Here & There (13 page)

What she came to learn that afternoon was that a desert girl had no business in the mountains. She had no sense of their proportions. Her lack of perspective failed to grasp the immensity. She couldn’t coordinate with their reality. The mountain should be getting closer, but after hours and hours of walking, it stood there, where it had always been, looming in the distance. The honest, bleak perspective had forced her hand, and she and her father finally gave in and turned back. During their retreat, she kept looking over her shoulder, watching, trying to measure, but only glimpsing an awesome size that failed to waver.

That’s how it felt with him now. Inexorably drawn toward him, but never any closer and utterly baffled by the disconnect between her efforts and her progress.

He would speak of
the inability of infinity. The myopia of minutiae
, he would quip.
There’s always more room at the bottom
, he would paraphrase Feynman.

It used to be different with them. He wouldn’t run away to do work—he would sneak away from work to be with her. The more he had of her, the hungrier he became.

You are a perpetual-motion-of-longing
machine
, he would say.
You defy the physics of desire. A source of unceasing concupiscence
, licking the sweat off of her chin as if it were distilled from the fountain of youth.

Back then she was his solace, his escape hatch, a sanctuary from the frustration of uninspiration. It was with her—having freed himself from a relentless and fruitless focus—in bed, sticky with sweat and spit and cum, that he would find his epiphanies, connect disparate abstract concepts, grab her lipstick off the nightstand, and draft equations across her body, filling up the blank page of her belly with calculations that spilled down the tabula rasa of her thigh.

She adored the sensation of him tracing his graffiti over her, of being painted with his physics hieroglyphics.

It was an amaranthine time. One filled with love and hushed laughter, during scandalous, furtive excursions to his lab in the middle of the night because she refused to let him photograph his work on her naked body.

But my equations
, he would protest.

Are mine as of now. If you want them, you have to take me too. Take me with you
, she would tease.

So off they would sneak, into the office at night, him in
pajamas and a tweed sport coat, her in her Burberry raincoat and sneakers. She would stand by the window, bathed in the moonlight, adorned in his henna that held within its labyrinthine design the secrets of the universe, while he scribbled furiously on his whiteboard.

It could not last. Eventually the petals fell from the bloom. They are not who they once were.

Elle propped herself up on several of his pillows. The moonlight strained through the mosquito netting. Reinier lay perpendicular to her at the bottom of her legs. His fingers traced over the graffiti he had left on the inside of her thigh.

“Your equations are fading,” she exhaled, having just finished gulping half a liter of water out of the bottle.

“It’s ok. They’re already backed up.”

“If Venus only knew you were going to put Galatea to work, she might never have woken her up for you.”

“Don’t be jealous. A Greek statue could never compete with Elle. Especially considering the way you tabula the hell out of my rasa.”

Elle rolled her eyes. Even groaned a little and kicked him, not to inflict any punishment, but rather to physically connect with him, reassure herself that her lover was, in fact, skin and bone and not just some moonlit apparition. While Reinier groaned with exaggerated injury, her foot didn’t pull back from the strike; instead it remained in contact with his stomach, and rubbed back and forth.

Years ago Elle had seen a news program that featured a blind and deaf Dalmatian dog. The canine was part of a loving family and led a happy life, but it manifested a peculiar habit of having to always be in physical contact with one of the family members. As long as the animal could maintain a constant assurance of their presence, it felt safe and secure. At the time, it had struck Elle as tragically (eye-roll) touching, but an impulse, an existence she could
never understand from the inside out. Nevertheless, it stayed with her. It wasn’t until she met Reinier that she finally empathized with that dog’s need. It wasn’t possessiveness or insecurity. The closest she could get to describing it was as an addiction to the warmth, the happiness that would immediately leech into her like a secretion of adrenaline, the pure, unadulterated (eye-roll) joy.

“What does it all mean, anyway
?
” Elle kicked her leg out to indicate she was inquiring about his equations written down her limb.

“It describes the relationship between quantum chromodynamics and the hadronization process.”

“So secondary school science
merde
,” Elle said with a dismissive tone, all the more dismissive with her French accent. “I figured it’d have something to do with quantum cryptography. Public- and private-key encryption et cetera. Or it described the relationship of my exquisite
derriere
to the gravitational pull of your hands. One of those two phenomenon.”

“Well, they are all fundamental forces.” Reinier’s hand slid up between her thigh and the sheets, and grabbed a handful of
derriere.

Elle moaned playfully and then shoved him back with her foot. “No, no. First you explain quantum chronamyics then we delve into my
derriere
.”

Reinier started to correct her but was stopped by his brain catching up to her double entendre.

She laughed at his speechlessness. “Come, come. Edify me,” she teased in a sexy voice.

“Ah, well, so you see, um, physics. Normal physics. All physics really. It’s ok.” Reinier took a breath, still trying to orient past her evocative entendres. “The problem with physics is it’s still all about locality. One object can only be affected by another object
that has some sort of direct contact. A pitcher throws a baseball that smacks into a catcher’s mitt, a submarine launches a missile that travels thousands of miles and collides with its target, thunder undulates as sound waves through a medium of air particles and crashes in our ears. Even light must obey locality. Photons emitted from the sun zip through the void of space for over eight minutes, hit the moon, induce a photoelectric effect that essentially coaxes a ricocheting beam of photons out that then travel to the earth, through its atmosphere, past our window, between the mosquito netting, and collide with your leg making your skin glow.”

“I am glowing a bit, aren’t I
?
”

This time Reinier smacked her and similarly left his striking hand in contact with her leg.

Elle couldn’t help but curl toward the affection. Negative attention was still attention. “Locality definitely feels like a problem,” Elle quipped, as she bent her leg in an effort to make Reinier’s hand slide down from her knee and up her thigh.

Alas, she had already nudged him down the path of physics. Reinier started to speak animatedly, with his hands. “So in essence, everything has to travel. Everything has to go from here,” Reinier held out his left hand to indicate a hypothetical location, “to there,” Reinier held out his right hand as far from his left as possible to indicate a hypothetical destination.

“
Je comprends
. Aren’t there a handful of kinematic equations that describe that movement
?
I seem to recall something of ’zat sort from my secondary school days.”

“Yes, no. There are. And they describe the movement beautifully.”

“
Alors
?
”

“But I think it’s a waste of time.”

Elle snort-laughed.

Reinier tilted his head at her, curious as to the joke. “I’m not kidding.”

“I know,
mon trésor
. ’Zat is what’s so funny.”

Reinier grinned, still not getting it, but thrilled to make Elle laugh. “Ok, so imagine a yardstick, or in your case a meter stick.”

“I know what a yardstick is.”

“So if I were to lay that yardstick through a doorway—”

“Like going from your bedroom into your bathroom.”

“Yes, now, how much time would you say it takes for the yardstick to go from the bedroom into the bathroom if I were pushing it at, say, five kilometers an hour
?
”

“Trick question. No time, since it is already in the bathroom. Unless you mean completely in the bathroom. Is that what you meant
?
”

“No, you got the trick question right. It is already in both the bedroom and the bathroom. It does not need to travel from one to other. Unless . . .”

“Unless
quoi
?
”

“Unless you’re not looking at it like a whole thing
?
”

Now it was Elle’s turn to tilt her head at Reinier.

“You answered the question correctly, but by answering about the yardstick at all, you’re already tricked.”

“How
?
”

“The yardstick isn’t a yardstick.”

“The yardstick isn’t a yardstick,” she repeated, raising an eyebrow. “There is no spoon.”
*

*
The last thing I expected was to stumble across an allusion to a Keanu Reeves movie.

Now Reinier rolled his eyes. “The yardstick is only a yardstick if you look at it that way. More precisely, it’s a collection of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.”

“So is everything, no
?
”

“Precisely. It’s just a collection of atoms and molecules like everything else. Its essence as a yardstick doesn’t objectively exist.”

Elle started to say something, but Reinier precountered.

“Nor does a spoon!” he affirmed. “Objectively. To the universe, neither a yardstick nor a spoon has an objective essence beyond its mass, which is merely an aggregate of particles. There is a subjective essence that we perceive; a yardstick is a yardstick because it happens to be a length we’re interested in. A spoon is a spoon because it is useful to us for slurping soup.”

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
*

*
Hamlet
, Act II, Scene ii. There’s something arousing about a woman who quotes
The Matrix
and Shakespeare in the same minute.

“Exactly. The yardstick is only a yard long because we choose to differentiate its atoms from the atoms of air that lie just beyond it.”

“But if I grab hold of the yardstick and pick it up, it lifts up as a whole, while the air that lies just beyond essentially stays where it lies. Molecules or not, it is a whole thing in and of itself which I can manipulate as a single unit.” Elle smiled down at him, impressed with her own point.

“True. But if a giant were to come and pick up the house, then the yardstick, along with everything else in it, would simply become part of the house. The air beyond the house, if you ignore any vortex pull, would essentially stay in place. It all depends how you look at it.”

“Huh,” Elle said. She looked around the room and scanned the ceiling, as if Reinier might have had a giant waiting on hand to demonstrate the correctness of his point.

“I’m not saying there aren’t forces at work or that the molecules of the yardstick don’t exhibit a stronger binding to one another than
they do with the air. But it’s we who choose which forces, which relationships take precedence in our assignment of meaning.”