A Touch Too Close - Part 4 [END]

Conclusions Going Forth From Here

As I sit and compose what I have left, words with my own paraphrasing return both new and old.  

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is redeemable.¹T.S. Eliot, BURNT NORTON (No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

In the original quote, the last word is "unredeemable". Perhaps that is truer, but the change is my own.

I see Codie and Harper nearly every day. They smile and laugh, but they do not see me. They exist separate from every other person in this universe, together.

What they are now and why is the preoccupation of those who investigate them. I cannot follow their present, so I follow their past.

As their daughter, Lisa Hewitt-Melvang, I was carefully watched until it became clear that nothing special would ever come of me. My name made simple the matter of my research. I had full access to the preserved time concentrated around Codie and Harper whenever I wanted.

I wrote papers when asked, but mostly I searched. The record only goes back as far as about the time of the incident for Codie and when Harper lived on her uncle's farm, with no equivalent 'incident' on her side.

The incident, to all previous study, appeared as a random panic attack which filled Codie with immense stress as a child. It constitutes a thought of his mother, a baffling feeling, and momentary surprise.

Even most psychologists overlook it as the random fears of a child. Physicists blatantly disregard it because there are no oddities in the time record. Others shrug. I saw it swarming with possibilities.

Analyzing the direct 'incident' provides few clues. The record begins with young Codie stretching the C4-C5 cervical vertebra juncture of his neck to a safe degree. It is soon clear that he has been reading a book, stretching, and is just getting up from the floor. The book is Strange Attractors by William Sleator. Many have found 'irony' in the appearance of this work. They misunderstand the meaning of 'irony'.

There is much about young Codie I see in myself. These places I can understand. I can understand him reading quietly in his room. I feel a resonance with his loneliness where I struggle to see why Codie and Harper have such an innate connection that leads to their romance and marriage despite the inherent obstacles.

Their little glances, smiles, and behaviors make sense in the framework of normal courtship structure. But they bring me no closer.

I can play the tape of how they met by happenstance in that classroom. I can see their reactions and emotions preserved in the atomic structure of each moment. I can pull out to a mile from their position, which still takes a good amount of time for the computer to turn from quantum states into comprehensible data. Or I can focus on a single, firing neuron inside of Codie's brain.

There is so much information. And I have theses of my own.

Several are still formulating in my mind. What I have to share is also crystallized by time. My words are icons of the past. They cannot show the future, but only experiences I have collected. They are also locked out of matters of the present as I compose.

But they are my words and not the words of papers past and papers future.

I have a new thesis about the cause of Codie and Harper's 'entanglement'.

No. It is barely a thesis.

My stronger past thesis was a more nuanced version of wormhole theories put forward that tried to reconcile human events and quantum phenomena. It was a modest effort standing on the shoulders of others. It was completely wrong.

My flailing, weaker theses are to be admired, especially for their earnest efforts to make meaning. There is no more human struggle than the wrestling to find meaning in the incomprehensible.

My newest postulation may come closest to the truth. It may not. But it presents this moment I have preserved in words with the information best available to me.

Young Codie stands in his room as I monitor. I slow things and try to analyze this long-studied instant. I check his neuron states and I consider whether there is a female archetype forming in his mind which will make Harper a particularly pleasing partner. I had recently cross-referenced Harper's male role models growing up with Codie's personality type.  

I lean into the matrix of information and peer through it, trying to see a single blade of revelation in a boundless grassland of data. I focus and look and think. I peer into Codie and his head turns back. The moment of the incident.

The surprise seems to occur first. There is anomalous sensory data in Codie's experience. He does feel like someone or something has touched him. I go over this moment again and again, but it all seems so fleeting. There must be something more there. I replay it and do different passes as close as I can, zooming in and out of the system.

Eventually, I freeze on the moment of 'mother' feeling. I look into Codie's eyes and watch them. I look right into him and try to figure out what it is. Possibilities of the bizarre fill my thoughts as I click over for records of strange phenomena in his old home. The chill wash of the computer's cooling unit flows over the entire room and me. In the same instant, I let real, recorded time flow at normal speed.

Codie looks back at me across the distance. He shivers.

I pause there and have to think. Still, there is a single notion which assaults my mind.

Observations at the quantum level cannot be made without transforming what is there through observation. Recorded information is translated and changed, even just a little bit, to be observed.

Perhaps I actually touched my father/mother in some small way and never realized it. It could well be hubris, but still little is known of the nature of the preserved section of time.

Still, I have to acknowledge that I carry many of Codie's mother's physical traits. In a flash moment, I could well be mistaken for her, especially when no other clear explanation is known to a child.

But is there more? It has been so many years that the preserved time has been studied and Codie and Harper as well. If something from the recent past could influence the more distant past, then is it a grand leap to consider the cause of things in that far past may lie in the recent past or perhaps even the future?

This, however, is not a theory. It is just a thought triggered by a strange moment. And it does not explain how Harper became involved.

After mulling this, I decided to shift ahead in time to after Codie and Harper leave their three wise men of questions and return to Sewell Hall.

They linger in Codie's dorm. The mambo sloths make an encore appearance as they give each other a generous separation. They mentally count at each incidental touch of skin. Some of their discussions involve who to tell and when. Mostly, the possibility of a late breakfast or an early lunch is at the forefront of their consciousness in the soup of feelings and resurrected concern about their class examination results.

But this anxiety soon sublimates away.   

They laugh and chat and try to make something resembling food from what remains of the last supermarket trip by the other residents. Casually, they touch. After a few tense separations, they linger. They shift several times with the remnants of anxiety till they make a game of their little touches. Even memories of the incident do not surface in Codie's mind.

I can follow them in the days soon after, where kisses become strange and new. I can watch the reveal of their secret and the chaos to follow. I can see them no longer wince at the other's touch. I can see them discuss how they want to spend their entire lives together as experiment after experiment peers at them. I can see their peculiar wedding day.

I can see a discussion of in-vitro fertilization and who will be the mother. But I stop here. They never told me and I don't wish to dig into those secrets.

But the secrets of their love, no matter how deeply I look, remain inscrutable. That is not to say that all love is such. Physiological love, composed of neurochemical and hormonal responses, can be untangled. Psychological reasoning from shared interest and the appeal of pairing for mental benefit presents itself coherently. But Codie and Harper…

Why would two whose entire personal reality could be unraveled each time they come into contact...want to remain together? Did their early moments really strike such a deep resonance?

I listen to a random exchange after Harper's sister has been notified and produced several self-muffled screams and asked a thousand questions from witnessing their switch. The sweetness of the better-than-expected result to their recent psychology exam tinges the mood.

Codie and Harper discuss seeing a movie later, their hands lingering closely as they shift.

With few signs in her neurological state to pronounce a new topic of discussion, Harper says, "I think Lisa is a beautiful name."

Codie, no longer alarmed by his female change, widens her eyes and nods before answering, "It's lovely…"

Harper smiles at her. "It's love. It's like you could replace the vowels and consonants after L and it's another name for love."

It's not a direct letter substitution method and there are so many other names which could be formed in that way. But I lean forward and listen through the interface.

There are smiles between them as they lean close but relax their touch.

However, Codie's smile wanes after a while and she asks, "What if this is how it is from now on?"

Harper renews his smile for Codie. "From now on we always spend our evenings discussing what movies to watch as we giggle ourselves crazy?"

Despite her serious concerns, Codie can't restrain her chuckle from escaping. "Okay! Hehe…but…welll…we've kept my roommates and yours from finding out so far. But for how long?"

"As long as we have." Harper shrugs.  

Codie echoes my issues. She asks Harper if she/he might be happier with someone who doesn't cause so many problems. This kind of discussion has come before, in another form, over a meal a few days before. Harper's answer then is to muse on fate. I find it lacking.

Her answer at this 'now' is more substantive.

"I'm happy here. Sure, maybe it could be easier with someone else. But this is how things are. My uncle once told me love isn't perfect. What matters is how much you keep striving each day to understand it and breathe joy into it. It hurts more often than not. But it's also beautiful. It doesn't make sense and yet it feels right. It persists and it's a part of you….you are a part of me, Codie. And I feel like I'm a part of you…"

Their kiss is intense and emotional with their synapses flowing with endorphins and bright charges.

I can stop there. It's not a neat end to this composition. But neither are my life or the lives I have followed and continue to follow.

Like Harper describes the process of love, I also feel the process of my examinations. They are ever unfinished, as I hope the lives of Harper and Codie together will be, though I can only be a part of them in this small way.

This is not an end. It all continues. And in continuing there are always possibilities.