Hydrogen Event in a Bubble Chamber

In the dream, I give birth in reverse. A man I don’t recognize gets younger and smaller.   I try to stop him, hold him up and keep him tall, but his adult body collapses into that of an infant in my waiting arms.   Then, before I can establish even his eye color, he is vacuumed into my belly, where he makes me swell, then shrink, until I feel nothing but surprise.   I lift my eyes.   All around me people are shrinking, as if warped by too much gravity, and then getting pulled up into different women.

In the morning, over breakfast, I think, maybe, we’ve got this all wrong.   What if things are really supposed to happen that way, and we should all be compacted and pulled into our mothers, and they into their mothers, and they into theirs; until, crushed to the size of a single infant, we are sucked into the overwhelming gravity of that first mother.   And our first father stands by helplessly as a cord sprouts from his stomach and he doubles over, resigned, and starts to shrink.

I tell Marvin about my dream, even though we’ve just met, because his paper is on black holes and I think he might be interested.   He acts like he is, even if he’s not.   Our tables are next to each other at the city’s physics conference.   All of the booths are manned by graduate students pursuing masters degrees and showing off parts of their research.   It is easy to tell the first years from the second years.   The second years are already into their Ph.D. programs.   Their displays are black and white diagrams on typing paper, or else nothing. Marvin and I, like the other first years,   have tri-fold presentation boards decorated with household items painted to look like neutrinos or the electromagnetic field.   None of the seven patrons have stopped by our booths yet to look at Marvin’s paper towel roll vortex covered in black electrical tape, or my particles made of navel and Clementine oranges, straightened paper clips shoved through them to show axis.   We chat out of boredom, but after a while I find him genuinely interesting.

Though we are in the same program at neighboring universities, we study with different professors and have radically different concentrations.   Mine is supersymmetric string theory and its products, especially how it is able to interact with quantum physics on a sub-atomic level.   Marvin tells me his is special relativity, the new visualization of gravity.   My conference paper is on particles with half-integer spins and how M-theory manages to account for their exchange.   It is a relatively new field, still largely theoretical, pioneered in the 1980s   It is the rock and roll of physics to his classical Mozart.   I have an appreciation for the beauty, balance and stability of his equations that I’m not sure he has for the innovation, creativity and danger of mine, whose consequences have yet to be explored.

Marvin is tall, even sitting down, with thick wrists and a thick waist.   His whole silhouette is soft.   When he wraps his hand around his water glass his fingers widen and he has to spread them out a little.   My fingers are long and thin from six years of piano lessons that I hated.   I have knobby joints like ball-bearings at each wrist.   I could completely disappear behind Marvin.   It is a feeling I’m not sure I like.

“Your dream may not be that far off,” he tells me. “Studies have shown that the human brain makes no interesting distinctions between the past and the present.   If someone looks at a hot dog, or remembers looking at the hot dog, the same parts of their brain light up.”

I already know this.   It has always made me wonder if consciousness is selective.   If we only remember things the way we do because it’s more attractive.   We like to think of ourselves, of our minds, of our universe as expanding.   But if there is no difference between what is happening and what was happening in our brains, is it possible we’ve only created this reality?   That what we think of as experience, is only us remembering?

I ask Marvin, who shrugs and doesn’t look at all convinced.   He tells me he likes math, equations and experiments.

He says,   “You’re talking philosophy.”

His exact words are: “If you can’t test it, it’s philosophy.”

Two thousand years ago the shape of the earth was philosophy, I tell him.   Maybe I’m ahead of my time.

Marvin starts to nod before I finish my sentence.   “I knew you would say something like that.”

Our third date happens to be on my birthday.   Marvin brings a present over when he comes to pick me up.   It is wrapped, well even.   There doesn’t appear to be a card.

“Wow. Thanks,” I say.   “You didn’t have to do this.”

He says, “It’s your birthday.   This is what people do.”

“I know,” I say, “but you haven’t known me that long.   It’s just bad luck my birthday’s so soon.”

“Are you trying to say I can’t pick out a good present?   I think I did quite well.”

I smile. “Let’s find out.”

The package is big—flat, but looks almost two feet by a foot and a half—and   heavy.   I sit down to open it.   Marvin helps.   Inside is a picture, a print, professionally framed.   The print is blue with curving white lines and little dots all over it.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’s a picture of subatomic particles, through an electron microscope.   The technical term is ‘hydrogen event in a bubble chamber.’   It’s what happens when two particles are smashed together at very high speeds.   This one’s from the accelerator at FermiLab.   The lines and spots are tracks made by the explosion.”   He runs a bulky fingertip along one of the swirls.   “See?”

I nod. “I really like it,” I say.   And I do.   It reminds me of an old map, or an astrological chart.   The circles are so perfect they look compass-drawn.   “I can’t believe this symmetry just happens.   Doesn’t it amaze you?”

Marvin shrugs.   “You know, they can pretty much predict all this stuff now.   If you know the size of the particles, their spin and how fast they’re moving, you can calculate the force with which they’ll hit and plot out how the pieces will move, and where they’ll all end up.”

“It sounds complicated.” I say.

“It is.   Theoretically, they could do it for anything, like an egg rolling off a table, or a car accident, but they don’t have computers that can run the equations efficiently enough'”not without over-heating.   Some people think that if we did, we could even plot out people’s lives.”

I want to ask if he means free will doesn’t factor in at all, but I’m afraid of what he’ll say.

I feel something soft on the back of the frame.   I turn the picture over.   There is an envelope, taped to the cardboard, with my name on it.   The script looks choppy and uneven compared to the elegant shapes on the other side.

“You don’t have to read that now,” Marvin says.   “It just says ‘Happy Birthday’ and other boring stuff like that.   It’s very generic.   It would embarrass me.”

“Let’s hang the picture up,” I say, already moving to the junk drawer for a nail.

“You have a hammer?” He asks.

I detect skepticism.

I pull a small tool case from the hall closet.   It’s pink and says “Ladies’ Tools” on the side, embossed in fake cursive handwriting.

Marvin laughs.

I open it and remove a pink-handled hammer from among the pink wrench, pink measuring tape, pink screwdriver.

“My dad gave me these when I moved out to go to college.   They were very popular in my dorm,” I say in defense.

I hand him the hammer.   It looks miniature in his big hand, like a toy for a little girl.

Marvin comes over and we drink red wine on my small back porch.   It is cool outside and he lets me sit on his lap.   We share a blanket, a twin sized fleece throw.   It is too short to wrap around ourselves, so we drape it over both of us.   The backs of my legs are cold from the breeze coming under the chair.   I try to line my legs up with his for warmth, to block the wind, but I can’t balance.   It’s okay, though.   I prefer cold ankles to the thought of being away from him, even a short distance, even for a moment.   We look at the moon even though we both know it is only reflective rock and dust.   We don’t stare at it because of its mystery, but because it is pretty for what it is.

Marvin tells me that a small black hole orbiting the earth could power ten large space stations.

“As black holes take in matter,” he says, “they give off energy.   Tremendous amounts of energy.”

“Even if it were possible to harness that energy,” I say, “black holes are formed by collapsing stars.   The nearest star past the sun is more than four light years away.   We could never have one that close.”

Marvin shakes his head.   He says, “You can move them.   They have incredibly powerful gravitational pulls.”

“How?” I ask.

“You could dangle a piece of matter in front of it, like a large meteor or a small planet.   You keep it far enough away from the event horizon that it doesn’t get sucked in and the black hole will just follow it.”

“Really?”

Marvin smiles. “Like a carrot in front of a donkey.”

The possibility of this makes me think about how folklore and tradition might be different if the Earth had a black hole instead of a moon.   Maybe our fascination for things that shine would be shifted to things that attract.   I imagine Romeo and Juliet discussing magnets instead of moonbeams. The division of the year into “months” would be a product of menstruation instead of the waxing and waning of a glowing orb.   Imagine the new reverence for the power of the hole.   Women would carry with us, each our own black hole.   A source of life and energy.   A mysterious place: small, but with infinite draw.

Marvin and I make love on the porch, him on his back on the thin fleece throw, me on top with most of my clothes still on.   He leaves some of himself inside me and I feel ownership.   It has been swallowed, pulled past the event horizon where it will be absorbed forever.   He will never get that back, that part of himself.   I love how I don’t have to give him anything.   I leave whole.   I leave stronger.

Afterward, his sweat starts to chill us both and we dress quickly in the cold.   The wine is gone and we move inside, holding hands.   I wonder if Marvin thinks I’m going to tell him that I love him.   He puts his big arms under my ribcage and squeezes.

He whispers, “You need to get some bug spray.”

But it there are no bugs.   I tell him.

“In May,” he says, “there will be.”

Marvin shakes the dust off the blanket, bull-fighter style.   I think about his bug spray comment.   I wonder if this means he plans to be with me, making love on my back porch, in May.   Or if he is just genuinely concerned that I might get mosquito bites.   Either way, I think, it is a good sign.

Cohomology dictates that the fabric of our universe can’t change shape.   It can bend and shift, expand and contract, but it cannot tear where there are no tears, or heal itself where there are.   So, a basketball could be reshaped into a brick or a table, but not a coffee mug or a doughnut.   A doughnut can be a record or a paper towel roll, but not a pair of scissors, and so on.   This cohomology is essentially the only thing that allows for difference.   On the scale of about a Planck length, this is the only insurmountable obstacle in changing matter.   I find it odd that human gender would be separated by so great a barrier.   I am a coffee cup.   As much as I may love, or feel a sense of belonging with a brick, we will never be alike in this most basic sense.   I will always be more complicated, more elegantly composed and more versatile.   This discovery comes with a sense of entitlement, and frustration.

I tell Marvin this idea at dinner.

He is familiar with cohomology, he says,   but he doesn’t think it applies.

I try to explain again.

We have been together two months and are celebrating.   This is also the first time I’ve seen him in almost a week.   Dr. Conn has him at the library fifty hours a week researching spin vectors of hypothetical particles.   Marvin starts to glaze over about the time I get to the coffee cup again.

“Yeah,” he says, “I get it.   But I don’t think you’re right.   I don’t think you can apply it on such a large scale.   Anyway, if it’s that important to you, If you feel like I need to be a coffee cup for us to connect, I’ll just get my ear pierced or something.”

“No,” I almost whisper.   “It’s not like that.   I’m just thinking theoretically.   Don’t you think this stuff is more interesting when you make it apply to your real life?”

“No,” he says, “there’s nothing more interesting than physics.   What you think is real life is bogged down with your interpretations, your memory, your spin.   Physics is pure.”

We drive to my apartment in silence.   Twenty miles over the speed limit, the way the stars look like world lines is the same way my contacts drying on my eyes makes the streetlamps look like light cones.   The reflection in my darkened window makes it look like Marvin is running beside the car. And I keep passing him by.   And he keeps coming back.

If we could visualize life in four dimensions, we could plot a world line for every existing thing.   Instead of only locating a specific object or person at a point in three spatial dimensions, we could drag its position point into the fourth dimension of space-time.   So, the world line of a bird would trace its entire history through all its different points in space and through all time.   It would be as if there were a million birds of different sizes, one for every instant of its life, at a different point.   But they would be attached, like paper dolls, or the stretchy blur of color you get when you take a picture of something in motion.   The bird then, though small in our perceivable three dimensions, would be expansive.

Normally I love this idea because it makes me feel bigger than I am, like I can change my shape based on where I move.   But today, it makes me sad.   I’ve spent the last three days on my porch moving between the folding chair and the side railing, where I’ve balanced a bottle of Orange-glo to kill bees with.   If you traced my world line, I would still be small.   Smaller than Marvin.   Smaller than this porch.   And mostly, you would only see the still image of me in the folding chair, chin balanced perfectly on my left fist.   This image would be clear, like a picture and uninteresting, like a stone.

I haven’t seen Marvin for fifteen days.   He’s found a correlation while tabling Dr. Conn’s particles and wants to look into it as something that might turn into his master’s thesis.   It wasn’t until day nine that I started to think he didn’t miss me.   And not until day twelve that I knew it.   I call Marvin and ask him to come over.   He barely hesitates before saying yes.   He must already know he won’t be over for long.   He must already know what I am going to say.

When I open the door he looks excited, even flushed. I think he might rush to me, pressing his soft belly against mine.   Instead he moves past me without any contact, which is not an easy feat in my narrow hallway.   He finds a pen on my desk and starts scratching notes into his palm.

“I thought of something on the way over.   A new way to organize.”

Seeing him again, I want to touch him.   But I am resolved.   I will wait for him to come to me.   I tell myself, I’ll give him twenty seconds.   Ten.   Five.

Finally, he puts his eyes, but not his hands on me.   “Right,” he says, “you wanted to talk.”

“Marvin,” I say, “I’m exhausted waiting for you. I can’t understand why you don’t love me, or love life, the way you love physics. ”

He tells me, “Life is physics.”

But it’s not.   His elegant equations can’t explain why I’ve spent the last three days on my tiny back porch.   And why, surrounded by pine trees, I can’t smell anything but the orange-glo I tried to kill the bugs with.

It can’t even explain why I don’t remember what happens to us tomorrow.

Marvin smiles.   For a second I think it might be a breakthrough; but, I know, it doesn’t fit the pattern.

He says, “I told you to buy bug spray.”

And it all comes together.   I love him for his creativity and brilliance, because being with him is like always having a new CD by my favorite artist: comfortable, but surprising and moving in a fresh, but expected way.   Because he is smarter than I am.

He loves me because I am always me.   He knows my composition, sure as rock, and doesn’t love me because there is mystery, but because I am pretty for what I am.   Like a formula, he knew what to put in and with the right amount of thought, what would come out. And like listening to his favorite song, he must have always known how it would end: the drum fill, the high note, cool summer tears, the smell of Orange-glo.   But even so, he wanted to get here.

There is mystery in that for me, and comfort.

“I need more than this,” I say.   “I need more than the occasional dinner together and advice about pesticides.”

“I know,” he says.

“I need to feel like I’m affecting something.”

He nods.   He’s making eye contact, but I can feel him trying not to look down at the numbers on his palm. After a while, he leaves.

I look at the print he’d had framed for me: its deep blue background, its swirling calligraphy like skate tracks on a frozen pond.   I look at it until I don’t want to see it anymore.   I take it down, lifting it from its nail in one swift motion.   Without it, the whole room looks different, empty.

Marvin’s envelope is still taped to the back.   I’d forgotten about it when he hung the picture.   I spend some time thinking about putting it in the shoebox where I keep old letters, or throwing it away, or sending it back.   But I don’t think of opening it.   Of running my fingertip along the seal.   Of looking for the thin, transparent half-moons of dried paper where his tongue slipped off, just for a second.

I don’t think about that.   Not even for a second.