Particle

 

by Christine Fischer Guy

published in Orca literary journal, spring/summer 2023

 

On the steps outside the main academy building, passing a pipe filled with aromatic herbs and discussing the beginning of the world, we hit upon ‘goddamn particle’ to describe the place of lack in our current theory. It was only an expression of frustration, no disrespect to the regime’s religion intended. Our theory about the matter of our universe was developing in the usual way, the result of hours of argument and competitive postulating. We were loud, but this was not unusual. The police would remind us to lower our voices.

But this time there was no warning. No siren wailed, no club was raised in signal. When the military bus pulled up, our conversation slowed but only briefly. We felt no threat. We were close to a resolution; we believed we’d almost cracked it. Then we were surrounded and everything went black.

Judging by the tender lumps on our heads, we concluded that clubs, not drugs, had been the cause of our new situation, packed into the small bus, facing each other, knees pushed together, hands tied behind our backs. Still we were not panicked. As young academics we’d been consumed in the fire of pursuit: of knowledge, of respectability, of eventual wisdom. We knew sacrifice was required, then and now; we were committed and sometimes arrogant but vowed never to become entitled. We would resist the comforts of success, however and whenever it came. We would stay true to the inquiries we were making. We would endure.

The new regime, whose place in our lives had been guaranteed by a persistent but mostly nonviolent campaign, continued to tend the buildings and gardens at the university. There was new paint on our doors and flowers under our windows, packages containing reams of paper, extra ink, and new lecture cloaks for winter. Considering the direction of our theories, we occasionally marveled at their generosity and tolerance. We suspected nothing.

Our captors were silent until we reached the edge of the sea. There would be no trial, the big one said. Our blasphemy, incontrovertibly proved in our writings, made us unwelcome inhabitants of the new city. We had crossed boundaries we hadn’t known existed.

We would have protested, tried to persuade, at last resort apologized, but our tongues were stopped with rags. Alcaeus slipped his elegant fingers out of the ropes and had begun to untie the knot at the back of his head when he was clubbed again. We dragged him with us to the other side of the raft so it would admit less sea water and watched the shore recede. It was a surprise how swiftly the current carried us out to sea. We knew that shore with the soles of our sandaled feet, and had often stood there thinking. Until it disappeared from view we were united in wordless purpose: to commit to memory its shapes and contours until we walked it again. The turn of events was unexpected but we were certain we could weather the regime’s displeasure, which could only be temporary. Surely the university could not survive long without us.

The August sun bore down on our bare heads without mercy and eventually we were forced to cover them with our heavy new cloaks, the only extra piece of clothing we were allowed to bring with us. The heat under them was stifling. Pindar, fair-haired and never of a stout constitution, collapsed twice. We revived him with handfuls of warm sea water, careful to keep our satchels dry; who knew how long the paper and ink would need to last? We used as little fresh water as we could from the five wineskins they gave us, one for each and one to spare, until our raft reached a new shore. The wine we also saved, knowing the night would drive us to seek solace in it.

 

*

We pace and curse and tell lewd jokes. We assemble a circle of logs suitable for discussion and commit only the best of our theories to paper. Owing to the lack of space, the relative poverty of our surroundings, and our distracting hunger, it is not always possible to recreate the intellectual focus of our days at the academy and nowhere to publish our theories, but so far we have been unwilling to give up on our work. We might have been delivered here against our will but we can make of this place and time what we want.

We build a little hut for sleep. We choose a spot near a robust oak sapling and take oaths committing ourselves to its health. Removed from our abstract familiars, we are clumsy with the hand work. For the seven nights until it is finished we slump into sleep around a fire pit we dug with our hands the first night after an argument fueled by too much wine. Only Horace was useful with any instrument but a pen, and he, having consumed considerably less wine, declined that late-night excavation; in the morning only his hands were unbloodied. His father had tried, unsuccessfully, to teach his son a trade, but we were thankful that he learned enough of wood and clay to coax this little shelter into existence. As the sun rises, we watch a small creature burrow into the overhead beam and etch a new spiral path. Dragonflies are a trick of morning light with their aimless yet urgent flight in and out the doorway.

Spider hurries along the windowsill and dreams of webs. We were like that. We were ideas and hypotheses and theories. Our gradual passage from threadbare seekers to cloaked lecturers escaped our notice. As young academics, we might not have recognized the people we were at the time of exile: we smoked nightly, able to afford a constant supply of the best herbs; we ate meat every night at meals not prepared by our own hands. We expounded and lectured and published, never once thinking that what we had might be temporary. We believed would never reach the end of the questions.

We braid our lengthening beards and hair, but except for Alcaeus we stop taking shifts at the shore to gaze at nothing. We take turns collecting water for the oak sapling outside our door instead. We trim it of dead branches and pull off curled leaves. Under our watchful eyes it should grow and thrive and eventually shelter us; our bright optimism hides the first wavering of our conviction that our heads will find their own pillows at the university before the snow falls. Alcaeus stands apart and refuses to lift a finger in any of these endeavors. A boat will appear on the horizon to take us home. He alone is still certain of that.

‘Wet your lungs with wine, now the dogstar shows,’ he says, ‘for summertime is harsh, and heat makes all things thirst.’

We counter with the obvious facts of our exile—the raft, the wineskins, the axe—and still he does not help. Once the wine is gone, Alcaeus passes the days with his back to us, keeping vigil for any shift in the horizon.

*

We no longer braid our hair. Only slivers of our skin, reflected in the shards of mirror Pindar found on the beach and insisted on embedding in the clay wall, are evidence of our continued existence. We do not comment on each other’s appearance, though we are privately repulsed by the sight. Not even in the days of stale bread and sour milk, when the academy had yet to confer our titles, had we witnessed such self-neglect, such obvious despair. Our lack of foresight humbles us. We no longer know what we are; as the days grow shorter we devote more and more time to hunting and salting meat. Discussions about the goddamn particle are half-finished sentences as we drift into exhausted sleep around the fire.

‘Be patient with whatever comes,’ Horace says. ‘This could be our last winter.’

We look at each other. Of us all, he always tacked most cleanly toward optimism. We never spoke of it, but we relied on him for that.

Pindar eyes us and reminds us of the questions we solved. Even Alcaeus nods, having been enticed to remain with us longer than usual by the conversation. Horace’s laugh is bitter.

The sunburned skin at Pindar’s filthy collar flares a deeper crimson. ‘In one portion of time the winds blow this way and that.’

Horace rolls his eyes. He strides past Pindar and as we watch, lobs his sharp sticks and nets of woven grass into the centre of his cloak. He slips a knife fashioned of sharp stone into his belt and walks out the door with two long strides. Alcaeus picks up his cloak and wineskin and does the same, but we know he will not follow Horace. We assemble our own hunting tools and the wineskin Horace has forgotten. We expect to find him in one of the usual places. On this island it is possible to lose oneself but not each other.

‘Whenever anyone drives pitiless anger into his heart,’ Pindar says, a little breathless for matching his pace with mine while talking, ‘he meets the strength of his enemies, sinking arrogance in the flood.’

‘Moonlight prevails equally over the bitter sea or ploughland filled with flowers,’ I tell him. Horace will recover, and we must hunt now if we are to have the strength to advance our theory around a winter hearth.

Pindar snorts and accuses me of abandoning our studies, then strides ahead.

This was the heart of our fatal mistake: all that we thought we understood about the universe was predicated on the presence of an unremovable particle we had not anticipated nor could extract from our accounting. Until we reached that point we had busied ourselves with the many and varied qualities of matter, never once realizing how untethered were our theories, how incidental to the sum of existence. We were like young lovers, willfully ignorant of the other’s character flaws. Our search until then was blissful and untroubled. We felt invincible, intoxicated by our own theories, until a question proposed by a visiting lecturer revealed the gaping hole in our theory.

The coming winter drives us indoors for longer stretches of the day. This hut is smaller than it should be, each of us incapable of comprehending how unsuited we were to close quarters. It was meant to be temporary until—what? Alcaeus was proven right and the boat returned to ferry us home? Until we miraculously found the strength of flesh and will to make another hut, and another, and another, so to establish a new academic community and a means to communicate with the city? Until we died of starvation or a failed attempt to leave the island?

 

*

Alcaeus continues to leave the hut in early morning for his position at the shore. I watch him leaving as I always do because his hair falls as yours does and a chill sweat possesses me; my tongue lies shattered while a thin flame runs beneath my skin. Will we ever sit under our tree again?

Horace has become ill-tempered about his refusal to hunt or build and raises the possibility of a second exile: why should Alcaeus be allowed to remain in a hut he did not help build? Four of us cover the floor when we sleep, each sleeping space narrower than a prostitute’s bed. With Alcaeus gone, he says we three would find more comfort, have more food in our bellies, and better quench our thirst. We are not surprised by his outburst. Though we would not admit it, we have followed the same path of thought in recent days.

Horace motions to the chink between wall and door we have all noticed. It will need patching before the snow comes on, he says. With summer gone it will be difficult to pry more clay from the ground but we will need to journey to the beach we found on the fourth day when our wineskins were empty and we prowled the island, hoping the heavy rain had left puddles deep enough to fill them. Alcaeus joined none of our efforts except that one. He laid his cloak on the ground and though he did not help us dig, he lifted one corner and bore his share of the weight of it back to the camp. He resumed his vigil at the shore as we packed clay around stones and logs.

Water-seeking has continued to be his only contribution to this new community. He seems to experience no hunger, but refills his wineskin and then returns to the shore. He plans only for rescue. We worry about his persistence with this delusion; he showed no signs of helplessness or dependency in any of our previous dealings. Whenever we took meals together at home he was indistinguishable from the rest of us in appetite, if not in stature. He has grown thinner still.

The same is true of all of us, though we three who hunt have fared slightly better. The exercise and occasional meat make us lean but strong. Alcaeus never hunts for himself or any of us and eats only when we can coax a morsel or two of the rabbit or fish we snared. It seems a favour to us when he does. One day after he takes up his daily post at the edge of the sea and we hunt for rabbit in the tall grasses, Horace says we should let him go. If Alcaeus does not intend to live, we are wasting our food.

Horace is not wrong. By the time the snow comes, we will need to have dried some of our catch to make it through the winter. We imagine the spectacle of meat drying above our sleeping heads. We have never before eaten such things but have already begun experimenting with evaporated sea water for salt. The process requires a week of sun and our constant attention. We have made a small amount but will need much more very soon.

Pindar says the hare will stay the winter, and there will be other creatures made slower by the cold. We will have enough to hunt. We must not forget the way Alcaeus defended Horace’s cataclysm theory of creation.

It was the most contentious of Horace’s ideas and it ignited fury within the academy. Except for Alcaeus, none of us defended him. We claimed to fear retribution, but in truth he’d failed to convince us. We have since been persuaded and shamed by our obtuseness: the route from Horace’s idea to the particle theory was direct.

‘We should forget about hope,’ Horace says. ‘Time goes running, even as we talk.’ His eyes are dull as river stones and there is a darkness below them. We wonder if we would recognize him if we came upon him in a place other than here.

‘The delight of mortals grows in a short time and then it falls to the ground, shaken by an adverse thought,’ Pindar says, at unsociable volume.

Horace takes Pindar by the shoulders. He is shouting too. I am glad to be standing at the other side of the fire pit. ‘No fortune teller knows what amount of time will be given to you. You cannot ask and expect an answer.’

‘Man is the dream of a shadow,’ says Pindar.

Horace’s face is scarlet now. ‘We do not know whether Jupiter will turn the calm seas to storm, grinding away the shore and the little life we have.’

Pindar murmurs something I cannot hear and Horace lunges at him.

In the voice you’ve heard me use with unruly students, I tell them to stop their nonsense and step toward them in an aggressive manner.

Horace glares at me and strides off in the direction of the shore.

 

*

None of us can surrender the fresh water we gather to anything but our own thirst, so the oak sapling just outside our door has become a sad stick in the ground. The roots have grown too shallow. It will not shelter us in any future we can imagine. Even its fallen leaves are not enough for bedding but Pindar insists on gathering them and others from the forest nearby for warmth in the winter. Horace worries about fire. The shorter, cooler days mean we will need to light one inside the cabin soon. He knew enough to make a small hole in the roof for this eventuality but it will be smoky in here all the same, and we will be forced into even smaller sleeping spaces to avoid catching fire. We think of our quarters at the academy, the high ceilings and enormous hearthstones where we might have laid our heads in comfort and kept warm by the fire as our theory developed.

All the more reason to let Alcaeus remain, I tell them. The extra body heat, the extra cloak.

Horace says he knew I’d be the one to want to keep him. He has long argued that a woman’s kind heart is a liability.

Pindar disagrees, though of them all he knows most of our mutual affection, our exchanges of ideas. He tells them I am only being pragmatic; at the very least, Alcaeus could help keep us warm. He reminds us that our theory is developing around the evening fire, however slowly. Alcaeus’s contributions are inextricable from the whole. We are one brain. We will not find the end of this without him.

The haunting cry of a raptor echoes nearby. We look up, searching for our competition. We mark the sun’s position in the sky.

*

Alcaeus comes running. The boat he knew would come approaches. We take up the flag we have prepared and run to the shore with him.

‘Give not up to grief, it profits nothing,’ he says, breathless. He is so thin now his grin is ghoulish. ‘Nor do we remedy our ills by loathing.’

‘I will be small when my fortunes are small, great when they are great,’ Pindar says. ‘I will honour in my mind the fortune that attends me from day to day, tending it to the best of my ability.’

‘Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair,’ Horace snaps.

I think of a clever reply, but hold my tongue until we are back in the hut, long after dark, long after Alcaeus has called me his honeyed maid.

*

 

If any of these papers reach you, my sweet purple blossom, you must copy them out many times and share them within the academy. I know I can rely on you to leave them in conspicuous places and tucked into satchels. In our time as teacher and student you showed me that you can understand the significance of this story to our theory. The boat approached but not near enough. Even so, our turns at waving the cloth banner stretched into the dying light, long after the boat has gone in another direction. Gods do what they like. They call down hurricanes with a whisper or send off a tsunami the way you would a love letter.

This was perhaps for the best, for although we have no other way to communicate our understanding than this message you are now reading, we cracked the problem during the winter nights that came, the long hours we could not hunt. We are resolved. I have written our calculations here. How exciting it is to go beyond everything transitory to fundamental features of the entire universe!

Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, atop on the topmost twig, which the pluckers forgot, somehow, forget it not, nay. None could get it till now.

 

Your devoted Sappho