Hobby Glasses
by
Vin Siegfried
The next name was someone who had read before. He was small and old but that did not matter, when you looked at him you just saw an enigmatic mischievous smile and blue eyes. He put on hobbyist glasses with tiny lights at the temples in order to read his story in the darkened room. The manuscript glowed in the dark. It was almost all you saw, he was left in the shadows.
The bar was either genuinely old or crafted to seem like it was, and had an upstairs room you got to from narrow stairs in the back. The long rectangular space had tables and chairs, no two alike, scattered as if they were just being stored. The writers all sat and made some order, pulling chairs to tables. At one end there was a microphone stand and a speaker. They left a lane down the middle clear so that when your name was called you could get to the front quickly.
The story was a reminiscence from childhood. It had some improbable turns that made us all laugh. When he was done, he looked up twinklingly at all of us over the warm applause and said “It’s all true.”
When I went downstairs for a beer, he had beaten me to the bar. I came up alongside to order my own.
“You know, you don’t need to say that.”
“Say what?”
“That it’s all true.”
He looked a bit annoyed. I needed to explain.
“It just needs to be good, I don’t think anybody cares if it is true, I know that I don’t. And if changing some things could make it a better story?”
I could tell he disagreed and did not even really want to have this conversation.
He picked up his beer and looked up. “I feel a responsibility to the people that were there. It is a shared story. It’s history. Should I make stuff up for better entertainment? I need to get back upstairs.”
When the writer’s group was over, I jumped on the subway to catch a train at Grand Central to the burbs where I live. It was late but the underground corridors still had a steady scattered stream of people, each going their own path, particles spinning in their own orbits. A young Asian woman in clothes too big for her stood behind an open cardboard box, singing something unintelligible above the ambient platform noise, fighting against anonymity. Nobody stopped to drop change into the box, New Yorkers have standards.
On the train back home I looked out the windows at the apartment buildings, sometimes catching fleeting movement through the lighted windows, but mostly they remained abstract glowing rectangles in a Hopper Nighthawk painting that Hopper never made.
I thought about all of the reading I’d been doing to ensure the plausibility of a story I was writing on quantum physics and on the concept of superposition– that the state and location of a particle cannot be known until it is observed.
In the midst of the research, I had watched an on-line course from MIT, essentially a video of their brick and mortar class, an energetic young professor wielding the chalk like a samurai, assailing the backboard, bringing diagrams to life with powerful strokes.
Explaining superposition, he looked out at all of them, his eyes scanning the class like someone who has just told a juicy secret, savoring the look of incredulity on the young students’ faces.
I was clacking through Queens at about 40 miles per hour, on a train destined for my Long Island stop. My state and location was known in the physical world. But my consciousness was elsewhere.
Primitive tribes, shown pictures of themselves, were wary, they wondered if the picture had stolen their soul. When I take someone from real life, and I put them in a story, even if I don’t change a thing about the situation I am describing, I am stealing, taking the people and appropriating them, culturally, emotionally, using them to nourish my own ideas.
And since my ideas are only bound by the limits of what I can imagine, there are millions of possibilities, all of which are just as real as the real one, just in my head instead of in the physical world, which is, as I consider it, a trivial difference.
In my research, I also read about the concept of infinite parallel universes, and thought how convenient it could be to use it to explain phenomena, and solemnly quote Casablanca: “Of all the universes, and all the situations, and all the bars, we found our way into this one.”
None of this is comforting. I am a thief, stealing reality, stealing infinite possibilities of alternative universes, stealing emotions, trying to make something of it all, locking down the location and the state of what I am observing, perhaps because the ephemeral nature of it all is terrifying and I do not want it– or me– to vanish.
As the train approached my stop I looked out the window again for signs of life but only saw more abstract glowing rectangles, and in the dark gaps between the buildings I saw my own reflection. We huddle in the dark with our light-up hobby glasses in this one supposedly true reality, illuminating what we want to see, destroying all the other possibilities.
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