Everything Exists at Once

 

It was cold the evening I went to meet her, not much above freezing. It was dry, at least. Not like last winter when there were 80-something days in a row of rain and wet overcast. Back then my breath would’ve left puffs of fog, my own contrail like the ones the 737s and A320s paved overhead in the last rays of the day’s sunlight. This year the mask sent all the condensation straight to my glasses.

The leaves crunched under the rigid soles of my shoes, worn down by 12 relentless months of pounding into concrete, asphalt, dirt, rock, and mud. My legs worked harder as I trudged up the hill to meet her, and I began to feel a little less shivery inside the old dirty jacket. I reminded myself that I’d need to wash it soon, and hoped I wouldn’t forget like the zillionteen times before. We met where there was nowhere higher to climb.

“I took a COVID test on Thursday. It was negative,” she said. Her bare face studied mine. Cloth didn’t make a sturdy shield, but it was better than nothing.

“That’s great,” I replied. “I haven’t, though.”

“Really?” she said with an accent of surprise. “All these months and you never took one?”

I shrugged. “It just never seemed necessary. Sarah had one a few weeks ago, though. It was negative.”

She nodded. “Well, you don’t need to wear that for me. I’m just wrapping up and then I’ll be outta here.”

I felt the elastic stretch as I tugged the mask off. It was always fun for a moment to pull off one loop and pretend it was like a fighter pilot’s oxygen mask. Then the next loop, and the flesh of my ears began to bounce back. I felt the true chill of the air on my face for the first time.

“Why do we have to do this this time of year?” I asked. “We could do this any time, and we pick the time when there’s uselessly little light and it’s freezing and it’s raining more often than not.”

She shrugged this time. “You could do this any time of the year. But it’s a long standing tradition to do it now. Can you help me with this?” She pointed to the contraption at the summit. I nodded my assent.

I slipped the backpack straps off and set the tank down on the ground. It felt heavier in my arms than it had on my back, even lugging it up the hill. “You’d think,” I said, “after holding three kids for five years I’d have a little more upper body strength than this.”

“Well,” she replied, “it would help if you actually worked out. You had a big tank, after all.”

I appreciated her bluntness. “It’s not as big as it looks when you’re living in it.”

We lined up the fittings and tightened the B-nuts. Something seemed less than professional about the setup. When it was designed by someone else it seemed like real engineering. When I designed it, it still felt like claptrap. The last connection made, I turned on the pump.

There was a long pause as time flowed from my reservoir into hers. I felt older, more tired. Each year, it seemed, the stressors accumulated, and relief became harder to imagine. I began to wonder if my sense of hope was defective. I was about to say something when she-

I get the feeling you guys don’t like me as much as my sisters.” She was staring at the twilight airglow in the southwest when she said that, then turned to me. Her pupils were big. I couldn’t quite discern the color of her irises.

I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well can you blame us? I mean look at January. We almost went to war with Iran. The wildfires in Australia made California, Brazil, Siberia seem like an appetizer. Locusts were devouring Africa. Democracy was falling apart. And it just got-“ She butted in.

"You’re talking about global scale events. That’s like a bacterium in a pond going on and on about a thunderstorm. You’re in a raindrop, not a storm.” She paused to take a breath. “Tell me about your life.”

I shook my head. “My life exists in this world. The events of this world affect me. A year ago I didn’t know there was a province of China called Hubei. A guy kills a pangolin at a meat market there and four months later I’m sobbing in a parking garage like I haven’t sobbed since Matt died.” My turn for a breath. “So now you’re going to explain to me how this is disconnected? How my reactions are unjustified by events?”

"No.” She shook her head. Those pupils again. “I want to hear about you.”

I wondered what to say. “Those first two months were anticipation. We’re not going to talk about the impeachment, but that happened. I care about this country, so that happened and it affected me. But you’re right, on the bacterium level there were more important things happening to us. Sarah had a hard time at the end of the pregnancy. That’s not me, but it is me in a way. I care about her. We live different lives but we also share our lives with each other. I knew things were going to change when Mira was born because of her, but I didn’t know they were going to change completely otherwise.”

“How else did they change?”

 “The same weekend Mira was born the lockdown started. We went from having two kids in full time care to three kids and no outside care in a 36 hour period. That same period included major surgery for Sarah and a moment where I was convinced she or Mira or both would die. So yeah, it would be great if I didn’t cry like someone had died, but it was hard.”

Time flowed through the lull in our conversation. In the coil of tubes heat flowed through forced convection in a turbulent boundary layer, conduction through the exchanger walls, and free convection with the air we breathed. I appreciated the brutal elegance of the system. I should’ve taken more and more practical heat transfer classes in college, I thought. I liked doing that kind of work and wished I was doing more of it now.

“It’s not as though you had no help,” she reminded me.

I had to concede the point. “You’re right. Having Sarah’s mom here saved our bacon. It was still hard adjusting. All the rules and norms and expectations about how work and family and the way we manage time between them had to break overnight. You can’t blame- well, I don’t think it’s fair to blame us for having issues.”

"What kind of issues?”

“Isaac weeping at the bottom of the stairs and screaming ‘I hate Seattle!’ For example.” I remembered that moment, that feeling of pressure like a kick pump slamming down on everything. “I’d stopped working by then. Sarah and I were both on leave and it still seemed like it wasn’t enough. We weren’t surviving, we were eating up our fat reserves. Sometimes I wonder if that’s still what we’re doing.”

She disagreed. “There was other help, wasn’t there?”

I remembered Isaac and Lucy fidgeting with their masks, not used to them yet. The descent over the water next to Oakland, waiting, taking off, flying over the fires at night. Lucy screaming and biting my shoulder in the airport, panicked and missing her mother. But then it got better.

“It was good visiting my family in Phoenix,” I said. “We needed that.” I remembered then the way the dryness, the warmth, the creosote dust, and the citrus pollen in the air filled my nostrils the way my feet filled an old broken-in pair of shoes. I took a breath and felt the air of Puget Sound. It was brisk, damp, full of life and with a pinch of salt and seaweed. Seattle air is the air I love, the air I chose, what feels like home now, but Phoenix air always touches the little child in the back of my mind. The air my wife breathes and the air my mother breathes, all circulating in the same open mix.

“It was fun seeing how much Isaac and Lucy loved the pool, and how much they loved seeing the family. I wish so much we could’ve done more of that.” A meteor flashed overhead and for a moment I saw her face clearly. The pump was humming away, the reservoirs approaching their moment of equality with each other. I shook my head at her. “You take so much. I guess I can’t really say I hate you, but I hate that you take so much.”

She rolled her eyes, and the childlikeness of that destabilized me, forced me back into the moment. “People go on and on about how much I take. I’m so cruel. I destroy everything and I take everything.” She shook her head, not the quick reaction, but the shake of weariness, the SMDH. “I don’t take anything. Don’t you get it? This works,” she motioned to the humming, frosting machine, “and I do my job, and the exchange happens.” It was truly dark now. The last of the buzzing insects had gone to sleep while satellites blinked out overhead.

I started this time. “I guess you want to talk about what else happened. Isaac and Lucy went back to Marji’s. That was great. We had to figure out again how to deal with the new schedule. Robin came. That was a blessing. We needed her and need her so much. I went back to work. I can’t figure out what’s going on there. Maybe we’re trying to crash the program and be like SpaceX. Maybe not, maybe just in the good ways. Blue Origin is 20 years old and still hasn’t figured out what she wants to be when she grows up.”

"What about Sarah?” she asked.

“She went back to work. I realize now what a blessing it is that she’s working kinda-sorta less than full time. We can pick up each other’s slack that way. I’m dreading her having to work more.” It was tough thinking it over. I thought of all the times I was dead tired at the end of the day, laboring through the dishes or laundry or just dumb stuff that needed to be dumb and done. I thought of the way I sabotaged myself, starving myself of sleep because it was that or I never did a damn thing I wanted to do. And of course Sarah in the same boat, starving the same way, my love and my choice, and the shame of it all stung like a rusty nail through my skin. I collected my thoughts.

“I hate that I feel like I have so little. I have so much constraining so much in my life and so few meaningful choices. I had fantasies of designing an airplane this summer when I wasn’t working. I mean what the fuck was that? When could that ever happen?” Unimaginable. “And then there’s Sarah, who’s been so beaten down by the garbage patch medical system that she doesn’t notice how un-normal all of this is. It just sucks.”

She shrugged. “You have a lot,” she said. I had nothing to say to that.

The transfer line coughed for a moment and flexed as the time reservoir ran down in my tank. The gray hairs were getting more numerous and my joints were obviously not working as well as they used to. I felt the fullness in my right ear that never really went completely away after the course of antibiotics in May, probably another sign of aging. I felt relentlessly, ravenously fatigued. She really did take so much, just like all her sisters.

“You wish you’d made different choices,” she said. I tried to figure out if it was a question or a statement.

“I don’t know. I’m here. I love Sarah. I love Isaac. I’m glad he’s in kindergarten now, even if the Seattle public schools wouldn’t let him in. He obviously needs to be there. I love Lucy. I hate myself for letting her break – well, for breaking her leg really. For dropping her in just the wrong way and the wrong time. I love Mira. I wonder what she’ll be like when she’s older, but I feel like I already know.” I smiled, despite my weariness. “I just hope I don’t find a way to screw this all up. I don’t know if I can keep up with all this. It seems obvious that I can’t. And I have to to keep everyone happy and moving forward in life.”

She seemed agitated. “I hear you talk, and it sounds like your misery is complete. Isn’t there anything that makes you want to get up in the morning?”

“I mean, usually I don’t really want to get up in the morning.” She deserved something more serious than that, I knew. “There’s music. And sex of course. Pecan pie. And laughter.” I felt I should dig deep, find something more. “I don’t know. Hopefully that’s enough for now. Enough for the storm.”

She wanted more. “Joe Biden won the election. Hell, I’m not supposed to say anything about that, but you know that’s good. And the vaccine is coming.”

I nodded. “You’re right. Politics is still fucked, though. Good lord we flirted with so much disaster this year. Sober heads…”

The pump really made progress as my tank drained down. The bang-bang valves were clicking less often now, as the ullage volume expanded above the liquid surface in the tank and the gas dynamics became less stiff. I shoved my hands in my pockets to keep them warm, and realized she was doing the same. “That’s a nice dress,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, “pockets.” After a while she continued “You really seem to like this stuff.” She waved a finger over the claptrap casually. “Are you really thinking of giving it up?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. We could be in La Grande, man. La Grande. I spent my whole life trying to get more. More grades. More classes. More success. More responsibility. More design impact. More love. More beauty. More fertility. More children. More holiness. I want less.” I paused. “It’s probably not great that I started with less of that last one first, but I need less… stuff, somehow. It’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. Giving this up, not working, in this career at least, is one way to do that. I guess not for a while, though, if ever.”

“If this were Sarah’s rendezvous, what do you think would be here?”

I considered that. “I don’t know. I should know better. I’m married to her, and it’s possible that some day she’ll be our sole source of income, so I should understand better.” After a moment to think it over I wagered “Superconducting magnets. Now that’s piece of heat transfer, keeping those cold. Software that would make my eyeballs bleed that understands what the magnets do. And other things. She spends less time making stuff in her head and more time doing things than me.”

“Like what?”

“Observing them. The patients. Bodies. Muscle tremors, eye movements, motion of crystals in the inner ear. Talking to them to understand why they’re there and figuring out what to do. It’s like us and the world. She works on the brain, but the brain is connected to the whole body, so she’s a whole body doctor.” I wondered for a moment if I was jealous of them. All those patients who had the full attention of her sapphire-aqua eyes, her brain and mind, her hands and her touch. Then I thought about what having ALS would be like for half a second and realized I had absolute zero envy or jealousy of them.

“She does good work. She’s about to be rewarded for it, really, for the first time. I hope she enjoys it. If not,” I motioned to the system. “I kinda like doing this stuff. I just wish the system wasn’t so dumb sometimes.” I thought then of the absurdity of the wealth of Bezos and Musk. It was absurd on January 1 and it would be absurd like the summation of all the horrors of Kafka and Lovecraft by December 31. There ought to be a better way to do this, to let the children of Earth out like dandelion seeds on the wind. It was dumb, but no one, including me, seems to be able to find a better way.

The quantity light flashed on in my reservoir. The ECO sensor tripped, and the pump shut down. We bled back excess time from the connection lines and disconnected the quick disconnects. I felt the chill diamond pattern of the grips on my fingers and the spring click as the coupler backed off the nipple. In 12 days the year would be over. It was finished.

“Like I said,” she began. “I don’t take anything.” From the machine she pulled a small jewelry box. She opened it. The jewel inside was fractally detailed, dark, exquisite in its complexity. It looked as fragile as the thinnest snowflake, but I knew it was impossible to change any detail. It would grow dusty and harder to view over the years, but its details were etched more securely than the bedrock beneath our feet. “I come. I’m with you for a while. The present flows. Then what’s left is the same stuff, just differently arranged. It’s all here,” she said, handing the jewel to me.

As I studied it she pulled a flashlight from her pocket. The light was bright, but not as blinding as I expected it to be. My eyes were already half-adjusted from the dawn simmering over Renton and the southeast horizon. I saw her face more clearly again. It was still beautiful, but a ragged, worn kind of beauty. Her hair was long and dirty gray, her skin obviously not what it used to be. I thought then of looking at Isaac’s perfect virgin skin at a church in California while the priest read of Jesus touching the Lepers. That same skin, in August, torn open on a rock in the Green River valley, then a few weeks later perfect again. Virginity is truly overrated.

“I’ll be on m way, then,” she said.

I nodded. “I’ll see you around.”

She smiled. I was surprised. It was a genuine smile, something full of mirth, an I’ve-got-a-secret smile and not a could-you-fucking-not smile. “No. You know how this works. No you won’t.”

I glanced again at the east. The clouds had cleared during the night, and Venus and a thin waning crescent Moon were the last objects in space visible as the silhouettes of the Cascades and Mount Rainier became clear at the edge between Earth and sky. When I turned back she was gone.

As dawn twilight came riding hard toward us I saw another woman walking up the other side of the High Point ridge. As she approached it was clear she was much younger than my companion through the night. Her face looked young, but more than that she carried herself with the blend of power and uncertainty of true youth. She had the energy within her to conquer the world, it was clear, if she could get past herself, learn enough about what to do, and do it. So much promise, so much fright, and so much excitement. She hurried up to me.

“Hi there!” She just about shouted. “I’d ask if I’m on time, but, you know, I’m literally the definition of what the passage of time is, so there you go.” Time for a chuckle now. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be over the top. Just a lot to do. Also sorry about my sister.” She frowned. “She’s kind of a turd. We all know. I think we’ll hit it off ok in spite of whatever she did.”

As the Sun began to rise on 2021 I appreciated the new burst of life she promised, well, offered at least, to bring. We shook hands. I began to tell her about my plans and she nodded.

"All right, then,” she said. “So what can I do for you?”