OLIVIE BLAKE is the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six and The Atlas Paradox. As Alexene Farol Follmuth, she is also the author of the young adult rom-com My Mechanical Romance. Alexene lives and works in Los Angeles with her husband and goblin prince/toddler, where she is generally tolerated by her rescue pit bull.
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A HYPOTHESIS
There would be times, particularly at first, when Regan would attempt to identify the moment things had set themselves on a path to inevitable collision. Moments had become intensely important to Regan, more so than they had ever been. Considering it was Aldo who had altered the shapes and paths of her thinking, it was probably his fault that she now considered everything in terms of time.
Her own hypothesis was fairly elementary: There was a single moment responsible for every sequence thereafter. Regan wasn’t the science enthusiast Aldo was—and certainly not the genius he was, either—but her view of causality was methodical enough. Everything was a consequence that rippled out from some fixed point of entry, and it had become a game of hers (probably stolen from him) to expose the genesis from which everything else had sprung.
Had it begun the moment Aldo met her eye? Was it when he said her name, or when he told her his? Had it been the moment she’d told him Get up, you can’t sit there, or did it have nothing to do with him at all? Could even that moment have been the product of something begun days, weeks, even lifetimes prior?
With Regan, everything came down to sacredness. She liked, in the time between docent tours, to wander her favorite parts of the Art Institute, which she typically selected to match the religiosity of her moods. Which was not to say she gravitated to religious art specifically; more often she aimed to match her private longings with the god (who was sometimes God, but not always) being worshipped through a polished frame. In early Catholic paintings, she looked for awe. In modern work, for sleekness. In contemporary, the vibrancy of dislocation. Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not. That was the torment of it, of art, and the perpetual idolatry of its creation. For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.
The wandering was a foregone conclusion—a constant, as Aldo would say—but the armory, that day, was not. When Regan had chosen to visit the armory in the past it had been because it stood for the sacredness of purpose: There was no frivolity here. Instead there was the irony of peace; empty shells of weaponry, garish red walls, fossils of conquest. It reminded her of a time when people still committed their violence eye to eye, which gave her a paradoxical sense of gratification. It was intimate because it was not. It was religious because it was not. It was beautiful because, at the heart of it, it was twisted and soulless and ugly, and therefore it mirrored something masochistic in Regan herself.
Her choice of the armory that day implied Significance; it had the ripple effect of Consequence, cosmically so. But then what had been the cause? Had she met Aldo there because fate had willfully intervened, or because they already possessed such similar forms of rumination? Was it contrived, god descending from machine, or was it because she had been vacant where he was vacant, and therefore both would inevitably seek to be filled?
Did it matter where it started, and would it matter where it would end? Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been. Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.
By the end, Regan would know the answer. Having turned a corner from where she’d been, she would come to recognize that it was less a question of when everything had happened and more a surrendering to when there had been no turning back. It was always a matter of time in the end, just as it had been in the beginning.
Because for once, in a moment that was either everything or nothing, there would be someone else in Regan’s universe, and from there everything would be as it was, only very slightly different.
PART ONE
BEFORES
The day before was nothing special. It was special only because of how unspecial it was, or perhaps by how unspecial it would very soon become. Things were always stranger in retrospect, which was a funny little consequence of time.
Aldo, who was called less frequently by his surname, Damiani, and even less commonly by his birth name, Rinaldo, had rolled a joint five minutes prior to his episode of silent meditation. He was twirling it between his fingers, staring into nothing.
SCENE: The air that afternoon has the crisp, weatherless quality that only happens in Chicago for about a week in mid-September. The sun is bright overhead, and the leaves on the tree above him are mostly undisturbed.
ACTION: ALDO raises the joint to his lips, saturating the cigarette paper.
The joint was unlit, because he was thinking. He’d come out to this park to sit on this bench to solve something, and he had been sitting there for ten minutes, thinking for nine and a half, rolling for four, and now fake-smoking for a good thirty seconds. Muscle memory, Aldo had always thought, was the key to unlocking any door that wouldn’t open. The act of solving something was, for him, as superstitious as anything.
ALDO glances at the audience. Noticing nothing amiss, he looks away.
The mechanics of his ritual were simple: Raise the joint to his lips, breathe in, breathe out, let his hand fall. This was the formula. Formulas he understood. He brought the joint to his lips, inhaled, and exhaled into nothing.
A BREEZE slides through the leaves overhead.
Aldo’s right thumb beat against his thigh, percussive to the rhythm of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,”
Cue soundtrack.
which then infected the rest of his fingers. They drummed against the threading of his jeans, impatient, while his left hand continued the motion of faux-smoking.
Aldo was thinking about quantum groups. Specifically, hexagons. It was Aldo’s firm belief that the hexagon was the most significant form in nature, not purely because of his fondness for the Apis— commonly known as the honeybee—but not entirely unrelated. Many people were typically unaware of how many kinds of bees there were. The bumblebee was slow and stupid enough to be petted, which was sort of sweet, though not quite as interesting.
THE NARRATOR, AN AGING, ARTHRITIC MAN IN POSSESSION OF MANY BOOKS: We interrupt your perusal of Aldo Damiani’s intrusive thoughts to provide some necessary academic insight. The great Kurt Gödel, a twentieth-century logician and friend of Albert Einstein, believed that a continuous trajectory of “light cones” toward the future meant that one could always return to the same point in space-time. It is Aldo Damiani’s essential thesis that these cones travel methodically, perhaps even predictably, along hexagonal paths.
Hexagons. Quantum groups. Symmetry. Nature loved balance, especially symmetry, but rarely managed it. How often did nature create perfection? Almost never. Math was different. Math had rules, finite and concrete, but then it just kept going. The problem and the thrill of abstract algebra was that Aldo had been studying it in depth for over seven years, and he could study it for seven million more and still understand almost nothing. He could spend infinite lifetimes studying the mathematical basis of the universe and the universe would still not make sense. In two weeks it might snow, might rain sideways, and then this park would not be available to him. He could get arrested for not-smoking or die at any moment, and then he’d have to do his thinking in jail or not at all, and the universe would remain unsolved. His work would never be done, and that alone was tragic, exhilarating, perfect.
Right on schedule,
FROM ALDO’S POCKET: a vibration that prompts the audience to reach instinctively for their own pockets.
his father called.
Aldo tucked the joint into his pocket and dug out his phone. “Hello?”
“Rinaldo. Where are you?”
There was a long answer and a short answer, and Masso would probably insist on both. “Working.”
“You mean school?”
“Yes, Dad. I work at school.”
“Mm.” Masso already knew that, but the asking was another ritual. “What are you thinking about today?”
“Bees,” said Aldo.
“Ah. The usual, then?”
“Yes, something like that.” There was never an easy way to explain what he was working on. It was nice of his father to ask, but they both knew that anything Aldo had to say was mostly lost on him. “Everything okay, Dad?”
“Yes, yes, fine. How are you feeling?”
There was a right answer to this question and many, many wrong ones. This question, much like quantum groups, did not get any easier the more times Aldo was asked. The more times he ran the scenarios, in fact, the more the variables changed. How was he feeling? He had been bad before. He would be bad again. It would cycle and fluctuate the same way the weather would. It would rain in two weeks, he thought.
THE WIND picks up slightly, tendrils of it slipping through the leaves.
“I’m fine,” Aldo said.
“Good.” Masso Damiani was a chef, a single father, and a worrier, in that order. Masso thought about the universe often, the same way Aldo did, but differently. Masso asked the universe how much salt to boil in the water, or whether this vine or that one would provide the sweetest fruit. He knew when the pasta was done without looking, probably because of the universe. Masso had the gift of certainty and did not require any superstition.
Aldo’s mother, a lively Dominican girl too young for motherhood and too beautiful to stay long in one place, had never been very present. If she had ever asked anything from the universe, Aldo imagined she’d probably gotten what she wished.
“Rinaldo?”
“I’m listening,” Aldo said, though what he meant was I’m thinking.
“Mm,” Masso said. “Did you try the museum?”
“Maybe tomorrow. It’s nice out today.”
“Is it? That’s good. Rare.”
SILENCE.
Masso cleared his throat.
“Tell me, Rinaldo, what are we doing today?”
Aldo’s mouth twitched slightly. “You don’t have to keep doing this, Dad.”
“It helps, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, of course, but I know you’re busy.” Aldo checked his watch. “It’s nearly lunchtime there.”
“Still, I have two minutes. Or so.”
“Two minutes?”
“At least.”
ALDO hums to himself, thinking.
“Well,” said Aldo, “I think maybe today we’re on the ocean.”
“What year?”
He considered it. “When was the Trojan War?”
“About . . . twelfth century B.C.?”
“Yes. That.”
“Are we fighting, then?”
“No, we’re leaving, I think. Journeying.”
“How is the wind?”
“Poor, I suspect.” Aldo took the joint between his fingers again, rolling it slowly. “I think we may be at sea quite a while.”
“Well, I suppose I’ll just have to find out again tomorrow, then.”
“You don’t have to, Dad.”
ALDO says this every day.
“True, maybe I won’t.”
So does MASSO.
“What’s the special today?” Aldo asked.
“Ah, porcini. You know I like to mark the season with truffles.”
“I’ll let you get to it, then.”
“Okay, good idea. Are you going back now?”
“Yes, I have to teach soon. At three.”
“Good, good. Rinaldo?”
“Dad?”
“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today."
“Okay. Thanks, Dad. Enjoy the fungi.”
“Always.”
Aldo hung up, tucking the phone back into his pocket. No answers today, unfortunately. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. Maybe not for months, years, decades. Luckily, Aldo was not a “right now” sort of person. It had once been a quality that frustrated the other people in his life, but he’d gotten rid of most of them by now.
© 2022 Olivie Blake