.”
“That kooky hippie institute?”
“The very same. I thought you were the one going all sixties. Perls is there. Right now, I can’t even bring myself to make appointments,” he explained with the slight hostility I’d been hearing in his voice all morning.
“Are you always this irritable now?”
“Pretty much. I miss being drunk.”
“Then, yeah. You do have to do something. But does it have to be something as drastic as leaving, giving up the practice it’s taken you ten years to build? Give it some time.”
I guess he didn’t want to hear that because when we reached his stoop he abruptly said, “Gotta go,” and took the steps to his brownstone apartment two at a time. He disappeared without giving me a backward glance, and left me standing there on the sidewalk feeling abandoned and angry. I knew I should have been more understanding. Jerry was still trying to find his footing after rehab.
I worked off my annoyance by retracing my steps to Columbus Circle in long, loping strides. This time spring made no impact on my mood. I headed to Caroline’s gallery. She was talking to a potential customer when I walked in. As usual, she wore one of her little black dresses. She was so beautiful I almost laughed out loud. I could feel my eyes widen when I glimpsed another Daphne painting on a nearby wall. I had seen all the paintings from this series with Jane in Galen’s studio, but I hadn’t been giving the work much thought. Each deserved its own viewing. And now here she was—half nymph, half tree, caught suspended in a moment of transformation. She was uttering green leaves, as my SDS Daphne had said at Bryant Park. My sharp intake of breath was just audible and Caroline glanced away from her potential buyer and toward me.
As her customer exited the gallery she ambled over and said, “Trust you to be standing under a Daphne painting. Never mind, I don’t want to talk about our problems at work. Why are you here?”
“I wanted to see you. Have any time?”
“Actually, I don’t. I’m leaving a little early to have dinner with Tom before he goes on stage. He’s in an off-Broadway play. Do you want to come? To the play, not the dinner.”
“Maybe. How far have things gone between you two?”
She narrowed her eyes, trying to decide just how much she wanted me to know. “We’re seeing each other. It’s not that serious. Yet.”
“What’s the stumbling block?”
“That information is beyond your security clearance.”
“I think I’ll pass on the play.”
“I thought you might.”
“Jerry is thinking of leaving New York,” I said. “And I had the brilliant idea of taking over his apartment.” I had improvised that on the spot. Although I really had no chance of being able to afford it, I thought it would pique her interest. Yet even I could hear that I said this with anger and defiance. Then I pivoted on my heels and abruptly left. I felt estranged from both Jerry and Caroline as I reflected on the fact that intimate relationships were often war zones.
Chapter Twenty-One
* * *
Jerry had left me on the sidewalk without ceremony, and now I’d added to my alienation by doing a similar thing to Caroline. What was going on? The ambiguities of the Schrödinger mystery were weighing on me, and both my friends had made it clear that they didn’t believe in the validity of my experience. If your best friends won’t back you up, who will? It should have been obvious to them that the more they questioned me, the more I would want to prove them wrong.
But it was worse. Jerry, who had been my sidekick since we were eighteen, was seriously considering quitting New York, and Caroline was flirting with replacing me with Tom. I couldn’t blame either of them. Kudos to Jerry for trying to build a sober life, and as for Caroline, our little dance had been going on long enough. Although there was desperation to her attempts to satisfy her intense desire for a child, there was nobility too. I’m sure I didn’t come across like this to her. But I couldn’t help being the person I was, and who I was now would forever more include Daphne.
Why had I said that about Jerry’s apartment? I had no idea. Was it merely to entrance Caroline, whom I feared was drifting away, or did I secretly harbor a desire to move back into Manhattan? Jerry had always joked that I envied him his apartment; clearly, I did. In truth, I hoped Jerry would come to his senses, drop all that Esalen business, stay in New York, and return to his practice.
I had taken the train so I could leave my car with the mechanic for a new set of brakes, and on the way home the early-spring Hudson River Valley scenery was whizzing by outside the train window. I had the whole two-hour ride back to study my new physics book. After I’d followed up on all the Schrödinger references I perused the index and found this entry: The Many-Worlds Interpretation. Here was a detailed, cogent discussion of the ideas of Hugh Everett III, a man who’d earned a doctorate in physics from Princeton with a thesis that postulated this idea of many worlds. His idea explained what happens to the Schrödinger equation over time—in other words, the progression of a quantum system, that portion of the universe under investigation for its wave-particle duality. Since light operated as both matter and energy, composed of both particles and waves, depending on the conditions of observation, the quantum model created problems that Newton’s model hadn’t, but it also proved more accurate. Physics now needed to find explanations for the ambiguities quantum mechanics introduced, and so far Niels Bohr’s model, called the Copenhagen Interpretation in deference to his Danish nationality, had been the most popular. The problem with the Copenhagen Interpretation was that it privileged the observer and set him apart from the rest of the quantum system, sort of the way Caroline had suggested that I was the linchpin of the Daphne phenomenon.
Everett argued against the Copenhagen Interpretation. He asserted that physics needed to accept its own math and embrace the obvious implications that arose from its calculations, no matter how surprising the real-world implications. His conclusions had the great advantage of restoring the observer as a part of the quantum system and removing his privileged status. Everett accounted for all anomalies by an idea that was directly suggested by the math: every time a quantum system interacted with the world, a new reality branched off. His simplest example was an intersection. When a car reaches an intersection in one reality the car will go right; in another it will turn left. Voilà! A new reality. This process of branching realities occurred throughout quantum systems, generating new universes, perhaps an infinity of universes. Borges had described this process in his “Garden of Forking Paths,” the story Daphne and I talked about on the bus ride to Washington. Once the two universes separated, however, they would never interact again. To put it more simply, there were an infinite set of possibilities for Daphne, for each of us actually, and it was arbitrary which possibility manifested in our universe. In another universe, a different possibility would manifest.
I reviewed these implications in my mind, assuring myself that I understood what I had just read: Daphne was a set of possibilities, and each possibility became manifest in a new universe when the universe branched off, as Borges had said it would. But once this new universe branched off, it could never interact with the previous universe. They split completely.
But the question still remained: why could I interact with all four?
Everett’s model insisted that I could never get two of the girls together. The laws of physics as described by Schrödinger’s equation, and interpreted by Everett’s hypothesis, prohibited it. That much I understood, but then why could one Daphne see another’s portrait? Why had one Daphne glimpsed another at a school teach-in? Why could I see all four? Which reality was I in?
I reread the Everett section. Everett’s conclusions were clear.
But poor Everett
had been ostracized for his elegant and daring theory and forced to leave physics. People had found him crazy, just for suggesting his Many-Worlds Interpretation as an abstract model, even without the concrete example of auburn-haired teenagers. A quantum conference in Copenhagen had pronounced him so, and so had the great man Niels Bohr himself. I would certainly always be found crazy too. Even so, I resolved to track down Everett and ask him about Daphne. And I also resolved to stop using the word crazy. Surely there were other words for bold ideas that frightened people.
I didn’t want to waste the time going over to the Vassar library, so the next morning I holed up in the less-impressive New Paltz library. I discovered that when Everett had been forced out of physics he created his own firm that designed weapons systems for the Pentagon. I even found a phone number for that firm. I took my notes home to make phone calls. I got bounced from one office to another, until finally I was speaking to Everett’s very businesslike secretary. I explained to her that I wanted nothing more in the world than to meet her boss. I expected her to explain to me why this was impossible.
Instead she said, “He had a cancellation, and I have a fifteen-minute appointment tomorrow at three.”
“Tomorrow?” I wanted to see Everett, but I was imagining a time frame of months, not hours. “I’m in upstate New York. I’d have to get down there, and there’s a problem with my car—”
“Excuse me. Dr. Everett never takes appointments like this without some pressing relationship to his business life. I’m giving you this slot because the only thing he might hate more than talking to someone just off the street or talking to someone about physics is having a gap in his schedule. He is very particular about time. He would not want a fifteen-minute break with no one across the desk from him on the day he sees people. However, he will not be receptive to your interest. I hope that’s understood. It’s tomorrow or never. It’s up to you.”