Before she could answer Ethan's head jerked to the left and the side of it seemed to melt away, as if his face were dissolving. His mouth was still moving as he collapsed down to the floor. A split second later the glass door shattered. Claire covered her mouth to keep from screaming. She backpedaled into the pantry and looked around for somewhere to hide. She climbed inside the dryer and flung the door up to close it behind her. She heard a crashing sound, splintering wood, the front door being bashed in. There were voices, muffled murmurs making their way inside the dryer. Then yelling, very loud yelling, still too muffled to make out. Then the house was quiet again. Claire waited. She forced herself to wait longer. Then she began to feel light headed and decided taking her chances was better than suffocating. She pushed the door open with her head and found that both her arms and her legs were asleep. She rolled herself out of the dryer and lay on the cool floor while the blood returned to her extremities. Eventually she pulled herself up and peeked out of the shadows. There was no one in the kitchen. Ethan's body still lay on the floor where it had fallen. She crawled along the floor, past the stove where a huge puddle of blood pooled out from his head across the linoleum. She saw little chunks of bone and skin stuck to the wall. She kept her head focused down on his feet and gently rolled him over. The gun was covered in blood, but still there. Claire wiped it off on Ethan's shirt and pulled out the clip to clean it. It wasn't loaded. Fuck. She pulled herself over to the wall and slowly peeked her head up over, looking through the railing. The front door had been broken in half and the street was visible beyond it, but there was no one there. Claire stood up and darted down the hallway to her grandmother's room. She opened the closet and threw her hand up on the top shelf, feeling around until she found a box that rattled. She pulled down the bullets and hurriedly shoved them in the clip, her hand shaking as she did. She jammed the clip back in the gun and slid back the top releasing a bullet into the chamber. She walked back down the hallway, peeked around the corner. There was still no one there. She crawled across the floor, trying to stay below the window, until she could reach her bag. You should have seen it Claire. Bringing those magnets across the desert was unlike anything I've ever witnessed. We went down to Bombay, just to watch them unload the things. They're bigger than the huge flatbeds that dragged them over the desert. There were protestors from all over the world down by the docks. I'm sure you've seen some of the protests that we've had... Well, for this protest everyone came over to Bombay and they were trying to block the docks. I went partly to see the magnets and partly to make sure things didn't get out of hand... as if things are ever in hand in India, but anyway, all the protestors are at the end of the docks and the workers start pulling the magnets out on these cranes that were brought especially to do this and only this, everyone is chanting no more wars or some nonsense and then the first magnet comes up out of the hull of the ship and it's like the opening of Star Wars when the massive ship goes overhead. It cast a shadow over the whole dock area and all the chanting stops and everyone, even me, is standing there, mouths hanging open in shock. I'd never seen anything so massively large in all my life. Such a monstrosity that the sheer size of it hushed several hundred people that had, up to that point, been getting more unruly by the minute. Waiben shook his head. It was something. And then the the crowd part and the magnets passed through without a word. No protest, no incidents, nothing. All the way across the desert. I got to ride in a helicopter that followed the trucks. There were half a dozen heavily armed helicopters, Royal Guard troops on the ground, riding in armored vehicles, AI predator drones flying along side the helicopters. It was wild. * * * * The plane banked hard and Waiben just barely grabbed his scotch before it slid off the table in front of him. He tucked the glass in his elbow and hurried fastened his seatbelt. As they leveled out and swooped low over the Mountains Waiben could see the clouds around TK observatory, wondered what poor scientist up there had seen the same sizmograph readings he had and unlike Waiben, was unable to do anything other than wait. Wait so see what the anomoly was, an earthquake perhaps... Waiben doubted most anyone would have made the leap to nulear detonation, it simply wasn't something the average imagination was yet able to wrap itself aroun, the inconcievable being comes conseizable only after... the real fallout of historical event is simply that it is now added to realm of possibilities -- no one in Washington had believed the early reports of the haulocaust not because they denied the facts, Waiben believed -- with the sort of 20-20 hidesight that comes naturally to scientists -- but because there was quite simply no precedent in their imaginations, nothing that so much as hinted such a monsterous thing could happen... and yet it had. Waiben imagined the response to the bombs in Los Angeles would be much the same -- disblief, denial, not this time because the bomb itself was unthinkable, afterall hundreds of nuclear bombs had been detonated, but only twice on people, and only then in war... the onlys, the qualifications still kept it out the general consciousness of the world... leaders might threaten, militaries puff their chests, but everyone deep down knew that no one was that crazy. Unless of course they happened to have access to Pesident Nadar and know what had been obvious to Waiben the first time their eyes met -- this man is insane. Of course it was very likely, Waiben reflected, that Nadar thought the exact same thing about him, though of course for wholely different reasons. But as soon as Waiben had first met with the president he had broken out in the cold sweat and hurried home to scan the globe and I2 in search of some place where perhaps sane people still held power, or, even better, where power was so dispersed that it effectively ceased to exist in any practical way, turned in on itself and became the furthest extremes of what Kafka parodied, which Waiben reasoned, was actually not hard to avoid -- you just need to make sure you stayed well clear of such a hydra like structure's many mouths. Stay out the mouth, stay out of its power. It was this line of logic that made him remember India. It was a return visit that convinced him the future lay there. The co-pilot emerged from the cockpit with a clipboard that Waiben already knew held their bogus flight plan, one that called for them to head north east to Kansas City. The co-pilot flopped into the chair next to Waiben. So was that what I think it was off to the west? Probably. It's been some time coming. So where are we really going. Where do you think? For good? If you want... why, something down there you'll miss? Tacos? Waiben smiled and nodded. He reached for the clipboard and studied it for a while. Stay low, under 4000 if we can, until we hit Mexican airspace. Then climb a bit and put out a distress call asking if we put down in TK by Corpus Cristy. It's a small airport, by the time they figure out we aren't inbound we'll be in international airspace and it won't matter. Then we refuel in St. Kitts and make the hop to Ferdinand Poo. Then we'll figure out where the cards have fallen... The co-pilot looked up from his notes, where they've fallen? Look. I don't know who did it, I don't know if it's all a big government conspiracy to enact martial law or if it's some rogue group acting on their own... it doesn't matter. I know what the consequences will be. Everything will change. Exactly. Except where we're going. Well, then I guess we better get there. The sooner the better. Waiben said as the co-pilot headed back to the cockpit. Waiben looked down at the desert below watching the shadow of the plane skim along the speckled brown and green landscape. ------------------ Waiben sat across the table from her. Her hands trembled a little as she wrapped them around the empty glass. Can I get you some more? She looked in his eye for a sign, a dropping of formal guard, some acknowledgment that this was the first time in six years that they had been alone together in the same room, that can I get you some more was in fact the first words they had spoken in six years, that he had studiously avoided her throughout the afternoon, always seeming to move ten steps ahead of her, a shadow preceding himself, as if he somehow held back more light than most people, had some extra light absorbent clothing, his dark, but not African skin, something Central Asian perhaps, but there was nothing there and so she nodded and he stood, the chair making a harsh scraping noise in the silence of the house. She gingerly slipped out of her own chair and walked out onto the ---------- under the first blue sky to blow through after a week of torrential spring rain. The lightning storms, brutal even by Tucson standards, sent enough white hot bolts into the sandy expanses surrounding Tucson to keep the glass collecting hippies in business for months to come. The rains fell hardest on the upper slopes of the Catalina Mountains, splashing through the pines and cedars, dripping down the leaves of red-barked manzanita and mountain laurel bushes to the needle-covered forest floor. Rivulets gathered beneath the pine needles and made their way to gullies, joining forces as as they sloshed into ragged ravines, tiny streams that met up on the sandy lower slopes of the mountains, where the desert reached up with rock and gravel for the taking -- pebbles at first, a few moving some yards while the stones held on for the larger waters. Further down creeks began to attracted larger hunks of granite, pulling them toward the point at which everything converged in the Rialto River where stones met with boulders and whole trees torn out the ground by the angry waters, churning now with an eye to the south, some insane dream of siestas in the Mexican shade, unaware of the boulder choking dams that awaited it and willing to smash steel and bone on its the way to the sea. ------- Claire's jazz discernment skills had been honed over the last six years in New Orleans, though in truth after her discovery of Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Arkestra she pretty much wrote off the rest... why keep searching if you've already found what you were looking for? Kill me and Shrimp seemed to have been inspired by some of the progressive jazz meets downer rock that had briefly flourished in Chicago some years back, a revival of an even earlier experiment along the same lines, what happened when bored white kids tried to apply math and theory to jazz. A likable, but somewhat cold form of music, made all the stranger by the warmth of what it had grown out of ... Kill Me and The Shrimp ended up, as best Claire could sort it out, as a revival several times removed -- how do you get from the Harlem renaissance, to Miles and Charlie Parker running off into experimental land to frolic amongst the confusion and find great profit in the adoration of white listeners desperate to escape the musical dead end of big band swing to a jazz rock fusion. She twisted the lineage around in her head as the band played, trying to follow the melody lines, but like the history it ended up a tangle. In the end she decided that while Kill Me in the Shrimp didn't have much to add to a line of musical pedigree so twisted and confusing PhDs were offered to those who could sort it out, somehow there was s -------- Where is Medina? Waiben looked up from his collection of monitors. Back in Mexico I believe. After you left I stayed in India. I sent her some money, and arranged for her to go back if she wanted. Claire nodded. That was nice of you. He shrugged and turned back to the screen. True. Well, I'm in no hurry. Just an empty hotel room waiting for me. Claire put her eye back to the telescope, I'm enjoying the view. But she was thinking that it would have been even nicer to find Medina and bring her back for the funeral. Though Medina had never met Claire's grandmother, Claire had come to think of Medina as a sort of surrogate mother and sometimes forgot that Medina was not in fact her grandmother's daughter. Medina would come by around noon to prepare lunch and the often untouched dinners. At first Claire didn't speak to her much, they were both, for different reasons, shy, Claire, like all only children, had no trouble ignoring her, not that she was rude, not that she didn't care, not that she was even shy, though sometimes she was, but simply that Claire was so used to total immersion it was always easy to ignore anything that might be happening outside that moment's immersive object. And then one day Claire couldn't focus and so she went in the kitchen and watched Medina cook, noticing that she seemed to pay attention to things Waiben never recorded in his food journals, like what a sauce tasted like, or how fresh the eggs were. Claire was halfway through commenting on the fact that Waiben seemed utterly unconcerned with the taste of food when she realized that Medina did not seem to speak much English. Later she was thankful Medina hadn't understood her since she soon realized that Medina wasn't tasting the sauces for Waiben, but for herself, to make sure she was meeting her own standards or living up to the invisible pressures she felt. At the time Claire slunk out of the kitchen feeling like a fool, but the next day she noticed Medina struggling to read one of Waiben's notes and so she translated as best she could with pantomimes a bit of broken Spanish picked up on schoolyards until Medina understood. It wasn't long before Claire spent all her time in the kitchen when Medina was there, leaving Waiben's books and her own notes scattered on the dining room table to talk in halting Spanish with Medina. Over the course of two years Medina became nearly fluent in English and Claire nearly so in Spanish. Medina was from Montepio, Mexico, a small town by the gulf. Her father had been a salt worker, her mother kept busy with half a dozen children, of which Medina was the eldest. Claire had been reading Anna Karinina at the time and consequently much of Medina's stories blended together with Tolstoy's romanticized vision of Russian Peasants and Claire's own escapist imprints of what life in small Mexican village surely must be like, though these illusions were somewhat shattered when she learned that I2 had made its way to Montepio. That modern trappings like online human assistants and Your Man in India (Medina looked at Claire like a she was a simpleton when Claire said that YMII seemed like it would, well, be something that involved people in India) had led Medina to Waiben and consequently to Tucson was Claire's first hint that he was not as decidedly anti-net as he seemed. But she was disappointed to learn that Medina had not slipped clandestinely over the border at night as Claire imagined, but arrived unceremoniously in Waiben's personal jet and, with his escort and few envelopes of money, simply skipped customs and moved straight to the apartment he had already rented. Why exactly Waiben had spent the time, effort and money to bring Medina Stateside when there were hundreds of Medinas already in Tucson was something Claire never thought to ask. It seemed beyond a doubt that Medina was in fact the only one who could do what she did as well as she did it and Claire was simply unable to imagine anyone else doing it. And yet now, staring through the telescope, for the first time Claire wondered, why Medina? ---------- So she did what she had been doing all year, she went to the library and logged into I2. The first thing she found were clinical papers and scholarly sex studies which she skimmed for bit and decided that such meta-game critiques were unimportant to the actual play of the game. Then she tried porn, but found that all the looks of love were staged. Well, not all, but the rare instances when it wasn't staged were too few and far between to bother sorting out. The only real thing Claire recalled learning from porn was that the game board of sex was infinite, but there were some places and some cards she was pretty sure did not appeal to her. That and that other men apparently like to slap their cocks against your pelvis, a habit she was glad Waiben seemed unaware of. Finding porn a dead end, Claire turned next to art. Still photography had a way of capturing the sexiness of individual moments in a way that its video counterpart seems to glossy right over without giving the view time to appreciate it. Photography told the story of s single moment, it left the moments that led up and the moments that came after to the imagination, which was far more powerful than any other piece in the game of sex. Naturally it wasn't long before Waiben's books began to change. It started with Reich, perhaps an innocent choice on his part, perhaps not, but soon she found Henry Miller on the table. Miller was what Waiben's note called a sensualist, a word that would forever remind her of The Brother's Karamazov, in a good way, but she found Miller decidedly short on the actual sex bits and she told Waiben as much. The next week there was the The Story of O. Now were getting somewhere thought Claire as she read with one hand. Next up with the Marquis de Sade, who might have had something to say about sex, but Claire never found it because the book was, without a doubt the worst writing Waiben had ever set on the table and she threw to book out the window of the bus one day on her way back downtown and refused to have sex for a week. It was Anne Laroque that opened her eyes to more possibilities than anyone else. It was the words that drove her mad, it was always words, whispered in her ear and the lay next to each other, breathed through the phone while he was at work, she by the pool, hands between her legs. Words that opened the doors in her imagination and led her to places she had never known. She latched on to Anne Laroque's Sleeping Beauty series in way that she hadn't bonded with any book since she read Flowers in the Attic at the tender age of ten. It was sleeping beauty that made her ask Waiben for a spanking and it was there, bent over his knee, relishing the devilish tingle in her skin every time his hand came down that she knew the way forward. The next week she convinced him to wrapped his hands around her throat, starved of oxygen as the blood rushing throughout her, circulating in pulses, drawing through the heart, picking up speed headed for the brain where the hands built tension, pressure, a vacuum opening up in her head, and then the release, the collision of everything all at once in deep thrusts of blood, air, flesh and static pops of light at the edge of her vision. Before long Claire was reading books on knots, sailing manuals from the nineteen century, discovered on the back shelves on a used book store in Albuquerque where they spent his birthday, to celebrate openly where no one knew them. Waiben played along at first, submitting to the handcuffs, the tickling, the ropes, the riding crop, but grew wary of the darkness in her eyes during those moments when he was helpless... then it went further, she produced real whips, clamps, electricity, until his bedroom had begun to resemble a strange cross between a medieval dungeon and an auto body shop. It was then that Waiben left the tantric book on the table. There was no note, just a slim illustrated volume with sanscrit text. Claire poured over it, having already grown bored with kink and fetishism. She was searching for something more, stumbling forward blindly, groping for the point of the game. There had to be something beyond mere kink, the fetishism of behavior, something more. She could feel something beyond every time she came, some glimpse of something hidden that was so fast and so disorienting as to be totally unprocessable, but it was there nonetheless. And she found it in the half decayed sketches of 2000 year old book. A few days later Waiben came home to find the whips, chains and auto body shop accouterments gone. Claire was sitting naked on the bed in a half lotus position, meditating with a vibrator between her legs. He almost burst out laughing, but somehow managed to quietly back out of the room without disturbing her. He went downstairs, outside to smoke a bit of hash. He reviewed his notebook, a record of Claire's experiments very different than her own, lacking the more ambient descriptions, but detail enough that he could review nearly two years worth of sex at a glance, complete with an index by date. Two years he decided was long enough. He waited until she came down stairs, wearing a silk robe and talking about tantric sex to ask if she would like to go with him to India, where they were talking of building a collider, something Waiben had been trying, unsuccessfully, to raise money for for years. He tried to work it in casually, using the tantric opening to make it seem like to fit, but the very next day he was at the jeweler's picking out something simple and elegant that he would hide in a shoe at the bottom of his suitcase and, as it turned out, never remove. ---------- she became insatiable, both out of desire and out of curiosity. It seemed somehow inevitable in hindsight that she would take him down roads he had never considered, only dimly knew existed, that the beginning was half sex, half wrestling was the signpost he had missed, that it would end as it began in a kind of playful violence that neither he nor she could ever really control. The problem, as she remembered it was that his curiosity had never quite extended as far as hers. He was older, had already been with many women and had certain tastes as one acquires with experience in anything. He did his best not to let them get in the way, but he was not prepared to go as far as Claire wanted to go. Outwardly little changed save the sex. She began to come by earlier, stopped spending her morning staring at the light in the entryway and spent ti staring at the ceiling his bedroom, or more often, the closet across the room. Waiben still left for the university and came home in the evenings to an empty house, but a house tinged with the smell of her, of them, of something he could never identify, not their sweat, not the come, not a perfume, not a shampoo or deodorant, something organic and seeping out of her that lingered long after she was gone. He would sit at his desk, papers spread out before him, inhaling, feeling a renewed energy creep over him that often lasted well past midnight. ---------- what began as a harmless spank, a playful snap from a wrinkled dress and the command, get back to work, turned soon enough into a craving, a need that grew out her from someplace she had previously kept locked up ... ... and then on, so far neither of them could ever really see the end of it and it scared him more than her she realized toward the end, not that he was afraid of her or what grew between them, but that he could not go as far as she was willing, that he would have to stop before she reached the end. Somewhere in the middle, the work on the collider began to change, no longer was it an abstract thing he worked on during the day, she began to demand progress, to see sketches, to hear of successes and failures... no longer was Waiben carrying on the work of the dead, but carrying on the work, the demands, of the living, the living who would push themselves beyond any reasonable human limit and drag him along beside her until it was no longer a thing separate from him, it was a thing growing out of him, a thing she was forcing out with every bit of semen, spit, saliva, sweat and blood, the red welts on his skin, the blue bruises on her breasts, and it grew, sketches on paper, graphs, remote experiments in the Alps, a curiosity as insatiable as appetite itself, linked, inexplicably to the boundaries they pushed together, penetrating another world, creating a space that did not previously exist ... She never had the heart to do the math, was afraid of what it would say, preferred to remain limp in chains, wrapped tight in plastic, breathing in gasps, shaking and raw from the sodomizing handle of a bullwhip while Waiben sketched diagrams on an enormous piece of graph paper hanging on the wall in front of her... Sometimes she found bits of it in him, begging on hands and knees, watery eyes, hoarse voice crying out directions between bloody gums licking at the steel teeth of the chastity belt, gumming mercilessly in self-flagellation as Claire with the no 4 bic wrote furiously trying to keep up with both pen and whip, to lay plans to push this world into the next... ---------- Occasionally she would pilfer a book from Waiben's shelves or read one of the books he left on the table for her, physics textbooks mainly, so of them mentioned her father, she read half-understanding, frequently pausing to stare off at the Catalina mountains in the distance. She that Waiben took a mad scientist's delight in learning that she was actually reading the books he left so she began to stop by more frequently in the evenings. One night, sitting on the desk that had, for a brief period of time somehow managed to shed its portion of the world's paper, she noticed Waiben glancing periodically at her legs. She tucked them back under the shadows of the table and Waiben went on about rules for reading. No, not rules exactly, he bit his lip in thought and for once seemed to measure his words rather carefully, rules are not good, suggestions based on experience, that's what I'd call them... She listened, but she was thinking about her legs and what they might mean to him. The suggestions, as it turned out, were pretty benign. Read non-fiction in the morning. Not immediately after breakfast when the food might make you feel sluggish, but soon after digestion had settled down and the brain was well primed to absorb convoluted subjects like string theory with the sort of sharpness that cutting edge science requires... you must have the mental acuity and prowess necessary to wade through the conjecture and theory to find those nuggets of truth that might lurk in the corners obscured by poor writing, substandard testing and all manner of other sins found in non-fiction authors... it's not that they aren't good at their craft, it's that their laziness is less forgivable Claire. Waiben popped a fresh piece of Nicorette in his mouth and continued. If fiction writer is lazy, the result is just a bad book, if it's non-fiction, well there's more damage to be done isn't there? Untruths, half-truths, lies, we're led astray, and to half-understand something is far more dangerous, unforgivable even, than to remain ignorant of it altogether. The devil is in the details okay? Never forget that. It might be a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason, the devil really does live in the details. And the devil is what we're after in this world. Just before summer arrived Claire was forced to finally tell her grandmother she had dropped out of school. There would be no graduation, just a diploma in the mail. Claire ended up tearfully confessing one night, though she carefully left out anything about Waiben, not so much to hide him from her as to avoid discussing her parents. Instead said she had been spending her days at the mall, the Y, the library and other places she reasoned her grandmother would believe she had been. Later she realized she should have told her the truth, that one day she went looking for her father and found someone else entirely. With night school over, Claire had no reason to go downtown in the afternoons so she stopped dropping by Waiben's office, which was just as well since Waiben's classes were out too and research had kicked into overdrive. Consequently Claire saw more of Medina, the housekeeper who came by each day to clean, tidy up and make dinner for Waiben, than she did of Waiben. It wasn't long before Medina insisted on making Claire lunch every day. Her persistance reminded Claire of her grandmother. Claire wasn't sure if it was so much a desire to feed her, as a desire to confirm that Claire actually ate her lunch, which gave Medina some satisfaction, unlike the meals she prepped for Waiben, which half the time he never came home to eat, leaving the tupperware in the refrigerator for days until Medina or Claire threw it away. Waiben had already explained his eating system to Claire, which, like the reading system, was a kind of self-optimization designed in part for convenience and in part to make him more productive. Waiben ate frequent small meals throughout the day to avoid the mental lag he claimed was associated with the digestion of food. Claire had never noticed such a thing, save perhaps for Thanksgiving day, but Waiben claimed he had documented the effect. In fact, he showed her years worth of meticulous records detailing his eating habits in a collection of spiral bound notebooks. It's a food database. A what? A food database... that what that produces the why... What? Have you ever had a brilliant idea? Uhm. Of course you have. Haven't you ever wished you could have more brilliant ideas? I guess so, yeah. Well, I wanted more brilliant ideas too, like you father Claire, he swore brilliance came from peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Well, I tried that, it didn't work for me. So I started keeping track of everything I ate to see if there was some connection between any brilliant ideas and what I had eaten that day... Was there? Of course. If there wasn't we wouldn't be having this conversation. Never mind Claire, another time. Eventually she got her hands on the food database. It was everything. Literally everything Waiben had consumed and any variation in mental state that a particular food or combination of foods might produced. She spent a whole day by the pool reading through the food database, learning in excruciating detail everything Waiben had consumed for the last three years. His breakfasts consisted of fruit and slow carbs -- eggs and black beans with a bit of spinach or green lentils, egg whites and spoonful of flax seed oil. Several hours later he would eat a hobbit-inspired second breakfast of spinach or other vegetables mixed with Pinto beans or half a chicken breast, followed by another piece of fruit. Afternoons meant a light meal at two, a few ounces of grass-fed, organic beef with asparagus or fish with more lentils. He would stop for snack of fruit and a touch of bread in the evenings before settling down to a larger, protein-heavy meal around eight. At first the regularity and lack of variety appalled Claire, but then she noticed his notes claiming increased energy and corresponding developments in his work. He seemed to become more efficient over time, even having time to add more detailed notes as time went on. Waiben was also a fervent consumer of tea. Not, she noted one day when she decided to try some, the sort of tea most people kept, which was sold in boxes that contained bags which were dunked in water. Waiben used raw tea leaves when possible and brewed his own private combinations of various leaves from around the world. Medina would combine the dried leaves according to his instructions, label the results and store them in the cupboard. One concoction Waiben favored involved Yerba Mate and an Oolong Tea by the name of Honey Dan Chong, a name Claire like so much that for a while she swore she would name her first child Honey Dan Chong. Claire was both fascinated and appalled by the food database, which, perhaps more than anything else in hindsight, had piqued her curiosity about Waiben as an actual person, more than just a link to her lost father. Her fascination with the food notebooks lay in the simple act of doing, that you could in fact record in minute detail everything you ate. Perviously Claire had not considered this within the realm of things you could do. It deeply offended her teenage sensibilities about freedom, priorities and the seemingly grave importance of only doing things that mattered, but it was yet another thing to be added to the list of things you could do. In the end, at least with the food notebooks, she ended up giving in to her curiosity and began to record her own eating habits, starting, as Waiben suggested in a card attached to the chartreuse spiral bound notebook she found wrapped up just inside the front door one morning, without changing her existing eating patterns, simply noting what she ate and how she felt after eating, if she did in fact feel anything noticeable at all. And she did. Feel that is. Eventually the Cokes and Twizzlers, which she noticed on rereading her notebook often made her briefly alert, but then sluggish and inclined to napping in the sun, were replaced with more fruit, water and occasional cups of tea, though she found, much to her disappointment that neither the Yerba Mate or the Honey Dan Chong agreed with her stomach or brain. She began to read with greater intensity, spending far less time staring off at the Catalina mountains, less time by the pool even, and more time at the table, books spread out before her, taking notes and recapitulating much of what she was reading. Looking back on it, it was fairly obvious that Waiben had essentially tricked her into going to college, his own private college, with its rather strange curriculum, equal parts fiction and non, imaginative and mundane, a college where the main curriculum seemed to be her, or her understanding of herself, which, she realized later is perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to study, the one thing that no one else can possibly understand, the you that is you, separating the innate from the personality, the personalities from each other, digging deeper and deeper until you where swimming in depths where the light was so faint, gravity so weak that it was easy to loose track of which was up, which down and where, if anywhere, you might have been headed. But the beginning was nothing but wonder and astonishment. So pleased with the her food notebook experiment and the resulting dietary experiments, Claire began to experiment on herself in other ways and kept detailed notes about what happened. She accidentally became a prolific writer, expanding from simple food databases to more elaborate journals about what she was reading and what she was thinking. She wasn't entirely sure that she understood herself any better because of it, but rereading what she wrote later, she found she was able to do something she had never done in school: learn. She learned in a way she never had before, going beyond the pure statistical data that school had tried to shove down her throat, to something far more valuable and interesting, a way to cultivate her own curiosity. She began to notice things she had never seen before, patterns that surrounded her, patterns of eating, patterns in books, patterns in thoughts, patterns in the light in the entry way, patterns in the rugs upstairs, patterns in the rippling of the swimming pool. She even began to notice a pattern in the books left on the table for her to read. Three months into what was to become her longest running experiment, yoga, she realized that the soon after she had begun her food experiment Waiben had left the first edition translation of the Yoga Sutras. That she moved from food to Yoga seemed so natural at the time, it wasn't until later that she saw Waiben's hand guiding her. It made her wonder what it was he wanted. She dug out the copy of the Yoga Sutras and reread the post-it note still stuck to its tattered green cover saying that it was essential for anyone who wanted to understand the why that came with the what. At the time she had simply signed up for a few classes at the YMCA and then surreptitiously downloaded a few videos at the Library's I2 terminal which she then ferreted onto a thumb drive. It wasn't long before she could bend both physically and mentally in ways she had previously never imagined, carefully recording her progress in an ever growing collection of notebooks. Exactly whom she had found was still not clear to her even now, but with her grandmother gone she did know that Waiben was her last remaining link to her parents and that thought made her want to run. Run as far and as fast as she could, back to her life in New York, as far from Tucson and Waiben and India and all the rest as she could get it. And yet here she was, sitting on the cool smooth leather of his couch, staring out the desert she could just never seem to fully escape. No matter how far she ran, some desert always appeared. She wondered if she would ever just accept the desert, but deep down she already knew the answer. It was the same answer she had always had, no. She said no to school, eventually she said no to Waiben and she always said no to the desert, though she would not, when things first started, had thought of it that way. The closest she came to no for a long time was its bastard cousin, why. Only the facts ma'am. But why? She began to notice the gaps in Waiben's notes more than the notes themselves. It was the first sign of trouble, but at the time Claire simply thought Waiben was being too clinical, never she noticed, recording how something tasted or whether a particular dish had a pleasing assortment of color, how much he had been craving a particular food, a rare hanger steak for instance, something Claire frequently found herself craving. Nor did he record details about the room around him, the color dishes, which lights were on, the candles burning of the table, whether the sunset was still filtering in the picture windows in the back of the house or if it were dark whether or not the moon was visible through the curtains in the dining room. Claire set about to, as best she could correct these oversights in her own recordings, giving them, she imagined, a more readable touch, something more than simple facts, though she did consider that perhaps such descriptions could be facts, records of how a room looked, impressions on her mind yes, words she filtered, formulated and strung together, different perhaps than the words another might have chosen, but facts for her nonetheless. Subjective facts, Waiben called them. The facts of your own impressions which were, at the time, all you had. It was only in hindsight, through historical artifacts like writing that it was possible to combine words, images, photographs, descriptions, paintings, video, surveillance footage and the rest into some sort of collectively agreed upon objectivity. There was nothing in the actual moment save you and your own impressionistic facts. Claire found this realization troubling at first. Waiben did not. He seemed perfectly at ease with the idea that everyone was recording something different, billions of highly refined cameras with incredibly sophisticated lens and highly evolved processing software each trapped in its own infinite loop of unknowing. The real knowing he said coyly, comes from those who trust their facts, but never completely. Claire found the statement deliberately obtuse, but later, when she began to meditate it made more sense. She found, as Waiben already had (though in his case it was with LSD), that there were two observers, one personal and trapped, and another that was neither. The man over the horizon Waiben called it. To Claire it seemed more like a source of what many people call the soul, a thing outside of, but intertwined with, everyone, like a voice just over the horizon, calling her name, though like most Claire had not yet found the courage to follow it. Not that the brain would be damaged or anything permanently altered in her body, but that some things once seen cannot be unseen and the perspectives gained from such sights might have an impact on your outlook, on how you lived your life that led in a direction you did not think you wanted to go. The battle between the essence and the personality, Waiben called it. He being a proponent of following the leads, going past the line and damn hell and high water, let's see what's out there people, a speech Claire found incredibly naive for the forty-eight year old man who, in any case, had ceased his own self-experimentations in the drug realm before Claire had even been born. Not that the drugs themselves had changed much, though Waiben swore the pot was stronger, but the world, the set and setting had certainly taken a turn for the worse. Waiben shrugged it off, the world has always been ending, ask anyone in history he said wryly one night, sipping Malbec by the pool, she dangling her feet in the water, watching the undulating light in the bottom of the pool. Okay, she thought, but what if eventually they're right? How long can we go on with the sneaking suspicion that the world is ending before it turns out we're right? Even worse what if our beliefs are in fact bringing the end of the world closer, because we believe in it, it begins to believe in itself? Recalling it now, as Waiben fiddled with his servers and agents behind the desk, only made Claire want to write down her reflections upon reflections in the little black leather book that was forever in her bag, but she restrained herself. She was thinking about the stack of notebooks in the back of her closet at the apartment in New York, she had not reread them in several years, did not want to revisit everything, preferring in the end to use the recording as way to put it all to rest, the exact opposite of what she had imagined herself using them for when she was actually writing them. She found herself thinking about one of the last fights she and Waiben ever had, she was already packing her bags, grabbing her clothes out of the dresser in their shabby Indian apartment and shoving them in worn out backpack. He had moved past pleading into yelling and she retaliated by telling him he had hypergraphia, and out to seek a doctor, not a guru or a collider, but a goddamn doctor that can straighten your fucking egotistical head trip out from the reality the rest of us are fucking living in... it had shut him up at least, but then she looked up from her bag and saw the look of pain in his eyes, saw that he knew she was not just g him, but abandoning him, abandoning them, abandoning the private world they had lived in for so long, just the two of them, a little battle hardened unit against the world, the unseen support on which everything depended, abandoning him in it, alone in a private world that no one else could ever enter, stuck forever or forced to likewise leave it behind. She felt herself falter, it was the moment at which Claire saw with absolute clarity how she could choose right now, right here, in this singular moment between two entirely different lives and for a moment she almost stayed, but she knew deep down that he was right about one thing, damn hell and high water, she was pushing on. She picked up a clay statue of Ganesh hurled it as his head, grabbed her bag and walked out the door. Until today, it was the last either had seen of each other. -------- She spent the morning in the kitchen, watching the light in the entryway. The sun streamed through two abstract stained glass windows on either side of the front door and filled the entryway with kaleidoscopic patterns that moved and shifted with the light and made it Claire feel as if she had just stepped into a gothic cathedral. It lent a sense of ceremony to her morning that made it seem more purposeful than it did on the bus ride, which she mainly spent sitting in silence, headphones plugged in, jealous of her fellow passengers and the new immersive goggles that were all the rage. Sometimes she took her headphones off and listened to the people around her talking to unseen entities somewhere in the world behind the glasses. Claire could not afford the googles so she got by with stained glass windows, headphones and jealousy. Once the sun had crept higher and reduced the entry windows from the mystical to just pretty colored glass, -------- That day was also the result of a book. One Claire had found on her own in the footnotes of some other book Waiben had left. She went to the library in search of something by Wilhelm Reich, which she found and read nearly breathless. That day Waiben made excuses for himself, to himself, to his colleagues. He came home early. He came home early to see her because that day the morning was no longer enough. That day he wanted more. That day Claire made excuses to herself. She took off her top and lay in the sun feeling risque and thinking about Reich, about Waiben, about time, about time. And then that day he appeared in the afternoon. Long after she had put her clothes back on and come inside, but long before she had ceased to think about him. That day she simply asked him if he would like to have sex with her. Part of her simply wanted to feel what it was like, part of her wanted something more. He was sitting on the couch, she on the floor. The coffee table between them, the green fronds of a fern half-hid her face. They were flirting over Reich. And then she stood up and asked if he wanted to have sex with her. Just like that. As was his habit when life confounded him, Waiben said nothing at first. Then something flared in Claire and she moved toward him, planting her hands on his chest and driving him back on the couch. Or perhaps you'd like to wrestle. He caught her wrists in his hands and started to push her away, but she simply twisted and fell forward, pressing her body against his. He could feel her shirt against his, the thin bones of her wrists in his hands, her breasts pressed against his forearms and he knew it was over. He tried to turn her over but she resisted now, wrestling him for real, with a strength that he would not have thought she had, until she ripped her arms free of his grasp, spun him over on his side until he collapsed onto the couch and she lay triumphantly on top of him, breathing hard, but staring down with a defiant look in her eyes that he would never forget. She leaned down and thrust her tongue in his mouth clumsily, groping her way forward like a blind woman. She pulled off her clothes, he his and she climbed astride him as he guided her down onto him. They stumbled through it from beginning to end, making it up as they went along, creating a private world just for two. She remembered strange moments. The first time she took him in her mouth, the softness of the skin on his penis, the slight rasp of his tongue between her legs, the way smell of sex mingled with the lingering smell of refried beans still on the stove, the moment she realized that they could do it again. And again. Forever. She remembered writing about it later, trying to record all the sensations, the feelings that defied words and in the end deciding that, for her, sex was like discovering the world's best game and she was angry that no one had told her the world's best game existed. She had of course known that sex existed, but she had no idea and nothing she had ever heard or seen regarding sex would have led her to believe that it was the world's best game. Yet it was clearly was. It reminded her of the first time she had eaten mushrooms and decided that she simply must live in the psychedelic world of mushrooms for the rest of her life, the only difference being that when she woke up the next day she changed her mind about the mushrooms, but she never did change her mind about sex. It was still definitely the world's best game. Assuming you did it right, which as far as Claire knew she had. But then she started to think that perhaps, if sex was the world's best game, then she out to learn more about it, see how big the board was, what the different pieces could do, learn the hacks, tricks and discover any still-secret levels that she might want to open up. TK continue in this vien until we hit the part where they travel to India, then drop in the prospector thing and tie it together with tucson, claire's interest in yoga, etc. All the while Waiben worked on finding a new home for the collider he still hoped to build, despite the death of his colleague and the loss of the site in Japan. The reorganization of government meant that there were no federal grants left. The collapse of the banking system and the subsequent seizure of the Federal Reserve had sent the moneyed elite scurrying for cover, many moving off shore, to the more stable economies in Eastern Europe, China and India. No one had any interest in such a colossal project of very dubious financial value and, given the astronomical odds against succeeding, not even the promise of controlling a potentially unlimited source of energy was enough to entice the once powerful bankers into backing anything so risky. When Nadar was elected president, Waiben's forutnes changed. Somewhere in the middle of promises that he would reign in the people's movement, restore order to the economy and remold America as a land of producers, Waiben's project found its way to the president's desk. Waiben suspected it was the result of some clerical error, a secretary spilled coffee on the paper that should have been sent in with the morning breifings was ruined and in her haste she had simply plucked Waiben's out of the stack and sent it instead. However it happened, Nadar took to the project and flew Waiben to D.C. post haste and explained to the good doctor that his collider was to the space project of the decade, something to capture the public imagination Nadar said. Waiben simply nodded and then found himself flying back and forth to Washington for most of the next year. Later, in the wake of the riots, when Nadar moved the presidency to New York Waiben began to wonder if the promised money would ever materialize. There was talk in the halls, when Waiben walked by voices dropped to whisper. He knew that something much larger than him was happening all around him, but he had never cared for politics, considered it simply a bad hangover from early primate territory games. He did however have presense of mind to notice that he had thrown is lot in with a rather dangerous seeming crowd. by then he no longer cared and of course, even if he had he would have been powerless to do anything about. Waiben loathed Nadar, loathed the fact that he needed him, loathed the fact that if he succeeded the bastard would control what might be the most powerful tool in the known world -- a tiny little sun locked underneath an endlessly sunny desert. After six months of hounding, proposal and counter proposals Waiben finally caved to the government's demands and the money began to flow. spent his time wandering the cold metal world of the city thinking, with alarming frequency, that he missed the smell of her. It went on for three years, playing out not unlike the Nabokov novel that Waiben now rounded up and destroyed in the fireplace, a ceremonial act he preformed with some drama the night after her eighteenth birthday. The affair began normally enough, just as Waiben had envisioned it so many times in his head, but then it began to spinning away from him and eventually away from her... In the center the collider grew, their offspring, burrowing into a desert womb... a monstrous creature of tubing and pipe, enough copper wires to fund a small nation, not to mention the liquid hydrogen which was plentiful enough to put the better part of Tucson in cryogenic suspension ... the myriad ancillary gear and tools -- compressors, ventilation equipment, control electronics, even entire refrigeration plants. The tunnel itself was 24 miles in circumference, and lay some five hundred feet beneath the earth, encased in granite and laced with magnets, drawing everything toward itself, so powerful even gravity would collapse in its depths -- the finite made infinite. Not made, revealed, as she had revealed to him... the finite always more than the historical artifacts we take it for, the line tilted on its axis to reveal a circle, observations made and then demarkations drawn in the settling dust of aftermath. There are however markers in the present, gut rumblings, a nebulous feeling of inevitable doom that dogs many from their earliest years, portending *something* -- some indistinct, cloudy something, which was no less real, no less *happening* for its vagueness. Instincts, insights, flashes that reveal too much, too fast, leaving behind a seared in vision but nothing on which to pin the impending dread, that nonetheless are the only distant early warnings available before the historians return to sweep up the dust and debris into tidy printable pages for children to pour over. Claire saw the end long before Waiben, saw him disappear into the game she had invented, saw him disappear into the collider, the peculiar male fixation of building despite the obviousness that decay always wins, in this dimension and most likely all others. Nothing can really be destroyed, nothing can ever disappear, only change forms to something indistinguishable from nothing. And even the change was deceptive, something perceived more through the flaws in the observation than any real change, at the quantum level very little changed, save in the center of the sun, or the center of the collider, where atoms would turn to something beyond atoms. She began to withdraw from him, to let him go and he, despite the warnings all round him, the missed dinners, the nights out with friends, even the fire dying out in her eyes, could not see or refused to see -- even now she was not sure -- that there could be only one ending. It started as Waiben began to gain some notoriety, as the project picked up speed and money he began to appear on the news broadcasts, installed I2 feed, and Claire began to question it, to question him about the colossally arrogant waste of money in a world that was, perceptibly now, coming apart at the seams, but what better way to tear it limb from limb, my dear, to ensure the total destruction and rebirth ... so long as it was being built anyway... may as well answer some questions so we can all move on now folks ... might as well take it for a spin, no? So now... what the hell *does* happen to gravity when a particle is obliterated? Only Waiben and Nadar really cared, and only Claire really understood. The locals didn't give a damn, which bought Waiben some time with the pitchfork and torches crowd. The collider served its purpose in their eyes -- created jobs, drew in investors, turned Tucson into a thriving example of American ingenuity in the midst of chaos, cults and failure. But Waiben had overheard whispers around the staid university about the, "er, dear me, how do I say this..." the *nature* of some of the recent arrivals, drawn to the collider, to the jobs, to the thriving oasis in the desert like moths to a roaring camp fire, only to end up ashes blowing right back out, gray dust drifting off into the night air. Lately there had even been a few scraggly suspicious looking types with placards announcing the inevitable end of the world... It began to turn Tucson into the modern day equivalent of vaudevillian circus side show. Wild-eyed, but more or less taciturn physicists were the first to arrive, a semi-suspect collection of characters that began turning up late at night slurping espressos in elbow-patched tweed. Many such characters wandered the stacks of the university library in a caffeine-induced haze, pulling down old tomes, flipping the pages without reading a word and then returning them to their spot on the shelves and again wandering the halls purposefully trying to look purposeless, hoping vainly that they might bump into someone, perhaps Stanslivski or even the Hungarian, Dacha Mailfay, rumored to be in town consulting on the finer points of universe creation... As time passed the locals began to sense a slight variation among the scientists invading their previously seldom noticed city -- mathematicians began to arrive in droves, with the ill-kept hairdos popularized by their demigods Feynmann and Einstein. Even those with little interest in the outcome of the collider flocked in right alongside fervent, even worshipful, believers that the math must be put to the test. Their enthusiasm percolated slowly, building throughout the cold winter until it reached a sort of fever pitch at the beginning of April, just a week before Claire decided she had had enough, enough of Waiben, enough of the collider, enough of the desert and so hitched a ride east, eventually jumping down from a big rig cab door into the muggy July of New Orleans where she finally found something that felt like home. But behind her in the west where the sun never sets, Tucson continued to grow and spasm with the influx of engineers, construction contracts of a size and magnitude no one had witnessed in decades, enough money to lend the entire city more than a little hint of good old wild west danger, the likes of which locals had not seen since the wild and wooly days of uranium prospecting nearly a half century earlier. And of course with the scientists -- generally still able, despite their enthusiasm for the mathematical satisfaction of literally seeing particles smashed off into any one of the now confirmed 26 other dimensions, were, so long as they stayed out of the cantinas and taco stands where the cheap Mexican imports flowed like cocaine over the border, generally a very sober and serious lot -- came the more enthusiastic, the starry eyed mystics talking of the Deity and the dimensional possibilities... where God might truly be found. The hundreds of crystal sellers and heavy metal seekers down from the north with every variety of calcite, pyrite and complete novella-length explanations of why you must, simply must have a Agate or at least, god, you don't even own a dinosaur fossil? Here just take it, take it, I don't even believe this stuff, mainly a hustler really, leaning in with conspiratorial smiles and the faint scent of whisky hanging from bearded chins, but even I can't bear to see someone with no, absolutely no way to draw on the compressed, compacted, and therefore endlessly potent, power of geologic energy.... The alien ship greaters were always the last to arrive, requiring some time to detect more earthly concerns like the fact that all their crystal vendors seemed to have mysteriously decamped Sedona and headed somewhere else, where probably there was also a good chance of the mother ship popping up, unpredictable as it was. Come to find, this lot did, that the mother of all dimensional openings was being constructed right here in Tucson, libel to just spit out some sort of hexahedral multi-dimensional craft chock full of little green men probably just seconds after it went on line... For the locals he only real plus to the maelstrom of weirdness that had descend on Tucson was the auxiliary support, the pick ax vendors of old, tagging along behind the miners, keen to make a real profit and well versed in the sorts of goods that everyone, starry-eyed mystics on up the line, had some use for, like taco trucks come all the way from Los Angeles, a flood of out of town cab drivers (finally no waiting for a cab on a Saturday night, almost like New York Claire had marveled walking out of the airport terminal), musicians, bands that had previously never considered making the drive to Tucson began to pour in, playing gigs in whatever wayward bar would have them and bringing naturally a flood of new and much higher quality drugs and willing dealers along with them. It was in the latter that Claire sought refuge, out of the proper world of atoms and the sting of the whip into something more tangibly beyond, no waiting for particles to collide, no multi-billion dollar investments, just a drop or two of this on the tongue, there you are now dear ... until the day she had jumped in the car with a couple of peyote dealers headed for Texas and disappeared. ------------- So Claire began a new routine: dress for school, get on the school bus as she always had, though now her backpack included a change of clothes and a bathing suit. Once at the school walk down to Prince Avenue where she would catch the 17 bus downtown and then transfer to the 105X which took her up Swan where she would, on occasion see Waiben in an identical bus, southbound for the University. From Swan the bus turned left onto Sunrise, then Skyline and into the foothills beyond. From the last stop it was a ten minute walk to Waiben's house, which she would open with the key he had given her. ---------- The day sucked in on itself, a collapsing uncertainty, like so many passenger pigeons, broken-winged and exhausted, returning home on foot. ------------ , and Claire already knew it wouldn't matter what the band sounded like, or wished themselves to sound like, since, at their best, most of these recently arrived musical nomads were just nascent sonic ideas, hatched by children, unsure yet of what shapes and forms the hungers they felt would take in the world around them; unsure even of what the hunger might be, only that they salivated even when the bell did not ding anymore, when no time was marked, no passage given, no launch attended, waking only to find themselves at sea, tiny paper boats tossed in the ocean of sound ... --------- The marker for Claire was much clearer, a tattered notebook she found on Waiben's deskt on day when he had come home early to watch the world series. It was an ordinary spiral bound notebook, curled and creased with use, hand drawn tables on each page noting what seemed like food, but was interspersed with random snippets of equations and occasionally what looked like computer code. What is this she asked, holding up the notebook while Waiben hunched over his monitor watching the game. Huh? Oh, that's my food database. Your what? It's a food database. What is that? Waiben sighed and looked up from the game for a minute. It's everything I'v eaten for the last five years. Actually that notebook is just one year but there are some others over there on the shelf. What's the point? Waiben looked exasperated, but said simply, it's a record of the what that produces the why. What? Claire, have you ever had a brilliant idea? Uhm. Of course you have. Haven't you ever wished you could have more brilliant ideas? Yes. Well, I wanted more brilliant ideas too, like you father Claire, he swore brilliance came from peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Well, I tried that, it didn't work for me. So I started keeping track of everything I ate to see if there was some connection between any brilliant ideas and what I had eaten that day. Was there? Of course. If there wasn't we wouldn't be having this conversation. He turned back to the screen and mumbled, they aren't very interesting, but if you want, feel free to read it. She did, finding herself variously fascinated and appalled by the notebooks, which, perhaps more than anything else in hindsight, had piqued her curiosity about Waiben as an actual person, more than just a link to her lost father. Her fascination with the food notebooks lay in the simple act of doing, that you could in fact record in minute detail everything you ate. Previously Claire had not considered this within the realm of things you could do. It deeply offended her teenage sensibilities about freedom, priorities and the seemingly grave importance of only doing things that mattered, but it was yet another thing to be added to the list of things you could do. In the end, at least with the food notebooks, she ended up giving in to her curiosity and began to record her own eating habits, starting, as Waiben suggested in a card attached to the chartreuse spiral bound notebook she found wrapped up just inside the front door one morning, without changing her existing eating patterns, simply noting what she ate and how she felt after eating, if she did in fact feel anything noticeable at all. And she did. Feel that is. Eventually the Cokes and Twizzlers, which she noticed on rereading her notebook often made her briefly alert, but then sluggish and inclined to napping in the sun, were replaced with more fruit, water and occasional cups of tea. She began to read with greater intensity, particularly her father's rather confusing books on physics. She noticed she spent far less time staring off at the Catalina mountains, less time by the pool even, and more time at the table, books spread out before her, taking notes and recapitulating much of what she was reading. Looking back on it, it was fairly obvious that Waiben had essentially tricked her into going to college, his own private college, with its rather strange curriculum, equal parts fiction and non, imaginative and mundane, a college where the main curriculum seemed to be her, or her understanding of herself, which, she realized later is perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to study, the one thing that no one else can possibly understand, the you that is you, separating the innate from the personality, the personalities from each other, digging deeper and deeper until you where swimming in depths where the light was so faint, gravity so weak that it was easy to loose track of which was up, which down and where, if anywhere, you might have been headed. So much easier then the simply stare into the mirror and think that perhaps somewhere in that other world, in that other pale skin turned brown there were all the possibilities already played out, simply there in all their splender rady to chosen if only, if only the mirror would mimic you, would show you some path, but there was nothing just the back night air, the warm water that surrounds you with uncertainity. But the beginning was nothing but wonder and astonishment. So pleased with the her food notebook experiment and the resulting dietary experiments, Claire began to experiment on herself in other ways and kept detailed notes about what happened. She accidentally became a prolific writer, expanding from simple food databases to more elaborate journals about what she was reading and what she was thinking. She wasn't entirely sure that she understood herself any better because of it, but she began to notice things she had never seen before, patterns that surrounded her, patterns of eating, patterns in books, patterns in thoughts, patterns in the light in the entry way, patterns in the rugs upstairs, patterns in the rippling of the swimming pool. She even began to notice a pattern in the books left on the table for her to read. Three months into what was to become her longest running experiment, yoga, she realized that soon after she had begun her food experiment Waiben had left the first edition translation of the Yoga Sutras. That she moved from food to Yoga seemed so natural at the time, it wasn't until later that she saw Waiben's hand guiding her. It made her wonder what it was he wanted. It was the same answer she had always had, no. She said no to school, eventually she said no to Waiben and she always said no to the desert, though she would not, when things first started, had thought of it that way. The closest she came to no for a long time was its bastard cousin, why. Only the facts ma'am. But why? She began to notice the gaps in Waiben's notes more than the notes themselves. It was the first sign of trouble, but at the time Claire simply thought Waiben was being too clinical, never she noticed, recording how something tasted or whether a particular dish had a pleasing assortment of color, how much he had been craving a particular food, a rare hanger steak for instance, something Claire frequently found herself craving. Nor did he record details about the room around him, the color dishes, which lights were on, the candles burning of the table, whether the sunset was still filtering in the picture windows in the back of the house or if it were dark whether or not the moon was visible through the curtains in the dining room. Claire set about to, as best she could correct these oversights in her own recordings, giving them, she imagined, a more readable touch, something more than simple facts, though she did consider that perhaps such descriptions could be facts, records of how a room looked, impressions on her mind yes, words she filtered, formulated and strung together, different perhaps than the words another might have chosen, but facts for her nonetheless. Subjective facts, Waiben called them. The facts of your own impressions which were, at the time, all you had. It was only in hindsight, through historical artifacts like writing that it was possible to combine words, images, photographs, descriptions, paintings, video, surveillance footage and the rest into some sort of collectively agreed upon objectivity. There was nothing in the actual moment save you and your own impressionistic facts. Claire found this realization troubling at first. Waiben did not. He seemed perfectly at ease with the idea that everyone was recording something different, billions of highly refined cameras with incredibly sophisticated lens and highly evolved processing software each trapped in its own infinite loop of unknowing. The real knowing he said coyly, comes from those who trust their facts, but never completely. Claire found the statement deliberately obtuse, but later, when she began to meditate it made more sense. She found, as Waiben already had (though in his case it was with LSD), that there were two observers, one personal and trapped, and another that was neither. The man over the horizon Waiben called it. To Claire it seemed more like a source of what many people call the soul, a thing outside of, but intertwined with, everyone, like a voice just over the horizon, calling her name, though like most Claire had not yet found the courage to follow it. Not that the brain would be damaged or anything permanently altered in her body, but that some things once seen cannot be unseen and the perspectives gained from such sights might have an impact on your outlook, on how you lived your life that led in a direction you did not think you wanted to go. The battle between the essence and the personality, Waiben called it. He being a proponent of following the leads, going past the line and damn hell and high water, let's see what's out there people, a speech Claire found incredibly naive for the forty-eight year old man who, in any case, had ceased his own self-experimentations in the drug realm before Claire had even been born. Not that the drugs themselves had changed much, though Waiben swore the pot was stronger, but the world, the set and setting had certainly taken a turn for the worse. Waiben shrugged it off, the world has always been ending, ask anyone in history he said wryly one night, sipping Malbec by the pool, she dangling her feet in the water, watching the undulating light in the bottom of the pool. Okay, she thought, but what if eventually they're right? How long can we go on with the sneaking suspicion that the world is ending before it turns out we're right? Even worse what if our beliefs are in fact bringing the end of the world closer, because we believe in it, it begins to believe in itself? ----------------- We seek it wherever we go, we seek until we become, even in our own homes, tourists, simply passing through in search of something else, some dark mass that only grows more confusing the close we come to it. ---------------- old end to ethan and claire Ethan we have to go. What? Wait a minute I want more coffee. Now Claire hissed, tossing money to the man behind the cash register and not bothering with change. She grabbed Ethan by the jacket collar and pulled him up out of the booth. What the fuck Claire? They stood outside the restaurant as another pair of fighters roared overhead. We need to leave. Now. What? Why? I mean... Are you coming? Where are we going? Claire was already walking down the street. We need to get to the base in the next 15 minutes. What base? What are you talking about? The Air Force base. Is that where the plane museum is? Ethan was runing to catch up with her. It's near there. Isn't that on the other side of Tucson? Yeah. there's no way... I know, but I have to try. We don't even have a car... Claire was trying to door of every car she passed. Two blocks from the diner a door opened. She got in. What are you doing? Trying to steal this car... Shit. He ran around and climbed in the passenger's side. Do you know how to start this thing? It's a stick, Claire said testily as she released the emergency brake. It's a piece of shit. Yes, but we can push it and it will start. She opened the door and climbed out, keeping one hand on the wheel to steer it out the parking space. Ethan climbed out the other side and they began to push. After a few minutes they had it out of the parking space and rolling down Tucson Boulevard. Once it had a bit of speed Claire jumped in and popped the clutch. The car lurched, coughed and died. They did it twice more before the engine finally turned over. The both ducked back in the car and Claire floored it. Do you think this is a good idea? What stealing a car? No. I know that's not a good idea. I mean driving toward an Air Force base. I mean, there are a lot of planes taking off, he twisted his head to look out the top of the windshield as two more fighters passed overhead. I'm assuming that all these planes, which seem to have missiles hanging from their wings, means the something, um, threatening and scary is going on and yet, you want to drive *toward* an Air Force base. Seems like they might not react well to that... That's a possibility. Claire ran a red light and Ethan hurriedly fastened his seatbelt. So are you going to tell me why we need to leave. My friend left me a message, he said he was leaving right now. And who is this friend of yours, an Air Force pilot or something? Not exactly no. Then what the hell is he doing at an... Does the name Waiben mean anything to you? You mean like Dr Waiben? Sorta crazy guy that built the collider and might be trying to end the world? Well, yeah, that's him, but he isn't trying to end the world. Or at least I don't think he is... Oh, fucking great. I feel so much better now that I absolutely know this is a terrible idea... They raced down the freeway, weaving in and out of cars. As they got closer to Davis Monthan more planes began taking off, much bigger planes. Planes even Claire recognized as bombers. And in the middle of them they noticed a private twin engine jet lift off and promptly break off to the east. That was him wasn't it? Claire didn't answer. She was looking off to the west, at the gap between the mountains where the freeway headed west toward LA. There was a thin trail of smoky cloud lifting up into the sky, so skinny, so frail from her vantage point on the freeway, but so clearly and distinctly mushroom shaped. And then behind it she noticed another, and another. Jesus. Ethan followed her gaze. Is that what it looks like? I don't know but if it is... If it is, we need to get the fuck out of here. Claire pulled to the side of the road and they got out of the car. A few hundred feet ahead of them a truck stopped and two men climbed out of the cab looking west. Ethan was using his hand as a visor, squinting in the afternoon sun. That's an atomic bomb cloud. I mean, that's how they look in movies. Suddenly Claire understood, that was the shock wave... Shit. Shit. Where you do think it's coming from? I don't know... there's nothing out there... Yuma's south, San Bernardino is north of that, it almost looks like... She turned to Ethan. It must be LA. Well fuck me. How long to you think we have? Have for what? Before the radiation and everything gets here... Christ, I have no idea. I mean it takes 8 hours to drive it... so if the radiation is in the atmosphere... is that how it works...? How the fuck would I know? Well, I guess we don't have much time then. We should get going then, once people realize... It'll be a mess. Where do we go? I dunno. South? Where is the jet stream right now? Claire just stared at him. South sound good to you? Claire nodded. We need food, canned stuff. Some clothes. Okay, rob a store or something? I was thinking my grandmother's house, but maybe a gun would be good... A gun? Okay. Do you have a gun? No. Well, let's get the food and we'll go from there. They drove in silence, each scanning the streets to see what was happening, but so far no one seemed to have noticed the cloud, off the elevated freeway it was difficult to see, still too low on the horizon and hidden by the mountains. Claire fiddled with the radio but it was dead, the entire FM band silent. At her grandmother's house Claire grabbed her barely unpacked bags and threw them in the trunk of the car while Ethan emptied the cupboards into trash bags. Claire took a last look around before she closed the door behind her, not bothering to lock it. They were driving down Prince Ave headed for the freeway when they saw the first military convoy pulling off the exit to the left of them. Claire floored it and slipped under the freeway grabbing the frontage road on the other side. They skimmed the freeway for ten minutes, running red lights the whole way. Once they were well on the east side town Claire finally got on interstate 10. You know what'll be hilarious? Ethan lit a cigarette and cracked the window. What? If it turns out we're wrong and we just stole a car, emptied out your grandmother's house and hit the road for absolutely no reason at all. Claire smiled in spite of herself. -------------- Claire background (add to meeting drummer scene) only that she had lived for so long alternating between a steady diet of music theory to hone her classical cello playing skills and Physics which she had fallen into through the very bookshelves just out reach now, downstairs. The final answer to her singular fascination with the blurred image of a cat-gut string in vibration, which had first somehow cast its spell over her after her dear departed father had given her her first instrument -- an old uekele bought for next to nothing during a stopover in hawaii just one year before he and her mother had perished off the coast of Japan. But the end had come far before Waiben was able to stop it, set in motion by a simple question, what if we are really gaussian blurs, vibrating like strings, reshaping, texturing and layering in the very same way that cello can transcend time and bring back the dead. A notion which sent her music teacher into paroxial fits of rage, metaphors are not science, nor are they music. TK Claire had run straight from what she had called home since her parents died when she was twelve, to the one man her grandmother blamed for their death. By the time Claire left Tucson for good three years later, her only living relative had cut her off completely. Claire was never sure how, but one day, two years after leaving, a letter found her dilapidated brownstone in the far reaches of Brooklyn. She saw Tucson on the return address and her heart leaped, thinking it might be him, but it wasn't, it was her. Not an apology, more knowing than an apology, the letter had given her pause, made her wonder for a fleeting instance how much her grandmother knew... not apology, an understanding that even now nothing had healed, that the wounds were as fresh as the day Claire had turned her back on him, knowing he was not a monster, worse, he had found the monster in her. But the letter had a phone number and after a month of debate Claire summoned the courage to call it. Her voice sounded frail through the telephone wires. They spoke haltingly at first, clipping each other's sentences, but then her grandmother began to tell Claire stories of her parents, picnics in the desert, the Neil Diamond records her grandmother played to lull Claire to sleep when her parents were away in Japan. She even spoke of the crash, the phone call, the officers at the doorstep, the funeral in Los Angeles, stories of events Claire had been too young to understand. static electicity scene to go with waking up with the drummer in a cheap motel room: shuffled her feet across the room, past the enormous bed, up behind Waiben and touched his earlobe, unleashing the static charge with a marvelous blue spark that yielded and yelp and a jump. Damn you... Sorry, couldn't help myself. She flopped down on the couch, maintaining an arms length distance between their bodies since she had not yet decided how the evening would end. cuts from Waiben and Claire's meeting after the funeral: She occupied herself by the pool, swimming when the spring heat required, but mainly reading his books, jumping randomly about from physics books, Kurtzwell, Feynman, Einstein to psychology, and other physicists she knew from her father's conversations, carefully, though not necessarily consciously, avoiding her father's own books, some of which were co-authored by Waiben but which he had already tucked away in corner shelves, keeping them away from her immediate attention. When she grew tired of cosmology she journeyed upstairs to the library where Russian novels held her attention for an entire summer, her pale skin turned a dark brown beside the pool, drinking Coke through Twizzlers and following Dostoyevsky through the tormented religious debates of a crumbling Russian society, chasing Tolstoy across frozen landscapes so different than the one that surrounded her it might as well have been the moon. cuts about claire's past: A sympathic music teacher in high school, thoroughly sick of her endless questions about the nature and behavior of that vibration had gently suggested she ask the physics teach who had simply shrugged and handed her a book on string theory. Of course then String theory fell out of favor in favor of the more promising comprehensive theory of everything which, though it certain sounded intriguing, Claire was disappointed to learn had little if anything to say about things that vibrated and was consequently of little interest. Still she had discovered at the fine institution of the University of Arizona that there were in fact a few string theorists still hanging about, talking quitely at tables in the quad. They may have looked like survivors desperate to find any scrap of hope or some news from a homeland they feared had been forever decimated by the damnable everything, that precense so all-encompassing that it left little room for what was left of their own visions carefully preserved now in memories of vibrating strings expanding and compacting in kind of musical harmony visible only to those with the ear for it, their secret reduced not to ashes, but discredited as a secret not worth keeping, not worth digging for, like the little glass jars Claire had found digging in the yard as a child which, to her great disappointment, turned out to be not message bottles left over from the time when Arizona had been an ocean floor, but simply cast off junk, soda bottles discarded by careless workers, buried in the sands of the desert, the glass glazed and softened by wind, water and time, all of which, nother graf about the grandmother Some where in the middle of the lightening and rain and creosote smells, Claire's grandmother, took her own life, largely, Claire suspected, out of bordem, not to say that her life was boring, rather that she was, after a respectable one hundred years, simply feeling as though she had overstayed what might be considered a polite amount of time. Later claire would significantly amend that judgment, but at the time it offered some amount of comfort, which was more recently helped along by two muscle relaxers she had found in the bathroom cabinet of what was now, according to a young bespecalled gentleman in a too-tight cheap blue suit, who claimed to be her grandmother's attorney, her house. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, the muscle relaxers that is, but now she found herself somewhat confused and, if it were possible, lost in a strange house. Back out in the main living room area a significant crowd of people claiming to be her grandmother's friends were milling about, talking in subdued whispers, shaking their heads and generally behaving very funereal, which, were any of them really close to the mysterious and often aloof Adamina Zindelo, they would, Claire felt, have known that about the last thing the woman would have wanted. Claire looked again at the small memorial service card and wondered abscently what her childhood would have been like if her name had been Zindelo. She was momentarily thankful for her father who passed along the more banal Petsha. The small lamenated card had a thin clipping of an obituary in the Tucson Sentinal, not the longer more extensive and some might say scandelous piece in the Sun which dredged up the old rumors of affairs with congressmen and other suspect behaviors that, surely Claire thought, were a bit passe in this day and age of celebrity oil wrestling and holographic sex clubs. The memorial service had been held on the Govenor's estate just outside of town, in the hills beyond the now crumbling remants of old Tucson, a prop set and backdrop for hollywood's never-ending fascination with the wild west that had, to the proreitars dismay, ended. , provided a backdrop for a number of speakers -- none of them Claire -- to wax various degrees of eloquent, heaping enough praise, hackneyed sentiment and banal platuitudes to bury her departed grandmother under a stinking heap of bullshit for all eternity. Claire's grandmother had never been a particularly kind person, not to her and certainly not to most of the people who gathered under the remaining scatter of bruised clouds to send her on her way. Which, as it turned out, they did by maintaining the fakeness and bullshit for one more day, which when Claire got to tthinking about it, was probably entirely appropriate. "She introduced me to my husband..." "Always gave to the church..." "Remembered our family each Christmas..." Claire briefly considered leaping up to podium, pushing aside the speakers and screaming off a list of things less savory -- insider trading allegations that never formalized, suspicious wire transfers that might or might not have removed a key tenant holding up a real estate deal, or perhaps mention the open pit mines she had funded, the Uranium prospecting outfit she financed (long since sent to prison for its participation in the incident at Two Guns) or any of the other more colorful parts of document pile Claire had been sifting through ever since the phone had shattered her otherwise peaceful afternoon lying on the couch, underneath a blaneket so soft it seemed made of puppy ears, alternatly reading a book on the history of Mexico and staring out the windows at the wild and wolly spectical of untamed lightening trying its best to fry the sauguro's on the ridgeline behind her appartment building. So claire also took the easy way, or planned to anyway hoping the muscle relaxers would induce a sort of brain state that would lend itself to fainting and allow her an excuse a avoid mingling with the increasingly hungry vulture-headed crowd is the other room. unfortunately the muscle relaxors ended up being something a little bit different than advertised. Old description of the desert: In her car the desert rushed by in dull hues of gray sand and rock, surging together in the moonling, lapping at the foothills of Mount Lemmon where the Palo Verde and Mesquite stood out, stark siloettes... Claire could see the now the bark wandering line of the Rialto River, looking like an after thought, an architect’s final over the top push on an otherwise sedate and monochromatic palette, the design committee so adament, we simply must have water, you have got to put water in there somewhere damn it... and so the frustrated and over-worked architect picked up a muddy brown brush and simply drizzled it Pollack-like on the ground, a splattering drip of water that Claire knew she would never be able to look at the same way... old trip to tucumcari: * * * The real strangness held off until Tucumcari, New Mexico, a small collection of 1950s hotels, some slightly more modern fast food chains, gas stations -- an otherwise lackluster community precense congregated like a cyst around the I 40 expressway somewhere just over the Arizona border. The Large Hadron Collider was designed to test where gravity goes when particles are smashed and as it turned out, largely discredited string theory because the gravity did not in fact appear to slip into some posited extra dimension, in effect vibrating right out of the string and into the brane the held it in place, but instead appeared to just transfer itself around in this same, rather disappointing universe. But while gravity may have ruined many a physicists passing enchantment with string theory, theoretical mathematicians like Claire were undaunted, they were after all quite accustomed to problems without solutions and had never been particularly interested in gravity to begin with. Most prefered the pure realm of numbers but Claire was more interested in where the maths and strings, like the musical strings that had piqued her interest in the first place intersected with her. Harmonic resonance was her holdout and in that she found a welcome home at the university of arizona which had, ever since the economic collapse in the east become a hotbed of castoff academics, discredited string theoriest and all manner of other castoffs who found themselve unable to produce as their academic oversight committees phrase it and were thus dispatched out of the ahllowed halls and into the larger world where they primarily spent their time searching for new hallowed halls to slip into. So it because a kind of their sceintific gold rush moving westward like the nuclear physics rush to los alamos in the 1940s or the electricty rush to colorodo in the teens only this time it was string theorists and psycologist who made the trek leading to a rather interesting, some might say potent, campus potential into which Claire had innocently wandered some seven years ago. Now approaching the end of her own student career she Disappointly none of them seemed to know much of anything about strings beyond the need to periodically change them on their guitars and bases. The drummer had elected to travel a day ahead of the others and seemed if not brimming with knowledge to at least show a willingness to listen to Claire talk about strings. I thought that the string theory was discredited a while back, something about being untestable Claire rolled her eyes. that's true she said patiently, but that really only bothers physicists. It works perfectly well as a mathematical framework. In fact if left to the realm of pure math, string theory already is a theory of everything. But if you can't test it... What if we just aren't looking at the problem the right way? What if we can test it but we aren't going about the right way? We're looking for an empirical way to test it. What if it can only be experienced, not observed. Okay. How would it be experienced? Maddy took her eyes off the road long enough to shoot Claire a meaningful look that amounted to roughly, stop. now. I don't know yet, that's what I'm working on. In addition to playing the cello. Yes. That's quite a little resume you have there, Chas settle back into the back seat and crouched down to light a joint. Does pot help? Claire took the prooffered joint and smiled. sometimes, though to really understand string theory we're going to need something stronger. What like coke? Consider this, strings are tiny, vibrating things that we primarily observe as points or particles right? If you say so. Well then what happens to the particles as the vibration changes, as we move from say D flat to E? You really do study classical music don't you? Claire ignored the comment and continued. The answer is, theoretically of course, that the particle changes too. String theory says that any elementary particle should be thought of as a tiny vibrating line, rather than a point. The string can vibrate in different frequencies just as a guitar string can produce different notes, and every frequency appears as a different particle: electron, photon, gluon and so on. What you get is a world where you look at a particle and it has a positive charge say and then the string shifts and poof it has a negative charge. Okay. No, not okay. That's serious problem. Right but didn't Eistien already show the problems with observation and time and all that realativeity business? That's right, but this is slightly worse because what we are seeing is actually not at all what is there. It's one thing to say that something is only the thing it is when it's observed, it's a whole other type of problem if what you observe is only the _effect of something else_ happening when you observe it. What you have then is quite a bit like poking your head in Plato's cave and momentarily seeing the shadows. Rather than believing the shadows are the real deal because of a lack of information, you're thinking the shadows are real because you have false information. But you have false information in both cases? Right, but in the second case you believe your information is correct because it fits with what you expect, that's the worst kind of false information you can have because you have an entire mathmatical model that tells you it's true. So string theory means Eistien was wrong? No not really, that shadows are still shadow, they behave the same way, they just aren't actually what they appear to be? So what's the point of all this? Claire though for a minute, opening the glove box and pulling out a cigarette. The point is that, given the theory, assuming for a moment that it's true, it would be possible for to divergent realities to intersect. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, a lot of the weird shit that happens might not really be that weird. And I guess at the same time it might be far far weirder than we imagine. I mean, on some level if string theory is right all bets are off, there's no telling what it would mean. intersection of two separate realities.