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.
oLightsoffnow D Sexuality Hidden Szh 1 Lights Off Now PANK Magazine / Aubrey Hirsch v d Lights Off Now m Lights Off Now Now nLightsoffnow D Sexuality Hidden Szh 1 Lights Off Now PANK Magazine / Aubrey Hirsch q u Lights Off Now