—I think it's all going to be miraculously all right!
We climbed the swirling stairs and went, our arms tight around each other, down the long unlit corridor that led to Dana's room.
— He's gone to sleep. He took his pills and went to sleep. He'll speak to you in the morning.
— Do you think he'll yell at me?
— Oh, Justin. You're such a little child! Justin the Child, crown prince of quantum mechanics.
— And you are the princess.
— And he is the king! My father is the king!
She had said that I was a child, but I felt that it was she who was the child, that she was as young as I was grown-up. I knew something about her life, a hidden variable that she couldn't have observed and would never infer, and I wouldn't tell her. He hadn't told her, so I knew that not to tell her must be right.
It was right to let her love her dotty mother, even with an erroneous, irrational, infuriating love, because it was her mother, the only one she would ever have. I repeated this over and over in my head, as if it were a fundamental truth, because it was.
I paused in the corridor, outside her bedroom door.
— Perhaps I shouldn't stay over tonight. If he's still angry with me, perhaps tonight it would be better for me to go.
— Don't be silly, Justin. You know that he doesn't mind your staying.
— It's what he wants. It's what he wants, isn't it?
— Mmm.
— It's strange.
— Strange, yes. It's strange.
She smiled at me, the radiance slowly coming, coming. Onto the bed she stretched herself out long and sighed.
I stood and watched her, enchantress of the world, as slender as a lotus stem, the radiance slowly coming. I had only to watch her stretch herself out long and sigh, and reach her hand out, palm up, to feel the radiance coming.
It was this that he had meant.
— Strange, yes. It's strange.
— I understand it, though.
— What do you understand, Justin the Child?
I came toward her now, and kissed her open palm, mouth laid on that other mouth that leads to bliss. It was this that he had meant, this search and this: the shuddering knowledge.
— What do you understand?
We lay quiet after long love, entangled in the moments before daybreak.
— What do you understand, Justin?
She murmured it against my shoulder, barely audible, the slight hiss emerging as it often did when she was tired, her legs still wrapped in mine, so that I didn't know which were hers and which mine. Our world had been restored to us and reconfigured, with something fundamental in it fundamentally now changed. Perhaps, I thought, reaching for the terms of the quantum condition of collapse that consumed us: perhaps it was no longer even meaningful to raise the question of our distinct psi's now at all.
— Tell me what you understand.
She said it with a slight press of insistence. I moved away to look at her. She was softened by our love, all things about her soft, her eyes half sleeping and ready for her dreams, and I would lie awake and watch her while she slept. Was she still as beautiful as before? I could no longer tell, I loved her far too much, too much. Only the psi of our union is defined now, I was thinking, free-falling into poetry, into metaphors and dreams, become at last a physics-for-poets nonpoet, loving her far too much, and so I told her.
— That afternoon last winter when he and I went for a walk and you stayed home. It was the day that we had proved the bizarre efficacy of knowledge.
— Mmm.
She lifted her chin in the gesture that told me to continue.
— He told me about Erwin Schrodinger, how his wave mechanics had poured out of an ardent love affair, a secret Christmastime tryst with a woman whose identity has never been learned. He thinks love like ours can add a fire to the understanding, Dana. Did you know that! Did you know that he thinks I do physics here in your bed! He means to get the physics out from me!
I had meant, I think, to laugh when I said this, but my tone could not have been further away from ridicule. I spoke the last words with an excitement that took me by surprise, only fully realizing, when I finally spoke the idea aloud to her, how proud of it I was: the great chain of knowing passing from God through Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Schrodinger and Mallach and me.
She turned her eyes away, but not before I had seen their look.
— Tell me, Dana!
She was turned toward the wall, her knees drawn up beneath her chin. I grabbed her knees and swiveled her back with such a lightning quickness that I heard the joints of her protest and the rest of her followed unnaturally after.
— Tell me! You know that you can't keep it from me!
She stared up at me, her eyes no longer soft, but full of their light blue light, a shade of blue I'd never seen before that autumn hour on the stairwell landing, when I had been, with all the certitude of well-formed instinct, afraid.
She said it softly, but with a measured clarity and charge.
— From me, Justin. He means to get the physics out ... from me!