He would love to knock the thought about with Jules, but he can’t talk to her about it. There she is, sitting across from him, reading The Life of Pi, and he knows they are like the boy and the tiger in their separate vessels, tethered together – he on the sturdier boat, she on the raft, terrified he might leap across and eat her with his God talk, his physics nonsense. No ground for his feet for many miles, so he wants to stay close to her. If he so much as starts telling her that thoughts and words have consequences, she pushes them apart with a long pole. Because it matters so much, he is undone by enthusiasm; by the flaming of light in his eye, his voice’s lift of volume and pitch as though he might burst into song. Enthuse, from the Greek en theos, in God. She sees in him the terrifying passion of an evangelist.

So he cannot tell her. And surely with his regular drifting into a meditative state, he is more waveform than particle, more connected, therefore more influential, than a woman who worries, collapsing better futures as she goes? He decides to believe his thoughts have more clout than Jules’s. He decides to decide that Tom is perfectly safe.

Consequences continue to unfold. Day after day, wave after wave, come these revelations. His body receives them with goosebumps, responds with tears. His distaste for organized religion remains, but lines of scripture drift to him unbidden across the decades, transmitted from Mrs Holinshead’s lovely young lips to his middle-aged ears, no longer opaque and meaningless, but sonorous with truth. Ask and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. A perfect description of what would be so if one’s focus collapsed waveforms into reality. And more words, words that have carried their meanings undetected for years; he hears them now. He writes them down:

I realized.

I made real.

He takes new routes through the forest. Out of the trees and across the open heaths where small groups of cattle and ponies cluster and wander. His dreams are lucid; he has developed the sense of touch inside them; can run his hand over the fur of a peach, finds spinach in his teeth with his tongue. He knows he is dreaming; controls his direction. In one dream he’s flying through a tunnel of branches and catches some thorns in his thumb. The pain of each thorn, embedded, is sharp and real. He says in his dream, This is an illusion, just as pain when I am awake is an illusion, and plucks out the thorns, understanding each one is a slight, an insult, a negative word.