“Mrs. G told me about your nice invitation,” Raymond said. “Thank you for that. I can still close my eyes and taste that chocolate cake. I was thinking maybe next Sunday.”
He stood at a fully exposed pay phone on a busy sidewalk, halfway to the subway station. When Sofia Velez answered him, the din of traffic nearly drowned out her voice.
“Next Sunday would be fine. It’ll be good to see you again. Come around and bring your friend about twelve thirty or one.”
“Okay, good. That’ll be good for her. I hope. She’s been very . . .”
But he couldn’t find the right way to fit the word despair into the sentence.
“Oh, I can imagine it’s hard for her. We heard about the trial. Luisa followed it on the internet. It’s really too bad when a thing like that happens and it’s not even in the news more. You would think people would care more about it.”
“Yeah,” Raymond said. “You would think. Can I ask you a question? What would you do to help a friend of yours if she was just completely in despair?”
A long silence. At least, on the line. In Raymond’s left ear. The rest of the world, in his right ear, nearly overpowered him with its noise.
“That’s a hard question,” she said. “Can I think about it?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe when you come on Sunday I’ll know more what to say.”
Raymond stuck his head into the library the following afternoon. Last period, when he should have been in study hall.
Every time he did, he expected to find other students using the facility. But once again there was nobody there but the librarian.
“Raymond,” she said. Wryly, as if his name were a nice bit of irony. “Where are you supposed to be?”
“Study hall.” He moved closer to her desk as he spoke. “But, seriously . . . can’t I study here? I mean . . . it’s a library.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll write you a note.”
Raymond breathed more fully. He grabbed a chair by its wooden back, pulled it up close to her desk, and sat facing her. He dug in his backpack and took out the book he’d borrowed. The beginner’s book on quantum physics.
“Are you returning this?”
Raymond only nodded.
“Did you read the whole thing? It’s not exactly light reading.”
“No. It’s really not. But I read every word.”
“Do you feel like you understood it? Because I know people two or three times your age who can’t grasp this stuff at all.”
Raymond sat back and thought a minute. He wanted to give her an honest answer. Not fire something off the top of his head. She seemed to be offering him a real conversation. He wanted to take her up on that.
“Kind of yes and no. A few things I had to read four or five times. Sometimes I could just sort of turn off my imagination, my reactions to things, and take it at face value. But some of the stuff . . . like the part about how when you’re not looking it’s a wave, and then when you are looking it’s a particle. Like it’s not actual matter till you look at it. And the thing about quantum superpositioning? How one thing can be in more than one place at the same time but still have the same reaction to some kind of stimulus even if the two things are miles part, because it’s not two things, it’s one thing in two places? If I try to think about that too hard, it feels like it wants to break my brain.”
“Good,” she said. “Then you understand it.”
“It almost sounds . . . like it’s saying reality is only real when we make it real.”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“So, this is the truth? This is, like, actual science?”
“Hard to say. It’s new science. It’s controversial science. Then again, new science is usually controversial. I mean it’s not new new, but . . . compared to Galileo . . .”
They sat quietly for what might only have been a second or two. Raymond was looking at the book, which he had placed on her desk—at its cover illustration that looked like a flexible surface of light waves bending.
“Can I ask you a question that has nothing to do with books?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?” She swept her arms wide to indicate the empty room. “I can fit you into my busy schedule.”
“What would you do if you had a friend who had just fallen into total despair about the world?”
“Hmm,” she said. And sat back. “Interesting question. So, this friend. Does the despair have to do with the world being a place where people do terrible things?”