Both particle and wave: a wavicle. Treat an atom like a particle: it’s a particle. Treat it like a wave: it’s a wave. Tom, he thinks, his tired mind staggering gratefully into a human association. Treats him like an arsehole; he’s an arsehole. Every atom of him collapses to arsehole. An inescapable destiny once viewed through that particular observer’s eyes; for it is the first observer who determines reality. Subsequent observers all see the same thing. So Tom sees, and then Tom’s friends see: Logan the arsehole. When in fact Logan is a collection of wavicles. A blending of contradictory, oppositional, mutually exclusive characteristics which settle into fixed polarity only in the eye of the beholder. More sardine.
Strange things have been done with ones and zeros, sealed cassettes and time delays. Logan drifts, finds his head lolling and dropping, and moves to the couch for a nap. Within minutes, he is on a game show, opening paired boxes. Son, no son. Wife, no wife. Confronted with the pair of boxes marked ‘daughter’ he asks, Can we leave them unopened? The game show host is his old Physics teacher, Mr Wife, a man who delighted in setting his students tests on topics he hadn’t taught so they would score zero and he (with the answers) would feel bigger than his five feet two inches. Mr Wife says the choice must be made, one box or the other. Logan asks, can they instead cut slits in the back? Mr Wife, who would never have agreed to such a thing, morphs into the amiable Jules, brandishing a knife she uses for filleting fish. Slits are cut in the boxes and the sky shines through them, its light tearing them open to reveal nothing but the blue and cloudless emptiness a daughter might have passed through.
Logan wakes like a man saved from drowning: shocked into sitting, his lungs rasping for air. He recovers himself slowly. Here is reality: scuffed leather Chesterfield, walls insulated with books, the titles as comforting as childhood prayers. Then coffee. Toast. Back to the page he had folded down. The sun swings a quarter arc, pulling the shadows like taffy.
Logan learns there are many responses to the uncomfortable implications of quantum mechanics, and most try to put the genie back in the bottle. Here are the four he will later remember.