Jordan’s been staring at his computer for so long that he can barely read the letters on the screen anymore. The cursor blinks steadily, endlessly. He feels like time could stop, and the cursor would still keep disappearing, reappearing, and then disappearing again forever.
The first time I saw Hannah D., a patient at Delia F. Belman Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, she was strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance.
When hospital staff released her restraints, she made a break for it. And I was the one who caught her.
What follows is her story. And mine.
Jordan rubs his eyes and takes a sip of the instant coffee that he made with warm water from the bathroom tap. If Hannah thinks that Belman coffee’s terrible, she should try this brew. It’s practically poisonous.
After impulsively deciding to take a break from writing his thesis, Jordan walks down the hall into the common room of his dormitory. A few students are flopped here and there on the overstuffed couches. Jordan can’t help but notice the room’s sharp-edged tables, breakable glass windows, and regular doorknobs. None of these things would be allowed on the Belman ward. Hell, even a hardcover book or a spiral-bound notebook is considered a potential weapon at Belman.
The girl who reminded him of Hannah is studying at her usual table, her hair twisted into a knot on the top of her head and held in place with a chopstick. Jordan makes another sudden decision and sits down across from her. Her attention doesn’t stray from the papers in front of her.
What are you doing, Hassan?
I don’t really know.
He finally says, simply, “Hi. I’m Jordan.”
She looks up at him. She seems a little confused at first, but a second later she smiles and pushes aside the article she’s been reading. He sees, with a start, that it’s about muons, the subatomic particles Hannah mentioned when he first met her.
“Do those things really break the laws of physics?” he blurts.
She pulls the chopstick out of her hair, and it spills in dark waves down her back. “I’m Ellie,” she says, “and no.”
He notices that her eyes are a clear, lovely gray. “They don’t?”
Her smile grows wider. “Well, okay, muons appear to violate known laws. The currently accepted laws. But if it can be broken, then it’s not really a law, is it?”
“All kinds of laws get broken,” Jordan says. He thinks of Cayden, Belman’s resident arsonist, and Amelia, the thief. They were sent to the hospital in lieu of juvenile detention or jail.
“The laws of physics are totally different from human laws, because human laws are decisions,” Ellie says. “They aren’t facts.”
Jordan nods. “Okay, so for example, there could be a country where murder was legal—”
“But there couldn’t be a country where gravity doesn’t exist.” Ellie finishes his sentence.
“What about the multiverse?” Jordan asks. “Is that a thing? And does anyone think that time travel’s really possible?”
Ellie laughs. “This is absolutely the weirdest first conversation I’ve ever had with someone. Do you want to go get a drink and see how much weirder it can get?”
Yes. Yes, he definitely would.