Schrodinger’s Gat is a quantum physics noir thriller.

Paul Bayes has begun to feel like all of his actions are dictated by forces beyond his control. But when his suicide attempt is foiled by a mysterious young woman named Tali, Paul begins to wonder if the future is really as bleak as it seems. Tali possesses a strange power: the ability to predict tragedies and prevent them from happening. The possibility of breaking free from the grip of fate gives Paul hope.

But when Tali disappears, Paul begins to realize that altering the future isn’t as easy as it seems: you can fight the future, but the future fights back.

5-star praise for Schrodinger’s Gat:

Enthralling, Intelligent Thriller
“…by far the smartest, most original book I’ve read this year…. Action-packed and engaging from beginning to end, this book accomplishes the nearly impossible: making quantum physics exciting, accessible, and even a little sexy….As unpredictable and twisty as the hand of fate itself, the journey of these exquisitely realized characters grips the reader from the opening words and lingers long after the book is finished.”

an excerpt from

Schrodinger’s Gat

by Robert Kroese

Part One:

Hamlet of the San Leandro BART Station

Everything happens for a reason. What a horrifying thought. I’d never believed it until the day I tried to kill myself, and frankly I wish I could go on not believing it.

You can probably guess the reasons for my suicide attempt. Tolstoy said that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, which I suppose is true, but in my experience suicidal people are all pretty much alike. God knows I’ve met enough of them. There are probably a million different recipes for suicide, with varying amounts of congenital depression, parental disappointment, personal failure and loneliness, but they all add up to the same lousy cake. That’s a metaphor, and a shitty one at that. I use shitty metaphors sometimes because I’m a shitty writer.

Anyway, I’m only starting with the suicide attempt because that seems like the logical place to start. I’m telling you this so that you won’t think this is one of those books about an anxiety-ridden writer trying to find Meaning in a cold, unfeeling Universe. Well, maybe it is, partly. But mostly it’s about two women. One is the girl of my dreams. The other is a nightmare. And we’re three fucking paragraphs in, so I guess I should get started.

OK, so there I am, standing at the San Leandro BART station, waiting for the train to arrive. But as you can probably deduce by my earlier remarks, I’m not planning on being on the train; I’m planning on being under it. The chief ingredient in my personal recipe for suicide is my father. The standard feelings of inadequacy plus the suspicion that I’m not-so-gradually turning into him. My father blew his head off with a shotgun at fifty-five. I’m only thirty-six at the time of the BART incident, which I figure makes me precocious.

Predictably, I start to have second thoughts about the whole thing. I’m indecisive; I get that from my dad too. Dithering like fucking Hamlet of the San Leandro BART station. Hands in my pockets, I realize I’m clutching the 50p coin my dad gave me when I was ten. At the time he gave it to me I thought it was the coolest thing ever, like some kind of ancient artifact from Atlantis. I’d never been to the UK, so I had no idea there were millions of those coins in circulation. To me it was precious, especially since my dad never paid much attention to me. I thought he had found this fantastic treasure and entrusted it to me. Later I realized he had been cleaning out his pockets after a trip to London. But some of the magic of that coin stuck; even after traveling to the UK in college I could never quite convince myself that there wasn’t something special about my coin, so I held onto it. I didn’t carry it everywhere I went or anything ridiculous like that, but I kept it in my desk and occasionally pulled it out and flipped it over my knuckles when I was thinking about something or grading papers or whatever. Sometimes I would slip it into my pocket without thinking and then find it there later. This was one of those times.

So I think, OK, Hamlet, to be or not to be. You can’t seem to make up your own fucking mind, so let’s let Fate decide. I flip the coin: heads, I live; tails, I die. It comes up tails.

Oh, but there’s something else I should tell you; something I forgot to mention because like I said, I’m a shitty writer. There’s this girl watching me. I say girl, but she was probably twenty-five. Pretty brunette wearing a black wool coat and a red hat. It’s February, so she’s bundled up against the cold. Or what passes for cold in the East Bay anyway. Just standing back by a pillar, watching me out of the corner of her eye. Now I’m a decent looking guy, but there’s no reason for a girl like that to fixate on me. And no, I’m not acting all crazy or anything. For all she knows, I’m just waiting for the train like everybody else.

Anyway, it comes up tails, and I’m like, OK, that’s it, and I take a step forward. I’m right on the edge of the platform now, and the train is maybe a hundred yards away and coming my way fast. I’m near the beginning of the platform, so it will still be going a good thirty miles an hour by the time it hits me. Fast enough. I’m about to step off when I hear someone shout, “No!”

Somehow I know it’s the girl, and I know she’s talking to me. It rattles me enough that I forget to take the step and before I know it, the train is passing. Frankly, it pisses me off. Do you know how hard it is to psych yourself up to actually step in front of a moving train?

I turn and see the girl running down the steps, off the platform. At this point, I’m thinking, what the hell? How can you interrupt a suicide attempt and then not follow through with at least some kind of pep talk? Tell me life is worth living or give me a suicide prevention hotline number, something. You can’t just yell “No!” and then run off.

So I go after her. Partly I’m mad and partly I’m curious. How the hell did she know what I was going to do? Because she pretty clearly had her eye on me before I made my move. And I suppose some small part of me thought, maybe this girl has the answer. Maybe she knows something I don’t know. About, you know, life or whatever.

So I’m chasing her down the steps, yelling, “Hey! Stop! I just want to talk to you!” But she won’t stop. She’s running at top speed down the street now in her black leather boots and I can see she’s headed for a cab parked about fifty feet away. I’m faster, and I get there just as she’s closing the door. I hold the door open and slide in next to her, slamming the door behind me.

“Embarcadero,” she says to the driver. “Get me there in fifteen minutes and I’ll give you …” She’s going through her purse. “Four hundred eighty dollars.” She doesn’t even glance my way.

“Embarcadero?” asks the driver, confused. “In the city?” The city in this case being San Francisco.

I’m about to say something but I hold off because I want to see what the guy does. The driver’s a good looking young guy, probably Indian or Pakistani. I can see what he’s thinking: there is no way in hell I can make it to Embarcadero in fifteen minutes. The only way to get there is to cross the Bay Bridge, and at mid-morning just crossing the bridge takes ten minutes – and we’re ten miles from the bridge. But he looks at the wad of cash the girl is holding, looks at her face and sees she’s dead serious. One more look at the cash convinces him. For $480, he’s willing to break not just every state law on the books but the laws of physics as well. He throws the car in gear and slams the pedal down. The car, a ballsy old Crown Vic, lurches forward like a charging rhino, scattering Hyundais and Nissans like hyenas on the prairie. That’s another shitty metaphor. Whatever.

I keep wanting to ask this girl who she is, where she’s going, how she knew what I was doing back there, why she stopped me … but every time I’m about to open my mouth I find myself biting my lower lip in an effort to keep from screaming. I’ve had some crazy cab drivers, but this guy – I think his name was Hussein (and don’t get offended; I don’t think that all Middle-Easterners are named Hussein, but I’m pretty sure I’m remembering correctly that this guy was, so take it up with his fucking parents) – is hopping curbs and cutting off old ladies and nearly running down pedestrians in crosswalks. Whatever public transportation karma this girl had earned by saving my life she more than canceled out by waving a wad of cash under Hussein’s nose. I’m not ashamed to admit I was terrified. Well, maybe a little ashamed. But holy shit is this guy driving crazy. And yeah, I get the irony of being scared of a car crash only a few minutes after I’d almost killed myself, thanks.

Soon we are flying down Interstate 880. I don’t dare look at the speedometer but judging by the way we’re passing cars – on the left, on the right, on the shoulder, between lanes – we must be doing a buck twenty at least.

“Slow down!” I finally yell. “You’re going to kill us!”

“You got big plans for today?” the girl asks me. Cute. She turns back to the driver. “Don’t listen to him. Keep going.”

“What’s the rush?” I ask her.

She’s pulled a phone from her coat. She’s brushing her thumb across the screen and frowning. “I’ve got an appointment at Embarcadero and Beach in thirteen minutes.”

“What kind of appointment? What could possibly be this important?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Look, if you’re going to risk my life getting me there, you can at least tell me …”

“I didn’t ask you to come along.”

“What did you expect me to do? What was that about, back there?”

A cloud passes over her face. “I’m sorry about that,” she said.

I sort of snort-laugh at that. “You’re sorry you saved my life? What the fuck kind of thing is that to say?”

“I’m sorry I interfered,” she says, finally looking up from her phone. “Not sorry I saved your life.”

“What’s the fucking difference?” I say.

“You swear a lot,” she says offhandedly, looking back at her phone. She’s right, I do.

“Look,” I say. “I’m trying really hard to be civil. But don’t you think you owe me some kind of explanation?”

“Yeah, probably,” she says distractedly, with a hint of agitation. “When this is done, OK? After my appointment, I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Sound good? I’ll buy you coffee. But right now you need to let me concentrate.”

“Fine,” I say. Truth is, I’m kind of glad we’re done talking, because I’m getting nauseous from Hussein’s driving. I’m taking deep breaths and trying to keep my eyes fixed on a point in the distance. You’d think you could see mountains from the East Bay, but you can’t. Just warehouses and gas stations and shit. My left hand is clutching the door handle and my right hand is braced against the seat in front of me. I’m pretty sure I’m going to puke. I roll the window down and lean my head out. At one point Hussein swerves and I get a bloody lip from the edge of the window, which of course doesn’t roll down all the way. We take the Fast Pass lane at the toll gate and get on the bridge. Hussein continues to drive like a fucking maniac. I can’t believe we aren’t pulled over.

We cross the bridge and exit at Folsom. Miraculously I haven’t puked yet. I spare a glance over at the girl, who is looking at her phone and chewing her cheek. Occasionally she glances out the window as if looking for something. I check my own phone: it’s 10:35, and I’m guessing we got in the cab around 10:25. Laws of physics be damned, Hussein is going to make it.

He gets us to Embarcadero. “Stop here!” yells the girl, and Hussein slams on the brakes. She shoves the wad of cash through the slot, gets out and starts running. She crosses in front of the car and darts into the street. I follow. We’re on Embarcadero just before Beach, a touristy part of town. She’s still staring at her phone, barely looking up in time to avoid getting hit. Fortunately the light is red so the cars are slowing to a stop. They honk recreationally as we cross.

And then she just stops. It’s a good thing I’m still feeling kind of sick and lagging behind or I’d have run right into her. She’s just standing in the middle of the sidewalk, holding up her phone like it’s a tricorder gathering data on an alien planet.

“What are you …” I start.

She shushes me. I follow her eyes and see that she’s watching a man and a woman standing on a corner having a conversation. The woman is tall and blond, wearing a fancy designer suit. He’s shorter and Hispanic looking, built like a weightlifter. Also wearing a suit, but clearly off the rack. They’re an odd couple, but they are a couple – or at least an aspiring one. They stand close and look each other in the eye; they talk so quietly that I can only grab a few words.

They seem to be discussing where to go for lunch. The guy wants to go to a Mexican place nearby (again, don’t blame me, I’m just the guy telling the story) and the girl keeps motioning toward Pier 39 across the street. He keeps saying the word “tourists,” and I empathize. Nobody goes to Pier 39 but tourists. It’s crowded and the restaurants are mediocre and overpriced. The couple obviously aren’t tourists; I get the impression they’re meeting on their lunch break. I hear her say “Maggiano’s,” which is an Italian joint on the pier. I’d been there once. Not bad, but nothing special.

The guy pulls a coin from his pocket. He says something I don’t catch and she rolls her eyes but nods. Coin goes up, comes down on his hand. The guy scowls and the woman laughs. He shrugs and takes her hand. They move to the crosswalk to wait for the light to change.

The girl standing next to me slips her phone back into her coat. She’s trembling, and I think she might faint. I try to put my arm around her, but she brushes me off.

“I’m OK,” she says, obviously relieved. “It worked. I did it.”

“Did what?” I ask. “Do you work on commission for Maggiano’s?” Dumb joke, my specialty.

“Come on,” she says, and starts off after the couple as the “Walk” signal comes on. “I’ll show you.”

We tail the couple across the street and down the pier. I’m sort of laughing to myself, because I thought I’d be smeared along train tracks by now and instead I’m taking a nice walk on Pier 39 with a pretty girl. I have no idea who she is or why we’re following some random couple down the pier, but still, nice.

She holds her hand up to indicate we’re stopping. She’s looking at her phone again. I can’t see the screen very well, but it looks like a GPS app.

“They’re getting away,” I say. Maggiano’s is about a hundred feet down the pier on the left.

“Can’t get any closer. Too dangerous.”

Sure, that makes sense.

The couple is about to walk into Maggiano’s when the guy stops abruptly, holding the door open. The woman continues into the restaurant, not realizing he isn’t following. He seems to be watching something, and I follow his gaze: a man, tall and heavy-set, wearing a trench coat, has just pulled a ski mask over his head.

“Oh, shit,” I mumble. There’s no skiing on Pier 39.

The man in the trench coat and ski mask is standing in the middle of the pier, surrounded by hundreds of tourists. The Hispanic guy has let the door go and his right hand is in his jacket. He’s maybe fifty feet from Ski Mask. I found out later that the Hispanic guy’s name was Dave, so that’s what I’m going to call him, even though I didn’t know that was his name at the time, because I’m sick of calling him Hispanic guy. Whatever.

Ski Mask reaches into his coat and pulls out a sawed-off shotgun. Before anyone can react, he’s firing into the crowd, seemingly at random. An elderly man and a teenage girl fall before Dave blindsides Ski Mask, tackling him to the ground. Ski Mask must have fifty pounds on Dave, but Dave doesn’t give him a chance to use his weight. He’s grinding his left knee into Ski Mask’s right hand, making it impossible for him to fire the shotgun or even lift it off the wooden planks that make up the pier. With his right hand, Dave is pistol-whipping the guy. Ski Mask is wriggling around like crazy, so it takes Dave seven or eight tries to subdue him. Finally Ski Mask lies still and Dave pulls off the mask. For some reason I kind of expect to recognize the guy, like at the end of a movie where they pull off the bad guy’s mask and it turns out that it was the prosecuting attorney all along. But of course I don’t. He’s just some random asshole with a shotgun. In any case, I don’t think his own mother would recognize him in his present condition: his face is pretty fucked up after what Dave did to it. Good for Dave.

I lean over and finally puke. Moon Over My Hammy from Denny’s – what was supposed to be my last meal. It had been trying to get out ever since I got on Hussein’s Wild Ride, and the sight of Ski Mask’s crumpled-in face pretty much did me in. By the time I straighten up, a crowd has gathered, cutting off my view.

“Let’s go,” says the brunette.

“Shouldn’t we stick around? Those people might need our help.” I hear sirens in the distance. “And we’re witnesses.”

“They don’t need us,” says the girl authoritatively. “What’s going to happen is going to happen.” Ordinarily I hate that sort of bullshit platitude, but the way she says it gives me chills, like this whole thing is just a scene in a movie she’s already seen. She turns and walks back the way we came. And to be honest, I have no desire to stick around and contemplate my breakfast any more. I go after her. As we reach the start of the pier, a team of paramedics runs past us the other way.

She’d offered me coffee, but we both need something a little stronger by this point. I’m feeling better, having emptied my stomach, but now I’m weak and shaky. She doesn’t look much better. She’s been on edge since I first saw her at the BART station, and I can see she badly needs to sit down and decompress. We find a bar a couple blocks from the pier. I go to the bathroom to clean up. My bottom lip is swelling up pretty bad, but there isn’t much I can do about it. I splash some water on my face, rinse my mouth out and head back into the bar. I flag down the bartender and ask him for some ice for my lip. He gives me a glass full. I see the brunette sitting at a table near the window and I go sit down across from her. Before I can say anything to her, a waitress comes by and asks us what we want. Thankfully, it’s now just after noon, so we can order drinks. Gin and tonic for me; whiskey for the girl. She orders a sandwich too. I’m not hungry. That out of the way, I finally get around to asking the girl her name.

“Tali,” she says. Nice name. It doesn’t seem to come with a last name. Not yet, anyway.

“I’m Paul,” I say. “But you must know that.”

I see some color return to her face. She’s blushing.

“Seriously?” I say, holding an ice cube to my lip with a napkin. “You don’t know my name?” For some reason I had thought she must know something about me to have figured out what I was doing at the BART station. My fucking name, at least.

“I never know their names,” she says. “That’s just how it works.”

“Their names? Who is they?” I take a sip of my drink. The alcohol hits the split in my lip and I wince.

She sighs. “It’s complicated. And I don’t mean, like, Mah-Jongg complicated. I mean quantum physics complicated. Look, Paul, I know I said I’d tell you everything, but trust me, you’re better off not knowing. I wish I didn’t know.”

“Better off not knowing?” I ask. “Is this one of those red pill/blue pill situations? Because lady, I’ve been on the blue pill for a while. Pills, actually. Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Effexor … probably others I can’t remember. The blue pill isn’t really working out for me, in case you hadn’t noticed. What’s the worst that could happen? You tell me that I’m actually a brain in a vat in a laboratory on Mars? Because that’s a step up from where I’m sitting.” I’m exaggerating, of course. Finding out I was a brain in a vat would be pretty devastating. And of course I don’t really think she’s going to tell me that. But I get the feeling she’s trying to play Morpheus to my Neo, so I play along.

She thinks for a moment, taking a sip of her drink. “OK,” she says. “But you can’t tell anybody. I mean, no one. It’s for your good as well as mine. Anybody you tell will think you’re delusional, and with your history …”

“My history?” I ask, a little irritably. “I thought you didn’t even know my name.”

“No, you’re right,” she says. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But I do know that you’ve seriously tried to kill yourself at least once, and you’ve told me that you’ve been on just about every antidepressant known to man, so I’m extrapolating. If you start talking about this to the cops or whoever, people are going to look into your medical history. I don’t mean this as a threat, but trust me, it’s not going to go well for you.”

“Why would I tell the cops? Are you involved in something illegal? Did you know that guy was going to start killing people at the pier?”

She shakes her head. “No,” she says. Then: “Well, yes, I knew there was a high probability of a mass murder on the pier.”

I’m stunned. “What? Why didn’t you tell someone? That guy shot at least two people. They could be dead for all we know. You could have prevented that!”

She shakes her head again. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why did you stop me?” I say. “At the BART station.”

She bites her lip. “I … interfered.”

“That part I know,” I say irritably. Her phone rings. “Shit!” she says and grabs the phone from her coat. “I’m sorry!” she says into the phone. “I had to get out of there in a hurry and I forgot to check in. What? No, Pier 39. No, there was a problem with the first crux. No, I just … didn’t get there in time. No, I’m fine. I know, I know, I said I’m sorry. I don’t know, maybe an hour or so. OK, see you then.” She mutters something to herself and slips the phone back into her coat. “Where was I?”

“You interfered.”

“Right! I interfered with the coin toss. What did it come up as?”

I’m confused now. “Tails,” I say.

“Then it was going to be heads. Before I interfered. You’d have walked away from the platform and gone back to your life.”

Some life, I think. I suck at my job, I can’t get a novel published, my wife just left me, taking our two kids … Anyway, all the shit you didn’t want to hear about earlier.

I pull the 50p coin from my pocket, regarding it. “You made it come up tails? That’s impossible.”

“Technically, I made it more probable that it would come up tails. And then I felt bad about it. That’s why I called out. I’m … not very good at this.” I realize she’s on the verge of tears.

 “Hey, it’s OK,” I say, because I’m fantastic at comforting people. That’s why my wife left me. “I’m lousy at my job too.” Nice, you just compared her to a suicidally depressed loser. Keep going! Finally I think of something helpful to say. “You stopped that guy on the pier. I don’t know how you did it, but you sent that cop down there. If he hadn’t been there ….”

She smiles weakly, tears in her eyes. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s true.”

Her sandwich arrives, and she pecks at it a little. At this point I’m not sure I even believe her about controlling the coin toss, but she seems to believe it, so it helps. I’m starting to think she’s the crazy one. Only one way to find out. “So tell me how it works.”

She asks me if I believe in ghosts. I say no, even though I don’t really have any feelings on the matter, one way or another. What do ghosts have to do with anything? Another mark in the crazy column for her.

“Some people think that when someone dies violently, they leave some of their life energy behind, and that’s what we experience as a ghost. It’s a sort of impression, or a shadow of the person left behind after their death.”

“Uh huh,” I say, trying not to sound skeptical.

“I’m not asking you to believe in ghosts,” she says. “I don’t, at least not in the typical sense. But it’s a helpful way to think about this.”

“All right.”

“OK, so someone dies violently –”

“Like those people on the pier.”

“Well, yes, theoretically,” she says. “But let’s use a different example, because I don’t want to confuse you. You remember that gas main explosion in San Mateo three months ago?”

“Yeah, somebody hit it with a backhoe. Killed a bunch of people.”

Eight,” she says.

“If you say so.”

“So these people die violently –”

“You consider that violence?” I interject. “It was an accident.”

“When I say violent, I mean suddenly and unexpected, as a result of external causes. Not somebody dying of a heart attack in his sleep.”

“OK.”

“So these eight people die suddenly, and they leave behind a sort of shadow of their life force, for lack of a better term. Maybe think of it like those shadows of people burned into the buildings at Hiroshima. Some remnant of their living existence left behind.”

“I think I’m following you so far.”

“Yeah, so here’s where it starts to get complicated,” she says. “Let’s say this ‘life force’ actually exists partially outside of time as we understand it. So that the shadow not only goes forward; it also goes back.”

“You mean back in time.”

“Yes. The trauma of the event of death is so strong that it projects both into the future and into the past. So that the person’s ghost, if you will, haunts the location of the person’s death even before their death actually occurs. This would be one way to explain premonitions of train wrecks and other horrific events. Maybe some people are more sensitive to these impressions, so they can sense the tragedy before it occurs.”

“Sounds like bullshit,” I say, starting my third drink. “But I’m still following you.”

“Anyway, most of this is academic. The thing you need to understand is that it’s theoretically possible to know in advance about some tragedies. The more people that are killed, the greater the impression and therefore the easier it is to predict. Impressions fade over time, both forwards and backwards, and with distance. So the easiest tragedies to predict are those that involve a large number of deaths and that are going to happen nearby, in the near future.”

I’m pretty buzzed at this point, having downed two G&Ts on an empty stomach. My lip isn’t bothering me anymore and I’m starting to notice how attractive Tali really is. Thick, curly dark hair, big brown eyes, tiny little freckled nose. She takes off her coat and I catch a glimpse of some significant cleavage down the V of her blouse. Focus on the nose, I tell myself. I don’t really care what she’s talking about anymore; I just want to keep her talking. “So you see that something bad is going to happen, and you stop it. Like with me at the BART station.”

She grimaces. Adorable. “No, not exactly. I was actually trying to get you to kill yourself.”

I’m suddenly stone cold sober. “What?” I ask.

“I mean, that’s not why I went there,” she says hurriedly. “I was trying to stop this.” She’s waving her hand behind her, vaguely indicating Pier 39.

“What does me jumping in front of the train have to do with some nutjob shooting people on the pier?”

She shrugs. “Maybe the shooter was on the train. Maybe jumping in front of it would have stopped him.”

“He’d just come back another day.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe he gets caught with a shotgun on the train. Maybe he loses his nerve.”

Yeah, maybe he does, I think. Maybe it was hard enough to get up the nerve the first time. But I say, “Maybe he goes to Jack London Square next time.”

“Could be,” she says. “I just don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t even on the train. You’re familiar with the butterfly effect?”

“Small random events have huge, unexpected consequences. A butterfly flaps his wings in Moscow and there’s a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“More or less. The point is that in a chaotic system, the end results of an alteration to the system can be difficult to predict. Maybe there’s no easily identifiable link between the train and the shooter. But somehow jumping in front of the train stops him, through some unforeseeable chain of events.”

“OK,” I say. “So you make the coin toss come up tails so that I’ll jump in front of the train, but then you have second thoughts and try to stop me. But that means you’ve failed to stop the shooter at the BART station, so you have to come here. Right?” She’s crazy, I think, but it’s a sort of crazy that she’s obviously put a lot of effort into.

“Right.”

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t just call the police and warn them. Or just call in an anonymous bomb threat and clear out the pier. That would have stopped him, wouldn’t it?”

She shakes her head tiredly. “No. I mean, yes, it would have, if it had worked. But it wouldn’t have worked. It’s a deterministic system. Ananke has accounted for all the variables. Except for true randomness. She can’t deal with true randomness.” OK, now she’s not even making sense anymore.

“Who’s Ananke? Your boss?”

She laughs and finishes her drink. “Yeah, something like that. Look, I don’t think I have time to explain the rest. I’ve got to get home.”

“Boyfriend?”

She doesn’t answer, but the way she purses her lips, I get the feeling there’s no boyfriend.

“Where’s home?”

“Near Palo Alto. But my car’s still at the San Leandro BART station.”

I laugh. “Mine too. I guess neither of us was planning on coming to Pier 39. You want to share a cab?”

She agrees. We pay the bill (OK, she pays it but I do offer) and get a cab.

“So who’s Ananke?” I ask, once she’s instructed the driver to take us back to the BART station. This guy’s a sleepy Eastern European type who’s in no hurry. Good.

“She’s an ancient Greek goddess, the personification of necessity or compulsion. In a sense, she’s the boss of all of us.”

“You talked about her like she’s a real person.”

“Yeah, that’s how personification works. Use another word if you like. Call it God or the Universe. Or Destiny or Karma. I prefer to use Ananke, because it has fewer built-in connotations. Also, I like to think of her as a she, because she’s a real crafty bitch sometimes. Ananke basically runs the show.”

“The show,” I repeat dimly.

“The universe. The space-time continuum. Pretty much everything.”

“So Ananke is God.”

She grimaces at the word. “Not in the sense you’re thinking. She has no grand plan, she doesn’t create, and she doesn’t care about ethics or morality. She just makes things happen. She’s necessity, compulsion, destiny. The laws of nature. Everything that must happen happens because of Ananke.”

“This sounds a little like Deism. God sets the universe in motion, and then it just runs based on its own internal logic, like a watch.” My liberal arts education at work, ladies and gentlemen.

She nods. “Sort of,” she says. “But the Deists believed in a distant, uninvolved God. Ananke isn’t distant at all. In fact, she’ll get right in your face if she has to, to make sure that she gets her way. Like I said, she’s a bitch. But she has a weakness, a blind spot.”

“True randomness,” I say, remembering her words.

“Exactly.”

“Like a coin toss.”

She sighs and looks out the window. We’re getting back on the bridge. “See, this is where it gets really complicated. Do you know anything about quantum physics?”

“Does Schrödinger’s Cat count?”

“Yes,” she says. “Actually, Schrödinger’s Cat is a good starting place. You know the scenario?”

“There’s a cat in a box. You don’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open it. So as far as you know, it’s both. Or neither.”

“Sort of,” she says. “But it’s not ‘as far as you know.’ The cat really is objectively both alive and dead at the same time. It’s called quantum indeterminacy.”

“OK, maybe I need a refresher on Schrödinger’s Cat.” (Look, I’m pretty sure I did understand this stuff at one point, but I’m a high school English teacher and aspiring crime writer. I don’t have a lot of time to keep my knowledge of quantum physics fresh. If you’re some kind of physics buff, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs. Come to think of it, if you’re one of those people who hears “quantum indeterminacy” and your brain starts to hurt, you may want to skip this part too. It’s not absolutely vital that you understand this stuff.)

SKIP THIS PART

I’m doing my best to reconstruct Tali’s explanation, with the help of Wikipedia. I’ve had some time to think about this since the conversation occurred, and I think I have a pretty good handle on it, but again, I’m no expert, so don’t come bitching to me if I get this slightly wrong and you end up with a dead cat in a box.

Earlier I mentioned Deism. Thomas Jefferson and some of the other Founders were Deists; it was big in the Eighteenth century. Deism is the belief that God created the universe with the laws of physics embedded into it and then basically checked out. Nobody really knows what the Deist God does with His time; maybe he plays Parcheesi with Vishnu. What He doesn’t do is involve himself in the day-to-day operations of the universe. That’s because the universe He created runs of its own accord, like clockwork. The Deist God is basically a watchmaker. Maybe eventually the watch runs down and the universe ends. Who knows?

Deism isn’t very popular these days, and I’ve got a couple of semi-educated guesses why. First, why bother to believe in God at all if He isn’t going to do anything? The Deist God is what a scientist might call “an unnecessary hypothesis.” Why shove God in there at the beginning of the universe when you could just as easily say “And then the universe started, nobody knows how or why”? Throwing God in there doesn’t really do anything but complicate matters unnecessarily.

But I think the main reason Deism fell out of favor is that it doesn’t offer a very compelling model of the universe. When Isaac Newton was tossing out universal laws governing all of reality left and right, it really must have seemed like people were finally getting a handle on how all the gears of the watch worked. It was like he had described the winding mechanism and how different sized gears caused the hands to turn at different speeds, and how potential energy was stored in the spring, and all that was necessary was to figure out how all these parts worked together. Except he couldn’t. And neither could anybody else, for the next 200 years. The watch worked just fine, and Newton and others had done a bang-up job describing the workings of the watch’s various parts, but no one could figure out how the parts worked together to actually make the watch function. Eventually the whole idea of the universe as a ticking watch fell by the wayside, and with it the idea of the uninvolved Watchmaker.

And it wasn’t just that they couldn’t figure out how the parts worked together; it was starting to seem like the different parts of the watch actually followed completely different sets of rules. One set of rules is what is known as “classical physics.” This is basically the physics that you learn in high school. F = ma and all that. If you’re designing cars for General Motors, classical physics is probably the only kind of physics you’ll ever need.

Then Einstein came along and introduced the theory of special relativity, which overturned the concept of motion from Newton’s day by positing that all motion is relative. Einstein showed that space and time were not two separate things but rather two aspects of a single thing called spacetime. The rate at which time passed was shown to be dependent on velocity: time slowed down as one’s velocity increased.

Finally, folks like Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck and Neils Bohr came up with the idea of quantum mechanics, which says that at a subatomic level the universe operates on a completely different set of rules from classical physics. The rules are so different down there, in fact, that they are almost inconceivable. You may be familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which I learned in high school as “It’s impossible to know both the speed and location of a particle at the same time, because by observing the particle you change at least one of those properties.” That’s weird enough, but it’s nowhere near as weird as what quantum mechanics actually says, which is that until the location of the particle is observed, it has no definite location. The particle (say an electron whizzing around the nucleus of a hydrogen atom) can only be thought of as having a range of probable locations. And I don’t just mean that you don’t know where the electron is, like it’s the Ace of Spades in a deck of cards. I mean that the electron has no location until you observe it. It simply isn’t anywhere. Or it’s everywhere within the range of probable locations at the same time. Or both, depending on how you think about it.

Even Einstein, who was pretty open-minded about such things (and no slouch at physics), balked at some of the implications of quantum mechanics. Einstein seems to have been wrong, though. Quantum theory flawlessly describes the operations of the universe at a subatomic level. The problem is that although quantum theory is theoretically universal, when you try to apply the rules of quantum theory at scales significantly above the subatomic, seemingly impossible things start to happen. The most famous example is Schrödinger’s Cat. In Erwin Schrödinger’s legendary thought experiment, a cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with a Geiger counter and a small amount of radioactive substance. Over the course of an hour, there is a fifty percent chance of an atom decaying, causing the Geiger counter to click. If the Geiger counter clicks, a mechanism connected to it releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid, killing the cat. If an atom decays, the cat dies. If it doesn’t, the cat lives. There is a fifty/fifty chance of either happening in an hour. So is the cat alive or dead at the end of the hour? Both, says quantum theory. At least until you look in the box. As soon as you observe the cat’s state, the probability function collapses into one possibility or the other. But before you observe it, it’s both alive and dead the same time. That’s quantum indeterminacy. As Schrödinger states, “[A]n indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can be then resolved by direct observation.” In other words, the experiment amplifies the scope of the quantum weirdness so that we can experience it on a macro level.

The funny thing is that Schrödinger’s cat has become sort of the poster boy for the weirdness of quantum theory, but that isn’t how Schrödinger intended it at all. He was trying to point out that quantum theory, if taken literally, is absurd. He was trying to show that quantum theory couldn’t possibly be right (or at least it couldn’t be the whole story), because the idea of having a cat that’s both dead and alive is ridiculous. But quantum theory has proven so reliable that physicists have basically just accepted that a cat can be both dead and alive simultaneously. I get the impression from Tali that most physicists these days try not to think about it too much.

OK, START READING AGAIN HERE

“So what does any of that have to do with coin tosses?” I ask. “Are you saying that when the coin is in the air, it’s both heads and tails until it lands and you observe it as one or the other? Just like Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until you open the box?”

She shakes her head. “Coin tosses are mostly deterministic, like everything else. “The result of the coin toss is determined almost entirely by forces known to classical physics. How hard you flip the coin, the angle and orientation of the coin at its starting point, atmospheric conditions, et cetera.”

“Mostly deterministic. Not completely deterministic.”

“Right. Nothing is completely deterministic, because underlying everything is a state of quantum indeterminacy. At the subatomic level, the universe is random, within certain limits. But the range of the randomness is so small that you’re not aware of it on a macro level. It is possible, though, to channel and amplify quantum phenomena, like we do with lasers and superconductors.”

“Still not seeing the connection with coin tosses.”

“Sorry,” she says, realizing she’s gotten off track. “My point is that it is possible to duplicate quantum indeterminacy – true randomness – on a macro level. Like with Schrödinger’s cat. Some physicists believe there’s no reason you couldn’t actually carry out Schrödinger’s thought experiment and have an actual cat that is both dead and alive. Well, there’s one reason, I suppose.”

“The ASPCA?”

She laughs. “That too. But I was thinking of the fact that the cat would have to be cooled to near absolute zero.”

“Ah. That would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”

She laughs again. “Yeah, the cat would be pretty definitely dead. And unable to inhale poison gas, in any case. What I’m trying to say is that there are ways of making coin tosses truly random. You just have to have a sort of quantum phenomenon amplifier – something that translates a random subatomic action into a physical push at the macro level.”

“And you have such an amplifier.”

She smiles coyly. “Right here,” she says. But she isn’t talking about the amplifier. She’s telling the cab driver that we’ve reached her car. We’re on the street that the BART station is on. My car is in the lot up ahead.

“I’ll pay,” I say, before she can get out her wallet. “Please. It’s the least I can do.”

“OK,” she says, opening the door. Her car is a blue Lexus with a parking ticket on the windshield.

“If this is your idea of explaining everything …” I start.

“I know, I know,” she says apologetically. “How about dinner on Wednesday? I’ve got to get home.”

It’s hard to overstate how much better this day is going than I had expected. For me, anyway. Not so much those people on the pier.

“Sure!” I say, a little too eagerly. Down, boy. “Where at?”

“You know Garibaldi’s in Fremont?”

“I can find it.”

“Six o’clock?”

“Works for me.”

“See you then, Paul.”

“See you.”

“Oh, and Paul? I’m looking forward to seeing you. So don’t do anything that would significantly decrease the odds of you making it.”

I smile and she shuts the door. I have the driver take me to my car.

Part Two: Particles and Waves

I get in my little blue Ford Focus and drive home. Home is a dingy one-bedroom apartment a couple miles from the BART station with an air mattress on the floor. Deb got the house. I’m not sure how that happened. She left me. Why don’t I get the house? The kids, right. She gets the kids, the kids stay in the house, I get to sleep on the floor next to a stack of cardboard boxes. Fuck.

I arrest this train of thought and go back to thinking about Tali, trying to prolong the high I felt while talking with her in the cab. On some level I’m aware that it’s a little morbid to be so thrilled about meeting Tali, considering the circumstances of our meeting. The adrenaline and endorphins and hormones and whatever else are all mixed up in my brain; it’s hard to say exactly what I’m feeling and why. Above all I feel alive, which is something I haven’t felt for some time. Am I simply infatuated with Tali, or is the intensity of my feelings related to the excitement of the day? Maybe, I think, this is just what it’s like to be around Tali. However she did what she did, this clearly wasn’t the first time. I wonder how often she does that sort of thing. Is it some kind of job? Does she get up in the morning and check her phone to see what tragedy she needs to prevent that day? Does she do this on her own or does she work for someone? I realize that I actually know very little about her. I don’t even know her last name.

What does it feel like to hold people’s lives in your hands? To know that you’re actually helping people, making a real difference in the world? When I was a kid, I dreamed about being a cop or a firefighter, somebody who saved lives, somebody who made a difference, but at some point I decided I wasn’t cut out for that sort of life. I took the road less traveled, decided to be a novelist, and that has made all the difference: I’m a divorced high school English teacher living in a shitty apartment in San Leandro. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a teacher, but I’m not one of those teachers who gets thanked during a former student’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I’m the teacher whose classes are filled with kids who drew the short stick when scheduling their electives. I fell into teaching because I figured I could tolerate it for a few years while I worked on getting my novel published. That was fourteen years and three novels ago. I’ve pretty much given up on making any kind of difference in the world.

The idea of “making a difference” goes both ways, of course. That psycho with the shotgun on the pier thought he was making a difference too. That’s the easy way. When you’ve given up on trying to accomplish anything positive, you can always cause mayhem. Tough luck for that asshole that Tali was there to stop him.

On some level I can understand that sort of thinking, the desperation to have some kind of effect on the world, even if it’s just destruction. Instant fame, or infamy, and these days what’s the difference? As low as I’ve gotten, at least I had the decency to try to check out without taking anyone with me. My legacy would have been making a few hundred commuters late for work one day. And hey, at least they’d have had an interesting story to tell their co-workers. But Tali foiled that plan too.

I pour myself a drink, boot up my laptop and open my latest abortive attempt at a novel. I guess I’m thinking that maybe the rush from the day’s excitement will translate into inspiration, or at least motivation, but it doesn’t work out that way. In fact, instead of my mood helping me to write, the inertia of the unfinished novel seems to be oozing out of the screen into my body, threatening to quash whatever is left of my buzz.

The novel isn’t bad. None of them are bad. They just aren’t good. I’m not aiming for Dickens, mind you. I write genre stuff, mysteries mainly. The trick in writing a novel, I’ve learned, is to find the proper balance of order and chaos. You’ve got to let things get a little bit out of hand to keep the reader’s interest, but you can’t get too crazy or you’ll never wrap things up satisfactorily. You have to allow your characters some freedom so they seem real, but you also have to find a way to somehow guide them inexorably to their doom (or happily ever after, if that’s your sort of thing. It’s not mine.) The problem is that I work so hard to tie up everything nicely that the characters become cardboard cutouts. They’re not real people; they’re just puppets of doom. Or I let them do whatever they want and the whole plot falls apart. I can’t ever seem to get the balance right. Anyway, you don’t care about this shit.

I have another drink and go to bed. Bed being an air mattress on the floor.

The next morning I awaken to the sound of my phone ringing. The school again. I put it on silent and go back to sleep. I’ve already got five missed calls from them since I didn’t show up yesterday. I didn’t bother to call in sick; I figured I’d let that fat ass of a vice principal earn his pay by scrambling to find a replacement or, God forbid, fill in for me himself. That was my nod to the cause of mayhem, I guess. I am become death, irritant of public school bureaucrats.

The buzzing of the phone on the box where I had set it wakes me up again an hour later. So much for “silent.” The phone’s display reads Mom. I sigh and answer it.

“Paul?” says my mom’s voice. “Aren’t you at school?”

Flashes of playing hooky in junior high. “Took the day off,” I reply. “Why are you calling if you didn’t think I would answer?”

“I was just going to leave you a message. Don’t you already get a lot of days off? Do you have extra vacation days?”

“I just needed some time to unpack,” I say.

“Why don’t you unpack on Saturday? You can’t just take days off whenever you want, you know.”

“I know, Mom.” Because I’m thirty-six fucking years old. “What do you need?”

“What do I need?”

“I’m sorry, Mom. How are you.” It’s supposed to be a question, but I don’t quite manage the little lilt in my voice.

“I’m fine, Paul. I was hoping you could come over and help me with something. I was thinking this Saturday, but since you’re not doing anything …”

“I just told you I was unpacking.”

“Well, how much can you have to unpack?”

“What do you mean? It’s everything. Everything I own, except the furniture.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“I don’t … what do you mean is it a good idea?”

“To move everything, I mean. That woman is going to think you’re never coming back.”

“Her name is Deb, Mom. And I’m not coming back. We’re splitting up. She made that pretty clear.”

“Well, she can’t just do that. Don’t you have any say in the matter?”

“What do you want me to do, Mom? I can’t force her to stay with me.”

“A marriage is a two person arrangement, Paul. One person can’t just end it. You need to make sure she understands that.”

“OK, Mom.” It’s easier just to go along than to argue when she gets like this.

“And why do you have to move out if she’s the one with the problem?”

“The kids are staying with her.”

“Pfft,” she says. This is the noise my mother makes when the conversation has veered toward a subject she doesn’t want to talk about. My mother has no interest in my kids. I’m not sure if this is because she doesn’t like Deb or because having grandchildren makes her feel old. Probably a little of each.

“So what did you need my help with, Mom?”

“Oh, it’s just this thing for your father, this award. They need some pictures of him for the presentation, and I thought you could help me go through the photo albums and pick some out.”

“Oh. Yeah, I can come over after lunch.”

“You aren’t too busy with your packing?”

“I can make some time. See you in a little while, Mom.”

“Goodbye, Paul.”

I get dressed and get in the car, stopping at Taco Bell on the way over. When I get to my mom’s house in Pleasanton, she’s got photo albums spread out all over the kitchen table.

My father is receiving a posthumous award from some literary society. I hadn’t heard of the group, but I guess they’re sort of a big deal. Ever since my father killed himself, my mother has dedicated herself to being the conservator of his memory. They fought like feral cats when he was alive, but the day he shot himself it was like a switch got flipped in her head. Suddenly he became a saint and she would brook no mention of any of his faults, of which there were many. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d lobbied this group for the award. Not that he didn’t deserve it; by all accounts my father was a genius. His first novel, A Dying Breed, won just about every award except the Pulitzer. His second novel, Retribution, won that too. His third novel was, according to most critics, bloated and derivative, but by then his reputation was firmly established. Rather than risk slipping further on his fourth, he shot himself between the eyes. Nobody says it in so many words, but I get the impression that his suicide actually helped secure hi