Clifford

by Harold R. Johnson

  “Of course the earth isn’t moving through space. It’s moving with space. That’s why the result of the Michelson–Morley experiment was nil. Things can move through space, can even go against the current of space, same as an aeroplane on a windy day, or a ship cutting across ocean currents.”

  I put out a challenge: “Where’s your evidence?”

  “Weather patterns,” he answered. “Because space is spinning around the earth in a counter-clockwise direction, the majority of the winds on earth are from west to east. That’s at a surface level. If we go deeper, we encounter continental drift. The continents are moving very slowly around the surface of the earth counter-clockwise as well.”

  He paused. Took a step to the right again. Changed his mind and stepped back to where he had been. “You got this?”

  “Yeah, got it.” I replied.

  “One more thing. When we look at black holes, we see jets of energy coming out each end. Black holes are always in the shape of a sphere and they always rotate. So, if a particle — and there must be trillions and trillions of particles going into these things — if one of them is inside the black hole, in the void, it has no position. The only places with position on a black hole are the two poles.”

  “Stop.” I held up my hand, palm toward him. “Two things: What do you mean by jets of energy coming out of black holes, and what do you mean black holes have poles?”

  “The energy jets have been observed. They haven’t been properly explained, but they have been seen.”

  “So what causes them, then?” I knew he didn’t want to be interrupted, but he was going too fast for me to follow.

  “I told you that black holes rotate, right?”

  I nodded. Yeah, I’d heard that part.

  “Well, they rotate in a single direction like the earth and that rotation is on an axis that results in the black hole’s having a north and south pole. Now the thing is, if you stand a foot away from the north pole, you are moving in a circle around it. Even if you are half an inch away, you are moving. But if you could find the exact north pole, the precise point, the exact axis the black hole rotated around, you would not be moving. You would have position. So any particle inside a black hole that accidentally comes into contact with either the exact north or exact south pole of the black hole immediately gets ejected because it found position, and it’s those particles being ejected that make up the jets of energy that we see.”

  He calmed himself down a bit. “Now back to that damn rocket. It travelled straight up, creating a void in front of it. It created a long black hole from here to I don’t know how far into outer space.”

  “Whoa, sorry. So how does the void become a black hole again?”

  He sighed. I could see his exasperation. He was obviously thinking, Why aren’t you getting this? It’s simple. But when he spoke, it was with patience. “I created a void by getting rid of the space in front of the rocket. All of the space in front of the rocket was cancelled out. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, a void is just another word for black hole. They are the same thing. The only reason I use the word void is to differentiate it from space. We either have space or no space. When we have no space, it’s a void. When we have a big void surrounded by space, we call it a black hole because it’s basically a hole in space. Anyway, the one I created in front of the rocket will be only about four inches across, but its overall size will depend upon how far up it went. I went back and checked, and I can’t detect anything, so maybe space pushed in on it and it’s much smaller than the four inches.

  “But here’s the kicker. If space pushed in on it one way, then it probably pushed in on it linearly as well. That means that it might not be long and skinny, a scratch in space. It might have become a sphere, I don’t know. Maybe the faster the rocket went — and I’m pretty sure the battery lasted until well after it exceeded the speed of light — maybe at that speed it did more damage to the space it was travelling through.”

  I consoled, “But it would be pretty far away from Earth by the time that happened.”

  “True, except that one tiny end of the black hole points directly down on this apartment building. In fact, it would be right overtop of your bedroom. I launched it from that corner of the roof.”

  “Okay, so…I still don’t get it. How did that start Armageddon?”

  “If I in fact created a massive black hole out in space, and the track that created it points back here, I’m worried that the black hole will follow the track of the rocket back down here.”

  “Why would it do that?” I was looking at the ceiling.

  “Path of least resistance is what I am worried about.”

  * * *

  We never did resolve the black hole thing. It never happened or it hasn’t happened yet. We did move out of that building not long after, and we kind of split up. We went our different ways. He got married, had three kids, broke up with his wife, and ended up back in La Ronge with his children. He kept doing experiments and what I began to consider as simple silliness, nothing of importance.

  I got married, had two children, and ended up living just outside of Prince Albert. I kept working at mining and logging, but having a family, raising children, meant that my life was more controlled, more purposeful. I didn’t have time to use my mind for things like black holes and space travel and Clifford’s world of fantasy. I had important things to do, like make money to support my family.

  Racist

  I don’t remember what we were doing in Prince Albert. Just a chance get-together. Both in town at the same time and decided to go check out our favourite restaurant. I do remember that we walked there, through downtown, Central Avenue and the panhandlers. We were passing a pawnshop, and he stopped and looked through the window at the collection of rings.

  “Getting married?” I asked.

  “No, I’m looking for a ruby.”

  “What do you want a ruby for?”

  “What are rubies used for?”

  I didn’t know; couldn’t think of anything.

  “Shine a light through a ruby and all the light waves are concentrated into one laser beam.”

  “So, next question: What do you want a laser for?”

  “I don’t want a laser.”

  My confusion kept me silent.

  He explained. “Light is a wave. But light isn’t the only thing that’s a wave. It’s just one tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays — they’re all waves. I want to see if I can focus these other waves the same as a laser.”

  I let that sink in, with all the connotations; tried to imagine a concentrated beam of gamma rays. The only image my brain could come up with was a Star Trek phaser and Captain Kirk blasting aliens. Then a thought, remembering that space itself, according to Clifford, was just another wave. “Hey, could you make a tractor beam?” I was still on Star Trek and towing a disabled USS Enterprise with a beam of light.

  “I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about that,” he answered. “I suspect it would work kind of like magnetism.”

  We were walking again. None of the rings in the pawnshop window had a red gem inset. We continued toward Tilley’s Restaurant a few blocks west of downtown Prince Albert, in a rougher part of town.

  He’d been silent as we walked and I was in the mood for a discussion. We hadn’t seen each other for a while and I missed our conversations. “So, tell me. How does magnetism work?”

  “Space waves.”

  I didn’t respond. No need. It would come out.

  “Take any material and arrange its molecules so that they line up and you get a magnet. The way it works is, because the molecules are lined up, space can move through the material in a straight line. Usually space waves just go in any direction and are a jumble. But when you line them up, they begin to flow.”

  “Ho
ld on. I thought space waves bounced off material. Isn’t that what causes gravity?”

  “Some of the space waves bounce off the surface. Some go deeper before they hit something to bounce back. Remember, even things that are solid are mostly empty. Same thing with a magnet — space waves move through the empty gaps between the atoms all in the same direction. You know that opposites attract and likes repel.”

  Of course I knew that, everyone does.

  “The reason is the space waves coming out of the magnet. If you put two magnets together so that the north and south poles are together, the space waves flow from one to the other. When the waves are inside the magnet, they’re compact; when they jump the gap between two magnets, they stretch out to make the jump. The waves act like a spring when it’s stretched; they want to take their original shape again and contract. That’s what pulls the two magnets together.”

  Okay, I could see it: waves that acted like coil springs. A two-dimensional image of a spring kind of looks like a wave. I could see it stretched out and contracting. But I still had a question. “So, what causes likes to repel?”

  “Same thing. If you force two magnets together so that the space waves coming out of each of them meet head to head, the waves are compressed and, again like a spring, they want to take their original shape and push back.”

  We walked on, mostly in silence, and I let myself absorb this new information.

  We were sitting in a booth in Tilley’s Restaurant when he bluntly stated: “You know you’re a racist.”

  “Bullshit!” I called him on his naked statement.

  We had just sat down in anticipation of one of Tilley’s huge meals. She had taken our order: coffee, soup of the day — tomato macaroni — big burger, and fries. We both knew that when the meal was over, we would both order pie and ice cream. We’ve been here before, many times over the years. If we are in Prince Albert at the same time, it’s where we go. Tilley knows us and likes us. We eat. She likes to feed people and it makes her happy when two skinny guys come in and order her biggest meal.

  Her big burger is no quarter pounder. It makes a quarter pounder look like a snack. She has to make her own buns to match the handmade patty and all the lettuce, cheese, bacon, tomato, onion, relish, and mustard. And it isn’t served on a plate. A plate is too small. She serves it on a platter with a pile of french fries and a heap of coleslaw.

  “You can’t help yourself.” He spooned his soup.

  “Bullshit!” I wasn’t buying it.

  “I can prove it.”

  “No way. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.” He wasn’t going to get away with anything as absurd as calling me a racist.

  “You pay for lunch if I do?”

  “You’re on. And if you can’t prove I am a racist, you pay.”

  Elbow on the table, hand stroking his beard. “You are a racist because you live in a racist story and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything is story. You are story, I am story, the universe is story. Figured you’d know this. You’re a writer.”

  I am a writer. Have always been a writer, ever since Dad showed me how to copy the letters from the Winnipeg Free Press onto a brown paper bag with a pencil stub I borrowed from him and never returned. There was a time when I was about seven, I was already going to school and bringing books home with me. I was sitting, reading a simple kid’s book, and Dad came by. He never said anything; just placed a copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird by my elbow. It was a struggle to get through. I had to force myself to understand all of the words, all of the complex sentences. I probably stayed with it to the end only because it was Dad who gave it to me. I never figured out why he gave it to me. Was it because it had children in it my age and he thought I would enjoy it? Or was he pushing me to read at a higher level?

  As a teenager I wrote poetry. Still believe the world could be saved by an army of thirteen-year-old poets, with all the love and caring and hope they generate.

  Clifford also encouraged my writing. When I came home on leave for Christmas from the navy, his present was a little book: Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Rust Hills. I’ve been exploring the craft of storytelling ever since. When I am at work in the mine, driving a haul truck and waiting for my turn for the loader to fill my truck, I write down a few lines, and then while I am driving the truck to the dump area and back, I am thinking up the next few lines.

  I wasn’t sure where Clifford was going with this. “What do you mean, ‘everything is story’?”

  “You’re made out of DNA, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And DNA is a four-letter code. A, C, T, and G. With that four-letter alphabet we write every living thing on the planet. When we understand this language, we will understand life. We will know the story.

  “This table is just a story.” He taps it with his knuckles. “It’s made out of atoms, but it’s the space between the atoms that gives it solidity. All that holds this table together is the story we all agree upon. It’s the uncertainty principle in science. We can know the velocity of an electron or its position, but we can’t know them both at the same time, so we can’t know anything absolutely. Combine that with the observer effect, that we change things by observing them, and the only reason that anything exists is because we are conscious of them. We, in fact, make it up. It’s the story we all agree upon. Reality is a story. That’s why Einstein said, ‘Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.’ He also said, ‘I refuse to believe the moon is not there when I am not looking.’ He wasn’t convinced it was all story. He believed in objective knowing.

  “So let’s accept his reasoning for a moment. This table” — Clifford raps it again — “is solid, it’s an object. We can say that it is objective, but any description of it must be subjective because we are humans and we can’t help but be subjective.”

  “Hold on, hold on. You’re getting too carried away. I’m not entirely subjective. I have objective, rational thoughts.”

  “Do you? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I can be completely objective and put aside emotion and irrationality.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning. Shortly after you were born, someone put a nipple in your mouth and squirted warm milk and you heard sounds. Somewhere in your brain a neuron fired and connected with a neuron on the other side of your brain, creating a pathway, and you inferred a connection between the taste of warm milk in your mouth with the sounds your mother was making and you began to infer language.

  “Throughout early childhood you learned an incredible amount. Each new thing you learned built upon the earlier things you knew. When you encountered a new experience, you inferred meaning to it based upon those things you already knew. Gradually you built up a body of understanding. Through grade school, then high school, out into the world, you kept learning and are still learning. Each time you encounter something new, you infer meaning to it based upon those things already in your head, and all those things in your head were things you inferred.”

  He tilted his soup bowl to spoon out the last tomato and macaroni.

  “Problem is that because you inferred the meaning of everything that you know based upon things you already knew, if you made a mistake, if you made the wrong inference anywhere along the way, going all the way back to the taste of warm milk in your mouth, everything that followed would be wrong because the basis it was built upon was wrong. You don’t know anything with absolute certainty.”

  “And neither do you.”

  “And neither do I. Difference is, I know that I don’t know anything. Everything I think I know is stuff that I made up. So I am very careful with the story I tell myself.”

  “And the bullshit story you’re telling yourself today is that I am a racist. I’m still calling you on that.”

  Tilley brought the burger platters and the conversation slowed down, no
t much though; we are both good at talking around a mouthful of food.

  “I still have to explain story.” Both his hands full of big burger. “Stories are really powerful. Even God is a story. The Bible says, ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.’ Now, I’m not saying that God is just a story. I’m trying to emphasize how powerful story is.”

  “Doesn’t get you anywhere. Neither you nor I am Christian.”

  He had a big smile on his face. “Yes, we are.”

  “Are not.”

  “Are too.”

  “Bullshit.” I felt a little short on words. But it was a good word that fit the moment.

  “We’re Christian because we are caught in the Christian story. It’s all around us. Remember the big bang?”

  I didn’t answer. No need, he was going to tell me anyway.

  “The reason science adopted a big bang theory is because the first words in the Bible are ‘In the beginning.’ There really was no big bang.”

  “So, now you’re trying to tell me the universe isn’t expanding.”

  “Oh, it’s expanding all right. It just isn’t getting any bigger.”

  “I think I once paid you a hundred dollars because you proved the universe was getting bigger.”

  He shrugged. “Oh well. You have to pay for your education.”

  He was right. Oh well. What was a hundred dollars spent years ago? But he wasn’t going to get a free lunch out of me now as easily as he had then.

  “The reason the universe is expanding and not getting any larger is because it is surrounded by a void. Anything that goes into the void disappears because it has no position. So our universe is constantly being eaten. Same as I explained to you about black holes and gravity. Think of our universe surrounded by a black hole that we are constantly falling into.”