Love: Atomic

Hel's special talent has its drawbacks. It is, after all, hard to trust someone with the knowledge they can walk through a wall or enter a locked room at the drop of a hat.

Love: Atomic

                As her car plowed towards the oncoming semitrailer at 110 km/h, Hel’s brain activity was remarkably stable. She saw the semi’s grille grow larger as it drew closer, and for a nanosecond felt perfectly serene as she allowed gravity to yank her body forward against her seatbelt as one foot instinctively slammed on the brakes.

                Then the front of the truck was through the windshield, spraying Hel with glittering granules of safety glass. Her body lurched forward, bottom leaving the seat completely. In that one moment, floating in the air amid a nebula of sparkling glass and metal, she thought how pretty it all looked, and wondered what dying would feel like.

                Just as the seatbelt was stretched to its limit, Hel forced her eyes closed, cleared her mind, and concentrated. Her body left behind the seatbelt and crippled car, and continued forward straight through the grille of the semitrailer.

***

                When Hel clocked out from her shift at the laboratory each night, she took the bullet train home. She lived in an apartment on the 11^th floor of a square, brown building that towered above the surrounding warehouses, low-income homes and grey, chain-link fences that made up the majority of the small, industrial town.

                Hel liked the neighborhood best in the winter, when she would take her laptop to the hole-in-the-wall Mexican coffee shop down the road and stare out the window at all the flat, snow-covered rooftops, above which her brown building stood like a silent monument. Anyone else would feel the loneliness of the empty, slushy streets like a chill in their bones, but not Hel. It suited her just fine, and she wasn’t afraid to tell her mother just so whenever she called from Stockholm.

                It was winter, but Hel decided against the coffee shop and instead headed home. Once safe inside, she shucked off her lab coat, tossed it on the couch, and shuffled into the kitchen. She returned moments later with a wine glass in one hand and a bottle of chilled Pinot Noire in the other.

                She plopped down onto the sofa, poured herself a glass of wine, and took small, measured sips while she scanned the room. The walls and furniture were white and bare, except for a few Pointillist paintings she’d taken the care to hang. Hel’s eyes were drawn to the largest painting, which hung just opposite of her: a print of A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Clutching her wine glass by the stem, Hel crossed the living room so that she was but inches from the canvas and, like most nights, she took the time to study the painting as she calmly sipped on her wine. And, just like most other nights, the miniscule, colored dots that became the faceless forms of men, women and children reclining in leisure in a shady grove by the water’s edge when she took a few steps back, did not fail to renew in her a kind of childlike amazement. She thought of those tiny dots as atoms swirling in a void, making and unmaking everything. Regular painting was dull to her now; it was too static, too cartoonish in the way it dared to paint people and trees and rivers in brash, unbroken pallets.

                There was no one around to criticize Hel’s narrow-minded taste in art, for she lived alone. A year or two ago she would not have minded a roommate, if she could find one who would stay. Thus far, she had not succeeded in holding down a roommate for more than a couple months. Understandably, people tended to develop a kind of paranoia and concern for personal privacy around Hel when they noticed her appearing in locked rooms and completely disregarding doors in general. That was all fine and good for Hel, because over the past year she had gotten it into her mind that she preferred solitude. She told herself that there was something poetic about being alone, that the simple pleasures of crisp sheets, cold wine and watching the history channel on Sunday mornings were far superior to anything companionship could offer.

***

                As a child, Hel had always been distinguishingly clever for her age, and her sense of perception was uncanny. She was impossible to distract, and thus was able to attune her senses to detect the miniscule things which even serious-minded adults could not. That aside, until the 10^th grade Hel was never particularly remarkable in any alarming respect.

                Being so terribly clever, she had enrolled in an upper year physics class. One day, while ghosting over the great intellects of the 20^th century, Hel’s teacher had breached the topic of Quantum Theory, according to which the universe was absolutely bonkers and randomness was always plausible (or so he had worded it). Hel was quite taken with the subject, and so her readings turn to Schrödinger and Heisenberg from whom she learned of the paradoxes of a subatomic world. Some rather funny ideas began to impress themselves in a young Hel’s brain. She set about training herself to perceive that which she had not previously, all the while straining her concentration to its limits. Even still, all her preparation and thought-experiments were mere theoretics.

                Only when a night of unfortunate circumstances caught Hel racing down a darkened street in Stockholm, the oxygen burning up in her lungs and heavy, stumbling footfalls behind her growing ever closer, did any practical application of her learning come about.  Through bleary eyes she perceived an empty wall, the side of an apartment building, rising from the sidewalk to meet her.  She focused on the wall ahead, perceiving and mapping out its atomic structure in her mind. Something like a ripple coursed through her body as she subtly and unnoticeably rearranged her entire being on an atomic level.

                As arms reached out to snatch her, she shut her eyes and with one last burst of speed threw her body at the wall. A puff of breath, reeking of alcohol, brushed against her neck �" and then she was crashing into a kitchen table, much to the bewilderment of the immigrant family who were seated for supper. Cups and plates shattered; forks clattered to the ground. Hel, for her part, lay in a magnificent heap upon the floor while the police were dialed and voices in a foreign tongue shouted back and forth to one another.

                She was arrested for break and entry. None of the policemen her believed Hel’s story, of course �" not until she phased out of her handcuffs and then out of the police car in a panic, causing the now equally-panicked policeman driving to send the cruiser off the road. An inspection from the scientific community and a brief court case later, all charges was dropped and Hel was allowed to walk free, though not without a degree of infamy.

                Thus, when Hel graduated from University later that year with a degree in microphysics, it was only sensible that she move to a small town in the countryside where she might find some respite from the never-ending requests for an interview or her participation in an experiment.

                Once she found work for a small research facility outside the rural town of Stentenberge, Hel began to spend more time developing her talent for rearranging her own atoms in order to phase through objects. As she did so, her curiosity began to fester, and Hel swiftly learned that living in a town where everyone knew one another had its respective drawbacks.

                Had she erred on the side of caution, Hel might have carried on fine, but she was not of the breed who think clearly before they act.  Occasionally, on her walk home from work she’d pass the still-lit displays of shops that had already closed for the night and something would possess her to meander casually through the shop window. On several occasions, Mr. Bengtsson from the second-hand bookstore in Stentenberge would arrive at his shop in the morning to open and find Hel curled up on the sofa behind the cash register, asleep with a half-read book splayed open on her lap.

                Following a few more incidents, the least of which involved absentmindedly phasing through a telephone pole in front of a dozen pedestrians, Hel could no longer be seen around town without incurring looks of a certain disregard. Businesses refused to serve her, and miscreant children sought their fun by chasing her with branches, in hopes she would phase for them.  Whatever little crime occurred in town that the police could not solve, whispers went about that Hel and her strange abilities were behind it.

                Truth be told, Hel would gladly return to Stockholm and endure the reporters and the sceptics for a chance to visit a coffee shop without having to endure hearing her name mentioned in whispered conversations, were it not for the crowds.

                The first time Hel phased through another human being had not been intentional. She’d been walking on a busy sidewalk in Stockholm coming back from the grocery store when a woman on a bicycle careened towards her, shouting something in Danish. In a moment’s trepidation, Hel had unwittingly entered phase-mode as woman and bike passed through her body.

                The experience of passing through matter was nothing new to Hel �" by then, she’d phased more than a dozen times. As the tire passed through her body, the usual sensations were fired off in her brain. She felt �" and saw�"the atomic structure of the rubber and metal; she sensed the buzz of electrons shrieking through the void.

                But as the woman’s body passed through her own, her usual perception of the atomic inner workings was blown away by a bright sharpness that pierced through her mind like a knife: something not quite material that could not be bisected into atoms and subatomic particles, something which intimately belonged to and was interlinked with the woman on the bicycle.

                All this happened in a second or two, but it left Hel lying on the pavement gasping for air after the woman had rode away. Her mind felt as though it were hot and throbbing with a fresh burn. Never before has she felt so uncomfortably close with anyone than she did with the woman on the bicycle, as if the strange brightness which had briefly penetrated her mind had somehow allowed her to know the woman. While what she’d seen was not altogether ugly, there was something foreign and painful about the intrusion which caused her thereafter to feel almost dirty.

                Hel would hesitate to call this immaterial entity she had encountered a soul, per say, but she could find little other explanation for it. Spirituality had never been a focal point with Hel, but after phasing through several more people, she could find little other explanation for it. Phasing through animals, she encountered nothing of the kind; the blazing, piercing light existed only in humans.

                When she came to this conclusion, Hel made a conscious effort to avoid any further situations which might lead to accidentally phasing through another person, thus her escape from Stockholm was in short order. It still happened on occasion by accident, however, and each time left Hel more shaken than the last. To phase through a soul became a far more culpable crime than any of her incidental break-and-enters.

                Over the years, Hel had gotten better and better at avoiding both transgressions. A tight schedule kept her from finding the spare time on her hands for any matter-bending deviancy, and by keeping to herself the occasions of incidental soul-phasing grew further apart. She’d lived in her current city, Chyrstoll, in the tall brown apartment building for over a year without any major incidents.

                Peace, of course, was not bought without price. She had no friends �" how could she without the embarrassment of having to explain her abilities, which she strove so hard to keep hidden? Certain residents of Chyrstoll, furthermore, were at odds with Hel’s lack of significant other �" how could so lovely and clever a girl tolerate living alone in such a drab industrial town? Hel had a brief, whirlwind of an affair in Stentenberge, but that was the one and only notch she’d acquired, as far as dating went. She didn’t mind the idea of dating at all, but she wasn’t particularly enthused by the idea either. It was awfully hard to grow close to someone with the knowledge that, with one misstep, she could end up with an intimate eyeful of her significant other’s soul, and that what she saw might frighten her. Hel had seen plenty of hideously misshapen souls, and knew that the people who bore them were often altogether pleasant on the outside.

                And anyways, Hel didn’t think she’d be comfortable having that much personal knowledge of an individual, whether their soul was good or rotten.

                Alone as she was, she carried on in Chyrstoll for a year without much trouble, until while riding home from work one day on the crowded bullet train she stumbled in the aisle and was forced to phase in order to avoid barreling over a pregnant woman. It was then she learned that a body can, in fact, house two souls �" a happy little discovery she would feel far more comfortable having lived without.

                By the time she stumbled home after that ride, Hel’s nerves were completely dissembled. Her hands trembled around the wine glass, which she was eventually forced to set aside, and no amount of Pointillist art could calm her. For a brief moment, she pondered whether any nearby towns were looking to employ a lab assistant.

                Once Hel had deduced that she was being rather silly, she made up her mind to go to the bank the following morning and take out a loan. The bullet train, she decided, was too stressful for her and the purchase of an automobile was in short order.

***

                Not two months after purchasing a car, Hel found herself phasing through the hood of an oncoming semitrailer, into the lane of which she’d swerved as a result of a patch of black ice and a horrible miscalculation on her part.

                She allowed herself to relax, allowed the geometric patterns of interlocking atoms to fill her mind, allowed herself to enjoy the tingle of her own subatomic structure being reshaped in order to pass effortlessly through a metric tonne of metal.

                Then she opened her eyes.

                A face was gliding to meet hers, frozen with fear and awe. It was too late for Hel to do anything; she merely braced herself as her body began the process of phasing through the semi driver’s body. The trepid, vast eyes before her grew until they filled her whole vision. Then �"

                She expected to feel the scalding heat of the soul cut through her mind, but it never came.

                Instead, warmth enveloped every inch of her body, like a second skin. Clear, pure light gently filtered into her mind, easing all little worries and troubles it found there. In her mind she could see the soul’s attributes, which were many and unique, like wavelengths of light shattered apart by a prism, yet together melded into something wonderful and whole, in much the same way as the tiny dots of her paintings back at her apartment formed a masterpiece when viewed at a distance.

                The soul’s warmth clung tight to her, refusing to release her. For the first time in her life, Hel encountered resistance while phasing.

                Then, like an elastic band stretch to its limit, the soul let go.

                Less than a second later, she hit the pavement rolling. She came to a stop a hundred feet away, battered and bloodied. As she lay sprawled on the hard, icy asphalt, Hel began to sob. Not because of the pain, though she was fairly certain that she’d broken several bones, but because she had been severed from that wondrous, all-comforting warmth that had been all too willing to accommodate her, however briefly.

***

                Kärlstad was already on the phone with an emergency dispatcher when he jumped down from the cab of the stopped semitrailer.

                It had happened far too fast:  the car swerving into his lane, applying the brakes, and the crunch of metal and glass being pulverized. He felt sick to his stomach, and when the dispatcher tried to get his location out of him he could barely say a word.

                He was in shock �" even he knew it. What else could explain what he thought he saw? Young women did not simply ghost through the steering wheel and disappear into his head. It was shock, clearly.

                As he rounded the front of the semi, Kärlstad’s throat tightened. The midsized car he’d seen seconds before it ploughed into him was completely flattened against the grille. If there was anyone inside… oh God, he couldn’t bring himself to think about it!

                Just as Kärlstad sprinted around the back of the trailer, praying that any occupants of the car had been thrown out the window by the impact and were not, in fact, mashed somewhere inside the hood of his semi, he spotted something humped on the road up ahead.

                Heart pounding, he sprinted over to the figure strewn across the road, phoned tucked under one arm and heart hammering at his chest. As he approached he saw the individual, a woman who laid face-down, donned a crisp white lab coat, freshly stained with bright red blood.

                “Oh God, please…” Kärlstad pleaded under his breath and he pushed the woman onto her back.

                His breath was arrested before it could leave his lungs.

                Peering up at him, worse for wear but still very much alive, was the lovely young woman he’d sworn he’d seen passing straight through his cab during the crash.

                He checked to make sure there were no cars coming and, once satisfied that the woman was not in any immediate danger, he crouched at her side. Taking off his jacket, he wrapped it around her shaking body. He noticed tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

                “Shh,” he murmured, brushing the hair out of her face. “You’ll be okay. An ambulance is on its way. You just stay put now; don’t move unless you have to.”

                The woman then looked at him with so much affection in her eyes that Kärlstad felt his heart ache.

                “Thank you, sir,” she muttered, voice raw.  Then, after a ponderous silence, she added, “You have a beautiful soul, you know.” And Kärlstad, quite correctly, thought her words seemed laden with a meaning he could not guess at.

                The pain then caught up with Hel, and she lost consciousness.

                Kärlstad held the woman’s hand until the ambulance arrived.

The End