Gedanken

Author's Note:
Young's Double-slit experiment demonstrates the result of light passing between two gaps: an interference pattern. Unfortunately, the same applies when only single photons are released over time. What are they reacting with?

From the diary of the person who calls herself Beth Tennyson:

July 13th
It is 5 am. I sit in the desperate silence that is my bedroom, surrounded by the instruments of torture that others call belongings and I write to think. Ten minutes ago, I set the timer of my camera, held rigid by a tripod, tightened the cold bed sheet around my body and waited to take photograph #183 of myself. It is now therefore one hundred and eighty-three days since my sister, my love, died.
        The Polaroid vomited another picture for my black leather album. I waited until the photograph had dried, waving it slowly between my thumb and forefinger, then I placed it securely with the others.
        Last night, yet again, I had The Dream - it's no longer a nightmare.
        Am I supposed to believe that there is a danger to myself because of my recognition of it becoming attractive? Will I kill myself?

It is the initial impression that Joseph Blackson decides he shall remember forever; the new girl - petite, compact, clothed in a white dress adorned with light blue cornflowers - is in the grounds of the hospital, sitting on a blanched rose-wood bench with her bare legs pulled up, her pale hands and arms wrapped around her ankles, her chin on her knees, and she rocks too and fro as she watches the emerald and aquamarine dragonflies darting and hovering over the lawn. She is in the aromatic purple-black shade of the low-branched yew that Sydney hung himself from last year, but the afternoon July sun dapples through the canopy and illuminates her waist-length French plaited chestnut hair with a halo of Pre-Raphaelite freshness. Joseph thinks about wishing he could paint as he approaches this apparition, somehow believing he could capture her spirit, encapsulate this essence of beauty, show to the world that here indeed was the reason for living.
        He stands to attention before her and proffers his hand.
        "I'm Joe," he says quickly, finding himself suddenly waving his hands and arms windmill style before she has a chance to respond. That is, they say I'm Joe," he pokes a thumb to his chest. "It's on my birth certificate, so I'm Joe apparently, not Joe public, but Joe."
        He spreads his large, but delicate, hands before her. The fingers dance and speak.
        "Joe?" he asks. "Joe? What's in a name, hey?"
        He folds his gangling arms around himself. Tight. And grits his teeth.
        "I'm Beth," she eventually replies with a sly smile, tentatively reaching out and up with her own hand, "and I take it you're not a doctor. Are you a loony like me?"
        Joseph laughs. Loud and quick! He slaps his forehead with his palm, winces, thinks he must stop the habit because it hurts, then reaches over and rapidly shakes the new girl's hand. When he lets go, she rearranges herself on the bench as though she's posing for an Edwardian photograph - straight back, hands clasped in her lap, feet and legs firmly together.
        "Of course, of course, " Joseph says. "Me a doctor? No, no, no."
        He leans against the tree and jambs a restless hand on his hip.
        "Still," he continues, frowning so much that his finger-worn eyebrows actually touch. "I can understand the trouble. They're just like us - crazy, crazy. Me a doctor? Well, come to think of it I nearly received my PhD, but I came off the rails, crash, bang, wallop," he says, punctuating the words with quick slaps of his hands. "Now need mending, but no, not a medical doctor. Oh, no. Did I mention my name is Joe?"
        She smiles again as she looks directly at him, and for a moment her hazel and green flecked eyes sparkle as her cheeks flush the palest pink. He breathes in deeply through his nose, thinks, ponders, finally decides that she smells of Spring bluebells and the promise of Summer poppies and risks joining her, to be near this angel he's discovered. They sit together on the bench as they discuss their individual insanities which have brought them as out-patients to St Clements and they find themselves falling in love as they dare to hold hands. The authorities won't like it, but Joseph believes it helps them both.

July 14th
Joe makes me laugh.
    How? Is it his experience - at twenty-eight he's nine years older than me, but seemly apparently as twisted? So? What is it? H is ability to laugh at his loony-tune Road-runner mind? I think I don't care what it is - he makes me laugh.

Joseph Blackson soon discovers that things are not all they should be. Beth Tennyson is not Beth Tennyson after all, but Alison Tennyson. Beth was her sister. The doctor-bastard who tells Joseph this the next day seems to get such a short-man-in-big-man's-trousers kick from telling him that Joseph feels pangs of regret that he decided to become a pacifist at the age of eleven. The doctor (somehow disturbingly smelling of disinfectant and fungus), adjusts the numerous pens in his top pocket, slowly cleans his glasses with a soiled handkerchief as he runs his tongue over his teeth, and informs Joseph that Alison had been the first relative to hear of Beth's death, via a tabloid journalist, and is now attempting to replace her as some psychological guilt trip. He also thinks that there is much more to it than that, but it's not something that lay people should think about, nor patients - that's what doctors are for, on both counts. Joseph is not to discuss this with her or involve himself with her. After Joseph leaves the doctor, it is the first thing he does.
        "It's true sometimes that I know I'm myself," she says. "That's when I don't need to come here."
        Joseph blinks his eyes; rapidly.
        It is another hot day. From the small, perpetually damp copse behind the plantation of ancient pine trees that grow opposite the big yew, the dragonflies with the rainbow wings dart and hunt and suddenly hover above the vast lake of cut grass. For a time, it seems to Joseph, they rush about at impossible speeds, performing stunts of supernatural agility - as though Newton's theories on movement have somehow been suspended and the known laws of the universe are dismissed and anything can happen and still be true. He massages his temples. The whispered conversation, when it continues, is rather confusing for Joseph.
        "My sister Alison drowned," says Alison.
        Joseph cannot stop himself: he frowns - his eyebrows kiss.
        "Don't you mean Beth?" he asks, scratching his head. "Beth was the one, wasn't she? Beth?"
        Alison stares ahead and plays with a wisp of hair.
        "No, I'm Beth."
        He fidgets with his fingers and she looks out from the shade of the yew into the light.
        "But I could be wrong," she adds, turning back to look at him with a broad smile. "You see, I'm mad."
        Joseph snaps his fingers and announces that, if it's okay with her, he's decided it'll be easier to call her Alison-Beth, but he admits the idea makes him jumpy.
        Alison-Beth says nothing.
        "So, so," Joseph splutters. "Alison, poor Alison, she drowned? Phew! Cold thoughts, cold thoughts. You must miss her."
        "Every day."
        "I'm so sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry."
        His whole body is twitching and he longs to leap up and wave his arms about as he speaks. Instead, Joseph has a moment of inspiration and puts an arm around his Alison-Beth. She leans into him and slowly slides her arm around his waist.
        "Ah," Joseph says. "Good boy Joe, done the right thing, done the right thing. Good boy, Joe."
        "Good boy, Joe," she replies, reaching around with her other hand to grip the one already there.

July 15th
I've discovered Joe is a jester with a genius mind - those grey-blue eyes hold clues to his imagination; his unkempt auburn hair spikes with his electric thoughts. His dress sense is appalling - how can anyone wear black suits with sandals?! He says he'd love to write wild children's stories some day - his creativity seeping out, he says. I hate him for that - good at using all his brain. But I feel I can be honest with him.
        He has made me think about my sister, about me, about all this crazy stuff.
        Oh, my sister, she was my mentor. We were a self-secure sibling unit that played and grew accomplished with our widowed father's cameras (my father made his name and fortune photographing the famous - I've lost count of the number of celebrities that came to our house) and we tolerated his numerous girlfriends - until he went and married one. Oh, my sister, my love - the hell that woman put you through.
        Our stepmother arranged a party two weeks after the wedding and she got drunk. She didn't get legless and loud and obnoxious, just tired and emotional enough to give her an excuse if we objected. She cornered me in the kitchen, said us girls should stick together to look after dad, then she suddenly kissed me and stuck her tongue in my mouth. It was alien and horrible. I was only eleven.
        My older sister found she had to remember to bolt the door whenever she had a soak in the bath - Step-Mum took every opportunity of joining her. Dad, for all his astuteness and sharp mind, never knew. My sister, in a way that began to haunt me, used to whimper my name in her sleep and I knew that she wanted me to help. I used to crawl in beside her to quieten her gentle shudders and became accustomed to falling asleep with her tears chilling and drying on my shoulder as I whispered curses at my mother for dying, at my father for making such a choice of a replacement wife and, of course, at Her.
        Shortly after my sister left home - I was then fourteen - I made the same mistake as she had done. Step-Mum must have been waiting by the door, limpet-ear to the wood or vulture-eye to the keyhole - I never asked - giving me time to undress. Just as I was about to step into the water, she came in, finger to her lips, then reached out and without any discussion immediately stroked my breasts.
        "My," she eventually said. "You're growing. So firm, so young. Tasty."
        She rapidly undressed, locking me into submission with her glare, and she insisted on being with me in the bath to help me wash. Her hands and fingers and tongue went everywhere.
        I remembered to bolt the door after that, but there had never been any lock on the bedroom that I now had to myself. She became My Visitor. I always choke when someone mentions secrets; and I still don't want to be seen nude. I hate stereotypes, but she was the archetypal wicked witch of my fairy-tales - Step-Mum: Queen Bitch Perversion.
        The sun plays with my Indonesian silver seashell wind chimes that hang in the large bay window of my bedroom (I live in a small terraced house that I insisted my father buy me, so that I could escape) and I pretend the sparks and glitter are daylight stars. I need their light. In a moment, I will set the timer and wait to take photograph #185 of myself. It is now therefore one hundred and eighty-five days since my love died.

July 18th
My sister was making it. She had had an exhibition of her photographs in London, The Observer on Sunday had done a profile of her, together with other bright young artists. She had escaped.
        I try to emulate her.
        I try to recreate her.
        I try to bring her back.
        Her death was such a waste. No public fund for her. Just a small obituary . She should live again.
        I sometimes feel the awareness that was her talent seeping into me whenever I take the sort of pictures she made her fame with. She does live.
        Half-an-hour ago, I set the timer and waited to take photograph #188 of myself. It is now therefore one hundred and eighty-eight days since my sister died. But, when I exposed the Polaroid, I saw that the haunted look was somehow fading, as though I'd seen another possible me. I shook as I placed it into the bulging album and sat for a long time clutching the book to my heart, knowing that I was rocking to and fro and wishing I could stop.

The sun has just risen diamond-sharp over Sutton Hoo, while the West is still a never-ending deep blanket of black, pinpricked with stationary sprinkles of white-fireflies that are stars and Joseph and Alison-Beth are sitting on the grass and reed and small hawthorn banks of the river Deben in Woodbridge. The air is still, the mist has yet to rise from the fractal mirror that is the river, the sparse pines are spindle-sentries on the small cliff opposite and the white-timbered tide-mill stands in the distance at the edge of the red and gold windowed buildings of the quay, patiently awaiting the tourists. The intention had been for Joseph to explain to Alison-Beth some basic astronomy using, as a backdrop, an infinite sky and stars, but as the bowl of blue radiance began to appear in the East, above the row of green mounds that those in Suffolk call hills, and then had rapidly lightened and melted to pale yellow and brilliant white, they waited, silent, for the sun to follow. It had been climbing for half-an-hour before Joseph speaks.
        "Ohhh, I was a bright thing, a bright thing. Triple A plus and honours all 'round, ohhh, a bright thing, pride of the university, great horizon beckoning."
        Flutter, flutter go his hands and fingers. He stretches out on the grassy patch of bank, smells the sweet, dank mud drifting up from between the cigar-topped reeds, wriggles his toes which are sticking out of his sandals, then, just as quickly, sits up again.
        "I lost it all on the race for a PhD. Nearly found the Holy Grail of physics and lost my mind, lost my mind, crash, bang, wallop!"
        Slap,slap, slap go his hands.
        "Came up with an idea for a solution to the unifying theory - to bring together quantum mechanics and relativity. I believed I could join them up, dot, dot, dot. Ohhh!"
        Joseph points a now steady finger to the sky.
        "There's a universe of universes out there, Alison-Beth. And," he taps his head, "in here as well. Yes, yes, yes. You see, it doesn't matter; out there, out there in the clockwork cosmos the universe turns according to Einstein, remnants of Newton and even Galileo, tick-tock, tick-tock. But down here," he brings his thumb and forefinger together, "down here you have chaos, un-predictability, and the two facts don't seem to jell. How can it be so contradictory? One suggests fate, the other implies the unknowable . How can both be true? All you have to grasp is that the two can simultaneously be correct - a way of forming new equations and the submission to the idea that two truths can exist as one. Dot, dot, dot."
        Alison-Beth gazes out at the river at the moored boats and yachts slowly turning to face upstream as the tide begins to ebb. Perhaps she thinks of water and loss and dreams and necessities.
        "But why bother?" she eventually says. "There's never been any point in feeling safe in believing that you know the truth. The world's a lie. My sister knew that. And my mother."
        "Ohhh, it all is, it all is, lies, lies, lies - but then faith is just acceptance of an ideology that's different from another, isn't it? Still, it's beautiful to think of everything working together."
        Joseph slumps back.
        "They didn't like it," he says. "Oh, no, no, no, couldn't understand it, couldn't comprehend the justification. I even suggested that time itself is in flux - ask the painter and the subject on how differently they view the passage of the seconds - it's both fast and slow. Oh, no, no, no, the scientists said, the anomaly in the simplistic version of Young's double-slit experiment - one photon, two slits, same result - was something that shouldn't be touched, let alone used to prove a preposterous theory. But think of the implications to science, I said. Think of the power that could be unleashed, I said. Rubbish, they replied - it was daring to look God in the face and shout that I knew the ineffable!"
        He jumps violently up, arms outstretched.
        "But it's the answer! I can prove it! It's The Answer! Give me the time! Give me back my sanity! Ha!"
        He sits back down, slaps his wrist and laughs.
        "Ah, mustn't get excited, mustn't get excited. Crash, bang, wallop."
        She leans over and strokes his forehead and he feels, rather than sees, the motion of the boats riding the tide.
        "Come live with me," she says.
        The small ice-blue dragonflies that live in the short-grassed meadows beside the Deben buzz and hum.
        "There," says Joseph softly. "Beauty and the beast - all in one. Two contrary things in synchronisation - an incredible piece of nature's art and a vicious killer. Two into one, two into one. Like us. Ohh, it's the way of the world, it's the way of the universe. Perhaps one day I'll have another go at working it out properly and writing it down."
        He smiles and coyly kisses her. She reaches down and grips the big toe of his right foot.
        "Those sandals will have to go," she says.
        Joseph pouts.

July 25th
Joe has tired to explain why he's loony-tune. It's something to do with attempting to explain the universe and atomic levels. Physicists, like Joe, have proposed a theory that the explanation of the phenomena of Young's double-slit experiment is that the single photons producing an interference pattern are interacting with photons from adjacent universes. They suggest that at the outer bounds of reality our concepts of non-determinism and determinism are joined. Perhaps perceptions can also be influenced. Phew! J oe says he fears that they're right; that other universes, other things, interfere with our lives - it's how it all binds together. He says there are looking-glass mirrors everywhere, of reality and thought, and God help anyone who gets between two of them, they'll end up crazy-crazy (his words) for sure, or else be forced into something beyond perception. That's his greatest fear. Because at the moment, he says, there's a price to pay - repercussions for being aware of such things - nature sometimes abhors Truth, as well as not being able to tolerate a vacuum. It's apparently a question of progression - our need to know. And who controls that? Joe will explain - if he can find the words. And if he can stay sane.
        As for me, I had The Dream again last night. I am my sister, standing on the Embankment, looking over the slurred waves of the Thames, wondering where exactly The Marchioness went down, and thinking about what it must have been like - to have felt a soul leave a body in a cold embrace of water which sucked away creativity and talent. Then, in my dream, I leap into the water - as my sister did in memory of those other bright young things, lost those years before, and in the anguish of our dead mother and the non-removable traces of abuse from Step-Bitch. I feel the dark comfort before my head breaks the surface - the sucking Nirvana of being completely surrounded by death and its bleak attraction. The water rushes off my face as I bob up, I stare at the lights of the city and they become fables in my torment for release. And then, before their full beauty can invade my senses and give me regrets, the undertow takes me down again and I cry out to the black invasion and imagine it is Step-Bitch washing my soul away. And then I wake.
        I have just paused to set the timer and took photograph #195 of myself. It is now therefore one hundred and ninety-five days since my sister died.
        But at least now I have the feeling that last night was the beginning of the end. For the first time after The Dream I awoke crying - wishing that my sister was still beside me. She would like Joe.

* * * *

September 10th
This morning I took the last photograph of myself. Joe was sitting beside me. We were laughing. It is so beautiful to be alive again. T here are still memories to haunt me, but I can take these in my stride now.
        By using my father's contacts in the media we are having a children's story published - Joseph wrote it and I took and manipulated the photographs on my computer - and it is full of curious children, secret gardens and mysterious places inhabited by ghostly fairies with rainbow wings and emerald and aquamarine dragonflies which dart and hover over manicured lawns. It's a good piece of work - it's art.
        I think my doctor hates me. He says there should be order - in society, in politics, in our minds. If someone's brain doesn't fit the expected standardised normal for whatever reasons, help should be given to fix it. Apparently, being like I am, I could be a danger to myself. He always makes me feel as though I'm on the outside - a worthless voyeur that should, perhaps, come to spend more time with him. Joseph just laughs in his face. And I agree with Joe; it seems that there are always going to be others that want control - misfits like us remind authority that there are alternatives to the status quo. I feel like an anarchist.
        We've both stopped taking our medication. The world is more extreme, more dangerous; but at least we're living in it.

May 20th
We are doing great. For some reason that the rest of critical humanity cannot grasp, the public is intrigued with greetings cards that have dragonflies and fairies as motifs - we are cashing in on the success of our book - I design and Joe writes away. He finished his thesis yesterday and can now concentrate on our other stuff. (He ran up the street in his underpants to celebrate - I know it was dark, but there was a moon - so I stood him in the garden afterwards, he posed, and I took a luminous picture of him wearing his pants on his head.) We are a team.
        A lone critic in The Guardian has suggested I am producing great art with my recent morphed pictures of myself as a ghost. He even put in some quotes from a psychiatrist debating my condition and how a dedication to creativity may be seen as a form of obsession. And at the end of the article, after a comparison with my father's work, my sister and her biography, he had some questions: What is normal? Does great art spring from great pain? Is that what frightens people about creative members of society? That they're outside, looking in?
        I wish I knew.

Joseph rolls over in the bed, tries to focus, rubs his eyes, does a fierce-cat lion yawn and when he realises Alison-Beth isn't there, he sits upright and then breathes out quickly when he sees the piece of paper Alison-Beth has left on the pillow.
        Too much drink and cuddles last night, hey? You were dead to the world this morning - stiff as a board. We'll shower this afternoon - stay stiff. Love you. Kiss, kiss.
        "Naughty boy Joe," he says and staggers to his feet. The peculiar ache in his head from his night's sleep that makes him rub his temples subsides - but he still feels tired, as if he hasn't really had any rest at all. He shakes his head, runs his fingers through his hair and starts to dress quickly when he sees the time.
        "Naughty, naughty, naughty!"
        He hikes up a clean pair of underwear, dives his head into a sweat-shirt that still smells fresh from the pile he's left near the laundry basket, slips on his jacket, pulls on the new boots that Alison-Beth has bought him, poses in the new mirror and realises he hasn't put his trousers on. He falls back onto the bed in his haste to remove his boots and decides to remain there as he struggles into his trousers. He laughs so much that he has to ease the sleep from his eyes before the tears can flow, thinking that Alison-Beth would want a photo.
        Finally dressed - correctly - he stumbles downstairs and heads out the door. Joseph decides that breakfast, urination and washing can wait.
        He is about to cross the road, checking - too late, as usual - that his pockets contain his keys, when he remembers he has his new bike and he should be using that, and is just about to turn and return home when a car rushes past at an unbelievable speed. As Joseph looks back to the road to shout some swear words that Alison-Beth has taught him, together with the gestures and passion that he knows he has to practice because he hasn't ever developed the skills, he realises that all the cars are being driven at the same crazy rocket pace. Whoosh! Whoosh! His whole body jerks, stiffens and he watches in amazement and complete awe. Whoosh! Whoosh! They are beyond the definition of vehicles - they are comet coloured blurs, harlequin spangles of lightning, liquid distortions of solids. He shakes his head to clear his vision. Then Joseph sees the people on the pavements and his bladder suddenly feels full. It's as if he's in an early film. The pedestrians are also galloping along at a breakneck run, their forms smeared in transition. They scuttle scissor-steps, some stopping for a micro-second to stare at him, then they turn to accelerate away. He begins to flounder around on the spot and twitch and jump at the sounds. Whoosh! Whoosh! The bands of colour that he knows to be cars are nearly hitting him as he stands in the gutter - their passing thrusts of air are heavy, solid, body punches. Whoosh-thud! Whoosh-thud! They are painful. The sounds of their disgruntled horns at his presence in the road are dog yaps hideously amplified. Suddenly a crowd of unshapely blemish-waifs, that are supposedly human, gathers before Joseph and he hears whistling squeaks and short guttural intonations as they try to speak to him. Their images drag and swirl as they move about him - a transitional slime of shimmering auras. The coldness in his head grows as he realises that they are human, but fundamentally different. More melted and flowing plastic faces loom before him; he feels fleeting touches as they attempt to move him away from the road. Policemen materialise as sudden apparitions - grotesque gargoyles with wide teeth-snarling open mouths. The blue light on their car is a constant glare of neon. An ambulance swishes alongside, stops impossibly fast and the crew and the police loom again and again in his face. Their bulging eyes make him retch. Their hands grip him. As he tries to protest, Joseph finds himself lifted into the back of the ambulance. The fear that he knows is sweeping his body in ripples increases. Whoosh! Whoosh! More cars. More echoes to reverberate in his strained and tortured ears before the doors to the ambulance are closed with a sudden BANG! The sounds are just too fierce, too compact. Joseph tries to stop the paramedics and the policemen, tries to put his hands to his ears, but they are too quick for him, his arms are forced to his side. He's in hospital. SNAP! Just like that. The journey there is but an instant. There is the briefest of pauses under the A&E sign that gives him the momentary chance to recognise where he is and to notice the disturbing brief whiff of disinfectant and fungus. Now white streaks appear and disappear . Doctors. A streak of green . A nurse. Chrome flashes, white tunnels, streaks of green, dissolved faces - terrible, terrible distorted faces - instruments to his chest, more blistered expressions, and brilliant, painful, sparks of light in his eyes. He tries to move, he tries to protest, he tries to argue, but to no avail. Then all Joseph can see is another ceiling with the screaming echoes of the voices of the hospital staff invading his ears. He's in a bed now. White streaks. Green smears. More garish manipulations of lights that hurt his eyes. More screams. Then the face of Alison-Beth. She waits and waits and waits, her face awash with a seeming torrent of tears. Alison-Beth, his one true love. He begins to try to reach out, but green streaks rush by again and then Alison-Beth is gone. He longs to see her again as the terror surges through his body. He loses control of his bladder and his mind disintegrates into unconnected thoughts and wishes and he himself starts to scream.
        There is nothing to do but to wait until the universe, or God, forgives him.

June 10th
There is no hope. Why?
        I sit in the desperate silence that is our bedroom, surrounded by the instruments of torture that others call belongings, and try to understand the complex physics and mathematics that Joe has written to explain his theory.
        There must be an answer there somewhere that can help him, but there are pages and pages of ideas that I cannot understand. I feel I must try this before attempting to contact his academic associates. I must be able to defend his corner.
        It is now fourteen days since my love froze.
        The gruesome expressions, locked onto his face for hours at a time, indicates to me that he is so appalled by what has happened that that is the reason why he cannot write even a little note. What can he be thinking?
        I must help him, I must, or my name is not Alison Tennyson.
        At least I can say that now.
        I am Alison.
        The world is a raw place. And every night, as my mind ebbs and flows to the rhythm of pain, I dream of little boats and colourful yachts turning to face the tide and I see dragonflies amongst the reeds - dancing in communion with infinity.

Author's note:
There is a rare medical condition that has puzzled doctors for years: it is called Stockly-Baker syndrome. The patient's metabolism slows to abnormal levels. Even their brain patterns appear retarded to a degree where one would suspect the patient to be nearly dead. They can take an hour to write a word or two and describe the world they see as a speeded up movie. It is suspected that the condition is related to hypo-thyroid, but to an abnormal degree.
        There is no known cure.