You're glowing, she said. And why would I be glowing? It can't be the gutrot wine, or last week's fast food lunches. It can't be my Quasimodo limp, I smashed my toe on a fire hydrant trying to shoo away a fucking pigeon, and was I drunk, well, do you even have to ask? I remember the sunsets in Costa Rica, this humid band of purple and orange squashed down into the sea by the darkness above, proof that night weighs more than any colour. Have you ever watched surf movies? They're super relaxing, I'm kind of obsessed. Janie got tired of them, you're stuck, she said, in a loop. You see these slow-motion waves curling over the camera like mercury, everything is a tunnel, everything gets reduced to a single radiant point, smaller and smaller and brighter and brighter the closer you get to it. Sometimes the surfers make it out, sometimes they get crushed. I can't presume to know what that must feel like. Drowning. Churning in a white froth. Maybe tumbling downwards in a rush of water with adrenaline pumping through your veins isn't such a bad way to go, crystals and diamonds and angels too, sparkling all around you and filling up your lungs.
Why was I glowing? It certainly wasn't the week-long coke binge with Matty and Finn that saw us babbling like deranged cockatoos next to the sickly light of an equally deranged flatscreen T.V. Occasionally I'd look over and see only this incomprehensible wash of primary colours and I don't even know why anybody bothers with TV anymore, it's poison. All of a sudden we're electric ghosts, there's this not wholly unpleasant pressure boring into our faces from beneath the eyes, through the sinuses, the spirit is hungry, but I like sleep usually, I need sleep, so staying up for two and a half days at a time is not recommended, hearts jackhammering and chainsmoking and ranting like skulls. But it is worthwhile if you want to feel how unreal waking life is, how it's just a thin sheen of illusion, there's not much depth to the surface of things, stay awake long enough and you'll feel it.
Rosa seemed happy with our meeting. She smiled in her youthful but long-suffering way. I'm always freaked out by younger people who seem to have their shit together better than me. Everyone in the faculty had been whispering for months now, I knew it, I was a relic and a headline and they wanted to push me out, especially since Janie. The meeting was a gift, because nobody needs physical copies of anything now, not my papers, not my presence, nobody is physical anymore. We'll be in touch, she said, You're glowing, You look really well. We'll figure something out. She was a saint, as far as I was concerned, and an unlikely ally on campus.
In Pavones near the Panamanian border Janie thought that maybe we were falling in love, but I was either experienced or cynical enough to know that it was just the foreign setting. Emotions all get cranked up a notch when you're on vacation in a hot Central American country. We did have a blast, I let the ice melt inside me and I was less cranky than usual. But what does that leave us with, really? Maybe I'm not someone you need to know.
I went back to my office, that would be the first thing I'd lose, of course, and I zoned out for awhile and stared, as I so often did, at the large framed picture of Heidegger that I had hung when the university first hired me. Sein und Zeit. Being and Time. How many more papers could I publish on the subject? How many more could anybody? One of the nice things about being sick of your academic specialty is that you start going back to basics, ontologically speaking. I started looking at things in a large, general sense, looking for patterns in unlikely places, and occasionally I felt like I was making some new kind of progress. A weird calm had come over me, maybe it was the calm of letting go, of accepting that single radiant point as it comes towards you. The old Nazi once asked, "Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question," and there we have it, folks, there we have it, why bother worrying about mysteries anymore, because have you ever watched surf movies or seen the sunsets in Costa Rica?
In the last six months or so - was it before or after Janie? - I took to hanging out with some of the quantum physics guys on campus, their labs were in the next building over, and we'd drink coffee in the cafeteria. I preferred talking to them over the crusty old fossils in my department, uptight bores whose shoulders were forever powdered with dandruff. I'd eat lunch with these quantum guys and they gave me a lot of strange looks, I grilled them with all kinds of questions, but in the end I was just happy to listen and I'd try to imagine what their invisible dimensions must look like, inevitably deeply psychedelic, I thought. Truth be told, I couldn't understand half of the more technical stuff, but I loved the concepts, the concepts were blowing my mind. As I was waiting to see if I'd still have a job in a week, they confused and excited me in equal measure.
Take this idea of a box of Nothing.
They explained to me that if you built a box and created a vacuum and got rid of all the gases and particles and light and soundwaves, and then froze it down to whatever the coldest possible temperature is and then sealed it off, would there really be Nothing inside? First you have to ask, what is Nothing, anyway? Is it just a lack of particles? Well some would say yes, at least in a universe governed by classical Newtonian physics or whatever, but it turns out that No, it turns out that even in our utmost, purest scientific understanding of what NOTHING is, in the post-relativity and post-Heisenberg eras, Nothing is something, it turns out there's some sort of weird ghostly foam that exists beneath everything, underpinning all things, beyond space and time, and out of this nothing-foam chemical reactions can occur, and given enough time entire realities and entire universes can develop, and maybe they already are, constantly, everywhere.
Or this other guy, Physicist #2 - he was less talkative and more wary of me, but he eventually loosened up - he tells me, "Or take the same box, and put an apple in it. Seal it off as tightly as theoretically possible, make sure no oxygen gets in there or ever does, and then just leave it there, lets say for billions of years. The apple will rot and decay, even without particles, which are energy, to speed up the process, and if none of the apple's decaying energy can escape the little box, which is a closed system, like our universe, albeit much simpler, well, over the course of billions of years that decayed energy will then mutate and be activated into all kinds of different permutations, and seeing as we have enough time, theoretically, various chain reactions are eventually a possibility and the remains of this apple, first organic sludge then dust then something unfathomable, will eventually give way to nuclear fission and then explode cataclysmically out of the box and start an entirely new cycle of creation and being and then entropy and death," and I was thinking, this is some Götterdämerung shit, Ragnarok shit, Revelations, Baghavad Gita, a massive dose of ego-destroying acid, I don't know, "Everything dies in Time but Brahmas too are innumerable, and a new universe is reborn with each new Brahma, Time ripens the creatures and Time also rots them."
Infinity within the finite. Strange attractors. Quantum entanglement. Mandelbrot's fractals. Phase space. All these beautiful phrases floated in my head as I went in to meet Dr. Kim, the new dean. Infinite degrees of freedom in a dynamical system. Spooky action at a distance.
Heidegger says there's no hidden power of Being at work in a person's life, we're fused onto meaning itself, we're not agents of any invisible force and there's no separation between phenomena and meaning. But how does any of that language compete with these emerging quantum views of the universe and our reality? The more I hung out with the quantum physics guys the more I started to suspect that Heidegger was a bit of a phony, just a man who delighted in the deliberately obscure.
Are you sure you're feeling okay? Rosa asked, walking down the hallway beside me. I was shivering from yet another late night, the thing was deciding itself, I smiled but my front teeth were browner than ever, all I wanted was to let go of the reins at this point.
There's this thing called retrocausality, where quantum theorists posit that time is not linear and the future influences the past. It's not sci-fi and the math holds up, it made me yearn for oblivion, to be honest, I was glowing, after all, and if the future determines the past I must eventually do something pretty terrible in this life, considering what happened to Janie.
When I was 16 some friends and I saw this old junkie amputee shoot up into his stump behind the mall, our eyes met and his were spirals, he reclined back and breathed a deep, near-sexual ahhhhhh of relief, and something stupid and juvenile in me saw a romantic life, the romanticization of decadence, a poetic truth beyond middle-class blandness, and this was before I'd ever read any Nietzsche quotes about voids staring back at you or any other German philosophy. Little did I know I'd eventually be drawn to these spirits in an academic sense, the junkie's eyes were radiant points, but it was a dark radiance, black holes sucking all the light into them and I was scared and drawn in by what they foretold.
Have a seat, Dr. Kim the new dean said and I bent over to put my suitcase down and as luck would have it a glass pipe fell out of my pocket at that exact moment and clattered on the ground, it bounced and rolled towards her desk and came to a stop, blackened tip pointing back at me. We all froze. Whose fucking pipe was that? I thought, I had no recollection of it, Matty or Finn's? But then I remembered I was wearing Janie's oversized parka, fuck me, and my heart sank. Dr. Kim looked up at me with furious eyes, her face very still, Rosa's shoulders slumped forward and she wouldn't meet my gaze, there was nothing else to say, my future was clear now, everything was very clear.
Have you ever seen those videos of glaciers calving off the coast of Antarctica? Or been stared down by a Costa Rican jaguar at night? Have you ever wondered what leads a person to surf an 80 foot wave in a storm surge off the coast of Portugal?
We're in a warm car sealed off from everything at dusk and there's snow falling outside. Janie and I never stopped to think about how far we'd gone, the hunger just grew and we fed it and only later did I realize it had always been there. We passed the little glass pipe between us and it smoldered in the dark as we filled our lungs with chemicals. "Your face is glowing" she said, a little cocoon of soft red light ebbing between us, Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and I saw her smile lazily and lean back against the frosty window and joy or maybe just relief coursed through us and that's the last thing I remember before shooting out into an uneasy dream realm.
The quantum guys say there's no such thing as Nothing, and who am I to argue with them? But have you ever woken up half-dead and shivering in your car in a suburban parking lot in February? Janie's body was frozen stiff beside me in the backseat, her blue cheek stuck to the window. It was a long time before I understood what had happened. I looked out over the wasteland of shitty box stores and cracked concrete lots dusted with tendrils of snow, there was absolutely no one around, not a soul, and after an eternity I began to sob. There's no such thing as Nothing, maybe, but I swear it's these winter sunrises and their glacial hues that account for a great deal of the emptiness in our hearts.
