A Tale for the Time Being (55 page)

Books end. Why was she surprised?

She thought back to the mystery of the missing words. Had she somehow found them and brought them back? It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Sometimes, when she was writing, she would lose
herself in a story so completely that the next morning, when she opened her document file and looked at the manuscript, she would find herself staring at paragraphs that she could swear she’d
never seen before, and sometimes even entire scenes that she had no recollection of writing. How did they get there? It was an uncanny feeling, usually followed by a quick upsurge of
panic—
someone has broken into my stor
y
!
—which often turned into excitement as she read on, leaning into the monitor as though it were a source of light or heat, trying
to follow the strange new sentences as they unscrolled in front of her. Vaguely, vaguely she’d begin to recollect, the way you might recall a mothlike image from a dream, her mind groping
peripherally, askance, shy to face the words full on, for fear they would flutter off into the netherworld, just beyond the pixels, and vanish there. Out of sight, out of mind.

But what had happened this time was different. She hadn’t been writing; she’d been
reading
. Surely a reader wasn’t capable of this bizarre kind of conjuration, pulling
words from the void? But apparently she had done just that, or else she was crazy. Or else . . .

Together we’ll make magic . . .

Who had conjured whom?

She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn’t really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being?
Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of
words that the girl had assembled. She’d never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, as a fully embodied being who persisted in a real world of her
remembering, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn’t so sure. She shuddered, and the sudden movement made her aware of all the places where her body
touched the bed. Better. She made an effort to feel the warmth and weight of the comforter against her skin, the cold air on her face and arms, the beating of her heart.

The diary, too, still felt warm in her hands. She stared down at the red cloth cover. Was it her imagination or did the fabric look more worn than it had when she first found it? She turned it
over. There was a dark spot on the back where the cat had drooled on it. She held it up to her nose. The bitter scent of coffee beans and sweetly fruity shampoo had faded. Now it smelled of wood
smoke and cedar, and faintly, too, of mildew and dust. She traced the gilt lettering on the spine, and then opened it up, quickly, to the last page, as though to catch it off guard.

The page hadn’t changed. Of course it hadn’t. What was she thinking? That a few extra words might have slipped in between the covers when they were closed, when she wasn’t
looking? Ridiculous.

Still, a few extra words would have made all the difference. She closed the book again and worried the broken corner like a loose tooth. The cover seemed cooler now. Was she imagining that,
too?

Enough.

She placed the diary on her bedside table and turned out the light. By morning, when she reached for it again, the book was cold to her touch.

2.

“Now that you’re finished,” she said, “I need to know if I’m crazy or not.”

They were sitting at the kitchen counter having their morning tea. Pesto, shaved, covered with open wounds, and wearing the Cone of Shame, was lying on a towel on Oliver’s lap, looking
drugged and exceedingly cross. Oliver had just read the last pages of the diary, and when he heard her question, he held up his hand to deflect her. “I can tell that this conversation is not
going to turn out well, so please let’s not go there.”

She ignored his protestations. “That night when the words went missing and you told me it was my job to find them, you didn’t really believe that the pages were blank. You
didn’t believe that the end was receding, either. Did you.” It wasn’t a question.

He looked her straight in the eye and didn’t miss a beat. “Sweetheart,” he said. “I didn’t ever
not
believe you.”

“But you let me go on and on about it to Muriel, who must think I’m crazy now, too.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding relieved. “If
that’s
what you’re worried about, don’t bother. Everyone on this island is crazy. I’m sure Muriel
didn’t give it a second thought.”

This answer did little to reassure her, but given that there were so many other unresolved questions, she was willing to leave it. “Okay,” she said. “Supposing, somehow, that
Muriel’s theory was right, and in my dream I was able to follow the Jungle Crow into Ueno Park and find Nao’s father and send him to Sendai . . .”

He had put the diary to one side, and now he was flipping through the most recent
New Yorker
.

“Oliver!”

“What?” He looked up. “I’m listening. You followed the crow to the park and found the father and sent him to Sendai.”

“Okay, so, what does that even mean?”

“What do you mean what does that mean?”

“I mean, are you saying that the Jungle Crow led me back in time? That if I hadn’t had the dream, Nao’s father might have gone ahead and hooked up with his suicide date and
killed himself? That Nao would never have discovered that her father was a man of conscience, or learned the truth about her kamikaze great-uncle?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Oliver said. “Believe me.”

“If I didn’t put Haruki Number One’s secret French diary into his box of remains on the altar, then how did it get there?”

He looked up then, surprised. “You put it there?”

“Yes. I told you. At the very end of my dream. I discovered it in my hand, and I was just on the verge of waking up, so I stuck it in the box.”

“Smart move,” he said.

She shrugged, feeling pleased. “Yeah, I thought so. I felt a little bit like a superhero just then.”

“I’ll bet you did,” he said, admiringly.

But she wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know,” she said, as her confidence ebbed. “If I were listening to myself, I’d think I was crazy, too. There’s
probably a simple, rational explanation, like old Jiko put it there. Maybe she had it all along. Maybe Haruki Number One somehow managed to send it to her before he flew, but for some reason she
didn’t want to let anyone know about it. Maybe she secretly supported the war and was ashamed of her son’s final decision not to carry out his suicide mission. Maybe she thought he was
a coward . . .”

“Stop,” Oliver said. “Now you really are sounding crazy. There’s not a single scrap of evidence to support that hypothesis. From everything Nao’s said, her old Jiko
was a pacifist and a radical, too, even if she was a hundred and four years old. So don’t go cooking up far-fetched explanations and practicing revisionist history in order to make yourself
feel sane. If you have to be crazy in order for Jiko to be who she is, so be it. That goes for everyone.”

Ruth fell silent. He was right, of course. He picked up
The New Yorker
again, but she wasn’t ready to let the subject drop.

“Okay,” she said. “But what about Haruki Number Two’s email? What about Q-Mu and MechaMu and all that quantum computing stuff? Do you really believe all that? He sounds
even crazier than I do.”

Oliver looked up from the magazine. “ ‘Quantum information is like the information of a dream,’ ” he said. “ ‘We can’t show it to others, and when we
try to describe it we change the memory of it.’ ”

“Wow,” she said. “That’s beautiful. Did you make that up?”

“No. It’s a quote from some famous physicist. Can’t remember his name.”
¹⁶⁰

“That’s what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can’t ever get
it back.” She stared disconsolately out the window and thought about her abandoned memoir. Another ruined world. It was sad. “But I still don’t understand. What does quantum
information have to do with any of this?”

Oliver shifted the cat on his lap. “Okay,” he said. “You were speculating about multiple outcomes, right? Multiple outcomes imply multiple worlds. You’re not the first to
wonder about this. The quantum theory of many worlds has been around for the last half century. It’s at least as old as we are.”

“Well, that’s certainly ancient.”

“My point is that it’s not new. Nothing is new, and if you buy the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then everything that’s possible will happen, or perhaps
already has. And if so, maybe it’s possible that in one of those worlds, Haruki Number Two figured out how to build his Q-Mu and get objects in that world to interact with this one. Maybe
he’s figured out how to use quantum entanglement to make parallel worlds talk to one another and exchange information.”

Ruth stared glumly at the cat. “I’m not following,” she said. “I should be wearing the Cone of Shame. I’m not smart enough to understand.”

“Well, neither am I. You have to be able to do the math to really get it, and that’s way beyond most of us. But you know about Schrödinger’s cat, don’t
you?”

3.

Of course she knew about Schrödinger’s cat. Their cat was named Schrödinger, after all, even though the name hadn’t stuck. But, if pressed, she would have
to confess that the name Schrödinger always made her feel vaguely anxious, in much the same way that the name Proust did. She firmly believed she ought to have learned about the former’s
cat and read the latter’s opus, but she hadn’t quite gotten around to either.

She knew that Schrödinger’s cat was a thought experiment, devised by the eponymous physicist, which had something to do with life and death and quantum physics.

She knew that quantum physics described the behavior of matter and energy on a microscopic level, where atoms and subatomic particles behave differently than macroscopic everyday objects, like
cats.

She knew that Schrödinger had proposed putting his theoretical cat into a theoretical box with a lethal toxin, which was triggered to release if a certain set of conditions were met.

“That’s right,” said Oliver. “I don’t remember the details either,
¹⁶¹
but his basic proposition was that if cats
behaved like subatomic particles, the cat would be both alive and dead, simultaneously, so long as the box remains closed and we don’t know if the conditions have been met. But at the very
moment an observer opens the box to look inside and measure the conditions, he would find the cat either dead or alive.”

“You mean he could kill the cat by looking at it?”

“No, not quite. What Schrödinger was trying to illustrate is sometimes called the observer paradox. It’s a problem that crops up when you’re trying to measure the behavior
of very small things, like subatomic particles. Quantum physics is weird. On a subatomic level, a single particle can exist as an array of possibilities, in many places at once. This ability to be
in many places at once is called superposition.”

“Talk about a superpower,” Ruth said. “Nao would have liked that.” She liked it, too. If she were a subatomic particle, she could be here and in New York.

“This quantum behavior of superposed particles is described mathematically as a wave function. The paradox is that the particles exist in superposition only as long as no one is looking.
The minute you observe the array of superposed particles to measure it, the wave function appears to collapse, and the particle exists in only one of its many possible locations, and only as a
single particle.”

“The many collapses into one?”

“Yes, or rather, that was one theory, anyway. That there’s no single outcome until the outcome is measured or observed. Until that moment of observation, there’s only an array
of possibilities, ergo, the cat exists in this so-called smeared state of being. It’s both alive and dead.”

“But that’s absurd.”

“Exactly. That was Schrödinger’s point. There are a couple of problems with this theory of wave function collapse. What it’s saying, by extension, is that at any moment, a
particle is whatever it’s measured to be. It has no objective reality. That’s the first problem. The second problem is that nobody’s been able to come up with the math to support
this theory of wave function collapse. So Schrödinger wasn’t really buying it. The whole cat business was meant to point out the absurdity of the situation.”

“Did he have a better idea?”

“No, but later on somebody else did. This guy, Hugh Everett, came up with the math to support an alternative theory, that the so-called collapse doesn’t happen at all.
¹⁶²
Ever. Instead, the superposed quantum system persists, only, when it is observed, it branches. The cat isn’t either dead or alive. It’s both dead
and
alive, only now it exists as two cats in two different worlds.”

“You mean, real worlds?”

“Yes. Wild, isn’t it? His theory, which is based on what he called the universal wave function, is that quantum mechanics doesn’t just apply to the subatomic world. It applies
to everything, to atoms and cats. The whole, entire universe is quantum mechanical. And here’s where it gets really freaky. If there’s a dead-cat world and an alive-cat world, this has
implications for the observer, too, because the observer exists
within
the quantum system. You can’t stand apart, so you split, like an amoeba. So now there’s a you who is
observing the dead cat, and another you who is observing the alive cat. The cat was singular, and now they are plural. The observer was singular, and now you are plural. You can’t interact
and talk to your other yous, or even know about your other existences in other worlds, because you can’t remember . . .”

4.

Could this explain her lousy memory?

She stared at the cat, shifting uncomfortably in Oliver’s lap. The cat stared back at her, a long, baleful look, before closing his eyes. Who was observing whom? It was hard for Pesto to
observe anything at the moment with the Cone of Shame around his neck, but before the Racoon Incident, he used to like to observe himself. Could Pesto be his own observer? Interesting question. He
used to like to raise his leg and study his asshole. It didn’t seem like this observation caused him to split into multiple cats with multiple assholes.