Split Infinity

Split Infinity

His mind was daydreaming about it as he drove his car towards the Lakes. It was a sort of poetic indulgence, applying the quantum world to the human. 

The beauty of entanglement is that no matter where one person is, he or she is automatically connected with his or her soulmate, even if they are light years apart and are destined never to meet. And as one performs an act, then at the same moment the other does the same. They are interlocked for eternity,

He reached the pub grounds in the Pennine village just as the event was starting to get under way.

He’d heard all about it by chance during the gossip that occasioned when he spent the evening out drinking with an antiques collector friend. Their conversation had turned to the subject of the human obsession for building collections. Objets d’arts in their collectors’ eyes. Vintage motorbikes, cars, tools, cigarette cards, medals, coins, stamps…

Anyway, once a year, in a marquee in The Murderers Arms car park, there was a collectors’ jamboree. Out of  their Aladdin’s Caves, the dealers came, pasty faced, unfashionably attired and gimlet eyed to down slow pints and discuss their recent finds and do some deals. They mixed congenially with the buyers, the well-to-do gin and tonic drinking county set in their tweeds and jodhpurs. 

Rufus Grant was taking time off from his job as a science journalist. He had just  finished a series of articles on quantum entanglement, hence his meditation on love and science as he was travelling north to this venue. He was taking a short break.  He had a bit of spare cash and was on a mission. He was searching for a vintage car. 

Why a car? It was the consequence of waking up one morning recently, having had the most invasive of nightmares. It was the night after he’d been to the Oxford labs to film, for a tv series, classical double slit photon experiments as a bridge to quantum entanglement. In the programme they discussed the possibility of human entanglement in the far future. There had been a video hook-up with France and during it he had caught sight of a young woman at the back of the Paris laboratory whose beauty sang to him, despite his advancing years. Her face had stayed with him. He could think of little else.

This was the nightmare.

He was driving across France in an old red Citroen 2cv. Unaccountably, in the dream he was speaking French, despite having left behind all attempts at that tongue while at school. The young French woman beside him in the car was the one on the video hook-up at Oxford. Dark haired, Mediterranean, with brown skin and almost black eyes. She appeared to understand him perfectly. They were lovers. And, as can be the way of dreams, she was his perfect Other, the woman he had sought and never found in all his life. 

So there he was, sixty years old, tired, grey-haired and dreaming that he was Jean-Batiste Grimaud, the twenty five year old lover of Emily, a Phd student and a flame for every moth that crossed her path, male or female. 

Dreams can compress reality. A lifetime can be condensed into milliseconds. The past, present and future can be known instantly the dream begins. In this case his dream self, Jean-Batiste Grimaud, was the youngest of four sons in a well-to-do French farming family. Since there were no plans for him in the family business he had been able to go to university and study quantum physics. He was a bit of a maths genius and got himself a doctoral place in an esteemed Paris-based research institute. Jean-Baptiste was quite unlike Rufus Grant, the man who was dreaming that he was him. He was slim, angelically featured, elegant and extrovert. He wore a bright red beret to contrast pleasingly with his flawless golden skin and long dark hair. He had green eyes! Green!

And oh how Jean-Baptiste loved Emily and she him. How they were planning to spend their days together living a bohemian life on the Rive Gauche. Two aspiring scientists. He glanced across at her and felt yet another wild upsurge of desire and delight, a certainty in their joint destiny. A timeless fusion of their deepest spiritual selves.

They were coasting down an incline through the mountains near Foix in the Pyrenees. Ahead, the two lanes of the carriageway divided to enter separate tunnels. It was an old 2cv so he opted to take the slower lane. But the car refused to slow down or alter direction and ploughed straight on,  certain to crash into the central wall that divided the tunnels. They looked at each other fearfully, grasped hands and mouthed in unison, “je t'aime tellement.”

There was a wild turbulence,  a moment of blackness and suddenly there were two identical 2cvs racing in parallel through the adjacent tunnels. As they emerged at speed into the light at the far end, he was alone in one car and he saw Jean-Baptiste and Emily in the other, alongside. Moments later the other car rose sharply into the air and disintegrated in a fine mist of atoms before disappearing. He pulled up in a lay-by. He touched the passenger seat. It was cold. Empty.

He woke up. 

The sickness of loss spread through his body. No Emily. The dream of meeting her in this life would not come true even though he knew she was out there somewhere. He could sense the living connection to her. But time and fate separated them. He was an unmarried childless ageing man, made brutally aware that transcendent joy had passed him by. 

The days passed. The pain stayed with him. Then a wild avenue for possible relief took hold in his thoughts. Mad and outlandish but possible. Hence his presence at The Murderers’ Arms.

He quickly found his friend and was led to a genial man in a broad check suit and trilby standing beside a blue two seater American car with huge rear fins. They exchanged pleasantries and then the car dealer asked, “So what are you looking for?”

“A Citroen 2CV. Oldish. 30 years.”

“Blimey! Really? Slow, left hand drive, 6 volt battery, horrible gears, claustrophobic…”

“Yes. Perfect. And red.”

“As it happens….” Was the man teasing him.

“Yes?”

“I haven’t… but I can get you one. I import through a French company. Any marque you fancy. But a 2CV. Hm. That’s as down-market as I've ever sunk.Two or three months it’ll take. Ready to drive.”

The car arrived on a truck with all the official documentation transferred into his name. He glanced through it. The small folder contained the receipts for past work done on it. The previous owner's name caught his eye and stiffened his fingers in white knuckle shock. Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Grimaud. The dream! The dream! He smiled.

A month later he was driving through Foix in the French Pyrenees. Following his instinct he took a turn towards Andorre. He felt sure he was on the road. A dark haired girl was hitchhiking just past the turn off. As he drew up she looked at him expectantly. 

Of course it was Emily!  His pulse quickened. But, he reminded himself, he was not the beautiful boy, Jean-Baptiste. She was looking at Rufus Grant, a sixty year old Englishman in sandals with white socks, baggy khaki shorts and a battered Panama hat. He tossed the hat on to the back seat. His features remained calm and polite as he wound the window down. 

“Ou vas-tu?” She asked, with an open smile.

“Andorra.”

His pronunciation made her nod. “Very good… I can come with you?” She said in accented English.

“Of course!” 

She paused, uncertain, as she sensed something odd in the way he was smiling so familiarly at her. She asked, “Have we met before?”

He lied. “No, not that I know of?” Talking about seeing her in the dream could wait.

They got on well. She recounted her life story - babyhood to a twenty three year old academic. She was taking a year out, after which she was starting a PhD in quantum physics in Paris. He did not react as she said this but glanced now and then at her, with a joy he’d never before experienced, her youthful energy filling the car as she quizzed him about his life, keeping them both entertained. “And isn't it a crazy kind of synchronicity,” she said at one point laughing, “Here we are, strangers, accidentally meeting in remote mountains - and both making a living out of physics! 

At a petrol station they shared snacks. The pleasure they felt in each other’s company was palpable. As they prepared to continue the journey, she drew out a velvet bag and from it took a multi-coloured braided bracelet. “Eternal friendship,” she said. “It’s like we've known each other in a past life.” He hung his temporarily on the rear view mirror above.

She was asleep when they arrived at the top of the gradient. He looked at her tenderly then pressed the accelerator hard. The car picked up speed. The dividing wall between the tunnels rushed towards them as he grasped her hand. 

“Je t’aime tellement,” he whispered. 

There was no feeling of impact. The car roared on. Emily’s head  bounced against his shoulder. Keeping pace in the adjacent tunnel in an identical red 2CV, he saw Rufus Grant with Emily beyond, looking across at him. 

He smiled, his green eyes glistening as they exited their tunnel and exploded in a great flash.

+

An hour or so later the local gendarmerie found a driverless old, red 2CV fallen into a gulley just after mountain tunnels near Foix. It was more or less intact. There was a battered Panama Hat on the back seat, a friendship band hanging from the rear view mirror, a suitcase of spare clothing and documentation showing that the car belonged to  an Englishman named Rufus Grant.