Sphere

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The former professor pushed another small log into the stove, poured some cheap oil into the skillet and continued chopping leeks. He tossed one to the golden retriever near the door, who crouched and pawed ever more boldly at a hapless beetle.

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“You’re going to kill it, Gold,” he said to her as she messily picked up her leek. “By your lack of dexterity if nothing else.” The beetle wiggled on its back; Goldie, emboldened, administered the next round of humid breath and clumsy paw-slaps.

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Outside, innumerable excited air molecules bounced and spun amid innumerable frenzied grass flies. Groundwater, drawn by the sun, crept imperceptibly upward from long-silent pools; emerged from the soil in beads; was borne off grassblades into the hot air; stagnated in invisible clouds; moaned in inchoate thought; was buffeted through in an instant by the flies. As each fly flew its confused tight spirals, between them seemed to grow an irreversibly tangled mass of hair-thin wire; at the instant the wire threatened to pull taught and bring the flies crashing together, it dissolved away and the work began again.

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Everywhere, meaning raveled and unraveled. Bumblebees, dancing in clumsy pairs, occasionally united (every movement through space threatened to rend one from another in time); every instant, immeasurably more virtual particles suggested themselves and were annihilated. A sea of quantum fields roiled endlessly: uncertainty mounted upon uncertainty, rendering here a falling leaf (the colors aren’t turning yet, the professor thought); there a cardinal’s call (the professor squinted at branches, searching); there a flash of golden fur bounding after a chipmunk. 

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The former physicist pondered these things, as he often did, sitting outside for an early dinner. As Goldie snuffed maniacally through underbrush and under fallen branches, he chose not to worry her again about spiders or snakes. He watched her strange elated frenzy and imagined he had felt something similar: the rising pulse and dilated eyes as one felt oneself coming nearer and nearer the great Unnamed Thing waiting to reveal itself on the turn of a page or in sleepless midnight excavations of old material thrumming with new potential—yes, maybe the Thing is on the next page—alas, It is elusive—nonetheless for Its elusiveness one must never lose belief in Its existence, for then one would be adrift in a blank sea with neither star nor compass to point one’s way, and anyway no destinations to point to—

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He despaired once again that university students no longer studied the theories that had captivated him for the first time decades ago, and everyday since. He despaired further over the suppression of texts, and his mind at once turned anxiously to the small hand-operated printing press that dominated the cabin’s single room. He allowed himself a final moment of despair for the great minds, his colleagues, who had chosen to leave the field rather than continue working under the alarming new legal restrictions. Theoretical physics, which mainstream culture had long regarded as a legitimate if somewhat mystifying endeavor, was suddenly under scrutiny as it had not been since the development of the atom bomb. Pundits and politicians shouted about indoctrination, godlessness, and waste; legislatures defunded and banned. Rumors of bizarre and unbelievable harassments circulated among the faculty who remained. 

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Mourn but don’t despair, he thought, before turning his attention to Goldie, who trotted back to him with a new stick. He wondered sometimes if quantum uncertainty did indeed characterize every object in the universe, or just every object except Goldie, who seemed to display a perfect conceptual unity.

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“I think you’ve already chewed that one,” the professor said through a bite of mushroom.

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She did not seem to mind.[1]

 

…

 

That night, the season’s first cool winds displaced the day’s stagnant air. The trees that through the summer had huddled in sweating groups peering over one another for some secret at the lake’s center now danced wildly in a manic arrhythmia. No light of awareness motivated them. Nonetheless they consecrated the continuing expansion of space: “All will accelerate from all,” they chanted, first in imprecatory whispers and then asynchronous shrieks which rose and fell with the wind—or maybe they were themselves the wind, their vitriolic wax-and-wane accusations gathering, tunneling, and dispersing pockets of spiteful pressure until the space over the lake roared like a chorus of blind pagans. Drums rebounded in complex time, defying notation. 

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Lightyears away, a vacuous region of space undergoing the same expansion quivered with quantum potential.[2]

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A shot fired; a sound wave propagated from the barrel in all directions but was scattered in the growing fervor, joining the countless dissonances of wind. A pair of flashlights beamed irregularly up and down; two pairs of combat boots stomped arrogantly away from the cabin of the former physics professor.

 

…

 

When the professor returned home it was nearly midnight and the sky’s deep blue was shot through by the blank black trees. 

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The professor returned home the next morning to find Goldie splayed, long tongue limply hanging, quarts of blood having drained, pooled, and begun on the edges to dry around her. They had shot her in the flank, had wanted her to suffer; she had likely spent most of the night bleeding.

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___

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I swear under penalty of perjury that the following notes were added of my own volition and without duress:

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[1] The text above refers to certain unscientific critical theories fabricated to undermine the contributions of great Europeans such as Isaac Newton and Galileo.

[2] See note 1, supra.