The Month of October

Hugh Everett's ashes are in the dumpster behind the restaurant I work at. I know because they start moving on Monday. By Tuesday, there is a writhing charred leg and parts of his open torso. Wednesday, he speaks to me for the first time.

"What year is it?"

"I think you might implode if you knew."

"Makes sense. Do you smoke, doll?" 

I light a cigarette for him, having pulled it with quivering fingers from my apron, and put it in his mouth. He leans up against a garbage bag leaking shake mix and puffs, exhaling clouds. 

"This is weak. Lady cigarettes."

He rips off the filter with his teeth. He only has three fingers on his left hand and his right arm is a stump. At least his eyes have grown in. 

"Do you know why I left academic physics?"

"To make models for the Pentagon?"

"Precisely."

He takes a long drag.

"A model, you see, is a representation of an ideal, a situation that can only occur exactly that way within a given set of circumstances. In reality, we can only create those circumstances with a certain degree of error, but in a model? Everything will work exactly as you predict. There are no American casualties in my models. Perhaps none at all in reality."

"How do you think your daughter felt about that?"

He grimaces. His lips are like two wet worms. The hole where his nose should be twitches.

"I don't think she felt much at all on that dope. She had whatever's inside me, and I hated that stupid girl for it. But, doll, aren't you at work? What are doing, talking to an old pervert in dumpster?"

"I wanted to know why you said there were parallel universes. You never argued for it, so why say it at all?"

"Well, sometimes men like me can only dream. I can tell, looking at you, you think of doing the wrong thing but do the right thing, don't you? Don't be shy now. I'm dead."

He laughs. It sounds like gravel. He spits up parts of his throat, bloody and blackened, slightly crisp. I nod and shift my weight from foot to foot, trying not to stare at his brain. The crown of his skull has yet to materialize.

"But, I thought of doing the right thing and always did the wrong thing. Can you understand that, doll?"





My phone rings. It's eleven at night and I'm driving from work to buy cigarettes in the county beside mine, because they're four dollars cheaper. I still have my apron on. I reach in its pocket to answer the call, switching it to speaker.

A high but throaty, nasally voice answers. She has a slight lisp.

"You've been neglecting me again."

"Who is this?"

"Why do we have to do this every time? It's yourself. The one you keep ignoring. Do you want to talk about what happened today?"

"What?"

"It's always gotta be pulling teeth with you. Slow down, there's a deer."

I come to a full stop. A doe crosses the road but not before she stops to look in my car. Her eyes are full of flies and there's a bullet hole in her thigh. Daddy said once, aim for the head or chest, and I was too embarrassed to tell him. She disappears with a swift jump, leaving behind fur and blood.

"I know you remember killing her. But that's not what happened today. That's just in your mind. Well, ours."

She laughs. 

I say, "I saw Albert Einstein at Meijer but didn't approach him. I wanted to ask him about his letters to Schrodinger, especially what he had to say about Heisenberg because everyone's heard what he has to say about Bohr, but I didn't want to offend him."

"That's us. Always wasting opportunities."

"Well, I mean, I didn't want to bother him."

"Or, you know, maybe he's just too ubiquitous to know as well as you might think you do. I know you don't like to acknowledge your shortcomings but really? That one was obvious."






On Thursday, but only the second Thursday of the month, Max Planck visits my closet. I take the day off work so I can prepare milk tea and chocolate biscuits for his arrival, setting each beneath my coats and dresses. He prefers that I sit outside the closed door, so I perch cross-legged on the stool from my vanity and put my ear to the faux wood.

He signifies his presence with three meek knocks and a, "Hello."

"Hello, Herr Planck."

"Are you having a fine day, fraulein?"

"So far no grievances. Was your trip pleasant?"

"Mostly. I found myself in the shopping district again, amongst the people who wear plastic, and then again in the park across the street. The children are so loud in this era, full of themselves."

"Yeah, I guess. Do you remember what I asked you last month? You said you'd answer, this month."

"You know, I was never much of a philosopher. Reason and causality is what governs the universe or so I thought. I do think it still, mostly. But the answer, fraulein, is that I am not a man who knows himself well enough to say what I felt when I realized what I'd done."

"Well, then, can you at least try?"

"Only because you're such a kind hostess."

I hear him sip his tea, taking his time to think.

"The feeling, I can say, is the same one I had when the world went to war a second time or perhaps it was the feeling I had when I lost another son to battle. It was one like an endless pit in the stomach, the sense at once that everything exists eternally outside your control and that even honesty can't cure mankind of its inherent ailments."

"I think you said that very well, actually. Thank you, Herr Planck."

"Ah."

He bites into a biscuit and chews, then swallows, then takes a moment to wipe his chin, as he's wont to.

"The pleasure is mine just for your kind words."







I waitress the graveyard shift. I have two tables of drunk college kids, all on separate checks, and a table where one old man sits, reading a thick leather book.

The kids want refills and another plate of fries, on the blond one's tab. I put their order in the computer, walk into the kitchen to make sure it printed, and then walk over to the old man. He's small, shriveled, and very familiar.

"Professor Wheeler?"

"I haven't been dead that long. Is it that much of a shock?" 

He laughs but his expression becomes stark and sober. He eyes me. 

"I think you're forgetting to read your old work again. I know, it can be tedious, but what is thought if not a continuous evolving event, always a product of itself?"

"I've just been strange lately. No one makes more sense than anyone else. It's all a void."

"But Miss Em, even light is alive in its own sense. There's no reason to despair over anything, we are part of an immortal system, a system that creates its own laws, and should just enjoy our time as us, before our matter becomes something else, something better perhaps. Don't bog yourself down with too many questions if you're too tired to find the answers."

"I know what you mean, but it's hard when I keep losing my place or leaving my logic at home. I think I'm at the end of my sanity sometimes but mostly I just worry about all the time that keeps slipping around me."

"I know the feeling. Just be strong."

"Thank you Professor Wheeler. I needed to hear that."






"Hey, waitress!" One of the drunk boys waves me over. "I need another Coke."

His buddies smile very straight or cover their mouths. I drop my eyes. I want to pull out all my teeth and replace them with theirs: straight, white.

"Anything else for you guys?"

"Nah. You can go talk to your friend."

They all burst when I walk away, laughing so hard the walls shudder.