The Fate of Droplets (ii)

I have been trying to draw this story to its conclusion, but has been taking time. The writing has become more laborious, but I am excited about it all the same. Certain changes in conditions have allowed me some more free time. Later today, I will likely post a few recipes I used for lunch.

...

A few days later, on the evening before the party—to which Henry and I planned to attend—I visited Georgia, who goes by George. On her apartment door reads, “Here, the miracle happens.” She once explained the joke to me and, all said, I didn't find it all that funny. In high school, George studied chemistry intensely. In class, her teacher described a certain chemical reaction and left an intermediate space between the source and the product blank, then filled it in with a jagged box in which he wrote, “The miracle happens.” This was the point where something brief and significant occurs in the process but has not yet been explained. The idea is that a miracle is unscientific, but until we understand each step, we simply label the bizarre intermediaries as miracles. George was unperturbed when I did not laugh.
George came to study chemistry in high school following a strange series of passions starting when she was five when she cut her left handed ring finger on a protruding nail in her grandparents' barn. At first, she cried out, but as she was in the barn and unattended, no one heard. After a few minutes, she examined her small wound; she described the image in vivid detail: “The blood was rich and deep. I was amazed that it came out of me, out of my pale skin. I thought maybe this was where my sunburns came from, from the blood. It hurt, but I came to set aside the pain. First, I pressed the lips of the wound together and made more blood come out; then, I slightly pushed them apart and saw the layers of flesh inside me. I spat on my shirt and wiped away some of the blood with it. My pulse beat hard and I noticed that blood came out more quickly with each pound of my heart. I realized that inside of me was this whole world that I could not explore the way I wandered around my Grammy and Pa's farm, but it was there all the same. I stayed there a long time, just sitting and looking at my wound, using it to see inside of myself.”
Later, she returned to the farmhouse and hid the wound from anyone else. Each day, she would look at it for changes and wonder about revelations it might provide. She still played and it became infected. This, she understood, was not her own body but something else; though at the time it felt like neither friend nor foe. The infection spread and when she left the farm, her mother noticed and drove her to the hospital, her mother shouting much of the way. In the emergency room, George's finger was removed to the first knuckle and healed. Her mother expressed her gratitude to the doctor for saving what little he could of the finger so that she could still wear a wedding ring when the time came.
This incident established a deep fascination in the natural world and the inner workings of bodies. George's parents nurtured this, hoping to see their daughter go off to medical school one day; but George's interest was analytic, not practical. This led to discovering chemistry which suggested a finer view of the world beneath the world; and in college she began exploring physics which she hoped would prove an even finer tool. She finished college in five years, though she might have completed it in three. She had schemed her way into a long-term experiment that she was determined to perform, so with the appropriate rhetoric and administrative contacts, she made the whole affair appear a happy accident. With the frustrating closure of her project, she came to appreciate the role of mathematics throughout her scientific exploits and has since corresponded with various mathematicians as well as other scientists.
George and I became friends in high school and attended college together. For some time, I was infatuated with her. Her drive and intelligence struck me as otherworldly and enchanted, but I later saw how she responded to romantic approaches and realized my folly. She would regularly attract the attention of fellow students, who would ask her to out, to which she would blandly comply. During such outings, she was always non-committal and pressed her dates about subjects of research. She once told me about a sexual experience and I then, almost violently, understood that I was intrigued by her emotional distance from other people and even herself. She did not say if it had been her first sexual experience—I suppose it did not feel important to her—only that it suggested animalism and mechanics. I uncomfortably asked about feelings of pleasure, to which she had little to say except that, such sensations were present, but said in a tone reminiscent of her separation of herself from the pain in the cut finger.
I knocked on her door.
“Come in, Lex, its unlocked.” Though I was expected, her uncanny certainty perturbed me.
“Hey George,” said as I peaked in. Immediately, four chalkboards set about in her living room caught my eye, each riddled with incomprehensible gibberish, but something written in a tight scrawl on the one blocking her bedroom door intrigued me. “What is all this?” as I gesture to the note in particular.
“You know my work in the chemical corporation labs? This is what it has been on. I just want to iron out a few details now so I can use the labs when no one else is around.”
“Don't the have people watching to avoid misuse of the labs?”
“The guards don't know what we're doing, it is all Greek to them. Besides, even my supervisor would expect me to have to work on this stuff there, so if I do it now, no one will expect it done and I can take my time.” She is sipping coffee from a mug with her employer's logo on it in the doorway to her kitchen, surveying the chalkboards critically. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
This is how George works: Establish a question, find the means to answering the question, accomplish all necessary precursors (job, security access, research, contacts, etc.), and answer the question. In this case, she was well into the fourth phase. Seeing as her apartment space was too limited for her lab work—and likely illegal—she went about finding a job somewhere she could use theirs, even if it meant being sly about it. In order to answer her question, she had found the right people to talk to, received a reassignment, then went about fooling her new authority. George is brilliant.
In the kitchen, she poured me a cup of coffee. It wasn't instant, but it wasn't far from it.
“What are you researching?”
“For work or for me?”
“For you.”
“What do you know about quantum states?”
“Not much.”
“What about neuropsychology?”
“I missed that lecture.”
“The pineal gland?”
“Can it become inflamed?”
“No. That was actually a joke.”
“So was mine.”
She smiled as she drank heartily from her mug and set it on the counter. Her sharp, clear eyes peered at me.
“My research has to do with how an individual factor can explicate an entire system; in this case, the role of consciousness in dreaming and the neurotransmitters involved.”
“Wouldn't you need fMRIs for that sort of thing?”
“So you did go to class sometimes.”
“I earned a B+ average for my psych minor, mind you.”
“Well pardon me.” She wandered back into the living room and marked a few things on the boards, erased an equation and replaced it with something that appeared entirely different. “fMRI scans and their records for dreaming are pretty abundant.” She spoke with her back to me. “Others have done some significant if inconclusive work with neurotransmitters. I am combing through and combining what I can. Most of the lab work has to do with databases, software, and syntheses of the neurotransmitters so that I can figure out what they're doing.” She laughed sharply, derisively, and continued to work at the boards. “If you ask an astrophysicist about the least known frontier, she'll say space; ask a marine biologist, she'll say the sea floor; a neurologist, she'll say the brain.”
“Sounds like we don't know much.”
“Exactly,” she chirped, pointing at something only she saw but still facing the boards. “But wouldn't you put more emphasis on the people who are asking about the mechanics of knowing rather than those who might specialize in one thing or another?”
“So you trust the neurologists?”
“Not exactly. Every neuropsychological paradigm anyone has put forth gets blown out of the water a decade later. Some say we could establish a median between them, a means of splicing the different theories together. Some say we still know nothing.”
“And you?”
“Take an experiment, show me the methods and the results, then I can tell you what the writers think they know and what they think they have learned. The latter always depends on the former. Without the former, you've got nothing.”
“So all answers are dependent?”
“Yes and no. The issue is that independent answers are those that arise from any assumption we make in the pursuit of the experiment, but all the same it is impossible to surmise the experiment that assumes any and all possible assumptions. Therefore, all answers we establish are dependent on precursory assumptions, but the existence of necessary answers remains a possibility, albeit an unachievable one. Ah!” She erases a great swath on the board second from the right—the far right being the one with the alluring gibberish on it—and marks it with an unreadable, tight cursive. She sets the chalk down and sighs, smiling gleefully.
“How long have you been at this?”
“What time is it?”
“About three.”
“Oh, eight hours.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Hmm? No I guess not.”
“Let's get some food in you.”
“Let me finish my coffee.”
“No, don't. I'll buy you some real coffee.”
“This is real coffee.”
“Just, don't.”
“Fine.” We each were looking around for our jackets. I peered closely at the fourth chalkboard.
“What is this about?”
“Oh, that is a side project relating to my research.”
“But this, what does this mean?”
“I think it is a theory of some sort.”
“How do you pronounce it?”
“Oh, I don't know. I think it says I'Yog-Sototh. But it doesn't make a lot of sense. Some 18th Century physicists or mystics put it together to explain dreams as a physical phenomenon of the world, as events that occur through stimulation via natural and para-natural forces. Why do you ask?”
“It stands out. I don't know why. It has something familiar about it. Let's go.”