by Laurel Brett
“Tomorrow. Thank you so much. I’ll be there.”
* * *
My mechanic had replaced my brake pads and assured me that the car was in good enough shape to make the trip to DC. Twenty-four hours later, after a night’s sleep in a favorite little hotel in Georgetown, I found myself sitting across from Hugh Everett.
“I’ve read your article in Reviews of Modern Physics and found other references to your work. While I can’t claim to follow everything, I understand enough to know that you are the first proponent of the Many-Worlds Interpretation, MWI.”
Everett was a sweating, portly man with very short hair styled in the fashion of ten years earlier who wore the same Coke-bottle glasses I did. He reeked of Scotch, from lunch, I surmised, and it seemed like he’d had more than one. He could obviously hold his liquor, but he seemed irritable, as if he were working to keep his temper under control. I had only been in his office for one minute, yet I had already watched him stub out the end of one cigarette and light the next. His immaculate walnut desk had a glass ashtray overflowing with the day’s butts. He had no pictures of family. His office had no artwork or decoration of any kind, not even the expected framed diplomas. The blinds were drawn, obscuring what must have been a spectacular view of the Potomac. In front of him was a yellow legal pad and an array of identical pens lined up like soldiers.
“I don’t do that work anymore, ” he answered in a clipped voice that prohibited any questioning. Through our two sets of lenses, his eyes bored into mine with determination and some impatience.
“Yes, I realize that, but I’ve run across a phenomenon that seems to prove your theory. I keep watching one girl split, first into two, then three, then four iterations of herself. Each iteration branches off into a radically different future.”
“That’s impossible,” Everett pronounced.
“No. It happened.”
He seemed to ignore my response. “Once a new universe branches off, it has no further interaction with the one before. You would never be able to see all four girls. That’s not my theory.”
“How do you know?”
“Schrödinger’s equation.”
“But observation is the basis of science.”
“Observation, yes. Under controlled conditions that can be reproduced.”
“I am sure that what I am observing is related to your paper. I just know it.”
“Perhaps. But it is not an example of the Many-Worlds Interpretation. It just doesn’t fit the math we have. Perhaps you should consider a more mundane explanation, like a problem with your mental health.” He began writing on his pad and evidently had no more interest in talking to me. There were no handshakes or goodbyes. There were four minutes left to my fifteen-minute consultation, so I just sat there, deflated, watching him work.
I thanked him for his time, and at 3:15 on the dot his efficient secretary returned to usher me out. “Dr. Adams, do you want me to validate your parking pass?” she asked right after she closed the door. I walked to her desk so she could stamp my ticket. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “You’ve gone a little pale.”
“I’m fine, thanks. Which way are the elevators?”
“Through those doors to the left. You can’t miss them.”
I had already checked out of the hotel, so I got on the road.
That Dr. Everett had discovered a theoretical framework for the idea of multiple Daphnes had given me hope of understanding this eerie experience life had brought me. That he had been thought weird and had been ridiculed had given me someone to identify with, and led me to conclude that there were worse things than being thought odd. Now I knew there were. Being told by Niels Bohr your model was crazy, as Everett had been, was one thing; being told that your experience was crazy by Hugh Everett was entirely different. Bohr was a great man defending his own theory; Hugh Everett was a failure in physics, rejecting an example that might validate his theory, however problematic the four Daphnes were. If he thought I was crazy, maybe I was.
Everett had solved his problem by walking away from physics, just as Caroline insisted that I could solve mine by walking away from these Schrödinger girls, only there weren’t really Schrödinger girls after all, if Everett was to be believed. But how could I ignore my own experience? One option was to accept the conclusion everyone else was drawing—that I was mentally ill. I didn’t feel it. Daphne felt as real as Caroline, and if I had to see her as a fantasy, maybe Caroline was a fantasy too. Maybe I had imagined the entire web of reality I’d experienced, or maybe my observations had distorted what I saw so much that the universe manifested itself completely differently from the way it seemed to me. If I pulled that one thread, the thread of the Schrödinger girls, what would be left? Would everything I knew start to unravel? I imagined myself peering into emptiness. If my perceptions of the Daphnes, who seemed so ordinarily real to me, were faulty, how could I construct any reliable reality? Perhaps reality was a fantasy.
Or maybe my perceptions were as real and accurate as they felt to me, and someday the math would be discovered to prove that I was right. Perhaps I alone lived in a tiny pocket of the universe that defied the laws of physics. One of my professors had insisted that the laws of the universe were really based on probabilities, and that anything was possible, even phenomena that defied the laws of physics. They just have an extremely low probability. I would never question my nocturnal meeting with my father when he told me that I was now the man of the family.
Things were just that strange now. For Everett, the Schrödinger girls presented no problem; the problem arose from the fact that I could interact with all of them in my one universe. I was grandiose enough to wonder if I had found a glitch in the space-time continuum. Of course, I also questioned if everything I had discovered about Daphne could exist only in my own mind. I had to reject that idea when I remembered the snapshot, the guidance counselors, the Green portraits—all the manifestations of multiple Daphnes that existed in the real world, even if I was the only one of billions of people to know the reality of the Schrödinger girl.
Chapter Twenty-Two
* * *
So now I was a minority of one, except for Daphne, but who knew what she’d think? I was in my study, as usual, making notes and culling my journals, now that Everett had rejected my experience. That was decisive. I could no longer turn to science; he had been my best hope. He had unceremoniously dismissed me, and indicated that I was a boring crank. Goodbye. I had expected a better reception. Driving down to DC, I had played fantasy scenarios in my head in which he was excited by Daphne and couldn’t wait to hear more and together we studied the math, and even coauthored a paper. Maybe in some other universe we did. In this universe he closed his door.
I had done an admirable job of alienating both Caroline and Jerry with my fixation. I had no friends in New Paltz, only distant colleagues. I thought about calling Jane Pinsky to meet up, so I could pump her for information about Daphne and Galen. Who was I becoming? A creepy, middle-aged guy fixated on a young girl—exactly who everyone thought I was. I typed up all my notes on my Stony Brook encounter with my last Daphne.
The rehab facility didn’t allow her visitors for five weeks, which was still a few days off. I was tracking her progress on one of my graphs. She sent me updates in little missives, posted once every few weeks. My time line had blossomed into a huge chart that occupied an entire wall, and I had traced each iteration with a different color marker. Stony Brook Daphne was a bright cobalt blue. Just this past week, the last week in March 1968, she had sent me this update: Doing well. No drugs. Beginning to work in the garden. I had recorded her garden work in my time line, which was becoming a dizzyingly detailed design. Galen’s Daphne was green, but whenever I checked in, she was off somewhere for a show or a gallery opening. I don’t know how she got her homework done. That’s why I wanted to talk to Jane. SDS Daphne, marked in red, seemed to have disappeared, so her line just stopped. I hadn’t heard a peep from her since that day at New Pa
ltz, right before the mobilization.
And my Ur-Daphne? Her trajectory, marked in purple, stopped the day of the march. She had given me her phone number that day, and I had called her house several times, but one of her parents always answered. I was afraid they’d think me a creep stalking their daughter, so I just hung up. One time, feeling desperate to talk to her, I tried to sound younger, and I left a message with her mother for Daphne to call me, but she never did. I wanted to sit in the parking lot of the high school and wait for her by the buses, yet I was afraid she would resent it.
Even Dylan and the Beatles had stopped releasing albums.
I felt like I was at the event horizon of a black hole. I had just read that term in a magazine article. The event horizon, as I understood it, was the vicinity of a black hole when you get too close to escape its gravitational pull. I was probably using the term wrong, but after seeing Everett I knew that I wasn’t going to be a scientist.
Before things had gotten out of hand, although I had never been the most prolific researcher or the most popular teacher, I had provided careful instruction on behavioral psychology that sent my students into the world a little better informed, thinking a little more precisely. I knew that they called me Dr. Stats, for statistics, but every year I had my followers, and my classes attracted just enough students to continue the behavioral track in the department. I began to worry that I would lose my job along with my friends. Everett had as much as told me that my preoccupation was a symptom of a mental disorder. He had turned his back on his own theories and intimated I should too. At least his model was rooted in reliable mathematics, whereas my thoughts were rooted only in random encounters with the Schrödinger girls, a phenomenon that only I had experienced.
Soon, events interrupted my self-absorbed brooding. That spring the fabric of history began to unravel for everyone. On April 4, after delivering his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis, Tennessee, standing on the balcony of his hotel. Evidence pointed to James Earl Ray, and a manhunt began.
On hearing of Dr. King’s death, Robert F. Kennedy, in Indianapolis about to give a campaign speech, delivered a stirring extemporaneous eulogy pleading with us Americans “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” But the pain brought riots in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, DC, and many other places across the country. Forty-six people died.
Tragedy brought the Daphnes back to me. On the back of a postcard of Michelangelo’s statue of Apollo in the Bargello Museum, Galen’s Daphne had drawn two weeping faces and signed her name. Still living with Terry, SDS Daphne sent a standard postcard, no picture, with just my address. She had written only two words: those fuckers. From high school, the always-generous Ur-Daphne had sent me a single of Joan Baez singing “We Shall Overcome,” recorded in 1963 in the UK, right after the folk singer presented the song at Dr. King’s big speech in DC. I couldn’t imagine how she’d gotten ahold of the recording, and I didn’t know how I would ever repay all her gifts to me or express my gratitude. I played the record so many times I was afraid of wearing it out. Did anyone sing as purely as Baez? I wished I could have been at the march, but in 1963 I had been too dumb and too self-involved to even think about going. Knowing Daphne had changed that.
From the rehab center, Stony Brook Daphne had written me a letter:
Dear Garrett,
Besides being heartbroken, I am doing well. You and Jerry were amazing to find me this place. I am making friends and don’t feel so alone in the world. I have people I can live with after I leave, but for the time being I will be staying here. I have jobs I really like. I get up early and bake the bread for everyone every day. Dr. Miller says that if I want to stay, we can call this a real job, and it will cover room and board. Then in the afternoons, around three o’clock, in good weather I work in the garden. In the winter I couldn’t do much—just pick up twigs and branches left by storms, but now that it’s spring, the earth needs to be turned over.
I am working on my GED. It’s very easy. There is an educational consultant who is helping me with ideas for college. So far the standouts are Stony Brook (where you found me) because I can get a Regents scholarship and some additional scholarship money, which would make attendance free. The other college is Wellesley because they have a special program for girls like me, and it might also be free. Emily, the consultant, is really pushing Wellesley, and not just because it’s so much more elite, but also because it’s so small, all women, and she thinks I’ll feel safe there. I’m not so sure I want to feel safe. Maybe I want something big, and something bustling, where I can feel like someone who’d rather have an adventure than be safe. I think I might like to go to school with Juliana. She was so good to me. Everybody there was. I might want to study botany.
Nothing about this makes sense to me. Love like Dr. King’s just makes people feel even more hatred, as if letting in the love would just break them apart. I wish I could tell them that it wouldn’t, and that they’d believe me. Otherwise there are going to be even more of these deaths. Love doesn’t hurt. Only people who have never had any think so. Anyway, if I can get through this, and I will, I’ll be all right.
Love,
Daphne
She was right. Nothing did make sense. Not in the United States. Hatred was always boundless. In the face of this anger, I wanted to do what I could to heal the rift with my friends. Jerry worshipped King. I called to ask if I could see him, but he insisted that he was fine.
“Still moving to Esalen?” I asked.
“Considering it.”
“You’re not angry, are you?”
“Don’t be silly. Just sad.”
I took him at his word and trusted him to stay sober.
Caroline was a different story. I wanted to show her Daphne’s letter from rehab and the rest of my proof, the postcards from the different Daphnes, each stamped by a post office at a different location, but Caroline was still angry with me. I suspected that proof would be beside the point. People can ignore evidence. Everett had the math to prove his theory, but his ideas didn’t make sense to Bohr. Now Everett wasn’t even a physicist. I despaired of convincing Caroline. When I called her she admitted, “I just don’t get you, Garrett,” her voice strained and weary. “No. I don’t really want to see you right now.”
I wanted to ask about Tom, but something in her manner prevented me from pressing her further. I had no one but myself to blame. “I’m sorry, Caroline. I shouldn’t have taken my jealousy out on you.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.” She hung up
I spent the spring semester going through the motions of teaching my courses. History was exploding around me, but my response was to crawl inside myself. Jerry, Caroline, and, more importantly, Daphne disappeared from my life again. I found more books on Everett, read more about the Daphne myth, and reread the time line so many times I had each dot of ink memorized. I read Everett’s paper seventeen times, and I read Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” even more. Sadly, I had to conclude that there were no more clues. For a while, my life had been blazing with Daphnes. Now it felt dark.
Although the date came and went when Stony Brook Daphne could accept visitors, when I called and checked with the front desk, her doctor kept putting off the visit. A month passed, but I was busy with grades and tried not to mind too much, though I was longing to see her. Finally, after another month, at the end of May I took my chances and drove to the rehab facility without making a date with the young botanist. At the front desk the receptionist referred me to one of the therapy aides because it wasn’t official visiting hours. A comfortable middle-aged woman with a graying flip hairdo and a fifties sweater set smiled at me when I introduced myself.
“Oh, we know all about you,” she said. “Daphne says that you’re a real gentleman and a life saver. Normally we wouldn’t allow visitors at this time of day, but Daphne is no longer technically a patient. She�
��s working in the garden out back. Come, I’ll show you.”
She led me through the building to a back door that opened onto a respectably large plot. I had to squint to see Daphne against the bright sunlight. She had her hair tied up in a green bandanna, and she wore cutoffs and a sleeveless top marked by sweat. She was weeding and working hard. Roses and peonies were blooming in side beds, but she was tending a big vegetable garden recently planted with tomatoes, corn, watermelons, string beans, and zucchini, their seed-packet markers mounted on sticks. Right now, the plantings were just tiny, tender seedlings with their heads barely out of the soil. She heard my footsteps and turned around.
“Garrett!”
I thought of how wanly she had said my name just months ago. Some of her old enthusiasm had returned. Someone had recut her hair, and it was even shorter under the bandanna, but it wasn’t hacked off anymore. The short hair gave her a gamine quality, but she was earnest too. She didn’t seem the same girl who had sat in an opium stupor ready to withdraw from life. As I watched her, I saw that her work in the soil had a methodical quality. I noticed that she had lost some of the spontaneity that I always associated with my Schrödinger girls.
“You’re working hard,” I said.
“I am. We will eat this food. I like watching seeds become food and seeing the food on the table. It’s mysterious, don’t you think?”
I said that I did.
“Will you excuse me for a minute while I finish weeding? I just have a few more rows to go.”
“Of course.” I liked watching her work.
When she finished, she walked over to a hose and washed the dirt from her hands. “Okay, I’m done,” she said.
“Can we go somewhere to talk?”
“I like to be outside. There’s a bench over there.” She pointed to a section of the yard just out of sight. Her nails were ragged and there was dirt under them.
I followed her, and we sat down on a long wooden bench. We each sat at an edge, so two people could have fit between us.