Unpossible (34 page)

They eat their dinner at the picnic table, in the shadow cast by the bulk of the RV. Six p.m. in September and it’s still in the nineties, but the lack of humidity makes for a 20-degree difference between sun and shade. All around the campground, people fire up grills and pull open bags of chips. At the campsite next to them a van full of twenty-something Germans laugh and argue. The sky hangs over them, huge and blue and cloudless.

"It’s beautiful out here," Venya says. "I can see why you came."

"I figured Julia could work anywhere, and if she came awake maybe she’d like seeing this place again." He dabs mustard from Julia’s cheek and she continues to chew her chicken breast obliviously. "This was the last vacation our family took together before Mom died."

Professor Mom killed herself when Julia was in grad school; Venya went with Julia to the funeral. Professor Dad checked out in a completely different way. He took a position in Spain, and soon after found a new wife. Everyone in the family, Venya thinks, has a talent for absence. Everyone except Kyle.

"What about you?" Kyle says. "Did you ever make a family? Two kids, cocker spaniel, house in the suburbs?"

"I have a son," she says. "He started college last year. His mom and I broke up a few years ago, but we all get along. He’s a good kid."

"A son? That’s great!" he says, meaning it. "It sounds like you’ve had a good life."

"Good enough. And what about you? Ever find someone?"

"Julia’s the only woman in my life." He laughs, forcing it a little. "Well, I’ve had a few relationships. I’m just not very good at keeping them going, and with Julia ... I stay pretty busy. Here, I want to show you something."

He went into the RV and came out with a fresh bottle of Canadian Mist and two glasses in the fingers of one hand, and a big three-ring binder under his arm. "You remember this?" He sets down the bottle and glasses and shows her the binder cover: "HOW TO DO IT."

"My God," Venya says, and takes it from him.

"It’s not the same cover, had to change that a couple times. But some of the original stuff you put in is still there. Still accurate."

When Venya decided she had to leave, she gave Kyle a binder like this. Operating instructions for Julia. Names of doctors, prescription dosages, favorite foods, sleeping schedule, shoe and clothing sizes ... everything, down to the kind of toothpaste Julia liked. The binder is much thicker now.

"It’s all there," he says. "The trust fund accounts, computer passwords, insurance papers."

Venya isn’t sure what to say. "You’re a good brother."

"Yeah, well. I am my sister’s keeper." He sets the binder at the end of the table.

They lapse into silence. Venya pushes the last of the baked beans around on her paper plate. Kyle drinks.

"You have something you want to say," Kyle says.

Venya exhales. "True." She takes the remaining glass and splashes a bit of the whiskey into it. She swirls it around, inhaling the sharp scent, watching the liquid ride the sides of the glass. She’s never particularly liked hard liquor.

"When she comes out of it," Venya begins. "Do you talk about how she’s feeling?" He waits for her to explain. "You said the absences were growing longer. Eventually ... You called it lock-in. She’s got to think about that. Does she feel trapped?"

He smiles, tight-lipped. "I don’t think so."

"Kyle, you can tell me."

"I would know," he says. "We’ve always understood each other. We don’t have to talk about it." He sips from his glass. "When Julia comes back, all she wants to talk about is her work. Non-stop Q.M. She just starts scribbling, because she doesn’t have much time before she goes away again. Even before she resigned from New Mexico I was helping her write up her papers—not just the layman stuff, the journal articles." He gestured toward the RV. "I should show you the stuff she’s turning out now. She’s dismantling Everett-Wheeler and the other interpretations. I can’t follow the math anymore, but that’s not important. The job now is to organize the notes and get it into the hands of people who can understand her. This is her chance to get into the history books, Venya. She wants to follow it."

"What if she follows it so far she can’t find her way back?" she says. "What if she can’t stop from disappearing for good?"

"I don’t think she’d mind," he says. "In there, that’s where her real life is. Everything out here is just ... distraction."

"You don’t know that," Venya says. "When we were together, she was afraid of getting lost. We talked about it. We didn’t call it ‘lock-in’ then, but that’s what she was afraid of."

"So?"

"So, I made her a promise."

He stares at her.

"I think that’s why she called me, Kyle. Because she’s getting close." Because she’s afraid you won’t be able to do what she needs.

He puts up his hands. His laugh is brittle. "Don’t take my word for it, then. Ask her yourself."

Venya smoothes back a stray hair blowing across Julia’s eyes. "I’ll need some matches," she says.

Venya clears a length of the RV counter and sets out the baggie of grass and the rolling papers. A bong would be better—cooled smoke is best—but Venya didn’t want to put one through airport security. It was nerve-wracking enough just to pack the marijuana, rolled up and hidden in her tampon box.

She shakes out a little of the grass onto the paper. She hasn’t rolled a joint in years, but motor memory guides her hands. In the end she spills only a little of the pot.

"This is your plan?" Kyle says. "Get my sister high."

"It worked in college." Twenty-five, thirty years ago. Marijuana screwed with Julia’s focus, derailed the train—if the concentration of THC was high enough. Venya’s co-worker assured her that the pot was near-medical-grade, but there was no way to know if it would be enough.

Venya sits cross-legged on the floor of the vehicle, almost under the table. Kyle guides Julia until she’s lying face up on the floor with her head on Venya’s lap, staring at the ceiling. Kyle lights the joint for her, and Venya breathes with it to get it going.

"Pinch her nose," she says, then takes a long drag and holds the smoke in her mouth. She lifts Julia’s head, and holding the glowing joint away from their bodies, bends to place her lips against Julia’s. Venya exhales, a long sigh. Smoke eddies above Julia’s mouth, then slowly drifts across her eyes. Julia blinks, but doesn’t shift her focus from the ceiling.

"It may take awhile," Venya says. She draws on the joint again, thinking about the first time they kissed. Julia seemed so afraid, as if she didn’t know how to live in her own body.

After a few minutes Venya’s lower back and shoulders begin to ache from the awkward position. Even though she’s trying not to inhale she feels light-headed. The pot is indeed strong, or else Venya is indeed old. She suspects both.

Julia never liked marijuana. Or any of the prescription drugs the doctors tried on her in the early days. None of them worked for very long once she developed a tolerance, most of them had uncomfortable side effects, and all of them, Julia said, made her stupid. She couldn’t bear stupid.

The smoke alarm goes off. Venya jerks, and Kyle, laughing, reaches up to the RV’s low ceiling. He pulls off the alarm’s plastic cover and yanks out the battery.

Julia hasn’t moved.

"I don’t think this is working," Kyle says. The joint’s already burned down half its length.

"Look, her eyes are closed," Venya says. She tugs one of Julia’s ear lobes. "Come on now, Sleeping Beauty."

Julia opens her eyes. She looks up at Kyle, then turns her gaze to Venya. Her hand lifts and touches Venya’s cheek.

Julia smiles. "My Princess Charming."

Kyle helps the two women to their feet. Julia laughs, coughs, then recovers, smiling. "We’re both old women!"

"Fifty is the new seventy, Jay." But Julia’s wrong, Venya thinks. Or half wrong. Julia awake seems as beautiful to her as when they first met.

Julia looks around at the cabin, at the stacks of paper in the slanting light. "I need to write some things down," she says quietly, then catches herself. "But not now. What time is it—seven? We can watch the sunset."

"If we leave now," Kyle says.

"Vee, you better roll another one of those before I go away again."

Kyle passes out flashlights for the way back, then leads them out of the campground. After a hundred yards or so they step off the park road and onto a well-traveled hiking trail. Julia smokes as they walk, putting the joint down by her side when they pass people coming back from the point to the campground. The trail runs across sandy ground, then over patches of slick rock where the trail is marked by small cairns.

Julia puts her arm in Venya’s. "I’m so glad you came," she says.

"You called," Venya says simply. She doesn’t know what she can say in Kyle’s presence. Julia called her without telling her brother, without even telling him that she’d woken up while he slept. "Kyle says you’re working on something important. Something about dismantling the many-worlds interpretation."

"You remember Everett?"

"A little. I proof-read a lot of your papers, Jay."

"You kept correcting my semi-colons," Julia says. She takes a hit from the joint and grimaces. "It’s not just Everett, and the Deutschian spin-offs of that. I’m also taking down Zurek’s many-histories, and Albert’s many-minds, and Bohm’s pilot waves. The Copenhagen Interpretation already died with the failure of complementarity."

"You don’t say," Venya says. In two seconds Julia’s zoomed years beyond her reading. "And your idea is ... ?"

"Wheeler-Feynman’s absorber theory, but fully extended into QED." QED is quantum electrodynamics—Venya remembers that much—but she’s never heard of the absorber theory. "With a few of my own twists," Julia adds.

She’s animated, waving the lit joint like a sparkler. Venya takes it from her and squeezes it out. There are matches in her pocket if they need to relight it.

"There’s no need for an observer to collapse the wave," Julia says. "No need for parallel universes sprouting out of control. The universe is not a growing thing, it’s already complete. From the moment of the big bang, all the work has already been done. It’s whole and seamless, going backward and forward in time. There’s no ‘now’ and ‘then.’ Everything’s now. Everything’s happening at once. Look—"

Julia stoops to pick up a small rock, and scrapes an upside down V on the sandy ground. "A particle going forward in time meets an anti-particle going forward in time." She scratches a minus sign on the left-hand segment and a plus sign on the other segment.

"Oh God, more Feynman diagrams," Kyle says.

Julia digs into the intersection of the two lines. "That’s an electron colliding with a positron. They’re destroyed, and emit two photons that fly off in opposite directions." She draws two lines extending from the intersection, making an X. "It doesn’t matter which way time’s arrow is pointing. We can read the diagram from any perspective and it’s equally true. Read it from left to right and you can say that electron meets a photon and emits a photon and a positron. Or from the top, two photons collide and emit an electron and a positron. All are correct. All happen."

"Okay ... " Venya says. She looks at Kyle, her expression saying, How do you put up with this stuff? She has no idea where Julia is going with this, but after hours with the absent version of the woman, it’s a pleasure to be with a Julia so present.

"But it’s equally true," Julia says, "to say that an electron strikes two photons and emits a positron that travels backward in time." Julia looks Venya in the eye to see if she’s following. "Time’s arrow doesn’t matter. If the map is true, it’s true for any point in time. It’s a map of the world, for all space-time. The future is as set as the past, for everyone. The territory doesn’t change."

"For particles, not people."

"What do you mean, not people? Schrödinger’s Cat, Venya. The EPR paradox. People, and their choices, are already factored into the equation."

"But people have free will."

"That reminds me of a joke," Kyle says.

Julia tosses the rock away. "Free will just means that you don’t know what’s on the map. You don’t create the future, it’s already there, waiting for you like a Christmas present. All you have to do on Christmas morning is see what’s inside."

"A Calvinist dies and goes to heaven," Kyle says.

"What?" Venya says.

"Ignore him," Julia says. "I do."