I wrote Connecticut for a short story competition about quantum physics. The brief was to write about an aspect of the science in 1000 words or less, including the phrase ‘things used to be so simple’. Why Connecticut? I liked the 'connect' homophone, and the 'fifth state' pun. Sometimes wordplay is irresistible. I didn’t get shortlisted, but I still really like this story.
There’s more than one Roald Dahl reference in this piece, so for the avoidance of doubt - yeah, I’ve always wondered how the champion of the world grew up too. As for the subject, I reckon quantum entanglement has always been a beautiful metaphor for love. Who knows? Maybe it really is love that holds the universe together.
It had been two weeks, and I hadn't cried yet.
I'd caught the train down to Mystic, Connecticut from Providence the day before, figuring the lab at Brown could do without me until after the weekend. That would leave me time to supervise laying Grandpa to rest.
Let me tell you about my grandfather. Tall, spare, he walked with a long, loping countryman's stride, taking long hikes even well into his eighties. He smiled with his eyes, never his mouth. Those eyes sparkled all the time I knew him, sparkled like he had a secret he was keeping for when you were older. I've always found it hard to relate to people, preferred burying my head in my books, then in my research, but Grandpa had a way of getting me out of myself. It was that sparkle.
The call had come from nowhere. Things used to be so simple: a life spent searching for the patterns in things, inside things. In the two weeks since that call, however, I'd barely slept for more than an hour at a time, skittering through experiments on caffeine and nervous energy alone, trying to focus on the coherence properties of a Bose-Einstein condensate while my mind stuttered and stalled.
It didn't make any sense. He was gone. But where? Where could something as big as my grandfather go? I turned it over and over in my head, trying to find the theory that would settle the data into a pattern I could live with.
But it had been two weeks, and nothing had fallen into place, and today. Today, today, today was the day, Grandpa's last big day, and then he could rest. And, I suppose, so could I. But I hadn't cried yet.
"It's a good turnout," Father Bell said, offering me a bottle of water. I declined.
"You think so?" I was surprised, and a little annoyed. "John, Grandpa lived here his whole life, and there's, what? Thirty people here?"
The priest laughed and took a sip. "Danny was eighty-nine. He made a lot of friends and he lost a lot of them too. All the ones that are left, the ones I know about anyway, they're all here."
"I suppose," I offered, slightly mollified. "I'm here representing the family, but I don't really know anyone."
Father Bell stood and motioned with a cordially raised arm to the doors. "Shall we go inside? We've got a little time. Let me make some introductions."
The church was cooler, sheltered from the August heat by tall ceilings and old stone walls. John shepherded me over to a lady the same age as Grandpa. Alice was his neighbour, it turned out, his best friend after Grandma had passed.
"Oh, that man," she said, shaking her head fondly. "He was my north star when my Kate died. We'd been together for fifty-one years, from back before it was even legal. Lived in San Francisco together before we retired to the fifth state back in the nineties. It felt like losing a limb when she passed, but Danny stood with me. Seemed like whenever I felt ready to fall, he was standing with me.”
She shook her head again, and for a moment she seemed oddly familiar. But then the moment passed.
The Draycotts, Mike and Aida, had run the general store for over thirty years. "He was something," confided Mike, hugging his wife close with one arm. "You know how you can feel tension in a room when you walk in? When Danny came into the store, it was like the opposite of that, like the sun coming out from behind a haze. You didn't even know the clouds were there until they parted."
Mike grinned down at Aida and she smiled back, a hand resting on his chest, and there it was again. Something I recognised.
Around the room, the tale changed with the teller, the way that tall tales do, but they were all the same story really: the story of my grandfather, and what he'd meant to them. Hester said he came over every day to read to her after her eyes began to fail, and brought a new book every week. Ravi said my Grandpa helped him build the extension on his house, gave him the space to finally bring his parents over to make their home with him. Diane and Pete couldn't afford to replace their car after it broke down seven, eight years back - but Danny drove them wherever they needed to be, and to church every Sunday.
And every story came with a look I knew, and after the fourth or fifth look I saw him: my grandfather, sparkling out from the eyes of strangers. And I understood.
We think of ourselves as such separate creatures, yet we're entangled in ways we might never fully understand. Ways we don't even recognise until something, some trial or adverse circumstance, brings us crashing down to absolute zero - brings us together, forces us to take the measure of each other.
We're connected in strange ways: connected by the starlight in each others’ eyes. We put that starlight there... and when we're gone, the sparkle in the eyes of those who loved us lives on.
It doesn't matter how far we travel from them. That light remains.
After everyone was gone I stood outside the church again, my eyes shining, and thought about my Grandpa. Father Bell came out to join me, and we breathed in the air of the village together. As he turned to me, a half-smile on his face, I knew he'd been thinking about his Danny, and I saw my grandfather again in the starlight in his eyes.
"You doing okay?" he said, handing me a handkerchief. I took it, held it to my eyes, my cheeks.
"Strange," I replied. "But it’s falling into place.” I smiled at him. “Just a little spooky action at a distance, that’s all.”
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