by B K Brain
Cars and houses. A mailbox. Blurry. “I don’t really remember.”
Big Sis tossed her a glance like she knew that was a lie, but didn’t say so. She didn’t need to say it; the look was enough.
Eddie said, “Okay. Maybe it was the first time I saw it.”
“Have you seen anything else?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m crazy, remember? How can I be sure of anything?” Three. Point one. “So, popcorn?”
“Fine.”
Eddie could tell Rachel was worried. New hallucinations meant more meds and more doctors.
“I won’t see him again. Promise.”
A red light, a crosswalk, staring teenagers. Judging eyes at every turn, as always. You can’t get away from them, even in a little town like Munster, Indiana. Eddie shrank down low and focused on her feet.
Your purpose, little girl. Tell me.
3
Rachel’s house was smaller than their parents’. Two bedrooms. Only one bathroom, which they shared, naturally. The living room and kitchen were the same room. A couch, two chairs, and a television on one side - cabinets, stove, and refrigerator on the other. Carpet and linoleum met down the middle in an abrupt declaration of boundaries.
She headed for her bedroom while Rachel went to the kitchen to cook hamburgers and popcorn.
With the door shut Eddie heard a voice coming from a shadowed corner. She turned to see an open closet and a jacket hanging from the knob. She heard things like that all the time. Low grunts. Mumbles. Breathy, disembodied whispers. Sometimes they told her things. Other times they just said her name.
Eddie.
“I’m not talking to you,” she said. “Go away.”
Your meds aren’t working anymore, Ed. Admit it.
“Shut up.”
Tell me about the bookstore.
“Nothing happened, okay? Nothing.”
Yes, nothing happened. And it will happen again.
She walked to the window and pulled open the curtain. Grass. Dirt. Trees. The trees here didn’t matter. She turned back to darkness. The voice wouldn’t give up so easily. They all hate you.
“Rachel doesn’t hate me.”
Not yet.
A knock at the door. “Time for your pills.”
A huff. “I know, Rachel.”
Into the living room. Carpet, then linoleum. Grease sizzled and popped at the stove. Sis stood at the sink with her back turned. The dishwasher, for whatever reason, never got used. Eddie pulled out a chair and sat at the table.
A full glass waited for her, and a little gathering of multicolored pills. Zyprexa. Lithium. Abilify. And one with a name so long even Pat Sajak wouldn’t be able to solve the puzzle. Eddie held up the bottle to count the vowels.
“Who’s in charge of naming these things?”
Rachel turned with dripping, soapy hands. “I wouldn’t know.” She crossed arms, waiting. She always watched Eddie swallow her pills; that was the rule. And Eddie followed the rules. Mostly.
Three point one four one five nine.
Eddie washed her meds down with water and a slice of Pi.
4
An atom, the building block of all physical matter in the universe, is very much like a miniature solar system, a tiny nucleus orbited by electrons. The empty space between the central point and those orbits represents nearly all of the atom’s size. Remove that space and matter would be much, much smaller. In fact, if atoms everywhere were suddenly relieved of their emptiness, the entire human race would fit into Eddie’s next bite of hamburger.
She grinned, chewing.
Rachel sliced into an envelope, pulled out a bill. The amount due made her exhale with frustration. A quiet moment, presumably spent despising the electric company, lingered. Then she looked to Eddie.
“Your appointment is at ten o’clock tomorrow. Don’t forget.”
“You’re taking me?”
“I told you I took the morning off. Remember?”
“Yeah.”
“So be ready. I’m not lying to your shrink again.”
“A flat tire is a perfectly plausible excuse.”
“She’s a psychiatrist, Ed. She knew it was a lie.”
Eddie shrugged. “Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t.”
“Just be ready to go.”
After dinner Eddie went to the living half of the room to watch TV while Rachel got back to washing dishes. The automatic dishwasher, quiet and useless like always. The television - on the other hand - always on. Even when there was nothing worth watching, which was nearly all of the time. She flipped channels like a spastic child. Two seconds here, five seconds there.
A show about sports cars. Next.
A show about a man eating strange food. Next.
1980’s sitcoms that couldn’t have been funny the first time. Next.
The search lasted nearly an hour.
Finally, at five minutes to eight she put it on channel 51 and set the remote aside to cool.
As she’d feared, the episode was a rerun. She’d seen it at least four times. Eddie remembered not only because it was the one about string theory, but because the host wore a pinstripe gray suit and a white shirt, with a red handkerchief in his breast pocket, a combination he hadn’t worn since.
“Seen it,” Eddie said. “Oh well. It’s a pretty good one.” She scooped a butter-flavored handful into her mouth.
“You wanna watch something else?” Rachel asked.
Ridiculous questions do not deserve answers, so none was given.
The first commercial break offered some great news. The midseason hiatus was over. Next week’s show would be brand new and all about the possibilities of time travel. Eddie squealed with delight, very nearly choking on her popcorn.
Big Sis did not share her enthusiasm.
5
Three minutes to midnight and Dr. Samuel Jacobson was preparing to bend space again.
He’d performed the experiment only once before, at the Norritech Laboratory in Chicago. He, his research team, and his partner, Dr. Leon Stakovsky, were there, along with a few board members and three men from the Department of Defense.
The government had known about the project for years but that didn’t mean they took it seriously. Quantum computing was still in its infancy and Sam claimed he’d built a machine that made the others look like Speak & Spells. Nobody actually thought it was true. Who in their right mind would?
The initial simulation changed everything. Skepticism vaporized in an instant, not unlike two chairs, a clipboard, a ream of paper, and Bonnie’s dog, Maurice. Hard to say where the old pooch ended up.
Even Bonnie had to admit it was amazing. After she finished screaming, of course.
That was five days ago, at Norritech. Sam and Leon moved the machine to a private lab immediately following the initial test. Not an easy job. Dismantling a device with hundreds of sensitive components and loading them onto a trailer, while keeping the four stage Helium 3 cooling unit powered to maintain a temperature of 0.015 degrees Kelvin was quite a challenge. If temperature rose even a fraction of a degree the signals from the quantum bits would be lost behind a wall of heat-induced quantum interference. It would then take days to re-cool the entire system, and weeks to recalibrate.
The particles themselves were special. Unique. Without them the machine was just like dozens of other quantum computers in facilities all over the world. With those extraordinary particles, the machine’s power was without limit. Five hundred and twelve Gravitons suspended between super-cooled titanium plates had given them the ability to accomplish tasks no one thought possible.
They could create things.
Change things.
Distort reality.
That’s why Sam had to take the machine. The project was to be seized by government-appointed personnel and all research forfeited. He could not let that happen. Leon reluctantly agreed.
So they stole it. One late night operation and the t
wo went from scientists to federal criminals. It had to be done. The government could not be trusted with such power. Nobody could.
As it turned out, not even them.
6
A field of wheat stretched out in every direction, a golden carpet swaying in the breeze like boundless ocean tides. Too far to see anything but a silver haze in the distance. The air, the field, the sky. It all stopped there, at the limit of her vision, for that was the end of Eddie’s world. The horizon was the end of her everything. A long walk from where she stood, but not impossible.
She began the journey through a thick, waist-high crop. Something below the surface moved, burrowing through the strands of wheat in a flooding of veins. Moving, shifting, pulsing. Crawling like a den of vipers. She ran.
As fast as her feet could take her, but it wasn’t enough. Eddie suddenly realized she was running in place. Sure she was – horizons, like everything else, were irrational. Unreachable. She’d been running in place her whole life.
She stopped, peered downward, spread the golden curtain to see. As suspected, there was nothing underneath. No ground, no dirt. Just a black, empty void. The place where she stood was an illusion.
Eddie fell into the nothing. The place between atoms.
It was a long way down, but not impossible. Nothing was impossible.
Eddie sat straight up in bed. Dark, cold, quiet. The dream faded, leaving behind a world that felt hollow. She headed for the kitchen.
Carpet, then linoleum. To the cabinet for a cup, the sink for water.
She leaned close to the window. Concrete and grass, the driveway, the sidewalk. And the empty silhouette of a man.
Don’t look too close, he said.
“At what?”
Anything.
“Why?”
The world is stitched with brittle thread.
“What are you talking about?”
Your expectations won’t hold much longer.
“I don’t understand.”
Soon you’ll see everything. And nothing.
Eddie walked around the table, to the door. She opened it and stepped out to the porch. The night air carried a frigid sting.
The shadow was still there, standing at the edge of the yard. The moon’s silver glow couldn’t touch him. She descended steps and walked closer. She’d been afraid at the bookstore. Here, at home, she was only curious.
“Am I still dreaming?”
Three point one four one five nine, the nothingman said. Then he was gone.
7
David Sandoval, executive producer, creator of the show, and director of this particular episode, walked into the studio and claimed a seat behind camera one.
Close up - the head and shoulders of the host, Randal Brickman, in sharp focus. Behind him, a green screen stretched from the floor to the top of a twelve-foot panel, awaiting a stock CG shot of a galaxy spiraling against a backdrop of starry space. David looked up from the monitor to see his crew preparing for the first take of the day.
Randal, looking smug as ever, slurped at a steaming cappuccino.
The makeup artist, Cathleen, patted shine away from his cheeks. “You’re killing me with the Mocha, Brickman,” she said. “You look like a fucking frog.”
“You’re fired,” he said with a thick British accent.
She snatched the paper cup out of his hand. “Fuck you. Now hold still.”
Cathleen dabbed at Randal as he demanded the drink back. She passed it to an intern who did a quick one-eighty and walked off set.
“I need my caffeine. Bloody hell, woman. It’s early.”
“Yes. Five o’clock. And you’re already whining.”
David grinned from behind the central camera, adoring Cathleen. He pressed a headset microphone to his lips. “Can I get my background, please?”
On the monitor: The green behind Randal snapped to Andromeda and a sea of twinkling stars, the magic of television in all its composite beauty.
The whining continued.
David raised his voice to cut Randal off in mid-complaint. “Daylight’s burning, people. We’ve got fourteen scenes to shoot today.”
The host shooed Cathleen away from his face. “Where are my glasses?”
The missing lenses were just clear glass, no prescription. The Brit thought they made him look more intelligent. David smirked. They didn’t make Randal look smarter, just slightly less stupid.
The coffee-stealing intern appeared again, not to taketh away this time, but to bring-eth. Wire frames and useless glass, freshly cleaned. The host slid them up his long nose, snugged them into position.
“Quiet on the set,” an assistant director announced.
Randal cleared his throat. Stared into the teleprompter. Mouthed his first line while crewmembers retreated out of the shot. Voices turned to whispers, then silence.
“Roll camera.”
He walked to his starting mark, a glowing white tile in front of the green screen. The surrounding squares were dull, waiting for their moment to shine. Three columns stood in random formation at the center of the floor, illuminated with tube lighting behind panels of blood-red Plexiglas. The bridge of a sterile, alien spaceship. David was quite proud of the set, or at least had been sixty-four episodes ago. Five seasons. Two time slots. And a million headaches. Nearly six years.
Has it been that long?
Camera one: Close up.
Camera two: High angle, perched ten feet above the subject, on a hydraulic crane.
Camera three: Long shot.
A moment of silence, a vacuum of dead space. Quiet enough to hear pins drop and electrons buzz.
Then, a voice. “Scene one. Take one.”
The distinctive smack of the clapboard.
“Action.”
Randal Brickman, winner of two Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a British Academy Television best actor award. Rigid and bespectacled, sweating in a twenty-six hundred dollar Armani suit. The star of the show, like it or not. David frowned.
Randal’s awards were years ago - twenty at least. Any respect the actor arrived with had long since faded. He was nowhere near as cool as Morgan Freeman, host of the immensely more popular Through the Wormhole. The programs had the same premise, same demographic. Identical on paper in nearly every way. Except Wormhole had Freeman.
Morgan fucking Freeman.
Competing with him was a ridiculous undertaking, a futile task if ever there was one. He’d played God in two movies, for Christ’s sake.
He might as well be God.
Randal gazed into camera one, lowered his brow, spoke his lines.
“Have you ever considered how fortunate you are? The four fundamental forces of nature. Electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and gravity. Each walking a delicate balance across the entire universe. This balance is what makes stars form, planets orbit, comets race, and life emerge. Change the value of any of these forces, even slightly, and none of this would have ever happened.” Randal paused for dramatic emphasis, pursed his lips, raised an eyebrow. “How did we get so lucky?” He turned to face a different camera, number three. “Or…was it luck at all?”
The camera rolled forward on its track and zoomed out simultaneously, keeping Randal in focus. It was what cinematographers called a ‘Dolly Zoom.’ The background stretched to a new focal length, creating a strange, vertigo effect. The movie equivalent to Oh shit, something crazy is about to happen. Hitchcock would’ve been flattered. David liked to think so anyway.
Across the set David spotted the network vice president. Mr. Peter Lewis, or Vice Dickhead, as he was known in hushed circles. And wrap parties. And everywhere else. Arms crossed, rigid posture, foul expression, with an asshole puckered tight enough to create its own gravitational field. Brownnosers beware.
A younger producer would’ve been intimidated, but not David.
Randal continued his monologue. “Is our reality a product of intelligent design? Did God create the cosmos? We will explore these questions and so much
more in this episode of -- Squaring the Circle.”
Squaring the Circle, a clever title David came up with six years ago. It was a reference to constructing a square with the same area as a given circle using a compass and straightedge. (The challenge was proven unachievable in 1882, because Pi is a transcendental number.) Over the years squaring the circle had become synonymous with doing the impossible, like discovering the secrets of the universe or competing with Morgan Freeman.
“Cut. Let’s do it again.”
At the end of the day David had only ten shots of which he was satisfied, and that meant they’d be starting tomorrow in a hole. Story of my life. If he couldn’t get production back on schedule his weekend was toast.
Eight o’clock found him sifting through dailies in the darkened control room, looking for anything he could salvage. He, the assistant director and Stan the security guard were the only ones left in the building. Everyone else had cleared out at six.
His stomach groaned. Lunch was long gone.
Stan walked in tugging at hidden belt loops. He could’ve used a good pair of suspenders. Or a sugar-free diet.
He said, “I nearly forgot, Dave. Sorry.” He held out a folded piece of paper. “Mr. Lewis gave me this earlier.”
David exhaled sharply, snatched the note, opened it.
David,
Come see me in the morning. 9 AM. I need to speak with you.
Mr. Peter Lewis
Executive Vice President, TechNet Television
David stuffed the note in his pocket.
Shit.
8
Doctor Thatcher’s office was messy, somewhat dark, and big. A massive desk occupied the back half of the space, heaped with folders, loose papers, spiral notebooks, and a chaotic horde of picture frames. Eddie had only ever seen the cardboard backs and the hinged kickstands. Patients weren’t invited to the photo-viewing side of the desk.
She didn’t know why but she often imagined those frames still holding the pictures they came with, pretty models smiling with their pretend families at the beach. Some would be in color, some in black and white. Fake love is always more convincing in black and white.
