by Liz Harmer
* * *
—
In addition to aliens and A.I. and time travel, one of Jason’s obsessions had been lucid dreaming. It was easy for him to wake while dreaming and walk the streets of his unconscious. Marie could not do it, even when using all the tricks he’d taught her.
He’d set his watch to go off every ninety minutes, and each time it did, he’d ask, “Am I asleep?” And while he was sleeping and the watch chimed, the sound would reach him deep where he was, and he’d see through the gauzy confusion and know that he was dreaming. At first Marie wore foam earplugs to bed, but soon the distant chiming didn’t wake her either, instead reaching into her dreams where her dream-self barely noticed it.
In the mornings she would make coffee, forgetting to unplug the fridge when she started the machine, and so he’d run out to the grimy corner store to buy new fuses. Eventually he had a large stash of them on hand, said nothing to demean or correct her, laughing instead, kissing her on her neck, her shoulders, her chest. He had been happy. He was not prone to happiness, but he had been happy with her.
“I dreamed that I had a lucid dream,” she told him once.
“That is a lucid dream,” he said. “When you become aware that you’re dreaming, then you’re lucid.”
“But I wasn’t lucid. I just thought, Oh, I’m having a lucid dream. But it didn’t feel any different than any other dream.”
Even his eyebrows were fair, like a small child’s. “Well, I don’t have access to what you’re experiencing,” he said.
Another trick to induce lucid dreaming was to toggle a light switch whenever you saw one, so that you’d be inclined to toggle one while sleeping. Cause and effect only behaved themselves in waking life, and these habits could help trigger lucidity. In the morning when they sat to drink their coffees and eat toast, for the sake of romance—I’m so happy, I must be dreaming—Jason would get up and flip the light switch. The golden light in the hallway flared on and off, on and off, on and off.
* * *
—
Marie was able to pluck from her memories the angst that was otherwise always with her, and remember only those days when they’d been together in the apartment, Jason at his screen sorting out the mysteries of the universe into formulae to describe strings and particles, and Marie rolling sticky ink over a carved piece of lino. She would find pages and pages of scrap paper covered in numbers and equal signs and squiggles of pi in his tiny scrawl. She collected them for some future art project. They were as beautiful to her as cave drawings, or—more so—fossils.
Now she could see that their good fortune foretold its own undoing. Not only the world but their love was like an egg destined to break.
In the clammed-shut innocence of their marriage, she’d been working on a series of prints that connected fetuses with universes. It happened by accident. She carved a third-trimester fetus housed by a thick uterine wall into a fat block of linoleum. Each of the veins in the cross-sectioned uterus was a little tick-mark. She printed blue on white and black on blue, and then she printed white and blue on black and saw that the uterine tissue surrounding the fetus was the night sky lit up with stars. By then, she and Jason were deep into discussions about when to start a family. Marie believed they should wait until Jason finished his doctorate, which would also give her a few more years to launch her art career (although she did not use the word “career,” and despised the concept of “professionalization”).
Nothing had ever come of these or any of her other prints. Among friends, on patios, over wine, she claimed not to have ambitions, saying that she worked on her art because she loved it, and nothing could take that away. If she were never recognized, she said, never paid, that would be okay. Art would hang not only on the walls but from the ceilings and draped from curtain rods and over the backs of sofas. Art would be not artifice but integral to life. She may even have quoted Oscar Wilde (this was how full of shit she’d been): Your life will be your art.
The friends were all Jason’s. She had by then abandoned her college pals, or they her, drifting apart, they told each other, or moving to New York or L.A. Who needed people? She hated everybody but him, wanted the world to be nobody but the two of them. When they did go out, the people surrounding them at a large plastic patio table in Hess Village, a trendy cobblestoned area near their apartment, thick with bars and clubs, booming with music, were grad students and professors from Science and the Humanities. These were the people who invited them to poker games and to smoke weed. How was it that Jason and all the nerds were somehow less socially awkward than she was? Jason, despite growing increasingly agitated about his work, remained beloved and not the least bit eccentric in this company. Beauty was a warrant, she thought. Jason, with his kind eyes, his naturally lean, broad-shouldered body, was an aesthetic object. His looks were as much a fluke as his intelligence: rare, and a ticket to the admiration of others. On one of these days she realized, from across that plastic patio table, that it wasn’t only that he wanted wealth and fame and a perfect, beautiful family. It was that the world would give those things to him. It wasn’t envy she felt for him in that moment, but fear. I won’t be one of the fools to give in to you, she thought. Between the two of us, everything will be different. He lifted his hand to order another pitcher of beer.
So later, when the first miscarriage came, and then the second, she knew that she had, by wishing, caused them.
Jason was telling a philosophy grad student that he was tiring of physics. “At first it was just that I wanted the puzzles, but now I want to find a way to look underneath the puzzles.”
“There aren’t enough collaborations between science and humanities departments,” said a woman, a young history professor whose name Marie never bothered to learn. “The future of all of our professions depends on it.” When they were drunk, these academics slipped into generalizations that otherwise would have embarrassed them.
“It isn’t like the relationship between the maths and philosophy isn’t already belonging to a rich and storied tradition,” said a heavily accented Eastern European man.
“With physics, at a certain point,” Jason said, “you get so far from describing reality that you don’t even know why you’re interested in the puzzle anymore. It’s a puzzle for its own sake, like any puzzle. Physics can’t answer the questions I’m asking anymore. It can’t really even ask those questions.” He looked over at Marie. She was still capable of flooding with feeling for him then, his eyes on her, his good looks. In bed that very afternoon, moving his finger slowly up her waist, over her breast, he had told her that she was the only one who could ask the questions. She was always saying what came into her head—observing ant life, for example, and wondering about the stories ants told themselves, how they interpreted their existence. He would tell her to go on, go on, go on. “Maybe artists can ask the questions I’m talking about,” he said to the others.
“How romantic,” said the Eastern European professor. He had always appeared to detest Marie.
“For example,” Jason continued, “Marie is always zeroing in on shapes and textures.”
The others ignored this. “But even in philosophy,” someone else said, “you’re hardly engaging with anything urgent or pressing. I think what’s happening is you’re just finding the real limit of what we can know. We don’t have the vocabulary or the framework to understand most things.”
“Nah. I don’t believe that,” Jason said. “You find a way to build the vocabulary. And it’s not that science can’t do it, it’s only that the powers-that-be won’t let me. If it doesn’t sound plausible to a grant committee, it doesn’t get studied.”
“But who wants to know everything anyway?” Marie said suddenly. She pictured such knowledge like a room suddenly lit with over-bright fluorescence. She knew that Jason did want to know everything. He wanted a god’s vantage.
Everyone turned toward her, silent. As always, they treated her with polite condescension.
“Beauty w
ould increase. With every scientific advance, our awe increases,” Jason said. “Like Darwin. Copernicus. The world doesn’t get smaller because we know it better.”
Jason’s father had died only a few months before, but looking at him then, she had perceived in him no additional despondency. She had felt only distrust in his belief in his own specialness, no matter how much proof there was that he was above them all, an anomaly.
“You treat math and science like they could tell us everything. I think that’s reductive,” Marie said. “You’re acting like one of those people who would explain love chemically.”
“Of course I am,” Jason said. “As well you know.”
As well you know: one of his favourite phrases. “Well, I’m not,” she said. “And I don’t think you are, really, either.”
She picked up her beer from the scratched and grimy table, waiting for someone to move the conversation elsewhere. Someone cleared their throat. They were all of them kinder than she was.
Jason, she saw much later—too late—was suffering, and drinking too much. Nothing had meant what it had seemed to.
* * *
—
Marie was never paid for her art, but for her entrepreneurship she earned a kind of fame in their city. She opened Frankincense & Myrrh after the divorce, just as the artists began to arrive, tired of the cost of living in the capital on the other side of the lake, and converted the vacant buildings to galleries, the dime stores to vintage clothing shops, and the convenience stores and markets to cappuccino joints.
She was solvent by thirty, consoled by a growing savings account, the shop’s view of York Boulevard from the wide north-facing window, and by chitchat with the artists and activists who came daily through the door. Her store was local and idiosyncratic, and she was beloved for her good brushes and paper as much as her appearance of being slightly scattered, a fledgling too soon dropped from her nest. The activists came for poster-making supplies and a place to pin signs, and they saw in her one of their own: a person unattached to any status quo, a person willing to make sacrifices. Most days, she woke up thinking heave-ho—the sound of the shop-door opening so constant it became seared into her brain. She became, to her surprise, a person of commerce. As an artist she was too critical, too sarcastic, too skeptical. She loved making art but did not believe in the idea of art. Just like she had loved but not believed in marriage.
She’d had no friends during this time, only customers—and that had been plenty of company. Now that it was gone, she longed not for any person from that period, but for the feeling of life in the store, for her old playlists and the grids and buttons of ordering pages, for the cleanliness of a well-inventoried existence. She longed for her old routine, how it felt to watch the street cycle through the hours, from early dark to midday shine and busyiness, to the lighted streets of evening.
And for Jason, his shadowy presence.
One year after the divorce, on Marie’s twenty-eighth birthday (and even though both she and Jason had agreed that all dates were arbitrary, and all birthdays meaningless in the face of infinitude, occasions more grim than gladdening), she began to dream about him. She dreamed about him as he had looked at twenty-three: her first sight of him standing in line at the library with a single book in his hand. What if she’d never spoken to him, and all had been only potential? In the dreams his mouth opened to reveal first their solar system and then the whole Milky Way, until it had opened so wide that she could see everything, every star, every system in the known universe. She woke terrified. Even the bedding she’d embroidered herself in a medieval style, unicorns and greenery and gold leaves, seemed sinister.
She had phoned him, asked him to come back, and he came. He told her that he understood hormones and grief, the loss of his father and then of those possible babies, had crushed them both. She remembered how she had stopped talking to him, left him alone in the apartment in the middle of fights, refused to smile, forced him out. “You weren’t in your right mind,” he said then, standing in the shop after she’d closed it up and locked the door behind them, although anyone could see through the windows on every wall. “I know it wasn’t your fault.”
“It was a mistake. It was grief,” she repeated, filled with the ease of another future arriving to solve the past, him coming upstairs to spend the night and then the sounds of him above while she worked the next day, his familiar weight a creak on her floor, the whoosh of him showering. But it was by then already too late, and she’d known it. He’d so quickly managed to be scooped up by the biological imperative of this other woman—thirty-six-year-old Maria and her fascinating brain and her feminism and her parents’ wealth and the fact of her pregnancy. Maria could afford to support him through to the end of his doctorate and into post-docs or while he flailed for a job. She’d been his professor, once. And now he was going to have a child, and he was going to raise it.
Had Marie any choice? “You can love two women,” she told him. “Maybe the universe is infinite, and there are no rules.”
“I’m different with you than I am with her,” he said, heavy with sleep on her mattress on the floor. “I am two people.”
Without her, he’d have the family she couldn’t have, and he apologized to her with his mouth on her body. Whatever had gone wrong between the two of them, the many babies that grew to the size of pebbles and apricots and then shook themselves loose to be found in grievously bloody clumps in the toilet, whatever would not take hold, would not take hold because of her.
It wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t her fault—and so they carried on together, despite Maria and the baby. The single year apart would be only a blip in their long lives together, she told him. He tried to leave her; he came back to her; they had one-night stands; their one-night stands became an affair. “I shouldn’t come back,” he said. Then, “How am I supposed to live without you?”
“You’ll never leave me,” she said.
Marie found out about the wedding from a friend of a friend and then posted a few regrettable things about it on her feeds before shutting those accounts down for good. “Nothing weird about your ex-husband marrying a woman with almost the same first name as you. Puts a lot of pressure on that one vowel,” she’d written. The paltry recompense she’d received for this was a little thread of WTFs and frowny faces and “who needs men like that” and that sort of thing.
Jason was the love of her life. As though she had been foreordained by some god with a dark sense of humour to constellate herself around this man, and to never, no matter how much she fought its gravity, be free of him.
Poor Marr-rr-ea, Marie thought, mocking her with the rolled r, beyond good and evil by then, beyond good manners, and beyond grief. What mattered was that he always came back.
* * *
—
By the time they’d watched PINA’s demonstration video, the affair had gone on for years, but Marie hadn’t seen Jason in a month. She tried to reach him at his office phone as he preferred, but he didn’t return her messages. The world was not fair but nepotistic, favouring the beautiful and wealthy, and so Jason had a job in Maria’s department. The PINA video clip passed from status update to status update almost as quickly as the man shown on stage slipped into the invisible tube and disappeared. Evaporated.
Everyone Marie knew expected news that the video was a hoax. It was the only thing people talked about at the store, when they weren’t wondering whether she carried oils in Sap Green or silk-screening kits or a certain ironic tote bag everyone else seemed to be selling. “I hope I get this series finished before the world ends!” they joked, many different versions of the same joke. Customers were always thrusting their phones at her, to show her new videos and tweets. The original PINA video was followed by months of public outcry, by concerned journalists asking concerned politicians how it was that something that rearranged your molecules and moved you to a completely different place and time! (people always dipped into an exclamatory tone here)—how something like that
could be safe and ethical? There were no rules; the rules had changed. But what about the epistemological and ontological implications? The bloggers, the academics, and everybody’s grandparents had their panties tied in knots. Who were we now?
PINA’s port campaign rolled out more slogans. They argued for curiosity. They argued for fun. They said: Did curiosity really kill the cat? Don’t let Big Brother tell you what to do! But by then the slogans were unnecessary. Everyone was pooling resources, tapping out bank accounts, buying ports the way people stock up on bottled water at news of an approaching hurricane.
Marie wanted to see how things played out, to be sure about side effects and unintended consequences. Meanwhile, Albrecht Doors went from billionaire to trillionaire in a matter of months, beaming out his neat and toothy smile from YouTube and TED and The New York Times—even though, all too soon, no one was watching.
“You don’t do it for the money.” This had been one of Doors’ many soundbites. “You do it to feel something.”
And it was weirdly true: All of those trillions were worth nothing now.
One day during this time, Marie had gone to a party thrown by a local celebrity-artist who’d bought a port. She decked herself out in a tight black dress and gold jewellery, in case Jason happened to be there. The celebrity, a man who called himself Salt Peter, had been the first in town with a PINAphone and, before that, the first to have a blog. He’d been one of the first artists to move from the expensive capital around the other side of the lake and into Marie’s once-depressed, now-trendy, gallery-ridden neighbourhood. Technically, he did not even live in her neighbourhood but had purchased an enormous house near the escarpment, one of the houses that Marie and Jason used to wander past, admiring. At the front door, stacked turrets loomed over her. Salt Peter and his husband had completely restored the place.
