V.
In the following weeks, I prepared for another shoot. I wanted to cover a gamut of smaller urban legends: a woman bitten by a cobra at a supermarket, a cactus exploding with an army of tarantulas, an AIDS Mary who infected hapless men and sent them letters welcoming them to ‘the world of HIV.’ I hired eleven models, including Rick’s friend Tara. I had the usual crew at hand, took over ten thousand photos, and knew I was going to discard 9900 of them. As I clicked away, I wondered, if a person could discard 99 % of their life and experience only the best 1 %, would they think life a grand and beautiful thing?
On the fourth night of the shoot, I went to grab some Italian food with Tara. Tara was cute, lithe, tanned with a nimble figure. She was nineteen, with the face of a ten-year-old and the body of a blossoming twenty-year-old. She was Greek, though she wielded a British accent, and she’d spent half her life in Japan training as a kendo artist. I was apologizing about turning down her idea of photographing her performing martial arts in the nude.
She laughed it off. “Don’t worry about it.” We chatted about some other topics. “I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“What’s up?”
“Where do you get your ideas for your shoots?”
I thought about it. “I do research online and there’s a bunch of books I go through. I focus a lot on phobias and I pick ones I think work on film.” I thought of something from long ago and laughed to myself.
“What?”
“When I was eight, my piano teacher told me if you leave a chair out while you’re sleeping, a ghost’ll come and sit in it, watching while you sleep. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to sleep with a chair pulled out.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No. I still have to put chairs in before I sleep.”
She put her hand on my shoulder and laughed. “You poor thing,” she said.
“You know what’s even weirder?”
“What?”
“A lot of things you’ll swear aren’t urban legends are actually urban legends. And sometimes, you hear about something so ridiculous, you know it can’t be real, it’s gotta be an urban legend — but it isn’t.”
“How do you tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not?”
I was struck by the question, so simple and yet hitting at the core of the issue that had plagued me so long. “Do you know when you’re having a dream, it feels real, like it’s really happening? And you fight and get pissed off and you’re like, why is this happening? Or if you’re having a good dream, you’re like, this is too good to be true.”
“Uh huh.”
“I think the only way for you to tell it was a dream is to wake up,” I said. Before I could explain further, the waiter came by. “We better order before it gets too late,” I suggested.
She nodded. “I’m really hungry.”
“So am I.”
Then thought to myself, I’m awake now. I am awake.
Cold Fusion
Frank Guo, engineer for SolTech Industries, figured out the solution to cold fusion while visiting the aquarium with his wife, Amanda. The grail of endless supplies of energy produced in a tiny box with water electrolyzed on top of palladium had been deemed ‘pseudo-science’ in many corners. He realized the problem hadn’t been with the particles. Not even the math. It was relationships.
It triggered when Amanda told him about an experiment where small sharks and fish were placed in a tank together. A transparent glass partition separated the two. Whenever the sharks instinctively moved to devour the fish, they banged their heads against the wall. A month of this and scientists removed the partition. The sharks had it so ingrained that the fish couldn’t be eaten, they’d leave them alone, even if they were floating right next to them.
Fish became atoms, and Frank realized electrons weren’t all that different from humans. Negative, positive energy, fission, anomalous heat production, mysterious reactions. Quarks were feisty sons of bitches and the Heisenberg uncertainty was just another name for someone who was moody.
Normally, the discovery would have been a moment of joy. But Amanda also had an announcement. “I’m leaving for China next week.”
“For how long?” he asked.
“Permanently.”
“Why?”
She sighed. “Things haven’t been the same since…”
And he knew she meant the moment she’d been diagnosed with diabetes. “I hate that I can’t have sugar whenever I want,” she said. “What’s the point of the American dream if I can’t have sweets?”
Or the freedom to be fat. He barely recognized himself in the mirror anymore because the two gorged on desserts so much. His belly was more like a mountain and hers was no different. Pang fuqi, she joked. The fat couple.
Frank worked in a huge lab with a fusion generator that looked like it was from Star Trek. Unfortunately, his job was clerical. Administrative. Boring. Even if it involved explosions that could rip the planet in two.
How to convince her to stay? he wondered. Tell her he discovered a way to provide interminable supplies of energy to the world? Tell her he’d make the sun obsolete by understanding that electrons were as whimsical as fireflies? Then again, it wasn’t like he would tell anyone his solution. SolTech Industries had the nasty habit of canning people who made important discoveries. Liabilities, the lawyers said. Basically, they didn’t want anyone to receive credit or financial compensation. Better to draw them out, take baby steps so he’d keep his job, mislead them just enough.
Part of his cynicism came from the fact that all his bosses cared about was promoting themselves to more grandiose titles, executive of this and president of that. They lived off the achievements of past years, eliciting grants like vultures, their hypocrisies more manifold than wavelengths of sound. Not that Amanda cared. She just wanted her chocolate tapioca dipped in caramel and red bean.
He remembered that on their eighteenth date together, he explained how superstrings were reverberations in other dimensions that caused the physical manifestations in our universe. Marriage gurus said it was reverberations in our desires that caused attraction. Amanda had a confused look. Why was it so hard for him to simply say I love you?
Maybe because his nerves were fused together, like hydrogen particles that combined until they exploded and caused a catastrophic detonation. He wanted to hold Amanda that much.
“I’ve already bought the ticket,” she said.
“I’ve discovered the solution to cold fusion,” Frank sputtered out.
She looked at him and said, “That’s nice…” She lowered her head. “Maybe next time, you can just find out how to say, Don’t go.”
After Amanda left, Frank watched manta rays chase hammerhead sharks, and tropical fish slither through corals. His fingers were interlaced. He bought a slice of cheesecake and took a bite. It tasted bitter.