Falling Apart (348 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryLabels: ubermadness
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Submitted by Coyote <spacecoyote42.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2004-10-19 17:06:39 EDT
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It's a weird thing to stand in your lab and watch reality falling apart right there in front of you. I guess it shouldn't have been so surprising.
I'd been working on the project for a dozen years, and we'd run simulation after simulation that always reached the same conclusion: we were just *this close* to completely breaking down the fabric of space and time. I was interested because I wanted to recreate the conditions that prevailed about a millionth of a millisecond after the Big Bang, to tease out the secrets of the unification of all natural forces, and to discover the patterns of the fourteen-dimensional continuum described by the quantum theory of superstrings.
On the other hand, to my wife's way of thinking, I was obsessed with work because I had a problem dealing with life. This was-- is-- patently absurd. What could be more relevant to life than the quest for ultimate truth? I think Ellen was just bothered by the ninety-plus hours I typically spend in the lab each week.
Or it could have been the increasingly strange behavior of our daughter that started to bother her. After our third move in as many years, when our daughter had just turned four, I got home from a run on the accelerator at about 3 am, and Ellen was lying awake in bed. Before Katie was born, this was often a signal that she'd be receptive to a sexual advance, but that hypothesis seemed invalidated by other data: Ellen was wearing an old flannel nightgown, the reading light was on, and she was surrounded by an irregular pyramid of parenting books.
"Joe, we need to talk about Katie."
I was already drifting off to sleep, with cloud chamber patterns rising up in front of my retinas, but I gave my most attentive-sounding response.
"Mmmmnnuh?"
"She's been at her new pre-school for a week, and she still won't talk to any of the other kids. She told the teacher she has a friend called Tiger, and he won't let her talk to anyone else."
"So?"
"Well, it's odd enough that the teacher called. Still, most of the books seem to say it's not so unusual to have imaginary friends at this age."
That didn't sound like such a crisis, and I let myself slip off to sleep.
I didn't give the matter much thought for several weeks afterward, until I staggered in from a thesis defense party and tripped on one of Katie's toys that had been left on the stairs. The next morning at breakfast, she insisted that Tiger was the guilty party.
"He's grownup, and he's soooo big, but sometimes he does things that aren't good," she told me, with the meaningless solemnity only a four-year old can muster.
"Well, if he causes any more trouble for me, he's going to lose his TV privileges for a week," I let her know. She stuck out her tongue at me and went to watch the Saturday morning cartoons. I kissed Ellen goodbye and headed back to the lab.
Winter came, and as far as I could tell, Katie never did get adjusted to her new school. She never wanted any friends other than Tiger, and he was always the one who took the blame for any accident or incident. I could tell it was putting some stress on Ellen, who was growing more and more withdrawn and distant.
One cold morning around midwinter, Ellen looked up from pushing her breakfast around on her plate, sighed, and asked "Don't you ever take your nose out of those lab notebooks long enough to look around at your life?"
I looked around the kitchen. "Sure. At least once a day. Looks great. Beautiful wife, lovely kid..." I paused and smiled the crooked grin that had captivated Ellen back when we'd been students, "and an imaginary friend who listens well and doesn't cost much to feed."
The joke fell flat. "Joe, no little girl can be that obsessed with her imaginary friend. Especially one she thinks of as a grown man." Ellen looked steadily at me, eyebrows half-raised, as if trying to lead a particularly slow student through a mathematical exercise. "Don't you think there's a problem that we should deal with?"
I tried to turn the situation over in my mind to get a feel for its seriousness, but the circuit diagrams of our new gallium-arsenide detector arrays kept intruding. The charge transfer efficiency problems we were having seeemed a lot more fundamental than how my daughter was choosing to exert her imagination. I started sketching out possible solutions on a greeting card that had been left on the table...
...when I looked up a short time later, Ellen was in the living room, vacuuming fiercely.
"I think I have it solved," I announced proudly.
"And what's your solution?" Ellen asked. Her tone was icy.
"Well, I'm not sure it's exact," I demurred, waving the card and its graffiti of mathematics as if she could read the meaning for herself. "I need to go to the lab and run some tests to be sure."
"You do that," Ellen replied. "Katie is sledding with Tiger. I'm going over to the hill to meet them."
"Jeez, don't you start too with the imaginary friend," I answered. "I thought you were going to deal with that problem?"
I drove over to the University, but the physics building was closed. Apparently all the staff had some kind of a vacation. I had the place to myself, which was a relief. In the quiet, I finally had the chance to get some serious work accomplished. In fact, what I'd sketched out over the breakfast table had been correct, and a few hours' work with a pair of pliers and a soldering iron would probably boost our detector efficiency to the point that we could start collecting useful data as soon as the grad students got back.
Excited, I called my co-I to break the news. "I solved the CTE problem, Dirk," I blurted out as soon as he picked up the phone.
"It's Christmas, Joe, give it a rest," came the answer. "I'm in the middle of some kind of major Lego project here."
That would explain the empty physics building.
Well, I could start running some diagnostics myself. I made some coffee in the old Bunn-O-Matic drip machine and started preparing the target sample, whistling carols along with Bing Crosby on the radio.
I was just about to initiate the power-up procedure when the lab telephone rang. I picked up with every expectation of hearing Dirk, begging me to wait until he was there before I started the experiment that would get us the Nobel Prize.
"Joe?" It was Ellen. I could hear Katie's laughter in the background, and a man's voice, too indistinct for me to make out any words. "Katie and I will be gone when you get home. I'd rather have an imaginary friend than an imaginary husband. Goodbye, Joe."
The phone clicked dead, and I stood there with the receiver in my hand, listening to the whirring fans of the computers and the holiday songs echoing morosely in the high-ceilinged lab.
It's a weird thing to stand in your lab and watch reality falling apart right there in front of you.
User Reviews
Submitted by Alter (user info) at 2007-09-26 20:54:34 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No, Comment.
Submitted by Circe (user info) at 2005-02-22 06:37:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I liked this one.
Submitted by youarsoghey (user info) at 2005-01-16 11:44:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
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