Eighty-Sixed : Chapter 6 - Science Fact

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In the early 1980s, life for young urban professionals like Frankie and Becca was promising and full. They’d filled their wardrobes with Lacoste, Ralph Lauren, and Members Only for weekends, and business attire by Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood for their long hours at work.  

They were newly accredited with prestigious degrees, newly employed, newly together, newly in love, and yet already newly discovering the first signs of the rift that would grow between them throughout the ensuing years. 

It was a Saturday morning and they sat upon the shore of Lake Michigan, all those years before, watching children dig tunnels in the sand. 

“Let’s have a picnic,” Becca enthusiastically suggested when Frankie called her that morning.

“So romantic,” Frankie flirted over the phone. “I’m on the way.”

It had started as a lovely outing on an uncharacteristically sunny but not yet sweltering and humid June afternoon. Yet before they’d even settled into their chicken salad and the bottle of wine Frankie brought, their conversation quickly escalated into the first of many disagreements to follow regarding Becca’s chosen profession.

“But that’s just science fiction,” Frankie scoffed that day.  

“No, Frankie, it’s not,” she argued. “It’s science fact.

“And the good of this would be what, then?”

“The good?” Becca said, almost with a laugh.  “Unimaginable good.  This is how we expand space travel.  This is how we develop contingency plans for when Reagan or Gorbachev finally push the button and blow us all to hell.  We’ll have somewhere else we can go once this planet is gone.”

“Baloney,” Frankie had laughed, and laid back on his towel.

“It’s not baloney,” she said. “And this isn’t just my theory.  The idea that something like a shuttle, or just something simpler like a carrier pod or satellite, could enter at one point and then immediately exit the other end, even if there were trillions of miles between them, well that changes everything we know about our existence.  Surely you can see that?”

“Not really, sorry.”

“Einstein’s relativity equations have a direct correlation to the potential of two points in space connecting by a tunnel through some sort of higher dimension.”

“That’s your wormhole, then, huh?” Frankie said and gulped his first wine glass empty.

“Or something very much like it,” she said. “That’s how we’ll get to Mars.  That’s how we’ll see the next universe.”

“Maybe so, but I don’t get it.  For what purpose?”

“Military? Medical? Just plain preservation of all humanity?” she answered. “Does it matter?”

“Just sounds more dangerous than helpful, to me.”

“That’s what this work would prevent.  That’s what my work will prevent.  The danger.  What we’re doing — what I’m doing — would not only make it possible but make it safe.”

“I’d be for that, I suppose.”

“Then there are the theories that suggest that not only is transdimensional relocation an absolute possibility, but with it transchronological transportation.”

“Transchronological? As in, over time?”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, you lost me again,” Frankie said.  “Now we’re back to this being dangerous.”

“Just think about it for a second,” Becca said. “Two converging points opening up over significant distances would be separated not only by distance but by levels of time.”

“So what?”

“Logically, you couldn’t have an opening and closing separated by distances measured in light years without there being time disparities associated with those two points.”

“If you say so.”

“And if it was theoretically possible to control or pinpoint where the two points originated, you could also theoretically reset time displacement.”

“Time displacement?” Frankie said.  “So what, you’re Doc Brown and I’m Marty McFly?” 

“What are you talking about?”

“This sounds like that movie that just opened up.”

“Movie?”

“Back to the Future, or something like that,” Frankie said. “A kid goes back in time using a DeLorean that travels at high speeds and whatnot.”

“Now you’re just mocking me.”

“I’m not mocking you! It’s an actual movie. Maybe we should go see it tonight. You could get some ideas.”

Becca sighed and laid back on the blanket they’d set out for a picnic lunch.  She stared at the clouds as ideas continued to percolate and boil to the surface of her mind as new tangential revelations were cultivated by the second.  She could see the possibilities, she just couldn’t yet see the solution that would get her there.

“So what would you change if you could go back in time?” Frankie asked as he laid back as well and cradled up next to her.  

“I would have avoided this conversation.”

“Ah, come on, Becs.  I didn’t mean to rub you wrong.  You talk about things that are five thousand miles above my head.  I need to just keep my yap shut and take in what I can.”

“I don’t want you to just be silent.  I just wish you could see the value of what I’m doing.”

“Listen, you know me.  I push back when I shouldn’t push, which is usually when I’m ignorant about something.  And that’s when I should be listening instead of talking.  I’m sorry.  And to be honest, I can’t argue with your confidence level.  So there, you’ve convinced me.”

“I haven’t convinced you,” Becca said and turned her head to look up at Frankie.  “I just wore you out.”

“Same difference, as far as I’m concerned,” he said and leaned down to kiss her.  

He didn’t always understand her drive, and certainly, he grew tired of sharing the attention she placed upon her work.  But Frankie knew from the very beginning that he’d forever be in competition with Becca’s quest for her own Holy Grail.

And even as they kissed along the shore of Lake Michigan, Becca was not entirely present.  Her mind was still elsewhere, as it would be for the next forty years, as ideas surfaced and theories were tested while she sought that missing piece, entwined in the mysterious jumble of theories in search of the unknown variable from the fuzzy equation she couldn’t quite solve.

And now here it was, those four decades of rapidly passing time now behind them.  With great rapidity they went from that Saturday picnic on the shore of Lake Michigan to hastily exchanged vows at the courthouse shortly thereafter, followed by constantly advanced careers and more patents and awards and a sizable mortgage for them both, all while Becca never stopped promising that she was so close, that her work would change everything once she uncovered that last discovery just waiting to be found.  

And yet it never was.

And now Frankie stood barefoot in his new kitchen.

“Same story, just a different year,” Frankie muttered and poured himself another Scotch.  The cardboard box full of liquor bottles and drinking glasses was the first thing he unpacked after the movers left.

At his feet were Sam and Frodo, the two Pomeranians he never wanted, but had now taken from his home with Becca.  They looked up at him with vacant expressions, both panting, still unaccustomed to their new surroundings.  

“Well boyos,” Frankie said as he bent over and scratched them roughly on their heads. “It’s just us lads now.  What say we make a party of it?”

The dogs were in desperate need of baths, another area where his wife — or whatever Becca was to him now — had failed miserably.

He was being too harsh, as he often was.  Too threatening and too final. Too rash.

But waitaminute - Too rash? Really? 

“Too patient is more like it,” Frankie said out loud.  The dogs did not respond.

Realizing no treats were forthcoming, Sam and Frodo left his side and launched themselves up onto the couch he’d purchased that very afternoon.  

Isn’t that what you do during a split?  You take occupancy of a pale and empty one-bedroom apartment like this one, with fresh eggshell paint splattered on the walls and hasty tracks on the floor from a carpet cleaning rush job?  You buy the first couch you sit on.  A mattress for the floor until a new proper bedframe is picked out. 

“She knew this was coming,” he said to himself, again out loud.  “What choice did I have, really?  Abandon our home of so many years, take these bloody dogs with me.  And don’t forget the Scotch.”

He took a long swallow.

This was not the retirement he’d long imagined.  

So what now? At sixty-nine years old, would he really even consider life with another woman? Of course not.  All he’d known for so long was Becca.  They’d created a life together, even if it was a disjointed one.  How could they have a life apart?  What was he thinking?  And what would be the point of trying to find someone else even if he wanted to? 

Could he start a new life with someone else? Even if the desire wasn’t there, Frankie certainly had the confidence to do so.  With silver hair and deep lines branching out from the corners of his eyes and mouth and only the slightest paunch around his belt, he somehow still managed to carry himself with an air of ruggedness, sturdy and handsome and confident.  He’d aged gracefully, as many often told him.  Becca would say it in a more self-deprecating way, complaining about how unfair it was that Frankie stayed trim while she seemed to shorten and widen all at once.  

As Becca had confined herself to her lab over the years, Frankie had carved out a reputation of his own.  A successful architect who’d watched his greatest imaginings bleed out of his pencils and onto stacks of paper before becoming real towering monoliths hovering over the Chicago skyline, he was well accomplished and respected.  Had been profiled in Architectural Digest and taken home three AIA statues over the years.  Those statues were buried now in one of the many boxes scattered about his new living room.  

Even without Becca’s sizable salary from ENH and her royalties from patents she’d procured on behalf of her company, Frankie had few financial concerns.

Certainly, getting a one-bedroom was a step down, but Frankie told himself it was only temporary as he got his bearings about him as he adjusted to this new life.

But in truth, he didn’t want another life.  

As he poured the last of his opened bottle of Scotch into the lone glass he’d unpacked before joining the dogs on the couch, the mere idea of starting over put a lump in his throat. Was he as prepared now as he was just a few days before to live his remaining twenty or so years alone? Did he even have that much time?  Watching over these dogs, and then another set after they’re gone? To what avail would that be, when in truth he still loved Becca deeply, and just wished she wanted to be with him as much as he wanted to be with her, even though her persistent absence drove him mad most days? 

For years he morally supported Becca, then cajoled, then complained, and finally threatened, but he never stopped being at the lower tier of his wife’s priorities.

He’d hoped that his brash actions - the apartment, the dogs, the phone calls, the leaving — would have shocked her into action.  

And yet here he sat alone on a couch that still smelled like Scotchgard, Sam and Frodo licking themselves on either side of him, and his actions had caused nothing more than additional protests from Becca for the same thing as always: the precious preservation of her project.  

Her work.

The project. 

She was so close when in reality she had always been too far away.

“This isn’t playing out at all like I thought,” Frankie told Frodo and Sam, and swallowed down the last of his Scotch.  

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