Schrodinger's Gat (4 page)

She shakes her head.
“Coin tosses are mostly deterministic, like everything else. “The result of the coin toss is determined almost entirely by forces known to classical physics. How hard you flip the coin, the angle and orientation of the coin at its starting point, atmospheric conditions, et cetera.”

“
Mostly deterministic. Not completely deterministic.”

“
Right. Nothing is completely deterministic, because underlying everything is a state of quantum indeterminacy. At the subatomic level, the universe is random, within certain limits. But the range of the randomness is so small that you’re not aware of it on a macro level. It is possible, though, to channel and amplify quantum phenomena, like we do with lasers and superconductors.”

“
Still not seeing the connection with coin tosses.”

“
Sorry,” she says, realizing she’s gotten off track. “My point is that it is possible to duplicate quantum indeterminacy – true randomness – on a macro level. Like with Schrödinger’s cat. Some physicists believe there’s no reason you couldn’t actually carry out Schrödinger’s thought experiment and have an actual cat that is both dead and alive. Well, there’s one reason, I suppose.”

“
The ASPCA?”

She laughs.
“That too. But I was thinking of the fact that the cat would have to be cooled to near absolute zero.”

“
Ah. That would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”

She laughs again.
“Yeah, the cat would be pretty definitely dead. And unable to inhale poison gas, in any case. What I’m trying to say is that there are ways of making coin tosses truly random. You just have to have a sort of quantum phenomenon amplifier – something that translates a random subatomic action into a physical push at the macro level.”

“
And you have such an amplifier.”

She smiles coyly.
“Right here,” she says. But she isn’t talking about the amplifier. She’s telling the cab driver that we’ve reached her car. We’re on the street that the BART station is on. My car is in the lot up ahead.

“
I’ll pay,” I say, before she can get out her wallet. “Please. It’s the least I can do.”

“
OK,” she says, opening the door. Her car is a blue Lexus with a parking ticket on the windshield.

“
If this is your idea of explaining everything …” I start.

“
I know, I know,” she says apologetically. “How about dinner on Wednesday? I’ve got to get home.”

It
’s hard to overstate how much better this day is going than I had expected. For me, anyway. Not so much those people on the pier.

“
Sure!” I say, a little too eagerly. Down, boy. “Where at?”

“
You know Garibaldi’s in Fremont?”

“
I can find it.”

“
Six o’clock?”

“
Works for me.”

“
See you then, Paul.”

“
See you.”

“
Oh, and Paul? I’m looking forward to seeing you. So don’t do anything that would significantly decrease the odds of you making it.”

I smile and she shuts the door. I have the driver take me to my car.

I
get in my little blue Ford Focus and drive home. Home is a dingy one-bedroom apartment a couple miles from the BART station with an air mattress on the floor. Deb got the house. I’m not sure how that happened.
She
left
me
. Why don’t I get the house? The kids, right. She gets the kids, the kids stay in the house, I get to sleep on the floor next to a stack of cardboard boxes. Fuck.

I arrest this train of thought and go back to thinking about Tali, trying to prolong the high I felt while talking with her in the cab. On some level I
’m aware that it’s a little morbid to be so thrilled about meeting Tali, considering the circumstances of our meeting. The adrenaline and endorphins and hormones and whatever else are all mixed up in my brain; it’s hard to say exactly what I’m feeling and why. Above all I feel
alive
, which is something I haven’t felt for some time. Am I simply infatuated with Tali, or is the intensity of my feelings related to the excitement of the day? Maybe, I think, this is just what it’s like to be around Tali. However she did what she did, this clearly wasn’t the first time. I wonder how often she does that sort of thing. Is it some kind of job? Does she get up in the morning and check her phone to see what tragedy she needs to prevent that day? Does she do this on her own or does she work for someone? I realize that I actually know very little about her. I don’t even know her last name.

What does it feel like to hold people
’s lives in your hands? To know that you’re actually helping people, making a real difference in the world? When I was a kid, I dreamed about being a cop or a firefighter, somebody who saved lives, somebody who made a difference, but at some point I decided I wasn’t cut out for that sort of life. I took the road less traveled, decided to be a novelist, and that has made all the difference: I’m a divorced high school English teacher living in a shitty apartment in San Leandro. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a teacher, but I’m not one of those teachers who gets thanked during a former student’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I’m the teacher whose classes are filled with kids who drew the short stick when scheduling their electives. I fell into teaching because I figured I could tolerate it for a few years while I worked on getting my novel published. That was fourteen years and three novels ago. I’ve pretty much given up on making any kind of difference in the world.

The idea of
“making a difference” goes both ways, of course. That psycho with the shotgun on the pier thought he was making a difference too. That’s the easy way. When you’ve given up on trying to accomplish anything positive, you can always cause mayhem. Tough luck for that asshole that Tali was there to stop him.

On some level I can understand that sort of thinking, the desperation to have some kind of effect on the world, even if it
’s just destruction. Instant fame, or infamy, and these days what’s the difference? As low as I’ve gotten, at least I had the decency to try to check out without taking anyone with me. My legacy would have been making a few hundred commuters late for work one day. And hey, at least they’d have had an interesting story to tell their co-workers. But Tali foiled that plan too.

I
pour myself a drink, boot up my laptop and open my latest abortive attempt at a novel. I guess I’m thinking that maybe the rush from the day’s excitement will translate into inspiration, or at least motivation, but it doesn’t work out that way. In fact, instead of my mood helping me to write, the inertia of the unfinished novel seems to be oozing out of the screen into my body, threatening to quash whatever is left of my buzz.

The novel
isn’t bad. None of them are bad. They just aren’t good. I’m not aiming for Dickens, mind you. I write genre stuff, mysteries mainly. The trick in writing a novel, I’ve learned, is to find the proper balance of order and chaos. You’ve got to let things get a little bit out of hand to keep the reader’s interest, but you can’t get too crazy or you’ll never wrap things up satisfactorily. You have to allow your characters some freedom so they seem real, but you also have to find a way to somehow guide them inexorably to their doom (or happily ever after, if that’s your sort of thing. It’s not mine.) The problem is that I work so hard to tie up everything nicely that the characters become cardboard cutouts. They’re not real people; they’re just puppets of doom. Or I let them do whatever they want and the whole plot falls apart. I can’t ever seem to get the balance right. Anyway, you don’t care about this shit.

I have another drink and go to bed.
Bed being an air mattress on the floor.

The next morning I awaken to the sound of my
phone ringing. The school again. I put it on silent and go back to sleep. I’ve already got five missed calls from them since I didn’t show up yesterday. I didn’t bother to call in sick; I figured I’d let that fat ass of a vice principal earn his pay by scrambling to find a replacement or, God forbid, fill in for me himself. That was my nod to the cause of mayhem, I guess. I am become death, irritant of public school bureaucrats.

The buzzing of the phone on the box where I had set it wakes me up again an hour later.
So much for “silent.” The phone’s display reads
Mom
. I sigh and answer it.

“
Paul?” says my mom’s voice. “Aren’t you at school?”

Flashes of
playing hooky in junior high. “Took the day off,” I reply. “Why are you calling if you didn’t think I would answer?”

“
I was just going to leave you a message. Don’t you already get a lot of days off? Do you have extra vacation days?”

“
I just needed some time to unpack,” I say.

“
Why don’t you unpack on Saturday? You can’t just take days off whenever you want, you know.”

“
I know, Mom.”
Because I’m thirty-six fucking years old
. “What do you need?”

“
What do I
need
?”

“
I’m sorry, Mom. How are you.” It’s supposed to be a question, but I don’t quite manage the little lilt in my voice.

“
I’m fine, Paul. I was hoping you could come over and help me with something. I was thinking this Saturday, but since you’re not doing anything …”

“
I just told you I was unpacking.”

“
Well, how much can you have to unpack?”

“
What do you mean? It’s everything. Everything I own, except the furniture.”

“
Is that a good idea?”

“
I don’t … what do you mean is it a good idea?”

“
To move everything, I mean. That woman is going to think you’re never coming back.”

“
Her name is Deb, Mom. And I’m not coming back. We’re splitting up. She made that pretty clear.”

“
Well, she can’t just do that. Don’t you have any say in the matter?”

“
What do you want me to do, Mom? I can’t force her to stay with me.”

“
A marriage is a two person arrangement, Paul. One person can’t just end it. You need to make sure she understands that.”

“
OK, Mom.” It’s easier just to go along than to argue when she gets like this.

“
And why do you have to move out if she’s the one with the problem?”

“
The kids are staying with her.”

“
Pfft,” she says. This is the noise my mother makes when the conversation has veered toward a subject she doesn’t want to talk about. My mother has no interest in my kids. I’m not sure if this is because she doesn’t like Deb or because having grandchildren makes her feel old. Probably a little of each.

“
So what did you need my help with, Mom?”

“
Oh, it’s just this thing for your father, this award. They need some pictures of him for the presentation, and I thought you could help me go through the photo albums and pick some out.”

“
Oh. Yeah, I can come over after lunch.”

“
You aren’t too busy with your packing?”

“
I can make some time. See you in a little while, Mom.”

“
Goodbye, Paul.”

I get dressed and get in the car, stopping at Taco Bell on the way over. When I get to my mom
’s house in Pleasanton, she’s got photo albums spread out all over the kitchen table.

My father
is receiving a posthumous award from some literary society. I hadn’t heard of the group, but I guess they’re sort of a big deal. Ever since my father killed himself, my mother has dedicated herself to being the conservator of his memory. They fought like feral cats when he was alive, but the day he shot himself it was like a switch got flipped in her head. Suddenly he became a saint and she would brook no mention of any of his faults, of which there were many. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d lobbied this group for the award. Not that he didn’t deserve it; by all accounts my father was a genius. His first novel,
A Dying Breed
, won just about every award except the Pulitzer. His second novel,
Retribution
, won that too. His third novel was, according to most critics, bloated and derivative, but by then his reputation was firmly established. Rather than risk slipping further on his fourth, he shot himself between the eyes. Nobody says it in so many words, but I get the impression that his suicide actually helped secure his reputation as a genius. It would certainly explain the comparisons to Hemingway, which obviously didn’t arise from similarities in their prose. Clarity and directness weren’t Dad’s strong suits; frankly I think he used cryptic language to camouflage the fact that he didn’t really have much to say. But then, he’s the one with all the awards, so what the hell do I know? I’m comforted by the fact that if there is a heaven, Hemingway is probably up there beating the shit out of my dad right now.

I spend two hours going through the albums. It’s almost comical how many photos there are of my dad and my older brother, Seth. I suppose that’s typical; everybody takes more pictures of their first kid, but my parents’ obvious obsession with Seth is almost creepy. If Seth’s future biographers ever want to know the exact date Seth was potty-trained, they’ll be in luck. And it’s pretty much inevitable that somebody is going to want to write that biography; Seth is only two years older than me and he’s already known around the world as the inventor of a form of cochlear implant that “learns” from its environment, providing better quality sound to its recipient based on feedback over time. Currently he’s working on a device that is supposed to repair damage to the auditory nerve, providing almost normal levels of hearing to individuals who are effectively deaf. Seth is a pompous asshole, but there are kids who can hear because of him. In ten years I’ll probably be going through these same albums looking for pictures of him to use when he’s awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. Hopefully posthumously. I kid.

My mother vetoes all my choices of photos, which is par for the course. I try not to take it personally; I like to think that she puts me through these exercises because she likes spending time with me rather than because she wants to rub my nose in my father
’s and brother’s successes. I try to make pleasant conversation, but not many appropriate topics are available. I have no interest in hearing more of my mother’s opinions on my marital situation, and like I said, she has no interest in my kids. My job bores both of us, and in any case I’m on the verge of getting fired. I’m tempted to announce that I almost stepped in front of a train yesterday, but I can’t see that going well either. I can almost hear my mom’s disapproving response: “How do you
almost
step in front of a train?”

So I make the mistake of bringing up my latest attempt at a novel instead.
I should know by now that this is a mistake, but I keep thinking that someday my mother is going to come around. The problem is that my mother views all novels as attempts to replicate my father’s work. That’s not an exaggeration; she once told me that F. Scott Fitzgerald should have read
A Dying Breed
before he wrote
The Great Gatsby
. She seemed to be dead serious, despite the fact that my father hadn’t been born when
The Great Gatsby
was published. My mother only reads “literary” fiction, and by “reads” I mean she skims the first few chapters, decides the author is no Edward Bayes and then puts the book on her shelf with all the other great literary works she’s never actually read. My mother spends most of her time watching soap operas. Once, in a misguided attempt to bridge the gap between us, I mentioned that a writer who had worked on one of her favorite soaps two years earlier had just won an Edgar Award for his latest mystery novel. Her response: “That wasn’t a very good season.”

So her response to my statement that I might try to finish the novel I
’d been working on is predictable. She says, “Is all this writing distracting you from your job?” If, by the way, I had made a comment about my job, she would have said something along the lines of “How long are you going to keep teaching at that school?” She disapproves of my job but also disapproves of the idea of me neglecting my job. Just like she disapproves of both my marriage to Deb and my divorcing Deb. Not that I particularly care about her opinion, but you see how it’s difficult to sustain a conversation with the woman. I don’t really want to get into a discussion of my job situation, so I ask her if she’s heard any news about Seth’s latest endeavor. This sends her into a seemingly endless explanation of clinical trials and the FDA approval process. After twenty minutes, I beg off, telling her I need to get back to unpacking.