And Back Again

“The Road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began. / Now far ahead the Road has gone, / And I must follow, if I can, / Pursuing it with eager feet, / Until it joins some larger way / Where many paths and errands meet. / And whither then? I cannot say.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

The days have been normal ones. Each day I still eat my breakfast, and each day I still make my way down to the library, though only today have I managed to write anything. The sky is still there, hanging above this forgotten city, perhaps just barely managing not to scrape the top of Wilshire Tower, but yet still managing.

It seemed when I arrived as though this were a place at the edge of the world, a stack of plates spinning on a stick on a clown’s finger. One would need only a small nudge to send everything careening down into shards of shattered china. Things didn’t fit together right here, all the patterns were wrong, and the seams were tearing. Now I know I was wrong.

The end of the world did happen, but the scenery is just the same. The sky hasn’t fallen, the tower still stands, even the carnival will outlast me, it seems. No, even I am still here.

The day after I was delirious, it’s true. I went to the library, searching in a daze. I asked the librarian if there was a book about two. She told me they had One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish if I wanted it, and asked me what I meant by all this. I told her two was important, but she didn’t listen to me. I don’t remember what else she said.

Yesterday, I finally went back to the carnival. I had tried for three days, but each time something stopped me. I saw a battered old man by the side of the road one day, a sick man coughing there the second, and on the third a wild-eyed preacher tossing sermons to the wind. Each one of these repulsed me in a way no street-side vagrants ever had before. Maybe I was scared of them, or maybe I was scared of the street they traveled on. When I looked at them I could see ten to the eighteenth water molecules in dizzying arrangement, and it was a terrifying vision. This time though, the fear did not stop me, or perhaps it drove me onward, as I went to the carnival.

Once again I stopped before the Fortune Teller’s tent and thought to step inside. Before me, the purple canvas rustled with the unknown.

In Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment a cat is placed in a box. Inside the box is a poison gas cartridge that has a perfectly even chance of going off immediately or never going off at all. The question is, before we open the box, is the cat alive or is it dead? The answer is, in equal measure, both. That is until the box is opened. Once reality is observed it cannot be undone.

The tent was another one of Schrodinger’s boxes. While I remained outside my life was still an infinite branching of quantum universes. Entering would collapse the waveform. I saw this and stumbled backwards, allowing myself to sit beneath a small tree. It was a parking lot tree, contained within its square, held steady by metal wires, but it was also the tree from which our eons-great-grandparents descended to the African plain. It was the tree from which Eve stole an apple, and the tree under which Newton tried to nap. For a moment everything was still and clear.

Some time later, a trumpet played, heralding the end of the calm. I arose, filled with the restless energy of the well rested. Swiftly, lightly, I walked down the road to my apartment, and set to work.

I toiled long that night. My only companion was the intermittent lightning. How appropriate, to be accompanied by such Promethean pyrotechnics, traditional music of the mad scientist. The crackling energy of its melody echoed my joy.