November 30, 2007 at 8:57 pm — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Charlie Rose: Good evening. Our topic tonight is, of course, the topic that’s on everyone’s minds. The time anomaly that we all experienced on Saturday. Our guests include scientists and philosophers who can shed some light on the events of the past forty hours or so. First is Doctor Barnard Cormier, the Director General of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Doctor Cormier, welcome.

Cormier: Thank you, Charlie. Please, call me Bernie.

Charlie: Our next guest is Doctor Johannes Taurejo, the director of the Center for Responsibility in High-Energy Physics Research, and a long-time critic of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project. Welcome, Doctor Taurejo.

Taurejo: I’m pleased to be here. Please, call me John.

Charlie: Our third guest is Doctor Sabrina Wheeler, the Stanford University Distinguished Professor of Consciousness Philosophy, whose most recent book is The Consciousness Gap. Doctor Wheeler, thank you for being with us tonight.

Wheeler: My pleasure, Charlie. And please call me Sabrina.

Charlie: Our final guest is the popular author and speaker Doctor Chopak Deepra, founder and Director of Enlightenment at the Deepra Center for New Consciousness in San Augustin, California. Doctor Chopra, welcome.

Chopra: It is my great honor to be here. And please, call me Doctor Chopra.

Charlie: Bernie, let me start with you. Your organization, CERN, seems to be at the center of the unprecedented events of the last day and a half. In particular, the time anomaly seems to coincide with the timing of an event of enormous importance to experimental physicists, the detection of the Higgs Boson. What can you tell us about that?

Bernie: It appears that time reverted to the approximately the time when we produced a Higgs boson in our LHC, our Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. We have a team of scientests now trying to determine how closely the two events correlate in time.

Charlie: What is the Large Hadron Collider?

Bernie: It is the world’s largest particle accelerator — a circular underground tunnel sixteen miles in diamater beneath Switzerland and France. In the LHC we accelerate hadrons –”

Charlie: You say particle accelerator. Is that what is sometimes known as an atom smasher?

Bernie: Yes, though technically it smashes subatomic particles. In the LHC, we accelerate hadrons — a class of subatomic particles that gives the Large Hadron Collider its name — in opposite directions around the ring at speeds very close to the speed of light. These hadrons collide at predetermined locations inside enormously sophisticated particle detectors. When the accelerated hadrons collide, the enormous energy of the collision transforms the particles into other particles. The exact nature of these transformations, and the exact energies of the resulting particles, is if great interest to experimental and theoretical particle physicists around the world.

Charlie: Can you explain, simply if possible, what a Higgs boson is, and what makes it so important to physicists?

Bernie: Let me start by describing two fundamental questions left open in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Standard Model describes elegantly and relatively simply where all of the forces of physics come from. Each physical force is created by an exchange of what are called particles, particles that are not currently known to have any substructure. For example, the electromagnetic force is mediated by elementary particles called photons. We also know the particles that mediate two of the other fundamantal forces, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, which affect the composition of atomic nuclei. The one force for which we have not observed the mediating elementary particle is the force of gravity. To fill this hole in our understanding, the Standard Model posits a particle called the graviton.

John: Get to the point.

Charlie: Let him finish.

John: Let him get to the point! I want to hear how he justifies what he’s done.

Deepra: It’s all vibrations.

John: Shut up.

Charlie: Bernie, You mentioned two fundamental questions that the Standard Model has not answered yet. The first is the particle responsible for gravitational force. What’s the other?

Bernie: The other question is where mass comes from. How is it that particles have come to have mass at all? In the early 1960s, Peter Higgs and his colleagues posited something that came to be known as the Higgs field. It is from this Higgs field that particles come to have mass, similar to the way that particles come to have magnetic charge from the magnetic field. Now, one the aspects of this theoretical Higgs field is that, like other fields, it is exists as a field of particles that carry the minimum sized chunk, or quantum, of the field. So the Higgs field, according to the theory, will have some quantum particle. And that particle is called the Higgs boson. Now, nobody has ever detected the Higgs boson for certain, and until we unambiguously detect one, we can’t be sure that the Higgs field is indeed the mechanism by which elementary particles acquire mass. And until we detect several, we can’t fill in some of the details of the Standard model. Now, there have been several observations over the past few years — such as the observation at Fermilab — that could be interpreted as a Higgs boson of one form or another. But the data aren’t clear. So we continue the search at CERN with the LHC colliding photons at enormous energies to create and observe a Higgs boson.

John: And destroy the universe.

Charlie: John, you have objected to the LHC project since its announcement in the early 1990s. What is your primary objection?

John: That it will destroy the universe.

Deepra: You cannot destroy the universe. The universe is timeless, a vibration in the void –

John: Shut up.

Charlie: Where does your fear come from?

John: The point of the Large Hadron Collider is to recreate conditions that existed at the start of the universe, at the big bang itself. Higgs bosons just don’t happen at normal energies. In order to create one, you have to have energies like that existed during the big bang.

Charlie: Do you mean that the LHC could itself create another big bang? Create another universe?

John: That’s right. In fact, that’s the intent.

Charlie: Would that be a separate universe from ours? Or a universe inside ours, if that means anything at all? The idea of a tiny universe inside ours boggles the mind.

Deepra: It would create another vibration that would harmonize with ours. The vibrations –

John: Shut up. It would create a universe that would destroy ours. Take a look at the disasters that have already been created by the creation of the first Higgs boson. People suddenly found themselves in traffic at highway speeds. People all over the world have died because of this. We don’t have the estimates yet, but it could be in the tens of millions of people. And then there are the people who couldn’t cope with what had happened to them and killed themselves. We’re hearing reports of people killing their entire families, sure that the rapture has come, or that aliens have hit is with some kind of time beam. Society has been blown apart, and it’s all because these so-called scientists didn’t heed the warnings. Not just my warnings, but their own.

Bernie: Our intention was –

John: Your intention was to create interactions at energies beyond any every produced on earth. Isn’t that right?

Bernie: Yes, because Higgs bosons don’t exist at lower –

John: And what do your models of physics say will happen at those energies?

Bernie: That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out. How much mass does the Higgs boson have? What is the tensor strength of the Higgs field? At what energies do the spin symmetries break down and form mass?

John: You see, Charlie? The one thing they do know is that their models don’t apply at the energies they are trying to create. With everything that is known in all of physics, every model that’s been created in all of history, we don’t know what will happen when we start smashing things together at those energies. I’ve been saying for years that these experiments are dangerous and irresponsible. And for years I’ve been marginalized as against scientific progress. And now I’ve been vindicated, but it’s too late. There’s no satisfaction in this for me. I’m deeply ashamed that I couldn’t get CERN or the governments of Europe to listen to me.

Charlie: Are you saying that CERN somehow caused this time anomaly? Do you have anthing to back up that accusation?

John: Just look at the timing. Just as the LHC smashed particles together with enough energy to create a Higgs boson, just as it recreated conditions that have not existed in the universe since the big bang itself, time starts to loop on itself. Are you saying that that’s a coincidence?

Charlie: I don’t know enough about this to have an opinion. But what about you, Doctor Cormier?

Bernie: Please, call me Bernie.

John: Because he wants to burn up the universe in a grand experiment.

Bernie: The correlation between the creation of the Higgs and the start of the time loop is of great concern to us. Our analysts have determined that the two events coincided to within 1 microsecond, one millionth of a second.

John: That’s pretty sloppy.

Charlie: What do you mean, sloppy? A millionth of a second seems extraordinarily accurate to me.

John: Not at the scales where these so-called scientists are working. A microsecond is like an eternity. They typically measure the timing of events to the precision of femtoseconds. A femtosecond is one billionth of a microsecond, a million billionth of a second. So not knowing to better than a microsecond is like someone asking you what street you parked your car on, and you can tell them any more precisely than “somewhere between Maple Street and the Oort Cloud,” which is 50,000 times as far away as the sun.

Charlie: Is that true, Bernie? A millionth of a second sounded pretty good to me. Is it true that that’s not your usual precision?

Bernie: Well, yes. There have been some anomalies in the data.

John: Oh, here we go.

Charlie: What kind of anomalies?

Bernie: Some of… some of the data seems to be missing. The Higgs boson is a very short-lived particle. When it comes into existence, it almost immediately decays into a number of other particles based on its charge, particles that we cannot detect directly except by the particles that they in turn decay into. In the case of this particular Higgs boson, the detected particles were all muons. And these muons decayed, at a somewhat more leisurely pace, into a variety of fermions, which we also readily detected. The first anomaly is that the muon energies no longer appear on our CMS data.

Charlie: What is CMS data?

Bernie: Sorry, that’s data from our Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS. That’s the thing that detects the muons, as well as other particles.

John: And all of the children of the Higgs are gone?

Bernie: No, and that’s even more puzzling. We still have the data for the fermions, but not for the muons.

John: You guys obviously have no idea what you are doing, which is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell the world all along. Thanks for confirming that for us!

Charlie: Bernie, I don’t understand the significance of the anomaly you’ve just described. Can you explain it simply?

John: Simplistically, maybe.

Deepra: Shut up.

Bernie: Remember the chain of particles. The Higgs decays into intermediate particles of a variety of kinds. These decayed, in this case, into muons. And the muons decayed into fermions. So we have: Higgs, intermediate particles, muons, and fermions. Are you with me so far?

Charlie: Yes.

Bernie: We have the data for the last particles in the chain, the fermions. We don’t have the data for the particles before them in the chain, the muons that decayed into the fermions.

John: You lost the data.

Bernie: That’s one of the possibilities, yes.

Charlie: What are the other possibilties?

Bernie: Some phenomenon that we haven’t yet identified created the fermions.

Charlie: Can fermions come from somewhere other than muons?

Bernie: Oh, yes. Lots of processes create fermions. In fact, that’s one of our biggest challenges. How do we distinguish the Higgs boson from other processes that create the same decay products. For that, we rely on statistics. Some signatures, specific groupings of particular kinds of muons or fermions, are so rarely produced by other processes that we can safely conclude –

John: Safely, my ass.

Bernie: We can conclude with confidence that they resulted from the decay of a Higgs. In this case, the data were clear.

John: Until you lost the data.

Bernie: Well, again, we’re not sure we lost it. Perhaps the data were wiped out somehow in the time anomaly.

John: Which you created.

Bernie: There is a chance of that, yes, that we somehow triggered the time anomaly. And perhaps the anomaly somehow masked the muon data.

Charlie: You still have the data from the particles at the end of the chain, do you not?

Bernie: Yes, we do. And that’s another anomaly that interests us greatly. The fermion signatures that we observed after the time anomaly differed from the signatures before.

John: Or somebody switched the data in order to cover up your responsibility for nearly destroying the world.

Bernie: I assure you that we did nothing of the sort.

John: You assured us that there was no danger in starting up the LHC. And now we have an estimated tens of millions of people dead because of you. You, sir, are not to be trusted.

Charlie: All right, all right, I’m sure there will be plenty of time later, in other forums, to sort out the cause and effect here, plenty of time to assign the blame that seems to be an inevitable… decay product of any kind of significant event such as this –

John: Charlie, he and his so-called physicists nearly destroyed the world. This is no time to mince words.

Charlie: At this point, John, my intention is to understand what has happened. Nothing more than that.

John: Well, my intention is to put the responsibility right where it belongs.

Charlie: You are perfectly welcome to pursue that goal when the show has ended.

Deepra: John, you must let go of your ego –

John: Shut up.

Charlie: Bernie, you were explaining a second data anomaly. Or was it a third?

Bernie: The second. The first was that we no longer see the muon data. The second, as I was explaining, is that the fermion signature is now different than it was before the time anomaly. And on top of that, the fermion signature is… problematic.

John: Because it shows that you caused the time loop?

Bernie: Because the signature is one that seems to be forbidden by the Standard Model –

John: Oh. You mean it shows that your Standard Model is wrong? That you don’t know what you’re doing?

Bernie: Look, I’m not the only scientist who relies on the Standard Model. The predictions made by the model have never been violated.

John: Until now.

Bernie: Until now, yes.

Charlie: What does that mean? What is the significance of something violating the Standard Model?

John: It means he doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Bernie: It means that there are phenomena that aren’t accounted for in the Standard Model, which, again, is a model that has stood the test of…

John: Say it!

Bernie: Look, this is one of the things we were hoping to learn with the LHC project. We were hoping to make observations that helped us to clarify, or to revise, our model of the universe.

John: What’s unusual about the fermion signature?

Bernie: Two of the muons decayed into the usual set of fermions. One of the others decayed into an electron and a photon. The final one decayed into two electrons and a positron.

John: You’re kidding me.

Bernie: No.

Charlie: What is the significance of those decays?

John: Well, they can’t happen, for one thing.

Bernie: And yet, they have happened. And we don’t have the moun data that might help us to explain the fermion signature.

Charlie: So this all suggests something wrong with the Standard Model, is that it?

Bernie: Yes.

John: And it shows that these obsessed lunatics don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t care.

Charlie: So, bottom line, Bernie: Did you at CERN and the LHC project cause this time anomaly.

Bernie: At this, uh, time we simply don’t know for sure.

Charlie: But there’s a chance of it?

John: A dead certainty!

Bernie: A chance, yes. We’re reviewing the data now –

John: What’s left of it, you mean. What you haven’t destroyed yet.

Bernie: And we have, of course, shut down the Large Hadron Collider –

John: So you admit it!

Bernie: — just as a precaution.

Charlie: So we won’t be experiencing this time loop again?

Bernie: If the loop was caused by the LHC, then it won’t happen again, yes.

John: It’s about time. No pun intended.

Charlie: Let me ask you a question, John. What kinds of disasters did you predict from the LHC?

John: The energies in the LHC are enough to create a black hole.

Charlie: A black hole? When you say that, I imagine a monstrous object that sucks matter and light into itself. An object with gravity so strong that nothing can escape.

John: Right. An object that could potentially destroy the universe.

Charlie: So do you think that’s what happened here? A black hole that, while not destroying the universe, instead bent time?

John: That’s one possibility, yes.

Bernie: Our calculations show that any black hole created at these energies will be too small to do any damage before it evaporates.

Charlie: What do you mean evaporates? I thought that nothing could escape a black hole.

Bernie: It turns out that’s not quite true. Black holes can evaporate, over time, by a phenomenon called Hawking radiation.

Charlie: Is that named after the famous Cambridge physicist, Steven Hawking?

Bernie: Yes, it is. In the model that he created, the model that is accepted today, a certain form of radiation can dissipate the mass and energy within a black hole.

Charlie: So is what John is saying possible? Can the LHC make black holes?

Bernie: Yes. But at the energies we’re talking about, the energies created inside the LHC, the black holes that would be created are so small that Hawking radiation would evaporate them instantly, before they could do any harm.

John: Has anyone ever seen Hawking radiation?

Bernie: No, but it’s the commonly accepted –

John: Can anyone prove that Hawking radiation even exists?

Bernie: Again, the theory is widely accepted.

John: Like the Standard Model?

Bernie: Well, no, it isn’t quite as widely accepted as –

John: As the Standard Model, which says that muons can’t decay into the fermion signatures that you reported?

Bernie: Well… yes.

John: Why don’t you just admit that you don’t know what you’re doing?

Charlie: What I want to know, John, is what sort of predictions you made about the LHC. What disasters you foresaw.

John: I’ve already explained the black hole.

Charlie: Is that the most likely scenerio, in your opinion?

John: Yes. But there are others. Collisions could also produce a magnetic monopole that would cause all of the –

Charlie: Forgive me, but what is a magnetic monopole?

John: It’s… the easiest way to describe it is a magnet with one pole.

Charlie: I don’t understand. That’s like saying it’s an object that has an up but no down.

John: Yes, it does sound like that. The only way I can explain it more thoroughly is with string theory, and the details –

Deepra: Vibrations. The strings are vibrating, and that’s what creates the universe.

John: Rather than explain what a magnetic monopole is, which I think is beyond our discussion here, let’s just say that if it happens, the results are disastrous. A magnetic monopole would trigger massive proton decay. The protons that form the nuclei of atoms would decay into more fundamental particles. And that would blow atoms apart. In effect, every atom in the neighborhood of the monopole blows apart, which causes a chain reaction that turns the earth into the most massive nuclear bomb ever created.

Charlie: And this is possible?

John: It’s inevitable if they keep colliding particles at these energies.

Charlie: Bernie, what’s your take on that?

Bernie: In 2004 a team of scientists concluded a study of all of the kinds of hazards fantasized by Doctor Taurejo. They determined that the likelihood of any of the events considered was so small as to be impossible.

John: And yet I was right, wasn’t I? Now what do you have to say?

Charlie: Did you, John, ever predict that the Large Hadron Collider could trigger the universe to hiccup, to revert twenty nine hours and eleven minutes into the past?

John: Not that exact scenario, no, but disasters of a similar magnitude.

Bernie: So you don’t know what you’re talking about either?

John: I like how you said ‘either’. So does that imply what I’ve been saying all along, that you have no idea what you’re doing?

Bernie: I didn’t mean anything of the sort.

Charlie: But you yourself, John, didn’t suggest this specific scenario, is that right?

John: Well…

Bernie: You’re right, Charlie.

Charlie: Please, Doctor Cormier, let Doctor Taurejo speak for himself.

John: Thank you, Charlie.

Charlie: So isn’t that right? That you never predicted this exact scenario?

John: Yes, you’re right. Not this specific scenario, no.

Charlie: What can either of you tell me about what is likely to happen next?

Bernie: As I said, we have shut down the Large Hadron Collider indefinitely. Over the coming days and weeks we will look very closely at the data to see whether our activities were in any way related to the time anomaly –

John: As if there’s any question.

Bernie: — and if so, what the connection is.

Charlie: And what do you think will happen next?

Bernie: If the LHC is related in any way to the time anomaly — and that’s a big if at this point — then our turning it off should prevent any further similar events.

John: Should. You know my definition of should? Should means probably won’t. Turning it off probably won’t prevent further anomalies and chaos and death. And it may be to late to prevent whatever mechanism is at play here from destroying the universe.

Charlie: Are you predicting that, John? Are you predicting that the universe is about to be destroyed and that it’s inevitable?

John: Well, they’re the ones with the data. And they’re obviously hiding it. Bernie says that they’re “missing” data about the muons that were created in his death beam device. I say hogwash. I say, find that data, find those muons, and you’ll know whatever they know, whatever they’re hiding.

Charlie: So what, if anything, are you predicting?

John: I predict more duplicity, that’s what I predict.

Charlie: I’d like to turn now to another topic, which may be less urgent than the time anomaly itself, but is at least as big a puzzle. How is it that we remember the twenty nine hours eleven minutes leading up to the moment of the time anomaly? If everything in the universe reverted to the state it was in on August 8 at 5:28 pm eastern time, why didn’t our minds revert? Sabrina, what can you tell us about that?

Sabrina: My theory, which you may be familiar with, Charlie, is that consciousness cannot be attributed entirely to brain function. Consciousness is not just a function of brains. It is far more fundamental than that. Earlier Bernie described several fields that are important in physics, such as the magnetic field and the theorized Higgs field. Another that everybody is familiar with is the gravitational field. My theory is that consciousness forms another field, a field which is just as real and fundamental as those other physical fields. In fact, the consciousness field may be even more fundamental to our reality than are the other fields.

Charlie: Do you mean that consciousness is somehow more real than gravity?

Sabrina: Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. David Bohm was a brilliant physicist who theorized about what he called the implicate order of the universe. He was studying the hard problem of how quantum mechanics could possibly work. One of the tenets of quantum theory is that you cannot make a definite statement about the state of any phenomenon before you measure it. You can measure the position of an electron, but you cannot say — even in principle — where the electron was before you measured it. By “even in principle,” I don’t mean that we just don’t know enough to form a good conclusion about the electron’s prior position. I mean that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about it’s position before you measure it. Another way of saying this is that before you measure the position of the electron, it does not have a position.

Charlie: But it has to be somewhere, hasn’t it?

Sabrina: No, and that’s the leap that gives most of us the willies. Quantum physicists learn to accept that bizarre conclusion, that before you measure some subatomic phenomenon, there is nothing to be said — even in principle — about the phenomenon you’re measuring. They speak instead of wave functions, of a series of equations that describe, among other things, the range of possible positions that the electron could take if you were to measure it. Before you measure the position of the electron, the electron has no position. All you can say is that its wave function assigns probabilities to all of the positions in which it might be measured. And, even more strangely, it is the act of measuring that forces the electron to “choose” a definite position. Now, I’m just anthropomorphising here. I don’t mean to suggest that the electron itself has consciousness and intention.

Charlie: That’s the weirdness that we non-scientists encounter when we hear about the quantum world. I can’t say I understand it.

Sabrina: Well, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman was once asked whether it was true that only a dozen people really understood quantum theory. Feynman replied, “Oh no, that’s totally untrue. Nobody understands quantum theory.

Charlie: Okay, so I feel a little better now about my own ignorance. But how does this relate to the time anomaly and the question of why our memories seem to have survived it?

Sabrina: Well, David Bohm wasn’t satisfied with the conclusion that we can’t know, even in principle, the state of a quantum phenomenon before we measure it. He developed a model of what is happening underneath the quantum probabilities, underneath the wave functions. He called this model the implicate order. His model is very sketchy, but it describes the possible fields that give rise to the wave functions, to the probabilities that are at the heart of quantum theory.

Charlie: Are you saying that Bohm’s implicate order includes some kind of consciousness field?

Sabrina: Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Now I want to be clear that Bohm himself never said that, at least not in so many words. So I don’t want to attribute this cockamamie idea to him. But I believe that a part of this implicate order is a consciousness field.

Charlie: So let me see if I understand you. Are you saying that consciousness exists outside of our minds?

Sabrina: Outside of our brains. Our minds may not be confined to what happens inside our skulls.

Deepra: The consciousness field is vibrations. You are a vibration. The universe is vibrations. Therefore you and the universe are one thing and cannot be separated. You only think you are separate, but that’s an illusion. Your mind has fooled you. But it’s just vibrating at its own unique frequency.

John: Shut up!

Bernie: Sabrina, hundreds if not thousands of neuroscientists are making breakthrough after breakthrough in how the brain works, and how it affects our thoughts and other mental activities. Are you saying they’re looking in the wrong place?

Sabrina: That’s a great question. No, the things that neuroscientsts are learning about the brain are enormously important. Enormously important. They are providing practical breakthroughs in treating brain disorders and associated mental dysfunctions. What they are not doing, and what I believe they can never do, is explain how brain functions, in and of themselves, give rise to subjective experience. There will always be a gap. No matter how much we know about how the brain works, we will always be left with that unanswerable question: How does this brain process give rise to conscious experience? I suspect, though I’m not certain, that the essential limitations in attributing conscious experience to mechanisms in the brain is inherent in the nature of the questions we’re asking. On the one hand, we want to know how our brains work. So we measure measurable entities and events and processes in the brain. So far so good. That’s the objective question. The data we’re gathering there are objective and repeatable, and if two people make the same measurement, they’ll get the same result. On the other hand, we’re also asking about conscious experience which is profoundly — and I believe inherently – subjective. One set of questions is objective and independent of who is asking the question. The other set of questions is inherently subjective, answerable only to the person who is having the experience. And I believe there will always be a gap between direct person experience and measurable third-party observations.

Charlie: So how does your theory address that?

Sabrina: Before I can explain that, I have to go back to quantum theory, and in particular one more bizarre outcome of quantum theory. I’ve already hinted at it, but now I want to focus on it. And that is: It is the act of observing a quantum phenomenon that forces it out of its wave function — out of its complex of possibilities — and into a particular observable state. Observing causes what is called the collapse of the wave function. All probabilities go to zero except one, the one that we observe.

Charlie: So it’s the act of observing that causes the phenomenon to… stop playing around, as it were…

Sabrina: That’s right.

Charlie: Now, there’s something about this that puzzles me –

Sabrina: That’s a good sign.

Charlie: What constitutes an observation?

Sabrina: That’s a central question that has puzzled scientists and philosphers since the formulation of quantum theory. What is an observation? What kind of thing can interact with the wave function in such a way as to cause its collapse? What is an observer?

Charlie: And what conclusions have science and philosophy come to?

Deepra: Vibrations. It’s all vibrations.

Sabrina: One famous interpretation — famous and controversial — is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which says that the collapse of the wave function requires a conscious observer. It is the act of observation by a conscious observer that forces a quantum entity to take a particular state.

Charlie: Well, that raises a whole host of questions. For example: Doesn’t that mean that the universe didn’t exist before there were conscious beings?

Sabrina: That’s right, that’s one of the puzzles of the Copenhagen Interpretation. And if the universe didn’t exist before there were conscious beings, then how did the conscious beings evolve?

Charlie: A cosmic chicken and egg problem.

Sabrina: That’s right. And as with the avian chicken and egg problem, the paradox and its resolution may be inherent in the question. The chicken and egg problem easily resolves itself if you can define both chicken and egg in non-contradictory ways. If by “egg” you mean an egg with a chicken in it, then clearly the egg came first. That first egg was laid by something that was not quite a chicken, but whose offspring was a chicken. If on the other hand “egg” means an egg laid by a chicken, then clearly the chicken came first. That chicken came from something that was not a chicken egg — that is, an egg that was almost but not quite a chicken egg. It was laid by a hen that was almost, but not quite, a chicken. If we can define chicken and egg in non-contradictory ways, the question of which came first is easy to answer. It’s only when we insist on defining chickens and eggs in contradictory ways — that all chickens come from eggs and all eggs come fron chickens — that the question becomes paradoxical. If we insist on asking the question in a paradoxical way, of course it will be a paradox.

Charlie: So what’s the paradox in the Copenhagen Interpretation?

Sabrina: Let me give you one more term: classical mechanics. This term refers to the kinds of phenomena that you and I observe in real life. We kick a ball, and the ball goes into motion. Planets orbit around stars. A magnet picks up metal filings and repels other like-charged magnets. These phenomena are all described well using classical physics, the kind you learned in high school. It’s only at subatomic scales that things get weird, that quantum effects come into play. So the question is, then, how do quantum probabilities turn into definite classical phenomena? So that’s what the Copenhagen Interpretation was about. How do quantum probabilities give rise to classical phenomena? On the one hand we insist that quantum phenomena collapse — that is, transform into definite classical phenomena — only by the act of conscious observation. On the other hand we also insist that consciousness arises only by the activity of brains, in particular by some set of classical processes occurring within brains, classical processes that we insist we will eventually discover. So consciousness arises from brains, which themselves arise from the collapse of quantum wave functions. But the quantum wave functions collapse only upon observation by some conscious entity. Yes, it’s the chicken and the egg.

Charlie: So how does your theory resolve the paradox, or if you prefer: the pair o’ chickens?

Sabrina: Remember how we resolved the chicken and egg paradox. We had to relax either our insistence that all chickens come from chicken eggs, or our insistence that all chicken eggs come from chickens. So with consciousness and quantum collapse, we have to abandon either our assumption that quantum collapse comes from consciousness, or our assumption that consciousness comes from classical — that is quantum collapsed — phemomena.

Charlie: And you reject the second assumption?

Sabrina: Yes. Experiment after experiment has demonstrated the bewilderingly weird truth that it’s conscious observation that causes the collapse of wave functions into classical — that is, observable — phenomena.

Charlie: You’re talking about the famous double slit experiment?

Sabrina: Yes. One aspect of the subatomic world is that subatomic particles act in some ways like particles and in some ways like waves. The double slit experiment showed that if you measure the wave properties of these subatomic entities, they act like waves. And if you do that, they do not act like particles. On the other hand, if you measure their particle-like properties, they act like particles and not like waves. And it’s impossible to measure both the wave properties and the particle properties. Measuring one kind of property causes the entity to behave, in a weirdly obliging way, the kinds of properties you’re measuring.

Charlie: So you reject the assumption that only consciousness causes wave collapse?

Sabrina: No, not at all. What I reject is the assumption that consciousness comes necessarily from classical objects. In particular, the assumption that consciousness comes only from brains.

Charlie: Where does it come from, then?

Deepra: Vibrations!

Sabrina: From another field that is as fundamental to the fabric of the universe as is the gravitational field or the magnetic field. Or the Higgs field, for that matter.

Charlie: I’m having a hard time comprehending what that might even mean. Do you mean that the universe is conscious?

Sabrina: Not in the way that you and I are conscious, but yes.

Charlie: Now, is this just a wild theory, or is there experimental data to back it up?

Sabrina: I admit, it’s mostly theory. And we’re still working on falsifiable predictions that could lead to experiments.

Charlie: What do you mean by a falsifiable prediction?

Sabrina: A prediction that, in principle at least, could be violated by real-world observations. Falsifiable predictions are the heart of science. Any prediction that could not be violated even in principle isn’t useful to science, because there’s no way to tell whether it’s true.

Charlie: So what’s an example of a falsifiable prediction from your theory of consciousness fields?

Sabrina: Well, as I said, we’re still at the theory stage. We haven’t yet been able to formulate a falsifiable prediction. But we’re hoping that this experience we’ve all gone through in the past few days will yield further insights. But notice this: If our memories persisted even though everything else we can observe in the universe reverted to an earlier state, then there must be some mechanism by which that happened. And as far as we can tell — we haven’t looked closely at this given the urgency of coping with the emergencies — our brains did revert to their earlier states.

Charlie: So let me see if I understand this. Our brains are the same but or minds are different?

Sabrina: That’s right. And if that’s true, at least to the limits of our ability to measure, then it must be true that consciousness does not arise entirely from our brains.

Charlie: It comes, instead, from this consciousness field that is somehow a fundamental part of the universe?

Sabrina: Yes, that’s right.

Charlie: How does this consciousness field relate to what you and I experience as thoughts and feelings?

Sabrina: We don’t know that yet. Again, it’s early days for this theory. Clearly, the brain has a central role in all of this. We speculate — and we realize that we’re speculating wildly here — that there are processes in the brain that interact in some way with the consciosness field. Roger Penrose has posited, for example, that the interesting microtubule structures in the brain — which have been observed, though their function is not known — are involved in some way in consciousness. I suspect that this mechanism, or some other mechanism like it, interacts with the fundamental, universal consciousness field.

Charlie: That still leaves the chicken and egg problem. If it’s only through brains that the classical world interacts with the consciousness field — that is, if it’s only brains that exhibit consciousness in the classical world — then how could the universe have existed before there were brains to observe it?

Sabrina: Ah, thank you, yes, that’s another element of my theory. It isn’t only through brains that the consciousness field interacts with quantum processes and causes collapse into classical phenomena. My theory is that the consciousness field interacts directly with quantum processes, and that through those interaction quantum wave functions collapse — become real, as it were.

Charlie: So brains are not necessary?

Sabrina: That’s right.

Charlie: Now, you’re touching on something very significant to the religious world. You’ve posited a consciousness that is involved in bringing reality into existence. Are you saying that this field — the consciousness field — is God?

Deepra: The universal God-mind.

Sabrina: No, not at all. In fact, I’m not positing that the field itself is conscious in the way you and I — and even my dog Muffie — are. I’m saying that this is the field from which our own consciousness arises, mediated by the kinds of brain mechanisms that are the subject of great study of late. Let me offer an analogy. You feel the pull of the earth on your body. That feeling is not, itself, the force of gravity, but only an effect of the force of gravity as it interacts with the mass of the earth and the mass of your body. Similarly, the consciousness you experience is not, itself, the conscioussness field, but only an effect of the consciousness field as it interacts with mechanisms in your brain.

Charlie: I think I understand, at least as much as I am likely to without delving into the underlying principles, and I’m probably not equipped to do that. So I’d like to leave it at that for now, and extend a wish that as you develop your theory and data for or against it you will come back and visit with us in the future.

Sabrina: I’ll be happy to, Charlie.

Charlie: We’re almost out of time for the hour. I apologize, Doctor Deepra, that we haven’t been able to include you more thoroughly in our conversation. But before we go, is there anything you can add, in a minute or so, to the topics we’ve been talking about tonight?

Deepra: Of course. Charlie, it’s as I have been saying. It’s all vibrations. The universe is nothing more — and nothing less — than a complex vibration. You and I are nothing more than vibrations. The reason the state of your consciousness survived, though the state of your body did not, is that you are not your body. You are pure vibration. And one day you and I and even Doctor Taurajo — probably — will vibrate in the same frequency as the rest of the universe. And at that time we will be enlightened.

Charlie: Anything about the time anomaly?

Deepra: Time is an illusion. There is no time.

Charlie: Well there you have it. I’d like to thank my guests, Doctor Bernard Cormier of the Eurorpen Organization for Nuclear Research, Doctor Johannes Taurajo of the Center for Responsibility in High-Energy Physics Research, Distinguished Professor of Consciousness Philosophy Doctor Sabrina Wheeler of Stanford University, and finally Doctor Chopak Deepra, founder and Director of Enlightenment at the Deepra Center for New Consciousness in San Augustin, California. Thank you all for coming.

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November 18, 2007 at 12:29 am — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Ken Lessinger squinted at his computer monitor. He leaned forward, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The curves on his screen showed the energy levels of the particles detected by the Large Hadron Collider’s detectors at 21:28:08 UTC, August 8, 2008. In particular, it showed the data from five microseconds before to five microseconds after brief life of the first unambiguous detection of a Higgs Boson.

But the signature Ken was looking at now was different. When he had studied the data earlier, before the time anomaly, it had clearly showed the four neutrinos into which the Higgs had ultimately decayed. And to the great delight of thousands of particle physicists at CERN, those four resulting “final state” neutrinos had been muons.

The Higgs itself was, of course, undetectable, as were some of the intermediate products in the decay chain between the Higgs and the mons. Hundreds of technicians had spent the next 29 hours 11 minutes scratching their heads and trying to discern the exact decay chain that had led to the muon quartet. Had a single Higgs emerged and decayed into a pair of undetectable W bosons, each of which had then decayed into a pair of muons? If so, that would set an upper bound on the mass of the Higgs, and open the door for scores of more precise experiments and observations over the coming months.

And if the muons turned out to be a pair of muons and a pair of anti-muons, that would indicate that the Higgs discovery was even more momentous than anticipated. It would mean that they had observed not a single Higgs boson, but a much rarer event, the production of a pair of doubly-charged Higgses. CERN’s chief statistician Jackie Andros had pegged the likelihood of a pair of doubly-charged Higgs bosons at once chance in about one trillion scatterings of protons and antiprotons. One in a trillion, and maybe it had happened on the first try.

The possibility sent an electric charge through CERN. A doubly-charged Higgs boson would violate some of the fundamental rules of the Standard Model that summarized all current knowledge of particle physics. A violation of that magnitude all but guaranteed years of new discoveries and new theories for hundreds or thousands of experimental particle physicists.

Twenty nine hours eleven minutes later, at which instant the theories were still flying and the bets were still unsettled, time had looped back on itself. One second it was 02:39:11 UTC, Sunday, August 10, 2008, and the next it was, inexplicably, 21:28:08 UTC, August 8, 2008, the exact instant, down to the nanosecond, at which the Higgs, or pair of Higgses, had begin their extremely brief existence.

Ken had found himself suddenly awake and suddenly on the cot in his office, at which he had lain for a brief nap shortly after 9 o’clock on Friday night. After Ken threw up, after he regained his bearings, after he realized that the moment to which time had reverted could not be a coincidence, he had turned his computer on and started the software he used to analyze the particle detection data.

And his mind began to spin.

Ken Lessinger picked up the phone and dialed.

On the other end of the line, in an office in a building three hundred yards away, his research partner Nola Uldritch answered the phone.

“Nola, you’d better come over here. Something’s happened.”

“No, shit, Sherlock.”

“No, not the time anomaly. Something else. And it may be just as big.”

“Ken, can it wait? We have people passed out from shock over here.”

“Is there someone attending to them?”

“Of course.”

“Then get over here. Something’s wrong with the data.”

“What do you mean, wrong?”

“I need to show you. Are you coming or not?”

“I’ll be there in three minutes,” Nola said.

Ken checked the data before and after the Higgs event. The data before and after was, as far as he could tell, as he remembered it. But that didn’t mean anything. He had spent the last day and a quarter focusing intently on the Higgs signature, and hadn’t paid much attention to the earlier or later data.

He checked the Higgs data again. The muon signatures were gone, and yet –

From the doorway, Nola said, “What’s so important?”

“Look at this,” Ken said, and pointed at his screen.

Nola leaned over the desk and looked at Ken’s screen. “What’s this?”

“That’s the Higgs signature.”

“No it isn’t. Where are the muons?”

“They’re gone.”

Nola looked at Ken quizzically. “What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean what people usually mean when they say ‘gone’. I mean the muons aren’t there any more.”

“The data got erased?”

“No, look,” Ken said, an pointed to an area of his sceen, an irregular, wobbly horizontal white line. “There’s data there. That’s what the detectors were picking up. So they were operating normally.”

“Then where are the muon signatures?”

“They’re gone.”

“How could they be gone? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Right. And here’s what’s worse.” Ken scrolled the display to the right, showing the next few microseconds after where the Higgs event had been. “The bloom of fermions is still there, right where it was. Right where you’d expect it if –”

“That’s crazy. If there were no muons to decay into fermions, where did the fermions come from?”

“That’s exactly what I was wondering.”

Nola said, “Get out of the way.” She sat down in Ken’s chair and grabbed the mouse. She clicked several settings. The display zoomed in on the fermion bloom and rotated to show a dozen or so peaks stacked one behind the other. She changed several more settings. Two of the peaks changed from white to red; two others from white to blue; and a third from white to green. The other peaks remained white.

“Jesus,” Ken said.

Nola said, “I don’t think it was like that. Earlier those were just the usual muon decay signatures, electron plus electron-antineutrino plus muon-neutrino. All of them.”

“How did you color them?”

“White for electrons, red for hard protons, blue for positrons, green for neutrinos.”

“That can’t be.”

“And yet, there it is.”

“But the Standard Model forbids this.”

“Yeah, well observation trumps theory.”

Ken scratched his head. “But we can’t trust the data, can we? I mean, where are the muons that these fermions came from? Clearly the data is wrong.”

“Awfully coincidental, the data going wrong at that exact instant, wouldn’t you say?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” said Nola, “Suppose that the data is right. Suppose this is what the detectors picked up.”

“Okay, we get fermions all the time. But not that pattern. Are you saying that that exact fermion signature just happened to show up at the exact instant where we would expect it if a Higgs had appeared? That’s a little hard to swallow.”

“So it seems we have a choice of coincidences. Either the data chose that precise moment to go wrong, or something beyond our experience made muons disappear.”

“Bah,” Ken said. “You know I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“So what’s your theory?”

“I don’t have one. But this is all related somehow. The Higgs, the time anomaly, the missing muons — hey, The Case of the Missing Muons, that would make a good Holmes story — the forbidden fermion clusters. It all has to be related somehow, doesn’t it?”

“I think so, yes. Now we just have to find how it all fits together.”

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November 18, 2007 at 12:28 am — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Okay, I think that’s the last of my character interviews. For now, anyway.

Q. Hey, Zoe. What’s up with you?

A. I’m rethinking my involvement with this particular fatal attraction.

Q. How did you get yourself into this predicament?

A. She was there and she was interested.

Q. Is that all it takes?

A. And she was hot.

Q. With criteria like that, you’re bound to have a disaster like this sooner or later.

A. Yes, apparently so.

Q. What are you doing in my story?

A. I’m the other guy, the guy that gives the jealous guy someone to be jealous of.

Q. Is that all? You sound like a prop.

A. With a name like Zombie Goat, what do you expect? I’m someone that someone can kill on the first page fo the novel. I’m a prop.

Q. Okay. What else would you like to be?

A. I’d like to be the guy who lives happily ever after.

Q. Oh, no, I don’t think that’s going to happen. What else?

A. I’d like Faith’s crazy husband to stop killing me.

Q. Okay. What else?

A. I think I’d like to slip quietly out of this relationship.

Q. You’re one of those “gone in the morning” hit and run guys?

A. I’m a temporary distraction.

Q. From what?

A. From the loneliness of married life. Do you know anyone who’s married who isn’t lonely?

Q. Depends what you mean by lonely, I guess. I’d say that married people are no more or less lonely than anyone else.

A. So you think I’m lonely?

Q. You’re having an affair with a married woman twice your age. That’s not the mark of a man who is satisfied with his relationships in life.

A. Well if she were the only one, you’d have a point.

Q. If she isn’t the only one, that makes my point even more strongly.

A. I can be with a woman any time I want. You call that lonely?

Q. Yeah, that’s how it seems to me. You’re a cliche. You’re with lots of women so that you never have to notice that you’re not ever really with any of them.

A. You think too much. I’m enjoying my life. Can you say the same thing?

Q. Actually, yeah, I can.

A. Only because you’ve given up on your dreams.

Q. What are your dreams?

A. You haven’t been listening. I’m *living* my dream right now.

Q. Different women every night?

A. Didn’t you ever want that?

Q. Nah. I couldn’t handle the emotional turmoil.

A. Yeah, you get all emotionally involved. It’s a trap.

Q. Well, I guess we choose our traps, eh? Are you happy with the trap you’ve chosen?

A. What the hell are you talking about? I’m as free as I want to be.

Q. And you want to be with a different woman every night?

A. Of course!

Q. Okay, I don’t think there’s much I can do for you. Not at the moment, at least.

A. Well, okay then.

Q. But you’re still a cliche. I’m not happy about that.

A. Well, cliches are cliches because they’re true. So maybe you can just leave it at that.

Q. Your’e the first character who hasn’t become more interesting during the interview.

A. Yeah, cliches are like that.

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November 18, 2007 at 12:26 am — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Q. Hi Frank. What’s your story?

A. Feeding the family, that’s my story.

Q. What else?

A. That’s pretty much it. Farming is a full time job. I don’t take a lot of time out for other stuff.

Q. So is that your entire identity? Farmer?

A. No. Also father. Also husband. Also just regular guy. I don’t think there’s much story in me.

Q. Why did you hit Amy?

A. I lost it. We almost lost Zack, and when I found out Amy had been drinking, I just lost it. I went into a kind of trance. You can’t fucking do that. You can’t relax when your only two kids — who can’t swim, by the way — are playing in a pond. Whatever else might be going on in your life, you *have* to protect your kids. There’s no excuse for what she did. Drinking slows your reaction time, and you can’t do that when your kids are depending on you like that.

Q. So you blame Amy for what happened?

A. Hell, yeah. Don’t you?

Q. And how about Amy’s teeth?

A. Fuck. That was me. That was me losing control. There’s no excuse for that, either.

Q. So family is important to you?

A. Of course.

Q. What’s your role in the family?

A. To feed them.

Q. Is that all?

A. Well that’s important, isn’t it? If they aren’t eating, not much else is important.

Q. What if you didn’t have to feed them?

A. What do you mean? Who’s going to feed them?

Q. Just imagine it. A little thought experiment. If you didn’t have to feed your kids, what would you do?

A. That depends. Are they getting fed?

Q. Let’s say that they have everything they need to survive, and also enough to be comfortable. The main idea is that they don’t need you feed them.

A. That’s interesting. That’s a tough one.

Q. There must be more to family than that for you.

A. Well, sure. You have to teach them how to get along in the world. The value of hard work.

Q. Okay. What else is family about for you?

A. You keep asking me that. What are you getting at?

Q. It sounds as if you see family as an obligation.

A. Well, yes, but more a responsibility. I chose this life, this family. It’s not as if anybody is imposing any obligations on me. I’m responsible because I chose to take responsibility.

Q. What about benefits? What do you get from the family?

A. I get meaning for my life. What’s more important than raising a family, raising kids to be decent people in the world? There are a lot of jerks out there. We could use a few more decent folks.

Q. What do you mean by decent?

A. I mean they go about their business, they leave other people to their own ideas, they work, they make something of themselves. They do something of value. Like that.

Q. So you represent responsibility, I guess.

A. Sure, I can accept that.

Q. What about other responsibilities to your family? Like companionship and emotional support?

A. That’s not easy for me.

Q. What makes it hard?

A. The farm takes up most of my time. And like I said, you have to prioritize. If the kids don’t eat, companionship doesn’t matter.

Q. What about involvement in their lives?

A. I’m with them when I can be. You know that.

Q. I think you’ve chosen a lifestyle that limits your availability. And you’ve done it on purpose, even if only unconsciously.

A. That’s an interesting theory.

Q. What’s interesting about it.

A. Well, what reason would I have for doing that?

Q. If you’re unable to be available for them emotionally and mentally, you might design a life for yourself that gives you an excuse.

A. So I’m lying to myself, is that it?

Q. Probably. How does that fit for you?

A. Probably better than I want to admit.

Q. So what would happen if you had more time to be with them emotionally and mentally?

A. More fantasy games?

Q. Yeah. What if?

A. That’s a scary thought.

Q. Scary in what way?

A. If I can’t give them companionship, and they don’t need what I *do* offer, then why would they keep me around?

Q. Let me turn that around: Why would you *want* them to keep you around?

A. What? This is my *family*, dammit. They’re all I have. What kind of question is that?

Q. I’m trying to figure out what your family means to you beyond a responsibility that gives your life meaning.

A. Jesus. You want to take away the one thing that gives my life meaning?

Q. I’m afraid so. Then what? What do you fill that void with?

A. You know what occurs to me? I’m afraid that I can’t have what I want from my family. If I don’t provide for them, there’s no reason for them to stay with me.

Q. Do you really believe that? That the only reason they love you is for your ability to provide for them?

A. Fuck. Fuck you and your questions. But, no, thank you. You’re right, that’s a pretty cynical view I have of my own family, that they need me only as long as I provide for them.

Q. I want to push this idea again: What if they didn’t *need* you at all?

A. That’s a scary fucking thought. I don’t want to think about that at all.

Q. Is there nothing else of value that you contribute to the family?

A. Ah, I see what you’re getting at. Sure. I’m a good man. I’m a good role model. Even if I’m don’t have to provide for *them*, they can see how I do something of value in the world, how I contribute. That’s an important thing for them to see, an important possibility.

Q. And what do you contribute in the world?

A. Milk. I feed people.

Q. There’s that role again.

A. Well, I like that role. It’s steady. It’s necessary. People appreciate what I do. I make a difference. I help keep the wheels of the world turning. Grease the wheels, you know?

Q. And what if people didn’t need that for a while?

A. (laughs) Okay, you’re going to take that away from me, too? All right. I’d find some other way to contribute. Everybody needs something. And most people need similar things. If they don’t need to eat, they’ll still need something I can offer.

Q. Companionship and emotional support?

A. I don’t know about that. There’s probably something else — I was going to say something more basic — but there’s probably some other basic thing they’ll need that I can provide.

Q. Let’s change topics for a while.

A. Good idea.

Q. How are things with Amy?

A. Strained. Obviously. I mean, I wasn’t trying to hit *her*, I was just trying to knock the fucking drink out of her hand. But still, you don’t do something like that if everything is hunky dory.

Q. Sounds like you have some regret over that.

A. Of course. I wasn’t thinking at that moment. Violence doesn’t solve anything. And Amy doesn’t deserve that, either. She’s just going through something big, something I can’t tap into. I wish she wouldn’t drink to deal with it, though. That causes more problems than it solves.

Q. A while ago you said there was no excuse.

A. Yeah, well. Something’s going on with her. She seems pretty darned unhappy here.

Q. Here?

A. On the farm. I’m not sure this is what she wanted for herself.

Q. So you have to provide in order to keep her here?

A. Something like that.

Q. There’s an obvious answer to all of this.

A. I know, I know. But what if I can’t give her the emotional support she needs? Then what?

Q. Well, that’s *her* choice, not yours.

A. Jesus, you’re a hardass.

Q. Yep. You’re providing for her and the kids so she’ll stay with you even though you aren’t able to give her what she really wants. Or maybe you just aren’t willing to try. Does that about cover it?

A. (silence)

Q. Okay, then… What else do you want me to know about you? What else will help to make this a good story?

A. Well, I’m not a bad guy. No, scratch that. I’m a good man. I don’t know how to give Amy what she really needs from me right now, but I’m a good man. I’m coping with my limitations poorly — using the farm to cover up my weaknesses — but I’m a good man.

Q. I can see that.

A. Well, good.

Q. Are there any other questions I should be asking you?

A. Yeah, ask me what I want.

Q. Okay, what do you want?

A. I want a happy family. Same as Amy, I suppose.

Q. Well, a happy family would include a happy Frank. So what would make *you* happy?

A. To know that I’m wanted.

Q. Are you willing to take a risk to find out whether you’re wanted?

A. I have a hunch you’re not going to give me a choice.

Q. Probably right. So what do you think would make your family happy? What can you contribute to that?

A. You know, I’ve lost track of that. That can’t be good. I guess I’ll have to ask. Or maybe just listen when they tell me.

Q. Okay, but don’t become Mister Understanding all at once. We have to draw this subplot out for a while.

A. Yeah, whatever. That’s your problem.

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November 15, 2007 at 10:45 pm — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Q. Hi, Faith. Tell me about yourself.

A. I’m dead.

Q. Okay, tell me how things were before you were dead.

A. Things were pretty good right up until I was dead.

Q. Getting it on with Zoe?

A. Yes. That boy is super hot.

Q. You like younger men?

A. At the moment. Maturity is overrated. This kid is… attentive.

Q. And you weren’t getting that from Dan?

A. Not lately. I haven’t been getting much of anything from Dan. Nothing except growls mostly, punctuated by yelling now and then.

Q. What did you want from Dan?

A. The usual stuff.

Q. What’s the usual stuff for you?

A. Raise some kids. Have a family. Make a life. That kind of stuff.

Q. So it wasn’t turning out the way you wanted? There’s a lot of that going around in this story.

A. Oh, don’t compare me to that sad sack Amy. That chick has no spine. And what does she want out of life? She wants to be a waitress! Good grief, she can’t even make that happen.

Q. What do you want out of life?

A. I want spark and zing. I want to feel alive. I want a buzz. Excitement.

Q. Like cheating on your husband?

A. I’m not sure it’s cheating if he doesn’t want what I’m giving away elsewhere.

Q. But is that part of why you’re diddling Zoe? Because of the excitement of cheating?

A. It does add to the appeal. But mostly the boy is good at what he does.

Q. You keep calling him a boy. What’s up with that?

A. Have you taken a good look at him? Not a wrinkle or sag anywhere on that gorgeous body.

Q. So he’s young, hot, and good in bed. And there’s the excitement of cheating, the danger of it. Is there anything else about him that appeals to you?

A. He’s available.

Q. It sounds as if this is mostly just a sex thing.

A. Well, yeah, that’s because it’s mostly just a sex thing.

Q. Does Zoe agree about that?

A. (pause) You ask a lot of questions.

Q. Yes, I’m trying to interview you here, to get to know you. And you’re avoiding that question. So Zoe thinks this is something more than just sex?

A. He’s a kid, what does he know? He’s broken plenty of hearts in his young career. I’m sure he can take it.

Q. Sounds as if you don’t care much about how this affects him. And it sounds as if you’re trying to justify what you’re doing. “He’s young.”

A. Didn’t you ever get your heart broken? You got over it.

Q. There it is again. More justifying.

A. I’m having a good time. Anything wrong with that?

Q. That depends on who else is involved and who’s getting hurt.

A. Well, he knows I’m married. He’s no saint, either.

Q. You’re full of rationalizations.

A. And you’re full of judgment.

Q. Probably so. I do have to make a moral judgment out of you, for the story.

A. So what’s the moral?

Q. I don’t know yet. What do you need to learn?

A. How the hell would I know? If I knew that — if you knew that — you wouldn’t need to write the story.

Q. Good point. So I have to force you somehow to see the effects of what you’re doing.

A. Well, that won’t be too hard. I knew what I’m doing. I just don’t care.

Q. I don’t believe you.

A. (silence)

Q. So, how much of the excitement here is about the danger? I mean, you know how controlling Dan can be. And how vindictive. You must know that, and you must know that you’re putting yourself in harm’s way.

A. In the end, Dan doesn’t have the spine to do anything about it. He doesn’t want to lose his house and his money.

Q. Well, divorce isn’t the only danger here.

A. Yeah, I guess I can see that now. Who knew Dan had it in him? He must really care after all. But it’s a bit too late, and his way of showing it isn’t the most romantic.

Q. Hey, he shot Zoe in the nads, didn’t he?

A. Yeah, that showed some flair. Maybe I underestimated the poor sap.

Q. So was all this a cry for attention? You just wanted to get Dan’s attention?

A. No, I wanted some excitement. In particular, I wanted some steamy sex. If I get attention from that, I’ll take it. But that’s the icing on the cake.

Q. What do you want from Dan now?

A. I want him to stop shooting me.

Q. And Zoe?

A. Sure, that, too.

Q. What are you going to do to get him to stop shooting you? Barricading the door didn’t seem to help.

A. I don’t know. Jumping out the window naked doesn’t seem like a good idea. Maybe if Zoe gets a spine he can help out. Did you see him duck behind the bed? Twice?

Q. You’ve talked about three people now who have no spine. It sounds as if standing up for yourself is important.

A. Well who else is going to? You have to stand up for yourself. Jesus, what kind of wimp are you?

Q. You like strong men?

A. I’m with Dan, aren’t I?

Q. And with Zoe.

A. Zoe’s a wuss.

Q. A minute ago he was a hot stud.

A. That was before the bullets started flying.

Q. So why haven’t you stood up for yourself with Dan? Demanded what you deserve in a marriage?

A. At some point you know you got a turnip. You can demand all you want, but at some point, you gotta face up to reality. Dan’s just not enough.

Q. Not keeping you excited?

A. Not even trying any more. He used to. Holy shit, did he used to.

Q. Like how?

A. Just use your imagination.

Q. You mean just sexually?

A. No. Sexually, sure, but more than that. That won’t keep me interested for long. Do you know he took me skydiving once? That’s a fucking panic. I screamed all the way down. It was great.

Q. So… anything for a buzz?

A. A buzz of excitement. No drugs. Drugs kill the buzz.

Q. Alcohol?

A. Who needs it?

Q. All right, I get it. Excitement is your thing. Is there a limit?

A. Probably. I’ll let you know if I find it. (pause) Getting killed slowed me down a little. But, oddly enough, not that much.

Q. I mean, do you ever limit yourself? Are there things you want more than excitement?

A. Well, I gotta eat. I can’t eat every meal while skydiving.

Q. What else is there in your life? And don’t give me that “what else is there” crap. What else besides the buzz?

A. I like to take it easy, too. I like a nice cozy place to relax.

Q. What do you mean by cozy?

A. Like our house. Have you been there? It’s quite nice.

Q. Sadly, no, I haven’t been there. What’s it like?

A. It’s perfect. Enormous leather couches, a kitchen to die for, a master bedroom the size of Iowa. It’s really something. You should come.

Q. So… luxury?

A. Of course. Why settle for less than the best?

Q. And yet you drive a Ford Fusion.

A. You’re going to have to change that in the next draft. It was a nice metaphor, a nice symbol, but really, Dale, it ain’t me.

Q. All right, so you’re into excitement, and you like to relax in between full-out buzz modes. And you like luxury. Here’s a thought. Is luxury about how it looks and feels, or about status?

A. I don’t care about status. That’s for other people to worry about. I don’t want to keep up with the Joneses. I want to be the Joneses that everybody else is keeping up with.

Q. That sounds like status to me.

A. Well, I don’t mean it that way. I just want the frills of life. If everybody else is envious, that’s their problem. Three hundred dollar shoes really are so much nicer than 40 dollar shoes. We can afford it, so why not? Status doesn’t matter, trust me. In the end, you’re dead anyway, and status doesn’t buy you anything then except a nicer box. So why not enjoy life while you can?

Q. Okay: Excitement, relaxation, luxury. The finer things life has to offer. Let me ask you something else. What are you doing in my story?

A. I’m giving Dan a foil, someone he can work against. I’m one of his opponents. Or maybe an ally in the end, who knows. And while I’m at it, I can give you plenty of conflict with Goat Boy if you want it. Turns out he’s not all that interesting when the lights go on. And he sure ain’t no hero.

Q. So that’s your main role, to stand in opposition to Dan, and secondarily in opposition to Zoe. Is there anything you want for yourself?

A. Yeah, don’t make me one-dimensional.

Q. I mean within the story. What do you want for yourself?

A. I think I want to get out of this alive. The time loop thing is… I don’t know, a pain in the ass. I mean, I’m going to keep waking up with Goat Boy’s dick in me. Suddenly I’m not all that interested in that.

Q. That should be interesting.

A. And I’d like to find a way to keep Dan from killing me again. I guess what I want is to get out of bed, get dressed, and get the frock out of there. And do what, I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Q. Well, I got news for you, sweetie, you get lots of tries to figure it out. The time loop is going to go on for a long, long time.

A. Oh, you’re a real asshole, aren’t you?

Q. I hope so. Anything else you want me to know about you?

A. No, I think you have enough.

Q. Are there any other questions I should be asking you?

A. No, I don’t think so. Just don’t make me look like a total shit heel, okay?

Q. We’ll see.

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November 14, 2007 at 11:10 pm — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Q. Hi, Amy. Tell me about yourself.

A. You picked a lousy time to talk.

Q. I have it on good authority that you don’t have much else to do right now.

A. Urgh. What do you want to know about me?

Q. First, just tell me what you want me to know about you. What you want readers to know about you.

A. You made me look like a drunk. That’s not me. It’s a temporary thing. Just a rough patch, you know?

Q. Rough? What’s going on?

A. Frank has all but abandoned us. I mean, where’s he going to go? He works on the farm, but somehow he’s always gone. I don’t mean physically. He’s always here, somewhere, and not all that hard to find if you don’t mind scouting around the farm. But he’s not really here, you know?

Q. Just you and the boys.

A. Sure. And they’re growing up, doing their own things. Boy things.

Q. You sound lonely.

A. (pauses) Yeah. I’m surrounded by men who love me, and I’m lonely.

Q. What do you mean?

A. I mean why can’t I be happy?

Q. I’m not following you. Your boys are off on their own, as far as boys their age can be. Your husband is emotionally unavailable. That sounds pretty lonely.

A. Yeah, but still. I’m not locked in cage here or anything. Why don’t I just go out and make some friends?

Q. Okay. Why don’t you?

A. All of my friends are off running their own lives. I haven’t seen my best friend Jill in nearly a year. We took the kids out together last Halloween, and I haven’t seen her since. We talk on the phone now and then, but that’s as far as it goes. She’s got her own life.

Q. Maybe she thinks the same thing about you. Maybe she’d like to be with you, but figures you’re busy with the two kids and a farm.

A. I don’t know about that.

Q. You’re sounding kind of like a victim here, but you’re not really blaming anyone. You’re a bit of a puzzle.

A. So maybe you can solve me.

Q. Do you feel like a victim?

A. Yeah, in a way. But I’m a victim of myself. Like I said, nobody is holding me back, but I sit around and pout, waiting for someone to come and rescue me. And my knight is covered in cowshit.

Q. Do you want Frank to rescue you?

A. No, he did that once. It would be nice, but he’s not really the courtly type. But it would be nice.

Q. I’m getting mixed messages here. Do you want that or don’t you?

A. Well, sure I want that. I’d love to be swept off my feet again. Wouldn’t you? But I can’t expect that. Frank isn’t all that handy with a broom.

Q. There’s always–

A. Oh, don’t even go there. Whatever doldrums we’re going through, I’m a good wife. I’m Frank’s wife and he’s my husband. I’m not going to cheat on him just because I’m a little lonely.

Q. Do you think–

A. No I don’t. Frank loves me.

Q. It will be interesting to hear what Frank has to say about that.

A. (glares) What the hell do you want from me? I thought you wanted to know about me, and here you are stirring up shit.

Q. Okay. Tell me something else about you, then.

A. I was happy. How’s that? I was happy for a long time. When the boys were born. When Frank and I met. I was happy. But it’s slipping away, little by little. Life settles into some sort of comforting routine, but it’s deadening. We take each other for granted. We see only each other’s faults instead of the beauty that attracted us. We get used to the good stuff, and stay on guard for the bad stuff. How pathetic is that? See what I mean? That’s not a good way to be happy. And it isn’t Frank doing it. It’s me. I take him for granted, he takes me for granted, we both take the kids for granted. And we only notice when we aren’t getting what we want.

Q. So why not do something about that?

A. Like what?

Q. Notice something good. Comment on it.

A. I guess. (pauses)

Q. You seem pensive.

A. I don’t think this is what I signed up for. This routine.

Q. There’s a lot of that going around. Ray Andollo commented on that, too.

A. But Ray is doing something about it, isn’t he? He puts himself out there and makes something happen. He’s taking life into his own hands.

Q. Is that something you want to do?

A. I don’t know. I’ve forgotten what I wanted. I’ve been in this groove so long I’ve forgotten what the road looked like.

Q. Is that true? I get the sense that you know what you want somewhere down in side, but you aren’t willing to acknowledge it. It’s too discouraging to want something so badly and not be able to get it.

A. So what do you think I want?

Q. I have no idea. What do you think you want?

A. I just want to be free of here. I mean, it’s not as life is pressing down on me or anything. But it feels like the air is a little close. I can breathe it okay, but it’s stale. A little constricting.

Q. If you were free of here, what would you do?

A. I don’t know. Work in a restaurant or something.

Q. A restaurant?

A. Yeah. Does that surprise you? Did you think I wanted some grand thing, like to be the queen of everything?

Q. It does surprise me. I was thinking you wanted to do something artistic, like be a dancer maybe.

A. (laughs) Oh, right. Hey, maybe I’d be a hell of a dancer. I can move all right. But that doesn’t appeal to me at all. I don’t need all the attention on me. But I would like to do something worthwhile, something people appreciate.

Q. Raising kids?

A. Sure, that’s important. But lots of people work and raise kids. I can have meaning beyond just my kids. I mean, I love Zack and Jacob and all, but they don’t take all that much work, do they? They’re good kids. They’re going to do just fine. All I really have to do is keep them fed and give them a hug now and again. They’re really just raising themselves, and doing about as good a job as I would.

Q. So working in a restaurant. What’s important to you about that?

A. People appreciate it. I get to see the smiles on their faces. I’m good with people, and I like being with people. And that for sure wouldn’t be lonely. I’m here all alone most of the time. I wouldn’t mind being around people more. It just feels good. Do I need to justify it any more than that?

Q. No, it sounds nice.

A. What else do you want to know?

Q. What are you doing in my story? What do you represent?

A. I represent getting off my ass and doing something with my life. Wasn’t that obvious?

Q. Well, frankly no. I thought you were just a drunk. Although that surprised me when I wrote it.

A. Yes, you tarred me nicely with that brush.

Q. Okay, so you represent getting off your ass an doing something with your life. And not necessarily something world-shattering; just something worthwhile, something that matters to people. Something that people appreciate. Is that about right?

A. Right. So the question is: Will I do it or not? Will I wallow in my self-pity about the stale farm air, or will I get off my ass and do what I want with my own life?

Q. What do you think?

A. I think it’s going to take some doing. This story hasn’t started well for me. I’ve saved my son from drowning, had my teeth bashed in, then lost that same son while I panicked on the beach. Not a very happy start to things. That’s a lot to deal with. I might just drink some more.

Q. Is that what you want?

A. Not in the long run. But in the short run, how do I make the pain go away?

Q. Pain?

A. Loneliness, I mean. Drinking fixes that. And don’t go telling me it’s not good for me or anybody else in the long run. I know that. I’m not a drunk and you know it. You do know it, right?

Q. Yes, I guess I do.

A. So maybe let up on that. I know it gave you something to write about, something that would cause a nice conflict in chapter 2. But it’s not who I am. I’m lonely, I’m watching life pass me by, I’m not doing what I want to do even though it would be pretty darned simple to put it in motion. Let that be enough. Won’t that create enough drama for you?

Q. Maybe. That and coping with your son drowning.

A. That’s really not a big deal. You and I both know that that was because of the time shift. That’s not me, either. I saved him the first time, and I’ll do it again if I have to. And again and again. And you and I both know where that part of the story leads. I teach him to swim. End of drownings. Easy peasy. But that’s not the real story, not my real story. My real story is whether I will show up in my own life.

Q. And will you?

A. Hard to say. Let’s see how it goes.

Q. Is there anything else I should be asking you?

A. No. I think you have enough now to do something interesting with my story. (laughs) See? Now I’m leaving my life up to you! But I think there’s a story line there. I don’t know what it is, but something. Something good, maybe. Maybe a happy ending for me.

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November 14, 2007 at 9:38 pm — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

This interview was even more fun than the other two.  Dan pulled some serious attitude here, and kept turning the conversation back to me.  I like him!

Q. So, Dan, what are you doing in my story?

A. Duh! I’m the killer.

Q. There are lots of killers in lots of stories. What makes you worth writing about?

A. I have to do it over and over again.

Q. Why did you do it?

A. Because she was cheating on me. She betrayed me. You can’t let a woman get away with that.

Q. Why not?

A. Because then they’ll walk all over you.

Q. Have you been walked all over, Dan?

A. No, because I won’t let it happen.

Q. What makes you think women will walk all over you.

A. Because everybody will walk all over you if you give them half a chance. It’s not about women, it’s about people. People suck, and in particular, people will walk all over you every chance they get. Haven’t you read Looking Out for Number One?

Q. You mean the metaphor of the poker chips? They’ll tell you they don’t want your chips, then they’ll take them?

A. You got it, shiny boy.

Q. That’s a pretty cynical view of life.

A. Yeah, you’re a new age fluffball, all right. You think everybody’s all sweet and tender way down inside.

Q. Actually, for a new age fluffball, I’m pretty practical. But enough about me. I think cynical people secretly yearn for something to trust. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be cynical, they’d be accepting, or at least resigned.

A. Pop psych mumbo jumbo. The world sucks. That’s it.

Q. So how do you deal with that? If the world sucks, why not just kill yourself and be done with it?

A. Now who’s being cynical?

Q. Answer the question, Dan.

A. It’s a stupid question. Don’t I get to live, too?

Q. Sure. But you have a choice, don’t you? So if life sucks, why prolong it? Clearly you have the means to take a life, so why not your own?

A. You’re a fucking barrel of laughs. Here’s your answer: Life sucks, but it’s all I have. When you come right down to it, that’s all you got. Whether it sucks or not, there ain’t nothin’ else, is there?

Q. Now that sounds sad. It sounds as if you’re settling for the least rather than shooting for the most life has to offer.

A. Well, it’s my life. I’ll live it my own way, thank you very much.

Q. So nobody gets to tell you what to do, right? Even your creator?

A. Exactly. But I do invite you to try to make me do whatever fits your little story. That should be fun.

Q. I like your attitude, Dan.

A. Yeah, well you’re a wuss.

Q. I’m getting a picture of you now. You’re been hurt somehow, or seen someone hurt somehow, and you spend your time trying to keep the pain to a tolerable baseline.

A. And you have a need to know everything. Like that cop.

Q. What do you know about Ray?

A. He’s a cop. He thinks he’s smart, just because he was able to track me down. The first thing he does when he walks in the door is insult me. “You were an easy one,” he said. Well, I’ve been under some stress lately, as you can imagine. I admit that I’m not thinking clearly. But now guess what? I get to think about this as long as I want. I get to kill Faith—God is an iron, giving her a name like that—I get to kill her over and over. I get to watch her suffer. And if those brainiac cops catch me, I just get to do it again. They can arrest me, sure, but they can’t hold me, can they? When the time loop happens, I’m right back at the scene of the crime, ready to…

Q. Ready to what, Dan?

A. Ready to teach her a lesson, I guess. To show her that she can’t fuck around on me with some spanish goat boy. She can’t be capricious with my trust. Get it? Capricious? Goat boy?

Q. Yeah, yeah, you’re a smart one. But if you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?

A. Only dumbasses are happy. Take a look around you. Are you telling me that you can look the world straight in the eye and see it in all its fetid putridness and still smile at the end of the day? Are you blind, or what?

Q. It sounds, Dan, as if you’re letting the world push you around. On one hand, you say that ain’t nobody gonna push you around, and on the other hand you let the whole world push you around. It’s their fault you’re not happy. All you’re doing is observing.

A. I’m seeing reality, you moron. Are you telling me that you can be happy with the world such a fucking mess?

Q. I’m pretty happy. And when I’m not happy, I know that it isn’t the world making me unhappy; my unhappiness is my own response to the world.

A. Fucking new age fluffing fuckball, that’s what you are.

Q. Is that your jealousy talking, Dan?

A. No, it’s me thinking you’re a wild eyed fool.

Q. Well, now you’re becoming very interesting to me. I think I’ll be able to figure out ways to poke at you, at your weaknesses.

A. I’m all calluses. I got calluses on my soul. Poke all you want.

Q. You’re secretly hoping I won’t take you up on that.

A. Yeah, yeah. Bring it on, fuckball.

Q. So you killed Faith because she betrayed you, and ain’t nobody gonna get away with something like that.

A. Right.

Q. If it really didn’t matter to you, Dan, if you really believed that people suck, then you already knew she was a shit. So now that you find out that she’s a shit, what makes that such a big deal? I mean, if you already knew it, why not just tell her to fuck off?

A. What, and let her get away with it?

Q. What difference does it make if she gets away with it?

A. If she gets away with it once, she’d turn around and do it again.

Q. Do what again?

A. Fuck me over.

Q. How did she fuck you over?

A. What the hell? She cheated on me. You don’t think that’s fucking me over?

Q. Only if you trusted her not to.

A. Nice try. But I didn’t trust her. I knew she would fuck me over eventually.

Q. Why did you marry someone you knew would fuck you over?

A. Hey, don’t I deserve love, too? While I can get it, I mean? I mean, sure, she would fuck me over eventually. But in the meantime I get something to make life a little less miserable, don’t I? You said it yourself: Why do I keep going. Well, it’s for what little pleasures I can get here and there. Don’t you like women?

Q. Nice try. So you stayed with Faith for the little pleasures, and when she ultimately betrayed you (as you knew she would), you make her pay?

A. Now you got it. You’re not as dumb as I thought you were.

Q. So how did you come to believe that people are shit?

A. I have eyes. Don’t you ever watch the news? Did you ever try to negotiate with someone? Ever have to deal with a telemarketer? And, hey, you’re using me right now, aren’t you? I mean, you have what you need from this interrogation already, don’t you? The only reason you’re still talking to me is that you need your word count for the night. See? Even my creator treats me like shit. What kind of world are you creating here? You suck, just like everybody else.

Q. I think I have a challenge with you, Dan. The challenge is to redeem you.

A. Yes, because in your new age fuckball philosophy every behavior has a good intention, right? Well, here’s the good intention: I want to live my fucking life my own way. What’s to redeem? If you’re going to redeem me, first you have to judge me as morally wanting. So you see? You’re a fucking hypocrite. You don’t believe in judging, but you’re going to judge me anyway so you can redeem me.

Q. No, you don’t understand. I’m not going to redeem you in my eyes, I’m going to redeem you in yours.

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November 14, 2007 at 9:35 pm — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Q. Hi, Patty. Tell me about yourself.

A. I’m a cop. I arrest bad guys.

Q. That’s it? That’s all there is to you?

A. At the moment, yeah.

Q. Personal life not going so well?

A. Uh, no. I don’t want to talk about it.

Q. I’m going to break out the butter if you don’t start talking.

A. Fuck. Yeah, you’re the kind of guy I usually go for. Then I’m left all buttery, naked, and alone.

Q. Guys dump you?

A. Fuck, no. I dump them. (laughs) I need more in a guy than sweet cream butter. More than warm hands and butter, even.

Q. So tell me about a day on the job.

A. A bad guy does something stupid and we get the call. Then we gather the information to nail them to the wall. Not much to it, really.

Q. Seems kinda matter-of-fact.

A. We’re in the facts business. It’s the facts that burn the dumbasses. They have no idea how good we are at this.

Q. You’re good at it?

A. Oh, yeah. First, we’re smart. We know what we’re doing. Second, we’ve seen it all before. You can pretty much tell when you get the crime scene exactly what went down. You learn the signs and they just jump out at you. Hell, you could probably do it if you put your mind to it.

Q. Hey!

A. (laughs) No, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just saying that if you could see the few key facts, you’d piece them together pretty quickly. For example, this Roberge thing. Man and woman naked on the floor. His dick has been shot off. Doesn’t take much to figure that one out. And in her purse is her wedding ring. So that just shouts, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s funny how so few facts paint such a clear picture. So we check her wallet, look up her address, and we’ve got our prime suspect. And it turns out he never went back to work after lunch. And so it goes. The rest is overkill, which we gotta have sometimes to satisfy the jury. It’s one thing to solve the crime to our satisfaction. It’s another thing to make the case so fucking overwhelming that it’s beyond even an unreasonable doubt. We need that sometimes. Some of the defense lawyers are pretty fucking smart, so we have to make sure everything is just right. The evidence is exactly as we say, the chain of custody is crystal clear, and the picture we’re painting is about a billion pixels per square inch.

Q. So thoroughness is your thing?

A. One of them, sure. One thing you don’t want is some fuckwad walking because you congratulated yourself too early. You solve the case, and then you solve the trial. That’s a harder problem, but it’s not all that hard if you put your mind to it.

Q. So what drives you?

A. The last nail in the coffin. We don’t want these fuckers to ever, ever see the light of day. Nail it shut, then nail it shut again. Then one more time for good measure.

Q. Tell me: What are you doing in this story?

A. Catching Dan Roberge, and nailing his coffin shut.

Q. But isn’t that pretty easy? I mean, you said it yourself. He left so many obvious clues that it’s hardly a challenge.

A. Oh, I don’t mind if it’s not a challenge. But there’s a quirk here, isn’t there? I mean, the evidence of his first crime spres is gone, isn’t it? What do we do with that?

Q. Well, it seems as if it isn’t just the evidence that’s gone, but also the crime.

A. But he did it, didn’t he? Just because time undid it doesn’t mean he didn’t do the act. He planned it, he pulled the trigger, numerous times and in a particularly, uh, poignant way, and he ran off. Does he get away with that just because of some deus ex machina? No, no, no. You don’t get away with murder, period. Not on my watch. Not even God is going to get the guy off this one.

Q. Anything else I need to know about you for this story?

A. Probably, but I don’t know what. Maybe ask me later.

Q. What’s it like working with Ray?

A. Ray’s great. A little flighty, maybe, but is so fucking smart it makes my head swim. We’re a great team. I find the puzzle pieces, and he puts them together. Of course, both of us do both of those things, but he’s better at the big picture and I’m better at noticing small things.

Q. What do you mean flighty?

A. Well, that may have been the wrong word. I don’t mean he’s some Shirley MacLean or anything. But he always wants to get on to the next thing. He’s usually in a hurry to say we’re done, and I know we’re not. We’ve solved the case, yeah, but we haven’t solved the trial, you know? We’ve been burned once or twice on that, and I won’t let it happen again. It’s a struggle to keep Ray focused on the current case sometimes. He’s always looking for something shiny and new. In more ways than one.

Q. You mean women.

A. (looks over tops of glasses) Uh, duh.

Q. Tell me more about that.

A. I don’t think so. I don’t think so, no.

Q. Well, you brought it up.

A. And now I’m shutting it down. Are we done here?

Q. For now, I guess. One more thing. Is there anything else I should be asking you?

A. You should ask me about my flaws.

Q. Okay. What are your flaws?

A. I have bad taste in men.

Q. Yeah, I know from the last book.

A. Well, you did that to me, you bastard.

Q. What challenges do you have at work?

A. Nothing, really. I honestly don’t find it all that stressful. I know that if we just keep plugging we’ll get what we need. I mean, I don’t slack off or anything, but what’s the point of stressing out over it? Life’s too short. Just keep plugging, and let that be enough.

Q. But what if the bad guy gets off?

A. Yeah, that sucks. That sucks. But if the evidence isn’t enough, it isn’t enough. Here’s the thing: Af there’s evidence, I’ll find it. I’ll notice it and forge it into one of those coffin nails. If it’s there, I’m on it. But if it isn’t there, it isn’t there, you know? I’m not into making up shit. If the evidence is enough, it’s enough. If not, well, them’s the breaks, kiddo.

Q. Methinks the lady dost protest too much.

A. Yeah, well, we’re all entitled to our opinions.

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November 14, 2007 at 9:28 pm — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Q. Hey, Ray, tell me about yourself.

A. Okay. What do you want to know?

Q. What are you doing in this story? What’s your purpose here?

A. Well, I’m the hero, of course. My job is to catch that rascal Dan Roberge and put him behind bars where he belongs. I mean, I can understand jealousy and anger and all, but you gotta draw the line at homicide.

Q. So what makes your story worth writing? What’s the point?

A. Well, it’s going to be tricky with this time loop thing going on. Just as the guy was getting on the bus to come home, to come to justice, a frigging time loop erased all the evidence.

Q. Good thing he did the murders again, then. Fresh evidence for you.

A. Yeah, that’s true. But how am I going to prosecute that? Is that four murders, or two?

Q. So is that the big question? Whether it’s two murders or four? Seems to me if you prosecute the second two, that will be justice enough.

A. Yeah, yeah, I know. But something doesn’t seem right. I can’t put my finger on it.

Q. So justice is a big deal for you?

A. It’s everything. I mean, why else do this job? It’s a frigging slog. I know it looks glamorous on TV, but in real life it’s a lot of running around, a lot of scanning and rescanning teh same evidence, looking for some clue that you missed. And there’s no scriptwriter to do the job for you. You have to do it yourself. And then there’s the bureaucracy, the paperwork. The bonehead cops who step in the evidence or fumble the chain of custody. I tell you, it’s one frigging thing after another. And the only thing that makes it worthwhile is that every now and then we actually nab one of the bastards. They’re fucking scum. Every one of them.

Q. How did you become so passionate about justice? Were you always that way?

A. (laughs) No, not at all. I was an MP in the army. I served during Nam, but I never went into the field. I was stationed in Iowa. At first I was just a prison guard, but I had a knack for piecing together interesting puzzles, and crime investigations are all about solving puzzles, figuring out where the pieces fit.

Q. So you’re smarter than I’ve written you so far, at least in this book?

A. Yeah, sure. But there’s always a crime that beats you, that nags you. As a beat cop you can live with that, in a way. You hand it off to the detectives and go on to the next thing. You solve the puzzles you can, hand off the puzzles you can’t solve, and grab the next puzzle off the shelf. There’s always another one. It’s predictable in a way. After a while you get used to the solve rate. It becomes a numbers game. But there’s something deadening in that, too. It all starts to look the same. Yeah, something surprises you now and then, but even the surprises become a kind of pattern.

Q. Sounds like you want novelty, something new now and then.

A. (laughs) No, I want something new all the time. Like this fuck Dan Roberge. You know how many guys try to kill their cheating wives? Lots. Lots. And none of them spend more than twenty minutes figuring out how to do it. So they waltz in with a gun, catch their sweeties in flagrante delicto, shoot a bunch of times, and run. But they never plan their escape. It’s like they never thought about it until they see their life partner bleeding on the bed or the floor or in the car or wherever they did the deed. Then it’s “Oh, shit, I gotta get out of here.” They’ve been in a trance of jealousy (and boy, don’t I know that one) and haven’t thought clearly for weeks, if they’ve thought at all. I mean, what woman is worth the rest of your life in jail? But they didn’t think about that. They just wanted her dead. So now she’s dead, and what do you do? Uh, oh, didn’t plan that out. Dumbasses, every one.

Q. Sounds depressing.

A. Yeah, sort of. But I tell you what, being the last line of responsibility gets my juices flowing. Now that I’m a detective, I’m the guy that the beat cops hand the cases to. I’m the guy that figures out the last piece of the puzzle.

Q. So how does all of this relate to justice.

A. Simple: If justice is to be done, it’s up to me. I get the responsibility, and that’s what makes the slogging and bureaucracy worth it. And I get the pressure, which keeps my blood pumping, keeps me from retiring on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean. So that’s it. If I solve the puzzle, justice is done. (laughs) I am justice!

Q. What’s it like working with Patty?

A. Oh, Patty is great. Man, she can tease evidence out of… I don’t know, a place where it’s hard to tease the evidence out of. (laughs) Yeah, she can spot a nicked shell casing at a thousand yards.

Q. She speaks highly of you.

A. Yeah. We’re a good team. A really good team.

Q. In what way?

A. We complement each other. She sets ‘em up, I knocks ‘em down, you know? I’m always looking for that last piece of the puzzle, and she’s finding not just that piece, but six new pieces to a whole new puzzle. She has some kinda sixth sense for out-of-place details. She’ll offer up some little bit of something, and say, “What do you suppose this means?” And it’s always the frigging key to the whole thing. It’s always that last puzzle piece I was looking for.

Q. So she’s good with the details.

A. Yeah. (pauses) Too good, sometimes. I mean, every bit of evidence matters, of course. There are lawyers out there paying off judges and swindling juries, playing on their emotions and prejudices. That shit just gets my goat. And as angry as it makes me, it sends Patty ’round the bend. She’s frigging paranoid about it. She just won’t stop. Even when we have the case solved three times over, she comes up with some new piece of evidence and spins everything into a new light, explains the dumbass’s motives or opportunity or means just that little bit more clearly. But enough is enough, you know? After some point it’s time to move on.

Q. Sounds as if that frustrates you.

A. Well, not frustrates, exactly, but more… I don’t know. (pauses) Maybe frustrates, yeah.

Q. What challenges you most at work?

A. (laughs) The search for a smarter dumbass! It’s all in vain, I suspect.

Q. That’s it? The sameness of it all?

A. Yeah. I mean, justice matters, you know? In the end, that’s the point of all of this. But I just wish it weren’t so fucking repetitious.

Q. Is there anything about those twenty nine hours and eleven minutes that gives you pause? Anything that you did that you might come to regret? Or anything you chose not to do? Even anything that happened that you wish you could do over?

A. Not sure. I mean, I’m sure there’s something. That’s what’s going to give my storyline meaning, after all. But I don’t have a good idea for you yet. Let me sleep on it.

Q. Okay. One last question: What else should I be asking you?

A. Nothing I can think of. Maybe that’s something else to sleep on.

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November 14, 2007 at 7:06 pm — Many Happy Returns — Tags: manuscript

Homer Vulkovsky siad, “Where can I place a bet?”

The woman behind the glass wall said, “You can’t. Betting is suspended.”

“No, you can’t! I need to place a bet. For today. The Yankees against the Red Sox in New York. I want to bet on that.”

Homer really wanted to bet. If what his cousin Sniffy had said was true, then everything had gone back in time. And if everything went back in time, then he knew how the game would turn out. And if he knew how the game would turn out, he wanted to place a bet. It was a sure thing, and he needed a sure thing in his life.

“Like I said, we’re not taking bets now.”

“Why the hell not? I need to place this bet!”

“Kid, we ain’t taking bets. We’re still trying to figure out what to do with the bets we already got.”

“You don’t understand. I want to bet on the Red Sox.”

“Against the Yankees?” The woman smiled. “Let me guess. Seven to three in twelve innings?”

Homer said, “Uh, yeah, how did you know?”

“They played that game yesterday. We paid out already.”

“But the game is later today!”

The woman laughed. “Listen, kid, you trying to scam me? You think you can tell the future?”

Shit, Homer thought. Was it that obvious?

The woman said, “Hey, don’t feel bad. You ain’t the first idiot to try that.”

Homer tried to recover. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You think you know the final score of tonight’s game, because you watched it last night. Or you watched it later tonight. Or something like that.”

Homer was crestfallen. Apparently other people had already thought of his brilliant idea, and they had spoiled it for him.

“Well, I have news for you, pumpkin. The game has been cancelled.”

“What?” Homer said. “But it *can’t* be cancelled? I watched it on satellite TV. It happened. It can’t be cancelled.”

“Well, it’s cancelled,” the woman behind the glass said.

“How can that be?”

“I don’t know, kid. And in any case, we ain’t taking no bets right now.”

Homer turned and walked out.

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