Entangled Objects. Susanne Paola Antonetta
and mostly decoherent structures. But inside them, as Paul said, the little bits could pop around all over the place.
Paul said, “There are physicists like Andrei Linde who think we humans were made to detect things and keep this happening. Decohering and cohering. We participate in making the universe.”
“Why would that have to happen though.” Fan tapped her foot on the dashboard for a minute. She was a squirrely passenger. “Why can’t what made us to watch do the watching? That sounds awfully theological.”
“Linde doesn’t believe in God. It’s like the universe’s need. Just part of the needs of existence, I guess. The rules.”
“The needs of existence.” Both Fan and Paul had been raised Catholic and rejected it. “Existence should have no needs.”
Paul added, “Maybe the answer is we’re always observed, so we’re always in a definite state.”
And Fan thought of Cate Crawley, a woman she watched on TV. It seemed quite true that if Fan or someone did not watch Cate, Cate wouldn’t exist.
“Observation,” said Paul. “It’s a thing, in physics.”
“Observation as reality, huh,” she responded, and answered him, as she often did, with Shakespeare. “There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this.”
Fan thought of Instagram, Snapchat, many apps her students mentioned that she’d never heard of, like Tea and GibGab and Yakking: didn’t they believe to be seen is to be real? Though the average person wouldn’t know about the double slit, Fan thought, that did not mean their instincts had no merit. Popular culture offered its own intuitive cosmology.
Fan felt about Cate’s show, Crawleys Coming On, the way she felt about physics. There seemed to be something fundamental in the world that the Crawleys, especially Cate, had figured out. As Fan watched the show, she started imagining herself in the scenes, giving Cate advice, asking her questions. In her head she talked like Cate: Paul, you’re being ridick! she thought. Or to Cate: I need your thoughts on this, Cate, she would think, although she’d also interject her own ideas into the show. You can’t live your life for your mother, Cate.
They became one another’s voices of reason.
Paul and Fan invented drinks for one another. Their drinks became little guessing games, and in Korea, the drinks came to represent physicists. One invented; the other had to guess. One would mention drinks in the morning, and it generally suggested an evening in which they’d have sex. One night, Fan came home from the jjimjilbang and met Paul, as she’d promised, at six in the kitchen. He handed her a highball glass, empty.
“It’s the Heisenberg,” he told her.
“And I presume my drink is uncertainty-principled elsewhere.”
“Exactly.” And Paul produced a bottle of Brunello, a wine she loved.
When it was Fan’s turn to create a drink, she handed Paul a martini, running a spoon fast around the glass, so the gin and vermouth mixture in his hand still stirred around the olive. It quaked a little.
“The Einstein,” she told him.
Paul looked at the glass for a minute. “Ah. Mass and energy. I get it.”
Then Paul glanced admiration at her, which she took to mean she’d shown more imagination than he thought she had.
The week after this, after a late Korean class, Fan came home to find in the kitchen a line of plastic cups coiling around the table, each with a sip, maybe a teaspoon, of pastel liquid glazing the bottom.
“Drink,” said Paul, “and guess.”
She walked around the table, dripping the liquid on her tongue. It was vodka, a little sweetened, with a vaguely floral note. Ten cups’ worth barely left a flavor. All the cups had a slightly different color, shading from pale violet to a series of yellows. Paul began to drink too, starting at the other end, drinking towards her.
“This would be the Hugh Everett,” she said finally. Hugh Everett believed in infinite universes—the multiverse theory—and that we constantly pop out new versions of ourselves. Any multiverse theory holds that any possible reality must be, somewhere, true.
“It would be.”
“You know Bryce DeWitt once told Everett, ‘I like your math, but I have the gut feeling I’m not constantly splitting into parallel versions of myself.’ And Everett said, ‘Do you feel like you’re orbiting the Sun at thirty kilometers per second?’”
“Touché.”
There were days when Paul said, “I love you,” and Fan spun him by the shoulder and said, “But are you splitting into parallel versions of yourself?” trying to sound jokey, and he looked at her sadly. What did he say? Don’t use science against me.
Holding a violet drink, Fan said, “But you can’t ever stop. Every second there’s a choice. You’ll have to walk in front of me pouring Hugh Everetts for the rest of our lives.”
“What a future.” Paul put his hand on Fan’s ass, lightly, as if her ass were a vulnerable infant.
Fan moved away from the hand and tipped her finger into the next cup, bluish. She stuck the tip in her mouth and licked it. The lack of clear flavor bugged her.
“What’s in this?”
“Vodka and simple syrup. I got a few little bottles of liqueur, chartreuse and amaretto, and I meant to get more, making each one taste different. But then I got lazy and just used food coloring.”
“So this is a universe and this is a universe and this is a universe.” Fan kept dipping her finger into the cups. “And the difference is food coloring.”
Later that night Fan turned to Paul and said, “Victor, we live in chartreuse.” Paul had no idea what she was talking about.
“The chartreuse universe. The first one we drank. For us at least. There may be in infinity of Fans and Pauls before us and after us. But we’re here.”
“Or we phase into another universe with each choice and just don’t know it.”
“It’s weird to think that each of your embryos is a choice you make. You choose to clone. You choose to stick that DNA into those nuclei. So maybe in some universe they’ll grow up.” She glanced over at Paul, who began his unhappy surveying of his thumbs.
He said, “Terrifying,” and she answered, “You knew they could be women.”
Ef: Theft
Ef found she had to shove four cotton balls into the toe of each shoe to keep them in sync with her feet, rather than trying to flap off. She unwrapped the cotton balls from the little bags on her cart, slips of plastic labeled “Toiletries for the Lady,” each containing two cotton balls, a cotton swab, and a tiny emery board. She had put her own shoes, brown loafers, on the bottom rack of her cart where she kept her street clothing. For her job she had had to purchase a gray uniform with a white apron sewn onto the cloth under the double-breasted bodice, for $55. This felt maybe more absurd than anything, that for a job that was all handling dirt she had to dress so particularly. All day she had to wipe at the uniform with wet cloths, to keep stains from showing. The fabric dried right away, and soon some other stain appeared.
And she knew from what happened after a change of clothes that while she wore it, she melted into her uniform; no one saw her, just it. It absorbed her. She wore the scratchy uniform until the end of her workday.
With the new shoes on, Ef walked experimentally around the room. Even four cotton balls barely kept the taupe leather shoes under control. She was a petite woman, fine-boned, with size five-and-a-half feet, six if the shoes ran small. So she unwrapped more cotton and wedged in a few more wads, adding theft to theft; the woman in this room, whom she’d run into a few times, obviously had not meant to leave these shoes here—she found one under the bed