Eternity and the Kettle Song

I sometimes visit a perfect recollection of that night. An echo, embossed by my years of study and still remembered by the atoms of my aging body. My instinct, of course, as I lifted my head from the damp pillow into the deep silence of my childhood bedroom, darkened by blackout blinds, was to brace for the sudden spike in heart rate, loneliness and the inexorable dread that had been waking me since I had moved back into my parents’ house. On that night, the 30^th of January 2025, seven minutes and 43 seconds passed before I realised that my fists were clenched by my side and my teeth were set down hard against one another; but I hadn’t needed to adopt this fighting stance. So, I sunk back into my mattress and a softness crept into the edges of my eyes; a sense that, even through the darkness, I was beginning to make out the shape of something.

A few days before that I had read (I should stop doing that — it was an Instagram reel) that in 2022, in a study that won the Nobel prize in physics, professors somewhere had proved that local reality isn’t real. That night I was still an ignorant layman and the esoteric concepts did take a while to filter down to me. Even though I had spent longer than I’d meant to on my feed, trying to meet those mythical popular physics presenters halfway as they explained the concept, I’m not sure I’d got all that much closer to understanding the implications. The best I could do was this: we think of an object as either green or red, or in possession of some property, BUT, because of some unbreakable symmetry with its quantum particle pair, this can change instantaneously, faster than light travels, on the basis of a symmetrical change on the other side of the universe. The things we perceive about an object are not fixed to that object, but dance around as reflections, distant whirs of one another.

Before those endless afternoons of scrolling through posts and waking in the middle of the night fearful and crying, I had spent six months in your flat, seldom brushing my teeth, barely leaving the bed, in unwashed pyjamas, trying to find something that felt worth doing. Those months had been hard and beautiful. We’d had two beagles then, with big watery eyes and slobbery cheerful tongues, your mother brought me things she thought I might like when she travelled to England, you made me tea in mugs we’d painted together on brighter days. A sweet life in the haze. On a lot of those evenings, after you got home from work, you’d try to say something, try to point out that you felt it too, try to hold my hand. I wanted it to work, I wanted to say the right thing at the right time, and we’d both know what we wanted for ourselves and for each other and for the dogs, but instead, we’d sit and watch a show or look at our phones for a while with the space between us folding; approaching infinity.

Close to midnight, at the end of that impossible January, I had drawn my eyes back into a squint in the darkness and realised that, unlike the night before and all the painful nights preceding, none of that tarnished rose gold light that had so often crept into my vision remained. The sense that I needed to return to the soft warmth of our shared bed before I’d ever sleep again had vanished. What was there didn’t circle and demand justice with ominous spectral gestures. I could hear something, a hum, as though I had found myself suspended at that point in the oscillation of a rubber band where on either side it crests to a tense and taught amplitude but for an immeasurable instant is perfectly still.

The sound seemed to vanish but then, like a deep sonorous breath, it returned. As I lay there listening to that strange resonant rise and fall, the pattern emerged. I rushed over to the kitchen, flicking my tongue back and forth in my mouth to keep the time and sound it out; gripped by the thought that this might vanish from me like so many details from so many dreams. I found pots and pans. They wouldn’t do for the pitch. Maybe glasses part filled with water? No. Then there on the counter: the recorder. I’d used it to learn how to play Hot Cross Buns in third grade. I picked it up and put it to my lips. Froze. Remembered a crucial step. I filled the kettle and put it on the stove, counted 23 beats and began to play, softly blowing out the tune I had been transposing from the air around me. The moment the kettle’s whistle chimed in; I knew what everything meant.

I never told my parents why they had found me, ecstatic and naked at three o’clock in the morning, accompanying their kettle’s deafening whistle on a dusty spittle-drenched recorder. Why I had laughed maniacally afterwards, drinking my tea and watching the sunrise. They were concerned for a while and my mum would cautiously try to raise it for months whenever she perceived me to be calm and collected, though I seldom was. In every quiet moment, I was listening to those resonances.

My parents were surprised but satisfied, proud and relieved, as parents of physicists tend to be, when I moved here to CERN following my studies.

The first song I heard had not been mine. It was the bridge between you and the fixed point to which you travelled, each small vibration mapping the decisions you’d make, the people you’d love, every detail down to the rakish angle of a stray eyebrow hair you’d grow in your late thirties.

The next was mine. Once I had tuned myself to that frequency it became quite simple. Over the years I’ve gone through the necessary terminology of quarks, lectured on quantum entanglement, buttered up the right engineers and research institutes. I don’t like to brag, but if this didn’t work and tomorrow arrives, the Pentagon would scarcely be able to afford a single pair of camouflage bike shorts, or whatever else it is they spend their massive budget on.

I’m sure this will never be read but if it is I am sorry, dear reader, today I feel like letting it all out, as these languid celebratory polemics, despite their futility. It has been a long time since an entry in this journal has been so necessary or so blissfully self-indulgent. I’ve been pontificating. I’ve tended to recapitulate and adapt the research of my colleagues, ventilate about their parochial focus, or half-heartedly meditate on my designs. I also sometimes write an entertaining parody of Dr. Žižek, who believes I will singlehandedly bring about the cessation of existence. The old fool would miss his imported cheese and pickles very dearly. None of it worthy. Tomorrow, however, is special, it will be for a while the 31st of January 2054, until I decide that it is again the 31st of January 2025. They will never know that I have built and will build again and again, an instrument on which only I can play out the perfect tune of time.

It’s funny, you thought all those seemingly arbitrary coincidences excluded the possibility of God, but in many senses, I have become an intentional and conscious creator. I call the next round. You wouldn’t understand the working or the proofs, but for you it probably suffices as an explanation to say that there will always be a rubber band that fixes you and your destiny. You will in every instance follow your band and tomorrow, when I press my rather comical big red button (you would have loved the facility I’ve designed), I get to decide how hard to strum the rubber. I couldn’t spare myself that small luxury.

So, when the world is reborn on that first morning that I chose to forget you, I’ll sit in the warm sun, waiting for slow swirls to seep from my teabag, I’ll be met with a distinct chord and, without knowing what I’ve done, my eyes will glow with the mischief you claimed to love. I’ll whistle each subtly distinct note of the happy Sisyphus you’ll have to learn to be on a given go-round, lingering in the moment where I sip from my steaming mug and set myself on the path to divinity.