A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

  The page hadn’t changed. Of course it hadn’t. What was she thinking? That a few extra words might have slipped in between the covers when they were closed, when she wasn’t looking? Ridiculous.

  Still, a few extra words would have made all the difference. She closed the book again and worried the broken corner like a loose tooth. The cover seemed cooler now. Was she imagining that, too?

  Enough.

  She placed the diary on her bedside table and turned out the light. By morning, when she reached for it again, the book was cold to her touch.

  2.

  “Now that you’re finished,” she said, “I need to know if I’m crazy or not.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen counter having their morning tea. Pesto, shaved, covered with open wounds, and wearing the Cone of Shame, was lying on a towel on Oliver’s lap, looking drugged and exceedingly cross. Oliver had just read the last pages of the diary, and when he heard her question, he held up his hand to deflect her. “I can tell that this conversation is not going to turn out well, so please let’s not go there.”

  She ignored his protestations. “That night when the words went missing and you told me it was my job to find them, you didn’t really believe that the pages were blank. You didn’t believe that the end was receding, either. Did you.” It wasn’t a question.

  He looked her straight in the eye and didn’t miss a beat. “Sweetheart,” he said. “I didn’t ever not believe you.”

  “But you let me go on and on about it to Muriel, who must think I’m crazy now, too.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding relieved. “If that’s what you’re worried about, don’t bother. Everyone on this island is crazy. I’m sure Muriel didn’t give it a second thought.”

  This answer did little to reassure her, but given that there were so many other unresolved questions, she was willing to leave it. “Okay,” she said. “Supposing, somehow, that Muriel’s theory was right, and in my dream I was able to follow the Jungle Crow into Ueno Park and find Nao’s father and send him to Sendai . . .”

  He had put the diary to one side, and now he was flipping through the most recent New Yorker.

  “Oliver!”

  “What?” He looked up. “I’m listening. You followed the crow to the park and found the father and sent him to Sendai.”

  “Okay, so, what does that even mean?”

  “What do you mean what does that mean?”

  “I mean, are you saying that the Jungle Crow led me back in time? That if I hadn’t had the dream, Nao’s father might have gone ahead and hooked up with his suicide date and killed himself? That Nao would never have discovered that her father was a man of conscience, or learned the truth about her kamikaze great-uncle?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Oliver said. “Believe me.”

  “If I didn’t put Haruki Number One’s secret French diary into his box of remains on the altar, then how did it get there?”

  He looked up then, surprised. “You put it there?”

  “Yes. I told you. At the very end of my dream. I discovered it in my hand, and I was just on the verge of waking up, so I stuck it in the box.”

  “Smart move,” he said.

  She shrugged, feeling pleased. “Yeah, I thought so. I felt a little bit like a superhero just then.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” he said, admiringly.

  But she wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know,” she said, as her confidence ebbed. “If I were listening to myself, I’d think I was crazy, too. There’s probably a simple, rational explanation, like old Jiko put it there. Maybe she had it all along. Maybe Haruki Number One somehow managed to send it to her before he flew, but for some reason she didn’t want to let anyone know about it. Maybe she secretly supported the war and was ashamed of her son’s final decision not to carry out his suicide mission. Maybe she thought he was a coward . . .”

  “Stop,” Oliver said. “Now you really are sounding crazy. There’s not a single scrap of evidence to support that hypothesis. From everything Nao’s said, her old Jiko was a pacifist and a radical, too, even if she was a hundred and four years old. So don’t go cooking up far-fetched explanations and practicing revisionist history in order to make yourself feel sane. If you have to be crazy in order for Jiko to be who she is, so be it. That goes for everyone.”

  Ruth fell silent. He was right, of course. He picked up The New Yorker again, but she wasn’t ready to let the subject drop.

  “Okay,” she said. “But what about Haruki Number Two’s email? What about Q-Mu and MechaMu and all that quantum computing stuff? Do you really believe all that? He sounds even crazier than I do.”

  Oliver looked up from the magazine. “ ‘Quantum information is like the information of a dream,’ ” he said. “ ‘We can’t show it to others, and when we try to describe it we change the memory of it.’ ”

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s beautiful. Did you make that up?”

  “No. It’s a quote from some famous physicist. Can’t remember his name.”160

  “That’s what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can’t ever get it back.” She stared disconsolately out the window and thought about her abandoned memoir. Another ruined world. It was sad. “But I still don’t understand. What does quantum information have to do with any of this?”

  Oliver shifted the cat on his lap. “Okay,” he said. “You were speculating about multiple outcomes, right? Multiple outcomes imply multiple worlds. You’re not the first to wonder about this. The quantum theory of many worlds has been around for the last half century. It’s at least as old as we are.”

  “Well, that’s certainly ancient.”

  “My point is that it’s not new. Nothing is new, and if you buy the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then everything that’s possible will happen, or perhaps already has. And if so, maybe it’s possible that in one of those worlds, Haruki Number Two figured out how to build his Q-Mu and get objects in that world to interact with this one. Maybe he’s figured out how to use quantum entanglement to make parallel worlds talk to one another and exchange information.”

  Ruth stared glumly at the cat. “I’m not following,” she said. “I should be wearing the Cone of Shame. I’m not smart enough to understand.”

  “Well, neither am I. You have to be able to do the math to really get it, and that’s way beyond most of us. But you know about Schrödinger’s cat, don’t you?”

  3.

  Of course she knew about Schrödinger’s cat. Their cat was named Schrödinger, after all, even though the name hadn’t stuck. But, if pressed, she would have to confess that the name Schrödinger always made her feel vaguely anxious, in much the same way that the name Proust did. She firmly believed she ought to have learned about the former’s cat and read the latter’s opus, but she hadn’t quite gotten around to either.

  She knew that Schrödinger’s cat was a thought experiment, devised by the eponymous physicist, which had something to do with life and death and quantum physics.

  She knew that quantum physics described the behavior of matter and energy on a microscopic level, where atoms and subatomic particles behave differently than macroscopic everyday objects, like cats.

  She knew that Schrödinger had proposed putting his theoretical cat into a theoretical box with a lethal toxin, which was triggered to release if a certain set of conditions were met.

  “That’s right,” said Oliver. “I don’t remember the details either,161 but his basic proposition was that if cats behaved like subatomic particles, the cat would be both alive and dead, simultaneously, so long as the box remains closed and we don’t know if the conditions have been met. But at the very moment an observer opens the box to look inside and measure the conditions, he would find the cat either dead or alive.”

  “You mean he could kill the cat by looking at it?”

  “No, not quite. What Schrödinger wa
s trying to illustrate is sometimes called the observer paradox. It’s a problem that crops up when you’re trying to measure the behavior of very small things, like subatomic particles. Quantum physics is weird. On a subatomic level, a single particle can exist as an array of possibilities, in many places at once. This ability to be in many places at once is called superposition.”

  “Talk about a superpower,” Ruth said. “Nao would have liked that.” She liked it, too. If she were a subatomic particle, she could be here and in New York.

  “This quantum behavior of superposed particles is described mathematically as a wave function. The paradox is that the particles exist in superposition only as long as no one is looking. The minute you observe the array of superposed particles to measure it, the wave function appears to collapse, and the particle exists in only one of its many possible locations, and only as a single particle.”

  “The many collapses into one?”

  “Yes, or rather, that was one theory, anyway. That there’s no single outcome until the outcome is measured or observed. Until that moment of observation, there’s only an array of possibilities, ergo, the cat exists in this so-called smeared state of being. It’s both alive and dead.”

  “But that’s absurd.”

  “Exactly. That was Schrödinger’s point. There are a couple of problems with this theory of wave function collapse. What it’s saying, by extension, is that at any moment, a particle is whatever it’s measured to be. It has no objective reality. That’s the first problem. The second problem is that nobody’s been able to come up with the math to support this theory of wave function collapse. So Schrödinger wasn’t really buying it. The whole cat business was meant to point out the absurdity of the situation.”

  “Did he have a better idea?”

  “No, but later on somebody else did. This guy, Hugh Everett, came up with the math to support an alternative theory, that the so-called collapse doesn’t happen at all.162 Ever. Instead, the superposed quantum system persists, only, when it is observed, it branches. The cat isn’t either dead or alive. It’s both dead and alive, only now it exists as two cats in two different worlds.”

  “You mean, real worlds?”

  “Yes. Wild, isn’t it? His theory, which is based on what he called the universal wave function, is that quantum mechanics doesn’t just apply to the subatomic world. It applies to everything, to atoms and cats. The whole, entire universe is quantum mechanical. And here’s where it gets really freaky. If there’s a dead-cat world and an alive-cat world, this has implications for the observer, too, because the observer exists within the quantum system. You can’t stand apart, so you split, like an amoeba. So now there’s a you who is observing the dead cat, and another you who is observing the alive cat. The cat was singular, and now they are plural. The observer was singular, and now you are plural. You can’t interact and talk to your other yous, or even know about your other existences in other worlds, because you can’t remember . . .”

  4.

  Could this explain her lousy memory?

  She stared at the cat, shifting uncomfortably in Oliver’s lap. The cat stared back at her, a long, baleful look, before closing his eyes. Who was observing whom? It was hard for Pesto to observe anything at the moment with the Cone of Shame around his neck, but before the Racoon Incident, he used to like to observe himself. Could Pesto be his own observer? Interesting question. He used to like to raise his leg and study his asshole. It didn’t seem like this observation caused him to split into multiple cats with multiple assholes.

  Nao’s words came back to her just then, or were they Jiko’s? To study the Way is to study the self. No, it was Haruki who’d written that. He’d been quoting Dōgen and talking about zazen. It made some kind of sense. From what Ruth could tell, zazen seemed like a kind of moment-by-moment observation of the self that apparently led to enlightenment. But what did that even mean?

  To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of of an open-ended quantum array.

  To forget the self is to be enlightened by all myriad things. Mountains and rivers, grasses and trees, crows and cats and wolves and jellyfishes. That would be nice.

  Had Dōgen figured all this out? He’d written these words many centuries before quantum mechanics, before Schrödinger put his enigmatic cat into his metaphorical box. By the time Hugh Everett came up with the math to support a theory of multiple worlds, Dōgen was dead, and had been for almost eight hundred years.

  Or was he?

  “So you see,” Oliver was saying, “we’re now in a world where Pesto is alive, but there’s another world where he was killed and eaten by those dastardly coons, who, by the way, I’m going to trap and drown, thereby splitting the world yet again into one with dead coons and another with live ones.”

  “My head hurts,” Ruth said.

  “Mine, too,” Oliver said. “Don’t worry about it too much.”

  “I don’t think you should kill the raccoons,” she said. “Not in this world, at least.”

  “I probably won’t, but that won’t stop the world from splitting. Every time the possibility arises, it happens.”

  “Ouch.” She thought about this. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. In other worlds, she had finished her memoir. The memoir, and perhaps even a novel or two. The thought cheered her. If she’d been able to be so productive in other worlds, maybe she could just try a little harder in this one. Maybe it was time to get back to work. But instead she continued to sit there.

  “Do you really believe this?” she asked. “That there are other worlds where Haruki Number One didn’t die in a wave, because World War Two didn’t happen? Where no one died in the earthquake and tsunami? Where Nao is alive and well, and maybe finishing her book of Jiko’s life, and you and I are living in New York, and I’m finishing my next novel? Where there are no leaking nuclear reactors or garbage patches in the sea . . .”

  “There’s no way of knowing,” Oliver said. “But if World War Two hadn’t happened, then you and I would never have met.”

  “Hm. That would be sad.”

  5.

  Not knowing is hard. In the earthquake and the tsunami, 15,854 people died, but thousands more simply vanished, buried alive or sucked back out to sea by the outflow of the wave. Their bodies were never found. Nobody would ever know what happened to them. This was the harsh reality of this world, at least.

  “Do you think Nao is alive?” Ruth asked.

  “Hard to say. Is death even possible in a universe of many worlds? Is suicide? For every world in which you kill yourself, there’ll be another in which you don’t, in which you go on living. Many worlds seems to guarantee a kind of immortality . . .”

  She grew impatient then. “I don’t care about other worlds. I care about this one. I care whether she’s dead or alive in this world. And I want to know how her diary and the rest of the stuff washed up here, on this island.” She held out her arm and pointed to the sky soldier watch. “This watch is real. Listen. It’s ticking. It’s telling me the time. So how did it get here?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “I really thought I would know by now,” she said, getting to her feet. “I thought if I finished the diary, the answers would be there or I could figure it out, but they weren’t, and I can’t. It’s really frustrating.”

  But there was nothing she could do about it, and it was time to go upstairs and get back to work. As she reached into the cone to scratch Pesto’s head, a thought occurred to her. “That cat of Schrödinger’s,” she said. “It reminds me of you. What quantum state were you in when you were hiding in the box in the basement?”

  “Oh,” he said. “That. Definitely smeared. Half-dead and half-alive. But if you’d found me, I would have died, for sure.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t go looking for you.”

  H
e laughed. “Really? You mean that?”

  “Of course. What do you think? That I want you dead?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes I think you’d have been better off without me. You could have married a captain of industry and had a nice life in New York City. Instead you’re stuck with me on this godforsaken island with a bad cat. A bald bad cat.”

  “Now you’re the one practicing revisionist history,” she said. “Is there any evidence to support this?”

  “Yes. There’s plenty of evidence to prove the cat is very bad. And very bald.”

  “I’m talking about me being better off without you.”

  “I don’t know. I guess not.”

  “Well, then, you should wear the Cone of Shame for even suggesting it. Because now you’ve gone and sentenced me to another life in another world in New York, with some boorish corporate oligarch of a husband. Thanks a lot.” She gave the cat a final pat on the nose.

  “Well, don’t worry,” he said. “You’ve already forgotten all about me.”

  He was joking, of course, but his words hurt her feelings. She withdrew her hand. “I have not.”

  He reached across the counter and took her wrist. “I was just kidding,” he said, and then he held on a little longer so she couldn’t pull away. “Are you happy?” he asked. “Here? In this world?”

  Surprised, she stood there and thought about his question. “Yes, I suppose I am. At least for now.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy him. He gave her wrist a squeeze and then let go. “Okay,” he said, returning to his New Yorker. “That’s good enough.”

  Epilogue

  You wonder about me.

  I wonder about you.

  Who are you and what are you doing?