Love Among the Particles

by Norman Lock

  7. Painful Acknowledgments

  Once again on earth’s surface, which was no longer mine to speak of as firm or blessed (not now that I no longer stand upon it), I went to the apartment where I had enjoyed the company of the writer, insofar as I could enjoy what I could not touch or speak with. The writer had fallen into the hands of mystics! With unkempt gray hair and long beard, he looked like Tolstoy. Just as before, he paced the room. But he no longer smoked, and having sent a scouting party of free quarks through the closet door, I determined that he did not drink. He appeared to have relinquished his vices, and in place of pornographic and Steampunk fiction digitized within his word processor, I found moral tracts and maxims and downloads of Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass. He still paced disconsolately, and he still wadded up his hard copy into paper balls, although instead of throwing them against the corkboard, he set them alight on a small brazier as though burnt offerings to his new muse, who was, presumably, one of the Hindu gods. My eyes (to speak familiarly) smarted, and I knew that whatever consolation was his was too narrow to share in. I spun round in space like a dervish, feeling myself shunned by even this meager, unsatisfactory society. I longed to look into the mirror and see myself there, even if my hair had turned white and I was no longer young. I wished to have an identity! But only those fated to pass away in time are granted it—or so it seemed to me as I gathered myself together and prepared to take my leave of someone who did not know that I was there.

  What began as a comedy has become a fable or farce of a self pulled to pieces by strong forces and dark matters whose cause and meaning are incomprehensible. Why have I lost my composure so completely as to be no more than a cloaking mist or a dirty cloud of dust raised by a truck lumbering over an excavation site? Excavating what? Precious metals? Antiquities? Or nothing more fabulous than broken terra-cotta pipes of an ancient sewer?

  In panic (call it “agitation” to remind you of my particulate state), I fled the writer’s apartment by the window (open or shut, it does not matter) and hurried to the office building where I had passed so many years of my working life. On the twelfth floor, I entered the labyrinth of cubicles, illuminated at this late hour only by the tiny green and blue lights of electronic equipment—silent in their sleep mode, except for the intermittent muffled noises of background processing or the suppression of rogue data. In one cubicle, I had racked my brains at a computer monitor for headlines with which to sell all manner of useless trash. Was it this, I wonder, that had broken me? I roamed the office’s subdivisions, recalling this man and that woman and seeing clearly—for the first time—how they had eluded me. I had passed among them as if I were made of air. We had spoken and, at times, touched; but of mutual contact at the depths of our separate beings, there had been none. Was it this that smashed me to smithereens, that confirmed my estrangement in space and in time past all hope of rescue? Or was it so that I might be given a second chance? How given and why, I could not even begin to imagine.

  8. Consulting the Oracles

  Inside a computer at a branch of the New York Public Library, I searched the Internet in order to illuminate my condition. Elementary Particles, Behavior of the Strong Force, Quantum Chromodynamics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electromagnetic Radiation, Fundamental Forces, Higgs Boson, Antiparticles, Muon and Tau, Supersymmetry, Kaluza-Klein Towers of Particles—I surfed as if on waves of light the data streams of the World Wide Web, consulting Wikipedia as in the ancient world victims of a tragic fate had consulted oracles. Many times, I was attacked by interceptors and antivirus mechanisms that sought, like antibodies, to annihilate me. The digital world is also cruel to interlopers. Whether an existence as refined and fundamental as my own can be destroyed has yet to be tested. In my despair of a possible life without end, I may have yearned to be no more; but I do not want to die at the foot of a firewall, coughing up dark matter and bitter squarks.

  I no longer needed a word processor to record my story: I could think words into being without intermediary, imprinting them onto the electromagnetic field that is, I suspect, my consciousness. Saved in my own random access memory, thoughts—dark as clots or colorful as jelly beans—can be accessed whenever I wish. I can project them, at will, into another’s data cloud. The gist of what you are reading here was imprinted on the mind of Norman Lock, who believes himself sole author of this eventful history. During my wanderings in space and in time (unfixed, capricious, and circular), I rested—unknown to Lock—among the Edwardian railroad timetables he collects, in order to slow the wild arrhythmia of my heart (to speak hopefully). I had overtaxed my particles in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago during a failed experiment in romance.

  9. Sleeping Among Tortoises

  I had gone to the Galápagos Islands to think about time in time’s stillest backwater. There, among giant tortoises whose species’ evolutionary history spanned five million years or more and whose individual histories, a century, I roved the desolate beaches. The ancient tortoises were like objects left over from the past: To wander among them was to feel time—know it intimately—as you might a rock that has lain in the hot sun of a garden or scarcely visible under snow: a thing familiar to your eyes and touch and smell and (should you be imaginative) to your taste; for we can, some of us, imagine the taste of rock—the very different tastes of granite, soapstone, basalt, and marble. And for me, who had been given the power of empathy raised to an extraordinary degree, my experience of time under the volcanoes on those fabulous islands was … immense. I’m sorry to be vague. But how can I be otherwise, speaking as I am trying to do of a subject forever beyond our grasp? I empathized with the tortoises, which are wise. If anything can lay claim to wisdom, it must be they. I mingled my atoms with theirs and apprehended, by sensations rich and various, what it means to be a tortoise and, therefore, what time must be—its qualities and flavors. Physicists speak of elementary particles as having flavor, although they mean by it something other than the taste of a thing in one’s mouth.

  I remembered how, in the middle of the night, I would wake. Perhaps the moon had come riding into the window, splashing its garish light over the room, or maybe my wife had been startled by something monstrous in her dreaming. Awake, I remembered that I must die—in time—and grew, after so many nights of waking in the dark, to fear time and to hate it. Now that I am mired inextricably in its morass, I feared death’s opposite—seeing in it only an ultimate intensification of my loneliness. Stroking a tortoise’s shell (the color of smoke and nothingness), I spoke to it in Tortoise (why not?) of my longing to escape time and be no more. Despondent, I wound myself into an empty chambered-nautilus shell to be reminded of what it had been like to sleep in a narrow space, pressed against another’s sleeping body. Afterward, I dreamed. And of what might a swarm of particles dream? Of an orchestra playing on the sea a serenade for strings from the deck of a ship—its portholes blazing white light onto the black water, like pinpoints of illumination cast by electronic devices in a dark room. By this simile, I acknowledge—as I must—that all things have been annexed to the digital world. The night and the harrowingly beautiful music invaded the shell’s small rooms and seemed to dispel, for the moment, time’s appalling mystery and give me peace.

  I inhabited the shell (for a moment or an age) as the mind does the inside of a skull—my thoughts’ data streaming like luminous ribbons far and wide: to the cold ends of the universe as they are known to me, who is—in his makeup—their comrade and who had—as a householder and husband—watched in fascination science documentaries broadcast by PBS (and, with equally rapt attention, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai ). Was it for this, I wondered, that I had been reformed and reformatted as a swarm of particles? Was it for this that I had traveled to one of the ends of the earth to sleep among giant tortoises, where Darwin had landed and dreamed, too, in his time, about time—its grand recessional, whose origin is a protein compound in “a warm little pond”? Or was it (to speak sentimentally) to meet Marie Risset, who, like me, had been
reduced to fermions, bosons, and assorted hypothetical particles whose existence (like ours) is yet to be (dis)proved?

  10. Dance of the Particles (in 4/4 Time)

  Commingled with the flavors of that remote place (tang of brine, pungency of tortoise and guano, the charcoal and tannin of red mangrove, the tartness of prickly pear cactus favored by iguana and tortoise) was the unique flavor of what I knew at once to be a woman. I insist that Marie Risset is a woman still! I promptly emptied the nautilus shell of my agitated particles, attracted by the intense flavor of her subatomic structure. Marie had been particularized beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, at the Large Hadron Collider while inspecting one of its superconducting magnets. (The cup of French roast she had held in her hand lent its own stimulating flavor notes to her altogether-delightful ensemble.) An immensely energetic particle beam on the order of 3.5 TeV had derailed in her vicinity. (She maintains that the accident was the result of a “magnet quench incident,” subsequently covered up by CERN.) I wondered how she had managed to arrive in the Galápagos. Her answer pleased me by its frankness and by the compliment it paid to my own flavors—let me call it sex appeal for old time’s sake. Not that I had possessed it. On the contrary, I was a dull and plodding lover, inclined to fall asleep during foreplay. But I now imagined myself quite other than I had been then, in this novel shape and form purged of gross matter—the “fat” of a previous sedentary life.

  “I felt your attraction,” she said to me in French, “across the distances of space and time.”

  Doubtless, you are ready to protest. And you would be right in thinking that I know no French and she, not a word of English. “Furthermore,” I hear you demand of me, “how could two discrete swarms of particles—however they might be favorably disposed—converse?”

  I would answer you thus: “Among the particles that comprised and created us were other energies obedient to their own rigorous constitution and government. I am speaking of letters of the alphabet—French and English, both—which constitute words governed by syntax. Parts of matter and its energies … parts of speech—the same, in that worlds may be constructed of them!”

  “But you don’t speak French!” you shout, your willing suspension of disbelief at an end.

  I shrug my shoulders and would remind you that not everything can be explained.

  So it was that Marie and I exchanged information (to speak in the new style), talking together—shyly at first—of this and that:

  “These tortoises …”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “They live to a great age.”

  I agreed.

  “Like rocks, they seem to evolve not at all.”

  “Evolution,” I said stupidly, “is one of the grandest of ideas.”

  “I have been thinking,” she said after a pause that may have been of a day’s duration, a week’s, or an age’s—it mattered not at all to me, who had all the time in the world and more at his elbow (farcically speaking)—“that we may be—who knows?—the next evolutionary thing.”

  She staggered me! I had believed myself to be a freak of nature considered on a cosmic scale. I had been (to be honest with you) a little ashamed, as if I were responsible for my misfortune—as if I had brought it on myself by some unclean and unwholesome act. That I could not recall having committed one did nothing to lessen the burden of my guilt.

  The orchestra was once again playing its serenade upon the water. (If it was a dream, we were having it together!) Night had fallen with the suddenness of a scythe. Stars there were also that fell into the unlit ocean—their bits and particles so very similar to Marie’s, I thought, and would have told her if not for the old shyness.

  “Do you dream?” I asked instead.

  She nodded, and a glossy wisp of dark matter fell across her breast.

  “Of what are you dreaming now, Marie?”

  “Of a dance—a kind of fox-trot to go with the music of the orchestra.”

  “Yes,” said I, who had never danced well.

  But that was then. Now, to the glissandos of the serenade, we moved through one another nimbly, trailing luminous clouds of energy like auroras of flame. Our particles mingled and nearly caressed in the moonlight while the tortoises on the beach regarded us stolidly. She was superb! I rejoiced in my strong force; she, in her grace and mastery of the dance’s fluency.

  The serenade at an end, we completed our fiery passage and drew apart. Space—cold and vacant—loomed once more between us. Marie became distracted by thoughts of the nearby Humboldt Current: its temperature and salinity. I wandered off to be by myself, dogged by the sadness that comes of knowing that we are—in the end and for all time—fated to be alone.

  Loneliness in the New Kingdom

  1. Nostalgia Is a Property of Matter

  Objects belonging to the past, which have become stranded in the present, yearn for the time of their manufacture. It is the desire of the compass needle for its north. Only when desire has been satisfied will the nervousness of matter—the agitation of its particles—be resolved. Like fetishes, objects impregnated by time can excite the body into a new arrangement of its electromagnetic field, which then seeks to fulfill matter’s wish to return to its origins. Irradiated by the past latent in an Edwardian train schedule, I departed Euston Station to a noisy recessional of steam. My destination was the Manchester of 1910, where Ernest Rutherford was enlarging our knowledge of the atom. He was about to replace the prevailing “plum pudding” model with a planetary one. I hoped that he might reconstitute the fermions, quarks, leptons, and bosons into the man I had been before my atomic structure was smashed—by accident or malice—at the beginning of the Digital Age, in 2012. I reasoned that my reintegration could be accomplished more readily at a time when knowledge was concentrated largely in the minds of individuals instead of dispersed among hundreds of jealous specialists. You say I ought to have gone to the Swiss Patent Office at Bern to consult Einstein? But I had no railroad timetable to enable such a trip in space-time. (Traveling from New York to present-day London posed no special difficulties. I had merely to attach myself to something moving. Even a bird would have sufficed.)

  2. A Course of Mind Reading at Victoria University

  The train slowed outside Manchester, and the rain that had been falling resolved on the window of the first-class compartment into individual drops, which, in their precipitate motion and transparency, reminded me of the cloud chamber—a particle detector beloved by physicists of the mid-twentieth century. Inside the terminal, called then Manchester London Road, a blast of steam escaping the locomotive scattered the itinerant beads of rain and ascended in a dirty cloud to the immense glass-coffered ceiling, floating (so it seemed to one who was himself unmoored) on cast-iron columns. Exceptionally empathetic since my misfortune, I thought of black moths imprisoned by a window, regarding desperately the sprawling air beyond.

  I found Rutherford in his office at the university. His back was turned to me as he sat watching the rain disperse its atoms across the window. I wished I could whisper to him the secret of the cloud chamber so that its invention might be his. I felt an inexplicable regard for the man. But how could I whisper, who have only the potential for speech, lacking speech’s organs? Had the moment been in the present (and by present I mean early in the twenty-first century) and had he, like Stephen Hawking, been unable to speak without the aid of a computer interface, I would have channeled my data stream into the device and announced myself. But how, in 1910, was I to speak my mind? Even flies can make themselves seen and heard! But I was as invisible and inaudible as any ghost. You think I could have revealed myself in a cloud of chalk dust, moved the papers on the desk, or stained my particles with an Ehrlich dye? You have no idea how rarefied I am, how disembodied my consciousness! If I could not make my thoughts known to Rutherford, I would see if I could know his: I would read the man’s mind.

  By decreasing the strong force that held my particles in a kind of federation, I resolved to pa
ss through Rutherford’s skull and merge with his mind’s atoms and energies. Hadn’t I done as much when I entered computers by their data ports—those intelligent machines modeled on the human brain? But to my surprise, the electromagnetic field surrounding Rutherford was vibrant with his mental activity, which at that moment was constructing an image of the young woman passing beneath his office window, her long skirt trailing over the wet sidewalk, as she might appear undressed on a divan. (While not without interest, such thoughts lie outside the scope of this history.) I passed deeper into the field, beyond the sparks (so to speak) produced by nervous excitement, and found there an image of the atom—the tight fist of its nucleus and the orbiting electrons. To one used to the hyperrealism of digital media, the picture lying at the bottom of Rutherford’s mind was scarcely more elaborate than a cartoon. Disappointed, I began to doubt even so august a scientist as he could reverse my catastrophic disintegration.

  To have been changed into a swarm of subatomic particles through no fault of one’s own is a hardship with little compensation. Inevitably, one tires of passing through walls and longs to enter by a door, like any other hominid. (I claim to be one still!) The same dissatisfaction with novelty applies to travel: After flitting about in space like birds, flies, or a sneeze, one yearns for the machines of conventional relocation. But this much I will admit: A sentient and ambitious particle swarm can increase its understanding of the world to an astonishing degree by Web crawling. Since the fission of my formerly nuclear self, I have surfed the data streams of the Internet, acquiring veritable gigabytes of information. As a result, my grasp of the cosmos and its various microcosms is nothing less than encyclopedic!

  3. The Texture of Thought Is Knotty, Not Silken

  “Is someone there?” asked Rutherford, pulling at an earlobe.

  I concentrated all that host of sentient particles of which I am comprised on Rutherford’s mental activity. Cogitation, though highly developed in him, still seemed a kind of mechanical computing machine in its dogged worrying of scraps of thought; but in his sparkling flights of imagination, his audacious leaps beyond what a moment before had been the limit of the known, his appetite for destruction of accepted ideas and forms—by these marks I knew that I was in the presence of genius. To call Rutherford’s imagination sparkling is not to assign a fanciful image to the unseen, for within the powerful electromagnetic field produced by his brain, I saw and heard sparks fly. The atmosphere in which we two scouted for traces of each other seemed a night sky crowded with fiery comets.