As much as I like Asian take-out, I’ve eaten as much as I’m willing and we still have leftovers. Five minutes later that mini fridge is packed full of food, sentencing the beer to get warm all by it’s onesie.
“Speaking of things that niggle the back of our brains, what are the chances I can touch your hair tonight?” My fifth beer allows me not to be embarrassed about asking to touch her, but tomorrow I’m likely to micro analyze every moment leading up to this one.
Katie bites the lip of her fourth lemonade. “That was unexpected. How odd. It’s annoying and interesting that your behavior is just a little bit . . . shifted from what I expect. For example, you kept looking at my hands, and I expected your first contact request would be to compare hand sizes.”
“I mean, I am interested in that, but I’ve already seen how your hand envelopes a pair of chopsticks. So a size comparison has already been completed. Your turn. What’s been bothering you about me?”
She looks away at my question, allowing me to continue enjoying her biting the rim of her lemonade, staring unabashedly at that pointy tooth until she pulls her knees to her chest and her baggy shirt shifts up granting me a view of volley ball butt and her black lady briefs. I clap my mouth shut and re-direct my eyes to the remaining selection of beer that I really don’t need more of, but my distractions are limited.
“I’m still wondering how you let a community, that you advanced, kick you out.”
Oof. Leave it to her supercomputer of a brain to worry over something that hits so hard. I pop a stout and stare out the window full of glowing lights. “This hits on a personal embarrassment, like a failure of a lifetime. A character defining moment. And you want me to explain it to you because you want to understand, despite how uncomfortable it makes me?” I give her my own version of a piercing gaze, one that tells her I will demand something in return for this.
Katie glances between me and her fidgety toes several times, my gaze does not waver. She looks up, locks her eyes with mine, pull the tie out of her hair and nods her acceptance. The half second it takes for her curls to bounce back toward her temples makes my brain skip in realization that she’s willing to trade contact for information.
This knowledge makes me feel filthy, but also excited. And also worried? Like she would be able to walk, away, equivalent exchange for one of my deepest shames? No. not enough, and I’m not going to be fair about it.
I set my beer down without breaking our eye-lock and approach her, pausing briefly to let her flinch before reaching up with both my hands, but she clinches her jaw in commitment. Katie was no coward. Good. My small, round finger tips sink into her silky textured ringlets and I squeeze them lightly to appreciate the wondrous, delicate springs.
She lowers her eyes, as though her part of our transaction is complete when I grab her head and tilt it up so that her eyes meet mine again. “No escape, Katie. Sharing this kind of thing is what friends do. Despite the odd collision that was this evening, I actually like you. When I’m exhausted after telling you this, I’m going to want your deets so I can text you and everything.”
Her eyes widen in . . . fear? Huh. I am coming off as a little commanding, but she isn’t pulling away or presenting with signs of trauma. But I loosen my grip and pull my hands from her hair. The time was so short but so enjoyable. My hands will be in that hair again by hook or by crook.
But before that, personal trauma.
I sit on the edge of the bed, with my elbows on my thighs looking at the carpet. “I was an ambitious, intellectually aggressive teen. I felt that people should understand that I was smarter than them, and that they should appreciate my opinion based on that fact. Excellence reinforced that opinion, despite what I now can see as a depreciated value of my intelligence due to my arrogance and brutish approach.
“Excellence and results were enough to get me through six years of higher education, a career making paper for my advisor, and half a dozen patents with my name on them. I can’t say with accuracy how caustic my attitude and aura of superiority was at the time, because I didn’t think anything of it then; and now none of the people I worked with want anything to do with me. None of the people I was intimate with, none of my research associates, not even the professors whose careers I advanced by ‘playing the game’. Once they got the last patent application out of my research, once my knowledge was public, they kicked me to the curb.
“They tolerated me long enough that the advances I’d curated for eight plus years were adequately described and published that they could cut me loose to make their own advances without having to deal with me. They did this knowing that anything I could develop would be at least five years in the making.” I sighed and gripped the textured bottle as hard as I could, trying to shatter it within my pigmy hands.
“It hurt. It hurt a lot that they gave me the equivalent of a pat on the head and then separated themselves from me, taking my baby in the divorce. I knew the lab I was a part of would keep the rights, but I didn’t think it mattered. I though excellence and innovation would be enough to carry me to the next project. So, I kept working. Even after they fired me for spurious reasons, I kept working and renting lab space with the money and political capitol that I had made, expecting excellence to be enough as it always had been. Turns out, when people are acting against you, five years wears on you, it claws your insides every minute, making your intelligence, your innate gifts, have to wade and fight through the bog of emotions and politics that embody the social hive that is humanity.”
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The last part I have to say is the hardest. I want to throw and break glass, to scream into the night about the frustration this short monologue has dredged in me. Instead, I spy the small trashcan next to the sink and belt the bottle at the plastic receptacle. I hit the lip and the weight of the bottle hitting the lip, overturning the trashcan over the mess of the bottle as it shatters against the linoleum. Well, at least the mess is contained.
There’s a smidge of mania in the chuckle that follows.
“I broke when I realized that excellence wasn’t enough. I believed until that moment that my fear of people, my fear of social interaction, emotion, and not understanding the human condition would be ignored if I was good enough. That I could be crass and driven and ignore the consequences of my fears if I was simply the best at what I did. When the cracks started to show, I tried harder, likely alienating even more of the people that could tolerate me, until the point where my brilliance had been rewarding enough that my peers felt they no longer needed to apply the social glue to keep the cracks from spreading. They didn’t have to help prop up my manufactured personality anymore, and the pain that they felt I put them through justified their decision to leave me in a padded cell of my worst fears.
“And here I am, years later, knowing that I will never be good enough to never be afraid again.” I pull hard on my 9.6% imperial stout, feeling my buzz shift as I do it. “And that fucking sucks, you know?” I don’t know when I started crying, but when I look up to see Katie’s reaction, she’s blurry. I turn my eyes back to the carpet and let the tears fall.
I weakly register sensations of the bed moving and that something besides my pants are touching my leg, but it feels so far away. It takes a whispered voice next to my ear to bring me back to the present.
“You have described one of the fears I constantly fight against.” Her breath on my ear makes me realize she is holding me from behind, arms wrapped around me, chin on my shoulder. I know that this is all a calculated response on her part—an algorithm of social interaction. But the flutter in the whisper of her fear feels real, lending some authenticity to the rest of her calculated action.
My tired and coping brain started doing the math of the logistics specialists responses and how they would change to manage my emotional outbursts.
“Tell me about your project.” It wasn’t a question. It is probably just another calculation, but it feels like an open window, a breath of fresh air, so I decide to take the offered branch.
“In the beginning, there was the Big Bang. We can’t really look back before the times of cosmic background radiation, and as a child this bothered me.” Katie nods her head against my shoulder. A kindred spirit searching for a completed data set. “So I started gathering information about how that started. A hyper-compressed matter and energy stew doesn’t just appear out of barren space, so there has to be a reason.”
I take a sip of my beer, making sure the rest of my body doesn’t move or give a reason for the Vampire Treant to stop holding me. “But what do I find? That no, really, that shit does just appear out of barren space. It just takes a fucking long time and a Googleplex of rounding errors to create enough errant matter and energy to form a gravity well to collect things in a tiny space with oppressive inner pressure. Makes sense right? I mean, not totally as cosmic rounding errors is an odd concept, but with DNA copy errors driving evolution, it’s not as difficult to believe.”
I transition from sad to excited, as talking about my life’s work always does, and I revel in the deftness of maneuvering Katie’s brain has calculated to distract me. “So my teen brain readily accepts that errors are a part of existence, and that by reduction, that it is possible that the universe could possibly be created by a collection of errors. But then Einstein and Hawking’s teachings hit me: a singularity should have formed and transformed and dislocated the matter present if it was present in such an overwhelming quantity. A lot of theories break down at transformative moments. Newton’s laws distort outside of a personal scale. Einstein’s theories break down around overwhelming and underwhelmingly massive singularities. Aka black holes and subatomic particles.”
My excitement usually causes a dislocation of thought experiences and physical experiences, so I ignore a shift of a chin to nose and lips on my shoulder. She must be tired and humoring me. I pause to make sure she’s not catastrophically bored.
“Mmm,” the rumble on my skin splits my focus. “from what I’ve heard, this inconsistency has been tabled until a more unified theory is discovered.” A buzz charges through me as her lips move against my shoulder.
“Exactly! They tabled the discussion. I’m thrilled that you know that, by the way.” A squeeze briefly reminds me that her body has practically enveloped me. But my brain is excited! “Anyway, this led me to believe that energy was the key. Einstein’s mass energy equation still holds up, so what if, what if a saturated energy field creates a region where matter is in a mutable state? What if conditions were right that the transition from matter to energy could be as easy as a disturbance in space time?
“Long story made less long, and taking the coda on a lot of theoretical physics and exploratory engineering . . .” my mind stutters again as a kiss connects beneath my earlobe.
“Keep going Penelope.”
Jesus effing Christo. My abdomen responds with engines ready to answer all bells and I am suddenly hyper focused at the nuzzling that is occurring in my melt inducing region behind my jaw.
“So, I . . . I do a lot of math with my computer friends, and with a fissile reaction or an advanced Fusion generator, I would be able to create the energy field to re-create the rounding errors at the beginning of this iteration of the Universe.”
When her long, long slender fingers slide up under my t-shirt I consider that maybe LS2 O’Connor is a Sapio-Sexual. The laden breath next to my ear convinces me to keep on fucking talking.
“I later found out that a national laboratory and several universities bet fifty million dollars on my theories. At the time I was in a creative fugue of CNC machines and plasma generators and didn’t realize the cost of experimentation. But after months of failures and refab, we created antimatter in a controlled environment. Granted, containment only held for a minute, and it then obliterated half of the experiment apparatus, but we created antimatter purposefully for the first time in human history!”
When her sexy fangs drug across my arteries, I lost all sense of reason. My ovaries steered hard to port and twisted my hips in the cradle of comfort that was the Irish Vampires enveloping presence. My thumb finds itself counting her half ribs while my mouth takes hers in a surprised panic.
“What the fuck are you doing Katie.”
“Not my fault, your brain is sexy.” Her spindly fingers weave themselves amongst my treacle trusses, pulling firmly to raise my chin and expose my neck. Her tongue leaves a damp trail to my earlobe which she firmly bites and causes my hormones to take control and fade my conscious thought to oblivion.