Chapter 7
Akira's dad, Dr Ichi Mizoguchi, was a small, thin man in thick-rimmed black glasses that magnified the size of his eyes. He wore a blue vintage wool sweater that looked like it belonged on a European jazz musician. Indeed, he probably was a jazz musician in his spare time, as well as a photographer, astronomer and geologist. The walls of his study were covered in European pre-war film posters and blown up covers of prog rock albums from the 1970s. He was sipping hot tea from a small porcelain cup.
"Sit, please," he said. His voice was so confident that Paulie had no trouble imagining it echoing around an auditorium, discussing particle physics or theories about the theoretical uses of dark matter.
Paulie sat.
Behind him, Akira, who'd been standing watch and staring at his own feet, said, "I guess I will leave you two alone," and left.
The study door clicked closed.
"Please, have some tea," Dr Mizoguchi said, holding out an identical cup to the one he was drinking out of.
Paulie took the cup. "Is it Japanese?" he asked. He wanted to say something because he was nervous and that was the first question to spring to mind. It was a stupid one. He wasn't even sure if he meant the tea or the cup.
"Scottish," Dr Mizoguchi said. "I bought it in Glasgow."
"It must be great to be able to travel... so much—I mean, so frequently, as yourself."
Dr Mizoguchi smiled. "Sometimes I travel as someone else entirely."
Paulie took a sip of tea. Boiling hot.
"That was a joke. To lighten the mood. Yours feels oppressive. Tell me, are you a bright boy, Paul?" Dr Mizoguchi asked.
Paulie stumbled over an answer.
Dr Mizoguchi glanced at a poster of King Crimson's In The Court of the Crimson King hanging on a wall by a window. "At school, for example. Do you receive top grades, are you contemplating attending a superior university?"
"A bit better than average, I guess," Paulie said. "My grades." He blew on his tea between sentences. He didn't know whether that constituted ill manners or not. "And I'd like to go to university, yes. Maybe in Toronto. I haven't looked at my options very well."
"You may be honest with me, Paul."
"Yes, sir."
"Call me Ichi. Akira has told me your story. I have seen your video. I have spent most of my life studying matter and forces that others do not understand. I am not frightened by the unexplained."
"Have you ever studied... someone like me?"
"I have not."
Paulie's hopeful expression faded.
"You are a unique specimen, Paul. Perhaps the only one. Probably the first of many, but a specimen far before your time."
"I'm a freak, that's what you're saying."
"A prototype, a deviation. Time is a freak, Paul. It is an aberration. And, yes, you are an aberration, too. You do not pursue the same interests as normal boys your age, do you?"
"I like hockey," Paulie said a little defensively. "And I like girls, if you're implying..."
"Continue drinking your tea. Do not get upset. I am not implying anything. I am asking, do you still like hockey and girls, after your first experience with the Ninetieth Degree?"
The Ninetieth Degree? Paulie had no clue what—
"Never mind the nomenclature. Please answer my question. I am not here to judge, only to learn."
Paulie still liked hockey and girls, but where before there was passion and yearning, now there was boredom. A hockey game on TV wasn't interesting. A girl in his class wasn't what caught his eye. Both were faded photographs compared to the sublimity of what he saw during his drownings. "Not as much as before," he said.
"My hypothesis is proved correct," Dr Mizoguchi said.
"What is the Ninetieth Degree?"
Dr Mizoguchi put down his tea cup. "It is, so far, a mathematically based philosophical construct. Are you familiar with my work on theories of entanglement, Paul?"
"Quarks?"
"Of course you wouldn't be. I apologise. It is just that I am getting ahead of myself, becoming presumptive in the presence of a fellow superior mind."
"Like I said, I'm not especially smart. Akira's way smarter than I am."
"Akira," Dr Mizoguchi said, "spends his time browsing hardcore pornography and sports statistics. He passes his school exams. He will go to university, and he will enter a profitable profession. He does not, however, have a superior mind."
Paulie downed the rest of his hot tea in one gulp. His throat burned and he was sure he was going to have loose layers of dead skin in his mouth in the morning. There was a story on the BBC recently about the high rate of mouth cancers in certain parts of Iran, where people drank hot tea all the time. Paulie's mind raced. Its thoughts were fractured, one slicing another in half, both falling, and as Dr Mizoguchi gazed at him he was sure that he was gazing into his mind, too. Who was gazing into whose?
"Relax, Paul. Calm yourself, and I will tell you about entanglement."
"Yes, sir."
"Ichi."
"Yes, Ichi." Paulie considered the possibility that Dr Mizoguchi was trying to hypnotise him, so he looked away. Was hypnosis scientific or bogus?
"Time is not universal," Dr Mizoguchi said. "It is, at its core, an illusion caused by the entanglement—let us say the occupation of the same space—of two different objects. These objects interact."
"I think I get that," Paulie said.
"Now imagine that both of these objects are you, Paul."
Paulie remembered seeing himself on the video that Akira had made, unmoving at the bottom of the tub while simultaneously remembering the movements that he had actually made.
"Paul A is entangled with Paul B. You interact with you. Do you follow?"
"Somewhat."
"We only ever follow somewhat. Anyone who claims to understand completely is a fraud. Good. Now imagine observing this scene. Because Paul A occupies the same space as Paul B, to all observers outside of this space, there is one Paul and he is static."
"Like on the camera..."
"Yes, exactly like on the recording. However, if one were to go inside that space of interaction, to become entangled with Paul A and Paul B, that observer would no longer see a single static Paul. To that observer, there would appear to be motion, action, happenings."
Paulie picked up his empty tea cup, mostly just to hold something and keep his fingers from betraying his anxiety.
"Do you want a refill?" Dr Mizoguchi asked. "There is plenty of tea."
Paulie shook his head.
"Let me propose another hypothesis. I propose that during your drowning, when to the camera and to Akira you appeared static, you yourself experienced something else."
Paulie's cup dropped to the floor and shattered. He stood up to pick up the pieces.
"Leave them be!"
Paulie froze.
"I apologise for raising my voice. Sit again, please. I am not angry. I need to know, Paul. I need to know what you felt when you were drowning."
"I felt shaking, my head was moving, and my knees..."
Tears started to stream down Dr Mizoguchi's cheeks. "Yes, yes, and..."
Paulie weighed what to say against what to keep secret. He wanted Dr Mizoguchi to know. No, he knew that Dr Mizoguchi already did. But at the same time he felt that the details of the visions he had seen within the drownings were his and his alone. They were private. He didn't want to share them.
"I saw things," Paulie said. "Incredible things."
"Things not of this world?"
"Yes."
"Alien things?"
"Yes."
"The Ninetieth Degree," Dr Mizoguchi cried. "You have seen the Ninetieth Degree."
Paulie sat back down in his chair.
Dr Mizoguchi went on, speaking faster and faster. "What we know as time is merely an emergent phenomenon come about as the result of entanglement. That we observe this phenomenon means only that we are observing it from within. Had we the c
apabilities to send an observer—a camera, for example—beyond the range of the entanglement, all of our world would appear dead."
"But it wouldn't actually be dead. I mean, we would still be here, talking and going to school and drinking tea?"
"The difference between being and seeing is meaningless in this context. But, yes, we would still be here. We would observe one so-called reality and the camera would observe another. But you, Paul... you have gone beyond being and seeing, life and death. You possess the power to create time within time, do you understand?"
Paulie didn't understand anything any more. Too many concepts were being expressed in too many words, which were themselves imprecise.
"Entanglement within entanglement."
He just wanted to drown again. He wanted to forget everything and drown and see new visions.
"Visualise it like this. Every life is a conveyor belt running north-south, or along the x-axis of a Cartersian coordinate plane that represents our known reality. Have you studied calculus already, Paul? No, no, it hardly matters. You grasp these concepts at a higher level. You have no need for useless crutches." He was gesticulating madly with his hands and salivating at the mouth. His glasses had turned crooked on his head. "The conveyor belt, it runs north-south at a constant rate for all, but it has a definite beginning and a definite end for each, and we say that its length is measured in time, and for each person his conveyor belt is called his lifespan. When you are born, you are dropped at the beginning—let us call this point B—and you ride the belt until you die, where once and for all you thrown into the endless abyss at a point we may call D."
"I don't think I—"
"The idea is simple. By creating time within time, you stop your conveyor belt, Paul. You get out and you walk in a straight line exactly ninety degrees east or west of your lifespan. Unlike the finite world between points B and D, the world that exists east and west—the world that none but you have perhaps ever seen—is infinite. It is as real as the highest quality Scottish tea, yet you can sip from it forever."
Paulie, grasping at anything to conceptualise the insanity of what Dr Mizoguchi was saying, tossed aside math, physics and religion and settled on Minecraft. "Endless creation," he said, aloud to himself as much as to Dr Mizoguchi. "Endless creation and all the time in the world to explore it."
Akira had introduced him to Minecraft several years ago, when it was still in beta.
Dr Mizoguchi wiped his cheeks. "You truly understand."
Paulie shivered. He did.
"How much time Earth time have you spent in Ninetieth Degree, Paul?"
Paulie wasn't sure, but he did a quick calculation in his head to figure it out. "Ten hours, maybe. Less than a day for sure." He knew he should be keeping better track. He would start a dedicated spreadsheet.
"You're that much younger, Paul. Your body doesn't age when you're off the conveyor belt. According to my model, Earth time passes you over."
Paulie didn't feel any younger. He felt older.
"Have you written of your experiences anywhere—on your computer, perhaps? In a Google doc?"
"No."
"So the NSA doesn't know yet," Dr Mizoguchi purred.
They were startled by a knock on the door.
Dr Mizoguchi straightened his glasses and cleared his throat and the usual confidence returned to his voice. "Yes?"
"I thought you might want cookies. I know that thinking always makes me hungry. I baked chocolate chip and peanut butter," Akira said from the other side.
Dr Mizoguchi scratched his head.
Paulie shrugged.
"I suppose being aware of infinity does not mean one cannot enjoy a freshly baked cookie or two," Dr Mizoguchi said. "Bring them in," he told Akira.
Akira opened the door and walked in carrying a tray of light and dark cookies, which he placed on the desk. "Help yourselves. I already took several for myself. These are all for you." He bowed. "Are discussions proving fruitful?"
"Quite," Dr Mizoguchi said.
Paulie stuffed an entire chocolate chip cookie into his mouth. It was so deliciously creamy it nearly melted on his tongue. The proportion of chocolate to butter was exquisite. Though he'd never admit it publicly, the cookie was even better than the ones his mum made. "These are really good," he said while chewing.
Then he sucked in air. His tooth was making itself known again.
"Is the tooth still bothering you?" Akira asked.
Dr Mizoguchi broke off half a cookie, put it in his mouth and the placed other half back on the tray. The topic of the tooth had piqued his interest.
"Uh, no," Paulie said. "Kinda. Less, I think. It's not a big problem, anyway. Comes and goes."
"Has this toothache been bothering you since the time you fell into the lake?" Dr Mizoguchi asked.
There was something suspicious about the way Dr Mizoguchi was feigning nonchalance. He wasn't good at it. And the way he kept grinding his peanut butter cookie into mush without swallowing it...
"I don't really remember," Paulie said. "I think it hurt before then. It's my own fault because I don't floss every day."
"Who does? I know an exceptional dentist. I can arrange a visit. And if money is a problem for your parents, I can put in a word for a discount rate," Dr Mizoguchi said.
"Thank you," Paulie said, "but it's really OK. You've already helped me so much, Dr Mizoguchi."
"Ichi."
"Yes, Ichi. I should be going now."
Scooping up a handful of cookies on the way, Paulie backed out of the study. "See you at school tomorrow," he said to Akira, but he was already running out the door.