The Schrödinger Girl Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  About Laurel Brett

  Copyright & Credits

  About Akashic Books

  About Kaylie Jones Books

  For Mia and David

  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

  It is the source of all true art and science.

  —Albert Einstein

  Chapter One

  * * *

  I didn’t really get the sixties or all the sixties worship that went on around me. I was tired of paisley and cartoonish graphics. I would go to my grave convinced that green and blue and orange and pink don’t go together, whatever anyone said.

  I didn’t want to have to take a side about Vietnam and make up my mind about whether our government was right and righteous, mistaken, or even worse, just conning us. I left that to other people.

  Everyone bad-mouthed the fifties, and I could see why. Sure, the blacklist was awful. And I hadn’t much liked Eisenhower, either. But I liked the neatness of those times—the notion that our routines could save us from the savagery of the war we had just lived through, that they could contain us with their boundaries. That’s why I had studied behavioral psychology and made it my life’s work—it made people fit into predictable patterns.

  And I didn’t get the music. I didn’t even like Elvis. What was rock and roll? A few chords and a simple beat? My dad had built an impressive collection of jazz records, and had heard many of the greats in person too: Duke Ellington and Count Basie when my dad ventured up to Harlem, and he’d loved Billie Holiday. Before the war he’d even heard the young Charlie Parker play, and I knew from the way he talked about him that if my dad had lived, he’d have loved to see where Parker went. When the war ended in 1945, and things went back to normal, nothing went back to normal for me. I was a fifteen-year-old kid, my dad had been killed in combat, and I held onto the culture he left me.

  That included baseball and the memories of all the games we saw together. The Yankees meant hope and redemption, but now there was no redemption on the field. Last season, the summer of 1966, was the worst season in Yankees history. We came in last place. I had had my hopes up this year when they won their opening game on Monday, but then they lost on Wednesday, and now on Friday they were losing again. I was already panicking, afraid the team was heading for last place a second time, even with Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle still on the field.

  Before this year’s opening game, the end of March had brought freakishly cold conditions and snow, which hadn’t improved my mood, and the management of the Yankees had traded Maris back in December. The old gods were gone—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio—and Ford and Mantle weren’t coming through for us anymore. No great players were waiting in the wings to save us, and the Yanks were taking down my life with them. Baseball had always been the only thing I was truly passionate about, and spring always meant baseball.

  The game kept me going after my dad died when I was thirteen. Trading cards was my hobby then, and I often skipped afternoon classes to sit in the stands. Now I sat in a dive bar on the Upper West Side nursing my second Rheingold. If I’d known they didn’t serve Ballantine here, the Yanks’ beer, I would have found a different joint. Rheingold sponsored the Mets, the newfangled team that couldn’t make up for the Giants and Dodgers leaving New York. In the few years the Mets had been around they had finished last or next to last. I could find no solace in baseball, and if it wasn’t in baseball it wasn’t anywhere.

  I found myself staring at the picture behind the bar of the last Miss Rheingold, a Hitchcock blonde elected by twenty-three million votes in 1964, just before the contest ended. Nearby a table of gals was watching the game too, and one or two of them eyed me with interest. The four made an interesting collection—two resembled fifties good girls in their sweater sets, and the other two, London “birds,” were decked out in the recent British street style—stick-straight hair and mini-length print shifts. A blonde caught my eye and smiled with her fashionably pale lips. I thought of approaching her, but I was in a real slump too, so I nursed my beer alone. Absolutely nothing felt right when the Yankees were losing.

  Jeez. Strike out for Mantle. Disgusted, I left the bar. I didn’t watch the Yankees to see them lose. I carried a beat-up briefcase with notes for a book on an experiment I had been running on super-unmotivated rats that I had bred to procrastinate, and now the rats in my lab wouldn’t run the maze I had set up. I really identified with those rats. I’m a research psychologist and teacher, and I was looking for something that would motivate the rats, but now I realized that I hated the experiment. In the mood I was in, I decided that the animals could just be dispirited for life, and I dumped the satchel in a trash can I passed on the way from the bar to Columbus Circle. I knew I’d regret the loss of the leather case, but I was in the mood to make a grand gesture.

  Instead of spending a dreary afternoon in the New York Public Library scouring periodicals for my rat experiment, I was now free to walk to my favorite paperback bookstore, Bookmasters on Columbus Circle. I had never seen a space so overflowing with soft-covered books. I pointedly ignored the psychology section and headed to science to peruse books on quantum physics, which I studied as a hobby. For the hundredth time I wondered why I’d chosen to study psychology and not physics. It must have been that girl—buxom, with the darkest eyes I’d ever seen—in science class, who told me that deep down I was really a people person. I wondered where she was now.

  I selected a volume with two stunning Egyptian cats on the cover representing Schrödinger’s cat experiment. At one point Schrödinger had found quantum physics silly and had imagined a thought problem in which a cat is penned up in a metal box with a very small amount of a radioactive substance. The probability that the substance will decay is equal to the probability that it won’t. Should it decay, the decaying atom will immediately smash a device containing poison gas that will kill the cat. If it doesn’t decay, the cat will live. While the cat is still in its box, in theory the equation that describes the entire system includes a dead cat and a live cat. The indeterminacy that is our state of not-knowing, that begins with the decaying atom and includes the fate of the cat, can only be resolved by opening the box and observing the cat directly when it is clearly alive or dead.

  Poor Schrödinger! Instead of dissuading people from the complementarity hypothesis, the idea that light is both a particle and wave, they took his little allegory, simple as a children’s book really, as a perfect representation of the concept. That’s the way things work. Schrödinger’s satiric fable became the emblematic parable of quantum physics, also known as quantum mechanics, and his cats had been appearing everywhere ever since—on book covers, in conversation, and in jokes and cartoons. Here they were on a populist account of “the new physics,” which was really not new anymore.r />
  I began earnestly reading the Schrödinger chapter in the text when a crowd of shoppers entered. Despite the morning’s beautiful weather, the skies had suddenly opened with a sun shower, the rain falling in such profusion that droves of laughing, rushing, pushing people entered to escape getting soaked. The weatherman had not predicted rain.

  Aisles became so full that as more bedraggled pedestrians crowded in, the mood became convivial. A fiftyish woman in a dampened gray hat asked what I was reading, and I showed her the cats and began talking about quantum physics until she waved and headed off to gardening or cooking or maybe it was classic literature. A younger woman, alone, asked me for a recommendation for her teenager who liked biology. “The Voyage of the Beagle,” I replied. I wondered if the child would be thankful for the Darwin.

  I saw that there were other copies of the Schrödinger book on the shelves. I decided that if anyone else picked up the book I’d ask him to lunch for the fun of talking to another science lover. The randomness of the possible meeting appealed to me.

  Ten minutes passed with no takers. There were no serious browsers, just people who had discovered that the science section was one of the less crowded. I glanced over to the children’s aisle where a mom was reading one of the Alice books to two tiny girls who seemed too young to appreciate it. Just close enough for me to eavesdrop, I heard her reading from the chapter called “Down the Rabbit-Hole”:

  Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”

  So she was considering in her own mind, (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid,) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

  There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterward, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

  The mom read in a lively manner so I kept listening and realized that I had never read Lewis Carroll and thought I might like to. His quirky world was unexpected, mysterious, and more fun than the one I lived in where the Yanks were now a losing team and rats suddenly bored me.

  I looked back at the book rack and saw that the physics text, with its cover of the two Egyptian cats, spines pressed together, black and gold, with their fancy tails, was being held aloft by someone in a yellow rain slicker with the hood up. I couldn’t ascertain any notion of the person, except it was someone prescient enough to know it was going to rain. Wow! Perhaps something unexpected would enter my life.

  I muttered excuse-me’s as I elbowed my way through until I was peering down at the reading figure who barely reached my chin.

  “Pardon me,” I said, “but are you interested in quantum physics?”

  Slowly the hooded head lifted. Emerald eyes gazed up at me, and the hood fell back to reveal clouds of auburn hair. “Yes, of course. Yes. Yes, I am.”

  “Oh,” I said, barely a syllable. The sound was really just an expiration of air.

  “Hm?” she inquired.

  “Would you like to have lunch with me? I promised myself I would offer lunch to anyone who picked up this book.” I showed her that I had the same book in my hand, the same enigmatic cats staring out of the cover. I was nervous, though I couldn’t imagine why. My heart appeared to have sped up, and it seemed that something momentous was happening. I really wanted her to say yes.

  “That doesn’t sound like something I could refuse,” she said, and then she giggled, and I saw she was very young—perhaps sixteen. Not more. I had the silly thought that she had materialized straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

  “Where shall we go?” she asked. “The automat? That’s where I go. I love putting the change in the slot, opening the little door, and taking out my fruit salad topped with a fresh fig. I never had a fresh fig until I went to the automat. They’re so different from dried figs. Don’t you think?”

  “Oh yes, of course.” I don’t think I’d ever really eaten a fresh fig, but the moment felt charmed, a bubble that could burst. “Lunch is on me,” I said. “That was my plan, whoever picked up the book.”

  “It’s your choice, then.”

  “We shouldn’t go too far. It’s still raining.”

  “I don’t care,” she laughed, pointing to her hood.

  “Are you nervous about going to lunch with a stranger?” I asked her.

  “Not a scientist,” she answered somewhat wryly.

  “How did you know it was going to rain?” I asked, gesturing toward her rain slicker. There were beads of rain clinging to strands of hair that had escaped the hood.

  She shrugged and said, “I have to buy this book.”

  “Allow me,” I offered.

  She shook her head. “That wouldn’t be right. No, no, thank you. Lunch? Okay. But I’ll buy the book.”

  “I’ll buy my copy too,” I said, though I already had a library of books on the subject. Buying the same book she was about to buy might continue the connection.

  The register line was long, rain being an excellent advertisement for the pleasures of books. As we waited, me standing right behind the yellow-slickered girl, I tried to think of where we should go. That question hadn’t been part of my calculations. I was imagining a man with an attaché case or a retired gent with a bow tie or even a plump gray-haired grandmotherly sort who was interested in all manner of things. Eighth Avenue was pretty dreary, with only a pharmacy, an upscale fashion boutique, and this huge bookstore on the block. The Huntington Hartford building with its alabaster arabesque facade was the only interesting architectural detail to relieve the monotony. We’d have to walk over to Seventh.

  The downpour had just stopped. Although the afternoon sky had returned to blue, an atmospheric breathlessness suggested it might rain again so we settled on a small, nearby coffee shop. The entrance was crowded by a prim mother and her two toddlers just coming out. I noticed that one wore his lunch on his face, spaghetti by the look of it. The girl from the bookstore, the Schrödinger girl I was calling her in my mind, made eye contact with the child whose mother was rushing him through the open door. I assume the girl from the bookstore was making faces at the toddler because he was giggling.

  The café was crowded. It was past lunch hour, but the shower had shepherded in people caught in the rain. A harried waitress who’d had a busier afternoon than usual showed us to the one empty table in the back. The Schrödinger girl deftly negotiated the feet and bags on the floor—the trophies of afternoon shopping trips—while my size-ten feet had more difficulty wending through the clogged and zigzagging space. The round, worn wooden table had seen better days but, with the bentwood chairs, gave the space a European atmosphere. It wasn’t the worst place we could have ended up. The girl hung her slicker on a close-by hook. She was dressed fashionably—fishnet stockings, miniskirt, and a turquoise sleeveless silk blouse with white polka dots that made her sophisticated and kittenish at the same time. She took the far seat with her back to the mirror. “I don’t like to see myself,” she explained, while I took the near seat so I had no choice but to notice myself in the mirrored wall when I looked up suddenly without thinking.

  I caught my reflection and saw a rather tall, regular-

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bsp; featured, brown-haired man of thirty-seven. I was clean-shaven and my hair was just long enough to not be military. I had been told I had a pleasant smile, but I wasn’t smiling at myself in the mirror. I also saw my glasses glinting in the bright lights of the little eatery. Inwardly, I sighed. I had been self-conscious since childhood about the thick lenses, and I had heard all the usual comments, “four-eyes” always the favorite.

  I could see her miasma of auburn hair in the mirror too. When I studied the girl I found a face that was full of possibilities. Her features were small and precise. She had bright, intelligent eyes that suggested mystery when set in a pale face that was punctuated by the wild profusion of hair. She was speaking.

  “My name is Daphne. Yours?”

  “Garrett.”

  “Family name?” she asked.

  “Yes. It was my father’s. Why did you ask that?”

  “Was?” she asked.

  “He didn’t come home from World War II.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Her voice was surprisingly low for her age. She was speaking very quietly. “So you’re not a Junior anymore then.”

  “No. I guess not. I was once.”

  “Did you mind?” she queried.

  “What? Being called Junior? I guess I did, but I went to pieces when he died.”

  She was nodding sympathetically. When was I going to get over the loss of my father? Doing the math she asked, “Did you fight in Korea?”

  I shook my head. “Student deferment,” I answered.

  The encounter was not going as I had expected. When I had decided to ask to lunch any bookstore patron who picked up my book, I imagined the diversion of discovering another mind. But we weren’t talking about science. We weren’t exploring ideas. Instead, this girl was finding out about me.

  “I asked if it was a family name because I’ve never met anyone named Garrett before, not that it doesn’t sound like a real name. It just sounds like the kind of name people in New England pass down for generations, creating little Garrett variations.”