GOD. YOU ARE GOD. EVERYTHING IS GOD! Quintessence!”
Ben’s face clears, and my wonderful atheist boy looks very relieved.
I think I feel just like Chuck Yeager did in 1947 when he became the fastest man alive by being the first pilot to break the sound barrier, flying faster than the speed of sound at level flight. In The Right Stuff, the flying aces are always talking about chasing a demon in the sky, like the sound barrier itself was a demon—and I think I just did the same. I beat that hungry ghost by a mile.
“Just so you know,” he says, “that quote of Yuri’s has been disputed.”
“Really?”
He nods, very serious, his lips twitching. “Apparently, he was a believer.”
I stare at him. “Now he’s fucking with my serenity EVEN MORE.”
Ben is trying hard not to laugh, I can tell. “Does that change your conclusions?”
“Of course not. Gagarin is irrelevant to the logic of my argument, which is sound.”
“You’re still God.”
“Yes. And so are you. At the end of the day, the universe is clearly a proponent of equality.”
“So, basically, you lay down on Boston Common and achieved enlightenment,” Ben says.
“Basically.”
He throws up his hands. “A couple visits to Dharma Bums and you’re already a Zen Master.”
I grin. “I progress through things very quickly.”
“Like father, like daughter.”
Ben reaches for his copy of Dark Diving. Flips through it to a dog-eared page. Reads my dad’s words to me.
“When his dear friend Michele Besso died, Einstein imparted his theory on death to Besso’s sister, in a letter of condolence. He writes, ‘Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.’
In my search for quintessence—the meaning of existence through understanding what dark matter (and therefore the universe) is made up of—I find myself returning to this scrap of knowledge that Einstein imparted to a grieving woman and, perhaps, to his own grieving self. Is it possible that Einstein discovered true quintessence—the secret to eternal life that philosophers and alchemists have been searching for across the centuries? Perhaps the Elixir of Life isn’t a tonic at all, but the simple knowledge that time is elastic and, as such, what we would consider a life’s end—consciousness forever relegated to the past—is its beginning elsewhere.”
“Houston, we have SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF ETERNAL LIFE!”
Ben laughs. “Maybe. But I think he’s ultimately saying what we have to be okay with is not that we’re going to die, but that we don’t know what, exactly, or where or when we’ll be when these physical manifestations of ourselves time out. So we have to live the hell out of the atoms we are right now and be okay with letting the form they take go when the time comes. But…” He smiles. “Maybe my atoms will always find your atoms.”
I think of our kiss: I am lost without you. Quantum love.
“No object has a definite position except when colliding with something else,” I whisper.
He nods. “You’re my definite position in the universe.”
“We’re a funny pair,” I say. “You love gravity, and I’m always trying to escape it.”
“I’m so proud of you. I can’t wait to be standing outside, looking up, and knowing you’re somewhere above me looking down.” His lips turn up. “But every astronaut needs to have her feet on the ground sometime.”
Ben Tamura is my favorite gravitational pull.
I take his hand and kiss the palm.
“You hold me, too, you know,” I whisper against it, the universe of me in the palm of his hand.
His eyes turn glassy.
“I’m so sorry, Ben. All these months. I—”
He stops me with a salty, sweet kiss. “Save your apologies for all the heart attacks you’re going to give me when you’re a fighter pilot, hm?”
I squeeze him a little tighter. “Thank you for the meteorite.”
“I promise I won’t get you rocks for every occasion. Despite being a geophysicist, I do have some self-control. But I thought you might like that one.”
I burrow closer to him. “You know what’s strange? If the wave hadn’t happened … maybe I would never have met you.”
He runs a hand over my head. “I don’t think anything happens for a reason. The wave being the price we pay in exchange for this. I think a part of me would have found a way to collide with you, Mae, no matter what. Even if I had to take a quantum leap to make