It’s built to be dismantled. The pipes that commit state are the only bits of the skunkworks it is connected to. It can be removed at any time. She can wait. She can let this universe be too haphazard to understand, much less document, be the new normal until Mom is cured. The tides will be wrong and the foundations of physics will crack, but Mom will live.
She can have all the mangos and soup dumplings she wants. She and Ellie will chat deep into the night. Mom will tell Ellie stories about growing up on a farm in southern Taiwan. Ellie will tell Mom about holding it together in Boston. When Ellie finally finishes her dissertation and can afford it, she will bring Mom back to Taiwan. They can hike through the country Mom loves, misses, and could never afford to return to. Ellie can’t help thinking Mom is worth any number of spontaneously combusting reefs and erratic planetary orbits.
Valves clack and pipes shrink and swell in time. From end to end, they jog and twist around each other at wild angles. Data travels through pipes too long and too hard to trace. No builder would route them this way except to work around pipes already there, all the other possibilities being even longer or harder to trace. Or functionally wrong.
Once, as a teenager, Ellie had found a truly elegant fix. By then, Mom let Ellie make repairs herself, but only after Mom approved them. This one was just a few short pipes connected at right angles installed in an easily accessible place. Piece of cake. They’d be done in no time. She rushed to show Mom, who slowly shook her head and pointed out the one case in billions where data would not reach the reservoir before its valve closed.
Instead, as the people whom Mom refused to name bore down on them, Mom and Ellie threaded pipes through the existing tangle. The fix was time-consuming and ugly. They had to use their arc-welder hands not only for cutting pipe but also for self-defense. Mom drew their fire and kept them occupied, so Ellie could stay focused on the work. Not unlike what Daniel is doing now, she supposes, except they were close enough that she felt the pipes and reservoirs shake as she tried to fix the skunkworks while Mom held the troublemakers off. She and Mom barely escaped with some cuts and bruises. But the fix was also provably correct.
Ellie looks at the valves she needs to hold open to flush outspeculative state and the mechanism she might dismantle. She knows what Mom would do in her place. She knows what she has to do.
It’s like dismantling her own heart.
CHAPTER 4
The gastropub where she’s meeting Daniel and Belt is fancier than Ellie’s usual haunts. She leaves all things food-related in Daniel’s capable hands. He does things with a knife and a wok that most people wouldn’t even dare. Predictably, he’s more familiar with restaurants in the South End than she is and she’s the one who lives in what a friend in Framingham calls “the city.”
Bamboo lines the walls. Planks of aged wood cover the ceiling. Branches and twigs form nests around the light fixtures overhead and hang down in artful ways. The place is bright and inviting. A row of banquette seating lines one wall. On the other side, a set of cream-colored pillars separate the space from the chef’s table. A row of round tables sit between the two.
The gastropub isn’t empty, but it isn’t full either. Ellie’s escorted to one of the round tables before she has a chance to tell anyone who she is. The table is set for three. The napkins are impeccably folded into tents, and chopsticks sit next to each one. A server sets a cocktail in front of her, compliments of the house, while she waits for Daniel to show up. This is unexpected, but considering Daniel is involved, not that unexpected.
Daniel is busy collecting his boyfriend Belt, who has just sung Enoch Snow inCarousel. Ellie thought the production was fine, if the show itself is a bit problematic. Daniel had some sort of ecstatic religious experience, his face fixed in a broad grin, while tears streamed down his face for most of the show. By intermission, he was barely holding it together. Ellie went to the lobby soDaniel could contemplate the first act in private. At the end of the show, he suggested she go on ahead and he would catch up with Belt. She didn’t argue.
Ellie takes a sip. It’s vodka, lime, simple syrup, with a kick of heat. She’s not sure where that’s coming from. Maybe the vodka is an infusion. In any case, she loves it. Daniel knows her tastes well. Clear liquor with citrus is more or less what she always orders when she wants a cocktail.
A man is escorted to the table. Having seen him onstage for three hours, Ellie recognizes Belt right away. Even out of costume, he looks like if not precisely a herring fisherman from Maine then a lobsterman from Gloucester. He exudes the hardness and solidity of someone who has spent the nineteenth century picking up heavy cages and throwing them onto the deck of a ship. A tall, lean man with a sharp but grizzled face, he’s at least a notch too generically handsome to be plausible. No doubt he gets double takes in the supermarket, but no one ever outright stares.
When Belt booked the gig, it would be another nine months before Mom would fall into her coma. Ellie expected this would be one of the occasional weekends she took off from going down to DC. She’d stay in Boston, Daniel would come up, and they’d catch Belt’s last matinee and have dinner together. When Mom died two weeks ago, Daniel asked Ellie whether she wanted to beg off.
Daniel didn’t say it, but he was absolutely coming to Boston either way. This is a geographically not inconvenient production ofCarouselwith top-notch opera singers, the original orchestrations, and, most importantly, every last note of the score. On top of that, his boyfriend is the second male lead. If, say, evil opera-hating prokaryotes encased Boston in an impenetrable dome and levitated it into the sky, Daniel would have found a way to climb up and punch through.
Ellie couldn’t imagine Daniel coming to Boston and not seeinghim. So here she is, finally meeting Daniel’s boyfriend in person. He books gigs wherever he can find them, and she’s only in DC on the weekends. They chat and text on occasion, but this is the first time their schedules have lined up and they’ve been in the same town at the same time.
“Hi, you must be Ellie. I’m Belt.” He waves as he sits across from her. “Daniel’ll join us in a moment. He’s friends with the chef. They worked together at a previous restaurant or something.”
“Of course he is.” It became obvious the instant Belt said it.
A server sets a drink in front of Belt. His involves a tawny liquor.
“I’m sorry about your mom.” He takes a sip. His eyebrows rise, and he takes a second sip. “How are you doing?”
“OK, I guess.” Ellie swirls her glass. “I’ve been distracting myself with research, playing lab traffic cop, and course-correcting the newer grad students. Deadlines don’t really care that your mom died.”
“You’re doing grad work in, if I remember correctly, some sort of engineering?”
“Yeah, engineering physics.” She stops playing with her glass. “I basically run my advisor’s lab at this point.”
“Isn’t that a little on the nose?” Belt unleashes a massive grin. “Given what you and Daniel do.”
Daniel will introduce everyone within a fifty-foot radius of him to the real cosmology of universes and teach them the fundamentals of maintenance given half an opening. The odds are fifty-fifty that Daniel described the skunkworks and gave an intro lesson to Belt before he even bothered to mention his own name.
“No, well, maybe a little. My day job is all about how to use physics, not how to implement physics. That said, once in a while, a newish grad student will ask me whether I can make physics more ‘convenient’ for them.”
“Do you tell them to go do it themselves?”
“Of course not!” That comes out louder than Ellie intends. “I mean, if they want to learn how to maintain the universe, I’ll teach them. They never do, by the way. But our job is to make sure that physics continues to behave sensibly, not change it to suit our whim.”
“I don’t see how what Daniel does can change physics at all.” Belt leans in with interest. “Do you do something different?”
