We ran the test again. I printed up the results, being careful not to look at them. We turned off the equipment.
I folded both pages in half and slid them into manila envelopes. I gave Satish the envelope with the screen results. I kept the detector results. “I haven’t looked at the detector results yet,” I told him. “So right now the wave function is still a superposition of states. Even though the results are printed, they’re still un-observed and so still part of the indeterminate system. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Go in the next room. I’m going to open my envelope in exactly twenty seconds. In exactly thirty seconds, I want you to open yours.”
Satish walked out. And here it was: the gap where logic bleeds. I fought an irrational burst of fear. I lit the nearby Bunsen burner and held my envelope over the open flame. The smell of burning paper. Black ash. A minute later Satish was back, his envelope open.
“You didn’t look,” he said. He held out his sheet of paper. “As soon as I opened it, I knew you didn’t look.”
“I lied,” I said, taking the paper from him. “And you caught me. We made the world’s first quantum lie detector — a divination tool made of light.” I looked at the paper. The interference pattern lay in dark bands across the white surface. “Some mathematicians say there is either no such thing as free will, or the world is a simulation. Which do you think is true?”
“Those are our choices?”
I crushed the paper into a ball. Something slid away inside of me; a subtle change, and I opened my mouth to speak but what came out was different from what I intended.
I told Satish about the breakdown, and the drinking, and the hospital. I told him about the eyes in the mirror, and what I said to myself in the morning.
I told him about the smooth, steel “erase” button I put against my head — a single curl of an index finger to pay for everything.
Satish nodded while he listened, the smile wiped clean from his face. When I finished speaking, Satish put his hand on my shoulder. “So then you are crazy after all, my friend.”
“It’s been thirteen days now,” I told him. “Thirteen days sober.”
“Is that good?”
“No, but it’s longer than I’ve gone in two years.”
We ran the experiment. We printed the results.
If we looked at the detector results, the screen showed the particle pattern. If we didn’t, it showed an interference pattern.
We worked through most of the night. Near morning, sitting in the semidarkness of the lab, Satish spoke. “There once was a frog who lived in a well,” he said.
I watched his face as he told the story.
Satish continued. “One day a farmer lowered a bucket into the well, and the frog was pulled up to the surface. The frog blinked in the bright sun, seeing it for the first time. ‘Who are you?’ the frog asked the farmer.
“The farmer was amazed. He said, ‘I am the owner of this farm.’
“‘You call your world
“‘No, this is not a different world,’ the farmer said. ‘This is the same world.’
“The frog laughed at the farmer. He said, ‘I have swum to every corner of my world. North, south, east, west. I am telling you, this is a different world.’ ”
I looked at Satish and said nothing.
“You and I,” Satish said. “We are still in the well.” He closed his eyes. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“You do not want to drink?”
“No.”
“I am curious, what you said with the gun, that you’d shoot yourself if you drank…”
“Yeah.”
“You did not drink on those days you said that?”
“No.”
Satish paused as if considering his words carefully. “Then why did you not just say that everyday?”
“That is simple,” I said. “Because then I’d be dead now.”
Later, after Satish had gone home, I ran the experiment one final time. Hit “print.” I put the results in two envelopes without looking at them. On the first envelope, I wrote the words “detector results.” On the second, I wrote “screen results.”
I drove to the hotel. I took off my clothes. Stood naked in front of the mirror.
I put the enveloped marked “detector results” up to my forehead. “I will never look at this,” I said. “Not ever, unless I start drinking again.” I stared in the mirror. I stared at my own gray eyes and saw that I meant it.
I glanced down at the other envelope. The one with the screen results. My hands shook.
I laid the envelope on the desk, stared at it. Keats said,
One day, I would either open the detector results, or I wouldn’t.
Inside the other envelope there was either an interference pattern, or there wasn’t. A “yes” or a “no.” The answer was in there. It was already in there.
I waited in Satish’s office until he arrived in the morning. He put his briefcase on his desk. He looked at me, at the clock, then back at me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Waiting for you.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since 4:30.”
He glanced around the room. I leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind my head.
Satish just watched me. Satish was bright. He waited.
“Can you rig the detector to an indicator light?” I asked him.
“How do you mean?”
“Can you set it up so that the light goes off when the detector picks up an electron at the slit?”
“It shouldn’t be hard. Why?”
“Let’s define, exactly, the indeterminate system.”
Point Machine watched the test. He studied the interference pattern. “You’re looking at one-half the wave particle duality of light,” I said.
“What’s the other half look like?”
I turned the detectors on. The banded pattern diverged into two distinct clumps on the screen.
“This.”
“Oh,” Point Machine said.
Standing in Point Machine’s lab. Frogs swimming.
“They’re aware of light, right?” I asked.
“They do have eyes.”
“But, I mean, they’re aware of it?”
“Yeah, they respond to visual stimuli. They’re hunters. They have to see to hunt.”
“But I mean, aware?”
“What did you do before here?”
