The Abadi Force

by Christie XT Cushing Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

My last wish was to die while physicist

Felix Abadi made love to me in his lab, listening to Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. I wanted our hearts to go supernova, to go out “not with a whimper, but a bang.” But Felix Abadi had been dead for 100 years, so my wish was science fiction.

It was autumn, 2022. I was a History of Science student who would never make history because I’d be dead by winter, or even earlier (courtesy of heart failure). Why my young heart was dying bumfuzzled doctors because this diagnosis wasn’t in their medical books: Unused-Heart Syndrome. Too metaphorical and emotional. My bored heart no longer wanted to keep ticking for just writing research papers on electricity and gravity, obeying MLA guidelines, stomaching ramen noodles, and dreaming of time travel but never going anywhere except tomorrow. Mine was a romantic heart that yearned to use its beats to electrify Felix Abadi to his depths. I dreamed that together we could pull out the potential passion, like potential energy, stored inside both of our unexplored cores, and let that energy become the motion of our connecting bodies. With an attraction that surged across space and time, we sometimes met in dreams where he brought my girlish heart close to exploding, but I longed to feel his electric thump closer.

Lying alone in my dorm room, going along with the inertia of blah, I listened to midnight rain cry all over the New England forest. My fatigued heart surely didn’t have many beats left. I envied lightning—capable of bringing the dead back to life (at least in sci-fi). Listening to Mahler, I reread my favorite biography on Dr. Abadi, A Force Most Eccentric.

This bio offered a small window into the recluse’s personal life. The eccentric scientist probably died a virgin, and was obsessed with time travel, Hershey’s bars, and Felix the Cat. He told colleagues he was searching for his “strange particle,” and he described electricity in terms of “positive charge,” “negative charge,” and “Abadi charge”: not attracted to anything. His quiet shyness concealed a mad Nikola Tesla! Felix also died alone and young at 32 in 1922: heart attack. Truthfully, I went into History of Science because of him, my own ‘obsession.’ In many ways, he was so unlike me, so not romantic, so not spiritual, and he believed anything ‘magical’ that happened in his life was brought by way of science and technology. Yet opposites attract. I was howling mad about him but the howls had never escaped the core. I even slept with a Felix the Cat plush toy. I had dedicated my life to understanding Felix, digging through his journals and books to find his soul. While working on a potential theory of everything, a quest to find the “underlying force” on the night of his death, he wrote a note on his lab’s chalkboard: “Girl from the future, please come to me.” The handwriting was a mess, written by a man with a heart under attack. I had always sensed that message was for me; to come hold him, so he wouldn’t be alone while his heart stopped.

It was November 11, and my compulsion to go to the lab where Felix had died exactly 100 years ago was stronger than my fear of insanity. Why not use these last heartbeats to do something fantastical? In the past, I had insulated this crazy feeling in daydreams, but on this night, the heavy impulse drove me through a storm to his lab. It was the kind of crazy impulse we never let steer our lives in daytime, while we follow our body’s inertia of working to make money to eat, but thundering madness feels natural when you’re alone; no one is around to say you’re nuts, and the stars are out, and the same moon that can transform a person into a werewolf or a lover is waiting to be howled at— these are the heart’s hours.

My student ID granted me access to the guarded Finney-Matheson Hall, mostly deserted at 2 a.m. Strange things took place in Goldell’s physics department: world-changing experiments, turning science fiction into science. The hall that led to Abadi’s lab was taped off with “Caution – Enter at your own risk.” I didn’t care; I was going to die anyway. I was a wet mess and I walked past “Caution.” I no longer felt tired, surging with the energy of madness, but I felt foolish—this was no longer his lab, and wouldn’t it be locked anyway? Maybe the hand of ‘meant to be’ would unlock it?

Yes, indeed, the silver knob gave no resistance. I had no explanation for what happened next: somehow turning the doorknob was like turning a radio knob to a station on another frequency, as if 2022 was a channel, and I had turned it back to 1922. Both channels existed simultaneously on the time spectrum, but my life’s dial had been tuned to 2022. During the briefest second or less, I felt formless, like pure energy or consciousness, while everything turned as white and fuzzy as the snow on an old TV channel—like I was passing through the ‘static’ between worlds. I heard that familiar gobbledygook of surfing radio stations, those beeps and wheerps that sound like alien spacecraft transmissions. Feeling the topsy-turvy disorientation that happens right before fainting, I worried I was dying. But I didn’t faint. Instead, all the energy of me coalesced into a form again—a nerdish, nineteen-year-old gal. My vision suddenly cleared, and so did my ears, and my orientation came back as the dial of my life ‘tuned into’ this bygone era. I clearly heard Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. In the doorway I stood astounded, my heart thudding like I had climbed all the way to the moon. By a long lab table, Felix, in a 1920s tweed suit, was turning the radio’s sound knob. Seeing me open the door to his private lab, he paused. Shocked speechless, we became the lightning in each other’s nights—the moment as startling as thunder booming on a calm sunny day. If I had not enjoyed so many dreams about Felix Abadi, perhaps seeing him alive in fleshy color in the lab where he had died a century earlier would have knocked me off my feet, but I chalked the experience up to another dream. Yet I didn’t feel asleep; I felt very awake. With wide eyes, the scientist noted my

21st-century wardrobe, dripping wet. I noted the chalkboard was blank, no message yet to the girl from the future. A tingle surged through my heart—I was that girl. Crazily, I walked through the passageway and blurted out who I was—a time traveler, and here’s proof: my iPod, a tiny music machine. As his starstruck eyes beheld a device incapable of being made in 1922, I told him I was seeking not to make love but to save his life. He was going to die of a heart attack and we had to get him to the hospital. What if this wasn’t a dream? What if an experiment in this laboratory had opened a portal through time? What if these portals opened every century on Earth when whatever was lined up just so in the universe? Or what if the force that had propelled me to come here and had unlocked the door for me had also constructed this bridge across eras for me and him to meet so I could save his life? He must have seen the fantastic experience as a dream too: a strange particle with an affinity to the Abadi charge coming into his lonely life to electrify it. The force didn’t take control of our lips to make us speak but to make us kiss. The kiss spoke everything we were feeling. An attraction stronger than magnets and electricity overcame our shyness and fears, knocked over lab equipment, threw off our clothing, and moved us into each other, two opposites uniting and sticking together with a bond older than the stars. The same attraction that had forced us hard onto the table to feel it, really feel it, the intense connection, was now giving us the feeling of flight. Oh God, that soaring into warmer and warmer light. Touching his body, I knew why energy took form. Why matter came to life. Supernova after supernova. My heart wanted to keep pulsing forever to keep exploding in his arms. “You’re my soulmate,” the skeptic said, on the brink of pure bliss. I said, “You’re my antiparticle. Annihilate me. I want to be one energy with you.”

In the quivering subsiding of the heartgasms, I pleaded to take him to the hospital. But he put my hand to his sweaty chest, where I felt under the hairy forest his heart pumping fantastically, his and mine, in unison from a shared electric rhapsody. We smiled, playful-like. He was as cuddly now as the plush toy. He wanted a Hershey’s; I did too.

“ And what’s your name, my dearest?” Before I could say “Cynthia Day” and immortalize that name, he dematerialized into white noise, just like that, finger-snap quick. Static replaced the song, and the scene fuzzed up like snow.

I felt the ugly disorientation of being yanked away from the beautiful dreamy moment, as the ‘magical’ portal closed (or maybe it was truly magical), stranding him in 1922 and me in 2022. Feeling the force release me, I dropped off of the lab table and landed painfully hard onto the cold floor into a pile of my own clothes, with my heart alone again and aching.

“Heart attack,” doctors would rule his death, because “loss of girl” was too science fiction; those doctors could not have saved him anyway. But I knew the force that had accelerated our hearts would also stop our hearts with its departure. Yet despite the certainty of pain, loss, and death, Felix Abadi had written a message for me to materialize in his life, if only for one fantastical moment, a historical event that would be both cause and effect. The same force underlies this story, the same force who wrote it—you know the story; it’s famous.