IV. The Line at the End of The Milky Way
Jericho, Texas. February, 1998.
It’s funny how the line at the end of The Milky Way sneaks up on a person, how something as simple as a visit to the country doctor will do it. We never thought something like that would catch us, but it did.
After her shower one morning, Irene complained to Levi about a stiffness in her right arm.
“It feels tight,” she said, “Like something’s stretching inside of my arm.”
Ken Roberts, the local General Practitioner in Jericho did a breast exam, and ordered x-rays of Irene’s chest and arm. The physical exam revealed an oblong lump on the right side of her breast. The x-ray however, showed no trace of the fractured collar bone that Irene suffered when she was thirteen.
“I don’t understand,” Dr. Roberts said, as he shook his head at us. “Signs of a fracture like that don’t just go away. They show up on an x-ray for years and years after the fracture has healed.”
We didn’t have much of an opportunity to question our “doubles” before Levi dispatched them.
“Nasty business,” was the phrase he used, along with chloroform, thick ropes, garden shears, duct tape and three heavy duty, two-ply garbage bags. If fratricide is murder committed against a sibling, and suicide is killing one’s self, then what is the term for murdering a person’s double in a parallel universe?
I don’t know, but after the thing was done, the three of us were never the same again. And after the revealing visit to the doctor’s office was completed, we all decided to do a little research into our respective characters’ lives. Turns out the Levi Bingham from this parallel never married the Irene Turner. Records at the court house indicated that she’d married a local boy, a promising baseball player named Ted Wilcox, who eventually divorced her for a lonely life on the road as a scout.
Our Irene moved out of Levi’s house the next day, and I proposed to her a month later.
In 1988, renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking published a book about the universe, called A Brief History of Time. It provided a fundamental understanding necessary to comprehend the theories he would espouse in later tomes dedicated to black holes, general relativity and string theory. Mr. Hawking’s name is most often associated with discussions of quantum physics in the general and popular media outlets, but it was a man named Hugh Everett, working in the late 1950’s who initially proposed the idea of the so-called “multi-verse”.
Years later, another scientist named Bryce Seligman DeWitt renamed the notion, calling it the “many-worlds interpretation” of the theory of universal wave function. These are all heady terms for what is best depicted in the model, often referred to as the Schrodinger’s cat analogy. In one “root” world, the feline encounters a box, containing a radioactive substance or poison. This poses a dilemma for the cat. If it indulges its curiosity and investigates the toxic substance, it dies; if it doesn’t, it lives. The “choice” forms a “branch” in the root world, creating two possible outcomes, one with a surviving cat, one without. Multiplying the number of “branches” each entity faces over the course of a day, produces an almost infinite number of possible parallels, and thus the “many-worlds” of DeWitt’s nomenclature.
I have no scientific basis for my own reinterpretation of these tenets, but I firmly believe that a considerable amount of randomness has been injected into this equation by the very universe itself. Take for example a billiards table. Once the triangle of stripes and solids has been scattered all over the green felt, the person acting on the cue ball has a multitude of decisions that he or she could make. Added to this complexity is the presence of the opponent, who also could make any number of decisions concerning which ball to strike next.
It makes little sense to me that every single one of these decision points would produce an alternate world, filled with variable circumstances. To put it another way, sometimes the sky gets cloudy and it rains. Sometimes it gets cloudy and it doesn’t rain. I don’t know why. Maybe the humidity or barometric pressure, temperature or dew point isn’t right. Like I said, I don’t know. However, my humble modification to the “branches” in DeWitt’s “many-worlds” theory is that sometimes a decision produces an alternate or parallel scenario; sometimes it doesn’t.
When I asked Irene to marry me, she said yes, and in that world, we became engaged. But in that world, the results of her biopsy showed that she also had stage IV breast cancer. It had metastasized and spread through her lymph nodes to several other areas around her body.
I left her in her room there at the hospital with Dr. Roberts and a couple of nurses. I went around the corner and found a telephone in an empty corridor and I dialed Levi’s number.
“What do you want?” he answered in a gruff tone.
“We have to keep going,” I said.
“Keep going where?”
“The plane, the ‘puddle jumper’,” I clarified, “We have to find a parallel where they can help Irene.”
“So now you want my help,” he asked.
“It’s for Irene, not me.”
There was a long pause, during which I heard his labored breathing, the rattle in his chest from years of smoking and drinking.
“You know where the hangar is,” Levi said at last. The phone clicked and the mechanic buzz that flooded my ear was the sound of hope calling us to endure a little more, to be patient just a little while longer. I sat down and I cried. I blubbered into my hands and my body shook and I moaned like a broken old man. I cried so hard that it literally hurt inside. It wouldn’t be the last time.
***
Jericho, Texas. October, 1994.
The first time Levi caught us in bed was on a gorgeous autumn afternoon during our sixth year in the new parallel. The window was open and the light fabric of the curtains was blowing in the gentle breeze drifting in from outside.
At some point, Irene and I had both slipped into a lazy afternoon slumber. Levi said very little about the incident in retrospect; he just kind of grunted his disapproval, muttered something about how he assumed this would happen eventually and walked past the disheveled bed and the two naked bodies wrapped up together on top of it. What could he say really, given the long string of his own dalliances?
The second time occurred about six months later, around five in the morning. He was sneaking in and I was sneaking out.
“I ought to punch you in the jaw,” he said.
I straightened up and hardened my body, preparing myself on the off chance that he did that very thing.
“But it wouldn’t change anything,” Levi added.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“You love her,” he answered. “You think I don’t know that?”
“Why did you marry her?” In all honesty, I didn’t expect an answer. It was a simple observation phrased as a question. “You don’t love her.”
“I don’t know,” he said, “Maybe I do, and I just don’t know how to show it.”
“But surely you know that being with all of these other women doesn’t help your cause on that front.”
“It’s what I do,” he said, looking down and shaking his head. “I buy and sell cattle, real estate, municipal bonds. I drink too much and I screw around. It’s all part of what I do.”
“But why?!” I shouted, not really meaning to raise my voice.
“Because just like you,” Levi hissed at me, “I want something in my life that feels normal! Something that feels like it used to –“
“Before we got on that plane,” Again, not meaning to, I interrupted him and finished the thought.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s right.”
We stood away from each other, but our postures relaxed. Without him saying so, I knew he wasn’t going to hit me anymore. Still, Levi rubbed his fist in his opposite hand as if he was consciously trying to give up the notion of throwing a right jab at my face.
“You want to come inside and have some coffee?”
“I don’t know,” I answered him honestly. “Sure.”
We talked for hours, retracing and re-thinking several of our decisions, but as is nearly always the case, the only way out of the forest is to keep moving forward down the path. Some time later, Irene got up and fixed us eggs and bacon, toast and more coffee. In the oddest sense, it was the happiest day of our lives after “Spruce Lake”, a moment when all time seemed to stop and give us the right of way for several minutes, maybe even a couple of hours.
The three of us sat at the breakfast table in the other Levi’s house, eating and laughing, even making plans for the coming spring. We talked about the places we’d been together, the things we’d seen and done, and we lamented the fact that we had no pictures, no souvenirs other than the plane, the Grumman G-44 Widgeon sitting in a rented hangar out at the small two landing-strip Jericho airport. We had nothing more than that old “puddle jumper” and our own ephemeral recollections, but for that span of several hours that morning, it was enough.
The next time I ran into Levi, he was drunk and angry and he did hit me. It was just before midnight, and I was headed for my truck. He was coming from the barn, a cigar in one hand, a bottle in the other. Despite the arid climate, thick rain poured down around us.
“Why can’t I have something normal like you’ve got?” Levi shouted over the dull white hum of falling precipitation.
“You did!” I answered. “She was married to you for more than ten years.”
“She never loved me,” he responded.
“You never loved her!”
He staggered forward, too drunk to be steady on his feet. “I did,” he mumbled in that crazy blend of British and West Texas accents. “I loved you both like my own family.”
Levi’s parents died in an automobile accident when he was sixteen years old. For a year, he lived with a grandmother who couldn’t even begin to control the grieving boy’s wild desires. After he turned eighteen, he left England for good, choosing the small town of Jericho on the western side of the Texas panhandle for a home.
“It doesn’t rain much there,” he said to anyone who asked. Those who knew him understood that he blamed the rain, the infamous London weather for his parents’ demise.
In West Texas, the lanky young man found work on a ranch. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut, because he knew his accent would be a challenge to the hard worn cowboys that grew up in towns like Jericho. He fought, drank and screwed to prove that he was every bit the man that they were. But he rode bulls in the local rodeos because he wanted to fight with the spirit of the universe itself.
“We were going to have kids,” he sputtered. “We were going to start trying after the cabin was built.”
“You were forty years old,” I reminded him. “Irene was thirty-five.”
“It’s too late for any of that now,” he added.
“Let’s go inside,” I tried to pull him over with my arm. “We’ll go inside and we’ll drink some coffee.”
“All of this,” he backed away and motioned with the bottle in his hand, “All of this is our hell. It was our heaven and our hell both at the same time. Every day we pay for what I’ve done.”
CONTINUED…
Jericho, Texas. February, 1998.
It’s funny how the line at the end of The Milky Way sneaks up on a person, how something as simple as a visit to the country doctor will do it. We never thought something like that would catch us, but it did.
After her shower one morning, Irene complained to Levi about a stiffness in her right arm.
“It feels tight,” she said, “Like something’s stretching inside of my arm.”
Ken Roberts, the local General Practitioner in Jericho did a breast exam, and ordered x-rays of Irene’s chest and arm. The physical exam revealed an oblong lump on the right side of her breast. The x-ray however, showed no trace of the fractured collar bone that Irene suffered when she was thirteen.
“I don’t understand,” Dr. Roberts said, as he shook his head at us. “Signs of a fracture like that don’t just go away. They show up on an x-ray for years and years after the fracture has healed.”
We didn’t have much of an opportunity to question our “doubles” before Levi dispatched them.
“Nasty business,” was the phrase he used, along with chloroform, thick ropes, garden shears, duct tape and three heavy duty, two-ply garbage bags. If fratricide is murder committed against a sibling, and suicide is killing one’s self, then what is the term for murdering a person’s double in a parallel universe?
I don’t know, but after the thing was done, the three of us were never the same again. And after the revealing visit to the doctor’s office was completed, we all decided to do a little research into our respective characters’ lives. Turns out the Levi Bingham from this parallel never married the Irene Turner. Records at the court house indicated that she’d married a local boy, a promising baseball player named Ted Wilcox, who eventually divorced her for a lonely life on the road as a scout.
Our Irene moved out of Levi’s house the next day, and I proposed to her a month later.
In 1988, renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking published a book about the universe, called A Brief History of Time. It provided a fundamental understanding necessary to comprehend the theories he would espouse in later tomes dedicated to black holes, general relativity and string theory. Mr. Hawking’s name is most often associated with discussions of quantum physics in the general and popular media outlets, but it was a man named Hugh Everett, working in the late 1950’s who initially proposed the idea of the so-called “multi-verse”.
Years later, another scientist named Bryce Seligman DeWitt renamed the notion, calling it the “many-worlds interpretation” of the theory of universal wave function. These are all heady terms for what is best depicted in the model, often referred to as the Schrodinger’s cat analogy. In one “root” world, the feline encounters a box, containing a radioactive substance or poison. This poses a dilemma for the cat. If it indulges its curiosity and investigates the toxic substance, it dies; if it doesn’t, it lives. The “choice” forms a “branch” in the root world, creating two possible outcomes, one with a surviving cat, one without. Multiplying the number of “branches” each entity faces over the course of a day, produces an almost infinite number of possible parallels, and thus the “many-worlds” of DeWitt’s nomenclature.
I have no scientific basis for my own reinterpretation of these tenets, but I firmly believe that a considerable amount of randomness has been injected into this equation by the very universe itself. Take for example a billiards table. Once the triangle of stripes and solids has been scattered all over the green felt, the person acting on the cue ball has a multitude of decisions that he or she could make. Added to this complexity is the presence of the opponent, who also could make any number of decisions concerning which ball to strike next.
It makes little sense to me that every single one of these decision points would produce an alternate world, filled with variable circumstances. To put it another way, sometimes the sky gets cloudy and it rains. Sometimes it gets cloudy and it doesn’t rain. I don’t know why. Maybe the humidity or barometric pressure, temperature or dew point isn’t right. Like I said, I don’t know. However, my humble modification to the “branches” in DeWitt’s “many-worlds” theory is that sometimes a decision produces an alternate or parallel scenario; sometimes it doesn’t.
When I asked Irene to marry me, she said yes, and in that world, we became engaged. But in that world, the results of her biopsy showed that she also had stage IV breast cancer. It had metastasized and spread through her lymph nodes to several other areas around her body.
I left her in her room there at the hospital with Dr. Roberts and a couple of nurses. I went around the corner and found a telephone in an empty corridor and I dialed Levi’s number.
“What do you want?” he answered in a gruff tone.
“We have to keep going,” I said.
“Keep going where?”
“The plane, the ‘puddle jumper’,” I clarified, “We have to find a parallel where they can help Irene.”
“So now you want my help,” he asked.
“It’s for Irene, not me.”
There was a long pause, during which I heard his labored breathing, the rattle in his chest from years of smoking and drinking.
“You know where the hangar is,” Levi said at last. The phone clicked and the mechanic buzz that flooded my ear was the sound of hope calling us to endure a little more, to be patient just a little while longer. I sat down and I cried. I blubbered into my hands and my body shook and I moaned like a broken old man. I cried so hard that it literally hurt inside. It wouldn’t be the last time.
***
Jericho, Texas. October, 1994.
The first time Levi caught us in bed was on a gorgeous autumn afternoon during our sixth year in the new parallel. The window was open and the light fabric of the curtains was blowing in the gentle breeze drifting in from outside.
At some point, Irene and I had both slipped into a lazy afternoon slumber. Levi said very little about the incident in retrospect; he just kind of grunted his disapproval, muttered something about how he assumed this would happen eventually and walked past the disheveled bed and the two naked bodies wrapped up together on top of it. What could he say really, given the long string of his own dalliances?
The second time occurred about six months later, around five in the morning. He was sneaking in and I was sneaking out.
“I ought to punch you in the jaw,” he said.
I straightened up and hardened my body, preparing myself on the off chance that he did that very thing.
“But it wouldn’t change anything,” Levi added.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“You love her,” he answered. “You think I don’t know that?”
“Why did you marry her?” In all honesty, I didn’t expect an answer. It was a simple observation phrased as a question. “You don’t love her.”
“I don’t know,” he said, “Maybe I do, and I just don’t know how to show it.”
“But surely you know that being with all of these other women doesn’t help your cause on that front.”
“It’s what I do,” he said, looking down and shaking his head. “I buy and sell cattle, real estate, municipal bonds. I drink too much and I screw around. It’s all part of what I do.”
“But why?!” I shouted, not really meaning to raise my voice.
“Because just like you,” Levi hissed at me, “I want something in my life that feels normal! Something that feels like it used to –“
“Before we got on that plane,” Again, not meaning to, I interrupted him and finished the thought.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s right.”
We stood away from each other, but our postures relaxed. Without him saying so, I knew he wasn’t going to hit me anymore. Still, Levi rubbed his fist in his opposite hand as if he was consciously trying to give up the notion of throwing a right jab at my face.
“You want to come inside and have some coffee?”
“I don’t know,” I answered him honestly. “Sure.”
We talked for hours, retracing and re-thinking several of our decisions, but as is nearly always the case, the only way out of the forest is to keep moving forward down the path. Some time later, Irene got up and fixed us eggs and bacon, toast and more coffee. In the oddest sense, it was the happiest day of our lives after “Spruce Lake”, a moment when all time seemed to stop and give us the right of way for several minutes, maybe even a couple of hours.
The three of us sat at the breakfast table in the other Levi’s house, eating and laughing, even making plans for the coming spring. We talked about the places we’d been together, the things we’d seen and done, and we lamented the fact that we had no pictures, no souvenirs other than the plane, the Grumman G-44 Widgeon sitting in a rented hangar out at the small two landing-strip Jericho airport. We had nothing more than that old “puddle jumper” and our own ephemeral recollections, but for that span of several hours that morning, it was enough.
The next time I ran into Levi, he was drunk and angry and he did hit me. It was just before midnight, and I was headed for my truck. He was coming from the barn, a cigar in one hand, a bottle in the other. Despite the arid climate, thick rain poured down around us.
“Why can’t I have something normal like you’ve got?” Levi shouted over the dull white hum of falling precipitation.
“You did!” I answered. “She was married to you for more than ten years.”
“She never loved me,” he responded.
“You never loved her!”
He staggered forward, too drunk to be steady on his feet. “I did,” he mumbled in that crazy blend of British and West Texas accents. “I loved you both like my own family.”
Levi’s parents died in an automobile accident when he was sixteen years old. For a year, he lived with a grandmother who couldn’t even begin to control the grieving boy’s wild desires. After he turned eighteen, he left England for good, choosing the small town of Jericho on the western side of the Texas panhandle for a home.
“It doesn’t rain much there,” he said to anyone who asked. Those who knew him understood that he blamed the rain, the infamous London weather for his parents’ demise.
In West Texas, the lanky young man found work on a ranch. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut, because he knew his accent would be a challenge to the hard worn cowboys that grew up in towns like Jericho. He fought, drank and screwed to prove that he was every bit the man that they were. But he rode bulls in the local rodeos because he wanted to fight with the spirit of the universe itself.
“We were going to have kids,” he sputtered. “We were going to start trying after the cabin was built.”
“You were forty years old,” I reminded him. “Irene was thirty-five.”
“It’s too late for any of that now,” he added.
“Let’s go inside,” I tried to pull him over with my arm. “We’ll go inside and we’ll drink some coffee.”
“All of this,” he backed away and motioned with the bottle in his hand, “All of this is our hell. It was our heaven and our hell both at the same time. Every day we pay for what I’ve done.”
CONTINUED…
No comments:
Post a Comment