Schrödinger's Ball Read online

  “Schrödinger’s Ball is as funny as hell, charming and kind, and perceptive and moving. Adam Felber has an amazing feel for the interior lives of his characters, even while using the shifting points of view of a David Foster Wallace.”

  —PETER SAGAL, NPR

  “[A] crackling comic novel … [Felber] frolics in the fields of science…. His wit and linguistic acrobatics make this clever mindbender worth the ride.”

  —Booklist

  “Few novels attempting a deliberately bad explanation of the uncertainty principle could surpass this inspired romp…. Felber’s debut is illogically, warmly entertaining.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] raucous, willfully absurd debut … designed to expose the beautiful randomness of existence…. Felber has embraced postmodern fiction’s favorite themes … and turned it into a work of broad comedy instead of a fit of fatalistic handwringing.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “If Einstein and John Cleese had written a novel together, this would be it. Felber creates a world that is both completely real and totally enchanted. Tender, hilarious, and packed with delightful surprises, Schrödinger’s Ball is even more original than other really original books”

  —JOSEPH WEISBERG, author of 10th Grade

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coicidental.

  A Random House Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2006 by Adam Felber

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-548-4

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.0_r1

  Cast of Characters

  IN AND AROUND CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

  The Gang of Four:

  Johnny Felix Decaté, a musician with severely limited gun-cleaning skills

  Deborah Johnstone, an implausibly happy twenty-four-year-old temp

  Arlene, whose cat, Furble, has recently died

  Grant, a total geek

  Supporting Players:

  Leonora Decaté, Johnny’s foxy grandmother

  Jack Kennedy, Boston police officer and Leonora’s considerably younger amour

  Dr. Erwin Schrödinger

  Dori,Dr. Schrödinger’s young assistant

  Floyd, a Harvard Square troubadour and former MIT researcher

  Brenda the Bag Lady, a homeless counter-historian

  The Prophet Bernie, a.k.a. “Crazy Bernie,” chosen prophet of the Lord

  Colin, a temporary sex partner to Deborah

  Lester the Rat, a rat

  Melanie, another rat

  Werner, Dr. Schrödinger’s cat

  An unnamed sparrow

  An unnamed truck driver

  Muldower, geneticist and old school chum of Earl Anderson

  IN AND AROUND THE FREE STATE OF MONTANA

  Earl Anderson, the President of Montana

  Tammy Anderson, the First Lady of Montana

  Dixon Reese, Montana’s Secretary of Defense

  Jimmy, Montana’s Secretary of Housing

  Boone Jeurgens, a young Montana Free Militia soldier

  Murph, a member of the President’s Cabinet

  Deke, the county sheriff, no longer recognized by the Free State of Montana

  Barbara, the sheriff’s wife

  An unnamed follower of Jebediah, prophet of the Jebedites

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 6A

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Appendix: The Real Erwin Schrödinger Stands Up

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  THERE’S A CAT IN A BOX in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s about three-quarters of a mile from the firehouse in Central Square, which means that if someone launched a rescue operation now, the trucks could be there in half an hour. Or so.

  Boston’s roads started out in the colonial days as tracks and paths, routes for people and horses and cattle to travel from All Over to certain Important Places. In the fullness of time, the roads widened, lengthened, and were finally paved for the automobile, that newfangled machine whose basic operation still confounds most Boston natives.

  So it’s pointless to speak of Boston’s “grid.” Boston’s roads were never meant to be urban thoroughfares—they intersect at odd, often precipitous angles, with frequently interesting results from an urban-design standpoint. Often, three or four roads will intersect in more or less the same place.

  When this happened in an area unburdened with history, landmarks, or valuable real estate, the twentieth-century Bostonians created enormous disks of pavement where the roads collided, which they called “rotaries.” The traffic laws governing how you enter and exit a rotary are poorly understood and rarely followed. Fortunately, the fact that a rotary is at the intersection of many roads ensures that there will be easy access for emergency vehicles, which spend a great deal of time cleaning up the messes that happen inside rotaries.

  However, when many roads intersected in places that were historic, landmark-laden, or filled with valuable real estate (a set of conditions that can be best described as “almost everywhere”), the planners and pavers of Boston opted to create Squares. From a design standpoint, this roughly meant, “Do nothing and name the place after the principal reason why we can’t have a rotary here.”

  In a Square you will find nothing that resembles an actual geometric square. In fact, the predominant shape is the triangle, as the intersection of many randomly generated roads would dictate. For drivers, Squares are nightmarish; because the roads rarely intersect at the exact same place, motorists can expect to encounter a confusing battery of traffic lights and signs every twenty yards or so. After running this gauntlet, Boston drivers can expect smooth sailing for roughly the next quarter of a mile, at which point they will come to another Square.

  Harvard Square, Inman Square, and Central Square, the areas that we’ll be primarily concerned with herein, all exist quite close to one another in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They are, naturally, made of triangles. Taken as a group, they form something of a triangle themselves (as is the wont of any three points). Not an isosceles triangle, mind you, but a stable and powerful shape nonetheless. Inman and Central are a bit closer to each other, linked by Prospect Street. Harvard is slightly farther off, to the west, linked to Inman and Central by Cambridge Street and Mass Ave, respectively.

  On a map, if you look at the triangle formed by these three Squares, you might note that the shape they describe is a triangle with one dramatically acute angle, the one emanating from Harvard Sq
uare. The angle is sharp enough that the triangle looks very much like an arrowhead. If you owned a map of the entire United States big enough and detailed enough to depict the street-level configuration of this tiny section of Massachusetts—a map that would by necessity be approximately the size of your living room—you would be able to see exactly what this arrowhead is pointing at.

  It’s pointing, more or less, directly at Montana.

  The President of Montana slumps low behind his desk and waits for the gunshots to stop. No doubt about it, the assassin’s dead out there, but there’s still a whole lot of risk from friendly fire. Dixon probably won’t stop until he pumps thirty rounds into the pile of flesh that was a man thirty seconds ago.

  There’s a small corner of the President’s mind that wonders if all the assassins who have come around here lately were actually assassins at all. By the time the President sees them, there’s really not that much that can be done in the way of interrogation. They could be just ordinary visitors, couldn’t they? Salesmen and milkmen and such. But why would Dixon shoot the milkman? the President wonders. No reason that he can see. Dixon likes milk.

  Dixon comes in and sits in front of the President’s desk. The President looks at his Secretary of Defense, watches him without moving. Dixon watches back. They spend a long while watching. The President is aware that Dixon is looking at a fiftyish “white” man whose lean, youthful pallor has given way to a fleshy, mottled, embarrassing red—the kind of red that lets everyone know that all efforts to lay off the salty fried food have been unsuccessful. The President also can’t understand why Dix seems to look the same way he did when they were twenty-five.

  It’s not a good moment, from the Chief Executive’s point of view. Finally, the President speaks.

  “Assassin?”

  “Yep.”

  More watching. They’ve been friends since they were small, but the President feels like these quiet staring times have been getting longer lately. Hell, friends don’t need to talk. That’s how you know it’s a friend. But these silences have been getting … tense. Ever since he took the Oath of Office.

  “Damn, I’m hungry! Could you ask Retta to fix me a big bowl of cornflakes with bananas? Could you do that for me, Dix? I got a lot of paperwork to do….”

  “Can’t do that, Mr. President.”

  “Why not?”

  “No milk.”

  “We’re out of milk?”

  “Yep.”

  Now, suddenly, the President of Montana is scared.

  Johnny’s first thought after the noise and the blood started was how incredibly cliché it was to have one’s gun go off while one was cleaning it. Then he bled to death, realizing all the while that that, too, had been done before. Done to death, he thought. Ha-ha.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one came down to the basement for three days after that, so Johnny Felix Decaté didn’t actually die until his grandmother opened the basement door three days later. Well, really, he was dead long before that. But not really. It’s hard to explain.

  ———

  Dr. Schrödinger was trying to explain quantum physics.

  “Imagine if you will,” he said, “a cat in a box with a vial of deadly gaseous poison which may or may not have been broken by a trip-hammer before you open the box.” Everyone imagined this. “Now let me tell you that, in terms of particles, the cat is neither alive nor dead until you open that box, but it is in fact simultaneously alive and dead AND neither alive nor dead until a human observes it!” Everyone was thrilled. Captivated.

  “Only in terms of particles and waves, of course,” continued Dr. Schrödinger. “I’m not talking about a real cat, of course. And this is somewhat of a counterexample.” No one was listening anymore, the idea was too grand. “Really,” plied the doctor, aware that he was losing his audience, “we’re talking about subatomic particles here, not cats. Not cats. Please, let’s forget about the cat, okay?”

  By this time, Dr. Schrödinger had pushed everyone a bit too far, and he was given his coat and shown to the door, still grumbling something about being misunderstood.

  In a small one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Deborah Johnstone is having an orgasm.

  Johnny Felix Decaté was in a bar. This was several hours after he accidentally shot and killed himself. But he hadn’t been found yet, so he wasn’t actually dead—he was both alive and dead, and neither alive nor dead, and he was drinking a beer. Being dead wasn’t a problem at the moment; it was just an eigenstate.

  We called Dr. Schrödinger on the telephone to find out about these eigenstates. He was eager to oblige us. Frankly, he seemed a little lonely. He started to talk about subatomic particles, but we played dumb so that he would talk about the cat and the box. He then explained it like this:

  “When I say that the ‘cat’ is both alive and dead before human observation intervenes, I mean it. It has the properties of both a dead thing and a living thing. At that point, it is said to exist simultaneously in two opposing eigenstates: alive and dead. At the moment of observation, it retains all the properties of one of the eigenstates and loses all of the other’s. The cat becomes either truly alive or truly dead.”

  Then Dr. Schrödinger let us know that this only applies to subatomic physics, that we should substitute “particle” and “wave” for “alive” and “dead,” that, tellingly, complex physical systems don’t behave with the same indeterminacy.

  “How would you know?” we ask, and he gets very quiet for a moment. Just enough time for us to hang up on the tiresome old codger.

  Deborah Johnstone is still having an orgasm in Cambridge. The same orgasm. She is sitting upright, straddled across a man, her head is thrown back, and rivulets of sweat are running down her neck. Her eyes are closed, her jaw is clenched, and her body jerks and flails spasmodically.

  Deborah has been having this orgasm for three minutes, and it’s a very powerful orgasm, and it shows no sign of abating. In fact, it’s intensifying, all of her soft but strong nether muscles convulsing in an uncontrollable spastic rhythm as a low, open-mouthed moan dances around the very back of her throat. Bear all this in mind.

  Arlene ordered another cognac and tried to cry again. No dice. It’s too soon, she thought. It’s not real to me yet. I still expect to come home and find him waiting for me.

  The Abbey was still in the frozen sobriety of pre-nine o’clock drinking. Within an hour or two, Arlene mused, alcohol will help us create a consensual reality in which all of us here believe we’re entertaining, intelligent people who really like each other. Depressed though she was, Arlene couldn’t quite swallow the thought. She knew there was at least one truly intelligent, entertaining person in the bar, who just so happened to be having a bad day because none of her real friends were here and her fucking cat just fucking died for no fucking reason at all. She suddenly noticed the tear running down her cheek and over her lips and she had to smile at it, and her toothy grin and moist eyes made her look like a newly crowned Miss America in the smoked glass behind the bar. She licked up the tear just in time to feel another one rolling down the other cheek, and her smile grew wider. “It’s about time,” she said softly. “I’ve been waiting for you fuckers.”

  Deborah Johnstone’s orgasm is at six minutes and counting.

  She’s leaning forward now, her moist palms pressed against the chest of her supine lover, a fine sheen of sweat highlighting her extended neck and swaying breasts. Her pale blue eyes are wide with wonder, and her smile is beatific. If you’re a man, you’ve never felt anything quite like what Deborah is feeling right now. If you’re a woman, you probably haven’t, either. That’s why it’s so important. Take note; she is moving purposefully atop her lover, to milk every last drop of ecstasy from her exhausted body. Easily, though, as if she’s done this before. In fact, she has done this before. Many times.

  In the bar, Johnny Felix Decaté was feeling curiously light. Couldn’t pin it on the beer; he wasn’t even finished with mug nu
mber 1. Come to think of it, he’d felt pretty, uh, light ever since he’d finished cleaning his dad’s old gun this afternoon. A funny feeling—like when he broke up with Stephanie, but without the pain. Like when he told Men’s Nipples to find a new bass player, but without the second thoughts. He let his hair fall like a bronze curtain over his face as he stared directly down into his drink and instantly fell in love with the golden facets of the beer-filled mug. He thought: This is the beauty that the commercials want us to see. They film the pouring of the beer in slow motion to make you feel the moment, to help you forget who’s pouring the beer and who’s drinking and why, and just appreciate the simple beauty of beer in a mug.

  Johnny slowly poured more beer from his bottle into the mug, even though it was mostly full already. Light danced in the little cylinder of falling beer, and Johnny realized that he could follow the stream as it plunged into the standing liquid in the glass. He could see the stream slow down as it sank and then divide and splay like an octopus and then curl like smoke, and then, for a tiny instant, Johnny understood that there was an extremely good reason why octopuses and smoke behaved like beer, and the understanding made him laugh, even though it was gone in an instant. He thought: I’m sitting here at the bar staring at a beer and laughing like a stoned moron, and I’m not on anything! What’s up with that? What do I usually do when I drink alone at the Abbey? he asked himself.

  Oh, I dunno, Johnny, you usually just think about stuff.

  What stuff?

  Oh, you know, John-man—your life and stuff.

  Oh. Yeah. But I don’t feel involved with that shit tonight. I’m watching a different channel, y’know? I feel …

  … light?

  Yeah, light.

  We just received a letter from Dr. Schrödinger. He might be angry or he might be apologetic, as near as we can figure. We haven’t opened the letter yet. Being sensitive, we call him on the telephone to ask him what the general tone of the letter is so we can be prepared to read it. “How should I know what the tone is?” he asks. “It won’t be either apologetic or angry and it will be both until you open the letter, right?” He hangs up. If we didn’t know him better, we might suspect that there was a note of sarcasm in his voice just then.