I need her for so much. I need her ability to impose order on the universe, I need her passionate desire to reduce everything to triviality. No result was good enough, everything was always too proximate for her; every solution she threw back in my face: "yes, but why?" It was like collaborating with a two-year-old.
I've always been a parasite. I feel like I've lost the vision in one eye.
I guess it was ironic. Keith Elliot, quantum physiologist, who saw infinite possibilities in the simplest units of matter; Janet Thomas, catastrophe theorist, who reduced whole ecosystems down to a few lines of computer code. We should have killed each other. Somehow it was a combination that worked.
Oh God. When did I start using past tense?
***
There's a message on the phone, ten hours old. The impossible has happened; the police caught someone, a suspect. His mug shots are on file in the message cache.
He looks a bit like me.
"Is that him?" I ask her.
"I don't know." Janet doesn't look away from the window. "I didn't look."
"Why not? Maybe he's the one! You don't even have to leave the apartment, you could just call them back, say yes or no. Jan, what's going on with you?
She cocks her head to one side. "I think," she says, "My eyes have opened. Things have finally started to make some sort of... sense, I guess—"
"Christ, Janet, you were raped, not baptized!"
She draws her knees up under her chin and starts rocking back and forth. I can't call it back.
I try anyway. "Jan, I'm sorry. It's just... I don't understand, you don't seem to care about anything any more—"
"I'm not pressing charges." Rocking, rocking. "Whoever it was. It wasn't his fault."
I can't speak.
She looks back over her shoulder. "Entropy increases, Keith. You know that. Every act of random violence helps the universe run down."
"What are you talking about? Some asshole deliberately assaulted you!"
She shrugs, looking back out the window. "So some matter is sentient. That doesn't exempt it from the laws of physics."
I finally see it; in this insane absolution she confers, in the calm acceptance in her voice. Metamorphosis is complete. My anger evaporates. Underneath there is only a sick feeling I can't name.
"Jan," I say, very quietly.
She turns and faces me, and there is no reassurance there at all.
"Things fall apart," she says. "The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
It sounds familiar, somehow, but I can't... I can't...
"Nothing? You've forgotten Yeats, too?" She shakes her head, sadly. "You taught it to me."
I sit beside her. I touch her, for the first time. I take her hands.
She doesn't look at me. But she doesn't seem to mind.
"You'll forget everything, soon, Keith. You'll even forget me."
She looks at me then, and something she sees makes her smile a little. "You know, in a way I envy you. You're still safe from all this. You look so closely at everything you barely see anything at all."
"Janet..."
But she seems to have forgotten me.
After a moment she takes her hands from mine and stands up.
Her shadow, cast orange by the table lamp, looms huge and ominous on the far wall. But it's her face, calm and unscarred and only life-sized, that scares me.
She reaches down, puts her hands on my shoulders. "Keith, thank you. I could never have come through this without you. But I'm okay now, and I think it's time to be on my own again."
A pit opens in my stomach. "You're not okay," I tell her, but I can't seem to keep my voice level.
"I'm fine, Keith. Really. I honestly feel better than I have in... well, in a long time. It's all right for you to go."
I can't. I can't.
"I really think you're wrong." I have to keep her talking. I have to stay calm. "You may not see it but I don't think you should be on your own just yet, you can't do this—"
Her eyes twinkle briefly. "Can't do what, Keith?"
I try to answer but it's hard, I don't even know what I'm trying to say, I—
"I can't do it," is what comes out, unexpected. "It's just us, Janet, against everything. I can't do it without you."
"Then don't try."
It's such a stupid thing to say, so completely unexpected, that I have no answer for it.
She draws me to my feet. "It's just not that important, Keith.
We study retinal sensitivity in salamanders. Nobody cares. Why should they? Why should we?"
"You know it's more than that, Janet! It's quantum neurology, it's the whole nature of consciousness, it's—"
"It's really kind of pathetic, you know." Her smile is so gentle, her voice so kind, that it takes a moment for me to actually realize what she's saying. "You can change a photon here and there, so you tell yourself you've got some sort of control over things. But you don't. None of us do. It all just got too complicated, it's all just physics—"
My hand is stinging. There's a sudden white spot, the size of my palm, on the side of Janet's face. It flushes red as I watch.
She touches her cheek. "It's okay, Keith. I know how you feel. I know how everything feels. We're so tired of swimming upstream all the time..."
I see her, walking on air.
"You need to get out of here," I say, talking over the image.
"You should really spend some time on campus, I could put you up until you get your bearings—"
"Shhhhh." She puts a finger to my lips, guides me along the hall. "I'll be fine, Keith. And so will you. Believe me. This is all for the best."
She reaches past me and opens the door.
"I love you," I blurt out.
She smiles at that, as though she understands. "Goodbye, Keith."
She leaves me there and turns back down the hall. I can see part of her living room from where I stand, I can see her turn and face the window. The firelight beyond paints her face like a martyr's.
She never stops smiling. Five minutes go by. Ten. Perhaps she doesn't realize I'm still here, perhaps she's forgotten me already.
At last, when I finally turn to leave, she speaks. I look back, but her eyes are still focused on distant wreckage, and her words are not meant for me.
"...what rough beast..." is what I think she says, and other words too faint to make out.
***
When the news hits the department I try, unsuccessfully, to stay out of sight. They don't know any next of kin, so they inflict their feigned sympathy on me. It seems she was popular. I never knew that. Colleagues and competitors pat me on the back as though Janet and I were lovers. Sometimes it happens, they say, as though imparting some new insight. Not your fault. I endure their commiseration as long as I can, then tell them I want to be alone.
This, at least, they think they understand; and now, my knuckles stinging from a sudden collision of flesh and glass, now I'm free. I dive into the eyes of my microscope, escaping down, down into the real world.
I used to be so much better than everyone. I spent so much time down here, nose pressed against the quantum interface, embracing uncertainties that would drive most people insane. But I'm not at ease down here. I never was. I'm simply more terrified of the world outside.