Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
of impulse that for all of her eighteen years she’d been acting on. It was as if each choice was a jump to a parallel track one step closer to one another, so that over time and on this windy almost-winter night in faraway Maine, Halley and Horace found themselves finally back in the same world. A pretty poor – they’d admit it even at the time – but loud enough local band thrashed through Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” Groaning, justengaged radiators couldn’t compete with the arctic breezes that slipped between quarter-millenniumaged lathe and wainscoting. As happens in old movies and quantum physics, their eyes met across the crowded room. The lead singer asked, “Do you remember when we used to sing la la la la la la la la la lala deeda?” and Horace’s blue-green eyes found Halley’s green-blues, like lasers across the packed dance floor they were. “Hi,” she said, holding out her hand when they’d moved closer. “I’m Halley.” “Like the comet,” Horace said. “Uh-huh,” she said. “My birthday.” “Mine, too,” he smiled, not surprised, as if this was somehow self-evident. Later, after they danced and stared at one another, after more common and unsurprising information had been exchanged, Horace asked her, “Do you think it’s possible that we’ve been in parallel and converging realities for eighteen years? Can there be such a thing as parallel and convergent?”
. . . ea ch deci si on, one di recti on s e t
o u t o n at a fork i n the road, cre at e d
a
new
and
di fferent
reali ty
from
the o ne th at she’d li v e had she ch o s e n
the other path.
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“Maybe each decision we’ve made has been like jumping a track, ever closer. Until now.” “So now we are in the same reality?” he asked. “Most certainly.” “Then what happens now, with each decision either of us makes?” Halley had studied a bit of quantum physics in high school. “Each triggers an instantaneous and correlated decision in the other – not the same, but related.” “So you think we can stay in the same reality,” Horace asked solemnly, after a pause. “I think it’s worth a try,” she said. February 9, 1986 After reading Etta the passage from the magazine about the singers in harmony, Everett is silent for a time. Then, seemingly out of nowhere although this bothers him not at all, he is taken back, way way back, to a scene he remembers like a staticky black and white cinema newsreel, but in a time even before such newsreels. The date is: April 20, 1910 A cold clear night in rural Maine. Spring has appeared then vanished like a mouse in a hole. Too dry and sharp – old even for snow. A pair of eleven-year-olds gaze upward. And see the streak, the long romantic tail against the starry sky, the appearance of Halley’s Comet. Tomorrow, April 21st, Mark Twain will pass away. Having been born under the famous comet’s last appearance in November, 1835, he has said that he entered with it and might just as well leave with it, too. Quantum theory, begun by Einstein and others in just a few short years, will develop and modify and drastically change the way humans view the cosmos and the microcosmic. And in quantum theory, strangely, the past is the present is the future. Just as it could be simultaneously 1910, and at the same time it is also: July 28, 2061 Who knows, but perhaps a pair of old Twain-esque seventy-six-year-olds, born entangled and separated and then rejoined together, one named for the celestial passing and one for a poet, might grasp hands and gaze upward and think some correlated thoughts. Impulsive, plaid-on-polka-dotted kinds of ideas that will need not be voiced. Visions that would not occur to one but for, and until, the other’s imaginings. n