Theories

 

String Theories

(Approximately 2,350 words)

 

               There is a scientific theory known as String Theory that claims on a plane of existence smaller than the one where atoms dwell there is a universe in which everything is connected by a number of strings that float out from our atoms and anchor us to each other and the earth at large.  I believe sometimes a few of these strings grow thicker between certain people, and I think the person at the end of my connection has died. 

I’m sorry.  I think I need to go back to the beginning.

I was four when I met him.  I had on a pair of blue jeans, a red “I’m a Pepper” T-shirt, and a giant, red, thumb-shaped sucker lodged firmly in my mouth.  I was staring at the sidewalk, deep in concentration, wondering how my stubby legs were ever gonna be big enough to jump on the hopscotch blocks marked off by the older kids. 

A shadow walked up next to me, but I didn’t immediately turn around.   I felt more comfortable standing next to the unknown figure than I usually did when I was with my little sister.  After a few minutes I looked over at him and popped the sucker out of my mouth.  He was close to my age and had bright red hair, but the most interesting thing about him was the way his skin was covered in more freckles than I’d ever seen on anyone before.  For a few seconds I wondered if you could connect all of his dots and if doing so would make a new person.

“Patricia Bell.”

“Patrick Anderson.” He answered.

“Hmmm.  Where did you come from, Mars?”

“No, Trenton.”

“Might as well be Mars.”  I told him, pointing the remaining sliver of my sucker at his face accusingly. 

He laughed, and I think that was when the strings first began to sink past our flesh and into our very bloodstreams.  It was too late for me.  I know now that it may have been too late for me the second he walked over and our shadows connected on the pavement.

It wasn’t long before they began calling us the two Pats, running it together as if it were one word, “the tupats”, as if we had somehow merged into one entity over the years and were now undeserving of individual names. 

However, it was two years later before blood solidified the connection and brought it one step closer to the thing that is now killing me.  I was six, and we were playing hide and seek at Patrick’s house.  There was a large, ornate, block lining one edge of his porch with intricate carvings of stone flowers and leaves blossoming out from its surface.  I was hiding behind one of these when Patrick sat down next to me. 

“Hey, we’ll be easier to find if we’re together.”  I scolded him, peeking up and around the corner to make sure that his brother, Clark, wasn’t anywhere in sight since he was the designated hunter. 

“I know, but the others already had the good hiding spots.”

Instead of answering him, I just nodded, knowing that he was probably right.  With his family, my family, and the neighborhood kids combined, there were over thirteen of us dashing around that house, looking for places to hide. 

  I stood up and looked around the corner again, and when I sat down Patrick leaned in to kiss me, his chapped lips brushing against the soft skin of my cheek caused me to gasp.  He pulled back and blushed until I thought his freckles would glow a new shade of crimson. 

I laughed deep in my throat, his embarrassment spilling over onto me as if it were an infectious disease I could not avoid.  Just then Clark’s dark head popped over the top of the carved cement.  “I found you!  You two are out.”

I was just about to inform Clark that he hadn’t touched us to tag us out when the block he was leaning on began to wobble beneath him.  A look of horror crossed his face seconds before he realized that the block was going to fall.  I tried to move my feet, tried to get up and run away, but I couldn’t.  All I could do was stare as it fell over the edge of the porch. 

Patrick stuck both of his hands up just as it was about to collide with my head.  I moved and Patrick let go, but not before the cement tore the flesh from his palms with a grating sound that made me wince and cry all at the same time.  I may have been too young to understand a great many things, but what I knew at that moment was that he had saved me.  I may not have died under that slab, but I’m inclined to believe that it would have been the end of a great many things. 

Because of him, nothing happened to me physically, but once our connection had been fed by his sacrifice, the string began to pulse with its first flickers of life.

We were eight when I kissed him back.  In the Anderson’s backyard there was a giant tree house that was at least two stories tall with a trapdoor.  A war had been declared against our siblings, and we meant business.  We’d hauled up the rope ladder and latched the trapdoor, barricaded in our childhood paradise with a burlap sack full of rotten potatoes. 

Every time one of them came near the tree we would plunge our hands into the mushy potato pile and hurl chunks at them until everyone involved smelled like decaying earth.  My mother had long ago given up on trying to put me in dressy clothes after they often came back torn and stained, but even so I knew that I would be in for it this time.  I had managed to get white chunks of mush pressed in against my Rainbow Bright tank top until the fabric had melded with the vegetation. 

I leaned over to grab another handful and found myself nose to nose with Patrick.  In the two years since he’d kissed me on the cheek I had often found myself remembering that day, waking up from nightmares in which my brains had been meshed in with the designs on the block.  I had also woken up more than once wondering if Patrick was ever going to kiss me again. 

Looking back, I’m not sure that I even thought about what I was doing, not sure if I thought about anything other than how much I wanted to find out what kissing him would be like.  His lips were soft, and almost ripe, as if I were kissing the potatoes.  After a second I pulled back and he smiled.  I smiled too, but the feel of the potatoes was still clinging to my flesh, and although I could feel his puppy love, I could feel none of my own.  It was barren inside my chest and there was nothing for me but the large, beating line that had grown just a little more. 

It began to call me in my sleep. 

In my dreams there would be the two of us, and instead of being joined by the connection we would be separated by it, its large, pulsating, body lying between us like a fleshy snake.  I would wake in a sweat, convinced it was moving closer to my throat, seeking to snuff me out. 

I moved away the next year.  Patrick watched the moving van as we drove down the street, riding next to it on his skateboard for as long as he could keep up.  I cried, but not as much as I would have had I not felt that line stretching to accommodate the space filling up in between us.  I was just nine, and I had no idea how small the world truly was and even though our new house was an hour away, that felt like forever to my young mind. 

For a while the link stopped growing, and in that time I stopped dreaming about it.  More than once I could feel it hibernating just beneath the surface of reality, but since the immediate threat of it overtaking me had relinquished its hold, I could breathe again.

When I was fifteen I fell in love.  Fell hard for a boy named Cody, and for a long time I forgot who I was, who I could be.  If someone had asked me, I would have sworn to them I couldn’t exist without Cody.  The truth was that we weren’t connected at all.  How could we be when my line was so directly hooked to Patrick? 

The dreams came back.

I tried to ignore them, tried to pretend it was just a product of my imagination and that it meant nothing.  Patrick was my friend.  I loved Cody.

I guess my fear led to my carelessness, and I ended up pregnant when I was sixteen.  I didn’t tell anyone, not even Cody, fearing my parents would try and make me get rid of it, fearing the scrutiny of all those peering faces. 

The nightmares returned before I was even sure I was pregnant.

They began to circle around the baby and the umbilical cord that tied me to her.  That cord was a connection that was anchored in this world, an actual tie between two people that no one could doubt.  But in my dreams it would come to life, coiling itself around her fragile neck until I could feel the little bones snap.

I would wake up, sweating and screaming into my pillow. I would cry out into the night in giant, gasping breaths until I could once again feel her heartbeat aligning with my own.  But I knew that it would not let her live, my little Jamie Lynn would never open her eyes on this world. 

A week later when the blood came I cried when I cleaned up, but I already felt as empty inside as I had the first time I’d kissed Patrick.  My grieving had been done on all those nights previously when I’d wept into my pillow, the fabric of my bed absorbing my anguish and feeding it to my enemy.

Patrick called that night and said he’d felt that something was wrong.  I told him that it wasn’t but I don’t think he believed me. 

I pushed Cody away, I pushed them all away, using sex and lust as an interchangeable replacement for love.  I knew my fleshy, snake-like appendage would never let me love.  It couldn’t allow love to linger in either of our lives when it had been born of something else entirely.

I tried to block Patrick from my mind, tried to ignore the thing’s call, but I learned you couldn’t ignore what’s already been encoded.

I found myself waking up from a binge on his lawn in the middle of the night, my car angled into the curb.  Its door was open and a soft ping broke into the night, reminding me that the keys were in the ignition.  A few minutes later I heard someone moving around in my car, yanking the keys from the ignition and shutting the door with a loud creak that tore into the night.  When I looked up, Patrick stood over me, his freckled chest shining softly in the moonlight.

“What are you doing, Patricia?” he asked, leaning down to whisper as if the otherwise silent night surrounding us might hear.

“Trying to find myself.”  I laughed.

“On my yard?”

“No, in the earth.”

He helped me to my feet and led me up to the tree house, the sound of our footsteps absorbed by the dewy grass. 

“Do you ever feel it, Patrick?” I asked once we were safely tucked away in the tree.

He looked at me for a long time, the bare, open eyes I remembered now sharp and accusing.

“The emptiness.”

“That too,” I said, not wanting to push him. 

He nodded and for a while neither of us spoke.  I knew what was coming when he kissed me, knew that this was the night that had been promised by my reluctant lips all those years before.  I could smell the lingering scents of a cherry sucker, the blood from his hands, and the overripe potatoes that had first fed the creature between us.  I could feel the concrete biting into the side of my head and knew my kiss wasn’t the only promise that had been unfulfilled.

When it was over we both dressed, descended the ladder and departed, both just as empty as we had been before, our emotions drained by our bond. 

That was ten years ago, and since then I’ve imagined that the fleshy connection has been fed, that it was dormant and satisfied.  That was before the dreams returned two weeks ago.

I sat upright in the bed after the first one, pulling in great gulps of air as if they could quench the despair that flowed into me.  I’d seen Patrick working on his parent’s house, trying to keep up everything that they were unable to do in their old age.  I’d seen him lean over that concrete banister, reaching for something just beyond his fingertips, something I hadn’t been able to see.  Then, the cord that I had believed inactive for so long pushed against the pillar. 

I screamed as it fell on him, realizing that this was the other part of the bargain, this was what it ultimately sought.  After that night the dreams changed, morphing as the tip that had been connected to Patrick darkened and began to rot, chunks falling off its flesh as it writhed down roads, through houses and apartments I once inhabited, working its way toward me. 

It is a fuse to a bomb that I cannot escape, and I can hear its ticking in the walls.

Reviews

[kannerjay]

!

[kannerjay]

es, he's right. Ender's game is a wonderful book and I think you'd enjoy it. Try following in Orson's footsteps ;) he's very sucessful

[sconzey]

That's a distinctive style you have there missy: leading with the science, and then what is whole-heartedly a people-story. I like it.

The descriptions of the connections between people in terms of string theory reminds me of something Orson Scott Card touched on throughout his other three Ender books (Speaker For the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind)

Come to think of it, writing like that, I think you'd really enjoy Ender's Game. Go read.