Twelve beams of light quanta came through Ingrid’s apartment window, illuminating particles of dust dancing like a drunk grandmother at a wedding party, and the quanta continued, drifting through the room, fondling the couch’s fading arms, teasing the desk lamp with its nearly burnt out bulb, grazing the coffee table, the physics books, Spider-Man trade paperbacks, three spiral-bound sections of the My Dear Megalodon manuscript, half-full coffee cups, and the plastic blue plate covered with snatches of toast and lingonberry jam laying on it, all the while chanting the secret and hallowed name of the big everything, until most of the beams collide with the floor, leaving one final beam to continue further, reaching as far as the frontiers of the kitchen, touching the right edge of the olive-green, Fjallraven backpack containing a series of various items, among them a book with a minimal cover design consisting of a yellow expanse with the author and title in a scarlet, sans serif font, and there, finally, the ultimate beam faded into something Ingrid couldn’t see, but could still fluently picture in subliminal Feynman diagrams and mathematical sequences, something perpetually singing in a precise language that now stung like the syllables of a name that she didn’t want to hear.
Oh, God.
Ingrid sat on the bureaucratic-tan couch, holding her pillow as if it had a name, both legs folding underneath each other, little kid style. She stared at her frayed, vinlyon backpack, visualizing the book with the yellow cover inside, its mint condition mocking her. Even the mundane seemed alien now.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Ingrid should be working the book, covering its pages with scrawls of pencil and pen, highlighting each page to death until every secret became hers. But the book remained pristine. Its equations had been waiting for her to solve them, to understand them immediately. And she had been careless and unknowingly drifted beyond the event horizon, the massive pull of gravity spaghettifying her body into distinct particles. And it would never end.
Oh god.
Still hearing the ghost drone of the razor, Ingrid touched her now-sheep clean scalp and looked at the quanta beaming. The uneven lines of light evoked the skyscrapers she had seen on a childhood trip to London. The structures ascended towards infinity, desperate to transcend their glass, steel, and wire construction and sing the song of the long-dead stars that had breathed out their atoms. It was a memory even older than her interest in physics, even older than that day at the lake and the sound of bicycle wheels hitting the ground, an unnatural counterpoint to her dirt-path footsteps running to the fringes of the water.
No, no. Don’t think about that. Don’t—
God. God. God. God. God.
Now it would be all right. Ingrid had done what it had wanted. Now, it would have to—
The equation waited inside the book, daring her to test her hypothesis.
Obscene yellow cover. Red letters. Clean graphic design. Three Equations Towards a Final Theory. Everyone called it the “Yellow Book.” Dr. Nathaniel Ritter wrote it. He was the one who discovered the equations, the one they had whispered to.
But not even he had been able to solve the equations in a suitably elegant and beautiful way. No one had.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t.
The book had arrived that morning at 11:37 AM. Three weeks in transit from America. Before she opened the book, she prepared herself. She could afford patience. She had waited to read the Yellow Book since she was little more than a child. She had worked and longed and dreamed, preparing her mind. But she still wasn't sure if she was ready. Even some Post-Docs didn't understand the Yellow Book. Then Professor Berg told her what he had written in his recommendation email to CalTech. He had never met a student as fluent in physics as Ingrid. They accepted her into the doctoral program, and her emotional state approached contentment. Even then, she waited until contacting CalTech about housing so they could reserve an apartment for her. And now the book had arrived. She went into the bathroom and washed her face, arms, and hands in the sink, running the water over everything for more than minutes. She brushed her teeth and rinsed with mouthwash, swishing it in her mouth even after it burned. She laid all her newly bought supplies on the table: two college-ruled composition notebooks, one with a black cover and the other with a red, two packages of blue pens, three medium yellow highlighters, five black sharpie markers, and three packages of ruled index cards. She had closed the blinds and turned off every light except the desk lamp. Approaching ready, she sat at the desk, put the package on the table in front of her, and counted upwards, feeling the ecstatic music of numbers, her molecules singing the words that had gotten her this far: photons, fields, spin, uncertainty, gravity, entanglement, mass, momentum. She imagined universes branching out, multiplying new realities, creating strange laws that suspend the arrow of time at the crest of its curve, erasing entropy.
But she had forgotten something, and it would take most of the day for her to realize it.
The ritual completed, she finally began to open the package, every knife movement arranged and deliberate, desperate not to damage the precious book inside.
For the first time, she held the book. She had never seen a copy in person before. The shade of yellow on its cover was jarring, disharmonic, unsettling, nothing like the pictures on the internet. She couldn’t stand to look at it for more than a few seconds.
She skipped the thirty-page introduction and the twelve-page preface, turning to the first equation. She recognized every symbol by heart, shape, and skin, having breathed them for so long. Fluent, fluent. She followed the forward momentum of the equation with her pencil and hand, tasted the beauty of its numbers, the elegance of its symbols, tracking its twists and curves to a climactic solution. Then she saw something hidden in its frontiers, anomalous, unsettling, and almost impossible to see. It collapsed the equation into devastating singularities and sand-numbered fluctuations, exploding into infinite degrees of freedom, a universe spiraling out of control.
What the fuckin’ fuck?
She had worked and studied for seven years. She had dreamed of this moment. She had gone beyond her regular gymnasium classwork with Newton and Leibnitz. Sometimes she did not go to bed until one or two. She had spent her summer holidays devouring Feynman’s Six Not So Easy Pieces. Finally, she went to Oslo for university to study under Mikael Mannerheim, the best physics professor in Scandinavia. She had quickly become adept in relativity and quantum mechanics. All for this moment. All for this moment. And now—
The equation couldn't be saying what she thought it was saying. Could it? Was she the first person to see this? She read the commentary of the equation, and the implication wasn't mentioned, not even hinted at.
So she had discovered something new and highly significant, but it didn’t feel like she had imagined.
She took a break, trying to restart herself by reading a trade paperback of Romita-era Spidey comics and listening to the Shangri-Las. But even these nostalgic pleasures couldn't distract her. A furious need to know built momentum inside her until she could no longer help herself. She copied the equation ten times in the red notebook and twice more in the black, murmuring the equation slowly. Her tongue traced mathematical symbols on the roof of her mouth and the edges of her teeth, silently pleading with the equation to change its mind and spit out a different meaning. But the equation remained, holding fast to its fragile infinities and rubbish maths.
Was there something she had forgotten?
A silence.
All designs disintegrating.
Then, out of the equation’s vacuum, a repressed variable ascended and gained velocity, bringing with it the feeling of perpetual running, sudden chaos, and water and dirt, a feeling long submerged under maths and physics but now returned, reversing the arrow of time, collapsing all the millions of moments between then and now, playing those hours back as if it was still happening, every detail crisp: the smell of the pond and the algae and the beer and bubblegum amalgamation of their breath; and the sound of birds singing somewhere where she was not, and her voice crying from her true center, howling that whatever it was that was happening was not happening; and the feeling of dirt on her hands and fingernails and other places; and the terrible pressure invading her, with Helga just watching, as if they were just strangers.
The book hit the wall. Ingrid couldn’t remember how it happened.
She wrapped it in two REMA 1000 bags and put it and all her other materials into her canvas backpack. Once she was at the library, sitting at the long wooden table on the second floor, with the sun touching everything, the equation would somehow transform into something less disturbing. Then what she had seen would no longer be there. Yes. So she got on the bus, but when she arrived, it was closed. Midsommer Eve. She had forgotten all about it. She should've remembered. The morning before, Ingrid had a brief meeting in her building's hallway with one of her neighbors, Elin, a dull business student from Bergen with an awful habit of getting her bicycles stolen in front of the building. Ingrid only knew Elin well enough for polite greetings. Still, on one occasion, she inadvertently sat beside Elin's live-in boyfriend, Tommy, on the bus. He had droned on about his plan to become an Internet celebrity by filming himself playing Wombat Wizard and using his fame to run for political office. She had listened courteously, hoping never to reencounter this oddity. Finally, Elin asked Ingrid what her Midsommer Eve plans were. But with the impending arrival of the Yellow Book, her neighbor's question hadn’t registered.
She found herself at the Wayne's Coffee location on Henrik Ibsen Gate, a block from the library. She ordered a black coffee and a pastry and then sat at a patio table with the equation in front of her. She reread the introduction and preface, wishing so much that she was wrong. And then, breathing, closing, and opening her eyes, she looked at the table, the cream-colored ceramic coffee cup, the pastry, and the people sitting nearby talking to each other, touching and not touching their mobiles, none of them knowing what she knew. Finally, her eyes found a spot at the building across the street and stared. She counted to ten, once, twice, three times.
Something in her started to descend. Breathing, she closed and opened her eyes and reread the equation, running her finger back and forth under each symbol, hoping she had miscalculated. No. No. No. She hadn't. The desolate meaning of the equation stared at her. How could they have missed it? Useless. Its symbols were almost frightening now. Something breathed. A jet airliner flew overhead. She stared at its contrails, lost, dreaming that they spelled out a message from a yet undiscovered force, and it came to her. She could already hear the mechanical drone of the razor weaved within the noise of unfocused chit-chat, coffee cups touching tables and saucers, fingers hitting keyboards and screens, and of course, the euphonic vibrations of the jet engine. She knew what she had to do.
After it was over, she sat on the couch, watching the beams of light quanta come through the window.
Now the equation didn’t have any excuse. Now it would have to behave itself.
Ingrid ran her hand over her head, an automatic action, a final check to feel for residual hair among the stubble. She was confident of the result until she detected three strands behind her right ear. Shit. But she had been careful; she had even used a mirror. How could she have missed it? No matter. In a few more minutes, she would fix it. She would make it perfect.
Inside the book, it waited. But now, it would be different. She had made the sacrifice.
Just a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes and Ingrid would try again.
Then an idea came that wouldn't leave.
What if Freya had been right all along?