You said that in the years since, quantum physicists had begun to say, “Yes, actually.” Equation after equation, experiment after experiment kept indicating that subatomic quantum mechanics required macroscopic objects, even cats and people, to not always retain fixed states. A research team in Australia proved photons existed in multiple states until they were measured, which meant that if such a thing as an objective reality existed then so did objects in states of quantum indeterminacy. Another team in the U.S. successfully superposed molecules containing fifteen thousand protons, neutrons, and electrons. You said that somewhere in Europe researchers were trying to superpose a flu virus. It seems in the end that Schrödinger, in his effort to prove Einstein wrong, may have actually given us the most enduring vision for how Einstein was right. Or in other words, as I opened your bedroom door I opened the steel chamber, and as I stand here in this moment, in this gap in time on the threshold of your room, I look in. And I can see for myself.

The cat is both alive and dead.

When you and Lydia were computer engineering students at Carleton University in the early eighties, you once pranked a sexist professor by keying in “1 divided by 0” into the lab’s room-sized computer. He said we were ‘distracting the male students’ by wearing skirts to class. The computer chugged away all night trying to reconcile the impossible equation, filling the room with the smell of burning electronics until it overheated and shut down. It couldn’t fathom divisions by zero, or infinity, or eternity, or any abstraction beyond the binary world.

In this moment I am that hulking computer, filling the room with my burning incomprehension, unable to reconcile the impossible equation of your body divided by oblivion. Perhaps you are between breaths. Perhaps you are in a deep sleep and I’ve just happened to find you in this moment traversing the valley between inhale and exhale, in which everything is suspended and airless. Or perhaps at this distance, in this dark, and under those comforters your breath is altogether hidden.

It then occurs to me that as long as I stand here you cannot be dead. You will, at the very least, be kept alive by being in-between, by being as much alive in uncertainty as you are dead. That even after this second passes I could continue to stand here for many seconds, perhaps even a full minute or several, savouring the possibility of your life. Of your being both one and zero.

III

III