The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  We didn’t go into Einstein’s house. We didn’t go into any of the museums or churches or galleries that we passed. Mr Peterson said that he didn’t want to be indoors more than necessary, and he especially didn’t want to go anywhere quiet. He was happier in the fresh air and bustle, just moving from place to place. He didn’t want to stay still for too long.

  We were back at the hotel in plenty of time for our first appointment with Dr Reinhardt, which took place in Mr Peterson’s room. We both sat in the blocky art deco chairs while Dr Reinhardt perched a few feet away on the one-armed, stubby-footed sofa. She was, as Herr Schäfer had told us, a sympathetic woman, but she was also very thorough in her questioning. And because Mr Peterson often had to provide quite detailed responses, the interview lasted a long time.

  Dr Reinhardt asked about the injury to Mr Peterson’s left hand, and he told her that he’d fallen a few days earlier and had received treatment in hospital. (He omitted the second half of this story – quite wisely, I thought.) Then she asked him lots more questions about his PSP and the impact it was having on his life. This was probably the easiest part of the interview. The facts were simple and indisputable. Much trickier was negotiating the dark waters surrounding Mr Peterson’s previous suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization – his six-week stay on the psychiatric ward. These facts were, of course, well documented in his medical record, and they drew us deep into Catch-22 territory.

  Under Swiss law, Dr Reinhardt explained, the prescription of narcotics and anaesthetics was very tightly regulated. The specific law that controlled such prescriptions was a formidable piece of legislation, and it had a similarly formidable name. It was called die Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung. This name was considered formidable even by native German-speakers, who were used to long words. Nevertheless, Dr Reinhardt assured us that, once you got to grips with it, die Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung was not all that complicated – or not in the section dealing with physician-assisted suicides. In essence, there were three sensible rules: the patient must have expressed explicitly his desire to die, this desire had to be persistent, and the patient had to be of indisputably sound mind. It was this final point that caused the problem, of course, because it was standard medical practice – sanctioned by The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders – to regard the desire for self-destruction as evidence of poor mental health.

  Mr Peterson wrote an elaborate page and a bit explaining how he’d been hospitalized and forced to take Prozac for six weeks, but he’d never actually felt himself to be ‘depressed’ – or not until he’d been handed to the psychiatrists.

  It was being sectioned that made me depressed, Mr Peterson concluded, not vice versa.

  Fortunately, Mr Peterson’s past diagnosis of ‘depression’ was not deemed to be a critical factor, and Dr Reinhardt was more than satisfied with his explanation. She only had to be sure that he was thinking clearly in the present, and that his desire for death was not the product of a short-term depressive episode. The fact that he’d been a member of an assisted suicide clinic for the past fifteen months suggested it was not. Dr Reinhardt felt confident that she could write him a prescription without violating the terms of die Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung.

  She had greater concerns regarding whether or not Mr Peterson would be physically capable of ending his own life. The medicament – she did not refer to it as a ‘medicine’ – that was prescribed for assisted suicides was sodium pentobarbital, and since most patients would not be able to administer it safely to themselves as an intravenous injection, it had to be taken orally. The medicament would be dissolved in about sixty millilitres of water, which then had to be drunk down quickly, preferably in one attempt. This would cause a peaceful loss of consciousness in a matter of minutes, followed by respiratory failure a few minutes later. It was completely painless and risk-free, Dr Reinhardt assured us, but the sodium pentobarbital had to be swallowed quickly and in its entirety. Sipping the solution or taking an incomplete dose would be likely to result in a loss of consciousness, or even an anaesthetic coma, but it would not guarantee death.

  The problem, of course, was that swallowing thin liquids was not easy for Mr Peterson. The same neurodegeneration that caused the difficulty with his speech also affected his ability to control his throat muscles. Sixty millilitres of water was not a lot, but the dissolved sodium pentobarbital had a very bitter taste, and this increased the chance of a choke reflex.

  Dr Reinhardt had to be confident that Mr Peterson could knock back a small glass of water without complications, so she made him do two trial runs. The first was a bit of a struggle, but he managed it in less than seven seconds, which was deemed a satisfactory time-frame. In the second run, Dr Reinhardt suggested that he use a straw while I held the glass. (This kind of assistance was acceptable, as long as I didn’t pour the drink; the action that ended Mr Peterson’s life had to be his own.) Because he was no longer worrying about his hand–eye co-ordination, Mr Peterson could focus all his attention on his throat, and consequently, found the straw method much easier. Dr Reinhardt was satisfied and left with the promise that the next evening’s appointment would be much shorter. We would run through the practicalities once more, Mr Peterson would reconfirm his decision to die, and after that, the prescription would be written. There would be no further obstacles.

  It wasn’t so late when I phoned Ellie that evening. I don’t think it was even nine o’clock, less than twenty-four hours since our previous conversation, but already, in this short time, things had started to move.

  The police had gone ahead with their ‘appeal’ that morning: they wanted me, or anyone else who knew of my whereabouts, to contact the Somerset and Avon Constabulary immediately. My mother had declined the police’s invitation to deliver the appeal personally; her only involvement had been in supplying them with a recent photograph of me. According to Ellie, it was not a good one.

  ‘I guess it was the most recent photo she could find,’ Ellie told me. ‘Or maybe the only photo she could find. I don’t see why else she would have given them that.’

  The photo showed me sitting at home with Lucy on my lap. ‘That’s probably the only time she could get me to stay put for a photograph,’ I reasoned. ‘She knows I don’t like having my photo taken.’

  ‘Yeah. It shows.’

  ‘Do I look pissed off?’

  ‘No, you don’t look pissed off. I mean, you’ve got this kind of snarl going on – your face is really screwed up – but I wouldn’t say you look pissed off. That would be an improvement. To be honest with you, you look fucking sinister.’

  ‘At least the cat’s there,’ I reasoned. ‘I suppose that must humanize me a bit.’

  ‘The cat makes you look like a Bond villain.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘They’ve been showing it on the news – and not just the local news. By this evening it was on the national news. Seriously, this is a big story, and it’s gonna get bigger. You can tell. It’s got “public interest” written all over it. The details are just fucked up enough to grab people’s attention. We’ve already had a couple of journalists phoning the shop. Trust me: this story isn’t going away.’

  Once more, I didn’t relay any of this information to Mr Peterson. I didn’t think it would do him any good. And despite Ellie’s dramatics, I still felt reasonably insulated from whatever was going on at home. I doubted that anyone in Europe paid too much attention to what was happening in the UK, much less Somerset. Nevertheless, when Mr Peterson told me the following morning that he wanted to get out of the city for the day, I decided that this was not a bad idea.

  I don’t really care where we go, he told me, but I think I’d like to see those mountains a little closer up.

  ‘You want me to drive you into the mountains?’ I asked.

  No, I thought we’d walk.

  ‘Oh.’

  I’m kidding.

  ‘Right.’

  I’ll le
ave the itinerary up to you. We can go wherever the hell you want. Just so long as it’s away from the city.

  I thought about this for a few seconds. ‘How do you feel about CERN?’ I asked.

  So we drove to CERN. It was a four-hundred-mile round trip, but luckily when it came to car travel, Mr Peterson still had what he termed an ‘American mindset’. With eleven hours to spare, he did not regard a journey halfway across Switzerland and back as a daunting prospect, and neither did I.

  Sticking to the Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung and taking the A1, the Autobahn that cuts straight across Switzerland’s central plateau, linking Geneva, Bern and Zurich, the return leg of our journey took a little under three hours. But on the outward leg we took the four-hour scenic route, skirting the foot of the Alps with a halfway stop at Interlaken, which looked like a postcard – as did most of Switzerland, in fact. It was the kind of country where you couldn’t imagine anyone ever dropping litter, a country of crisp air and castles and jagged mountains and lakes like mirror-glass, reflecting only pristine hues of blue and green and white.

  Of course, by the time we’d reached CERN, at the French border just northwest of Geneva, the landscape had diminished somewhat, but the surroundings were still pleasant enough. There were rolling hills covered by vineyards and scattered trees and villages, and you could still see the Juras to the north and Mont Blanc rising fifty miles to the southeast. As for CERN itself, my first impression was that it looked like a large but otherwise normal workplace – the kind of business park you’d find outside any city or large town. It had a bus stop and a supermarket-sized car park filled with fuel-efficient hatchbacks. It had a reception and lots of blocky, flat-roofed buildings that looked like regular offices, and a handful of workers drifting around outside who didn’t look exactly irregular either, aside from the fact that none of them was wearing a tie. (As you probably know, scientists don’t wear ties unless they’re giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry or receiving a Nobel Prize.) The only noteworthy things about the complex were the twenty European flags flapping over the central boulevard and the thirty-by-forty-metre wooden globe that sat across the road from reception. But, of course, this was just the surface; I knew that most of what was interesting about CERN was buried a hundred metres below us.

  We weren’t allowed to go down to see the Large Hadron Collider because it was the most expensive science experiment in human history and not open to the general public. The receptionist directed us instead to the Globe of Science and Innovation, the vast wooden structure over the road, which housed a permanent exhibition on CERN and particle physics.

  What is a large hadron, anyway? Mr Peterson asked as I was wheeling him across.

  ‘It’s not the hadron that’s large,’ I explained, ‘it’s the accelerator. A hadron’s just a proton or neutron or similar particle, and they come in regulation sizes, like ping-pong balls. They’re exactly like ping-pong balls except they’re about twenty-five trillion times smaller.’

  That number means nothing to me.

  ‘Two point five times ten to the thirteen: twenty-five followed by twelve zeroes.’

  That’s even more meaningless.

  ‘If you scaled up a proton so it had the diameter of a ping-pong ball,’ I clarified, ‘then a ping-pong ball, in comparison, would have a diameter seven hundred times the diameter of the Sun. It would be approximately the same size as Betelgeuse.’

  That’s just plain ridiculous, Mr Peterson wrote.

  Although it was very austere on the outside, once we’d made our way through to the exhibition area, the Globe of Science and Innovation looked like the command centre of an alien spacecraft. Mr Peterson found it to be vaguely hallucinogenic, and while it had little in common with any of the hallucinations I’d experienced, I knew what he meant nonetheless. The interior was a vast circular arena dotted with variously sized orbs and screens and interactive display pods, with everything illuminated by coloured spotlights that shifted and faded and brightened as you moved around the room. The lights were all in very dramatic, futuristic tones like turquoise and violet and electric blue, and, inevitably, there were lots of strange, ambient noises humming and fizzing in the background – all the standard devices that marketing teams and PR men use to ‘sex up’ particle physics, as if this were a subject that needs such interference. Nevertheless, I had to admit that the audiovisuals were impressive, and the exhibition itself was very well put together. The interactive display pods had an English audio option, which meant Mr Peterson didn’t have to struggle to read anything. One touch of the screen elicited a two- to five-minute lecture on topics such as antimatter and dark energy and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and so on. There was plenty of information, but since Mr Peterson didn’t have the benefit of the onscreen graphics, which moved too quickly for his eyes to follow, I still found myself adding bits and pieces wherever I could. It started off with simple explanations of what was going on onscreen, but grew increasingly complicated from pod to pod. I don’t know why, but the more I talked, the less I felt like stopping. And, unusually, Mr Peterson seemed in no hurry to stop me either. He even asked questions.

  I suppose the ping-pong ball analogy must have whetted his appetite for more of the same. For some reason, he seemed to get a kick out of these ludicrous comparisons – not to mention all those mind-boggling numbers and scales in which fundamental physics excels. Of course, the display pods already gave us a fair number of statistics and analogies. There was the standard example used to illustrate the structure of the atom, namely: if you scaled an atom up to the size of a football stadium, its nucleus would be a single pea placed on the centre spot and its electrons would be dust motes orbiting close to the furthest seats. Everything else would be empty space. Then there was the terminal velocity to which the hadrons were accelerated in the LHC: 99.999999 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, the hadrons would be looping the twenty-seven-kilometre accelerator tunnel approximately eleven thousand times every second. But Mr Peterson was not satisfied with this information alone. Before long, he had me working out all kinds of ridiculous maths problems.

  How long would it take one of those hadrons to get back to Zurich? he asked.

  I scribbled my calculation on the back of his notepad, which I’d had to hold up to the display screen to read. ‘If it took the A1, just under a thousandth of a second,’ I answered. ‘In comparison it’s going to take us about three hours in the car.’

  How about from Zurich to the Sun? Mr Peterson asked.

  ‘Eight minutes twenty seconds.’ (I didn’t have to figure that one out.)

  How about us?

  ‘Driving?’

  Yes, driving.

  This calculation took a little longer. The answer I came up with was a little over one hundred and forty years, if we drove twenty-four hours a day and stuck to the motorway speed limit.

  But I think the number that made the biggest impression on me concerned the lifespan of the ‘exotic’ particles created in the LHC. The longest-lived of these particles could exist for only a few hundred-millionths of a second before decaying; the shortest-lived were so unstable that their existences couldn’t even be ‘observed’ in a conventional sense. They popped into being and were gone in the same tiny fraction of an instant, so quickly that no instrument had yet been invented that was sensitive enough to register their presence, which could only be inferred post mortem. But the more I thought about this, and the more I thought about how old the universe was, and how old it would become before it suffered its final heat death – when all the stars had gone out and the black holes had evaporated and all the nucleons decayed, and nothing could exist but the elementary particles, drifting through the infinite darkness of space – the more I thought about these things, the more I realized that all matter was akin to those exotic particles. The size and scale of the universe made everything else unimaginably small and fleeting. On a universal timescale, even the stars would be gone in much less than the blink of an ey
e.

  But this was not an analogy I felt like sharing.

  When I called Ellie that evening – after the second appointment with Dr Reinhardt but before Herr Schäfer’s boeuf bourguignon – she told me that my story had ‘gone viral’. A couple of journalists phoning the shop had, overnight, become a dozen transient reporters who took turns doing their pieces to camera in front of the shop and haranguing my mother for an interview. So far, she’d answered only one question, which had caught her off-guard as she was opening up in the morning. She’d been asked how she was feeling.

  ‘I’m upset, obviously,’ she’d replied.

  A thesaurus was consulted, and by mid-afternoon my mother was quoted as being ‘distraught’. After that, she said nothing at all, which was taken as further confirmation of just how dismayed she was feeling. People wanted to empathize with her suffering, and a wall of silence was not going to deter them.

  ‘I told you,’ Ellie said. ‘This story’s got “public interest” written all over it. It’s going nowhere. The appeal’s still running every hour. They’re still showing that fucked-up photo and making references to your “disturbing” note.’

  ‘Things like this have a lifespan,’ I philosophized, ‘and it’s not—’

  ‘You’re all over the internet too,’ Ellie ploughed on. ‘People are discussing you on forums! I’m surprised you haven’t seen. They do have the internet in Switzerland, right?’

  ‘They invented the internet in Switzerland,’ I said. Then my heart fluttered against my ribcage. ‘Who said anything about Switzerland?’

  ‘Everyone! That’s where everyone’s saying you’ve gone. Apparently, it’s the only country in the world that will provide medical assistance to foreigners who want to kill themselves. I assume that’s what’s going on here? If you were planning to drive the old man off a cliff, you could have done that in Dorset. No need to go abroad. Even the police have that part figured out.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I didn’t know what else to say. I thought I could hear Ellie lighting up at the other end of the line.