Invitation

Despite the bathroom being fully enclosed with no natural light, Elle knew the sun had gone out because Jamison told her and she listened to him, he had form.

One Christmas when she was six, he whispered that Santa was an alien, and she had kicked off in the grotto. She was carried out yelling and biting by a man dressed as a gnome, then parked in the nativity display next to an illuminated sheep. But despite being surrounded by mixed mythologies of reindeer and virgin births, nobody wanted to hear of another possibility. Aliens in particular were unacceptable metaphors for this context, but they generated interest and led to Elle spending much time in the offices of people who smiled and wrote notes. Jamison said to never mind, they were all idiots, and there was something better. He showed her how to narrow her eyes to split white light into a rainbow, how to listen to silence, and how, if she peered very closely at solid objects, she would see the spaces between the atoms.

Jamison himself inhabited his own space most of the time, somewhere just to the left of and above Elle’s right ear. But he let it creep into the TV, the radio, and sometimes her computer when he needed to get her attention. They’re wrong, he’d say, of some wildly speculative debate about the origins of the cosmos. They won’t be invited, was what he said, somewhat snarkily, about the Creationists, and you’ll see, when Elle said invited to what?

In the bathroom, Jamison elaborated on his initial stark statement about the sun, This universe is dead, we’re going to another one.

Elle wanted to ask where it was, this other universe, but Jamison never answered straight questions so she asked him what it was instead.

It’s foam

Like mating toads?  Blowing bubbles in the washing up?

This one has burst

I’ll need my meds

You won’t

Elle stepped out of the shower, reached for the towel on the heated rail and watched it shrivel down to squirming threads. She reached for her dressing gown instead but it slipped through her fingers like mercury, pooling on the tiles and running down through the cracks into bright new fissures. She held onto the door, opened it enough to peek through into the hallway where Henry usually sat smoking a spliff and rocking. But Henry wasn’t there and the hallway was a telescope – its interior bronzed black and with a tiny spark at the far end.

Better hurry, the surface tension is weak

Things don’t burst slowly

They do in slow motion

Can’t really hurry then, can I?

It’s relative

Very funny

Jamison made his sound, the one that shrieked in silence and filled Elle’s head with reverberating echoes. It usually made her pass out but this time it didn’t. This time it sent dazzling lights into her eyes, through her skin and down into her bones so they stood out as if she were in a scanner.

Quantum translation, Jamison said, by way of explanation. Ready?

Ready

Conboy-Hill 2015