The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria Page 4

  “What are you doing?” Karen asked.

  I stepped away to admire my work, made a box of my fingers like a cinematographer framing a shot. That glass was perfectly clean. Still looking at it, I said, “Spanish guys come from Spain. I’m Puerto Rican.” And without another word I left.

  As I drove to the lab where I work—I’m a physicist with the BES—my thoughts turned to Chase. I felt for him the kind of barrenness only fields of burgeoning corn can inspire.

  His service to his country had left him mutilated. He’d suffer for the rest of his life, physically. But worse, there was the secret pain of his wife’s betrayal waiting to reveal itself to him. Maybe someday when he was feeling stronger, maybe when he was starting to feel like he’d gotten a bit of his life back, Karen would unburden herself and tell him about us. Or maybe one day when she just felt like hurting him.

  I had to pull over for a minute to collect myself.

  Like everywhere in Pennsylvania this time of year, a cornfield abutted the road. I got out of the car and walked up to the six-foot-high wall of stalks. Took deep breaths.

  These fields always remind me of my research. If there are Many Worlds, that means that there are many versions of me out there: an infinite number, maybe. Uniqueness is our most pervasive illusion. I’m just one of many cornstalks in the field.

  I pushed a stalk gently, set it swaying. Flexible, but solid. Vibrantly alive. Indistinguishable, yes, from the thousands of others in this field: until you get up close. Then it becomes uniquely itself. The stalk was an embodied history of the little sufferings and triumphs that have allowed it to be here now, mature enough to yield corn. It had goals for the future: surviving, reproducing. And Fate had given it a farmer who has done everything possible to help it flourish.

  For now. I started getting lost in the metaphor. That same farmer would soon mow it down, it and all its buddies. This whole field of slightly different stalks would be razed to the dirt. Where was the lesson in that?

  There was none; it was just a field of corn. But even if the universe has no use for right and wrong, humans do. My affair with Karen had left me feeling very, very wrong. I needed to make amends.

  So, with the stalks of corn as witnesses, I said aloud, “I’m going to help you, Chase.”

  I met Chase in person for the first time three months after he’d come home. I invited him and Karen—she pushed his wheelchair—to the BES superportation lab late on a Sunday afternoon, when I was sure I could be alone with them. After I met them at the door and we introduced ourselves, they followed me to our experiment chamber. Karen rolled Chase carefully behind me; she was terrified of crashing into some multi-million dollar piece of government equipment.

  The first time I heard Chase speak, he said to Karen, “Why the fuck are you going so slow?”

  “There’s no rush,” she replied.

  “Fuck you there’s no rush. The game starts at 7:30.”

  Karen stopped moving; though I was studiously pretending not to hear any of this, I paused too. “You said you’d hear him out.”

  Chase craned to glare at her. Then, low and angry: “You owe me.”

  When he turned back to me, he was smiling: but like a hyena sizing me up. I sized him up right back. His hair was bristly and straw-colored, like he’d picked up a handful of hay and stuck it on his head. Harley Davidson muscle shirt, cargo shorts, nothing to cover the puckered, scarred ends of his legs. The tan he must’ve developed overseas had largely faded and his skin was returning to its default papier-mâché color, though freckle-speckled. His solid build was starting to slacken and fatten; he was starting to melt into his wheelchair.

  And he had good hyena-teeth. He was smiling when he said, “Before we go any farther, Doc, why don’t you explain to me what I’m doing here? See, that way, once Karen hears how full of shit you are, we can go home and I don’t have to miss the opening pitch.”

  I put my hands in my pockets and paced toward him. “You’re not talking about the All-Star Game, are you? You actually watch that?”

  He said nothing. He was shocked that a scientist could know anything about baseball.

  “Look, Chase,” I said, “I get it. You think this is just a waste of time. You think I’m some clueless egghead, or worse, some fraud who’s out to rip you off. You’re only here because of Karen. She’s the only person in the world right now who could’ve gotten you here on a Sunday.”

  He folded his arms. “So?”

  I closed the distance between us and took a knee in front of him. “You’re here because you love her. Because you want to make her happy, even when you know she’s wrong. Because now she makes your life possible. What would you do without her, Chase? If she got sick of your foul mouth and your bad attitude and the burden of caring for you, and left you?”

  I glanced up at Karen. She was stone-faced. It had taken me this many months to convince her I wasn’t plotting some kind of secret revenge on her, like some morning talk-show revelation/confrontation/ conflagration. She kept telling me she still loved me, that she only wanted the best for me, and why would I ruin the wonderful memories we had shared together by destroying her life: or Chase’s, who, I should remember, was a war-hero and deserved better?

  Only after weeks of repeating that I only wanted to help Chase did she finally halfway believe me. Now, though, her strained face told me she thought I was indeed about to betray her. She was stoically preparing herself for the ugliest moment of her life.

  Chase, meanwhile, reacted just like I thought he would. A guy like him is a tea-kettle; his shame at being disabled always boiled just under his skin, looking for any weak point through which it could escape, whistling. He bowed his head and, with a voice thick with self-pity, said, “Karen is the one good thing I have left in my life. I would do anything for her.”

  I smiled and nodded. Karen cocked her head. Then she squeezed Chase’s shoulders and, looking at me with a face somewhere between relief and wariness, said, “I’d do anything for you too, baby.”

  I stood up. “What you’re feeling right now, Chase—that’s what I need you to hold onto. And Karen, you too: hold onto every bit of love and loyalty you feel for Chase. Love is entangled across universes. We’re going to use the love you feel to find good matches for you.”

  “The fuck you talking about?” said Chase, staring at me, hard. I’d exposed his vulnerability, and now he needed to assert himself. He was used to making people look away whenever he wanted these days. A legless man glares at you, you avert your eyes; that’s the rule.

  I didn’t look away. I even smiled a little. One hyena to another.

  “I’m part of a team that’s researching a process called superportation. That over there,” I said, pointing to the 320 sq. ft. gray-concrete cube in the center of the room, “is the heart of what we call our Classical Information Aggregator. ClassAgg for short. It’s where we conduct our experiments.”

  Chase, like any good Pennsylvania farmer, scowled at all that mumbo-jumbo. But to my face he said, “Well, don’t stop now, Egghead. Tell me how it works.”

  “I’d have to lecture you for a year on current entanglement theory to even scratch the surface,” I said. I opened the door to the ClassAgg and flourished like a New York City doorman. “Why don’t I show you instead?”

  I love watching the faces of people when they first get a look inside the ClassAgg. It looked like a homey Pennsylvania efficiency apartment, featuring a 12-point stag-head presiding over the faux fireplace and framed, embroidered psalms hanging on the walls. The quilt on the full-sized bed was a gorgeous example of the local art. On the gingham futon sat an oversized Raggedy Ann. Coffee and whoopie pies—Karen loved whoopie pies—waited for us on the Amish kitchen table.

  “This room is so darling!” said Karen. I’d showed it to her several times back when we were lovers, but she had to sound surprised for Chase. “I want to move in!” she flourished.

  Chase didn’t seem able to see through her lies. Glad I wasn�
��t the only one. “This is science?” he asked, not without humor. “How is this science?”

  “Let’s eat and talk,” I said.

  So we dipped our fingers in cream filling and spooned sugar in our coffee while I did my best to explain uncertainty and entanglement in layman’s terms.

  “The room’s a little goofy by design,” I said. “To a lot of Pennsylvanians, it looks like Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and if not, it’s still campy and funny. Either way works for us. For our experiments, we need people to be as relaxed as they can be.”

  “That sounds like something a shrink would say,” said Chase, suddenly suspicious. “Is this all a trick? Are you a fucking shrink? I ain’t going to no shrink!”

  Karen pinched his arm. He turned to her and dared her with a “What?”

  I just kept talking. “We’re not trying to help you get in touch with your inner child here. For superportation to work, we need to get you in touch with the other Chases out there, ones that are similar enough to you so that we can copy information from them.”

  Chase stopped mid-chew. “What do you mean, ‘the other Chases?’”

  “Like that one,” I said, gesturing with my chin.

  I’d gotten lucky; the timing was perfect. I had started the ClassAgg before I entered the chamber, and now, as if on-cue, Chase and Karen looked across the table and saw a silvery, liquidy form sitting across from them. It looked exactly like Chase. It was speaking to someone we couldn’t see. A second later it started laughing like a silent movie. It was standing on two perfectly healthy legs.

  “That’s me?” said Chase. Then: “That’s not me. That’s some trick. Is this a movie set? Is this reality T.V.?”

  “Science is full of tricks,” I said. “This trick allows us to translate information of Chases from other universes and bring it here, into the ClassAgg. We call it superportation.”

  Some Chases joined the army but were never deployed. Some Chases were, but were never hit by the IED. Some were hit by the IED but made a full recovery. Some died in action. Some Chases never joined the army at all; they became poets and classical violinists and waiters and civil engineers and started businesses that failed and businesses that succeeded and were arrested for tax-evasion and became congressmen. Some Chases died when they were kids; some became the richest men in the world. Some married Karen, but most didn’t: they died virgins, or married other women, or were gay and moved to other states to marry men or stayed here and lived with men out of wedlock, or lived in universes where Pennsylvania allowed gay marriage at this point in the local history.

  But the most important thing I explained to Chase is that, out in the cosmos there were innumerable, luckier Chases who had perfectly functioning lower halves. I could sneak him into the ClassAgg a couple of Sundays a month and—using his love for Karen and Karen’s love for him—find other Chases. Then I could superport information from those other universes onto his own body.

  The upshot was, through an enormous expenditure of energy, and only while he remained in the ClassAgg, for a couple of hours every month I could give him mercurial legs. For as long as it lasted, Chase would be whole again.

  If you want to know what happiness is, give someone his legs back. Even if it’s temporary or incomplete. Even if it helps heal the marriage you wished every second of every day would fail, because you want Karen for yourself, even after everything that’s happened. Tell the love you feel for her to go fuck itself. Bring happiness back to a body the world has ravaged, and some of it will vicariously trickle down to you. You will rediscover what agency feels like. Agency, you will suddenly remember, feels good.

  If, on the other hand, you want to feel like a lovelorn teenager, drive into a cornfield and lie on the hood of your car next to someone who: 1. has already betrayed you once, but; 2. you want more than anyone else in the world, yet; 3. is utterly forbidden to you, and thus; 4. is even sexier because of it. Just lean back on the windshield with your hands pillowing your head and listen to the rustling stalks and look up at the stars. Try to be honorable. Try to be a good friend.

  “Thanks for dessert,” I said to Karen. She and Chase were constantly finding ways to thank me for sneaking him into the ClassAgg for the past four months. That night’s thank-you had taken the form of a homemade four-berry pie. It sat on the back seat now, untouched, tepid.

  “It was the only excuse I could think of to see you tonight,” said Karen, her eyes locked on the moon. “I have to tell you something.”

  “You couldn’t text me?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. What?”

  She swallowed. “Chase wants a baby.”

  I thought this through for several seconds before I responded. Then: “He figures there are some universes where you are pregnant right now. He thinks I can superport that information to our universe, the same way I’ve been superporting legs.”

  She laughed joylessly. “Our very own immaculate conception.”

  I waited a few seconds to make sure what I said next I could say completely without affect. I said, “Is that what you want?”

  “First I want to know if you can do it.”

  The last thing I wanted to do in any universe, ever, was to help Chase and Karen have a baby together. Because that would be it. Karen would be gone forever.

  Only thing is, the scientist in me wouldn’t stand for it. I’d betrayed my professional ethics more than enough for the sake of my stupid, stupid heart. Being good at my job was one thing over which I still had control. So I thought through the idea dispassionately, scientifically. And I can honestly say the best answer I could give was, “No. It’s impossible. It’d be just like Chase’s legs: the information vanishes as soon as you turn off the ClassAgg’s power.”

  There was relief in her voice. “That’s what I thought.”

  “There are other options.” This was me still being professional and self-sabotaging. “I could show you what your child or children look like in other universes. I could superport them a while into the ClassAgg. Maybe Chase would like to see them. Maybe you would, too.”

  She shook her head. Her voice was raw and tender when she said, “It’d be like seeing ghosts. That would break poor Chase’s heart.”

  At least she sounded raw and tender. I realized then I had no longer had any idea how to interpret her words. She had become a cypher to me, a placeholder zero of herself. Her words were dialogue from an audition-script: a good actor could play them a million different ways.

  Yet I still wanted her. What the fuck was wrong with me?

  I was awoken from my reverie by a touch. Karen’s hand had cautiously crawled over to mine, like a crab seeking a mate. I lay very still. She interlaced her fingers with mine. Neither of us said anything for a time.

  Eventually, her eyes jumping from star to star, she said, “Chase is coming back to himself. Those months when he first came home, there was nothing left of the man I’d fallen in love with. He was pure rage.”

  “He’d lost both his legs.”

  “Yeah. Who wouldn’t be angry?” She squeezed my hand a little tighter. “And I thought, ‘Karen, you slutty bitch, this is exactly what you deserve. You deserve a hateful husband you will treat you like shit for the rest of your life.’”

  “No one deserves that.”

  She looked at me for a second. Then she turned back to the sky and, rueful, said, “You should think that. You have every right to think I deserve every bad thing that could happen to me. What I did do you, Jesús—unforgivable.

  “Yet here we are. Not only did you forgive me, but you’ve given Chase his hope back. He feels like he’s living a miracle, thanks to you. You know what he says? He says, ‘I feel like every Chase in the universe is coming together to help me get through this.’”

  It was the longest we’d held hands since Chase had returned. “That’s a nice thought,” I said.

  “He’s not nearly as angry anymore. He can envision a future. He wants kids now.”

  �
��I can’t give him kids.”

  “But you made it possible for him to dream about the future again. You gave him his vision back. It’s the greatest gift anyone can give.”

  “Glad to help.”

  She laughed. “‘Glad to help.’ Really, that’s it? That’s all you want to say?”

  “What else should I say?”

  She shook her head and smiled. “Always so practical. So understated. You know why I fell for you, Jesús?”

  “Yep. Because I’m ‘Spanish.’”

  She squeezed my hand, hard, as punishment; I giggled evilly. “Never going to let me live that down, are you?”

  “It was pretty racist, m’dear.”

  “I know. I mean, now I know. I didn’t realize I was being racist. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. If I’m being really honest,” I said, letting go of her hand so I could roll on my side to face her, “I’m not really all that Puerto Rican. Really, I’m white.”

  Now that cracked her up. “Jesús, honey, have you looked in a mirror? You are not white.”

  “I know I look brown. But I’ve forgotten all my Spanish. I have a Ph.D. in Physics from an American university. I have money, a white ex-wife, a white ex-lover, and a Pennsylvania split-level I bought seventeen years ago. I don’t live the life of someone who has to struggle against racism every day. It’s not fair for me to call myself Latino.”

  I looked up. The moon pulled a curtain of clouds around itself like a magician, and the field grew a little darker. “Can I be really honest, too?” Karen asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I did fall for you because you’re Spanish. Latino. Whatever. I mean, your name sounds super-Latino—Jesús Camacho!—and you have brown skin and kinky hair. But you’re right. I mean, you speak perfect English. Better than me.”

  “Better than ‘I.’”

  Her laugh ascended to the stars. “See? So yeah, fine, you’re white. But off-white. I was lonely without Chase, and you were different enough to be exciting. But not too different. Just enough.”