Dinner Party
It was a regular Sunday morning, or probably a regular Sunday evening, or what the hell, may be even an irregular one, Frank had no idea. All he knew was that he was still in his bed and that his head was making periodic attempts to explode. He had a vague memory of hearing the door bell once when he was still asleep. He had assumed that it was the milkman and then had cursed the landlord for not doing anything about that extremely unpleasant sound the bell used to make. But that was long ago. It felt as if he had slept for ages after that.
He wanted to check the time. He looked around and realized that the only watch in the room was kept on the side table facing the window. This annoyed him. Why the hell should a watch be facing the window? Who was it trying to tell the time to? He thought of turning it around but soon realized that that would require him to lift his hand and lifting his hand was the last thing he wanted to do at that moment. The first thing he wanted to do was to have a cup of coffee. “Tara!” he shouted, gathering up some left over energy from the corners of his body, hoping that in all these ages he had been sleeping, the landlord had somehow appointed a maid called Tara who would be willing to serve him coffee. He was wrong. No one responded. “May be she had left already,” he consoled himself, “why would a maid stay in the house at such a late hour of the day?” This reminded him that he did not know the time yet and he had no idea why he was assuming it was already too late.
He looked at the watch again. It was still facing the window. He stared at it for five minutes, trying to make it turn with his will power. Didn’t work. Damn it. Time, was a piece of information that should have been easily accessible to everyone. He had never before in his life faced such difficulties in finding out what time it was and hence was puzzled that he was not able to do it then. It was not usual. He was probably missing something. May be there was a mirror somewhere in the room that would show him the other face of the watch. No, there was not. May be, the body of the watch itself would turn transparent. It did not. Then finally, as one last desperate attempt, he closed his eyes and concentrated hard hoping to make a telepathic connection with someone who knew the time. This didn’t work either. He got completely vexed and decided that once and for all, he was going to end this idiocy. He had the right to know what time it was and he was going to find it out against all odds. He shook his head, which hurt by the way, and decided that it was somewhere around 4 pm. That’s all. It was a Sunday and it was 4 pm. He took a mental note of it and warned the world to not argue with him about it. Good. A regular Sunday evening, then. Or may be an irregular one.
Through the corner of his eyes, he got a glimpse of the mess near his wardrobe. This made him uneasy. He closed his eyes, because although he was still in his bed, he knew that there were several things around him that he didn’t like. The mess of dirty clothes, empty beer cans and old newspapers was just one of them. He had long struggled with this dilemma and was still not even close to a solution. The dilemma was to choose between the boredom of arranging his room every now and then and the agony of living in a mess. If he chose to do one, the other wouldn’t happen, true. But his problem was, why even choose one? Couldn’t he, in some way, evade both of them? Why, in other words, was it so natural for the things around him to go from bad to worse when left to themselves? Couldn’t they just behave themselves even when he was not looking? He had learnt in high school that it had something to do with the second law of thermodynamics, the one that said that entropy always increased. He had always believed that it was some kind of cosmic error, a bug in the source code of the universe. He wished he had access to the code. He had worked on big software projects before and had the ability to handle thousands of lines of code. He knew he could deal with the universe.
All these thoughts about source code and software projects reminded him of his computer. It was a small, regular laptop with very humble features just sufficient to surf the internet, chat with friends, listen to songs and watch porn. His laptop was perhaps the only exciting thing in the otherwise monotonic and often depressing state of affairs around him. It used to be on and working most of the times running Frank’s favourite instant messenger. He would, every once in a while, take small five minutes breaks and check whether someone had pinged him. Finding a message from someone was always exciting and not finding anything was disappointing. So this was a kind of game he used to keep himself busy with.
He decided that it was time for one of those five minutes breaks now. His laptop was lying very close to him fortunately, so that he did not have to move too many limbs in order to touch the mousepad, which took the laptop out of its sleep mode and showed the extremely cluttered desktop. There were three different messages. He made a quick check if any one of them was from Olivia and then soon remembered that she wasn’t there in his list anymore. He had removed her a few months ago, as soon as she had announced her engagement. He felt bad, not because Olivia was engaged – that was past now – but because he did not have any messages from her. The fact that she was not on his list and could not send him messages in principle did not stop him from feeling bad. He felt bad out of habit, because it had been almost hardwired into him now.
Olivia was that girl he had met in his Economics class back in college. She had a round face, that sometimes gave a false impression that she might be plump. She was not plump of course, but was not too thin either – the dimensions that would make one feel that it might be fun to use her as a pillow. She was so soft that a lover trying to plant a passionate kiss on her body would be as pleasantly surprised as a kid who puts a date in his mouth and realizes that it’s seedless. Her hair were dark and short with a few strands hanging out of the otherwise well kept bunch, blocking her left eye on the way and finally tickling the area around her chin. She had a peculiar way of sitting in the class and listening to the lectures. In her right hand, she would have a pen which she would be chewing most of the times and her left hand would be pressed between her two knees in a slightly awkward but cute way. Overall, she was a kind of girl who was attractive without being too beautiful, the kind that Frank liked.
From the day the course started, Frank began doing all kinds of things to impress her. He would buy her gifts without any occasion, do her homework for no reason whatsoever, give her a shoulder to cry on whenever she felt bad, fight with people who didn’t like her, write her songs, drop her to the airport and so on. Very soon, she gave him a peck on his cheek and announced that he was her best friend. He was happy. His efforts had finally shown some results. Best friend was like the acme. If you were the best, you couldn’t get any better. So all he had to do now, was to probably propose to her in a nice, romantic restaurant and things would be settled for all. He would marry Olivia and then live happily ever after. He mulled over it a lot and thought about the restaurant he would take her to and the ring he would propose her with and daydreamed about the way he would kiss her at the altar and the place they would go for their honeymoon and so on when finally, two weeks later, she introduced him to her boyfriend. She said this was going on for some two months now and she was sorry that she never mentioned him to Frank but she swore that Frank was the first person to know about him and that no one else had any idea till now. And then she asked Frank if he was free the coming Saturday and whether he would want to join the two for dinner at that same restaurant where Frank had finally decided to propose to her. Frank was in major confusion all this while. This made him pretty much speechless and hence he just kept nodding. Olivia said she found this cute and gave him another peck on his cheek.
This was the beginning of his misery. Two years passed since then and nothing changed, except, for Olivia’s boyfriends. Frank still did her homework, he still bought her gifts and he still would be the first one Olivia would introduce her boyfriends to. This killed him. It wasn’t a kind of killing that a murderer would do though, for murderers are supposed to kill. It was rather the kind a confused barber would do – you go and ask him politely for a haircut and he pulls out a gun and kills you instead and then asks you for the fees too, because, may be a shot through your head is what he thinks you asked him for. Hadn’t Frank made it very clear that all he wanted was a regular haircut and not, for example, a shot through his head? Or couldn’t the barber at least give him some time to run or may be just a simple warning before pulling the trigger?
This ended though, or so he thought, when Olivia finally announced her engagement. Of course, Frank was the first one to know about it. He decided that this was the end, that this was the deepest one could possibly fall and that he was finally going to forget her completely. He removed her from his friend list, deleted her number from his phone and had a refreshing bath. He was all set to begin a new life.
This was all past now. He had not talked to Olivia in months and did not want to talk to her in future either. He was living a better life now, at least better than what it was earlier. Right now, all he knew was that it was a Sunday evening, he was still in his bed and there were three messages on his desktop that he had not checked yet. This made him feel a little enthusiastic. He read them one by one. The first one was by Sam. It said, “hey awesome party dude… thanks again… call when you are back in your senses…” This made many things clear, especially the heaviness in his head. He had had a party in his room the previous night and he had been drunk. Others had also gotten drunk. He looked around his room and could identify each person’s mess. There was that stinking crud that came out of Peter’s bowels immediately after his eighth tequila shot. It had dried up by now and the thought that he had co-existed with it in a small room for several hours now depressed him. Then, there was that pair of socks hanging on the lampshade that had previously been busy warming up Ted’s feet until Ted realized that socks had feelings too and that it was time that he would pay them back for all these years of care and do something to warm them up instead. He realized that there was some left over pizza lying right next to his pillow that he had not noticed yet. This was a lot of mess. He had no idea how he was going to clear it up. He thought he would call up his friends and ask for help.
The other two messages were from random people from work. He never bothered to reply to them.
He felt it was a good idea now to check who all were online, may be Olivia was and may be he could ping her and have a small chat with her. Then he felt annoyed for thinking along these lines and reminded himself that he had forgotten Olivia completely and that there was no chance that he was going to find her online. This didn’t stop him from scrolling through his friend list once. He even furtively sneaked a glance at that spot between Oliver and Peter, the spot that used to be his favourite till a few months ago. Olivia, of course, was not online. He felt bad.
He thought he would go and call up Sam now because he was pretty much back in his senses and he also needed some help to clear up the mess in his room. But then, he had now scrolled down his friend list completely and this was not the normal position for a friend list to be in. So he thought he would do it some favour by scrolling up and leaving it there. Of course, he planned to sneak another glance at that spot.
The spot was not empty any more. Olivia was online. His heart skipped a few beats.
He kept staring at the name for the next few minutes trying to answer three completely different kinds of questions, the first one being, “How the hell did this happen?” the second being, “What the hell was he going to do now?” and the third, “What the hell?” He first tried to handle the third one. He shook his head as hard as he could just to make sure that alcohol was not the reason for all this. It hurt. He checked the name again. It was Olivia, and not something that just looked like Olivia. He wrote her name on a separate piece of paper and matched each letter backwards. It matched. He scrolled up and down again. The name was still there. He scrolled up, remained there for some time and then scrolled down quickly. The spot was still occupied. It was time to deal with the first question now. He had absolutely no idea what had just happened. May be he did something stupid when he was drunk. Now when he thought of it, he did get a vague feeling that Olivia had come up in the discussions the previous night. He thought he should check his chat history and the numbers dialed on his phone. But then, he was running out of time too. Olivia was on his list after several months now. He didn’t want to miss the opportunity to say hello. What if she went offline and never came back? He didn’t want that to happen. This brought him to the second question. He thought he should ping her and ask what she was up to. He did.
She did not reply. He waited for two minutes. No response. This was definitely a bad idea. She was probably busy fornicating, or may be, getting cosy with her fiance on a sofa. He shouldn’t have pinged her in the first place. But now he had done that already and she had all the right to not reply and make him feel miserable. In fact, he was pretty sure that that’s what she was doing. She was not going to reply. He didn’t want to feel miserable. He wanted a solution and the only one he could come up with was that he should call her up and clarify that it was very confusing that she was on his list because he had removed her a long time ago and the only reason he had pinged her was to ask her how this had happened. He did remember her phone number, so the fact that it was not there in his phone’s memory wasn’t a problem. But calling her up could equally turn into a bad idea. What if she did not pick up? He would feel even more miserable.
He called her. She did not pick up.
He felt annoyed. He wanted to throw something at the wall. He chose the left over pizza. He picked his phone again to see if he had made any calls to Olivia the previous night. He was interrupted by the door bell. He wasn’t expecting anyone. May be, it was Ted. May be, he wanted his socks back. Or may be… no come on, it couldn’t be Olivia. He dismissed this line of thought as soon as it came. However, it did make him pace up a little. He reached the door and looked through the peep hole. It was Olivia.
Vacuum, as it turns out, is more mysterious than one would think it is. You say you take everything out of a given volume and what you have in the end is vacuum. But you see, there’s a problem here. ‘Everything’ does not just contain matter that can be sucked out using an ultra powerful vacuum cleaner. ‘Everything’ contains energy as well, especially because of that famous equation formulated by Einstein that says matter and energy are inter-convertible. Now when you suck out energy, using may be some sort of equivalent of an ultra powerful vacuum cleaner that can suck energy as well, you might end up in a state from where you are not able to suck out any more energy and yet, it is not the state with the lowest energy possible. In fact, to reduce the energy even further, you may have to give it some energy first. Such a state gives a false impression of being a vacuum even though it still has a lot of stuff in it. This is exactly like being in a valley, which even though looks like the lowest point in your vicinity, is not the lowest point in the world. Given a strong enough push up the hill, you may roll down into some other valley that is even deeper.
When Frank was looking through the peep hole, he was not aware of the fact that the universe he was living in was being fooled by one such energy valley, that the vacuum in which all the celestial bodies of his universe were floating around was not the actual vacuum but just a fake one with energy much above what could in principle be achieved. His universe had been in that state for some billions of years now and not many people were aware of this confusion of a cosmological scale.
The other thing Frank was not aware of was that about twenty minutes ago, something had happened at a distance of about two billion miles from his room that had never happened before in the history of the universe. A fairly catastrophic cosmic ray collision had occurred that had released a phenomenal amount of energy into the universe. The energy released was so massive that it had stirred up the vacuum and had caused it to finally climb up the energy hill surrounding it and roll down into a valley that was much deeper than the one it was previously occupying. Since the vacuum is what decides the fundamental nature of things in the universe, this had caused a major change at the collision spot. It had created a bubble that contained inside it a universe that was totally different from what one had ever seen before. The laws of nature were different. The fundamental constants that had been so loyal to their names for ages now were different. The whole fabric of the universe, its very nature, the way it behaved was different. Forces did not follow the inverse square law any more. Fundamental particles did not exist. And then, the bubble had expanded, reaching areas that were far away from the spot where the collision had occurred, changing the very fundamental nature of things into something very bizarre and unimaginable wherever it went and by the time Frank was about to open the door, it hit his building.
Frank, was no longer Frank. Olivia, was no longer Olivia. And the Sunday evening, perhaps the most irregular one in past, present and future, was no longer a Sunday evening. No one was left to even express surprise at the extremely unusual turn of events.
Vinayak Pathak is currently a graduate student in Computer Science. He writes essays and short stories as a hobby. Most of his writings try to bring out the mysteriously bizarre nature of the world we live in. The others are just random philosophical ruminations. He maintains a blog at http://vinayakpathak.wordpress.com.
It was a regular Sunday morning, or probably a regular Sunday evening, or what the hell, may be even an irregular one, Frank had no idea. All he knew was that he was still in his bed and that his head was making periodic attempts to explode. He had a vague memory of hearing the door bell once when he was still asleep. He had assumed that it was the milkman and then had cursed the landlord for not doing anything about that extremely unpleasant sound the bell used to make. But that was long ago. It felt as if he had slept for ages after that.
He wanted to check the time. He looked around and realized that the only watch in the room was kept on the side table facing the window. This annoyed him. Why the hell should a watch be facing the window? Who was it trying to tell the time to? He thought of turning it around but soon realized that that would require him to lift his hand and lifting his hand was the last thing he wanted to do at that moment. The first thing he wanted to do was to have a cup of coffee. “Tara!” he shouted, gathering up some left over energy from the corners of his body, hoping that in all these ages he had been sleeping, the landlord had somehow appointed a maid called Tara who would be willing to serve him coffee. He was wrong. No one responded. “May be she had left already,” he consoled himself, “why would a maid stay in the house at such a late hour of the day?” This reminded him that he did not know the time yet and he had no idea why he was assuming it was already too late.
He looked at the watch again. It was still facing the window. He stared at it for five minutes, trying to make it turn with his will power. Didn’t work. Damn it. Time, was a piece of information that should have been easily accessible to everyone. He had never before in his life faced such difficulties in finding out what time it was and hence was puzzled that he was not able to do it then. It was not usual. He was probably missing something. May be there was a mirror somewhere in the room that would show him the other face of the watch. No, there was not. May be, the body of the watch itself would turn transparent. It did not. Then finally, as one last desperate attempt, he closed his eyes and concentrated hard hoping to make a telepathic connection with someone who knew the time. This didn’t work either. He got completely vexed and decided that once and for all, he was going to end this idiocy. He had the right to know what time it was and he was going to find it out against all odds. He shook his head, which hurt by the way, and decided that it was somewhere around 4 pm. That’s all. It was a Sunday and it was 4 pm. He took a mental note of it and warned the world to not argue with him about it. Good. A regular Sunday evening, then. Or may be an irregular one.
Through the corner of his eyes, he got a glimpse of the mess near his wardrobe. This made him uneasy. He closed his eyes, because although he was still in his bed, he knew that there were several things around him that he didn’t like. The mess of dirty clothes, empty beer cans and old newspapers was just one of them. He had long struggled with this dilemma and was still not even close to a solution. The dilemma was to choose between the boredom of arranging his room every now and then and the agony of living in a mess. If he chose to do one, the other wouldn’t happen, true. But his problem was, why even choose one? Couldn’t he, in some way, evade both of them? Why, in other words, was it so natural for the things around him to go from bad to worse when left to themselves? Couldn’t they just behave themselves even when he was not looking? He had learnt in high school that it had something to do with the second law of thermodynamics, the one that said that entropy always increased. He had always believed that it was some kind of cosmic error, a bug in the source code of the universe. He wished he had access to the code. He had worked on big software projects before and had the ability to handle thousands of lines of code. He knew he could deal with the universe.
All these thoughts about source code and software projects reminded him of his computer. It was a small, regular laptop with very humble features just sufficient to surf the internet, chat with friends, listen to songs and watch porn. His laptop was perhaps the only exciting thing in the otherwise monotonic and often depressing state of affairs around him. It used to be on and working most of the times running Frank’s favourite instant messenger. He would, every once in a while, take small five minutes breaks and check whether someone had pinged him. Finding a message from someone was always exciting and not finding anything was disappointing. So this was a kind of game he used to keep himself busy with.
He decided that it was time for one of those five minutes breaks now. His laptop was lying very close to him fortunately, so that he did not have to move too many limbs in order to touch the mousepad, which took the laptop out of its sleep mode and showed the extremely cluttered desktop. There were three different messages. He made a quick check if any one of them was from Olivia and then soon remembered that she wasn’t there in his list anymore. He had removed her a few months ago, as soon as she had announced her engagement. He felt bad, not because Olivia was engaged – that was past now – but because he did not have any messages from her. The fact that she was not on his list and could not send him messages in principle did not stop him from feeling bad. He felt bad out of habit, because it had been almost hardwired into him now.
Olivia was that girl he had met in his Economics class back in college. She had a round face, that sometimes gave a false impression that she might be plump. She was not plump of course, but was not too thin either – the dimensions that would make one feel that it might be fun to use her as a pillow. She was so soft that a lover trying to plant a passionate kiss on her body would be as pleasantly surprised as a kid who puts a date in his mouth and realizes that it’s seedless. Her hair were dark and short with a few strands hanging out of the otherwise well kept bunch, blocking her left eye on the way and finally tickling the area around her chin. She had a peculiar way of sitting in the class and listening to the lectures. In her right hand, she would have a pen which she would be chewing most of the times and her left hand would be pressed between her two knees in a slightly awkward but cute way. Overall, she was a kind of girl who was attractive without being too beautiful, the kind that Frank liked.
From the day the course started, Frank began doing all kinds of things to impress her. He would buy her gifts without any occasion, do her homework for no reason whatsoever, give her a shoulder to cry on whenever she felt bad, fight with people who didn’t like her, write her songs, drop her to the airport and so on. Very soon, she gave him a peck on his cheek and announced that he was her best friend. He was happy. His efforts had finally shown some results. Best friend was like the acme. If you were the best, you couldn’t get any better. So all he had to do now, was to probably propose to her in a nice, romantic restaurant and things would be settled for all. He would marry Olivia and then live happily ever after. He mulled over it a lot and thought about the restaurant he would take her to and the ring he would propose her with and daydreamed about the way he would kiss her at the altar and the place they would go for their honeymoon and so on when finally, two weeks later, she introduced him to her boyfriend. She said this was going on for some two months now and she was sorry that she never mentioned him to Frank but she swore that Frank was the first person to know about him and that no one else had any idea till now. And then she asked Frank if he was free the coming Saturday and whether he would want to join the two for dinner at that same restaurant where Frank had finally decided to propose to her. Frank was in major confusion all this while. This made him pretty much speechless and hence he just kept nodding. Olivia said she found this cute and gave him another peck on his cheek.
This was the beginning of his misery. Two years passed since then and nothing changed, except, for Olivia’s boyfriends. Frank still did her homework, he still bought her gifts and he still would be the first one Olivia would introduce her boyfriends to. This killed him. It wasn’t a kind of killing that a murderer would do though, for murderers are supposed to kill. It was rather the kind a confused barber would do – you go and ask him politely for a haircut and he pulls out a gun and kills you instead and then asks you for the fees too, because, may be a shot through your head is what he thinks you asked him for. Hadn’t Frank made it very clear that all he wanted was a regular haircut and not, for example, a shot through his head? Or couldn’t the barber at least give him some time to run or may be just a simple warning before pulling the trigger?
This ended though, or so he thought, when Olivia finally announced her engagement. Of course, Frank was the first one to know about it. He decided that this was the end, that this was the deepest one could possibly fall and that he was finally going to forget her completely. He removed her from his friend list, deleted her number from his phone and had a refreshing bath. He was all set to begin a new life.
This was all past now. He had not talked to Olivia in months and did not want to talk to her in future either. He was living a better life now, at least better than what it was earlier. Right now, all he knew was that it was a Sunday evening, he was still in his bed and there were three messages on his desktop that he had not checked yet. This made him feel a little enthusiastic. He read them one by one. The first one was by Sam. It said, “hey awesome party dude… thanks again… call when you are back in your senses…” This made many things clear, especially the heaviness in his head. He had had a party in his room the previous night and he had been drunk. Others had also gotten drunk. He looked around his room and could identify each person’s mess. There was that stinking crud that came out of Peter’s bowels immediately after his eighth tequila shot. It had dried up by now and the thought that he had co-existed with it in a small room for several hours now depressed him. Then, there was that pair of socks hanging on the lampshade that had previously been busy warming up Ted’s feet until Ted realized that socks had feelings too and that it was time that he would pay them back for all these years of care and do something to warm them up instead. He realized that there was some left over pizza lying right next to his pillow that he had not noticed yet. This was a lot of mess. He had no idea how he was going to clear it up. He thought he would call up his friends and ask for help.
The other two messages were from random people from work. He never bothered to reply to them.
He felt it was a good idea now to check who all were online, may be Olivia was and may be he could ping her and have a small chat with her. Then he felt annoyed for thinking along these lines and reminded himself that he had forgotten Olivia completely and that there was no chance that he was going to find her online. This didn’t stop him from scrolling through his friend list once. He even furtively sneaked a glance at that spot between Oliver and Peter, the spot that used to be his favourite till a few months ago. Olivia, of course, was not online. He felt bad.
He thought he would go and call up Sam now because he was pretty much back in his senses and he also needed some help to clear up the mess in his room. But then, he had now scrolled down his friend list completely and this was not the normal position for a friend list to be in. So he thought he would do it some favour by scrolling up and leaving it there. Of course, he planned to sneak another glance at that spot.
The spot was not empty any more. Olivia was online. His heart skipped a few beats.
He kept staring at the name for the next few minutes trying to answer three completely different kinds of questions, the first one being, “How the hell did this happen?” the second being, “What the hell was he going to do now?” and the third, “What the hell?” He first tried to handle the third one. He shook his head as hard as he could just to make sure that alcohol was not the reason for all this. It hurt. He checked the name again. It was Olivia, and not something that just looked like Olivia. He wrote her name on a separate piece of paper and matched each letter backwards. It matched. He scrolled up and down again. The name was still there. He scrolled up, remained there for some time and then scrolled down quickly. The spot was still occupied. It was time to deal with the first question now. He had absolutely no idea what had just happened. May be he did something stupid when he was drunk. Now when he thought of it, he did get a vague feeling that Olivia had come up in the discussions the previous night. He thought he should check his chat history and the numbers dialed on his phone. But then, he was running out of time too. Olivia was on his list after several months now. He didn’t want to miss the opportunity to say hello. What if she went offline and never came back? He didn’t want that to happen. This brought him to the second question. He thought he should ping her and ask what she was up to. He did.
She did not reply. He waited for two minutes. No response. This was definitely a bad idea. She was probably busy fornicating, or may be, getting cosy with her fiance on a sofa. He shouldn’t have pinged her in the first place. But now he had done that already and she had all the right to not reply and make him feel miserable. In fact, he was pretty sure that that’s what she was doing. She was not going to reply. He didn’t want to feel miserable. He wanted a solution and the only one he could come up with was that he should call her up and clarify that it was very confusing that she was on his list because he had removed her a long time ago and the only reason he had pinged her was to ask her how this had happened. He did remember her phone number, so the fact that it was not there in his phone’s memory wasn’t a problem. But calling her up could equally turn into a bad idea. What if she did not pick up? He would feel even more miserable.
He called her. She did not pick up.
He felt annoyed. He wanted to throw something at the wall. He chose the left over pizza. He picked his phone again to see if he had made any calls to Olivia the previous night. He was interrupted by the door bell. He wasn’t expecting anyone. May be, it was Ted. May be, he wanted his socks back. Or may be… no come on, it couldn’t be Olivia. He dismissed this line of thought as soon as it came. However, it did make him pace up a little. He reached the door and looked through the peep hole. It was Olivia.
Vacuum, as it turns out, is more mysterious than one would think it is. You say you take everything out of a given volume and what you have in the end is vacuum. But you see, there’s a problem here. ‘Everything’ does not just contain matter that can be sucked out using an ultra powerful vacuum cleaner. ‘Everything’ contains energy as well, especially because of that famous equation formulated by Einstein that says matter and energy are inter-convertible. Now when you suck out energy, using may be some sort of equivalent of an ultra powerful vacuum cleaner that can suck energy as well, you might end up in a state from where you are not able to suck out any more energy and yet, it is not the state with the lowest energy possible. In fact, to reduce the energy even further, you may have to give it some energy first. Such a state gives a false impression of being a vacuum even though it still has a lot of stuff in it. This is exactly like being in a valley, which even though looks like the lowest point in your vicinity, is not the lowest point in the world. Given a strong enough push up the hill, you may roll down into some other valley that is even deeper.
When Frank was looking through the peep hole, he was not aware of the fact that the universe he was living in was being fooled by one such energy valley, that the vacuum in which all the celestial bodies of his universe were floating around was not the actual vacuum but just a fake one with energy much above what could in principle be achieved. His universe had been in that state for some billions of years now and not many people were aware of this confusion of a cosmological scale.
The other thing Frank was not aware of was that about twenty minutes ago, something had happened at a distance of about two billion miles from his room that had never happened before in the history of the universe. A fairly catastrophic cosmic ray collision had occurred that had released a phenomenal amount of energy into the universe. The energy released was so massive that it had stirred up the vacuum and had caused it to finally climb up the energy hill surrounding it and roll down into a valley that was much deeper than the one it was previously occupying. Since the vacuum is what decides the fundamental nature of things in the universe, this had caused a major change at the collision spot. It had created a bubble that contained inside it a universe that was totally different from what one had ever seen before. The laws of nature were different. The fundamental constants that had been so loyal to their names for ages now were different. The whole fabric of the universe, its very nature, the way it behaved was different. Forces did not follow the inverse square law any more. Fundamental particles did not exist. And then, the bubble had expanded, reaching areas that were far away from the spot where the collision had occurred, changing the very fundamental nature of things into something very bizarre and unimaginable wherever it went and by the time Frank was about to open the door, it hit his building.
Frank, was no longer Frank. Olivia, was no longer Olivia. And the Sunday evening, perhaps the most irregular one in past, present and future, was no longer a Sunday evening. No one was left to even express surprise at the extremely unusual turn of events.
Vinayak Pathak is currently a graduate student in Computer Science. He writes essays and short stories as a hobby. Most of his writings try to bring out the mysteriously bizarre nature of the world we live in. The others are just random philosophical ruminations. He maintains a blog at http://vinayakpathak.wordpress.com.
