She had said it years ago, in jest and maybe to try and make a connection with her young niece, something she didn’t understand but found intriguing. Or maybe to appear wiser than she felt.
They walked along the river that ran through town. The spring water high, the current flowed with a gentle burble. They stuck to the path in the woods, muddy in spots from the recent rain, their boots squelched and stuck at times releasing the aroma of dirt and mold.
“What if there are parallel universes,” she said.
Her niece, in characteristic teenage style said nothing. Was she trying to create a memory out of nothing more than a genetic connection?
A breeze came up and caressed her face with an icy hand. A reminder of winter recently passed. She stopped to watch the ducks navigate the river currents, bobbing up and down.
“If there were,” her niece turned to look at the ducks, “how would we know?”
Good question. They continued to walk for some time before she said, “If I am in another universe, I’ll send a sign.”
“Like what?”
“Three ducks. Duck, duck, duck.”
They laughed and she reached out to hug her niece. Maybe this would connect them.
Years later, lying in a hospital bed, fighting for her life after the car accident, in and out of consciousness, hallucinations that felt real and not real, and while not a religious person, she called for the clergy.
“What do you think happens when you die?”
“Parallel universes,” she said. This did not bring her the comfort she had hoped for.
On the precipice of death, she saw the irrelevance of it all. She was one tiny speck in the vastness of the universe.
The long road to recovery was littered with comments that didn’t clarify anything.
“No one said this was going to be easy,” her young physiotherapist said with a flip of her hair.
She decided to attend her college’s thirty-fifth anniversary. College had not been the best time of her life. She had failed first year but still became a doctor, almost died but lived. She spent the afternoon in the art gallery mesmerized by the Inuvialuk sculptures of David Rubin Piqtoukun. The shaman connecting our world with the cosmos. Quantum Shaman. Everything is connected.
The reunion was held in the English pub that held many drunken evenings when they were young students, decades before. The basement lair unchanged, the stink of stale beer, stained velvet seats, dark wood tables, rough and ringed from pint glasses. We had aged well, those who chose to come. Her old physics partner, now working for a large news organization in Europe.
Through the vacuum of time and memories, she did not remember him and wished there had been some pivotal moment on which to rest this reacquaintance. She tried to think of something to say about their year together as lab partners, but no memories came back. In the end, he saved the moment.
“I have a colleague who suggested that everything is predetermined. From the big bang onwards. All the particles were sent out on a wave, we’re particles so it’s like we’re just riding the wave,” he said.
“In the art gallery today. There was an exhibit from an Inuit artist, these amazing stone carvings that captured how everything is connected… the spiritual and the physical,” she said.
They talked at length in their limited way of knowing, about particles being in more than one place at once and isn’t this in a way what spirituality is? Everything in the moment that changes as you experience it, as you move on to the next moment.
“Kind of makes you wonder if this isn’t all an illusion.” She tapped a finger on the table. “What if this is just how we perceive it?”
“Like the observation thing.” His speech faster. “Like we see it like this because it’s how it is when we see it? Or maybe this is how our brain puts it all together?”
“Where do I end, and the universe begin?” She felt the edges of her brain foggy from the gin and tonics.
“Exactly.”
“That was the thing about the sculptures. It was the union of everything.”
They exchanged emails and parted. But it was only a moment in time.
Riding the bus through the Ring of Kerry, Ireland, damp and misty, to arrive at the end of the world; ocean, rocky outcrops, Skellig Islands, the crash of waves, unquantifiable, beautiful. How is such a thing possible?
She mentioned this to her cousin in Ireland, a professor of spirituality. They discussed the feeling of being at one with the universe, how it could come over a person in a single moment.
“I learned all of these strange things about quantum physics recently,” she said, excited to make sense of her thoughts. “I don’t know if I understand it correctly, but particles are everywhere at once, one spins up and the other spins down, everything is one and in balance. Like yin and yang.”
“Makes you wonder, what’s real,” her cousin said.
“Do you ever notice if you have an idea to write something, or do something, that suddenly you notice someone else has done it? Like it’s in the zeitgeist,” she said.
“The universe has energy that comes around periodically, ideas, and if you don’t,” her cousin raised her hand in the air as though to pick an apple, “reach out and grab it, someone else will.”
Back at home, she was left to ponder these thoughts. On a solo walk in the woods beside the river, everything had changed but nothing had changed. The same river, surface calm in the late summer heat, the dry path beneath her feet muffled her footfalls, the air heavy with the smell of wood and resin. She stopped to rest on a bench in the shade. Out on the river, a trio of ducks swam by.
