IT IS THE CASE IN PARTICLE PHYSICS THAT WHEN TWO PHOTONS are collided together in a particle accelerator, new particles are created in the collision. As I marched home along the old railroad tracks in the western part of Enon Swamp one freezing dawn, after another night of labored and aimless roving, I thought about Kate on her bicycle and the car hitting her. Instead of her and the bike being pulled up underneath the car and mangled, I imagined an explosion and a burst of light out of which three cars and three bikes clattered, and three Kates tumbled, too, each dressed in the same cutoffs and polo shirt over the same bathing suit, wearing the same Red Sox cap. One Kate somersaulted onto the sidewalk. Another sailed into the brush. The third vaulted over one of the newly minted cars and landed on her back across the hood of another. Each girl lay dazed for a moment, then sat up and looked around, frowning at the scene, fizzing with electricity.
Then the Kates saw one another. They gasped and said in unison, “Kate?”
The girls approached one another, this one limping, that one nursing an elbow, the other patting a goose egg on her forehead, and met in a circle. It looked like a girl in a fun-house mirror except that all three images were really girls, not reflections. They touched one another’s faces, and patted one another’s hair, and asked if the others were okay, and said, “I guess so, but who are you?”
Instead of the woman who struck Kate on her knees, wailing, and her three kids screeching in the back of the minivan, there were three of her and twelve kids rioting all over the road at seeing one another’s mirror images stampeding around them. There was mayhem when the police and ambulances and fire trucks showed up, but eventually all the Kates checked out and, after agreeing with the cops what a bizarre coincidence it was that identical triplets with identical kids driving identical cars had struck identical triplets riding identical bikes, we all went home, where I was able finally to distinguish the original Kate from her two new selves, because both new Kates still had the moles on their chins that the real Kate had had removed. I imagined us laughing and joking about bunk beds and how money was going to be really tight now, but how wonderful it was to have three daughters.
“My embarrassment of Kates!” I imagined myself saying.
If you stood the three Kates in line, the original Kate first, and looked at them left to right, you’d see that their eyes went from nearly stark white to anthracite black, in an even gradation, from eye to eye, girl to girl. The original Kate’s iridescent right eye had no color in it except for the faint shadows created by the traceries of its iris and glowed when reached by even the slightest source of light. Her left eye was mostly white as well, with just a reflection of blue in its leftmost curve. The next Kate, we called her Katie the Second, had a right eye the color of a robin’s egg, with speckles of moss green and brown in it. Her left eye was brown but for a speckling of blue along its right rim. Katie the Third’s right eye was dark brown with a grain or two of gold, and her left eye was pitch-black. It seemed as if either the original Kate’s white eye was a shooting star with a white-and-blue-and-green-and-gold tail trailing across the girls’ eyes back to the blackness of space, or as if Katie Number Three’s obsidian eye was a black hole pulling all the color and light toward itself through the others.
When the three Kates came home, we turned on the radio and danced in a circle around the living room and sang and cheered at our great fortune. By the next morning, though, there were signs that something was wrong. The girls awoke with headaches that got worse by the hour. They began to have nosebleeds. The original Katie was cold all the time, even though it was summer. She sat by a sunny window wrapped in wool blankets. She made me turn the heat up to ninety and spent the morning shivering and sipping hot, milky tea. I found Katie Number Two in the kitchen eating spoonfuls of salt and sucking on a handful of coins she’d scooped from the change jar. Katie Number Three could not stand the heat or the light, and I found her in the basement, lying in the deep freezer, which she had lined with a sheet so she wouldn’t stick to the frost. All three girls died as the sun set, and instead of mourning one daughter, right away, I gained a night of fraudulent joy at the cost of losing three the next day.