Schrodinger’s Cow

A cow died on a mountain highway.

“Then did it really happen?” you might ask coyly, and I am obliged to inform you that yes, yes it did, because I am the lonely soul scratching my forehead in disbelief and gawking at some vegetarian’s nightmare through the cracked windshield of my V.W. Bus.

It is no secret that I flunked out of my quantum physics class in college, and frankly every other class too, and that I failed any and every prior attempt I made to be a psychologist, and that I have spent my life soaking away in my own lukewarm mediocrity, but this colossal cow-corpse on the asphalt… this was extraordinary. This god-sent oddity, well, it made me some kind of special, right? I had come to the forest, as one does, to look for Something Great in life and to get away from the hypothetical, parenthetical, obsessive-compulsive sandtrap of a mundane early adulthood, and here it sits, bloody and raw, under my headlights. 

I toss my Aviators to the side and grin.

To the right of my car, the road crumbles away into a nasty-looking clifface, and to the left looms a dense mesh of trees and brambles. It’s not a wide road - hardly enough for my lumbering car—and the cow body, stretched out in a luxurious death-sprawl, takes up much more space than you might expect. There would be no passing by this burger-meat barricade. 

I’m tapping on the steering wheel, glancing into the glaring fog, wondering if this is where Stephen King gets inspiration for his books, when I hear the classy thunder of a sports car in front of me. A yellow Lamborghini skirts the turn, and shrieks to a stop directly opposite to me in front of the cow. The windows are so tinted that I can’t see the person inside, but I can hear the bass thumping loud enough to liquify the mountain. I look back at the cow. It's magnificent.

The base stops, replaced by the sound of my own pattering, over-caffeinated heartbeat, and I hear someone talking. His voice was so husky that I didn’t hear it at first, and it rose up in my ears as easily as cigar smoke.

“Are you alright, sir?”

I jiggle my keys from the car and slap down from the driver’s seat in my decomposing crocs. 

“Fantastic,” I say. He has a marvelous sense of style, if you’re into east coast CEOs and Rolex-wearing mafia villains.

He fidgets. 

“Little perplexed,” I add, scratching at my moo-moo. God, I have no idea how I’ll go back to normal clothes when this vacation ends. Just looking at his button down makes me sweat.

“You’re not… upset?”

I blink at him, my hand stalled mid-scratch. 

“...no?”

He puts a hand behind his head, dropping his black eyes onto the pavement to scan the cow. “Right. I just thought - it must have been quite the scare to hit that cow.”

I burst out laughing. “Sir, I spent ten years on the clean-up crew at my local morgue. Cow guts are practically a PG halloween decoration compared to what I’ve seen. Plus I didn’t even hit it.”

Plus, this is the most exciting thing that has happened to me since Marie Ann said she liked my sneakers in fifth grade.

He fidgets again, as if he’s trying to shake himself out of his patent leather dress shoes. Maybe I’ll keep my socks and crocs; I don’t miss those days.

“What do you suppose we do?”

I want to grin complete Cheshire-cat style, but I keep it together. That's the beauty of it. There is nothing we can do. There's a month's worth of Big Macs sprawled in front of our cars, and we're stuck right here, and unlike college quantum, or that stupid morgue job, or my current cubical-comatose lifestyle, I'm now a victim of fate, and not my own stupidity. I'm giddy.

I squeak-squeak-squeak my way over to the man, lean over the cow, tilt my head into the flies, and offer my hand. “Jim Ruthword.”

He blinks and his constant, slightly-uncomfortable frown deepens. “Harold,” he says, shaking my hand and jerking away when a fly dive-bombs into his ear.

“Well, Harold. I don’t think there’s anything we can do. Have you still got cellular out here?”

Harold frowns at me so hard enough that I worry his eyebrows will furrow into one another and start snaking down his nose. The insecurity behind his floundering glances comes at odds with the rest of him; he is unmistakably bad at being an arrogant, yellow-Lamborghini snob.

“No,” he finally blurts.

I smile. “Such a shame.”

Some final, sluggish reminisce of my work-self nags at me to do something. But I’m on vacation. And now I'm stuck on vacation. If I had cellular, I’d call Milton and tell him I found his lost Paradise.

When I glance back at Harold, he’s switching his weight from foot to foot as if the awkwardness of standing still burns his feet. Even his crystal-bottle perfume can’t mask the stench of rotting cow and festering social discomfort. 

“...so what do we do?”

He looks at me like I’m a pHD in Cow Entrail Disposal. 

“What do we do? Well, for starters, I sell allergy medication over the phone to paranoid people who still have landlines.” I say it all in the same breath, getting those foul-tasting words out of my mouth as fast as possible.

The wind howls over the cliff face as his mouth lolls open. Apparently that wasn’t the answer he was looking for.

“What about you?” I ask.

"I meant what do we do about the cow."

I squint at his glowing skin. He must wash it with fuzzy kittens.

"We could drag it off the road?" The fog keeps getting thicker and closer, and our headlights illuminate the cow with a saintly yellow spotlight. The only noise aside from our quickening breaths is from the flies. I feel like an actor on a horror set; the paparazzi must be waiting with the rest of the vultures.

"Yeah." He looks down at the cow but doesn't move any closer to it. He just keeps rocking on his feet, back and forth, as full of potential energy as a champagne cork.

"You seem like you're in a rush," I say. My thumb finds a hole on the right seam of my moo-moo, and I wiggle my finger through to scratch my stomach. Mandatory freedom. What bliss. I'm not even thinking about allergy medicines or scams or old people's coughs distorted through the phone.

He wipes his forehead. "No. Just stressed. We gotta move this cow."

"Wait—why is it so important if you don't even have anywhere to be?"

His dark eyes shoot to my face and blink from deep under his brows.

"I-" He pauses, mouth open. "I- I mean what else is there to do?"

I shrug. "I've got some Mountain Dew in the backseat."

The clouds come in closer, closer, closer, pressing against his stifle-ironed button-down. "You want to drink Mountain Dew on a deserted highway next to a cow corpse?"

I scratch my stomach through the moo-moo again. The hole isn't quite big enough for me to hit where it really itches, but I'm too happy to notice. 

"Why not?"

The high-wired businessman seems to have collected his composure, and he starts dragging the cow.

"Because," he grunts. "This. Is wasting. Time."

I blink at him, his butt in the air, his teeth clenched. He has his eyes shut and his hands dug into the black-white-red haunches.

"Are.” Grunt. “You.” Grunt. “Helping."

I just blink.

He straightens at the grey haze at just outside the headlight circles, heaving, watching the blood leak across the asphalt. If one of us backed up to the closest turnout, we could make it through.

Now that the cow lolls off the edge of the road, his whole manner changes, and his eyes darken, and his legs still. I glance at the cow, those glassy eyes boring straight into my especially insignificant life.

"You didn't have to do that," I mutter.

He rolls his eyes. "Don't worry about it. It was nice meeting you."

I sigh. I can already smell the recirculated B.O. from the office air vents.

"Wait!" I call, squeak-squeak-squeaking back to the van and then spinning back around. When I skid up next to his car, he's got one dress shoe in the car and one hand on the roof.

"In case you need something else to do," I say, offering a Mountain Dew. I failed quantum physics in college, yes, but I do remember that anything is possible until you observe a system and rule out everything but the boring old truth. You can't accurately tell what something is until you get stuck in the same moment with it, and wait for Something Great to come of it.

Harold smiles, faintly, in question.

People are the same way.